One of the games I spent several years on – and rightfully so – would be Team Fortress 2.
Team Fortress 2, with how much time I spent on it, and its place in the videogame drug pipeline, leaves me quite conflicted.
It’s not TF2 specifically that bubbles up as a disgruntled seizure, but videogames as a whole, and TF2 is only an artery along the faceless factory forming the hollowed.
I remember playing Team Fortress original, and when Steam was still green.
And you can surely summon up all the top dog titles through the year, CounterStrike among them.
No, I don’t have any grandstanding here to do. Nor big sweeping thoughts. It’s just talking about another phenomenon nestled within the wires that make the day. Imageboards and videogames have far more in common than you would be led to believe.
It’s just the effects are a lot more accentuated with videogames. To detail for another day.
Maybe it’s the trouble of “Youth Culture” as a whole, masquerading as anything but crumbling stairs toward those castles-in-the-sky – fueled by starry-eyed children. You can get a little emotional thinking about it. About the electric sparks from a child playing Minecraft for the first time. The same as an adult amongst city lights, displays selling you, sucking you into another world.
Think of the Youth of the 80s. They’re at least sixty now. And a whisper they may feel along our global tapestry.
Or the Youth of the 2000s. Now they’re approaching mid-thirties, forties or less. Where was their battle cry? What did they wish for? Can you see their face reflected in the dimmed display window, vending machine, elevator descending?
And I’m sure you come across scattered posts of people turning 40, 30, time always marching.
Do you feel it all melting? And how imageboards and videogames are a warm embrace into the dissolution.
Those city lights and those pixel symphonies and even television antennas.
All sweeping you into a feeling of center-stage, a totality found and sustained until it sustains no longer, candles blown away (if you ever bother to do cakes for later years).