Dead Man Blogging
I guess it had to happen eventually. Video games have finally killed somebody.

Fine, I admit it, I was wrong. I take back everything bad I ever said about the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, the Council Regarding American Families, the American Family Council on Families, the Research Foundation for Families in America, the Council-Foundation for Things in America that are Familiar, Tipper Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton and all the other wacko right-wing save-our-culture-from-itself types. They told me and told me and told me that it would come to this, but did I listen? Nooooo. I was too busy endangering my life playing Secret Agent Barbie.

I mean football. John Madden Football. And that other game with the guns and the nudity. The female nudity.

I'm worried it's going to be just like when the vegans all became insufferable, sanctimonious, self-righteous bores on the day... well, on the day they became vegans, but it got even worse when somebody died from mad-cow disease. Now the anti-videogame people finally have a dead body to gloat over, to point at and laugh and then wallow in the blood-red glow of vindication.

I do take some solace in the fact that their triumph is somewhat incomplete. I mean, it's not like the guy's brain overloaded and he died twitching and frothing and swallowing his tongue because he couldn't process the morality-free horrible-ness of the game he was playing. And it's not like someone next to him dropped the controller he was using to play Grand Theft Auto, pulled out a gun and shot the poor bastard in his random, doomed head.

No, the guy died because he didn't know when to quit. That's the most shocking part because for me the signs are pretty obvious. Usually I figure it out when I get sleepy or hungry or I just don't have the energy to masturbate to the orgy of digitized bloodshed anymore. That's when I know it's time to step away.

This guy, he basically died from self-indulgence. A weird, self-destructive, self-denying self-indulgence where he sacrificed his whole body for the sake of that little part of his little brain that is stimulated by artfully arranged pixels responding to his commands.

What a horrible way to go. Sitting there, hour after hour after hour, completely alone, ignoring your friends, your family, your obligations, your place in society at large. And then when you think you're done, when you've filled up that unfillable space with something so inconsequential, insubstantial and evaporative, you elect finally to set it aside and then... die.

Just staring at the computer screen as the minutes pile up, one on top of the other, so desperate for distraction you dare not let yourself be distracted from it. He won't be the last one, I guarantee it. It won't have to be videogames either. The next one could be from anything from chatrooms to porn to porn chatrooms to webcam porn to webcam porn chatrooms to bl... to blo... to b-b-b-b...

Excuse me. I suddenly have to go run around the block six or seven times.




This post on the Narcissus Scale: [What's the use, we're all goners anyway]


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:14 AM