Atomization

Recently, I watched one of my favorite video game YouTubers/Twitch Streamer play through the 1986 class, The Legend of Zelda:

He had never played it before, and according to him, he had only been vaguely interested in Zelda series; he had played through the Nintendo GameCube/Wii installment, Twilight Princess and some of the N64 installment, Ocarina of Time, but Zelda had always existed on the fringes of his attention.

In order to maximize the fun that he could have with the game, he made a number of rules that he tasked himself (as well as his wonderful chat) to follow:

• Enabled “Sub-Mode”, meaning that only people subscribed to Max’s channel would be able to speak.
• Any spoilers regarding the game would result in an instant time-out for anyone speaking out of turn in chat.
• He would have 3 Life-line Calls with which he could call a single specific person to ask them for hints in order to proceed if he was stuck.
• He would have a Single 60-second Period which with he could look through a Nintendo Power guide for further hints.

Over the course of two streams, he bumbled his way through the entire game like the year was 1986 all over again, in a time when the internet was very much in its infancy, forums did not exist, and you had to rely on your closest gamer friends in order to have any idea how to beat games of this era.

It might have been the most fun I have ever had watching someone else play a game that I like. It felt like a return to a time when gaming was a more social activity… and it got me thinking about how the abundance of information and content has robbed us of our ability to have a common language and culture.

We don’t discuss– or rather, we don’t have time to discuss – the media we consume more deeply; in the time that we are able to completely process the media we consume, the discourse has completely moved on to the next topical piece of media, and any deeper discussion that was likely happen in the absence of distraction is sidelined.

Is it any wonder people get burnt out on media, but especially gaming? We’re constantly trying to play catch up with the new hotness, trying to satiate the need for substance with quantity, rather than quality. This isn’t just about consumption, either; I believe that a large part of deep discussion is also the creation of new works.

Frankly, it makes me angry that so much of our creative capacity is stolen by our collective greed.

In my imagined ideal world, there might exist little communities of people using their skills and talents making things for themselves and for each other, and these little communities might sometimes come together to make some cool things that might not be possible with a small number of people, only to go back to their more local scenes to share their newfound perspectives.

What we have now, sadly, is brain-drain where skill, talent, and insight is taken from communities that need them the most, in order to make money for large conglomerates who have no other aims than profit at all cost.

This wasn’t intended to be an anti-capitalist rant; rather, this is was mostly intended as a look into what keeps us isolated from each other. However, it’s not hard to see the influence of the profit motive in the lives of people, and I believe we might be better off if we stopped consuming media, and started creating for ourselves and the people around us.