In news that is so achingly 'lifestyle' as to be utterly nauseating, Snoop Dogg has sold his soul to launch the Hip-Hop Gaming League sponsored by Xbox Live and Sprite, showing that the games industry can still shock when it comes to cocaine-fuelled marketing idiots making decisions to greenlight projects of epic pointlessness.
The event has been commemorated by a shocking staged press conference (at which the games press is portrayed as good looking professional adults – a classic error) at which Snoop outlines his latest way, replacing his dabblings in exploitative hardcore pornography, of funding planned further purchases of golden bathtubs to show off on MTV Cribs.
“The Dogg has called you here for a special announcement, one that could change the face of sports and vidoegaming forever!” Snoop explains to a large room of actors.
“So the rumours are true?” asks a good looking black woman in her mid-thirties, representing the least-likely videogame journalist ever. “You are here to initiate something revolutionary in the videogaming world?”
Crying yet?
“I'm an initiator, you dig?” continues Mr Dogg. “I've been hosting smaller circuit events consistently over the past six years in da hood with my entertainer peers or whatnot. But now we're doing it over this Xbox 360 and it's a whole new ballgame.” Wow! We didn't realise that a famous rapper had been organising game competitions in da hood! We don't know about you, but here at SPOnG we feel a new pride in playing videogames all the time. There was society asserting that locking yourself away for hours on end playing online games was for losers, when it turns out cool people with real guns and biatches have special organised competitions with each other. In your face, society!
“Baby girl, look,” says Snoop “Da Commissioner” Dogg to the next question, an equally tepid, sycophantic and bland question. “When me and my crew play games on Xbox like basketball, baseball, football, soccer, so on and so forth, but now we gonna take it to the next level which is where it should be at which is professional, international and universal. We gonna take this thing here straight over the stratosphere, baby.” Perhaps the reporter should think herself lucky that she was only subject to mild sexism and not being sodomised by three men while he films it.
See the forum for this news piece if you want to see the entire pretend press conference here and wonder just how girly and jealous hip-hop's elite have become.
We can picture Snoop on a conference call to an army of agents and publicists, demanding that they capture the zeitgeist and bottle it for him. “Fiddy Cent has a whole videogame! I need another golden bathroom, like, yesterday! I got MTV Cribs coming next week.”