After more than 20 years of playing Counter Strike on every game console, every laptop, every desktop, I can say its about as neoclassical as the tab on a pop can containing 5182 alloy of mostly aluminum with 4.5% magnesium & 0.3% manganese, cold strain hardened, amenable to every kind of welding, extremely ductile able to be drawn into complex 3D shapes, while the mouse and W A S D keys of a keyboard are the primary typical inputs for gaming, even illuminated specially on some gaming keyboards, but had did Valve the gaming company behind STEAM the online gaming platform, create a perpetually interest.
E-sports game popular worldwide across generations of people, so many iterations of computer and software advances, really a glimmering shimmering amazing example of a game that transcends space and time, connecting with millions of players globally, showing the best of what high speed internet can become when mixed with a computer powerful enough to play Counter Strike with enough frames per second displayed to be playable in a fluid way that players enjoy, special thanks to AMD, Intel & NVIDIA for making it happen, and Kudos to Microsoft & Valve for supporting PC gaming!
In the context of artificial intelligence data centers eating up HBM memory so pervasively its creating bottlenecks and market shortages for DDR production so bad that RAM prices for DDR4 and DDR5 have tripled in less than a year, graphics cards like 4090 and 5090 commanding $2000, $3000 or $4000 now, making gaming PC even more expensive, unfair in particular because PC gaming most popular with younger people with very little if any income or money, who rely on their parents to live, really kicking people who are already at layers of disadvantages, facing a dollar that has never been weaker, against a housing crisis where homes have never been more unaffordable, and wages in most areas of the economy while they have grown, they have not kept up with inflation or the increasing cost of all of life's basics.
In 1999 when I was in high school, gasoline sold for $0.99 per US gallon, today where I grew up, gasoline selling for $6/ gal, 600% increase in price, 290% when adjusted for inflation, a gallon of Milk that was $1 now $5, housing that was $250K selling for $1.5 million, apartments that rented for $450/mo now $2800/mo in worse condition.
Why have so many people taken to hiding behind their smartphone, tablet, TV, desktop monitor, gaming consoles, well, there are many factors, as with most complex phenomena we would have to touch on some very unconfortable realities, so lets go ahead and try.
Loss of community connection, people do not even know their neighbors anymore. A commonly expressed musical lyric touches on this with a pen & paper analogy, "I can't talk openly with anybody anymore, so I talk to my journal writing, social media posts, blog articles, or escape watching movies, videos, shorts, memes, doom scrolling, of whatever
Lack of an effective free to the public open space where people can connect that is not their home or place of work, while Churches have functioned to provide a 3rd place for social connection, in many ways church attendance been on a decline in America for decades because of an increase in secularization, and more recently criminal Islamic terrorist in America have been engaged in arson, burning Christian churches down.
Lets for a moment touch on a disturbing reality, in many Islamic Republics where Sharia Law enforced, girls & women have no rights legally or otherwise, child marriage pervasive, mostly very young girls married of to older adult men, illegal in almost all other countries, in many ways Sharia Law, killing GLTBQ+ alphabet people, stoning them to death, dropping them from tall buildings into the street, or shooting them in the head, Islamic police acting as judge & jury with on demand killings justified in the name of defending apostasy, in effect either become Islamic and practice Sharia Law or they will kill you for not joining.
Unsurprisingly, I always plat Counter Terrorist or CT when playing counter strike. Simulations where I get to stop the terrorists from bombing the target. To warm up after not playing CS for a long time, I play Practice with Bots, and once I am able to dominate the bots, means I am about to get smoked but still play on community maps with real people, usually a few rounds a few times per day for a few weeks and my chops improve, but then I get bored and stop playing CS for months, come back rusty, have to warm up and practice to be good enough to play against other people ")
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