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snattu

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Ramblings for a lazy day

I understand that games are for adolescent people. People with no real identity, and insufferable desire to please and to conform within their own group.

The clash between the neediness of the consuming populace, and the people creating the games is apparent and unavoidable. Games are made to be sold. Games are a business and rightly so. Just like music and visual arts before, the interactive arts are, and will forever be, a business. This is a good thing. It opens possibilities for all kinds of experiences. Niches need to be served just as the mass market. The problem is not with the underpinnings of the business, the problem is modernity.

And the cult of feelings. People feel things. Sometimes they are sad, sometimes happy, but mostly they are bored. Action has been replaced with never-ending introspection and sedentary rationalizing. Boredom becomes frustration. Frustration of the fact that we have been denied of our birthright of happiness and self-actualization. We've found this fact of life by, in part, introspection and in part from the zeitgeist. It's not actually our fault that we're unable to make things, to achieve, but it's the fault of society. This golden cage of ours. We waste our lives in perpetual adolescence, without real responsibilities or limits. We can enjoy our youth by endlessly meandering about our lives and our place in the world, without taking it, or making it. By the grace of school counselors, our heroes in media, and experts of all ilks, we are given our place in the world - our destiny is not to be forged, but its ready made and assembled.

The air is thick and filled with very particular, very atomized visions of the world. We don't actually understand ourselves, or the world, but we know - with almost complete certainty - what we are owed, what we are entitled to. We've been told that introspection is way to gain real knowledge of ourselves. We've also been told, that to the degree that our vision of ourselves, and how other people treat and interact with us, is divergent, then we as individuals are in the right, and everyone else is wrong. Social bounds and norms are not a guides formed with thousands of years of cultural evolution - they are shackles and chains to bind us down. We know better. We feel it. All hurt feelings are proof of injustice. If we feel bad, then it must be because of some underlying evil. If our vision of the world and actual reality are not perfectly aligned, then reality must be at fault. And the one who cries out the loudest and with most fervor is correct. Reality must conform to language, not the other way around.

We used to have simple rules, because the world is complex. Now we have complex rules, because the complex world has been turned into a minefield of hypersensitivity. Life is becoming unbearable for increasing number of people... and rightly so.

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