Years ago I predicted the imminent collapse of every civilisation on the face of planet earth [1] based around the unrealistic expectations we were all being taught via computer games.
After all, who wants to go out and get a job and pay bills and deal with “Hi, my name is Sally, and I’m here to help you!” [2], when you could instead be sitting in your basement for 38 hours straight, ruling a fictional interstellar empire with an iron keyboard, or driving around LA capping GangStas and prostitutes for extra bonus points, or freaking out when another player leads you to your inevitable doom in the valley of the face-eating mega spiders.
If anything, as computer and console games have become more realistic and more immersive, the collapse of civilisation has become even more imminent [3].
So imminent in fact, that, yes, aha ahahahaha, we now have hugely popular games [4] based entirely around how to kill time — and a lot of people — in the aftermath of the collapse [5].
Would you like the interesting solution, or the one that will work? … You chose Option A
Back when I first realised humanity was going to become extinct as a result of deliberately breeding out the ability to deal with boredom, I thought to myself, “What we really need is a game that forces you to navigate your way through an average day in the life of an average person. And then we need to nail all young adults to a computer screen and make them play the game over and over and over until they get it.”
A game in which your normal 50 minute commute to work takes two-and-half hours because of a railway strike or an accident on the freeway. A game in which your boss distrusts you and treats you like a child and ridicules you in front of other employees. A game in which your customers are rude, and your coworkers are emotionally distant, and your bills add up to more than you earn, and your company is thanking you for all your efforts and hoping you will enjoy your next job and it’s nothing personal, they just need to find a cheaper workforce in some country you’ve never heard of before.
And the only weapon you have, in the midst of all this mind-numbing immersive reality?
The only way you can finally get to the last level of the game and sit in a chair next to a window in an old people’s home and wonder why no-one ever visits?
The only way to win the game is through a general approach of trying to get along, trying to solve your problems, trying to accept that the story of the world isn’t about you, trying not to freak out when someone does something trivially wrong on the freeway, and definitely trying to avoid going postal with a letter opener one day on the 12th anniversary of ‘being promoted’ into the mailroom.
That’s it.
That’s all.
Game over.
The Future Is Almost Now, Please Hold
We may be decades away from this kind of fascinating and incredibly validating technology, but there are glimmers of hope ahead.
Let me introduce you to City Bus Simulator 2010, a game in which you… drive a bus.
No, you don’t save the world.
No, you don’t rule an empire.
No, you don’t have the special ability to make people’s faces melt.
Instead, you drive a bus and you negotiate through traffic and you make your allotted stops. If you do your job well, the extra special bonus is that you get to drive a different type of bus.
Of course, from watching the trailer, it appears that City Bus Simulator still has some distance to go before it can provide a truly realistic bus-driving experience. No-one, for example, attempts to stab you in the game. There isn’t someone sitting in the back row who took some bad acid and who’s screaming about how the texture of the seat tastes like watching a Stanley Kubrick movie. And no-one is bitching at you about how late you are and how you shouldn’t have gone through that last orange light and how being expected to have correct change will lead to the kind of fascism that started World War II [6].
But it’s still a step in the right direction.
One day, we will all be required to spend some time in Carlos The Bus Driver’s shoes, and maybe we will be a little kinder to our real bus drivers, and sometimes we will try to have exact change, and occasionally we won’t attempt to stab him for being 8 minutes late.
We can only hope, right?
Aha ahahahahaha.
| 1. | Yes, both of them. |
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| 2. | When “Hi, my name is Sally etc” is obviously fantasising about jamming a pen in your eye because you can’t decide whether you want the toothpaste with the active teeth-amazingness enzymes or the toothpaste with the bright-o-smiley implementers. |
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| 3. | I’m a little haunted by the idea that it might happen and I wouldn’t notice because the French Empire has launched an attack on my western border in Civilization IV. |
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| 4. | “Fallout 3: America’s First Choice In Post Nuclear Simulation”. I kid you not. |
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| 5. | Even war in the real world is becoming more and more like a video game, with remote control drones and robots being deployed in hotspots around the world. One day, I guarantee it, some young soldier is going to turn to the guy sitting at the next console and say, “Dude, I just, like, fragged that whole village in, like, 28 seconds. Awesome.” |
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| 6. | Also, if you want to experience the truly realistic essence-of-urine-and-vomit odour of a bus, you will need to keep a bucket next to your computer specifically for this purpose. |
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It doesn’t tell you what to do when a crazed bomber plants a bomb under your bus that will explode if you drop below 50 mph. Then they could just rebadge the game as ‘Speed’.
I’m looking forward to the ‘Mission to Mars’ game where you sleep for three months before getting near Mars. It would be a bummer if you accidently depressurised the cabin and had to restart the game again…
The Creature said:
Okay, that sentence alone is more exciting than is healthy for someone who is struggling to learn how to cope with boredom. You seriously need to think more before you post these interesting bloody observations, Creature!
The Creature said:
Okay, now we’re talking. But let’s take it a step further — in the game you’re actually playing a simulation of a mission to mars, and it still takes you 3 months to get there, and you can’t save it midgame, and when you get to the final level you discover that it’s all been a Kobayashi Maru test [1], but no-one told you you had to hack the game’s source files to have any chance of winning.
Aha ahahahahaha! Try to make that one interesting!
Murray @ Midnight