The Wife and I talked a bit this morning about our generation's fascination with toys. We continue to collect them and even play with them as we grow up. It seems to grow out of a sense of entitlement, irresponsibility, and a core discomfort with the aging process.
Our friend Mandrake came and spent the night with us this week. It's been too long since we've gotten together - he's finishing up school in the city and we've moved back to the 'burbs. So we had a great time, catching up and playing a game.
We stayed up until 2 AM playing Rock Band on his Xbox 360. He brought his whole kit with him: the drum-set, microphone, two guitars, and the console itself, of course.
The game is addictive. It creates this illusion of accomplishment as you tap buttons or hammer on drum pads in an attempt to match the patterns being flashed past you on the screen at increasing levels of difficulty. You create avatars to represent your band in the game, and after every gig, the machine tells you how much virtual money you've earned and how many imaginary fans have started to follow you. Then you can buy new virtual sexy clothes and hire virtual publicists to further your imaginary career. You can buy tour buses to get to different gigs around the country, and eventually a jet to carry you to opportunities around the globe.
I was hooked. The game simulates so much. There's the challenge of music, which is pretty damned tricky even in a game, and you feel the satisfaction that musicians must feel when they actually get together and pull it off. I mastered the drums on medium difficulty pretty quickly. Ivy did a great job with the karaoke vocals, while Mandrake and Snake pinned down the lead and bass guitars.
There's that sense of accomplishment when you've earned enough to unlock new songs and venues, which makes you want to keep playing to see where you'll go next.
Plus, it's a thoughtful way to listen closely to a lot of good songs you might have heard before but never paid attention to. I have a new respect for drummers after playing this game, and Snake is noticing base lines in a way she never has.
So I'm not going to knock it, despite the fact that it can't be as satisfying as, say, actually playing an instrument. It's a good way to have some fun with your friends - a heck of a lot more fun than just sitting down in front of the TV and getting stoned. (We missed Obama's speech on account of Rock Band, and I'm all right with that.)
But once I got past the utter concentration required by this new skill, my mind had a bit of free space to reflect on what I was doing. I couldn't help feeling a bit foolish - and futile. This is my Puritan ancestry speaking up, I'm sure. I often wonder if I was born missing the gene for a simple and straightforward appreciation of fun.
But video games, in general, have been leaving me cold, lately. This, despite the fact that I originally started this blog to write about game culture in detail - at least the games we could afford. I lost that focus a long time ago.
When the latest generation of consoles came out (Sony PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii), we went and got the previous generation machines we'd missed out on so we could try all those games we'd passed on for budgetary reasons. (Really, how can you justify being a multiple-console household when the things cost $300 apiece?) I'm glad we got these old, used machines so cheap. After putting a couple of hours into Metroid Prime - a game of the year, back in some year - and watching my wife wander around the fields of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, these pursuits just felt like fruitless labor. There's real crops to be planted and animals to feed, and the weather's getting warmer!
Another friend of mine has had an Xbox 360 since it came out. We've played some games at his place, on a truly stunning hi-definition projector. It was overwhelming, sensually. But I decided not to spring for one, because all these processor cores and graphics chips are just driving the same old game-play through more and more polygons. Dramatic and immersive, no doubt. And buying games might be good for the economy. But gaming on the 360 did very little to plug up that gnawing hole at the center of my self-worth.
So to the extent that Rock Band meant fun with friends, I had a great time. Mandrake claims that buying the game has already paid social dividends for him, with all the parties he's taken his kit to around the city.
But in terms of being an experience I want to pay for, then practice and master? Not so much.
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So, toys. There used to be a time when we put away childish things. Then our grandparents came back from the most brutal war of all time, made a bunch of boomer babies, and set about building a safe, comfortable, and structured world for them to grow up in. (The Wife is deep in study and appreciation of that era right now, and I'm loving it.) It seems to me that, for many of these Boomers, they came into a world where they really didn't have to grow up. There was no urgency to their childhood, no sense that if they didn't pitch in and pull for the family, people might not make it. This was probably the first time in history that this was the case. So childhood expanded to fill the space it was given, because childhood is fun and feels good.
The amount of schooling it took to start a career increased, until our parents could piss away four or eight years after high school in pursuit of something called a liberal arts degree. Then birth control came along, and so with their adult bodies they could have the most fun that a human being can have - all without consequence. When the government drafted a bunch of them into service, they certainly didn't like that one bit, and that was understandable too, since their leaders didn't have any more understanding of what was going on than a child would, anyway. So the boomers who whined like babies or ran away were let off the hook pretty easily, and we won't see a draft again.
Social Security, Medicare, education spending and other government programs grew until our parents really didn't have to make a grown up, responsible decision at any point throughout their lives. They might be more successful if they did. And they might raise more responsible and well balanced children. But if they weren't up to it, or just didn't feel like it - well, it wasn't like the universe was going to reach down and crush their families, like it would in the old days.
At least the Boomers managed to get up to some gritty, real-world, consequence laden fun. Free love, LSD, all that hippy-dippy alternative lifestyle bullshit - if they really played hard enough it could still get you killed.
But they seemed to wake up one day (maybe it was to crack and heroin, or maybe it was to AIDS), and they decided that the world needed to be made even safer for their children. Playing with adult things was too dangerous.
Unfortunately, rather than teaching their children to be adult with adult things, they encouraged them to play with playthings all the way into adulthood.
Now we have the Gen-X kids who were warned that drugs would kill them, only they've been bottle fed Ritilin to keep them calm and Dexedrine to help them concentrate. Kids who would once have walked, ridden their bikes, and played across entire neighborhoods and towns that have been locked inside their bedrooms to protect them from pedophiles, cannibals, and every other vague threat trumped up by Fox News and their brethren. Kids who were told that as long as they stick with the program and stay in school (and then continue to stay in school again and again while taking out government loans to pay for it) they'd be able to get a job, have money saved for them, and retire at a comfortable age. Now those Gen-X kids are all grown up.
And most of them believed it all, because they've never been told anything else. They've gone to school and done what they're told and come straight home. They've kept their minds busy with the only things they're allowed to control, which are toys. And it seems inconceivable that their kids will have to do anything different.
It was fun. I mean, the toys are good, immersive, dramatic and stimulating - more shiny and responsive than anything in the real world, anyway. But now we're getting to the point that, by the time this batch of kids grows up, they just want to keep playing with toys - the latest computers and consoles, preferably, while the toys which are too simple and obsolete to entertain them any more are shelved, collected, and revered the way we used to honor our ancestors.
I mean, what's with the Star Wars and Pokemon figures in office cubicles? The collections of old comic books? The action figures and Hello Kitty USB drives and this horrible, horrible torture toy? Is the world so safe now that we have to turn on our toys and abuse them to convince ourselves we're alive?
This brings me to Japan, the ultimate Toy State. (Play State?) Our obsession with disposable plastic amusements seems fleeting in comparison with Japan's, where the people work hard and play hard - they play like nursery school children on meth. Seriously, where do they build all these toys? And what must their landfills look like?
I suspect the Japanese infantalism is so much greater than ours because their welfare state hatched pretty much the day after the last bomb dropped and then grew into a behemoth that would seem positively Marxist if they didn't somehow simultaneously climb to the top of the world in manufacturing and trade. (Niall Ferguson does a nice job explaining the Japanese economic system and the consequences it now faces in The Ascent of Money.) So much modern fun seems to come from Japan: Nintendo, Sony, anime, cosplay, trance vibrators. It's a beautiful country, I hear. It's a wonder anyone ever goes outside to look at it.
* * *
So what's my problem with toys? I don't know. Maybe I'm just hitting middle age and feeling, shit, I ought to get out and look at something real while my legs still work. And I'm wondering why the rest of my generation seems so hung up on childhood, when really, we're only children for such a short time. Are we ever going to get our hands off our simulators and stimulators and actually do something?
Unfortunately, the real world has this against it: it's damned expensive.
I first cut back on the video games when we got the boat. Sailing was a tremendous unmediated experience, I tell you what. Hopefully someday we'll have the money to get back to it and enjoy again all the joy and life-threatening terror it involved. Meanwhile, the latest Xbox and a batch of plastic pretend instruments are immediately attainable, whenever we want them.
I have another major concern: that America and Japan and the rest of the Play States are going to take themselves out of the picture in a couple of generations. Because while we're completing our decade-long degree programs and having protected sex and playing video games, an awful lot of babies are being brought up in damned serious countries that cannot afford to coddle them, and aren't inclined to, either.
Not that it really effects me. I mean, I'm not making babies for the team. But, you know, somebody should.