Full disclosure, I am not a quote/unquote Pittsburgher by
residency. I have been a lifelong fan of Pittsburgh teams. I
attended and graduated the University of Pittsburgh. I currently work in
the city. To that end, I consider myself a Pittsburgher because I am very
attached to the area in one way or another. And even if I wasn’t I would still
have been affected as deeply by the events that took place in Squirrel Hill at
the Tree of Life Synagogue last month. And I’m here to say that it, along
with the rest of the world won’t get better.
I say that as I try to raise a daughter to not look at the
most horrible negative aspects of humanity. I say that as she, too, has
expressed that the world is a horrible place and everything sucks. And
quite frankly, I cannot disagree with her. But I can reassure her and I want to
reassure any of you that think that just because we are living through unusually
extraordinary times that it means the world is never going to not suck.
Let’s face it, we’re not getting out of her alive. The
moment we were born, we began to die. And that’s OK. After all, we
are a living thing and like any plant or animal, our physical beings are only
able to endure so much over so long a time. And no matter how much we try
to prevent or protect ourselves from disease or disaster, the end result is the
same. We will all die. We are born and we die. Those two
points are fixed in their existence. The degree to which we exist within two
points is flexible and therein lies the challenge.
Now, more than ever, we are bombarded with news and
information about the world. Now, more than ever, we are aware of things
that are going on outside our doors. Now, more than ever, is that
information shaped to illicit a heightened reaction, physical and
emotional. And our children are not immune to it. We can only guard
them against technology for so long. It’s everywhere. News alerts,
crawls, social media posts… It’s all out there and the more we try to wrap our
children in a blanket of ignorance to protect their innocence, the harder
reality tries to creep in. There is no escaping the wolf that is already
in the doorway. Because of that I embrace the news and offer you a caveat
in your digestion of it.
The world sucks right now. People are dying from hate
and violence more than just old age. People are more divided now than
they were at a time when we were actually divided by laws. People are
more willing to accept that everything will get worse before it gets
better. And they aren’t wrong. I’m sorry, but this is the reality
we live in.
Everything we eat will kill us. If we buy it, it’s got
chemicals. If we grow it, it comes into contact with chemicals. If
we synthesize it, it is a chemical. The reason you like the way a certain
food tastes is because they are designed that way. Natural foods have a real
taste that isn’t as fun or zingy as processed. But real food tastes good
if you know how to prepare it.
Our leaders all serve someone else’s interests other than
our own. Oh, sure, they tell us they do. They say they will remove
the corruption and drive out the evil. They dangle a small carrot to us
while giving others huge bushels. But if that’s what they’ve been telling
us for decades, and we keep falling for it, then why has no one actually done
it?
Death is everywhere. As I said, your body is literally
trying to kill you every day until it actually succeeds or loses that honor to
another killer. If you eat X, it will give you Y, which is bad. But if
you try to avoid X, by eating A, B will happen. If you take F it will
cause you worse side effects than what G’s symptoms are.
So, there you go. It all sucks. Our food will poison
us. Our government won’t protect us. And our medicine will make us
sick.
UNLESS
Instead of sitting there, making excuses for why it doesn’t
matter what you do to your body or the environment, instead of crawling into a
hole and waiting to die of old age, covered in bubble wrap with no sharp edges
on anything so you don’t get a cut, or instead of simply deciding that maybe a
long life isn’t worth it because what reason do you have to make it to 30 when
you can just gorge on processed cheese and chocolate and accept death at an
early age maybe you can do something to change it.
Stop being complacent that the world is horrible and make it
better. Come up with new solutions to old problems. Shout YES
louder than the loudest adult who shouts NO to changing the world. Get
off your ass, take a stand, and start making little changes that improve
things. Get help. Organize. Make a statement.
Stop listening to what they’re telling you is wrong and
start telling them what you can do to fix it. We used to make
things. We used to solve problems. Now all we do is make ways for
us to be enslaved by the problems we’ve created. We scare everyone into
thinking the world is horrible and that it’s all coming to get you, so hide
behind a shield of hate and lies and you’ll be safe from the truth.
We have access to the greatest wealth of technology and
information than we have ever had and it can be used for good. All it
takes is enough people to band together and use it that way.
So, unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing
is going to get better. It's not.
As we continue to hurl ourselves
into Idiocracy territory, I thought about the last 25 years of my
life. After all, my 25th reunion is this fall. Good
time to reflect. Look back on my adult life. Cry in the
corner a bit.
What I discovered is that for all the technological
innovation we’ve seen in the last two decades, we’ve become incredibly stupid
and selfish. If I could go back in time and change one thing, I
might actually make the ultimate sacrifice. I might try to prevent
the invention of the Internet.
I know.
I KNOW.
What madness is this? Why, on Earth would you
un-invent the Internet? Aren’t you
selling shirts, online? Aren’t you trying, and failing, to
produce YouTube videos? Yeah, but that doesn’t change the
truth. And, before you start clutching your routers and barking
madly, understand where I’m coming from on this. It’s
like Terminator 2. No matter how hard they tried to keep Skynet
from happening, it happened. Granted, it happened in a bad way, a la
Terminator 3, but it was inevitable. Now, I don't want to keep the
Internet from ever happening. I only wish to delay the process
until we are better equipped, mentally and emotionally, to handle it.
We were given fire by the Gods and we ended up torching
the world. We literally did not understand what we were
given. For awhile we just did silly things with the
Internet. Hell, we still do. Cats playing
keyboards, planking, Hadouken pics, Horse Head Mask videos, memes,
vines... But soon, it warped and became something
different. There was porn… so much porn. Then there
were cell phones and soon commercial WiFi. iPods.
Tidepods iPhones.
Facebook, Instagram, Elvis Presley, Disneyland.
It spiraled out of control. Slang (OMG,
WTF, ROTFLMAOBBQ)
We became addicted to technology. Our lives
revolved around little devices that did everything for us. A
phone replaced a pager, a camera, a gaming device, a laptop, watch, GPS, radio,
Walkman, and tons of other devices. It became the Swiss Army Lazy
Man. Texting gave way to sexting. Polaroids
gave way to selfies-in-a-bathroom-with-duck-face being Instagramed and put up
on Facebook. “Like, please!” (read: I have no self-esteem
and need constant and instant approval to maintain my shell of an
existence.) Soon, there was cyber-bullying. Hacking
phones, emails, the need for 24/7 news that may or may not even be accurate
spread like a wildfire. Hacking of elections and influencing voters'
minds.Fake News, trolls, and
bots. We have become unable to put the genie back into the bottle.
And, I don’t think we ever will. Isn’t
it odd that in the last 25 years we’ve invented things that bring us closer
together, more so than ever before, yet they put us farther apart in terms of
actually connecting with people. Used to be, if you wanted to reach
someone, you had to catch them at home, by phone. Now, you
call their cell. And, in a lot of cases, they want you to hang up
and just text. Also, isn’t it odd that in the last 25
years, so much technology has come about yet, what’s the last thing we
cured? Polio, I think. We’ve created a generation of
customers.
Our kids? Our kids have become over-privileged and
entitled.
“Well, Johnny has an iPod and he’s seven.” “Well, Johnny
is also a selfish brat that can’t wipe himself yet, but can send a
text. He probably still wets the bed.”
Nobody wants to work for anything. And I don’t
mean the entitled vs. the uneducated. I’m talking about
EVERYONE. Somewhere along the way, we lost our mission. Our
grandparents went to WWII. They sacrificed a lot of things in order
to keep the country running. Now, we’re asked to give up
something and suddenly, since 9/11, our government is either out to control
or enslave us. Take away our rights. Funny. Our
grandparents sacrificed a lot in order to give their family a better
life. Our parents, well, at least mine, gave up a lot of stuff
in order to make our lives better. They scrimped and
saved. They went without new clothes or fancy appliances. They
made ends meet and did what they could to ensure that we never had to live like
that, ever. And somehow, we thought, “Oh,
cool. Great. Thanks.” And that was
it. We accepted their generous offer. We watched as they
worked hard and bled for us and we just took that better life and continued to
not pay it forward, but instead we cheapened the thought.
We were given so much without having to ask for it and
yet, when it came to our children, or the next generation born into the
millennium, they didn’t understand what our parents did to provide, because we
were the end result. We didn’t continue the
trend. We didn’t have to work hard
anymore. Technology caught up and made it
easier. Hell, I am just as responsible. I
work in an office all day, but I also run a business where I don’t have to put
a lot of effort into it and am rewarded, monetarily. Granted,
I wish I could work more on it. I know the quality would
benefit, but at the end of the day, I get emails saying , “Congrats on your sale”
with no deserving of that praise. The Internet has done the work for
me.
We take to Facebook and instead of sharing our lives with
each other, we share half assed researched and cited examples of hate against
one group or another. I can count on at least one hand how
many friends I have on Facebook that never say a word, yet post CONTINUALLY
their disdain for one group or another in this world. And 9
times out of 10, they share from one subjective group that is not even factual
all the time. It’s just a funny picture, or what they claim to be
funny, slamming another person/group/religion/etc. They don’t
say “Hi”, or “How are you” they say, “Here’s why you’re all wrong and I’m
right” in graphic form. And for all that friending and sharing that goes
on, I believe we are more so divided than we ever were as a
civilization. Friends are not friends, they are an audience for our
amusement and our agendas. We don't connect, we try to redirect.
We do not deserve the Internet. If
aliens were to come here, looking for intelligent life, we’d be blown off the
face of the galaxy like we were a plague.
“For the love of Blurg! Zyphos, we must
eradicate this menace on Earth before it spreads and infects us.”
“How do you know that, Lishu?”
“I saw it on Reddit. And Grimjor saw a post
on Zarnbook that he shared from "I bet this Gorpcar can get more likes
than Firtarp.”
100 Andelorians like this. (Picture of a
tentacle in a thumbs up position.)
So, yeah. Let’s go back, blow the servers and
tell the geeks of the 90s to keep working on it and we’ll work on being better
humans, so that one day, we may be deserving of such an awesome power.
Open world games such as Minecraft or No Man’s Sky are
sometimes overwhelming to those of us who like a little bit of structure in our
lives. After all, we are essentially given not just a blank canvas, but a
blank studio, gallery, and entire world in which to create. The level of
awareness of how big the world or universe is in regards to what your footprint
is could crush your mind. You start out at spawn, and immediately worry
about survival, so you cobble together a shelter or hide out where it’s safe
until you can fully prepare yourself to venture beyond the safety of your
immediate surroundings. As you gain experience and develop more survival
skills, you explore further and further. Your original base is no longer
something you need and you want to look for greener pastures or more advanced
resources. You want to move somewhere that your level of evolvement is
now at the bottom of the scale and you can work your way up to the master of
the domain. Rinse and repeat.
And especially, in a game like No Man’s Sky, you will shed
resources a lot. You will throw away things that seem so important or valuable
all because you need more room for consumables to build and survive. It’s
the equivalent of people who survive a shipwreck on an island with a case of
extremely expensive 100 year old scotch and they use it for fuel because
survival is more important than status or wealth. Many times, and I mean
maaaannnnnnnnyyyy times I have come across worlds, rich in valuable resources
that I would love to plunder, only to jump in, grab a small, totally unrelated
item, and then jump out. I may be tempted to grab a couple of high
quality items if they are close by, but usually inventory space doesn’t allow
for a profitable haul. The game actually forces you to play slow. It
hamstrings your efforts, even though you may be capable of higher functions
with items such as advanced mining lasers or hazmat gloves. And until you
progress far enough into the game, you won’t have access to more storage on
your person, at a base, or in a freighter. Probably the best option at
this point is to acquire a bunch of starships, park them in your freighter, and
use their inventory space to hold multiple stacks of resources you need.
You can always jump back to them and pick up what you need.
But that causes another issue. Travelling. How
many times have you gone somewhere, say in Skyrim, or Minecraft, or No Man’s
Sky and not had what you needed or the inventory space to carry what you came
for? Imagine it, you’ve landed your ship, walked over a mountain towards
an item or location and then realized I am missing something that I need or I
can’t even carry this. So, you have to hopefully have something you can
drop or you spend an hour creating something to recharge your tools or suit,
and then scrapping the rest to make room… A simple walk becomes a two hour
ordeal. And when you don’t have hours to play, it can be frustrating to
make very small moves towards a goal. So there you are, bebopping
around the universe looking for a handful of items because they can’t all be
readily available in the system you start out in. So, off I go to another
system, and another, and the explorer in me is conflicted with the
achiever. I want to search for all the species and all the plants.
I want to discover and catalog all the planets, not just a landing patch on
each one.
In the early days of No Man’s Sky, the idea was that you
could discover planets and creatures and name them, uploading them to the
servers which would retain that information for when the next player, who happens
to warp on by, can see your discovery. It was a multiplayer feature in a
single player instance. It meant “discover all the things” which had me
wondering that if the universe of No Man’s Sky was based on algorithms and is
procedurally generated, how does every player exist in the same space? But, of
course, with the advent of this new type of feature, mapping and discovery,
that meant that he/she gets to the end fastest, gets the spoils of being first
but misses a lot of stuff along the way, something I find annoying about people
who speed run in order to have arbitrary bragging rights.
But I learned to let go. I learned that no system is a
snowflake. For as unique and detailed as each system and all their
planets may be, the one thing I learned in No Man’s Sky and Minecraft is that I
can pick up, go somewhere else and find exactly what I need, albeit after maybe
a wasted day, looking over new planets. The stuff in my inventory can be
valuable but materialism in this game is almost as inconsequential as your own
physical existence in the game. It’s all data. There’s a pattern.
It’s repeatable. It happens once and it happens again. It took me
awhile to leave the worlds I was so accustomed to, so familiar with and enjoy
finding the next place that is somewhat new but somewhat the same. At one
point in my early travels, I gave up on the allure of trying to reach the
destination and worried more about the journey. I spent a lot of time
just hanging out in the third system I traveled to. I hopped all over the place
to max out my ship’s inventory. I maxed out my weapon. I maxed out
my exosuit. I linked all the upgrades. Everything was great… and
then it all changed. And I was reset in a way. Suddenly, all the bragging
rights and inventory and discoveries didn’t matter. I’m now playing
differently.
No Man’s Sky is meant to be enjoyed, experienced, not rushed
to conclusion. And unfortunately, you have competing in game
directives. Follow the path, but explore and build. So, you move
from place to place and keep building, leaving remnants of your existence
scattered about the universe. When in reality, what I want to do is
settle down and explore an area that holds so many possibilities. But I
have to continually put that desire on hold due to a requirement that forces me
to go somewhere else. There is no rooting yourself in the experience
because the ability to do so requires you to leave your immediate area and
after searching countless systems and countless worlds for that perfect paradise
to build and grow, your objective lies somewhere else, like a princess in
another castle. The main issue became tracing back over your steps.
After a few updates my progress was lost, planets changed, bases reverted or
became missing. And for me to travel back along my path trying to find
previous worlds and systems became annoying.
Luckily, the NEXT update somewhat reconciles this
quandary. I can explore any and every world. I can follow the path
as long and as far as I need to, but along the way, I need to leave
breadcrumbs. In every system that has an essential component or seemingly
perfect world, I place a base. Getting enough resources to plop down a
wood shack and a portal isn’t too hard. As I move further and further
along, it just means more names on my transporter list. Even if I don’t
put a portal down, at least I can get back to the space station and fly down to
where my base is located. Then, when I find the perfect place to park, I
can build my final base and connect a portal network to the essential locations
for resources needed to complete base quests. The main annoyance will be
teleportation times but that isn’t as bad as having to physically fly to
different systems.
How infinitesimal will the legacy be of someone born in the 20th century. I often wonder about the effects of our lives and those who have come before us on this planet. Stonehenge. Easter Island. The Pyramids. The Nazca Desert drawings. Croatoan. These are all mysteries of history where we’re not sure what was the exact purpose of their design. In fact, what exactly was being discussed when those responsible stepped back and looked at their creations, now finished. Was it for the benefit of them to leave their mark or for us? Were they trying to simply say, “Killroy was here,” in some ancient fashion, or were they trying to tell future civilizations something important.
But what’s past is prologues and we are the new builders of a legacy that may never be realized. We’ve built structures on the beach, a testament to our ingenuity of molding sand. We leave monuments of our gritty labors for others to partake, some to take out with their feet. Hopefully, they take delight in our design for a brief moment in time. But, ultimately, the beach, like a giant Etch-a-sketch, shakes itself each day, wiping away our efforts. Once towering castles in the sand, a new resets the board and allows the next master builders a chance to impress the passersby. But what if no one glances our works in the sand? What if not one person wanders by before the tides reclaim the sand? Did it ever exist? Did it ever matter?
So what if we carved our initials into that tree or upon the steel beams of a rusted old bridge that spans a river. So what if we tag a water tower or train car? Someday that mighty maple may fall, a casualty of mother nature. Or that bridge may crumble due to the elements, only to be rebuilt anew, sans scratched in symbols of our defacement. The graffiti on an overpass may be painted over. And who really gets the chance to read all the tags on the boxcars as they roll by at the railroad crossing? Then what? Our monograms go unnoticed, forgotten in time. We lose a foothold on the past with our legacy erased.
Of course these acts are all destructive. They hurt nature. We should build things not deface them. But even then, over time, those structures could be wiped from memory with a wrecking ball or an evil plot. Our history books and the Internet preserve those images, indelible in our minds and hearts for generations to come, but still the memories get corroded and the history gets morphed into something different, a narrative told by one side to blame the other. Of course, this only matters to the legacies built by those with presence. Those items are on display for a reason and the knowledge of their dedication is made public. For us, the lowly, anonymous citizen, our legacy gets wiped quite often.
I hope, that one day, many, many years from now, a child puts on their father’s shirt. It’s faded design marks a time in the early 21st century, where a young man, no longer alive, decided to put funny images on a shirt, and perhaps a younger man bought that shirt, wearing it with pride And it held up, over the years, until he had a family all his own, and while the shirt no longer fits him, his young son can run around in the faded and cracked ink marked shirt, still giving the father a smile, remembering when he bought it so many years ago.
And one day, when a new generation comes up with a better idea for sharing content among viewers, and the servers of YouTube are wiped and scrapped, the last remnants of these videos will be lost to time. Even the raw footage and files from their recordings will no longer be able to be viewed as we move onto different, more efficient means of compression and storage of digital media. Today’s MP4s are yesterday’s 5 ¼ inch floppy disks. Centuries from now, an archaeologist may come across a box of these thin black squares and wonder what the faded words “Lemonade Stand” or “DOOM.EXE” means. What will be the legacy of Chocolate Rain or Keyboard Cat be when no one is able to view the videos in the 22nd century?
As for gamers, we spend time and money on a digital footprint. On multiplayer servers, long since decommissioned, we built massive bases and farms in Minecraft, creating pixel art Mario or Pinkachu out of wool, so that a n00b on the server could pass by and see our art or architecture, marveling at the design and detail. Even I gave money to a server which no longer exists. I built many structures costing me countless hours only to have them wiped away after the mods went away and stopped hosting. The videos of these structures, while still on my channel, harken to a time when I was still early into the channel, not really knowing how to best present and edit content. In GTA, we built empires and acquired clothes and vehicles, but those were all temporary fixtures as newer titles were released and support for the old was removed. The money gamers spent on shark cards to amass all this material wealth, gone in a command line execution of finality. Angry Phisting will be no more as will Bob in the world of San Andreas. These are the legacies I’ve perhaps wasted my time on. Many hours, many dollars in maintaining storage and Players Plus accounts only to have everything blinked away. What purpose did it serve? What did I hope to achieve in them? Why do we continue to leave footprints where we know someone will later erase them?
It’s a perfect rabbit hole to climb down as you play a game like No Man’s Sky where in essence, the game wants you to be found. Perhaps not physically, or even maybe literally, but your mark on the game is left to be witnessed. Of course, as the game continues to morph and update and become something further away than what it initially started out as, our digital footprint on the universe is being wiped clean from the servers and one day, maybe a year or maybe decades from now, no one will ever see how you named your first discovery, Planet McPlanet Face. As the NEXT update gives us the option of building bases anywhere and in any quantity I am laughing as I come across the many footprints, little messages from other explorers, screaming out into the void. Their messages like little, “Killroy was here” moments as I pass through on my way to completing missions. And as new players wander by, they may see my half constructed, abandoned bases, a simple checkpoint for me to find my way back, along the landscape of some world I’ve marked up in an effort to cash in on the resources of a world until I find that perfect location in which to build my ultimate base, only to have it wiped away from existence by the next update… or perhaps one day gone forever when Hello Games turns down the servers.
What do we hope to accomplish by making marks in the dirt or on the sides of buildings which can be erased with ease? How do want to be remembered when our digital feats and discoveries can be wiped away with impunity. Why do we care? As we move further and further online we lose more and more of our past because we become more closed off to the outside, opting to bottleneck our interaction into a screen and a signal. There’s a real chance that if we were to digitize our entire history and all of our accomplishments we could lose them all if something happens. If the power goes out, we lose everything. If some kind of attack occurs that wipes our data, we could lose our entire past. No more “Killroy was here” and no more “Ask not what your country can do for you.”
I’ve worked in knowledge management. I know what it’s like to be in an organization where the greatest wealth of information is held close by a very few individuals. The tribal knowledge that could help solve today’s problems and prevent tomorrow’s is closely guarded because by giving up that ownership, the owners feel they become obsolete and no longer useful. We didn’t get to space by having a few mathematicians say, “It’s easier if I just do it for you.” But it’s even more than that. We, as a society, are unprepared for what happens when those who take care of us don’t pass on their knowledge of everyday things. Farming or basic maintenance or even how to function as an adult and manage finances.
Education is the most powerful legacy we can pass on to our next generations. And it’s taught word of mouth and written. Yes, technology can help mobilize and shape the message. It can even help deliver it, but it cannot be the system of record when it comes to our past. That we must write down and teach to the youth. We must cut through all the Fake News and partisanship and pass along those details and facts that will keep up from losing ourselves completely. That is the carving on the tree we need. That is the graffiti on the water tower we should embrace.
We need to have more than a legacy of binary dust to have blown away by the winds of ignorance and shortsightedness. We need to learn from our past or we will forever make the same mistakes.
Why is that some people look at their life in terms of being so many years removed from something? And at what point do you stop counting?
This year is/was my 25th high school reunion. It’s been 25 years since I graduated high school. Now, I don’t typically count the number of years since I graduated college. It’s been 20 by the way. Maybe that’s because we don’t typically commemorate the year we graduated college whether because we have opportunities to go beyond just a basic four year college tenure, or because we just don’t typically have a college reunion. Hell, I didn’t even go to my college graduation. There were over 36,000 undergrads at my school. I don’t think anyone noticed me missing, nor was my name probably called. Yet, there I was some 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15 years out of high school saying, “I can’t believe it’s been 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15 years since I’ve been out of high school.”
And in these, now, 25 years since graduating I have been to a total of…. One reunion. I’m one for five. I went to only one reunion despite being very aware and vocal about how many years it was since I was in high school. 20%. I enjoyed high school. It was fun for me. I had good friends and had a great time there. I went to the last one. Yes, it was the 20th because I felt it was somewhat of a milestone. Now, I did attend a breakfast for the 10th which was basically across the street from where I was living at the time, otherwise I was not really interested in going. But for the 20th, I felt there was some need to do so. Perhaps it was the being almost 40. Perhaps it was a new chapter in my life. I was going through a divorce. Perhaps I just felt like I had some unfinished business to figure out and went to see about some closure. What I found out what was that any questions I had about my life and the last 20 years weren’t being answered by hanging out with people I rarely saw in 20 years, though communicated with via social media. I didn’t unlock any secrets of the universe in that evening. I didn’t look back and think, yeah, I should have really gone to the other three and this upcoming one.
I knew that it was a small moment in this life. We all came together and began talking and planning and getting back into each other’s lives but I said that probably, after the 20th, we’d also drift back apart. I figured we would probably go back to our little corners of the world and keep each other at a distance over social media. And even that has changed in the last five years. The people I remember from high school were not the same people I saw that night… and they are not the same people I see today. A lot has changed in the last 25 years… mostly in the last three.
A lot of people can’t wait to get away from that orbit of counting years from high school graduation. Their time in the halls of their local public school could have been difficult. They could have been sad or even cruel. We lived in a different world. The advances we made in social equality we’re small, but very impactful, when our parents were teenagers but then a huge gap of 40 years before we even began to rethink the most basic tenets of acceptance and tolerance. We’re still fighting that to this day. Meanwhile, kids in high schools have worse things to worry about. Drugs and violence are more rampant than they were 25 years ago. It will have been 20 years since Columbine next Spring. Knowing the odds, I simultaneously scoff and worry that my own child will be in high school by the time my 30th reunion rolls around. The odds are so small, but I’m sure every parent, including those at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and Sandy Hook, never truly believed they’d have to worry either.
Their unfortunate truth is that they will begin marking time in years since someone has passed. As we get older, those we love will ultimately be taken from us and we will begin remembering that it’s been “X years since Y passed.” I look back at how it’s been four years since my first cat died, a year and a half, and six months since two others died, respectively. I still have one left and she’s so stubborn that she will probably outlive me and one day be marking the years since I’ve passed. It’s sad, for sure, and I’m not sure how healthy it is to remind ourselves how it’s been that someone has left us. Perhaps it’s better to remember how many memories they gave us, focusing on their positive impact on our lives instead of focusing on their absence.
But, in all fairness here is a list of important “it’s been this many years since…” that I felt were impactful and poignant in our history.
It’s been one week since you looked at me
It’s been 7 years since the end of the Iraq War
It’s been 9 years since the first version of Minecraft was released to the public
It’s been 11 years since the introduction of the iPhone
It’s been 15 years since the beginning of the War in Iraq
It’s been 16 years since the attacks on 9/11 and the war on terror began, and the release of the first Xbox
It’s been 21 years since the movie Titanic was released
It’s been 22 years since the first Toy Story came out and the verdict in the OJ trial was passed
It’s been 23 years since the Sony Playstation came out
It’s been 24 years since Forrest Gump was released and Kurt Cobain died
It’s been 25 years since the first text message was sent, the .mp3 became a thing, and the first Jurassic Park was released
It’s been 27 years since the first web page was launched and the beginning and end of the Gulf War
It’s been 29 years since the first Simpsons episode aired
It’s been 32 years since the Challenger Shuttle disaster
It’s been 33 years since Rocky IV was released and the US release of the Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s also been 33 years since the first fully CGI character was used on film.
It’s been 34 years since the first Ghostbusters movie was released and the first PG-13 movie was released (Red Dawn)
It’s been 36 years since the first Compact Disc was released
It’s been 38 years since Pac-Man was released in arcades
It’s been 41 years since the first Star Wars movie and the Atari 2600 was released and also Elvis died
It’s been 43 years since I was born and the end of the American military involvement in Vietnam
It’s been 46 years since the first email was sent
It’s been 49 years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon
It’s been 50 years since Martin Luther King was assassinated
It’s been 54 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed and the Beatles first live American television performance
It’s been 55 years since JFK was assassinated
It’s been 56 the first commercial modem was released
It’s been 63 years since the first polio vaccine came into use
It’s been 65 years since the armistice was signed signaling the end of fighting in the Korean War
It’s been 73 years since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the end of World War II
It’s been 77 years since the bombing of Pearl Harbor
It’s been 100 years since the end of World War I
It’s been 115 years since the first Ford car, The Model A was produced
In the early days of No Man’s Sky, back when no one
cared about the game, it often became boring and tedious to world hop.We would spend hours trying to nail down
every flora and fauna discovery in order to complete the collection for the
most possible units.Sometimes you had
to travel great distances, at the expense of resources, just to find those last
couple crawlers or flying creatures in order to be done.And while exploration is a big part of what
makes No Man’s Sky work, the time it takes to complete a system’s
possible discoveries and race other players to the core in order to “be first”
to get there, naming everything, became somewhat of a conflict.In fact, the entire game is a conflict
between what you should do to conform to the games story and what you want to
do as an open world player, traveler.After all, grinding in the game was somewhat in direct conflict of what
you were supposed to achieve.As you
spend countless hours detailing every inch of every planet before moving on,
the game constantly pops up a reminder to “Travel”, “Explore”, and follow
Atlas.
We were given the options to build a base, but the amount of
time that you had to dedicate to building and completing all the quests
surrounding the base update took away from that whole Atlas path idea because
once you left a system, you either had to back track or keep a teleport node to
the space station or the base you had unless you wanted to do it all over
again.How many times had I revisited
the game, only to have to redo all the worker missions and building of vehicles
until the NEXT update game, erasing all of that and rendering 90% of inventory
as useless or outdated technology.It’s
almost as if it’s better to complete the game first and then do all the update
stuff, or so the developers thought most gamers would have done so when dolling
out these new updates.Some of us, still
haven’t reached the core, instead we soak in the landscapes, build wild
imaginative structures, and of course, spend a lot of time getting rich.
Yes, back in the early days of the game, you could exploit
the mechanics of the game to max out your ship and backpack inventory.You could invest a lot of time, finding
crashed ship after crashed ship in order to exchange it for another one with
one more slot.And if you found a world
with some Gravatino Balls or Vortex Cubes you could haul a ton back to the
space station and find that one traveler who had some ridiculous need for your
valuable items, overpaying for something so useless.In fact, if you were savvy, you could make
millions constructing bypass chips or components of the warp cell recipe and
selling them the same way.I think when
I last played the original version, I had amassed something like 26 to 30
million units without travelling more than four systems and never paying for a
new ship.
But, in a way, it ruins your experience.These days, with the NEXT update, you can
exploit a mechanic, making millions by selling cryo-pumps or just farming
nanintes from sentinels at an outpost, using the interior as a way to stave off
the wave upon wave of attacking bipedal and quadruped level defenses.While it isn’t cheating, this exploit is
basically a way for you to earn fast money and then spend it all on new
freighters, tools, ships, or expansions.Then, what?What happens NEXT?Do you build a huge base and just live?Do you explore the game and finish it which
basically restarts everything?
Part of the overall experience with a game such as this is
to immerse yourself in the world or universe.We are given countless worlds to discover, and even though they tend to
be a repetitive exercise, taking things slow and exploring is part of the
fun.Granted, it doesn’t have an overall
pro-content spin.After all, when you,
as a content producer want to put forth a game such as No Man’s Skyin order to satisfy a niche on your channel,
you’re given very few options as how to approach it successfully.You can do hits and bits on general tips to
showcase how to discover and build certain things, a basic tutorial style.. or
you do an overall long play strategy, where you invite viewers along with you
for the experience.
I tend to play that way, because in essence, I want to play
the game, not just give tips.I want to
experience what the game is and in the fast paced real world, where gaming time
is at a premium, for someone with little time, I don’t want to work twice.I want to immerse myself into the game and if
you want to watch, it’s all the better.But, in a way, that tends to destroy the experience for others… maybe.I say maybe, because there are games, like
point and click adventures or puzzle based titles, where the long play format
tends to ruin the game for someone else.Now, take a game like Mysterious Cities of Gold, The Bridge, Gone
Home, or Back to the Future.If
you bought any of those games and need a tip, Mysterious Cities of Gold,
and the Bridge may be a case for doing simple tutorials.Usually, there is a path to the a goal.But with games like Back to the Future or Gone
Home, it is more of a journey.It’s not about move here, move here, click this, but what happens when
you do those actions.It’s telling a
story, and if you watch someone play the whole way through, it can ruin the
experience for you if you were to choose to go back and play it after
watching.
Now, if you have no intention
of playing those games or are unable and want to experience it through someone
else, then by all means go for it.It’s
just that so many content creators are more focused on what is going to get
them metrics vs. which is more enjoyable to do.In essence, being demonetized frees me from having to worry about
getting “ratings” as it were.Though,
one would think it would be my focus to rebuild my channel to become monetized,
in order to get those ratings.But, I
simply don’t care enough about the process.I’m here to play the game and if that doesn’t fly for you… so be it.
Though, I can see the potential of various types of videos
with this game.It’s art, really.It can be simple as following someone on
their journey or just watching the landscape go by.The possibilities are endless.You just have to find them. I suggest going the long way.
I am old enough to remember a time when we had to wait days,
if not weeks to see what we took pictures of. I had a 35mm Instamatic
camera that required sticking a flash cube into the top. The film came in
a cartridge that looked like the modern day equivalent of the voice mail symbol
on your phone. You pointed, shot the picture, then had to manually
advance the film by a dial on the top that clicked when in place. You got
maybe 24 pictures and had to mail the film away to be processed unless you went
to a Fotomat in the mall parking lot, which would still take days. There
was no cloud. We didn’t have filters. We didn’t have ears and noses to stick on
our faces. We didn’t even know if we blinked. It was all a mystery to be
figured out weeks later. And we didn’t seem to mind. Nowadays, we have
selfie sticks and Snapchats and Instagrams and weird shit that makes our faces
look like fun house mirrors. And now we also take pictures in games.
Now, to be fair, taking a picture of your gameplay in a
video game isn’t a new concept. Long before sharing or screenshotting became a
thing, some games required you to send in proof that you accomplished some feat
or achievement. Somewhere in a shoe box, is a blurry photo of my high
score from Atari 2600 Decathlon, taken prior to 1984. Again, the ability
for us to snap a perfectly framed, in focus, picture with 70s/80s photographic
technology was very low and the game would have been turned off or the
television would have been burned out before the developed photo ever came
back. But if you were lucky to achieve something so grand as getting over
10,000 points in Decathlon or 20,000 points in Pitfall. Activision had
this thing called Activison Patches which they would send to you in exchange
for photographic proof that you finished or attained a particular score in one
of their games. They were these sew on patches you could put on your jean
jacket or backpack. The 80s equivalent to Xbox achievements or PS4
Trophies. But those were photos of you playing the game. Then,
something happened. We added taking photos in the game.
Games like the Sims or Second Life took taking photos of
your monitor or television and put the power of the photo op into the
game. Minecraft gave players a screenshot feature so that they could
share their epic builds or biggest fails with other players. And other
games offered the feature as part of the basic settings, some tongue in cheek
like GTA V, complete with selfie mode, filters and sharing capabilities.
Others were more about sharing the environment like Uncharted 4. But,
when you are immersed into a game like Uncharted or even GTA, having to stop
and take time to set up a photo op to capture a moment seems counter intuitive
to the game itself. When Uncharted 4 came out, it brought new gameplay
features to the decade old franchise. The first and last title on the 8th
generation console wanted to tout the advanced graphics of the PS4 with the
opportunity for players to take a moment to stop and look around at their
environment, snapping a picture and adding filters and other added
effects. It’s a nice little thing to do but again, it takes away from the
rough and tumble, puzzle solving action of the game. Cinematically, it
was on par with the 2nd game which seamlessly blended cutscenes and
in game action, but touting the newest bell and whistle brought to the table as
being able to Instagram your treasure hunt buried my interest in the game.
But, that’s not to say that in game photography isn’t
without merit. I mean, part of the initial gameplay of No Man’s Sky is to
scan and observe your surroundings, discovering new species of flora and
fauna. It only makes sense to enhance that initial offering by adding in
the ability to put in documenting of your journey into the great wide open by
taking some pics. After all, even though we’re unknown travelers, caught
in some weird metaphysical, philosophical mind screw about will and destiny,
we’re still tourists, exploring the universe.
The overall aesthetic of No Man’s Sky is based in that
kitschy retro-futuristic science fiction art along the vein of Christopher Foss
and Ralph McQuarrie. Those angles and flared pieces of architecture and
the animals that look like they were placed in the Cantina scene, straight out
of central casting from the Jim Henson’s creature workshop. Odd shaped
necks and horns and flying fish dragons beg to be captured on film. Caves that
resemble overgrown maws and throats, ready to devour you. The skyscape,
streaked with jet comtrails from other travelers dividing the space from
atmosphere. It all looks so pretty. And now, with multiplayer
added, Hello Games has given players the ability to gesture in order to help
you communicate… or perhaps pose for a selfie. Saying Thank you or Help
or just sitting among the flowing stalks of grass as you contemplate your place
in the whole story of Nada and Polo or Atlas. You thoughts flash towards
the meaning of all this… hashtag pensive hashtag Thoughts before falling
asleep.
When I went away to college in the fall of 1993 I was
travelling to a school over 600 miles away from my home. I was going to
have to have everything I would to survive. That meant taking a shit ton
of stuff, packed into the covered bed of my Dad’s pickup truck with enough
space for me to slide in and out of a me shaped hole a couple times over the
course of 12 hours. It wasn’t a great idea. And after four months,
I transferred to another school about 25 miles away from my parents’.
Clearly, I had learned my lesson and didn’t need to pack everything for the
hour long trip of which I would be coming home most weekends. Nope, still
packed a single dorm room to the gills. Then, during the summer of my
sophomore and junior years, I spent three months working in an amusement park
nearly 4 hours away. Yep, you guessed it. I didn’t learn and my
parents paid the price literally and figuratively.
Unfortunately, after college I felt this need… or at least I
was led to believe that I needed to acquire things as a homeowner. Things
I will never use save once. Things that sit in an attic or the garage or
shoved in a room somewhere, never to be seen until something goes wrong and I
have to pitch a lot of damaged or broken items due to a catastrophic
event. I am getting better because mainly I see what lies ahead of myself
and my siblings when it comes to my parents. That house is going to be a
ridiculous amount of hoarding to go through. Still, at some point, while
I have time and energy to enjoy it, I’d like to be able to build or move from
my current house I deemed a starter house because I never meant it to be a
forever home. I intended it to be a place I would fix up and sell after
raising a family and saving money. I’m half way on one, on my 2nd
attempt on the same one, and nowhere near complete on the other.
Now, in the world of gaming, my first ever attempt at
building a house in Minecraft was pretty much indicative of my loss of
imagination and creativity. The only defense I have is that I began
playing back in the days of Beta 1.3. Upside down stairs were not a thing
and if you broke a stair, aka roofing … it was gone forever. There was no
corner stairs either. So, my house, consisting of mostly stone walls and
cobblestone steps for a roof was pretty sad. It didn’t even have
windows. I would go in there and just store all my resources. I
made connecting tunnels to other parts of the area, including my first place of
refuge, the dirt house. The Minecraft equivalent to living in a cardboard
box.
Since then, I built many bases but always struggled when it
came to building a house. And usually, that’s the thing we want to build
in Minecraft and now in No Man’s Sky. We all geeked out over the
prospect of building that dream base we all envisioned in our life only to find
that spatial proportions made it look like a sad Barbie dream crack house. On
subsequent worlds, especially ones I’ve recorded the house was either a
requirement, for instance in Skyblock, or a nicety to show off whatever
building skills I thought I possessed. But in reality, the house in
Minecraft is never really a functional space, it’s more for show and often
times it is a pain in the ass to even have one, causing you to traipse up and
down steps to get to your bed in order to quell the banging of monsters outside
your door, or to store all your extra gubbins in your storage areas.
At one point, I condensed everything into an area that,
disregarding chests for all your shit would be an area roughly equivalent to a
6x6x12 space. That takes into account the 2nd floor containing an
enchanting table and bookshelves. The bottom would have a stacked
crafting table/furnace/brewing stand next to a bed and an avil/cauldron.
Granted you would be highly visible and vulnerable to any monsters that
followed you home you run the risk of not being able to sleep because they are
nearby. Also, if you’re not careful, waking up can place you outside your
house.
I guess I never saw the need or desire to build a house
because I saw so much wasted space. It never had any use other than to
look pretty from the outside and everything inside would be so far apart and an
inefficient use of space for a game such as this. For any game that involves
building, adventuring, or exploring, inventory management this is the furthest
thing from fun. Every episode I recorded for Skyrim involved me taking a
good hour to travel back to my house in Whiterun to drop off stuff, switch out
gear, and stock up or sell items. There is about 50% of the experience
you never saw because it was boring and usually involved at least one instance
where I accidentally took everything out of a bag or chest which caused me to
curse and cry. 7 Days to Die took so much time to sort your inventory and
you had only so much daylight or night to do it before you needed to get to
whatever your were doing next before the horde, which took all your
focus.
But in Minecraft I always felt like a great use of mods or
automation was to have a way to get stuff dropped into a central location to be
sorted into storage and then recalled when needed without the mundane task of
searching through every chest and walking up or down steps to find where I put
that thing I needed for the thing. I get that there is a mod that has a
computer that can hold all your items and allow you to craft on the fly and that’s
cool and all, but unless you’re playing with mods it doesn’t help
anything. And other mods allow for pipes and sorting but those are
usually resource heavy causing lag. It also solves a problem but it
leaned more heavily on function following form. These industrial looking
engines and pipes stand out as a stark contrast to the environment of Minecraft
which usually exists in nature. Now, if you were building a modern
looking city that relies on a lot of electricity or metal working or concrete,
then yes, these engines and macerators and whiz bang gadgets that automate
processes would be appropriate. However, I would like to see ones that
match the era of technological evolution a game like Minecraft sets itself
in.
In the ancient city of Petra, you know the one that inspired
the end scenes of the Holy Grail temple in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,
there was a complex piping system using math and terracotta pipes to transport
water from a source over three miles away. If you could demonstrate
through crafting functional machines from clay or sand or other primitive
materials as to solve the problems a game like Minecraft presents to you
without deviating from the aesthetics of your progression and surroundings I
would be all for that. Simply playing for ten minutes, building a dirt
hut, then constructing metal machines that run on electricity just seems to
bring me out of the immersion of such a game. After all, ancient civilizations
had irrigation systems and even piped methane gas to nearby settlements which
were far superior in their design compared to their relative place in history.
Fully fleshed out and functional water wheels instead of a block that generates
RF would be astounding… but probably lag inducing.
But I have truly got of track because those are solutions to
a different problem. The Minecraft house is such an impractical
structure, in my opinion, because it doesn’t do anything except protect us from
the dangers of the outside, something a dirt hole can do. It’s a status
symbol without the benefit of bragging rights because it isn’t earned any
differently whether you work all day mining for precious resources or just dig
up some rocks and chop down some trees. It’s all about imagination and
design and maybe that’s its saving grace. It exists as a testament to the
builder’s creativity, not development as a player in this world. I’m just
the stupid one who feels he can’t be bothered either because I am too lazy or
not creative enough to embrace it.
Since base building became a thing in No Man’s Sky it’s been
more of a distraction than an integral part of the game. Think about
it. What purpose does a base serve in No Man’s Sky?
Shelter? You spend 80% of your game in a ship, flying
around. The time you do spend on a planet is for exploration or
gathering. Any shelter you need is likely because you are on a planet
with adverse conditions so you retreat underground or towards your ship.
Resources? It makes more sense to just make simplified
bases on every planet with rare or valuable resources and just portal to them
when needed. I remember spending a ridiculous amount of time doing the
base missions, then doing them again, and then again only to have my base
removed with the NEXT update. The farming aspect was neat but not really
very profitable unless you expand to a larger operation and then, it becomes
unmanageable unless you multiplay.
Cool aesthetics? Yes. This is the main
reason. Again, the only reason you build a house in any game that gives
you some form of creative control over the process is to build something with
some kind of aesthetics. And No Man’s Sky has a very cool 70s retro
sci-fi look to it. Those of us who grew up in the shadow of Flash Gordon
or Speed Racer and remember the original Ralph McQuarrie artwork from Star Wars
have this exposure to a definite style of futurism with specific colors and
shapes that we saw in other games like Prey. And No Man’s Sky plays into
that motif with the shapes and architecture available to us along with the planetary
backdrops. I’ve always had an affinity for space and science
fiction. Movies like Blade Runner, The Black Hole, again Flash Gordon, or
Logan’s Run were favorites. Art from McQuarrie or Chris Foss. I was
a big lover of the 70s and 80s space LEGO sets. In fact, a recent episode
of This Old House featured a guy wearing the space logo from that LEGO series
which made me geek out, wanting to get one. Moonraker, as bad as it was,
was another favorite in that cheesy operatic space motif versus the 50s and 60s
B&W space style. For me, it wasn’t steampunk, it was that retro
futuristic look.
But the real problem with base building is that it sucks up
cycles to complete the quests to build the bases. And quite frankly, like
other games, bases in No Man’s Sky are not practical, they’re cool. Yes,
you need rooms for certain things, mostly storage as No Man’s Sky should have
been called, “No More Room: An Inventory Management Simulator.”
On my first go round with No Man’s Sky, I hurriedly
completed all of the quests surrounding the base building aspect because I
wanted to A: Complete the Game and B: Build a damn base. I had grand
plans to get towards the core of the universe and find a nice temperate planet
to move all my slapdash placement of structures to and rebuild. The
original planet I was on that offered me a base was a cold tundra whose weather
constantly fought me, even indoors, to keep from freezing. And while I
did all those necessary quests.. .TWICE mind you, I just sort of plopped things
down wherever. I needed containers. I needed a place to store all
the crap that was in my suit so that I could get stuff for building the base.
That was the main issue. And I still wanted to build out a freighter to
hold stuff but it became so resource heavy to build all the stuff that you
forget that there were other things you were supposed to be doing, especially
when the Atlas update came out. And then everything in those containers
became obsolete or no longer usable. Still, I can see where a base can be
purposeful, but usually, I need a spot for storage, and a place for
equipment. The constant wandering around, looking for things when I need
to grab it is wasteful, just like it was in Minecraft or 7 Days.
Still, the prospect of being able to construct a cool base
in this genre I so love is something I want to explore, if for no other reason
than the photo mode alone. That has been one of the updates that I do
approve of. We’ll talk more on that another time.
