This is a a sort of a meandering post that I mean to try to capture the flavor and mood of myself just before getting onto Guild Wars 2. The reason to do this is I want to try to give some perspective on the variations of where we are all coming from just before we log into the weirdness of a digital space.
I am traveling a lot lately. Yay!
Actually no, not really. I have some so far concluded America is crazy-town and I hate country music. Do you know how many variations of the same story there are for “my girl left me” and “this is how I want to say profoundly stupid things to you”? I don’t know, but apparently the variations are not that infinite, it just happens to rhyme well: the one thing country has going for it. There is the female singer’s variation on this sort of singing, too: “my house is burning down, but we’re in it together!” See, the first is all about process. If you’re a woman you already know where it is going so you have to sit through the guy trying to figure out where he’s going and then not miraculously arrives. The male experience of this is “where’s she going with this?” and “I already know that” followed by “and you didn’t see this coming, how?”. I hate country music.
You can realize a lot when trapped to twelve hours of this. One thing that came to mind happened way late at night. It was dark out, someone else was driving, and I’m watching these lights flashing away in the other lane. They’re variations on glaring white, orange, and weapons called halogen dazzlers. I had this intensely horrifying realization at this point that I was trapped in a vehicle going somewhere to the beat of American country music. It was more than enough to make me deeply reconsider my life and all its varied choices. Around this same moment, wanting to scream, I realized every other light out there flashing by was going through some variation of this, too. Maybe that red light was lighting to Insane Clown Posse, while the one just beside us was definitely some fresh hippies right down to those colorful glasses. Which one was the creeper-wagon I didn’t want to know, but that was surely there somewhere. This is what humanity has been doing since the dawn of time: trapped in a bubble of darkness, moving by the light of a fire, and going to the beat of a song rarely ever the one that is our own. Twelve thousand years and we’re still a bunch of tribes around a campfire. …Weird.
If you’re wondering where this is all going, we’ve arrived… Online forums, every post, every subjective little quip, quarrel, cheer, tangle, and mad-house raving is some variation of this ‘bubble existence’ we’re all meandering around with.
I imagine a campfire pressing back the night, then removing the actual fire, and standing in that bubble – that’s the image in my head. Sort of weird tin-foil hat screw up. Off in the distance we can see hundreds of trillions of other fires. Most the candle lights of the dead after their Battle of Dagorlad: “Don’t venture too close or you’ll join the dead to light a little candle of your own.”
Every time I have to go traveling like this I realize a few things. “It’s really great to mingle with other people,” … “for the perspective.”
To quote a friend from the other night:
I feel like social normality goes into infinite regression each time I watch a loading bar begin taking me onto a video game. It’s like watching people step through the Star Gate for the first time, tunneling into another reality. By the time the loading bar has reached full normality has ended. It remains with us like a supply of oxygen, personal, and finite. The more we’re here, the less we have.
Normality transitions from a state, into a condition at this point. We call this ‘normalicy’, This is the point at which the oxygen tank says, “You have this long to live,” by way of informing how much oxygen is left in the tank.
There are other signs the oxygen is running out. A person says hello, but we don’t respond. We respond, but leave without saying goodbye. We are offered a genuine compliment, but worry it isn’t. The oxygen is low at this point, nearly gone, but we don’t realize that’s really ourselves depleting.
The quote above really encapsulated what’s really taking place on an internet forum:
The more I play a video-game the more I find I have something to complain about. The less I play it the less I have to complain about.
Being gone a week with a bunch of books, a lab due when I get back, and traveling with a bunch of people I really can’t relate with sets my tent just on the edge of the firelight. It’s enough distance to know this bubble-world is in motion, that it’s being skimmed, passed, and perused for it’s ‘valuables’ – often in an entirely subjective (and more often uncomfortable) way. And when it’s over I’m back in an environment which is at least familiar, but maybe not any less stressing.
I think that video games of any sort can rightly be identified as a kind of escapism on one hand and a revitalization on the other.
It really has to be why we care so much about these things. Digital spaces are about the only “editable” spaces most of us have really. Maybe the only thing your parents can imagine for you is a ‘family’, as if this defines reality and all that life has to offer. Maybe you’re working 5 to 1700; this time of your a video game is the only means to your seeing of sunlight. They’re also a way to go to the beach because 1500 USD for a plane ticket is laughably out of sight. So, people want a lot from their virtual spaces.
But then there is the other end of it… making those spaces. There are companies like Blizzard that front-end a lot of their products to look good at E3. There are companies like CCP that need the Monocle Riots to remind them someone pays for their existence and doesn’t mind gutting it from the inside to remind them. Burning ‘indestructible’ things is beautiful. And companies like Anet, that after nearly three years of ominous silence has started to try to do this communications and content production thing before toxicity levels reached critical and community jumped ship (or burned it down in retaliation).
There are the companies and then there are the developers. Anet probably has a horde of staff, but realistically that horde of staff is still going through the same things as the picture I tried to form above. I am a complete software phobe. I hate it, I distrust it, if you give it to me it will die. No really. I have the Dresden problem. Software that has worked fine for years dies the moment I get within 100 paces. My mother kills batteries. It’s a thing. I always imagine trying to implement something into a game as a nightmare scenario that starts out like the Martian. At first it is just awful, but only awful. Next comes acceptance around the same time you’ve matched rhythm with the situation and a sort of normalicy is reached. This is, of course, is completely delusional because the universe is a sadist. A short time later that siren from the Alien films is blaring full blast, this probably the alien itself, and there is a serious consideration to just say kitten this just to see what a nuclear melt down looks like; radiation suit on because there is ever a give and take. At which point the whole story repeats itself.
