MMOs, Cell Phones and Sexuality

I dredged through pages of unparsed code to excavate something I wrote many years ago.  I like it because I think it shows how viscerally and virulently I used to spit words at subjects I wanted to deconstruct.  There is something to be said for speaking definitively, without constantly trying to justify and cover your own tracks.

 

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Sexuality is a very ambiguous thing.  It represents our lust, the flavor of sexual desire we find appealing.  We can't always choose them, and I believe they are based more on personality than anything.  Personality itself is something shaped by your surroundings, the 'nurture' within the 'nature'. 

So, naturally, our sexual desires manifest themselves in ways that affirm both our ego and id.  The only one who truly knows these things is the person themself.  We can only be so deeply intimate when we're alone.  By isolation, you can free every desire in your mind and body.  It's like singing into a hairbrush as a microphone, or just doing something you think is very embarrassing...  you only feel comfortable doing it by yourself.  Where the internet comes into this is digital media.  You have that same emotional isolation with a video camera, or a keyboard.  You don't have to worry about someone watching, and you can present anything you want.  There is no limit line, because there is no one there to take offense to your actions.  It seems to me that this is what makes online dating so appealing.  But beyond just the dating sites, the matchmaker scams... it appears everywhere.  A girl character in an MMO is almost always, at some point in their playing career, asked if they're really a girl.  If you put up the front that you ARE a girl, then you're treated much differently than a guy would be.  It's pedantic, I know... but it brings up a point.

When opposite genders meet on a medium that can't be seen through, things get out of hand.  It doesn't matter if the guy is some fat-assed, thirteen year old nerd, because it's the -words- he types that defines who he is.  On a site or messenger service with video and pictures, it's not as incognito, but the same trends are prevalent.  You can infer a lot from looking at someone's picture, especially in this day and age, when pictures are much more informal.

It's invigorating to not have to take the risks of physical growth.  It's easier to display what you want than to have someone deal with your full, head-on personality.

So all these children grow up learning that their faults are best to be hidden, that there is no complete vulnerability through a veil.  For example, the new thing I saw on MySpace, called 'IConfessional'.  It allows people to confess their sins, completely anonymously.

Now, I can see how this would be constructive -- but I feel that on a larger scale, it just feeds into the complex detachment associated with congressing on the internet.  It doesn't help that most of the demographic these services apply to and are marketed towards don't really know what it's like to form a long-term physical bond with someone.  I know that this is a blanket statement, and I'm not saying everyone has lost this opportunity.  I am saying, though, that the meaning of physical contact, physical growth between people has definitely been reduced in significance among society today.

With this shameless display of egoism, it's easy to see that a large effect of this would be censorship degradation.  Everything becomes more sexual by the week -- the standard is lowering itself because of this 'emotional enlightenment'.  Under-aged kids become cam whores, in a sense, because it's a venue that is free to the individual's use.

People use things in these ways, to liberate themselves, when really they're restricting their way of thinking.  When you become addicted to an outlet, your creative soul loses power to the lustral, earthly voice telling you how to justify your isolation.

And believe me, it -is- isolation.  I don't care the argument, or the reason.  If any part of you is hidden, you are completely isolated.  To form a real bond is to have everything about you accepted.

And, to become an advertiser of your own soul -- marketing what you feel is attractive, you have lost all worth as a person.  If you hide pieces of yourself from those you want to be intimate with, you will lose those pieces.  These words would have more meaning if the problem wasn't so wide-scale.  I don't even think anyone would agree with what I've written, because everyone seems to think this way.

But, I'm fucking glad I didn't grow up with a cell phone.

Pseudo-Anti-Ataraxia

Games seem so hand-holding now.  Even something like Dishonored, which is the New Messiah of Open-World Mission-Based Stealth Gaming, has its own signposts that cause anxiety in my freedom-loving self.

The exploration and triggered conversations remind me a lot of the Thief games, but there is something subtly different about them in Dishonored.  Hanging over my shoulder like a spectre while I play is the constant thought of, "Ultimately, I have to move towards either the 'Good' or 'Bad' ending."

The Thief games weren't like that.  There was a realer sense of freedom, even if it was probably imposed by a lack of logic in the game itself.  You weren't really tracked on things like kills or optionals between missions, and as far as I can remember, the endings were all standard, and part of a much more concrete fiction.

I enjoy game stories that are much more literary and unidirectional.  Maybe because of my roots in JRPGs.  But even so, I never felt like I was ruining my future statistics by killing a few people in Thief.  There was always the appeal in being stealthy, but settling things when they got out of hand.  It was easier to not rely on quick saves.  Dishonored feels to me like they borrowed the level structures and ambient stealth from Thief, but took the binary story structure of 'open-world' games that really just let you choose between outcomes.  It reminds me of the end to Deus Ex: Human Revolution; so very disappointing in a profound way.

I've seen interviews and videos that talk about how much freedom Dishonored gives the player, and it does feel like that when solving the inter-level problems.  When it comes to the larger scale, however, it really just ends up being Paragon or Renegade; Lawful or Chaotic; Nuke the Planet or Let Robots Eat Our Babies.

The ironic thing about it is that completely forced story structures have a different kind of freedom that is much more impacting.  It seems to me that one of the largest deciding factors for a weak storyline is a focus on keeping it too choice-oriented.  But, when created as a self-contained fiction, much more focus can be given to the real message of the story.  This is something I don't see in games much anymore.

Maybe that's why I think open-world game stories are so ridiculous.  I take in a game like a book or movie, in the sense that I expect a sort of arc that is specifically crafted by the author, not to make me feel like I'm creating it all by myself, but that I'm empowering it to happen so that I can experience it.

JRPGs have a long history of keeping gameplay and storyline separate in that way.  You played the game, you reached a checkpoint, and then you experienced a chunk of the story.  I don't think that's an artifact or anachronism of limited design, when it's done well.  It's a perfectly acceptable and even preferable mode of digestion for my taste in games.  Something about my choices changing the story doesn't make me feel like I'm weaving a fiction.  Instead, I feel like I'm creating ripples in something that is almost always wishy-washy in the first place.  I don't like that such types of choice are touted at the forefront of a game's promotion.

It sounds hypocritical to accuse choice as being limiting.  But it's just guided choice, down two or more narrow paths, with no real consequence other than trying to force me to play the game again.