In my 12th year of public education, I wrote an essay on a self-selected topic for my normal-level English class on the value of video games. Now I will argue the opposite.
Attention Weapons
I built my life on video games. Very young, I knew I needed a friend to see Luigi. This much later, I need $1k minimum to have a console and buy games at market price. You pay for licenses on the e-store if you want more, or you seek out someone brave enough to carry hard-back cartridges, and if they do they’ll carry anything because it’s a statement for the like-minded.
Video games were entombed in plastic cartridges when I met them, and they arrived by magic like my very own fairy tale, while none told by parents were ever true. I tolerated cold in the basement at virtually any valid hour, and resented being pushed to go outside. Parents wanted to have sex, but I couldn’t understand why I needed outdoor time when I was varying my indoors time like crazy. I was writing Warcraft-likes on paper. You were supplied an eraser.
I had fun reading all of the Deathgate Cycle or something. I craved the library when we went there. I had no taste, but I knew what I liked in the moment.
Video games constantly foiled me as I performed what they told me to, no matter how unclear their instructions. I’d do anything it said by definition. I’ll shoot a duck with a plastic gun for no discernible gain, sure. I’ll pick fights about what should have counted.
I mastered my games. I didn’t play for the speculation on the enjoyment, I picked marks. I picked them from Blockbuster in Walmart. They were my puppets, who I wished to puppet me instead. There is basically no wonder that I am into BDSM now.
Over time, I picked apart what it was that made it so satisfying, while learning to be hyperactive in my vigilance and carve its patterns on my brain for no discernible reason. I was solving work. I was figuring out how they set up the problems, and how clever some were. Games weren’t just good or bad, they were part of my collection or not. Wanting a game was wishing for it. Now it was costing money. Own it in perpetuity or bust. We didn’t bust.
Now I’m the literal person copyright holders hate, I want the 72-hour version streamed to my TV, played skillfully with a tour guide’s patience, completely unvoiced. I don’t solve problems for them, they are pure entertainment that allows me to never purchase the game.
There are ancient apps on my phone that counted as games that don’t even distribute anymore, they’re just in my backups and follow me around. I have shit you can’t get. It’s not gold, but is any of it?
Video games make us experience emotions for virtual rewards, usually tooled to help you do it again very soon. That was the spell they were casting on me in my youth to make me do anything it commanded. I have agency to play it or not, barely.
Some game types are accused of harvesting income from gambling, but the first gamble is tasting its formulated addiction. Copycat games appear because the formula is meant to be tasted again, even by those who like the real thing better.
Their cunning was the substitution of something real for something digital and not owned by you. You will feel frustration or glee, and you’re often meant to feel them in alternation like that, for nothing but the faces on the screen. There is a finite amount of time during the day to feel those things, and you’re often doing it without humans.
They can force you to feel worse about your digital gains by depreciating their value in a market designed to do that.
Early on, video games could only be described as artisanal experiences, technical feats with higher and higher concepts. Importantly, the distribution model were more like books.
Presently, video games are directly attached to you and your bank account, you stupid rich blood bag. They have pressurized back-flow to inhale more money from you.
Today, video games usually have a team of people writing software to turn You into their lootbox.
Multiplayer games are more profitable on paper when they make you all have a license, not just one and numerous controllers (and it’s technically hard to accomplish that anyway; It would require Craftsmanship and wear the marks of originality).
Multiplayer games are so socially powerfully that many companies give the game away for free, and they still expect to turn a profit. How could that be?
Multiplayer means competitive. People have to get angry or stupid for it to keep working. They make us toil in competition for no gains, no exercise, no skill with our peers.
The single player ones do it too, and may offer special deals on scrip.
See, if you’ll give them your money, they’d be stupid not to take it.
A staggering proportion of video games are predicated on this tenant of gambling. Loaded with your money for fake things and clout with no one, destined only for being a stage monkey in a league stage built to present you. It is paramount that the game be one of skill, but they are brainwashing you as the price for entry. These leagues make the folklore heroes when the underclass joins up.
I largely quit games because they were all violently competitive for no discernible gain. Pitting you against one another, even playing on teams, creates even better wartime simulation, making you do anything it says.
Modern Warfare games stepped into historical fiction in a way that led us to fantasy invasions of other countries and of ourselves. This isn’t a game where players pick a side, you work to play-act the mass murder of others with realism.
In the 1980s, my parents introduced me to contemporary culture, chorused by frequent lobbying from my mother’s mother. My father was into computers but not games. He had a computer and a guitar in the basement room, and though he never confessed it so lusciously, he wholeheartedly loved them.
His guitar gave me self-taught music, and his computer gave me an algorithm toy that infected me to trace the grains and build algorithms too.
We put algorithms everywhere. I specifically helped put them everywhere. After Digipets and Smash Brothers, I stuffed them anywhere people wanted them.
We made attention weapons.
Once, we were geeks for saying Chocobo in school, and now everyone plays something with their boredom, doing whatever it tells them for no discernible gain.
Multi-headed attention let us practice skills of the mind, but the Value was how much they could make us pay for more. The Value is what the market for you, the product they pass around to take turns on you.
The brazen worst of what people do with attention technology is not strictly the point. Some of us seek healing by engaging cooperative games, feel-good stuff and the like. Victimizing us further, they give us emotional loops which sate us but gain us nothing. Hypothetical therapy lies beyond.
Like on any battlefield, we make precious memories of what we have. If that can happen in real war, does it justify the war?
The Value of video games is the Value we could seek anywhere, and Green Food does not a Promised Valley make.
Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley let you toil away at a farm, meeting goals as you see fit. At introduction, these are educational, but their job is not done with you once they taught you something. They’re here to enlist you, kid. Games sometimes get bought and sold to new owners who have plans for you, and of you they can acquire.
Video games as a service are turned off to keep you purchasing new versions. Many feature encryption anyway which stops being unlockable if their company goes away. You are rendered only a disservice while it teaches you about how licensing really works. You pushed I Agree, continuing your self-puppetry without reading.
Video games can replace anything, and this is how they step beyond what physical games are. In person, games impersonating real experiences approach the thing itself. With the digital medium, sex and violence are explored as an art form in a loop, faster and more ruthlessly for scripted climax, for a price tag.
In 2004, Columbine Colorado had already experienced scrutiny for the influence video games may have had on the psychology of one who kills with guns in a school, so easily as that.
Video games alone did not make anyone do anything per se. Video games let us practice ideas they put there in our heads, the same way books or art do. This is why the culturally conservative wield claims of morality when they strike down outlets of prurient culture of any kind: Contact with culture itself puts ideas in your head.
The Value of video games is also the Value of exposure. I quite like this method of appraisal, because it necessitates a nuanced treatment of what Value implies in a piecewise function that can categorize f(x) on any number of logics based on x and likely more inputs.
Exposure drives interest. There are no AK-47 murder fantasies in an isolated tribe of humanity. The subconscious cannot summon that up with meaningful specificity.
Specificity in media created a demand for age ratings, as if working adults are better suited for murderous or sexual make-believe in a readily capitalized loop. Consent is inviting the vampire past the threshold. What should we propose is the Value in that?
Commercialization itself is not the culprit. Not just the industrialized slop stealing away hours for the recurring emotional stimuli, and for fattened price tags. What you receive here is most sticky to you, updated and updated. New and refined orders, every day.
We crave the updates because we enjoy exposure to novelty, even the promise of it if you run it again. We’ll even pay for the updates to our most precious no-gain activities.
Our ability to settle into healthy comfort with a video game depends very much on what the exposure does.
Is it keeping you a wage slave, darling?
TODO
- modern warfare
- modern weaponry
- modern competition esports
- CS/CS2 sponsors: lifestyle, energy drinks, furniture/fixtures, cars (luxury), bank
- Mastercard global sponsor with + Valorant (Riot Games, fully owned by Tencent in China)
- Visa + Team Liquid (Brazil)
- (LOUD has the bank, local discourse might have just slanted toward the gambling sponsors.)
- Helldivers; the magical thinking of satire
- modern idols
- modern issues
- department of war
- Kushner’s Electronic Arts
You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.
