The Eternal Consumption
This is a feature story from Unwinnable Monthly #184. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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The final dishonor of life is when it abandons principle in order to continue. When an organism has exhausted all its resources of community, friendship and inner strength, it will finally be compelled to die. Human life seldom chooses death, sometimes it prefers collaboration. But the shameful majority prefers to look on as the great sweeping wing of change materializes all the evil promises of history. A promise of world war, a promise of nuclear fire, a promise of devastating storms and dead crops, a promise, in short, of eternal conflict. We should not cower inside a game. We should look ahead in anger.
The pillars of the earth are strong. Our institutions are strong. They choose not to take action. When people talk about the ineffectiveness of government, they’re really talking about intentional policies. To scorch the earth with our venality and greed. To sort children in cages apart from their parents. To respect wealth above human life. Keeping the boat as still as possible, as the water rises to our ankles and the apes who use us climb up our backs and onto our shoulders, their fingers up our nostrils and in our eyes, choking us before we even taste the salt.
Diablo IV, in its commercial wretchedness, its trend chasing, its transparent rent-seeking, is a game about living in such a time. It’s not a persuasive representation of its ideas. It’s a living suppuration of them, a victim. The title launched with a store, a battle pass and the assurance of paid expansions, a forever subscription with both hands cupped and bottomless. It offered another day in the Eternal Consumption, sold to us with every advantage of big business.
Nothing of consequence happens in Diablo IV, a game where the devil always comes back, for the convenience of selling more sequels. What’s the basic idea? Hell is poised to invade the mortal realm of Sanctuary. Sanctuary’s creators, the Archangel Inarius and the demon Lilith, have also returned – good news perhaps? Inarius is weak and selfish, planning an escape to Heaven on the backs of his true believers. Lilith, conversely, intends to save humanity by, well, making Hell on Earth.
Here’s how the board is set up. On the side of Hell: its legions, demonic lords, agonies and nightmares, to last eternally and to eternally return. On the side of Humanity: a literal child and two old assholes.
Falling through the cracks is the player character and their crew: an orphan girl and a pair of old men who know enough to be depressed. Not just old, but exhausted as one can only be when one looks ahead to the crisis that will follow the crisis that has already tarnished the best of those among you. Where are the governments? Holding hands with smirking demons. Where are the faithful? Getting scammed by their holy father. Everywhere we turn, we find barriers and failed institutions. Heaven is utterly disinterested. Hell is all too interested.
Although Lilith’s role is antagonistic, she’s also an iconoclast and emancipator. When she inspires a church congregation to dismember their fire-and-brimstone preacher, it’s her way of caring for her children. Cannibalism is a taboo that Lilith would have you break, so that you live to fight. One has to ask. Can hate be beautiful? Are there degrees of nobility in hate that the hateful recognize and love? Love and gather around, praising it and hoping in it, and judging goodness awful and vain, and useless. That’s Lilith’s world, appealing to both the poor and the elite, each finding something good in this icon who liberates through excess.
An example. When reports of Blizzard’s culture of workplace harassment emerged we called that toxic. That is a pusillanimous appellation for evil. Hate requires us to dismember the offender. Contrariwise, moral outrage demands a mechanism of justice. And that is an emotional development of a higher being, but a being that has not forgotten how to hate. Countless clichéd stories are woven out of this universal danger. The hero becomes the villain. Life gives up its principles. Yes, we are a civilization of hateful beings that, miraculously and magnificently, desired a higher existence in a world that runs on the devil’s rules.
To build that civilization we were obliged to give up – not hate itself – the action of it, its legislation, and finally our identity with it. It is not the existence of disaster, injustice, and crime that devastates one’s morale. It is humanity’s attempt to tear it all down and build a world in which baby formula makers lobby against maternal leave, and oil companies will destroy the climate as a mandate of good business, and nations believe it is their manifest destiny to subjugate.
Perhaps it appears petty, petty and inadequate, to return after such considerations to a rank product the likes of Diablo IV. Deep down, it is a game about people who already feel defeated, for people who want to escape the crush of reality. Is it emotionally affecting? Rarely, but the emotions I feel do not belong to the characters, who swing between a pretense of gravitas and the most foul cheese Blizzard is able to cook up, they are my own.
The early Diablo games invented the future, even the live service always online reality that has earned not little contempt. Diablo IV has nothing left to say. It lives with the memory of how great it used to be. It holds your gaze like a wounded animal asking for the coup de grace, its decline echoed in the decline of Blizzard as a company, a body that lost all its principles long ago and continues as a spasm of what it was, betting on the numbing effect of its products against the abuse of its workers. It was a winning gamble.
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Andrei Filote lives and writes somewhere between the Alps and the sea. Follow him on Bluesky.
