Quicktime events are criminal
The first of, perhaps, many comparisons between crime under a full moon and quick time events.
The quicktime event is a scourge on mankind.
Abruptly changing to conversational tone, yet again, it's always bothered me that there is a tension in gaming between being able to enjoy what you're playing and being able to play what you're intent on enjoying. In this anecdote, my parents bought me a gameboy for a cross-country move, and, like all nintendo products, and, indeed, many toys, or, for women in unfulfilling relationships, sex, it sounded much more fun in the abstract than the actual act of penetrating the unit with a cartridge turned out to be. But when you're locked in a tight space which translates through space for hours at a tesselation, Nietzsche would urge you to make the most of it, because it is an eternally recurring situation. Having never read Nietzsche, I played mario.
I also tallyed roadkill in my sketchbook. But I ran out of room on the page.
Mario.
For some reason, the gameboy mario never entered fully into canonical mushroomery. While we still see Shy-guys from the 'this was a different game entirely in Japan' Mario 2, and the fruit jelly islanders from mario sunshine, the insects and other oddball denizens of the gameboy mario haven't made a reappearance, and neither has the mario plane or mario submarine from the shooter levels--despite visitations to shooterdom and vehicle use in the sprawling tentacles of the franchise. I only make mention of this because it supports the theory that everything which occurred on the gameboy was a biblical apocalypse of gaming, in which the programs of the MCP Magog had no color, and Tron was never written.
Trapped in the enclosed space of that tiny LCD screen, which was conceptually the 2nd russian doll inside the cab of the truck, I learned, as if it were possible, to focus onto an even smaller space, of the 64 or so pixels which represented mario's plane or submarine to complete aforementioned shooter levels. This is where I made the gamer-breakthrough, that epiphany where you stop seeing marios, goombas, and fireflowers, and see only what is relevant to completing the objective. That stupid plane must never die. As long as I hold both fire buttons down, I will eventually destroy everything on screen while zig zagging wildly to avoid death.
Thus embarking on a neural pathway obsessed with ignoring everything that makes playing a game interesting, and instead focusing on completion and success.
Years later, playing fighting games, I would experience strange moments of being born into forgetfulness; suddenly realizing I was playing character A, as opposed to some other character, since I had completely forgotten what I was doing, or who I was fighting for the last round and a half. This provides what I believe is a cogent argument as to why zen is nothing more than intellectual cowardice in the face of a hostile universe. Well, of course, you can have inner peace if you manage to turn off every receptor in that wrinkled mass of opaque flesh capable of determining the difference between antagonism and protagonism. Assuming you're successful, what the fuck was the point?
The point, which I think is pretty obvious, is that a street lamp only makes a difference to the people who are awake. During the full moon, crime rates rise. Why? Because people who are not giant bats sleep during the quote night unquote, regardless of how much skyshine we obscure Orion with. If you intend to take the belongings of these giant nonbats, then it helps to see what you're doing so that comical Brookesian situations with banging cutlery and yowling cats do not call the attention of the suspiciously-within-earshot constable.
In america we refer to them as pigs.
In any case, while you're sleeping you're oblivious to these attempts to enforce what are essentially buddhist ascetic values on your purusha. Let's boil this situation down in the following way, you're making an effort to do something you have to do to keep on trucking, and someone else is taking from you those things which make trucking worthwhile.
Back to the cab of the truck. There was probably some scenery outside the window, but I can only accurately report on how hot it was after the air conditioning committed harakiri in death valley. Or wherever we were. It was a desert, and there was a canyon.
So I beat the final boss in mario, being, at that point, the first and only time I had beat any game, largely by focusing so intensely on winning that I didn't even remember what the final boss was. Afterwards, there were no TI-82 LCD porn graphs of princess peach. Which makes the whole thing a waste of time. Consider the implications of that at your leisure.
If you were a bat, you might have a better time keeping PETA from bombing your labratory. Not only because you'd be an animal (and a giant one) but because, your presence at all hours of the night would make it difficult to burn the place down without accidentally hurting an animal that is best described as in the same family as chimpanzees. Except not, since, again, you'd be a bat.
Chain yourself to your steak.
Intense concentration is a hallmark of gaming, and, for some reason, when we're presented with situations where we are not overly taxed, but, instead, get to enjoy ourselves, a segment of the population unusued to blinking slowly, unfocusing their eyes, and taking in a scene in its entirety are upset. But do we need to abandon these opportunities for entertainment? Do we have to create a situation where UX design encourages this bullshit by showing you all relevant information in a corner of the screen far, far away from the meticulously textured and modeled, and only occasionally meticulously animated cirque de spiele. I end rhetorical questions with periods. This may not be in accordance with the dictates of style?
Ultimately, at the very least, these icons ordering and demanding me to take unsophisticated action could be positioned on the object de accione in such a way that I need not completely ignore the action in order to responde, and, even more ideally, constitute something thought-out enough, and regulated to a degree which makes it possible for me to discern my opening from the behavior of my prey, or environment, rather than a gross declaration. Even more ideally, if, when I pressed a button, it always did something that was exciting and interesting, and I had to determine, for myself, when it was desireable to press it would be so excruciatingly wonderful, it'd be exactly what we needed to get Dharma into this *brand* new 2009 Pontiac Vibe. And then get that vibe into Mrs. Dharma.
Who in this metaphor, is a gamegirl.
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