Halo: Campaign Evolved marked the official confirmation of something that felt like it would never happen just a short few years ago, with Halo officially coming to PlayStation. Following that announcement, GameStop, the retailer that was initially known for selling physical video games that's now more known for turning into a glorified Pop Funko and merch store called the 'Console Wars' over. Of all entities, the White House, which would normally have more important things to post about, responded with an AI-generated image of President Trump in Spartan armor with the caption "Power to the players."
GameStop's original post comes with a long and drawn-out declaration about the console wars being over, calling them "petty," which they definitely are, and also claiming that they originated with the release of the original Xbox and Halo: Combat Evolved with it.
A bit of a history lesson here for GameStop: console wars or, more accurately, players needlessly siding with one console manufacturer over another based on things like exclusive games you might prefer over the other and real-life factors like most parents being unwilling and/or unable to afford buying their kids consoles from every manufacturer, began long before the days of Xbox vs. PlayStation with Nintendo vs. SEGA.
Sure, Console Wars have always been more than a bit idiotic, but at least get the details of it right if you're going to go through the effort of making a big song-and-dance over it.
Speaking of getting the details right, unspurisingly, the AI that someone at the White House used to generate the image of Trump in Master Chief's armor holding an energy sword and saluting the American Flag on the White House lawn, did not get the details right. Specifically the key detail of the fact that the American flag should have 50 stars on it, one for each state. Instead, the AI-generated image only has 40 stars on the flag.
By now, we're used to AI-generated images getting details wrong, and we've also become used to The White House using AI-generated images to display the President in all manner of ways, including ones that have caught a fair deal of flak, like the image that showed Trump as the Pope following the death of Pope Francis.
But it feels telling that important details like getting the right number of stars on the American flag in a post coming from the official White House account are overlooked in an attempt to garner some kind of cultural clout. Like how the caption "Power to the Players" overlooks the fact that tariffs instituted by the current administration have been a direct factor in the cost of gaming hardware going up in the United States and worldwide.
Or how, in 2019, Trump pointed to video games as "the glorification of violence in our society," and pointed to violence in games as a reason for America's mass shooting problems. Never mind the fact that several studies have never been able to prove any links between mass shootings and violence in video games, or the fact that games like Halo and Call of Duty are available everywhere in the world, and only in the United States do these mass shooting issues persist.
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