Here Comes a New Challenger!
I am at once both proud and frightened to see the caliber of people at BCM. Never in my life have I seen an 87 average on a test, and that's saying a lot considering I took AP classes for 4 years at Bellaire High School, a place that harbored more gunners than a front-line trench during WWI. Not so coincidentally, a large percentage of BCM graduates also happen to have been Bellaire alumni.
But in all honestly, I'd be lying if I said I had expected any less.
If you think about it, for the majority of us, life really is quite like playing a video game. The first few levels are easily beat. The AI possesses minimal primitive intelligence and is slow to respond. You jump behind a block, they run into it. You jump on their head, they fall in the lava, flagpole, fireworks, on to World 2-1.
The middle levels get a bit more difficult as they require you to discover secret passages and uncover subtle clues that make possible your advancement. The directions become a little more vague and the roads begin to branch and anastomose with roads farther down, more than one of which is sure to contain a pit or gutter.
Finally, you get to the boss levels, the rip-out-your-hair, button-mashing, let-the-profanity-fly levels that have you up till three in the morning staring into a LCD screen. You begin to neglect your family, your friends, your health, and when you're not attempting to master the 63 move combo that you need to beat the last guardian of the last gate before the final boss of World 999999-2, you're studying the strategy guides on how to do so. So you master the game, you beat the boss, and you make him your bitch.
But what after? You've spent the last sixteen years of your life honing the skills to beat this son of a bitch and now it's over. You are left only with the satisfaction of seeing the credits roll, an act that carries at once both a sense of triumph and sadness over you. And so you dream about the good old days, the high score beside your proudly stamped initials, leading the steady upward scroll of a stream of other fictitious, preprogrammed names like stock photos on a picture frame devoid of meaning. You begin to ask yourself, "Wouldn't it be great if those were real people?"
So here we are, gurus of programmed success, discoverers of secret passageways, masters of the game, we are bored playing alone.
But in all honestly, I'd be lying if I said I had expected any less.
If you think about it, for the majority of us, life really is quite like playing a video game. The first few levels are easily beat. The AI possesses minimal primitive intelligence and is slow to respond. You jump behind a block, they run into it. You jump on their head, they fall in the lava, flagpole, fireworks, on to World 2-1.
The middle levels get a bit more difficult as they require you to discover secret passages and uncover subtle clues that make possible your advancement. The directions become a little more vague and the roads begin to branch and anastomose with roads farther down, more than one of which is sure to contain a pit or gutter.
Finally, you get to the boss levels, the rip-out-your-hair, button-mashing, let-the-profanity-fly levels that have you up till three in the morning staring into a LCD screen. You begin to neglect your family, your friends, your health, and when you're not attempting to master the 63 move combo that you need to beat the last guardian of the last gate before the final boss of World 999999-2, you're studying the strategy guides on how to do so. So you master the game, you beat the boss, and you make him your bitch.
But what after? You've spent the last sixteen years of your life honing the skills to beat this son of a bitch and now it's over. You are left only with the satisfaction of seeing the credits roll, an act that carries at once both a sense of triumph and sadness over you. And so you dream about the good old days, the high score beside your proudly stamped initials, leading the steady upward scroll of a stream of other fictitious, preprogrammed names like stock photos on a picture frame devoid of meaning. You begin to ask yourself, "Wouldn't it be great if those were real people?"
So here we are, gurus of programmed success, discoverers of secret passageways, masters of the game, we are bored playing alone.
posted by Peter at 11:19 AM
0 comments
