See that?

Funny, right? Clever, maybe? Insightful, at the very least?

NO! It's fucking REALITY is what it is! It's MY reality!

Hit the jump so I don't have to wax depressing out here in public. *sniffle*

That picture represents a reality that says the games industry is going to keep shooting itself in the foot until the wound gets infected and the entire business that keeps me in a steady supply of pre-stressed clothes, pasta covered in tiny shrimpies and white wine sauce, and the finest prescription drugs Rush Limbaugh can buy is about to run into a brickwall that only recently had the smoldering remains of an Atari 7200 scraped off of its stony facade.

I won't strain myself detailing the myriad ways the games biz seems to be autocannibalizing itself for kicks (mostly because Cracked's David Wong did it so elegantly in the article linked to the above image) but I will highlight one crucial point I think he missed, owing to his not toiling daily on overthinking gaming itself.

Following what Wikipedia calls the "North American video game crash of 1983," after Nintendo single-handedly resurrected gaming as a thing, when the overthinkers of the day were attempting to pin said crash on one overwhelmingly evil factor, the answer they nearly unanimously came up with was that Atari simply stopped giving a fuck as to who published games on their consoles. Thus retailers ended up with bargain bins jammed full of licensed pet food tie-ins and games about E.T. so terrible that the publisher was forced to resort to measures usually reserved for the disposal of nuclear waste to contain the game's innate stench of failure lest it infect the entirety of Reagan-era America.

With that in mind, have any of you seen the Wii shelves at your local gaming retailer lately? Not the items on the shelf, but the actual shelf itself?

No, you haven't, because they are too busy holding up billions of metric tons of shit like Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum 2009 and whichever Carnival Games sequel hasn't yet been conned into the cart of a poorly informed, if well meaning grandmother, who is too busy hoping against hope that her spawn's spawn might enjoy the abortion on a disc she just shelled out a wallet-breaking $7 for.

As famed aphorist George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."