~*~ 2026 | 06 | 06 ~*~
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now that i have been gradually putting small efforts (such as right now,) into writing, it is helping me, giving me the perspective i so desire, but it is not a perspective i very much like. i think i write like this because amongst the disciplinary & explorative motives is also a genuine search for connection. when i wrote of "once feeling very connected to the network," i was writing about my feelings of companionship, respect & trust for people who i once accessed through a computer network.
those people are very specific people, but they make up a very general populace. thinking back, i could trace each of their features, recalling each time we spoke, obsessing & obsessing again & again over the same fixations on my own loneliness i was pondering even back then. for example, on irc yesterday, i posted in response to a friend talking about NES games, that i'd played the NES game "balloon fight" a fair amount with my brother as a kid. this paints a nostalgic image of perhaps weeks or months spent playing that game fondly during childhood, or perhaps it suggests we'd play it sporadically, returning to it as we grew, but both of these interpretations are wrong. in reality, i've played balloon fight probably less than 10 times in my life, maybe 20 for a safer bet. the majority of those times were on my own, & i found the game much too easy to beat in the single-player mode. i played it with my brother maybe only twice or three times out of those 10 - 20. adding my brother to the game gave me a welcome, extra challenge, to look after him & teach him the game whilst clearing the levels as he was distracted by figuring it all out. it was "fun" to me because, like most instances of playing video games with people, i was convinced by the images displayed on the screen that my younger brother & i were somehow connected. connected in purpose of clearing the game, finally breaking through the usual mismatch between our personalities into cooperating & mutually aiding one another towards a common goal, mediated by a miraculous, magical, computerized picture machine. i don't think we beat the game, & it wasn't long before the illusion wore off & he died before i did, & the perceived unfairness came through of having played the game, & indeed games, a lot more than my brother, five years my junior. he was annoyed as usual, familiar with being second place & deemed a failure by an unfeeling video game. instead of continuing solo until the end, i stopped playing when he was out, turning attention towards just how well he did & how much fun we'd had playing that game. it managed to catch him out of the bad mood & convince him there was more fun to be had with the little balloon men on the computer game. as such, it was a game we were able to return to once or twice before "balloon fight" became just another product on the shelf & faded away into its deserved absence from my life as a simple, stupid & trite thing that once did me the favour of tricking my brother into feeling he had self-worth for letting me objectify him into a video game-form, if only for a bit. it would still possibly make him smile, if he still remembers it.
the irc message "i used to play balloon fight quite a bit with my younger brother," is something i say despite all of the factual & emotional inconsistencies i associate directly with the game "balloon fight". i am fully aware that it is not just balloon fight which makes me feel this way, but all video games & entertainment media - especialy neoliberal ones of the 80s & 90s which is so glorified by people of my generation & social creed. it infuriates me that it all exists as the only cultural touchstones others' have to checked & weigh by entire life experience against, & when i am posting in my very own irc channel with my very own dear friends, it is a fury & an indignation that i require myself to hold back from expressing in the name of being honestly able to speak to people in the same cultural continuum i have grown up in. these are the gamers - they love "balloon fight". i'm not allowed to say "balloon fight is a neoliberal capitalist propaganda distraction invented by a neoliberal subcolony of the amerikkkan empire. they share cultural capital with me - i would be violating the unspoken code of conduct to shatter the illusion that balloon fight is a marvel, a spectacle. in such circles, if the gamers are considerably detached enough, the neoliberalism enabling such material conditions becomes paramount enough to their lives that it becomes personal, which makes it political. it is a hugely bourgeois phenomenon. it is the same phenomenon of detachment that happens to anybody who stays shut up in their own tiny little inner-world of escapist fantasy, whether they are a racecar driver, gamer, botanist, ballerina or neuroscientist. there is an undeniable degree of social separation & alienation that marks individualistic performance, from the literality of maddening oneself for method acting to the dispassionate focus into the immaterial, third-other spectacle of video games mediated between two real people. i have an intense dislike for it, & i can smell it a mile away, but still through forced pleasantries i say, "i used to play balloon fight quite a bit with my younger brother as a kid," as i reach out to another friendly, alienated person in an unfriendly & alienating society.
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it is good then, that i have come into writing this piece with such sour emotion, because i believe this point will be a good one to use to enter my critique of my time spent living a spectacle, when i socially preoccupied myself with the smash bros melee phenomenon as it swept through my city. i owe a number of deep sociological scars on my soul to this time, this scene of people all dissociated into & distracted by the same image-machine, & i also owe to it a number of longstanding friendships & benefits. in some ways, the scene filled a void much like any cultish spectacle. it makes up a collage of memories in my head that i feel are culturally relevant & significant amongst the time i spent alive, & i believe applying my own dialectics to it would paint both the game & scene as it was observed by someone quite uniquely aware of its spectacularly antisocial nature, at least given my current perspective.
it makes sense to me start from this piece, because i think it may perhaps be the shortest of what i plan to write, although perhaps i have less to say about homestuck. it would be easy for me to write about it semi-autobiographically, picking up from the point where i've left high school & begun "partying," (socially drinking heavily, craving absolution & suicidal oblivion,) which eventually leads towards playing this game for the sake of its "hardcore"-ness & whatever else that means to me in my life. i think its working title can be "living spectacle," but i also want a dramatic, over-the-top & on-the-nose subtitle, such as "i was a victim of the cult of melee," or something like that. perhaps, actually, i would pick up the actual chapters of the story from there, & do the due diligence of prefacing such a tome laden with cultish, nerdy jargon with some tens of pages, characterising myself before i met the game/scene, lest i be judged by either outsiders or veterans of the cult itself (:p).
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to bring this piece home, my persistent social frustration at the people i keep in touch with is nothing new, & it is something i have promised to ventilate through my writing, & now that i am following-through on that promise, the writing is being given form, which i admittedly had doubts about. i'll turn my semi-autobiography into an intersectional class analysis on what it means to be labelled a "gamer," & explain lamentingly how it belongs with other commodified labels in the graveyard landfill of false ideologies. i'll come up with some good questions & get consent to intersperse it with interviews & excerpts from peers from the scene, & i will use it as a means of measuring whether or not i feel worthy enough to publish anything "real" (whatever that implies,) one day, or if i am just content to scrawl here. for now, i'm just glad i turned the critique into something positive, & afforded myself the space to finally verbalize just how universally i find entertainment media to be trite - something that puts me quite at odds with not just the bourgeois consumerist masses, but also my own friends & people closest to me. i hope they do not eat me alive before i finish writing.
:) :) :) thanks 4 reading :) :) :)
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