A common saying has it that the past is another country. It’s taken as a figure of speech, but pay a visit to almost any mid-American shopping mall these days, and the prevailing vibe resembles an archaeological site. What was the hub of American commerce in the previous era is now where commercial operations wait to die.
The mall might be suffering a slow death, but it outlasted video gaming as an in-person social activity. Video arcades and LAN parties preceded malls into the abyss; now all that’s left is online shopping and gaming or soft exile to the single-player cloister.
Many would dismiss these parallel declines as nostalgic trivialities of the Mall and Nintendo Generations. But everywhere you look, the omens point to a radical shift from the old order to whatever is next.
What’s more, the change in well underway. Millionaires get their utilities shut off because the company’s server maintenance delays payment processing till after the deadline. Police balk at arresting feral street hooligans while arresting productive taxpayers for sharing unapproved memes. Republican lawmakers do the bidding of fast-talking heads who demand the financial enslavement of usury victims and the elderly. Anarcho-tyranny is a shopworn term, but we have yet to come up with a better name for what’s going on all around us.
In light of the bumpy ride we’re all taking in the unknown, whether we want to or not, it’s a pleasant diversion to pass the time reminiscing about America’s not-so-long-ago last days. They were times when getting together with friends meant showing up at the local hangout to see who was there. They were the days when video games were made by actual video game companies, and those companies were willing to experiment with novel play styles and peripherals.
Last night I joined author and musician David V. Stewart to chat about the distant country that is the past. We started off talking about the mall, then one tangent led to another. But as always, it was a fun and fascinating time.
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“Millionaires get their utilities shut off because the company’s server maintenance delays payment processing till after the deadline.”
I’ll bet that glass-and-steel McMansions feel like paradises without heat or AC.
Meanwhile, I’m just waiting for imperialism to return. It would be nice for other nations to rule us directly with governors and soldiers instead of bribes made to congressmen.
All I have to say on the matter is there are more saints who were monarchs and nobility than congressmen. part of that reason is more monarchs and nobility were *Catholic,* but it is still worth noting…
I’m just hearing the same thing twice.
Say what you want about the Chinese and Russian governments, at least they have set rules, those rules are explicit, and the penalties for breaking them are no secret.
And their rulers earned the right to rule by force or are the ancestors of someone who did. Meanwhile you have a bunch of “public servants” who expect to be served by the masses. Funny how free society works?
Public servants whose primary loyalties are often to other countries.
Looking forward to listening to the stream.
I was a little too young/not in the right circumstances to catch the arcade setting in my youth. But I loved playing split-screen multiplayer games. Some of my fondest gaming memories now are times where I played the Halo campaign with a buddy, or played Jedi Outcast on the Gamecube with my brother as we tried to force-push each other into very Star Wars-ian bottomless pits. Online gaming was miserable; everybody kicked my butt. I liked being a big fish in a small pond. Gaming was fun as a solo activity, or a communal one; not fun as a remote one. At least for me.
I think this principle applies to a lot of things, actually. Just as online gaming unnaturally expands your pool of competitors beyond real people in your physical space – where that’s home or the arcade – dating apps make people think the real catch is far beyond their neighborhood, warping behavior in all sorts of destructive ways. Social media makes a popularity contest not be merely the antics of local high schoolers, but the whole world, as impressionable teens hold themselves to the standards of the top 0.001% of beautiful people and their self-hyper-documented lives that they shouldn’t even be exposed to. Those are just a couple examples that immediately come to mind; I’m sure many more could be mustered with a little effort.
This highlights, I think, that technology can be a good thing when it fosters local, real, community and connection, and bad when it disrupts or severs it. Kids hanging out together playing games and having a shared experience is a good use case for video games. Pumping endless cash into loot boxes in free-to-play online game intentionally engineered to manipulate your dopamine response system highlights a bad one. To name a quick example from just one medium.