That was how many of the dipshits who stormed the Capitol in Washington DC on Wednesday seemed to behave. For months, they’d LARPed their way towards the endgame: reading and rereading Trump’s tweets during the loading screens, purchasing supplies from conveniently located vendors, gathering allies on Twitter with sub-NPC levels of intelligence. Now, at last, it was forward, up the steps, into the Rotunda. The progress bar appeared for the final level of Modern Warfare 482: Capitol Insurrection. And after it had loaded, you couldn’t help but admire how pretty the graphics were…

I simply don’t know how else to account for the presence of a shirtless self-styled shaman in a Viking hat without concluding he thought he was in some kind of game. This is how our politics have gone over the past four years. The news cycle is now referred to in almost exclusively competitive terms: who can win it, who can score the most points. Twitter is a kind of game unto itself, pitting users against each other to see who can rack up the most dunks and likes (game over is when you get ratio’d). We sit around in our ludicrously comfortable ergonomic chairs sipping our Mountain Dew from out of our basement mini-fridges staring glass-eyed into our LCD screens and then we adjust our Amazon-discounted snuggies monogrammed with our dog’s initials and conclude that we’re doomed, done for, there’s a war going on, and we must fight back.