Dude it's two gamers talking about they're gaming rank while sitting in an ampitheater form the game they are talking about. What would you Talk/Brag about in such a surreal situation?
Yeah I'm no stranger to talking about rank, (what's your MMR bro? 1v1 me mid, so on and so forth) and I would never say "serious bill paying skillage", even if I was chatting it up with Artour "Babyrage" Babaev, who winnings go into six digits. I would talk about the game, the meta, my recent games, who my favorite players and strategies are, my hopes for the future of the game. I know this because I do this on a weekly basis, have been doing it since I was a teenager as well. Surreal? This very situation is happening to hundreds of people
right now, and has been a yearly occurrence for half a decade all over the world. This is just yet another area where Cline is hopefully out of touch despite his attempts to appear knowledgable.
Here, I actually wrote up a paragraph about this exact topic.
I don't think Cline knows how pro-gaming works...
This is, in a strange way, the most insulting part. He writes masturbatory fantasies where the best gamers save the world using their gaming skills but he has no idea what goes into being one of these people or how they're perceived or the culture that surrounds them. Even here, his mind is mired firmly in the arcades of the 80s where having your name on the top of a sorted list was supposed to be impressive.
Generally speaking, when authors write characters that engage in a particular subculture, they make some kind of effort to research that subculture. Thus, authors who write about law confer with actual lawyers, authors who write about biological topics confer with biologists, etc. Recent example,
Interstellar was made with with an astrophysics consultant. This is because most writers do not have the range of life experiences needed to properly convey every subculture they write about. The same is true for foreign locales and societies.
When writing about obscure topics is done poorly, it is painfully obvious the writer is just making stuff up as they go along and this breaks the flow of the narrative because you, the audience, question whether the writer is actually credible enough to invest in (ethos). That's why writers engage in research for their writing.
Cline, though? He doesn't give a crap. His idea of competitive gaming is the memories of his youth in arcades fossilized in amber and preserved to the present day. This is not writing, at least, it's about as far from good writing as you can get on this front. It would be excusable if it was a) justified through the plot (like for
RPO), b) self aware/self parodic, c) some sort of commentary on the relentless grip of nostalgia on modern society,
Armada is none of these.
No one would say
RPO is great literature, but it was enjoyable to many for understandable reasons.
Armada is actually a step back. What made
RPO digestible is conspicuously absent from
Armada. Instead, references and nostalgia actually further substitute for prose. He does not even bother conveying the emotions of his characters anymore. He just makes references to other, more popular characters, and wager that his readers are in on the joke.
In that moment, I felt like Luke Skywalker surveying a hangar full of A-, Y-, and X-Wing Fighters just before the Battle of Yavin. Or Captain Apollo, climbing into the cockpit of his Viper on the Galactica’s flight deck. Ender Wiggin arriving at Battle School. Or Alex Rogan, clutching his Star League uniform, staring wide-eyed at a hangar full of Gunstars.
And you think people are upset they can't write like this? No, the really upsetting part is that this passes for writing and that it actually sells.
