You could say this about all mainstream media being "industrial corporate"
yes.
are you saying nothing but indie and underground stories have any "real meaning?"
complexity of this means answering in a post is not possible. None the less, I put some things here in the spirit of love and compassion. I will change the question to ‘where to find real meaning?’. Hope that is OK.
God is dead! Nietzche did not mean literally, rather he meant God is dead in the hearts of modern western people. We have killed spirituality. Imagine seeing the world as a divine gift: clouds, food, birth, death, everything; spending much of your time in silence close to nature; living in a tight loving community of people who need and rely each other and saw the world the same way you did. Imagine a life without money. That is how humans lived for our almost our entire history. That is where meaning is found.
Now imagine living in a world without any of that, where you look for connection and meaning from commercial social platforms, commercial search ‘engines’, corporate trans-media IPs, Skype; all the while letting let companies use our most private details to manipulate and sell us things and ideas. Spiritually, we are empty husks.
A few years ago, the authors of a study on happiness and life satisfaction were flummoxed at why Bangledesh was near the top and rich Northern Euros near the bottom. Afterall, Bangledesh is really really poor and 90% practising Muslim, you know that regressive gay-hating, woman-hating, Abrahamic religion, while rich Euros had thrown off the shackles of stupid religion and embraced diversity and had lots of cars and TVs and iphones and literacy and pills and hospitals and vacations.
So, you know, looking for meaning from corporations and their products (Google, Facebook, Netflix, New York Times, CNN, Amazon, Videogames, Disney, etc.)
is a fool‘s errand. At best, they will provide you with enough distraction so you can pretend to be OK and do not have to kill yourself.
And a final note, this emptiness leaves us vulnerable to manipulation. Tapping into it provides power and profits, but it is dangerous as Jim Jones, Donald Trump, Antifa, self loathing white liberals burning buildings and cancelling police departments can attest to.
And your take is that the story's purpose is to justify hours of killing?
The
game part of the product is what? killing and getting stuff to kill with. What provides the connective tissue between the gameplay parts? The story. But it is a bit more complex than that.
The guy who wrote Spec Ops The Line said (paraphrasing from memory from a gdc talk) “your protagonist can never be more righteous than the game’s core mechanic demands. So, if your player primarily interacts with the game through killing....The AAA videogame industry is filled with progressive people who condemn the blanket use of violence and yet they devote their lives to making products that require players to kill hundreds if not thousands of people in a single game. creatives struggle to come to terms with this tension. As you get older and have children, it gets harder and harder to look at this and think it is ok. So, that is where the motivation for Spec Ops came from. Is there something else we can do? Something else we can make?” The writer left AAA games and now works as a partner in an indie studio.
So the other part of the ‘meaning‘ of the story is that it is an attempt by progressive devs to make a product that justifies or at least lessens the guilt they have for using their talents to make immoral and destructive things for money. They do that by making the player feel bad. In spec ops it was ‘you monster, you used white phosphorous. You could have turned the game off you know’. In tlou2, they make you kill puppies and murder people with names and stories and families, and ends with the PC alone and destitute and music-less.
it is hollow, however. The last of us 2 is still a fun muder sim. If the game played like TLOU1 dlc, then we could have had something special and have looked for some real meaning. But that game would have sold 10% of what actual tlou2 is going to. As it is, it is just another AAA kill game from billion dollar corp.
so, yes, the story is there to move and justify the killing, but with the added twist that it also makes the creatives fell a bit less conflicted.
Try again man, this post was a swing and a miss.
maybe this one is better?