Quotidiana/Musing

My girlfriend's sitting next to me writing up some kind of LARP-style adventure I'm to embark on, with the help of friends, this coming Saturday in celebration of my 31st birthday. We're listening to MC Lars, whose 2008 gig at the White Swan was, we've agreed, was one of the best shows ever. I like commas and long sentences. Now I'm gonna watch "I'm On A Boat," 'cause it rules.

I want to recommend that all y'all watch GET LAMP, Jason Scott's new documentary about text adventures. It's fantastic, even if you've never played a video game that didn't rely on graphics. His other film, BBS: The Documentary, is equally stirring, and is also worthy of your discretionary dollars/euros/yuan. If, like me, your consciousness managed to enter the flow of history at a time when both or either of the phenomena Mr. Scott's documentaries were prevalent, they'll be even more striking. My seemingly unbreakable attachment to the artifacts of my youth- many of which are artifacts of a time when I was far too young to really make the most of 'em, but which survived in recognizable enough forms for me to revel in what came before as well as the latter-day iterations- is only reinforced by Mr. Scott's work.

Now, this isn't about nostalgia. (Not entirely, at least.) This is about recognizing the things and events that in retrospect and at the time shaped my world- and still do. Text games and non-WWW sites still matter. Sure, 99% of the games I play and sites I visit are graphics- and WWW-based, respectively, but that doesn't mean that the remaining fraction are negligible. Investigating games like Galatea and logging onto SDF via SSH are important, not only because they're reminders of what life as a computer user was like a decade and a half ago, but because they still matter. People still enjoy and make great use of resources that seem outdated or outright foreign to the majority. That is why they matter.

I could extend my argument to a number of other subjects, most notably heavy metal and role-playing games. The "retro" movements in both of those fields are not purely nostalgic, but draw elements from the early finest hours of said fields in order to produce useful, enjoyable modern results. There's no denying that history lessons in any subject can be grasped and twisted to the point of slavish recreation, but the best of anything that left a mark on the past should serve as both a milestone and a jumping-off point for future work.

I suspect Jason Scott would be with me on this poorly-argued train of thought, but who knows. Thanks for reading, and I'm either sorry or pleased that this post wasn't just poetry.

Time for bed. 再见，朋友。