dystopia

Games And Reality

An image of the world burning with a toasted marshmallow above it, held by the figurative hand of mankind.
~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

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.

Society’s Canvas

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?”

Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski: A Little Book of Essential Quotes on Life, Art, and Love, 2019

The world makes us into things. Some become twisted, some not, but we all become what the world demands of us – or we are made to believe we are broken, and maybe we are. Maybe we’re not.

The society we live in demands of us as we demand of it. It writes upon us as we write upon it, though as individuals we do not have as much opportunity to affect society as we would like to think. We face the inertia of tradition, the peer pressure of those dead, combined with the inertia of those that are comfortable with the way things are or believe they are.

We tend to not apply our own knowledge to ourselves frequently, but we are in our own way a medium of society as much as society is our medium. In that regard, we’re also a message, but one of many and easily lost in the shuffle of chasing red dots – because society demands a toll, and this is the toll that has been negotiated in our interconnected world, even at the cost of broken time. We should decorate time.

This is a sort of problem. Inundated with interruptions parading as reminders, our lives are a pattern of hopeful decisions in a world we didn’t define, and the only way to change it is to define our world.

That means defining our inputs – what we take in and how we take it in, questioning what comes our way and interrogating it with rubber hoses and bright lights if necessary. It means defining our outputs, what we put out to the world.

And at the core, it means redefining ourselves.

Having lived a while, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But there is hope between the syclla and charybdis.

Beached.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

This morning I was thinking about the medium and the message and it’s semantic intentionality about discussing the same things. Then I realized it’s Sunday, and I can take a break from that and think on other things.

The beach is always a bad idea for me on the weekends. The North Coast Road on the weekend is too annoying and peopley on the weekends, which means loud annoying music when I just want to hear the wind and surf.

On the weekends, the beach is a petri dish for all that annoys me, on Monday, it’s still being cleaned from their physical pollution. Local government efficiency in Trinidad and Tobago is about the same as that of the Russian war machine – nothing maintained, everything falling apart except the will to try to do something.

It’s not too different anywhere, really. The bus of government goes nowhere. The weight of the wheels defies the torque of the will of the people through government, regardless of the size of the engine.

Meanwhile, people on the bus fight for seats while the driver keeps asking for help on a broken radio as the engine idles, poisoning the world around it and the people on the bus – the windows are down, the air conditioner broken.

Something has to change. I’m not sure what it is. While not as prosey as above, part of this is what we discussed at the barber shop, openly between equals regardless of social standing. There are people thinking about these things, all with a hand on a piece of the machine and wondering what the hell it’s actually supposed to be doing.

By process of elimination, we find out what it’s not doing.

I’d rather have spent my life on the beach, a castaway, full of wonder at what could be out there but with no way of going beyond. To dream of something better, imagining a world as one would want it.

Such occasion would be nice.