The world is coming to an end soon… the evidence is all around us, but the clearest indication is in the way the gaming industry is reacting to the changing environment. I saw a BBC Horizon documentary recently that said, "Forget Global Warming, there's something called Global Dimming going on." Incidentally, according to the BBC, there's something called "Global Weirding" going on as well. I watched their documentary on this as well, and strangely, it was not about Lady Gaga or Nikki Minaj, or whoever else is now vying for the WWE (World's Weirdest Entertainer) title.

But I say the BBC has got it all wrong. Forget Global Dimming. There's a serious problem of Global Dumbing going on. The gaming industry has reacted accordingly, and that is why I now spend my free hours watching BBC documentaries, over and over again, rather than gaming. For someone who used to play strategy games 90% of the time, I find it hard to find even a single decent one to play today that will not cause me to gouge my eyes out in disgust because of the last-decade graphics.

The problem is not that the new strategy games look terrible… it's that they don't seem to exist. The only reason why I hadn't killed my family and friends and attempted suicide myself yet is because despite the fact that the world is coming to an end soon, EA had promised us Generals 2, so I felt it was all going to be worth it, in the end…

Last week, I read they had "converted" the project, raising doubts about whether we would get what was supposed to be an epic follow up to a great game using the even greater Frostbite 2 engine - it was basically going to be Battlefield 3, but with you controlling everyone from above, instead of being the fool running around on the ground getting knifed/road-killed/generally shot at with ammunition of different calibers. In case you have no idea why this would be world changing to the point that one can forget that world is about to end, please read me gush about Battlefield Bad Company 2, Battlefield 3's predecessor built using the older Frostbite engine, and then watch this trailer…

Anyway, "Converted", not "Cancelled". That's probably the only thing keeping the people around me alive for now… "Converted" to be a Free-to-Play title, which, from what I have seen on the Internet, is another sure sign that the world is going to end/the Devil is taking over. Free-to-Play is basically a way for game companies to lure you in and then charge you for everything in the game if you really want to play and not just mess around - pretty much what Zynga specializes in, with their despicable gaming model.

Now you may think I'm just being paranoid, but I see no coincidence here. The fact is that the world is coming to an end… just like the fact that Zynga's brainless games that seem to be targeted at zombies became super popular. Now that in itself tells you something is wrong with the world at multiple levels - most importantly - something without brains shouldn't attract zombies, but hey! This resulted in big gaming companies like EA going into the red, and even questioning why they bother building the kind of intelligent, big-budget games they have always had a reputation for building

Want to build Nuke Cannons like the Blue guy (and win)? Well if you'd paid the $100 extra for them you wouldn't be stuck with just Humvees you Yellow chump.

But Zynga is not to blame - they were just smarter than EA and other traditional gaming houses because they figured out the world had gone dumber, faster. They were just the opportunistic fly laying eggs on a high velocity piece of shit hurtling towards a fan blessed with a large angular momentum. That piece of shit was social media, and the fan was all of us, spreading it far beyond it had the right to go. In fact, that's why Mr. Zuckerberg changed the "fan" button to the "like" button so that the truth would forever be hidden from us…

Now you may say social media is helpful - and I agree it could be, to an extent. I even remember having an argument with a couple of guys at work about the benefits of social media once. But that was when I was still young and had enough photos where I had not yet developed curved extensions to my midsection. Now as I sit watching documentaries about how the world is coming to an end, because there are no good strategy games to apply my mind to, and because I have not yet reached a point where sharing the latest parody of Gangnam Style across multiple social networks is intellectually satisfying, I have finally figured out the connection between the rise of social media, and the decline in human intelligence over the past 17 years…

Social Media 4 - 0 World Intelligence