In the Dope Show

"The drugs, they say, are made in California

We love your face, we'd really like to sell you"

 

Marilyn Manson - The Dope Show

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"Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur."

 

Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker (1937)

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"The sensories were an inescapable part of 2110, as omnipresent and popular as television had been in Blaine's day. Larger and more elaborate versions of the sensories were used for theater productions, and variations were employed for advertising and propaganda. They were to date the purest and most powerful form of the ready-made dream, tailored to fit anyone.

But they had their extremely vocal opponents, who deplored the ominous trend toward complete passivity in the spectator. These critics were disturbed by the excessive ease with which a person could assimilate a sensory; and in truth, many a housewife walked blank-eyed through her days, a modern-day mystic plugged into a continual bright vision.

In reading a book or watching television, the critics pointed out, the viewer had to exert himself, to participate. But the sensories merely swept over you, vivid, brilliant, insidious, and left behind the damaging  schizophrenic impression that dreams were better and more desirable than life.

[...]

In another generation, the critics thundered, people will be incapable of reading, thinking or acting!

It was a strong argument. But Blaine, with his 152 years of perspective, remembered much the same sort of arguments hurled at radio, movies, comic books, television and paperbacks. Even the revered novel had once been bitterly chastised for its deviation from the standards of pure poetry. Every innovation seemed culturally destructive; and became, ultimately, a cultural staple, the embodiment of the good old days, the spirit of the Golden Age -- to be threatened and finally destroyed by the next innovation."

 

Robert Sheckley - Immortality, Inc. (1959)

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Video games have been outputting more of an artsy fringe lately, but have yet to truly mature as a creative medium. Then again, how long did television take to outgrow the laugh track? Meh, games've got time. Still, re-reading Immortality, Inc. makes me wonder what Sheckley must've thought of the advent of video games by his death in 2005. Standard railing against new media used to revisit the same premise that increasing media sophistication brought audience apathy: the more work done by the program, the less done by the programmed, and thus new media will collapse civilization. When video games came along, the pretext to angst was flipped around faster than Procrustes could make his bed. They prompt too much action, hyperactivity, over-involvement, and THUS this new medium will collapse civilization.

Civilization having... sec (runs to glance out the window; nope, still there)

Civilization having neglected to collapse, we're left with the unsurprising conclusion that games are just another creative medium, amenable to personal or artistic expression, entertainment or propaganda in whatever ratios the monkeys in question produce and consume. Just like books, theater or television, some (like myself) in every generation will be prone to over-indulge by various standards, but as with every diversion the prevalence of indulgence is less an issue in itself than an indicator of the inadequacy of human life.

Engaging my superhuman powers of forevoyeurism for a moment, I can predict that media, genres and fads will continue to arise now and anon, and the relevant question each time will not be of the new mode's quality, but the quality of its creators and audiences. All the more relevant this to our slightly decentralized modern culture, with gamified public discourse encouraging us to score points against each other on every forum and comments section. The depth and complexity of a video game, more than that of a book or movie, depends not only on a target audience's ability to spot depth and complexity but its ability to behave deeply and complexly. Does your grand role-playing adventure consist of being ordered from HUD marker to HUD marker? Is your strategy just a race to the designated best unit? Is your city an endless reiteration of the same cookie-cutter neighbourhood?

 

Does your identity as an imaginary Werwolfe hold any meaning or are you just another werewolf? Games do hold one great, largely untapped potential to alter our thinking: establishing a personal playstyle, mode of interaction, be it expressed in simoleon expenditure, unit ratios or alignment wheel position... or preferences, or fears or aspirations. It gets you thinking about deliberately making your soul. Who were you in 2021, and who will you be in 2022? Have any words, sights, sounds altered your personality? With or without your informed consent? Are you moving or being moved? In our grand, global, interconnected all-pawn clash of psychological influences, are you a player or just another unit?