I have to be careful these days because reading Eurogamer can result in some terrible brain aches with just one click. Every now and then they still run a gem like the recent piece on ladders in videogames (I have not learned to love them, they are wicked things) but mainly, I’m likely to end up on someone business talking at me and it’s pretty awful to stumble upon.

In “and not for the first time”, this time it’s Shawn Layden’s turn to suggest the solution to videogames woes is … erm … the return of the double A videogame. Good one Shawn, that will surely fix everything.

The good thing about asking for the return of the double A videogame is that nobody knows exactly what these things are so diagnosing it as one solution can sound really good because people will think things like “yeah, I loved God Hand, I’d love more of that” or whatever their fave game from the crushed middle of videogames at a different period in time is.

Quite rightly you should love God Hand too! It is the correct way to live.

“Double-A is the tier of gaming below triple-A, and above the tier I’ve never heard anyone call “single-A” but refer to as “indie”. It’s the tier of game made by a team of fewer than, say, 70 people – it’s not clearly defined – and working within more apparent budgetary constraints. They’re games that can’t be everything to everyone, in other words, so they’re usually shorter and more focused, and arguably more fun.”

Even Eurogamer themselves are wrestling with explaining what Double A is in the piece there … it’s not indie, it’s not the industry, it’s sort of just like an indie studio, making an indie game, but it also isn’t that, it’s something else. It’s a magical inbetween state where none of the current pressures that studios already trying to exist in this space have even exist. Or the studios for that matter. Which is lucky because it wouldn’t be much of a solution if they did exist, eh? You know, with the industry being a bit fucked and all that.

Shawn introduces his logic by reminding everyone that there are still people alive in twenty twenty and a six who subscribe to the “Videogames are at the exact same time, the dominant superior medium and also somehow subordinate to anything else they can think of … for reasons” school of thought.

”If you walk into Tesco right now, almost everybody in Tesco has a favorite song, but they won’t have a favorite game, so the impact of music is everywhere, the impact of toasters is everywhere, but gaming is still, we make a lot of money but in this very prescribed set of users.”

Toasters? Bit desperate, mate. I don’t have a favourite toaster… to be honest, at the moment I don’t even have a toaster at all. I can’t say I’ve been seriously effected by this but sure, go off Shawn.

Whilst I’m not going to complain if someone is going to route more funding into studios to enable them to make games, this is really only a fluffy way round saying you’re only interested in funding ‘triple I’ games, which also only exist in the same nebulous state of I know what it is when I see it, mate. It just has the bonus of fewer people looking at you a bit funny when you say ‘Double A’ out loud.

The pressing material reality at hand is that there are already a lot of people working in this space currently. Some of them have been around a very long time (Rebellion spring to mind but mainly because I really love the stuff Rebellion manage to put out, even when it’s not entirely to my taste), some only cropped up in the past decade, but there are plenty of these costs plenty to make, aren’t AAA open world games, already out there.

And yes, they are struggling to find funding just like everyone else so by all means, fund them! Just don’t expect this to somehow roll back the past forty odd years of crushing capitalism or even to put a dent into the problems the industry faces now.

I worry more that this is one more thing where the folks who have lived and breathed the line go up forever times show how truly out of touch they have become and their only plans are “if we pretend it’s 2013 again, we are going to be fine” so back to the world of Double A when those pesky upstart indies weren’t the middle ground, that was taken up by … pesky upstart indie studios trying desperately to stay open instead, and exclusives and whatever else reminds people of 2013 and being A Capital G Gamer that springs to mind.

It won’t work but hey, it might buy us a few more years of not facing up to the shitshow that is today, whatever day you’re reading this.