itookthepillyougaveme

Every digital interface is lilted with components designed to engage every sense of it’s user, to drag them in and maintain their control, doing the most to avoid relinquishing their grasp on your psyche. Attention is time, time is power. The clankers have obtained our most valuable resource with such an efficiently constricting grasp.

Now, pivoting back to the realm of De Certeau. If interaction with your environment(in this case walking) lets us bend space in small acts of resistance, playing a video game can feel similar—sometimes finding hacks, sometimes being utterly strangled by it’s design. Either or, it’s evident that the power retained through agency isn’t purely an abstract concept. Submerged in stoplights, lurking in street names, even harbored in controller buttons. Or this keyboard. In my mind it’s difficult to escape the notion that we are all slaves to the technology we benefit so dearly from. A leach to both ourselves and this world.

I personally never play video games. I never possessed a system when I was younger, nor did my friends. This resulted in my never figuring out how to use a controller properly. Due to that, I still avoid playing them today. Admittedly, I despise the things. My hatred for video games is seated in my upbringing, my ecocentric mentality, the ideals that being outside and active will always be better. For you, and for your reality. Not to mention that your tangible interaction with the world IRL will always be closer to being real in my mind. Of course, it’s all just a differing of views within an infinite amount of constructs, so it doesn’t really matter. I can appreciate what video games can do for certain individuals. Complete creation of their own world, utilizing their own rhetoric to craft an entity that means something to them.

Go get drunk and watch shirtless kids get arrested for engaging in a liquor-fueled jousts instead of sitting in your basement. As with everything, this is purely my opinion, my interpretation of my world.