Silence is the Ruler

Before sleep so I contemplated yet again about video games. Something of which I am convinced I ran and categorized every facet previously. Yet some topics naturally encourage retracing all the directions one can take. To mix and weave conclusions, maybe.

One could liken it to heavy drug addiction, to the distaste of those in its throes. Others love to use it as a trampoline for life analogies, especially in its tendency toward halfway simulating, or a grounds to observe human nature, or its strange echo of modern work culture found between the trotting along and menial tasks suggesting you accomplished something. And, of course, one can always find a vague Sisyphus existential waiting.

Scrolling through a YouTube comment section of another video essay about some video game of my youth, so the commentator wished for a call-in podcast, an opportunity just sit down and talk about it more. How appropriate to see some parasocial bleeding, video game commentary as conduit. After all, for many, the formative years of their life were spent in this non-reality, and maybe through video games we can try to orient ourselves through the masterful global and online skinner box of today. To try, yet again, toward that vague idea of “connection” that plagues many teenagers and younger adults.

I bounced on over to a Classic WoW forum and read the top posts, trying once more to finally “crack” the code I’m sometimes inclined toward, that there’s an inherent fundamental truth waiting to unveil with enough video game reflection, wringing out a meaning beyond the commercial objective. You show up, you play, go fifteen years, you see all the accounts offline and you perfected some fancy tricks purely localized to the rat maze it was and one could pull up a chair and suggest, well, maybe it helped you learn how to type, or maybe it helped simulate economical thinking depending on genres, strategy. War games. Game theory. You got something, didn’t you? Still, reality peaks through the boarded crackhouse window and our 9 a.m. demands beckon again.

A poignant description of heroin is feeling an angel embrace you. To see a glimpse of heaven through a meager trade of your lifespan.

In that heaven surely you could glean a truth from her eyes, before your last breath. But to revisit watching heaven’s gates close, seeing the purveyor of my destruction turn toward the next customer, I was ready to conclude it’s best to stop thinking about these things. There’s no magic behind such defective rose-tinted goggles and I swindled my youth.

Yet when I take the goggles off, straight ahead is a world of people I have nothing towards. Something seems missing.

Putting them back on, I see all of these avatars radiating. Faceless keyboard warriors congregating in Thunder Bluff. 2Fort.

Off, nothing. On, there’s definitely something there. What is it?

There’s that vague word of “connection” floating around, but maybe it’s a delusion. But perhaps there are two types of connection.

The first type, of one everyone is well aware, of the typical portrayal, and that maybe you have some “deep” talks or moments shared (I don’t believe it matters as much as one thinks, but maybe it does).

The second type of connection, is implicit and silent. There are conditions in Nature which grant it. But it’s what keeps civilization churning: goodwill to your fellow man. Granted and known through a silent world. You can’t talk your way in or out, weasel your way this way and that. You are either implicitly connected or you aren’t. Without a single movement or breath.

Those avatars running past me, though we never exchanged a message and I’d never see them again, even that day, well, we were probably of the same lot. In contrast to today, where all I hear is static as I walk through any parking lot. Whatever living metaphysical membrane that connected one to another has ejected.

Indeed, this lack of common ground extends to the modern gaming circuit filled with all walks of life. You can talk to anyone in the world, but I don’t want to talk. I just want to share some silence.

There is no silence to share if there’s nothing to dampen the spastic entropy. Perhaps it’s all for the better.

It does come with that uncomfortable truth though: the last filament of implicit connection was found in a non-reality. The final simulation, before you walk out into the static wasteland.