No, that's not meant to be artistic. I just had 3 beers at the bar (2 bars actually) instead of the one I was initially aiming for, so I'm at work waiting to sober up, typing on my new netbook and decided to make a blog post. Plus my license is expired and I'm not sure DUI plus expired license would end particularly happily. I could talk about my new netbook but I think I'll save it for another time. It involves an operating system other than OS X that rhymes with "schmindows" so you can see it will be a post that sparks many strong feelings.
I have a new rule for my life that I wrote in bold letters in one of my journals that I still violate a little too frequently. That rule is: no more gaming blogs to watch the train wreck that is gaming forums. It is a waste of my life to spend time reading about all those other people wasting their lives. And yet, I can't look away. Probably because I am still working out what role gaming can have in the life of someone who is still growing, and working to be better than he/she is. I feel like the two things are largely incompatible. Like you can spend your life feeling good about new accomplishments like learning new languages, skills, or artistic outlets, or you can play games which give you an illusion of accomplishment, but that in no way actually made you smarter or has a lasting impact on you or the world at large. There are some good counter arguments to be made, namely that games are no worse than movies as an entertainment choice, but my counter would be watching movies as your sole leisure time activity would not necessarily be a fulfilling lifestyle either (although I think well crafted movies can inspire deeper though if they are genuinely artistic).
Anyway, that's a topic that can be argued later. What I want to talk about in particular is the arguments themselves. I constantly see arguments that are well thought out, and eloquent, and passionate . . . and it's about something like whether the death penalty is harsh enough in the game. Or whether the publisher did a good enough job marketing. Or whether the game mechanics are quality or not quality. And a lot of it about whether the game as a whole is good enough to suck them in from real life entirely. Like the lot of them are heroin addicts who have given up on real life entirely, and are now just bickering over which drug is the best destroyer of their potential. Like they've established what they are, they're just arguing about dosage. I'm being too harsh, I know. I just feel like if some of those guys could put the same amount of passion into their job, or their relationship, or anything with lasting and edifying effects whatsoever, it would be a really good thing. It just bothers me to see a whole bunch of men (maybe more teenagers than I think?) arguing about video game mechanics, with all the full-on alpha male posturing and seriousness of real-world debates. Like it's a symptom of the fall of the empire. Like we have a population and voting public full of people who make a great show of being very knowledgeable about tabloid fluff (because it's way easier to have strong opinions and involved theories about celebrity gossip and video games than it is about bridge engineering or governmental policy), and fewer and fewer who bother to learn hard things, which the real world is necessarily made of.
Okay, rant over. A lot of this is just projection on my part I know. Because I have mostly been the type of person to master easy things (games, comic book lore) instead of hard things (physics, astronomy) even though I have really good mental hardware and could do so much more with the resources I have. It bothers me. And it bothers me that it doesn't seem to bother anyone else.
