Below is a blog copied from my friend Mike on his Myspace page. It is quite the insightful bit of brilliance. Enjoy!
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Today I tried to rescue a turtle wandering in the complete opposite direction of my neighborhood lake. Turned out he was a snapper. Needless to say, this didn't work out for either of us, and the turtle and I agreed to go our separate ways.
When I was a kid, I briefly borrowed my mother's copy of "Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Even at a young age, I realized this book was crap. This is the kind of thing only Martha Stewart would think was awesome, and even then only if she were stoned out of her gourd on special brownies. Having recently retired from the world of video games, however, I gotta tell you: the shit you really need to know comes from video games. So many of life's little mysteries really only begin to make sense after you've wasted a few years on your ass exploding the crap out of computer-generated opponents. And I'm not attempting to be cute or clever, I'm deadly fucking serious: the lessons one can learn from video games will CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
BANANA STICKERS: This is a concept that I hammer into the ground because it's one of my favorites, and the term was first coined by Brendan Small. All right, you remember when you were a kid in school and your teacher would reward a good grade by putting a sticker on your paper? Maybe it was a little smiling apple ecstatically waving his hands saying "You're the best!" Or maybe it was Billy the Easily-Excited Banana with a word balloon over his head that read "YEAH YOU FUCKIN' DID IT!" Banana stickers are an ancient tool used by teachers to make you want to succeed. This is called "psychological validation" and can be applied to pretty much everything that motivates us. Video game designers implement the same sort of thing into their games: players accomplish a task, they're rewarded with flashy lights, big musical numbers, cheering CG crowds, a kiss from a princess, or a random old man that jumps out of nowhere and screams "YEAH YOU FUCKIN' DID IT!" It's all the same thing: Psychological Validation, AKA "Banana Stickers."
Banana stickers are a massive part of why we do everything. Athletes compete for them. Politicians campaign against each other for them. Junkies snort and shoot banana stickers. Smokers get stressed out that they don't have as many as they deserve, so they light a banana sticker on fire and shove it in their mouths (menthol banana stickers are particularly validating). Hell, a lot of people will argue that all of society is merely based on mankind's desire to acquire and keep acquiring the most overrated banana sticker of all: sex. "If I can get laid, then I must be doing all right. YEAH I FUCKIN' DID IT!"
Why is this useful information? Because knowing the cause can be helpful with the cure. It's a lot easier to quit smoking once you've reduced the psychological validation aspect to the term "banana sticker." And this isn't the sort of thing I would have realized before I played so many vdeo games. I once spent six hours in front of a Playstation trying to make a computer-generated puppet perfect his role as a pirate in an Opera, and never at any point during those six hours did it occur to me, "Dear God, why the Hell am I doing this?" Let's continue.
POKEMON: Three words: Gotta. Catch'em. All. Pokemon didn't invent this concept in video games, but they were the first to blatantly rub their psychological warfare tactics in the faces of helpless parents forced to spend thousands of dollars on Charizards and Psyducks and Penisface and whatever the fuck that raccoon-squirrel thing with three tails was called.
Surely to God if you've played at least one game in your life, you've played one of the Legend of Zelda games. In these games, you control a little green guy named Link. In every game, he starts with little more than a pocket full of dreams and an incredibly large bag with X number of slots in it. The "object" of Zelda games is SUPPOSEDLY something about rescuing a princess from a giant blue pig-thing armed with a magical three-sided paper weight (I'm not making this up.). But anyone who's actually played knows this is bullshit. Long after you've destroyed the evil blue pig-thing, you're still diving through sewers and digging through dungeons searching for those last magical items that you somehow overlooked during your adventures. And I don't mean the useful items like Hookshots and Boomerangs and Swords that shoot lasers (Again, not making this up.). I mean shitty, useless junk like the Toothpick of Everlasting Minty Freshness, the Discarded Underwear and the Toilet Paper Roll of "How the Fuck is This Supposed to Be Useful?" Kids in my generation devoted hours at a time to searching for all this useless crap, and we knew it was all worthless. But you wanna know why we did it?
Because we wanted to fill all the slots in the bag. Gotta. Catch'em. All.
Pokemon Syndrome applies to a lot of people in real life. Some people apply it to movies and television. Some apply it to music (hardcore music fans typically apply this to one genre.). Some people take it a step too far and apply it to drugs. Frat boys do it with beer and then devote yards of shelf-space to their Pokemon-beer can collection. Some people apply it to sex ("I dated a white girl, then a black girl, then an Asian girl ..."). Currently, soda companies incorporate the "Gotta Catch 'Em All" mentality into soda production. Mountain Dew in particular will release a "limited edition" soda for only a few months. The phrase "limited edition" is a huge psychological dickslap that forces people to go out and "try the soda while they still can." This actually works. Shit, I hate Mountain Dew. I HATE Mountain Dew. But everytime I go to Taco Bell, what do I get? The shitty Baja Breeze Mountain Dew flavor. Why? Because I can only get it at Taco Bell ...
Seriously, what is wrong with me?
Japanese invented the concept, but the Americans perfected it. MMO's like World of Warcraft add so many dungeons and items on a monthly basis that it is literally impossible to acquire everything in the game. There is literally, LITERALLY no end. How does one beat a game with no end? Simple: Cancel your account, uninstall the program, and throw your CD's in the trash.
I win!
THE RANDOM OLD MAN: The Random Old Man is a plot device implemented by the writers who put together the storylines for video games. The archetype is Fusoya from Final Fantasy. Fusoya's appearance in the game goes something like this:
MAIN CHARACTER: Come on gang, let's go kill the last boss!
(Random Old Man jumps out of a nearby piece of incsonspicuously-placed pottery.)
MAIN CHARACTER: (Gasp.) Who are you?
FUSOYA: I am Fusoya, the random old man who appears at the end of the game! You know that guy you've been fighting for the past twenty hours who almost killed you and raped your girlfriend while pouring sugar in your gas tank? Yeah, turns out he's not actually the bad guy, he's just your brother with amnesia.
MAIN CHARACTER: It all makes sense now!
FUSOYA: Now I'm going to disappear and never be heard from again after I join your party and help you wreck some shit!
MAIN CHARACTER: YEAH I FUCKIN' DID IT!
Some of the earliest random old men appeared in the Legend of Zelda. In this game, Link ran into random old men all over the place, and we're not just talking slightly random old men like you'd see in a shopping mall food court. I'm talking reclusive old farts hiding under lakes, inside of mountains, across invisible bridges. At one point you set fire to a tree. You know what's inside? Yep. An old man. That's the apotheosis of random. And once discovered, there was no way of predicting what these wacky geezers would do! Sometimes they give out weapons, sometimes they wanna sell you shit or gamble or steal your money. One dude SETS YOU ON FIRE. Why does he do this? That's not rhetorical, I'm genuinely asking a question because I have no idea why this jerk sets you on fire. This accomplishes ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Your character's just running around on fire while this senile, sadistic fuck laughs at you. Surely by now the randomness of the situation speaks for itself.
What's the point of all this? Arguably the most important lesson to be learned from video games: Never, ever, under ANY circumstances should you talk to random old men!
MICHAEL JACKSON SYNDROME: Video games do a great job of inflating one's self-importance. It's surprisingly easy.
A Non-Player Character is a computer-controlled character in the game. They serve a variety of functions such as vendors and hint-givers. Some NPC's are limited in actions, only able to move a few steps back and forth, and are unable to say much more than one line (Such as "What a horrible night to have a curse," or "I like swords," or "YEAH YOU FUCKIN' DID IT!"). NPC's are a little creepy. Why? Because every single one of them knows who you are! And they know about what you've been doing! It's like this in pretty much every video game ever, and more often than not, it achieves the desired effect: You feel like a celebrity! You feel like Michael Jackson, like the most famous person in the world! And just like people did with Michael jackson, these NPC's will be nice to you and sing your praises NO MATTER WHAT! You could drop your pants and take a shit on that poor NPC's head, and he'll just sit there smiling away and saying "YEAH YOU FUCKIN' DID IT!"
I began to notice these concepts a couple of years ago while playing WoW when I realized that this little online community was something of a microcosm of the human condition, and the more aware of this I became, the more I loathed it. Everything you hate about real life is evident in MMO's and it's hyper-exaggerated to the point of cartoonish ridicule: liars, cheaters, assholes, Napoleons, alphas, omegas, leeches, losers, drunks, perverts, druggies, womanizers, Eskimos and Republicans. When I was a kid and I used to hide in my room in the dark playing Crono Trigger, you think I did that to be social or popular? Video games USED to be a counter-culture thing, and they stopped being cool the moment Grand Theft Auto became popular and made the video game market safe for the average consumer. It's kind of the way Kurt Cobain got pissed off when he realized jocks and frat boys were listening to his music: it wasn't originally intended for everyone. Video game kids used to hide in the back of the cafeteria and whisper about Final Fantasy in small, tight-knit groups that collectively gasped if a girl so much as blinked in their general direction. Otherwise they were like me and they didn't play video games with anyone. Period. Ever. I got to college and I thought multi-player was a great idea. Oh how I erred ...
I like some of the kids I played WoW with, don't get me wrong. I've even met a few of them in real life. But Jesus ...imagine the casts of Animal House, Hee-Haw and Soul Plane all breaking into your house at once while you're trying to play Chess, and all providing simultaneous advice and commentary on your progression in the game. That's what online-gaming is like, and the fun part is that thanks to Michael Jackson syndrome, everybody's of the mistaken impression that their opinions are made of solid gold. Not to mention the inevitable drama that comes from cramming people together in such a close-knit (virtual) space. I got banned from playing with one group of people because one of their higher-ups wanted to boink a girl who apparently liked me. In a video game. I've seen people invest hundreds of dollars of REAL MONEY into disguising their identities and relocating after they steal from other people. In a video game. I know of at least two men that pretended to be women online and used their "sexual prowess" to get free weapons and armor from under-sexed nerds. In a video game. Have I mentioned that I'm totally not making any of this up?
After a while, I became incredibly sick of the game, sick of the people, just sick ...but I kept playing ...and playing ...and I couldn't stop, and for months I had this little subconscious news ticker (the kind you see scrolling across the bottom of Fox news) that kept saying "Why am I still playing this stupid game? This isn't fun. You know what'd be more fun right now? Ice cream. Or Internet Porn. Or a root canal. Or just about anything." Slowly but surely I began to recognize all the little devices this company had implemented in order to keep me hooked on their product, and eventually after having all these epiphanies I got to the point where I could walk away.
I'm dead serious that these revelations have real-life uses: understanding why you do something is the first step to dealing with it, acknowledging it, curing it, accepting it, helping other people understand it or whatever. If you have some sort of habitual behavior or drive or goal that you don't understand, that you have no idea why you do it ...it might be a banana sticker. It might be Pokemon. Or it's possible it's just another random old man.
That's all the psychological validation I've got time for today. Tune in next week when we teach poodles how to fly. Good night, and fuck off.
When I was a kid, I briefly borrowed my mother's copy of "Everything I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Even at a young age, I realized this book was crap. This is the kind of thing only Martha Stewart would think was awesome, and even then only if she were stoned out of her gourd on special brownies. Having recently retired from the world of video games, however, I gotta tell you: the shit you really need to know comes from video games. So many of life's little mysteries really only begin to make sense after you've wasted a few years on your ass exploding the crap out of computer-generated opponents. And I'm not attempting to be cute or clever, I'm deadly fucking serious: the lessons one can learn from video games will CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
BANANA STICKERS: This is a concept that I hammer into the ground because it's one of my favorites, and the term was first coined by Brendan Small. All right, you remember when you were a kid in school and your teacher would reward a good grade by putting a sticker on your paper? Maybe it was a little smiling apple ecstatically waving his hands saying "You're the best!" Or maybe it was Billy the Easily-Excited Banana with a word balloon over his head that read "YEAH YOU FUCKIN' DID IT!" Banana stickers are an ancient tool used by teachers to make you want to succeed. This is called "psychological validation" and can be applied to pretty much everything that motivates us. Video game designers implement the same sort of thing into their games: players accomplish a task, they're rewarded with flashy lights, big musical numbers, cheering CG crowds, a kiss from a princess, or a random old man that jumps out of nowhere and screams "YEAH YOU FUCKIN' DID IT!" It's all the same thing: Psychological Validation, AKA "Banana Stickers."
Banana stickers are a massive part of why we do everything. Athletes compete for them. Politicians campaign against each other for them. Junkies snort and shoot banana stickers. Smokers get stressed out that they don't have as many as they deserve, so they light a banana sticker on fire and shove it in their mouths (menthol banana stickers are particularly validating). Hell, a lot of people will argue that all of society is merely based on mankind's desire to acquire and keep acquiring the most overrated banana sticker of all: sex. "If I can get laid, then I must be doing all right. YEAH I FUCKIN' DID IT!"
Why is this useful information? Because knowing the cause can be helpful with the cure. It's a lot easier to quit smoking once you've reduced the psychological validation aspect to the term "banana sticker." And this isn't the sort of thing I would have realized before I played so many vdeo games. I once spent six hours in front of a Playstation trying to make a computer-generated puppet perfect his role as a pirate in an Opera, and never at any point during those six hours did it occur to me, "Dear God, why the Hell am I doing this?" Let's continue.
POKEMON: Three words: Gotta. Catch'em. All. Pokemon didn't invent this concept in video games, but they were the first to blatantly rub their psychological warfare tactics in the faces of helpless parents forced to spend thousands of dollars on Charizards and Psyducks and Penisface and whatever the fuck that raccoon-squirrel thing with three tails was called.
Surely to God if you've played at least one game in your life, you've played one of the Legend of Zelda games. In these games, you control a little green guy named Link. In every game, he starts with little more than a pocket full of dreams and an incredibly large bag with X number of slots in it. The "object" of Zelda games is SUPPOSEDLY something about rescuing a princess from a giant blue pig-thing armed with a magical three-sided paper weight (I'm not making this up.). But anyone who's actually played knows this is bullshit. Long after you've destroyed the evil blue pig-thing, you're still diving through sewers and digging through dungeons searching for those last magical items that you somehow overlooked during your adventures. And I don't mean the useful items like Hookshots and Boomerangs and Swords that shoot lasers (Again, not making this up.). I mean shitty, useless junk like the Toothpick of Everlasting Minty Freshness, the Discarded Underwear and the Toilet Paper Roll of "How the Fuck is This Supposed to Be Useful?" Kids in my generation devoted hours at a time to searching for all this useless crap, and we knew it was all worthless. But you wanna know why we did it?
Because we wanted to fill all the slots in the bag. Gotta. Catch'em. All.
Pokemon Syndrome applies to a lot of people in real life. Some people apply it to movies and television. Some apply it to music (hardcore music fans typically apply this to one genre.). Some people take it a step too far and apply it to drugs. Frat boys do it with beer and then devote yards of shelf-space to their Pokemon-beer can collection. Some people apply it to sex ("I dated a white girl, then a black girl, then an Asian girl ..."). Currently, soda companies incorporate the "Gotta Catch 'Em All" mentality into soda production. Mountain Dew in particular will release a "limited edition" soda for only a few months. The phrase "limited edition" is a huge psychological dickslap that forces people to go out and "try the soda while they still can." This actually works. Shit, I hate Mountain Dew. I HATE Mountain Dew. But everytime I go to Taco Bell, what do I get? The shitty Baja Breeze Mountain Dew flavor. Why? Because I can only get it at Taco Bell ...
Seriously, what is wrong with me?
Japanese invented the concept, but the Americans perfected it. MMO's like World of Warcraft add so many dungeons and items on a monthly basis that it is literally impossible to acquire everything in the game. There is literally, LITERALLY no end. How does one beat a game with no end? Simple: Cancel your account, uninstall the program, and throw your CD's in the trash.
I win!
THE RANDOM OLD MAN: The Random Old Man is a plot device implemented by the writers who put together the storylines for video games. The archetype is Fusoya from Final Fantasy. Fusoya's appearance in the game goes something like this:
MAIN CHARACTER: Come on gang, let's go kill the last boss!
(Random Old Man jumps out of a nearby piece of incsonspicuously-placed pottery.)
MAIN CHARACTER: (Gasp.) Who are you?
FUSOYA: I am Fusoya, the random old man who appears at the end of the game! You know that guy you've been fighting for the past twenty hours who almost killed you and raped your girlfriend while pouring sugar in your gas tank? Yeah, turns out he's not actually the bad guy, he's just your brother with amnesia.
MAIN CHARACTER: It all makes sense now!
FUSOYA: Now I'm going to disappear and never be heard from again after I join your party and help you wreck some shit!
MAIN CHARACTER: YEAH I FUCKIN' DID IT!
Some of the earliest random old men appeared in the Legend of Zelda. In this game, Link ran into random old men all over the place, and we're not just talking slightly random old men like you'd see in a shopping mall food court. I'm talking reclusive old farts hiding under lakes, inside of mountains, across invisible bridges. At one point you set fire to a tree. You know what's inside? Yep. An old man. That's the apotheosis of random. And once discovered, there was no way of predicting what these wacky geezers would do! Sometimes they give out weapons, sometimes they wanna sell you shit or gamble or steal your money. One dude SETS YOU ON FIRE. Why does he do this? That's not rhetorical, I'm genuinely asking a question because I have no idea why this jerk sets you on fire. This accomplishes ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Your character's just running around on fire while this senile, sadistic fuck laughs at you. Surely by now the randomness of the situation speaks for itself.
What's the point of all this? Arguably the most important lesson to be learned from video games: Never, ever, under ANY circumstances should you talk to random old men!
MICHAEL JACKSON SYNDROME: Video games do a great job of inflating one's self-importance. It's surprisingly easy.
A Non-Player Character is a computer-controlled character in the game. They serve a variety of functions such as vendors and hint-givers. Some NPC's are limited in actions, only able to move a few steps back and forth, and are unable to say much more than one line (Such as "What a horrible night to have a curse," or "I like swords," or "YEAH YOU FUCKIN' DID IT!"). NPC's are a little creepy. Why? Because every single one of them knows who you are! And they know about what you've been doing! It's like this in pretty much every video game ever, and more often than not, it achieves the desired effect: You feel like a celebrity! You feel like Michael Jackson, like the most famous person in the world! And just like people did with Michael jackson, these NPC's will be nice to you and sing your praises NO MATTER WHAT! You could drop your pants and take a shit on that poor NPC's head, and he'll just sit there smiling away and saying "YEAH YOU FUCKIN' DID IT!"
I began to notice these concepts a couple of years ago while playing WoW when I realized that this little online community was something of a microcosm of the human condition, and the more aware of this I became, the more I loathed it. Everything you hate about real life is evident in MMO's and it's hyper-exaggerated to the point of cartoonish ridicule: liars, cheaters, assholes, Napoleons, alphas, omegas, leeches, losers, drunks, perverts, druggies, womanizers, Eskimos and Republicans. When I was a kid and I used to hide in my room in the dark playing Crono Trigger, you think I did that to be social or popular? Video games USED to be a counter-culture thing, and they stopped being cool the moment Grand Theft Auto became popular and made the video game market safe for the average consumer. It's kind of the way Kurt Cobain got pissed off when he realized jocks and frat boys were listening to his music: it wasn't originally intended for everyone. Video game kids used to hide in the back of the cafeteria and whisper about Final Fantasy in small, tight-knit groups that collectively gasped if a girl so much as blinked in their general direction. Otherwise they were like me and they didn't play video games with anyone. Period. Ever. I got to college and I thought multi-player was a great idea. Oh how I erred ...
I like some of the kids I played WoW with, don't get me wrong. I've even met a few of them in real life. But Jesus ...imagine the casts of Animal House, Hee-Haw and Soul Plane all breaking into your house at once while you're trying to play Chess, and all providing simultaneous advice and commentary on your progression in the game. That's what online-gaming is like, and the fun part is that thanks to Michael Jackson syndrome, everybody's of the mistaken impression that their opinions are made of solid gold. Not to mention the inevitable drama that comes from cramming people together in such a close-knit (virtual) space. I got banned from playing with one group of people because one of their higher-ups wanted to boink a girl who apparently liked me. In a video game. I've seen people invest hundreds of dollars of REAL MONEY into disguising their identities and relocating after they steal from other people. In a video game. I know of at least two men that pretended to be women online and used their "sexual prowess" to get free weapons and armor from under-sexed nerds. In a video game. Have I mentioned that I'm totally not making any of this up?
After a while, I became incredibly sick of the game, sick of the people, just sick ...but I kept playing ...and playing ...and I couldn't stop, and for months I had this little subconscious news ticker (the kind you see scrolling across the bottom of Fox news) that kept saying "Why am I still playing this stupid game? This isn't fun. You know what'd be more fun right now? Ice cream. Or Internet Porn. Or a root canal. Or just about anything." Slowly but surely I began to recognize all the little devices this company had implemented in order to keep me hooked on their product, and eventually after having all these epiphanies I got to the point where I could walk away.
I'm dead serious that these revelations have real-life uses: understanding why you do something is the first step to dealing with it, acknowledging it, curing it, accepting it, helping other people understand it or whatever. If you have some sort of habitual behavior or drive or goal that you don't understand, that you have no idea why you do it ...it might be a banana sticker. It might be Pokemon. Or it's possible it's just another random old man.
That's all the psychological validation I've got time for today. Tune in next week when we teach poodles how to fly. Good night, and fuck off.
