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KlinotaxisKlinotaxis
in General Media
Hey it's ya boy Dipshit Fucksterson. Listen. When I was in high school I bought this anthology of short stories by Greg Bear. Greg Bear is this sci-fi guy. Hard sci-fi, so mostly stuff that's boring unless you have my kind of brain damage. But in this book there was this story called "The Fall of the House of Escher". A pun on the Poe story, of course, but I haven't read it so I can't comment on that.

In this story, the Escher one, which I did read, this magician, like a stage magician, is brought back from the dead, like a thousand years after he got eaten by a bus or whatever, by Technology. And the futurepeople who hold his life in their hands are like heya bud, let's see your shit. Give us a show. And he does, and I don't remember the details, but the basic premise was that these people, the future people, had fixed all their problems with Technology and now mostly kind of chilled. And watched stuff. Entertainment. They brought the magician back to see something new (by virtue of being old).

And then, critically, they made watching entertainment into entertainment. And watching watching entertainment, and so on. They'd have these extensive analyses of analyses of analyses of this guy pulling a rabbit out of his hat. And they'd analyze every aspect. Just pull everything apart. I think they fill the guy with sensors so they can monitor all his lymph flow, and then write fanfiction about one of the nodes, and then a nonfiction essay on the sociopolitical relations of the okay i made this part up a bit.

But yeah. And this was 2002 (not when i read it, but that's when the anthology was published, and probably the story had been published more previously as well). And I thought it was kind of terrifying, same as it was written. And then I got a tumblr account

BUT LISTEN, there's this thing i'm seeing now. i'm falling, you know, 17776. people are saying it's like homestuck. well, why not. it's like car boys too. here is what homestuck is: a story about speedrunning. People play a game in a way it was not designed to be played to Go Fast. Now when I say "about" obviously i just mean that's the surface premise, there's all this Deep Shit about Growing Up and such but that's not the point. And what is car boys? they just take this game, a real game this time, and fuck it up, and some other stuff happens, and they generate this whole mythology about Busto who is fundamentally a textured mesh that's supposed to look like a crash test dummy.

I think this is fundamentally different from, this just popped into my head, .hack, which is not really about the game. Or yugioh, whatever. In the first .hack, just like in the first yugioh, the rules of the game don't really matter. In yugioh it's cos they just didn't give a shit, in .hack it's cos whitey has his death dumbbell that's an abomination unto Nuggan. It makes the rules, the game, just setting. .hack isn't so much about subverting the game, it's just that they operate in a space where the game is subverted.

But in 17776, homestuck, whatevs, you can't just dismiss the rules of the game. In a real sense the thing is about the process of subverting the rules. What the mental consequences of that are for players. Or like, homestuck has vriska whose thing for a while is that she refuses to care that the actual game rules don't matter any more, and looks for in game treasure and shit. And then you go back to dave and terezi tells him like, hey, we need money. and dave's like what? who gives a shit about game money? or something, i haven't read it in thirty years

This all is fucked up to me, see, because I find it compelling and in a real sense it is genuinely novel in an incredible way. Humans haven't had all these rule-based, artificial logical systems, for very long. I mean yeah, football exists, but it's what like a hundred years old, and anyway the stuff in 17776 is based on nonexistent hyperextensions of it. You can't hack football that well. There's like, "Pretty Good" did that episode on that DeVry game that was basically like basketball getting its stack smashed, but that doesn't happen much. It's not a thing until you hyperextend it.

And we have this whole ethos. Large areas. We have speedruns, we have summer games done quick. It is very  nearly mainstream. I follow MSF on twitter, as in the doctors who get their shit bombed all the time, and they were tweeting about SGDQ! And why not! It gave em like a million dollars! And what is a speedrun, it's just breaking shit.

So yeah obviously I'm just kind of ranting but my point is, while I find it novel I also find it worrying. Because this sort of navel gazing of navel gazing of navel gazing in Escher is something I have a lot of experience with with respect to automurdering. That's scary. I'm not saying that writing fanfiction of an LP is morally wrong or something, but it's scary seeing culture at a point where it has to eat its own shit to keep going. If that makes sense. I'm done, I'm not even going to end with a joke here like mostly.
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