Beachballs in Paradise

.chatter

When a movie like Where the Wild Things Are is flamed to hell by the Internet for being too “hipster”, the term hipster is on the verge of turning into this decade’s “lamer”: a word of derision so genericized and overused as a strong indicator of complete disgust for anything one is even remotely annoyed with, it loses all significance and ends up shallow and trite to actually call anything that.

.chatter

Here’s something about protesting the inevitable.

That’s something people like to do; go on and on about what is natural and inevitable.

Your favorite book will get made into a movie. It will get a sequel written by someone who isn’t the original author. In a hundred years it will get re-written by another person and in five hundred years it may be entirely mis-remembered and reinterpreted as something else. It may be part of a song, or a poem or a computer game.

The same thing will happen to everything else you believe is sacred.

Every piece of music, every work of art, every film, every word, action, and deed. In spite of the effort to preserve these things in glass and shrink wrap in big boxes called museums. This is not to say it’s not worth preserving the original.

But the truth is that everything will be changed. That’s the way life works. Nothing belongs, in some eternal contract, to the person who created it. It only belongs to them, exclusively, so long as they keep it hidden to themselves. The moment they release it into the world, it becomes the shared property of everyone who encounters it and becomes whatever it means to each individual person.

Some people will piss and moan about the inevitable and try to draw a line in the sand. They like to feel self-righteous. (Everyone does; it’s another part of being human.) Self-righteousness is delectable. But it doesn’t matter if they’re right or wrong; if they have a point or they’re blathering nonsense. That’s all besides the point.

In a few billion years, this planet will not even be here and what you’re arguing over will be far past irrelevant. Not a statement of nihilism; just a slice of perspective. People may still exist, but not in any form you might recognize today. They won’t care about what’s sacred to you; in fact, they may not even consider you to be a thinking entity at all. Much less understand your protests that somebody wrote a new Hitchhiker’s book after Douglas Adams died.

And if you were them, you’d find to your own surprise you felt the same way.

Everything will be changed.

You’re next.

From the Department of Generational Turnover

What I would posit “hardcore” gamers don’t understand:

That the majority of their own community is not what they think it is.

“Hardcore” is a marketing label. Video game publishers stumbled across it and co-opted it in the early aughts, circa. 2002. Smelling fresh blood, the game industry sought to capture the mindshare of people who would have sneered at something as nerdy as video games just a few years before: college students into fraternities, booze, drugs, cars, sports, and bragging about their (fictional) sexual prowness. In short, the frat boys. They had spare money and plenty of time to play games.

So video games were suddenly give an extreme (x-treme) sports makeover. All the right brands of clothing were licensed, the right buzzwords used, the right pop-music imported, and the right subjects put to the front: gritty, bloody military shootouts, x-games, NFL, sports cars, gangsters (and wannabe white boy hoodies.) The existing base of young adult, hardcore gamers, the guys who had grown up with Nintendo and Sega and moved on to Playstation 1 (remember that?), always did have trouble with their self image and an exaggerated desire for respectability and “maturity”. They still have trouble figuring out that “maturity” doesn’t just mean photo-realistic human faces, blood, gore, profanity, nihilism, and name-dropping Ayn Rand. So when suddenly bucketloads of gangster and street games, glitzed up sports, and racing games started appearing, with tons of people playing them the OG hardcore gamer thought “yeah! We have arrived baby! We’re mainstream now… everybody is playing video games!”

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The frat boys who were enticed by the game industry’s latest image makeover still thought that the OG hardcore were nerds and faggots. Just listen to the OG hardcore complain about all the idiot users they put up with on Xbox Live - the guys who call everyone a homo, tea bag them, and just exist to grief and teamkill. The OG guys think it’s just because “the human race is shitty”. They don’t seem to realize that this is not the case. Rather the shittiest /segment/ of the human race has been invited to crash the hardcore party in a grab for cash.

And what the OG hardcore don’t realize, in their own petty and immature harassment of “casual” gamers, kids, and Nintendo Wii owners, is that they should be throwing their weight in with the Wii generation and the PC users who play the Sims and flash based games over the latest forgettable WWII shooter. Because the majority of the hardcore marketing demographic represent no future. The frat boys are like sterile, non-reproducing pack mules who have been hauled in to create an audience for Madden 11, GTA 5, Modern Warefare 3, and now, Guitar Hero 6. Those guys don’t represent the future of video games as a medium, a hobby, or a community. It’s the Wii kids, the people playing Pokemon on their DS and the people who never would have thought to play video games who are playing Wii Sports who represent the future.

All across the net, the misguided OG hardcore, having bought in to the myth of the casual gamer, are saying that these people won’t be here long; they’ll lose interest and never play another game. This is bizarro world logic. It’s the frat boys who are not long for this world. They’re the ones who will get bored soon, or will only ever buy games in 5 major ongoing franchises. When OG hardcore lament that another great, poorly advertised niche game has failed because nobody bought it, they believe this failure is due to the fact that they didn’t get the word out to their fellow hardcore brethren. In reality, I suspect, it’s that most of the “hardcore” saw those games and couldn’t care less. Okami was some gay painted Jap wolf shit. Bring on Guitar Hero, it’s got metal fucker!

It’s been shown again and again that most games actually sell by word of mouth… not advertising. (Again, most games; clearly, the handful of divinely chosen titles such as Halo get epic marketing pushes that do have an effect.) And the truth is, the hardcore are not talking to the people who might actually sympathize with them. They’re talking at their own poisoned community, their own inbred one. Most people who have not been attracted to the direction video games took after the 16-bit era have broader tastes than today’s hardcore gamer - not narrower. They want to see more than what they perceive video games offer. I’ve seen “casual” gamers be introduced to Okami and go “wow, that looks cool” instead of “LOL ANIMU FAG SHIT IT IS FROM JAPAN CAT MACRO”.

And the Wii kids are the ones who will grow up to be tomorrow’s OG hardcore. They’re the ones being exposed to classic games via the virtual console and have a shot actually appreciating them. It’s not going to be frat boys who drive the sales of Final Fantasy 18; it’s going to be the annoying Pokemon kids who have learned to appreciate a Japanese-style RPG.

OG gamers, the original hardcore, would probably do better to stop supporting the industry propaganda of the casual gamer now and get the hell out of the hardcore bubble.