BEg2 chapter 4 odds & ends (2)

[Michael Bailey]

I’m sanguine about the first-person-shooter angle.

The idea bores me, maybe too old as a middle boomer (1955 halfway between
the canonical dates 1946-64)

I installed Doom, and years later, Quake, and installing it was kind of
fun. But trying to play the game put me unconcho in a blink, and a few
people trying to teach me agreed I probably wasn’t first person shooter
material.

But it takes all kinds, to make a world.

I worked with guys not that much younger though, and they all fricken
pulled out their personal gamer laptops when it got slow and played that
sh*T like nobody’s business.

The week I started working in the data NOC the collective gaming load on
the wi-fi took it down for all uses including business. Real easy to trace.
So management punitively turned it off (for a couple-three days.)

I was talking to one of them about it, like, “what’s the fun in pretending
to go around shooting people?”

He goes like, “It’s just a game.”

I’m going like, “isn’t there some kind of game where people co-operate and
do cool things together?”

And he goes, “we all pretend to shoot one another but we get along great in
life.”

I think studies show that to be true, even for heinous-seeming sh*T like
Grand Theft Auto.


Maxine associates this “roving around looking for misdeeds” with her
profession.


Oh, I know what I wanted to do, was to compare playing the game (didn’t yet
have a name that I saw???)

With watching Disrespect and The Contaminator.

Disrespect - great hero for subteen or young teen - as a kid you mostly
accept programming, and award respect rather indiscriminately, but the
growing convolutions of the cerebral folds give rise to challenging
anybody’s claims to respect.

Developing a set of criteria and a collection of experiences around that is
all about critical thinking.


The Contaminator - the kid and his secret identity - with the home neatness
paradigm internalized, he reacts by seeing how people, businesses,
organizations externalize the messes they make, and brings the mess home to
the mess makers: they think they can wall themselves off from their own
mess & The Contaminator brings that mess back to them (in hopes they will
finally clean it up)


In the (nameless? I didn’t see one) game, it’s very similar but instead of
just watching, they are presented with instances of antisocial behavior
and take action. It fosters alertness, and studies show it helps certain
kinds of intelligence.

This is not a mass-market attempt - Justin and Lucas are a couple of nerds
who wrote it for fun - and with no splatter option, the real-life objective
correlative it points at (if there even is one) might be something as
wholesome as disapproval, or simply not acting that way oneself, or
believing in and supporting community resources for kids of swinish parents.

It’s like “pulling somebody’s Upper West Side mom card” in virtuality.