Every morning the world arrives in fragments. A flicker of headlines, alerts, and outrage masquerading as revelation. Each story claims to be the truth, but truth seems to have become a drowned thing, sinking quietly beneath the noise of the living.
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I’ve been playing one of these silly phone games. It’s a zombie survivor game and, predictably, it’s driven by real world money. They call it pay-to-win in the gamer shorthand (P2W), and that means the more you pay, the more advanced you get while you compete with other individuals and alliances for prizes, and battle with them over virtual items of one form or another. It’s all artificial scarcity.
This weekend, we had a war with another server – all, of course, orchestrated by the game developers. They create demand for virtual items to compete in a virtual world for… what, exactly? To ‘beat the other player’, which you could do by simply playing with dice. Effectively, these games are like that.
Why do I play them? Because I find it interesting to see how players go out of their way to pretend that they care about other people. Non-Aggression Pacts generally spring up (NAPs), which generally elevate some and cause the lowest levels to constantly be raided and losing the virtual resources they have gathered. Eventually the lower levels get upset, quit the game, and with a lack of new players, the server eats itself. Every single time.
What’s worse, any act of defiance to the higher levels is met with iron fists, not unlike the real world, but with virtual items.
The game developers then force the servers to battle each other because people spend money for that. And when that stops being the cash cow, they merge the servers, depending on the competitive nature for items you can’t park in front of your house to continue making money. Until that dies.
I play because I enjoy building things, really, and liking to see how the systems are built. For me, it’s a reverse engineering of the game and the players, and it generally leaves me with a particularly cynical view of humanity.
So we won that war, if there is any winning of a war, and I raise up to see that the issues with Israel and the United States and pretty much the entire Middle East, particularly Iran right now, have escalated again. You can have whatever side you want, I don’t care. The net result is the same.
And I think of the game. And I think of this. Because our planet – our capital on the planet – is not stored in banks. Our ability to breath and feed ourselves is our actual capital. That is diminishing.
The server, as it is, is beginning to die. Except we have no server to battle against, and no server to merge with. We’re playing musical chairs with an increasing population and less and less trees to make chairs.
A self-defeating species.
I’ll just toast marshmallows in the flames. We seem to have a surplus of marshmallows, for some reason.
In Trinidad and Tobago, there is much discussion about crime because… well, there’s been a lot of crime, so much so that there’s a Wikipedia page on crime in Trinidad and Tobago. Every administration blames the last administration, playing checkers for getting elected, but the crime has risen through all involved political parties running things over the past 3 decades.
The latest stab – or shot – at crime seems to be giving everyone gun licenses. On the surface, it gives a lot of people a sense of security to be able to get something only criminals seem to have. Right after an election, any criticism of the present government is seen as ‘anti-UNC’ – the political party that won was UNC. Just as any criticism of the past administration was seen as ‘anti-PNM’.
It’s a tired way of shutting down valid conversations. I have seen it in every country I’ve lived in or visited. Group-think offers comfort, and that comfort rivals religion in its power.
I do not care for politics. Both major parties are interchangeable to me. I criticize what I know in the hope that something useful can grow through the cracks in the political concrete.
Really, I don’t have much criticism of these ideas. I myself applied for a weapon more than once in Trinidad and Tobago some decades ago, where I was told behind closed doors who to bribe and who I would have to buy the gun from. Oddly, the present political party in charge then is the same party.
I do not have much issue with the idea of responsible gun ownership. I myself applied for a firearm license in Trinidad and Tobago more than once, decades ago. I was told who to bribe and who I would need to buy the weapon from.
My applications were “lost.”
I got the bureaucratic shuffle that corruption feeds on.
The thing about it is that I have owned guns in the United States for decades. I am a U.S. Navy veteran and having worked with the United States Marine Corps as their Corpsman, I got not only to train further with weapons but also further in dealing with the wounds. In essence, I know what I’m talking about.
The criticism is here: with more firearms licenses comes more guns to civilians. Training requirements aren’t very high, and the understanding of the responsibility of having a weapon is not seemingly making the rounds as much as the political grandstanding.
Legal access to guns means new risks. People who did not have firearms before could now shoot themselves or someone else by accident.
It might not happen often. It might happen frequently. But it will happen.
That risk depends entirely on how good the training is.
No one is talking about that. They should be.
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