Philosophy
There seems to be near unanimous consensus that Bioshock 1 and 2 are comments on the fiction and theories of Ayn Rand – and especially those in her colossal treatise thinly disguised as the novel Atlas Shrugged. It’s partially true: Bioshock is a counterargument to Rand, but only within the boundaries established by Atlas Shrugged. It might be a critique, but it’s not a very good one.
What is escapism? I'm not going to turn to psychology journals for this one, but rather attempt to reference my own personal experience. I had a lot of problems growing up: video games offered me a wonderful analgesic against the suffering of my existence. I was pretty miserable for a while, especially as a teenager. I could turn on a video game and lose myself in its colours, interactivity, problem-solving, and narrative. If the game was especially boring or repetitive (like minesweeper), I would often find myself inventing elaborate storylines to correspond with my various actions in game.
There is nothing hypocritical in asking the question, "Are games frivolous?" The answer is obvious: of course they are. But so is every conceivable manifestation of human intellect that does not directly contribute to the so-called human weal. It might also be said of intelligence that it is the rarest of things. Consider the immense size of the universe and the incredible fortuitousness of the circumstances that gave rise to carbon based life here on Earth. It does not take much contemplation to see that any consideration of genius must inevitably become a memorialisation: all life is doomed from the most hopeful moment of inchoate birth to the ineluctable tragedy of death. Why then do we not gnash our teeth and bury our heads in the sand? Certainly we do none of this with regards to the many apocalyptic distractions of culture: but as beings of intellect, we are so rarely called to take heed of the incredible, artistic phenomena of the everyday business of entertainment.
The invocation of etymology might be considered a paean to the wisdom of our predecessors. It is nevertheless true that when we encounter from a distance things once close and dear, their familiar unfamiliarity can strike an unsettling chord. Nostalgia now means a wistful longing for home: by which I an inspired to imagine men and women drifting through the fey valleys of their youth, yearning tears distilled on the points of their noses. I can't deny revulsion at this turn towards saccharine insipidity. Break the word down from its modern husk and you find some startling constituents. Johannes Hofer coined the term in 1688 from a combination of the Greek words nostos, meaning "homecoming", and algos, meaning "pain, grief, distress". Together, you get something a lot closer to, "extreme anguish at an inability to return" than our trite modern rendering.
M. John Harrison said it beautifully in his strange and underappreciated first novel, The Committed Men: they had altogether left the maps he had known. This simple statement encapsulates the halting, terrible moment whereupon the speaker recognizes he is no longer in familiar territory. He has crossed the line, as it were, into the Weird Places. And there ain't no going back.
I find deep satisfaction in the recent (ish) trend away from realism in video games. Specifically, high-quality, realistic depictions of fundamentally surreal elements – where 8-bit pixellation and posterization are enshrined in gleaming high-color environments. Let me explain. Start with a gorilla. A real, five-thousand-pound senator dripping chunks of banana and trying to pick lice [...]
Teasing, groping, and at times abusing the line between gaming and art, Yume Nikki is one of the most beautiful and upsetting games ever made. Little Bo Beep presents a series exploring this slow-burning nightmare.
The early Hominidae who walked the earth fifteen million years ago, our first ancestors to deviate from the family of lesser apes called the Gibbons (Hylobatidae), did not traverse the oceans or fly. But we could walk before we could reason; and more to the point, we could also run.
When I was a child I harboured a secret from the world. It concerned the places I couldn’t see, but knew of in a way that didn’t really avail itself of words. I am talking about indistinct realities. But then again that doesn’t really do them justice. They are not simply indistinct, or emotional; they are, properly speaking, beyond.
On the advice of a good friend I spent last night reading Peter Watt's recent novel Blindsight. It was GREAT. Whiplash-and-flash scifi that is, at its core, the best that the genre can be: brilliantly speculative. Extrapolation, prediction, and what if: Peter Watts proves himself brilliantly fluent in building worlds of possible outcomes that dont seem that far away at all. Since this article contains a few mild spoilers, take a couple of hours and read the story online here. Watts wins two internets for making the whole thing available free online! Or, support the guy and buy a paper version. By creating a foreign world that is alien both in aesthetics and in epistemology, Watts boils plot into a single, viscous question: what is sentience good for? The answers that he provides are unvarnished and insightful, and while they are not always completely original (what is these days), they offer one of the most accessable in unique perspectives on humanity that I have read. His conclusions are unforgettably powerful, and have had me second guessing my own actions ever since.
One of the most famous images imparted by the ancients to posterity is that of the eternal Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill without rest. The conclusion of the parable is well known: steps away from the summit, Sisyphus, through some fated contrivance of the Gods, loses his hold and sends the boulder tumbling back to its nadir. He sighs heavily, and Sispyhus returns to begin his task again, bearing a symbolic weight far in excess of the load he is forced to push. Sisyphus earned his punishment by defying the Gods (and specifically Hades), and his lesson is clear: by the work of day you will find yourself rewarded — or punished — in the longish night of death.
Imagine an abandoned building — let's say a ruined apartment. Somewhere in that building is a stairwell that leads to the basement. Wander through that lightless place until you see an old rusty grate in the floor, and pry it open. Go down the ladder until you find yourself in a small sub-basement full of old rotting boxes and broken tools, and find a little closet at the far end. There's a busted water heater stuck in the corner, but around the side of it you can find just enough room to squeeze in. Don't mind the little puddle of grime on the floor: it's been there longer than you have. Congratulations, you've just found a Shadowy Corner. They're special places, imbued with ancient secrets and a mystical je ne sais quoi, and they scare the hell out of me.
