Thursday, June 21, 2007
What will you say?
In X years from now, when you're 90 (yes, you made it!), and you've been rolled into the activities room of the retirement villa that you've been living in, the candy striper kids have come to talk to you. They look at you with a mix of compassion and and respect and revulsion: empathy for the state of being so old and weak bodied, amazement that you've lived through so many years that they can not comprehend, disgust at the process of aging and mortality and a new found there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I commitment for living fast and dying young. What will you tell them about the world they've inherited? What will you claim to be your generational hardships? What is the gift or curse you'll inflict upon their minds? What will you claimed has changed so greatly at so terrible a price? Bonus points for doing it in your you-at-90 voice, and for exhibiting eccentricity or curmudgeonishness or contentious ideas that you have learned between now and then.
My response:
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Miss, I appreciate the attention you bring to me and the other folks here who have outlived their family and friends. And while it's been a long, long time for me, I remember what it's like to be revulsed by age; by confronting mortality. Don't be ashamed of your revulsion: it's yours. Own it, understand it, embrace it. Because when you know and understand that it's your reaction, shame goes away; revulsion and disgust go away, and you see me for who I am, here and now, and not who you fear to be in six decades.
Also understand that I can't sit here and tell you about my long and varied life - I haven't lived one. I've lived hundreds of short and different lives, and been hundreds of different people. I can introduce you to the people I still am, or tell stories about the people I used to be, but life isn't an epic unified tale. It's a collection of short stories, by different authors, in different styles. Here, I'll reminisce for you about one of the people I used to be. When I was a game designer, back around the turn of 21, information was just starting to flex it's muscles, and really grow into itself. It's hard to imagine from the person you are today, or the person I am today, but ideas did not always flow freely. So for a long time, the only games available were those that a bare handful of people had created. Before the turn of 21, probably less than a thousand people, with maybe a few hundred popular games, strange though it sounds. So communities would form around certain games, or game designers or styles of game, and as communities do, they would grow insular by outcasting the Other - denigrate other games or styles of play as "Wrong", or "Bad". As information first began to crack it's shell and peak out at the world, suddenly there were tens of thousands of designers, and tens of thousands of games. And a mantra became popular to break the insularity - "There is no 'One True Way' to play". Take each game on it's own merits, in it's own time, in it's own place.
The wisdom that the game designer back then learned, and passed on to me - which in turn, I pass on to you - is simply this. "No One True Way" is true for life, just as it was true for games. Let yourself be more than one person and live more than one life. Let the people you've stopped being pass away gracefully. Learn to accept the new people you become. Grow. Change. Be human.
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Every once in a while, I kick out a piece of fiction, and think "Damn! How the hell did I produce that????"
James
Labels: I think too much
posted by James at 12:38 PM
1 Comments:
You had better be in a retirement home for aging gamers... or the poor little candystripers are going to have some very blank looks on their faces. ;)
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