Effects of Video Games on the Dead #14

Friday, September 18, 1998:

“You can’t hope to answer a question until it is properly formulate.”

Doesn’t this phrase suggest a couple of other questions. For example what the heck is “formulate”? Or, more importantly what “question”?

Video games lose much of their potency for transformation when you as a player have no question you are currently working on.

To fully elevate your work with video games from the relm of fooling around to transformative you will need a question that you have elevated — for the moment at least — into the position of all encompassing and requiring of an answer before tomorrow at the latest. This will give you focus and maybe even the necessary drive to move these lazy human machines beyond ordinary efforts. “That’s good enough” is a crippling phrase. Not a single individual that you respect for accomplishments has used that phrase. It’s good enough to swim did not motivate a fish to venture forth onto the land.

Of course that might be a bad example. I highly doubt that a fish even in a primordial pond would say to itself, “Self, let’s wander away from the soothing comfort of water into the scorching environment of sun and dry air. This way we can gasp and die of asphyxiation.” Yeah, right! What fish is going to say that?

That’s all well and good. But you should have one thing — at least one thing — that elevates you above a fish wallowing around in a primordial pond. That is either the good news or the bad news depending on how you take it.

This something that you have which would elevate you above the common allotment of biochemical machines flopping around on the surface of this mud-ball is for lack of a better word a “being”? This being is a certain something or other that has a continuance outside and beyond the limits of the biochemical machine. It has a destiny and history larger in both time and other such dimensions than the mere biochemical machines which it inhabits.

Well, that let’s the cats out of the bag. Several cats in fact.

 

All in one fell swoop we have introduced the ideas of

  • biochemical machines
  • a mud-ball
  • something which can exist outside of the limits of these biochemical machines
  • the notion that these somethings wear biochemical machines like an overcoat

Let’s let it sit there for a bit. Unless of course you are burning with desire for more. Then perhaps you can sit around waiting for something more to be posted.