I'm all about leaving things as they were. As anybody I've ever visited knows, I'm a low-impact guest to the point of annoyance. I always do the dishes, make the bed better than it was initially presented to me, and I refuse any and all offers that have anything to do with making my stay more comfortable. Nobody cleans up after me, because I make sure they don't have to.
This mindset has helped me immeasurably when it comes to being less of an embarrassment as a journalist -- at least less so than my meager training indicates I should be. I go in, ask around, record things, then organize them. The end-result is some kind of verbal conduit-product, one that bridges a moment in time and an audience that couldn't make it. If I do my job right, there's no piece or part of me at all in the story. It's as if I was never there.
And this is all why, I've finally realized, video games are not for me. I've had a PlayStation 2 for years now, as well as a dusty stack of jewel cases containing games that were played for about half an hour each. I never upgraded to the PS3, and had four different trial accounts with GameFly before I finally realized that it was a waste of money. For a long time I thought this was some sort of generational thing, but I didn't like video games when I was 16 either.
In the three decades since, they've have tapped into a raw, basic desire to impact a chosen context. It's the one thing that every video game produced since the 1980's has in common. Whether it's a first-person shooter, fake baseball, simulations of everyday life, or that thing where you smash bricks with a paddle, each video game ever made shares the same DNA. To "interact," in the digital sense of the term, is to impact. That's something that skipped me, for various reasons.
But I really think marketers have underestimated the market for impact. The majority of folks want to leave a mark, commit change against their surroundings. To act violently in any way is to fundamentally and irrevocably change things forever, and any understanding of violence has to take that basic connection into account. Alcoholics are agents of change too, but in the most weaselly and passive-aggressive way possible. Other than suicides, I guess. That's the ultimate sacrificial "deal with this" one could ever present to the rest of the world.
In evolving from 8-bit to Blu-Ray disc, video games have increased their capacity for different avenues of virtual impact. And now that controllers have gone from button-covered chunks to plastic guitars and motion sensors, these recent developments seem to indicate that users want new products to edge more towards actual reality than vague electronic escapism.
But without the unlimited possibilities that real life offers, every single one of these worlds are still Truman Show bubbles, empirically controlled by their creators. The 21st Century hasn't begun yet when it comes to giving consumers the real impact they truly crave.
Yesterday's fun happens to you; tomorrow's has no rules.
I am an unbiased outsider in this space, and am therefore not blinded by my own interests. So I have a free idea for a cash-rich entertainment conglomerate that wants to ride this wave of the future. This would be an expensive and messy undertaking, just like private space flight, but all costs could be passed on to the buyer. And the ones who can afford it will definitely buy this.
For however many tens of thousands of dollars it costs, buy a warehouse and set up a scale-model city with tiny cars and miniature animatronic people. Then offer the chance to strap on a rubber suit, knock down all the buildings, stomp the people to death and wreak destructive mayhem for as long as they can. Then rebuild the city for the next customer.
The feelings that this experience would unleash would be profound, satisfying, and life-altering. It's giving people what they have wanted all along, the opportunity to make a ferocious impact without any consequence whatsoever. And Godzilla, a familiar character, is a good place to start -- everybody always roots for him to destroy Tokyo anyway. Especially the people who live there.
