I’ve become aware, via cultural osmosis of a strange phenomenon. I’m not sure if the phenomenon is more disturbing than the fact that I know about it in such detail, or why. I was never much of a computer game enthusiast, and always wondered why anyone over the age of 12 would be. A tech savvy friend once described these games as “very sophisticated waiting.” The amount of time and energy spent navigating comic book worlds, solely created to pull profit from a devotional fan base is puzzling. In my day, the age of coin operated arcade games like pong and tank, I preferred air hockey, or pin ball- a tangible object made for a more satisfying expenditure of a quarter. The video game style that most appealed to me were cerebral, like the moon landing simulation, the lander depicted as a tiny illuminated stick figure that was sensitive to the forces of thrust, and the mystifying gravity of the moon, The only goal was to finesse the controls in a way that enabled a smooth touch down, no shooting lasers, no monsters no killing or capturing. Unlike me, my best buddy was a genius computer nerd, and there- by trustworthy enough to have keys to a community timeshare mainframe. We could get stoned on a late night bike ride and hang out at ‘The Peoples Computer Center’- A small store front operation that had some desks, chairs and couches in the front, a couple of banks of teletype terminals, and in the back an air conditioned windowed room that held the whirring refrigerator sized electronic brain. The game that interest me was the game called ‘Life.’ You would establish various parameters, and then enable your organism. The teletype would then begin the process of depicting with lines and symbols the geometric progression of your life form according to the program you established. Geometric patterns of growth emerged as the terminal clicked away...OK we were stoned, and waiting, waiting to grow up, waiting for more real life. So Pokemon Go is in the news, I know about it because people have been falling off cliffs, walking into traffic, being mugged and other strange viral behavior, apparently everywhere, very quickly. Of course I had to read about it, who wouldn’t. I guess I can understand the compulsion, the technolgy is intriguing- Enhanced reality, oh my. But lets get serious. Walking around with your nose on a slab of technology is a pretty low way to spend your time- Zero creativity, hardly an original thought is really required, and the goal- I’m not really even sure, as I’m not interested enough to care, but it seems like this stuff is being taken really seriously. My mind goes to the outlandish, and if anyone uses this, send me some royalties! What if this games GPS driven enhanced reality expands into. say point-of-view shooter games, or even POV malicious refrigerated trucks? Would there be people virtually machine gunning cartoon terrorists in public places, while not watching where they’re going, not interacting with fellow players, or maybe worse teaming up and creating virtual lynch mobs to root out the virtual guilty. The moral compass of this kind of gaming gets a little dicey. My proposed game is a Zombie hunt, where all those playing Pokemon Go have zombie attributes superimposed onto them by enhanced reality, and the goal is a brain shot, to put down the hapless fools that insist on playing this ridiculous game. Oh, but that creates another ridiculous game, that spawns another crowd of the hapless. Virus like, this thing has legs. Just wait till the drones get involved... Ah, Life. -Joshua Golden
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February 2018
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