It's all around you, like smog. This train isn't bound for glory.
Background by Deak Ferrand, who pwnz.
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It seems to me that we don't play games to live, or to "play" - we play games in order not to live. We play games instead of talking to each other. We play games in order not to think about the war - and maybe our game-playing is why the war continues.
Every moment devoted to our hobbies moves us more deeply into a pastime paradise, which removes us from public life and walss un the more thoroughly into a purely private world of masturbatory selves who do not care for, or interact with, the larger world in which others are dying - and they die through our inaction, and their dying facilitates our lives of "comfort" and isolation. Our greatest privilege - our luxurious vice - is to not need to care.
A culture of game-players, pop-culture fanatics, and hobbyists is a spectacle of alienation. As we disengage from the real world, and retreat further into our fantasies, that world - the only world - dies from our neglect of it. Soon enough, we will join it.
J f Z January 9, 2008 07:48 PM PST No, seriously. Thank you for linking to that video. I don't search out music videos for my own entertainment because the world is awash with them, but it was nice to hear a song that reminded me of my own times past.
Jeremiadist January 8, 2008 10:22 PM PST JfZ - I have to agree, upon closer examination, that you are utterly right about the song in question. As you express it, you capture quite well what I would call Good Christianity versus Bad Christianity.
Sinja - I regretted this post as soon as
I made it - not that I changed my mind, exactly, but because I didn't draw the right distinctions. It's not just social justice versus self-indulgence - it's also talking to your neighbors, and interacting with your immediate surroundings... and yes, I see value in human interactions through the medium of games. I think I was trying too feel around for the opposition between isolated self-amusement on the one hand and engagement with the real world on the other... political or purely interpersonal, or even alone-with nature. Ah well.
Thank you both, reflective gents, for your thoughtful comments past and present.
Sinja January 8, 2008 06:52 PM PST It's an interesting point you make, and I like the correlation to the WONDERful Stevie Wonder (what pun?), but I think the gaming culture is having a bit of an opposite effect.
I think the gaming culture itself has leaked and led to its own cultural machine of communication and criticism, and that carries forth to the online community in general. Sure, there's lots of games that are just tools for digital retardation, but the communities springing forth are good in the long run, I believe.
And I hope.
J f Z January 7, 2008 06:52 PM PST It's my sense that Stevie Wonder's song, "Pastime Paradise" is about people who don't live in the NOW. Baptists who preach about the second coming, future paradise. And preaching it with the past time paradise of the bible.
So, in this sense, I think pastime means past time, the good old days, not a hobby like golf.
I think the song is a criticism of those who are more concerned with the past and the rapture, than simply helping their fellow man now.
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