Today was a beautiful day, complete with sunny sun and happy little birds sharing bird jokes we’ll never understand. Somewhere, a kid was flying a kite. Somewhere else, a group of happy metrosexuals were drinking cold, rattling glasses of Magners and exchanging epic anecdotes about their respective gap years.
I’m not bitter - just jealous.
I’m jealous because I have missed the whole glorious glory of the day having been stuck indoors, a slave to my own inertia. It hasn’t been a complete waste of time because I’ve discovered something very important - I have got to stop playing video games. It’s taking over my life.
Although I should accept that all of those hours are now lost, I can’t help thinking about what I should have done. I should have gone to the park with a book and a bag of cans. Hell, I could have sat on the sofa and watched re-runs of Come Dine With Me, even that would have had a greater sense of involvement than watching the seconds tick by until I had enough energy to Steal a Tanker Truck in Mafia Wars.
God, it’s sick - I actually feel sick right now, like I could puke for days on end in a multicoloured orgy of self-loathing and the worst thing about it is that I’m still thinking about Mafia Wars - oh, I wonder how many energy points I have now? I probably have loads, it’s been, what, a whole hour and a half since I last checked - that’s a lifetime in Mafia Wars. I could probably make it to level 19, get my energy bar completely refilled and master the Soldier tier in New York.
Disgusting.
Count yourself lucky if that means nothing to you.
What I should do is ban myself from playing video games full-stop. Even now, I’m wondering what I could have done with my life were it not for all of those hours (and there must be at least a couple of years when you add them up) keeping my thumbs exercised. I’d be a really successful accountant by now I’m sure, but no fun at parties. Not that I ever go to parties because I’m too busy earning fucking achievements.
Just for the Hell of it, I’ll try it for a week - no video games week. Here’s a list of reasons not to, just so you can see how utterly pathetic it is -
1 - If I don’t use my energy points, who will?
2 - What if I don’t bank all of my money and it gets stolen?
3 - What if all of my strawberries rot in Farmville?
4 - What if I leave Final Fantasy VII for so long that I forget what’s going on and have to start all over again?
5 - What if someone beats my high score in Crazy Cabbie?
And so on, and so on. Meanwhile, I’ll grow old and useless and drop off the face of humanity like a leper’s nose into a bowl of gruel.
The bottom line here is that Mafia Wars is a purely diabolic creation. I don’t care how much of the proceeds go to Haitian disasters, it’s some sick bastard’s way of making money by exploiting the boredom of millions of technoholics.
The real evil genius of the thing is that in order for the players to succeed, they must invite more people to join their virtual mob. So, you look through your contact list for the people whose lives are just as meaningless as your own and, bingo, you now have enough witless zombies in your entourage to take on fifteen other lost souls in a battle with no ultimate conclusion - everyone lives to fight again and the only thing lost is a piddling amount of money that you never had in the first place.
Your list of Mafia Wars accolades isn’t likely to help you find a better job, or improve your sex life or bring you closer to discovering who you really are, so why waste your time with it?
‘It’s fun’, say the level 300 über-mafiosi who can’t understand reality unless it’s framed in a monitor. The painful truth is that it’s not actually fun at all, only addictive. This is what Mafia Wars sounds like -
Click...
Click...
Click...
Click...
Ad nauseum, ad infinitum.
It involves no skill, no thought, so, by definition, it’s not even a game. It’s just a mindless process of clicking and waiting and clicking some more until the next aimless set of mouse-related tasks is unlocked.
And therein lies the appeal and the great sin of game developers nowadays. So many games on the market today, aren’t even played for fun. The fun disappears after the first 12 or 14 hours. The only reason people continue is to unlock this achievement or that achievement or to find the secret area or the hidden item.
The creators know the mind of the gamer. They know that unless every little thing has been accomplished to 100% completion, this lonely soul will feel a great sense of emptiness.
With Mafia Wars, all of the fun has been erased leaving only the compulsion to unlock things, earn achievements and thus, eliminate emptiness.
Basically, it’s a really sick joke.
But if nobody played the ‘game’, it wouldn’t exist. Millions of people keep it alive and keep the creators swimming through pools of naked women drenched in Dom Perignon, laughing at the hapless fools who awarded them such a fortune.
Laughing at me.
How I’d love to wipe the smiles from their faces. The tragedy is that I’m too lazy to get up off of my ass and kill them for ruining my day. Why can’t I kill them? Because there isn’t a fucking button to click that will do that.
Fair play to them.
Clever guys.
So there you go - my day amounts to me digging a hole in which to get stuck, and then shouting at the spade.
I wish Red Forman was around.
I could sure use a foot in my ass.
Posts
I love it! I know too many people who could benifit from the realisation!
ReplyDeleteDear “GoeswithGod,”
ReplyDeleteI like your post very much. The main theme and your ways of expressing your feelings/ideas. But, then, I'm not a gamer.
My wife and son, however, are Gamers. They often play hours every day. I mean four and five hours. World of Warcraft, mainly. Since son made a 4.0 the last two semesters and is now a senior at a major university, hopefully, it’s a rather heavy form of relaxation/relief for him. He bought Starcraft II yesterday—he had been waiting for it to come out since he was 12! Had a celebration.
My son is good. I'm afraid he is already trained (for the military) to be a General (excellent strategist, formidable, he/his side wins all the time) or a Specialist (sharp shooter, he’s outstandingly good on the monitor and in real life, first noticed it when he was in 6th grade).
Which doesn't please me. To think about him either fighting and winning (killing others) or fighting and losing (getting killed himself). Since I'm coming to believe that half of our wars (at least) are (1) economically (or simply greed of corporations) determined or are (2) for empire and domination. Or both*, as in the PNAC pre-determined create-Middle-Eastern-bases-of-influence-while-grabbing-Iraqi-oil-that-our-corporations-were-denied-by-Saddam plans that Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz-Pearl got Bush II to substitute for the promise and mission (THE PROMISED MISSION!) of stopping or killing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan(say,at Tora Bora) back in 2003.
*I thought of a third not-so-good-reason our treasure gets shunted off to foreign wars: for funneling money to the military-industrial-financial-energy complexes ruining (that’s running with an “I”) the world. But I’m really just repeating myself This is especially true since we “privatize” and “contract out” so much that our military formerly did. Private corporations now provide the meals, the water, the gasoline, the security, etc. for super-big mark-ups and extra million$ (!), often with little or no accountability. (You can listen to the hearings on C-Span!)
Wow. Compared to that—killing or being killed and depleting our national Treasure (sons, daughters, and trillion$ of dollars) while killing a million and displacing four or five millions of Iraqi individuals and families--gaming sounds like a pretty good alternative. Wow, again.
Waste time and human potentials on games? (There's a place for games in moderation. If one can do them in moderation). OR, do harm to other people and their nations while doing harm to one's own people and nation? I like YOUR alternative, better.
USE all (most) of that time to be all you can be and do what YOU really want to do. In your one, single, limited life-time, you silly procrastinator! (Take it from an old man who is surprised like most old men to discover—after 70+ years--It’ll be over soon enough. And who knows when. It could be soon. Or, as the honkey-tonk sign used to say: “Vee R 2 zoon oldt and 2 schmart late.”)
Get up off your But’s and your Fears, and Live at Cause for the causes you most care about, even if it’s your self. Or family. You might even consider Going with God, “GoeswithGod.”
How's that, for your desired kick or the foot where you wanted it?!