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videogames are what you do when
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Being part of the Backloggd community for 3 years

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Favorite Games

Yume Nikki
Yume Nikki
Dark Souls
Dark Souls
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Kentucky Route Zero
Kentucky Route Zero
Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate
Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

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Super Smash Brothers, the acclaimed crossover fighting game published by Nintendo, has recently received a new installment in the series: Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. This title, unique in the franchise, contains every character that has ever existed in any of the previous incarnations; all resurrected, so to speak, for the sake of capital gain, marketing appeal, and above all, ideologically consumptive globalist propaganda. The game, unlike most fighting games (let alone games at all) is able to sell itself not only on the merits it possesses as a competitive fighting experience able to foster legitimate community through mechanical complexity and relative balance between the avatars and their individual options, but also (and more importantly) through that image which comes from the possession of an enormous number of intellectual properties and characters effectively culled from their separate universes, set to perform that most ubiquitous of actions in the world of videogames: unquestioned and spectacular violence. In this game, one can pit children against children, dogs against dogs, frogs against mice against midgets, and all this, for the sake of blissful pleasure and engagement with friends, and that with (and through) an abundance of brands. Playing Super Smash Brothers can feel at times like swimming in a pool of cocacola while using dominoes pizza boxes for floats and giant floppy jolly-ranchers for noodles, during december, at night, with the fairy-lights glowing, and a menorah lit in the window, with all your homies and bros doing jack-knives off the snickers diving-board; it can similarly feel sweet, extraordinary, over-the-top, familiar and inundating, at once. If holidays in candyland at christmas could both appeal to and the average consumer, throwing them into a diabetic fit of seizing rage and euphoria, we can as easily say that the average person — the non-gamer— is able to perhaps appreciate at a distance the appeal of the game, but not the actual value of its experience, ill-equipped as they are to properly consume it on the textual level it, granted, makes little effort to promote.

I felt at looking at William Gass' top novels of literary import a sense of loss both on his behalf and for myself. How long had he spent reading those same books over and over again, and joe recently had he touched them? A man and character such as him likely had read and read them multiple times, but i suspect that the significant moments with the books are from his young age. His best moments and most profound insights are likely from his youth, and the time of the freedom to feel. When young, I'm sure also his reading was for him; now he reads for his image. Or does he now? Perhaps those books fresh on his mind even after a lifetime of reading has given them a proper place; their ability to be remembered is their greatest asset; they are rendered again more memorable for having been inducted into yet another man's pantheon. He ennobles the titles, and they inform him.

I can imagine a young william (substituted for a young gass — gas that would have been) reading with eyes wide open the mort darthur, and feeling in the moment the splendors and tragedies of the english king. I can see him, young and free to his thinking. I see him now — his body has made him differently free. Liver spotted veiny hands on thin limbs attached to a paunch which has been sitting in silk approximations of the hairshirt; The neck bulges not with boom but sag, and any expected tightness in the image is found where the belly and ribcage join, and around the light of blue eyes upwards glancing. He has been totally freed of his youth, even before his time, to pursue the place of the reader and writer. He wears it like a sash.

The image hurts me some. Even a wise man can be a fool to his body — and this wise man no less, who among his favorites is Plato, mouthpiece to Socrates, himself a soldier and citizen foremost, and a philosopher simply for having been remembered by his pupil. Socrates spoke of the need to know the body. Gass I wonder at.

And I fear the lesson. To settle into a position can overtake you. to be overtaken because you occupy a role is to forget will; at the same time it feels as though will must guide to the place where one cannot forget ones future, and must always be aligning for the purpose yet to arrive. I have a need to know, but not so emptily as to learn while leaving my body behind. The world does not gift that man a name beyond his smallest circle.

I remember my first meaningful run with the Binding of Isaac — intoxicated, my friend and I, set at opposite ends of his dark basement bedroom and peering into the electric glow of our laptop monitors, were engaged in singular games of downward-delving, charting with the anxious precaution that only a marijuana high can produce, the procedurally manufactured basements of singular degeneracy and circumstance that the game yielded to us. Though we shared his basement space, and had marked out the beginnings of our moral baseness with our pipe-smoking and cheeto-chomping, the real depravity was drawn not in-game, but rather by the metaphysical distance we made between us when we, in the night, kept for ourselves different corners of his room to experience the plastic novelty of this dungeon-crawling game which we had both admitted earlier to having found mediocre for its want of aesthetic austerity. It was base in a way that was obvious; its commentary was crude, not shrewd; it drew lines too rough to say anything meaningful, and was on the whole a bit empty. But here we were, with this in mind, at the end of our long day, smoked out, and indulging that emptiness, and in the dark, enjoying it. I remember, in that playthrough,