The Body has a Head
In the desire to be loved and respected by those that matter one must conform and make sacrifices because inevitably those that matter are the type that will not accept one for who one is. Perhaps this is because few are born people of note; the most talented baby does not matter when compared to a run of the mill baby that can speak (thus eroding the soul) just a few months earlier than most.
Video games are not as old as those who are most after acceptance would have you believe. Seven decades affords a medium very little experience, even if it is a lifetime to those who make the medium itself. The influences that can be accumulated in seven decades are hardly even one era’s worth. We are still making the same video games that were expressed on a rusty old CRT, but we are not alone.
Perhaps this infancy is why video games are so often compared to film—both are young mediums that have over their short lifetimes seen little progression; film (so long as we make sure to include a camera) has not changed at a fundamental level since Thomas Edison’s boxing cats—a cruel precursor to YouTube, but if Edison is involved you can be quite sure that there will be a high degree of cruelty.
Literature on the other hand when taken as a medium (encompassing poetry, plays, novels and what have you) has evolved over thousands of years and, well, the parenthesis says it all. Those are not genres, but mediums within mediums, something that film and video games lack, and will continue to lack for hundreds if not thousands of years, and given that they are so reliant on technology they may never evolve other mediums within themselves; not to mention the high probability that time will reveal video games to be a medium within the medium of play. A medium within a medium cannot have a medium within itself; only genres that all rely on the same medium. Perhaps it’s a little unfair to compare video games to literature as literature has no technological constraints, though it often takes advantage of technology. It does, however, require a brain.
There are no video games in the brain, but if there were one may argue that the brain is growing a little faster than the rest of the body, perhaps even the head, because what the brain thinks and what the mouth says (a part of the head) do not always agree.
The brain’s art often becomes the mouth’s dribbled words, and they drip into critics’ mouths like nectar because they can understand the brain as they are part of it. This saliva is an emotional salvia that makes us feel better about our medium: all we need is Citizen Kane for the whole world to see what genius we hold within our minds. But the salvia is as intoxicating as it is delicious, and there are so many Citizen Kanes that how could anyone not a part of the brain possibly know where to begin, let alone know which one to vote for! Even the brain isn’t sure about that because each Citizen Kane is better than the last: technology is just as intoxicating as salvia, but technology did not need to progress for the real Citizen Kane to exist. Citizen Kane itself did not even need to invent technique: it was aware that such techniques already existed and had been used before, but it had the courage to consciously use them for its own purposes knowing full well that there could be consequences where there were no consequences for those that had used them before—the audience is a cruel beast, and without one, one is afforded great liberty.
But the saliva is not aware that the mouth is full of saliva just like it—each drop pooling in its own unique shape—and even though the mouth can feel that the saliva tastes and has the same texture as all saliva, the brain (if you managed to remember) is not perfectly in synch with the mouth, and does not realise this.
However for those who are not a part of the body it is easy to see that saliva is saliva is saliva; perhaps we simply should not be force feeding people saliva: it’s a little weird, though tasty and kinda hot. (Except when the saliva has been out of the mouth long enough to cool, obviously. Then it’s cool.)
But of course the brain is partly correct: saliva may well just be saliva, but it’s true that each drop is a little bit different; some very different, and sometimes there’s a nasty bit of old food or phlegm or puss in the saliva too which makes it all the more unique. It’s an understandable desire to want to get rid of such substances: they are violent, offensive, disgusting and just plain annoying, but in incessant brushing and flossing the body washes away a little bit of its credibility, and quite often hypocritically because the body hates to be censored by those pesky Australians and Nazi Nazis (a Nazi Nazi is a Nazi that institutes Nazisist practises to prevent Nazism).
The brain forgets (and must understand) that it is simply going through a self-righteous teenage stage (please grow a little faster) of activism and moral superiority. Hopefully it will pass soon, because the mediums it envies are filled with the most morally objectionable things any brain could imagine from abortion, murder and torture, to rape—obviously from least abhorrent to most.
The truth is any mature brain will be exposed to such things, simply because they exist, and some brains may prefer to be exposed to a form that is exploitive and thus less confronting, but others may prefer a harder to swallow concoction of cyanide and truth that can be just as validating as fatal for any mortal being: I cannot escape death; but others perhaps would prefer to pretend to escape death with immortality in video game form whether through stopping or creating destruction.
But one cannot find any validation in death in video games just as one cannot find validation in perversion in videogames—well, except in Japan, and those in Japan cannot do so without Western consequences because it is easier to believe in inherent evil, and even if it isn’t, it is more convenient for the brain in its search for acceptance.
But worst of all: the body has a body. Yes, apart from the two beautiful bits (the brain and the mouth; well the mouth will be fine in a few years time when it learns how to swallow) it also has horrible nobly clitorenises and a whole list of things that are even nastier than the last, and the last was an anus for God’s sake!
But as disgusting as these things may be the worst part is that the body has the power to hurt other bodies—though the brain is quick to point out that such studies are biased and conducted on the brain, and not the body at all, and that the brain is perfectly fine at knowing what it thinks and what it is capable of thank you very much!
All elder media are rife with propaganda: without it how could fully grown bodies function? They could hardly convince themselves to kill in the name without a little persuasion, could they? Unless they were the name—perhaps Stalin or Churchill, but one must remember that it’s very easy for one to believe propaganda about oneself: remember that every drop of saliva that claims to be really is the next Citizen Kane!
While there is some resistance to propaganda (a rather silly notion if one wants to be accepted) it pales in comparison to the resistance of perversion: even enlarged breasts are better than false validation in palatable war. Of course palatable war isn’t propaganda, it is comforting escapism.
But even America’s Army could hardly stand up against the war games that attempt to explore war—to really get inside the soldier and explore his internal struggle. An internal struggle free of fear, death, murder and post-traumatic stress disorder, that is. The personal consequences are of course important in such an internal struggle, but not nearly as important as reminding ourselves that most soldiers aren’t just scared little boys when they’re led by Kony, but are too when they’re led by men who have made a career out of being scared little boys, as well. Or to be more exact: to remind us that the opposite is true.
And even if it were true, it’s a comfort to know that before they kill another scared little boy they think over the consequences of their actions carefully through a QTE mini-game that depicts quite realistically their internal struggle.
Such things are better expressed in words, both in the literary sense, and the video game sense, but certainly not in the filmic sense: even the drops of saliva that wish to be film are closer to novelisation; the only films that last fourteen hours are made by doting pop-art (contradictory and oxymoronic) painters.
Which, if you have been paying attention, means that yes—it’s true!—the body has a head, but it is a part of the body, not apart of the body, and the body should be treated with just as much respect, even if it is squishy and excretes embarrassing bodily fluids that spray this way and that—often ruining masterpieces if one is sufficiently aroused by art: why do you think they keep paintings so far out of reach in museums? Duh—I mean splurt.