Happiest Place on Earth

I was being geeky the other day and reading the blog for Final Fantasy XII (one of my favorite games for the PS2; heavily recommended for RPG and MMO buffs!) and I came across the lore entry for one of the characters in the game. Long story short, and without seeming both like a tremendous dork and ... well, a tremendous dork, the story of the character was that after seeing the world go through its dark ages a few thousand times, a sense of dejection compressed itself into hatred and then spurred the character's new found obsession in world annihlation; much the backstory of any cliche direct-to-DVD release or anime megalomaniac. However, it did get me thinking.

No, I'm not going to blow up the world, even if the majority of the things I write about tend to be dark, depressing, sarcastic, loathesome and full of hate for humanity. It got me thinking about what it means to be an observer and most importantly, how much influence our observations have upon our own supposed objectivity.

I've often said that people should strive to seek as any experiences as possible, a balance both between holding an open mind and a judgmental decision making power, but I've never quite noted how one is supposed to deal with the emotional impact other than thinking it out logically. Surely, our experiences do leave emotional impacts; it would make little sense for them not to, although we might sometimes aspire to be as cold as we wish. This lends a fundamental flaw to experiential learning; how do we maintain objectivity?

In nowhere is this more prevalent than in romance. With the amount of hurt feelings and the sheer impact love makes on people in general, it is the easiest for objectivity to be broken completely. Much like secondhand smoking, even observing the multitude of pain that erupts from such situations, for anyone who is slightly empathic, results in a dimmer view on the spirit of love. Unfortunately, this emotional sort of problem cannot be dealt with by logic; it must be dealt with some form of an emotional solution. Like solves like and sadly, while I loathe the idea of dealing with emotions in such a fashion, I will have no choice but to dismiss logic and simply state, 'people will get over it.'

I have immense respect for people with extremely high emotional tolerance, capable of bouncing back from anything that actually happens. Despite my inward hatred for such things as internal optimism, I can't help but admit that sadly, it is potentially the only vaccine against the invasive darkness of bad experience. For the rest of us lonesome fellows, the happiest place on earth isn't where we're starting, but hopefully a place we can find by our own means.

Tonight, I'm watching 'Dorm Life,' which is awesome. Hence, I am lazy.

Cheers.

WWFOG (aka 'people have thought up better satires than me')

As I was getting used to my new frugal lifestyle preparing for graduate school (gone are the days of cheap Chinese food and hello 'crackers with peanut butter' and 'rice'), I was reading one of my favorite forums and came across the gem of a flame thread about the WWFOG.

To the uninitiated (read: people who aren't as dorky as I am), the WWFOG is a venture trying to unite professional gaming across the States under one banner, trying to serve as somewhat of a regulatory body similar to the NFL, KeSPA, and the editors of Science and Nature. The company promises sponsored leagues, tournaments, teams, and boasts a roster of '200 professional players,' many of which are situated in one team; Empire Arcadia. In order to participate in this league (and the term participate means 'be able to post on the WWFOG forums'), one must pay a yearly few of ten bucks, the equivalent of twenty packets of ramen noodles, enough to feed me for twenty days (thirty if I'm willing to pass out from low blood sugar).

As much as I like this idea, I can't help but be skeptical that the founders haven't done their homework. Admittedly, I'm going to cheat on my homework (as I only keep up with two 'professional' game scenes and one of them is a children's card game not named YGO) but just from the way these two scenes handle leagues, I forsee major, major problems. For one thing, WotC and KeSPA have strong, established bases within a very narrow range; the former caters to 25 year olds who love doing math in their head and playing with effects like 'destroy,' 'counter,' and 'exile,' and the latter live at their computers until being forced by the program to order a pizza (oh, whoops, wrong game). What the WWFOG is trying to do, however, is go multi-platform and this is a major, major problem. Instead of focusing on the solid fundamentals of a small and rabid fanbase, they attempt to appeal to the mass 'market' of gamers and thus, expose one fundamental misconception both within the old man financial founder of this enterprise and those who would currently support their logistical failings.

'Gamers are all the same.'

Gamers, sadly, are not all the same and if you didn't reach this conclusion from the financial powerhouse that is the Nintendo Wii (Samus x Team Ninja = amazing, btw), then you're either an ostrich or a moron. With so many genres prevalent in gaming, comparable to the variety within other entertainment industries such as film and music, it is a fallacy to say that gamers are somehow one 'large target minority of a demographic,' which is sadly exactly how WWFOG is treating them. Gaming is mainstream now, with middle aged women playing Cooking Mama (the irony here is delicious), young girls playing Hannah Montana's newest digital adventure, and even old women playing Wii Sports. The fact that I'm using all female examples with a high prevalence of occurence supports my statement even more; gaming is mainstream. If you want to appeal to gamers, you can't treat the whole body of gamers as the same body, and from WWFOG's perspective, that would be people who play games to be the best at something. Out of scope.

Even within professonal gaming, the variety of genres across the board means that focusing on a smaller player base is simply a better idea. A pro-SC player could care less about YGO, and a pro-SF4 player could care less about a Disgaea DS tournament (do these even exist?). How can you try for a mass-market appeal if the majority of your target market won't care about the other members? Simply put, you can't. It's folly to try. Gamers will be divisive, and you're better off making the individual leagues in specific games and then having your fanbase diversify as they see fit. Bad business is bad.

Well, at least internet drama will entertain me while I'm starving to death.

Today is sunny, but USPS screwed up my mail. Hence, I'm lazy.

Cheers.

Never Never Neverland

When I was young, I always thought that once I reached a certain age, I would instantly become 'an adult.' To my little, Asian brain, maturity and adulthood were things that instantly happened after one passed a certain age, sort of like spontaneous evolution or divine conception. The idea that we 'grow' towards a certain point and that stages, in fact, were mutable and somewhat fuzzy had not yet occurred to me. Instead, I just believed that when I approached the age of 18, I would instantly wake up and know everything I was supposed to do and develop the capabilities that adults had, like paying taxes and drinking champagne like an Englishman.

I now pay other people to do my taxes and drink champagne like an American.

By the age of 10, I had sufficient real-world experience to denote the entire concept of 'maturity' as 'crap.' It might have been my pre-teen emo hormone concentrations shooting up to unprecedented levels, but when one becomes aware of adults and the dumb things they do (extramarital affairs, bad financial decisions, really bad fashion decisions, etc), one tends to become somewhat cynical. Aware that I was traveling down this path of darkness (I had read way too many fantasy books at this point), I decided to decry maturity as simply 'a concept with no foundational basis and incorrectly assumes the proper course of action.' It was during this time, with my tarnished image of adulthood, that I began to conceive of a list of things adults should embody (which would later grow to my concepts of moralism and the like).

The idea that we progress in small incremental steps never really occurred to me as something I underwent, but rather something I observed in other people. Like a kid who picks himself up off the ground after skinning his knee for the umpteenth time, or the girl who cries incessantly at dating the quarterback who's banging just about everyone in the school, people take their punches, roll, and step up. Was this, then, 'personal growth?' The gain we received from experiential knowledge, as simple as a child knowing that 'if fire is hot, if hot things hurt, I should not touch fire,' that is what defined growth? It occurred to me that it was somewhat counterintuitive to think of life (and not just human life, but all forms of 'progress') in 'stages' when it was actually a vast continuum from point A to point B.

So what is adulthood? Maturity? Do we simply grow by steps and are suddenly proclaimed mature after certain qualities have been embodied, or are we never actually 'mature' and only approach the limit of it all?

(And why should I care?)

The definition of maturity differs between people, but generally appears as a list of characteristics one believes should be embodied within a 'mature' entity. Generally, they include skills and things like 'being able to deal with emotions in ways that don't detriment oneself and others,' 'being able to communicate,' 'being socially adept,' and so forth but can also include things such as 'altruism,' 'understanding,' and 'compassion.' It should be noticed that much of the colloquial general definition of maturity is not centered among the 'mature' person, but among the people around him or her. As such, we can interpret maturity as a rough approximation of 'social awareness' as a whole.

However, it's odd to think about it like this. Instead of being mature for ourselves, we are mature for the sake of others; instead, for example, of considering others because it is 'the right thing to do' (notably using a different logical track than 'we should be mature' as the sole reason), we do it because it allows us to be called 'mature.' By according a status to such actions, we do make it more attractive and thus, more likely for people to do but we also remove the reasoning as to why we do it in the first place. This inverted reasoning (we do things to be mature, not becoming mature by doing such things) leads to a great deal of deception; fundamentally, it leads to problems.

If the reasoning isn't present intrinsically that we should do good things because they are the 'right things' to do., then we simply won't do the right things in situations where they won't be recognized. We see this present in the deepest motivations of people, mainly when emotions suddenly become concerned, leading to no sense of chivalry but instead to things like selfishness coming out, and in situation where there's alcohol. When true personalities come out, those who are 'consciously mature' suddenly revert to their normal 'immature' selves, and then all sorts of awkward turtles are suddenly birthed into the world. My point is people shouldn't push themselves to 'become' mature; instead, they should understand it from a more primal, fundamental level of altruism.

It is entirely possible, though, that people won't ever 'become mature' in this sense because people sometimes never do reach the point where they understand why they should help others. However, in some ways, maybe it is better if people remain their honest selves, selfishness and all, and not simply become people they are not ready to be solely because they want to be 'mature.' At least in that way, people won't lose too much of themselves in confusion and life as it turns out, though might not becoming 'better,' will at least be a bit simpler.

Tonight, I cracked and ordered Chinese food and became full; hence, I am lazy.

Cheers.

The Hammer Falls

I had the most fascinating experience last night of watching one of my friends in a fit of repressed emotion down the equivalent of three glasses of red wine, turn bright red, and fall asleep after alternating between being a sobbing wreck, a budding nudist, and a crazy version of Dr. House. What was not so fascinating, however, was (thank god with a friend) dragging her into a taxi cab, into a bed, and making sure she didn't spend the night choking on her own vomit. The dawn greeted me as I wearily bought an issue of TIMES magazine and fell asleep in my own bed at six-thirty in the morning.

What have I learned from this experience, aside from people should not guzzle cheap, red wine?

People will always be there to help you if you need it. For most of us, we all have a support system, a series of friends, confidants, and the like who are willing to put themselves out there because of our own personal issues, or because we simply need a hug. Throughout our lifetimes we both depend on such systems and act as parts of those systems, a massive series of gives-and-takes to assure that when we get wasted and puke in the middle of the street, the guy who owes you for last week will be rubbing your back and calling a cab to take you home. However, there are times when we are alone, that we should examine such systems because intrinsically, there is always that danger of being too dependent.

Where do we draw the line? Between having problems we can handle ourselves, and problems where we need others; and more importantly, in the sense of being the one helping? Are there things that people should simply learn on their own that no amount of scaffolding can teach, or are they mostly things we can rationally understand and avoid from our friends and loved ones? This is an interesting question and, empirically, results in the following simplified form. How deeply should we care? To what extent should we invest our time, energy, and compassion if someone is constantly troubled, and for what aim?

As I was half-passing out on the way home from exhaustion, I realized that despite knowing the situation would irritate me (c'mon, escorting drunk chicks home, one of which who was hysterical? who wouldn't be irritated by that!), the line I drew for good or for ill, was quick, decisive, and hopefully for the best. I then realized what sort of burdens those who had to make this decision every day have to carry on their shoulders. The doctor in the ER who must triage, the general who must send his boys to war. The executive who balances between economics and the greater good, the president between politics and dreams. This decision I made and the subsequent consequences drained me completely and from my stupor, I could understand then why people have devoted their lives to things that perhaps are so irritating and difficult to manage. You don't do it because you want to, or because you love it, or because any of those reasons actually matter at the core; those are just the tricks and the shiny advertisements.

You do it because you made the call for both its appropriateness, and its utility. In short, because it was the right thing to do. That aforementioned line between our action and inaction then, perhaps, is the line of 'rightness,' the line that reminds us once we step across, that we are no longer acting because of an aim, or a motive, but for the ideal of 'the right thing.'

I must say that doing the right thing is a very tiring experience. However, it is perhaps an aim that we can all aspire to for each and every action, within each and every profession.

Today is cloudy, and because I slept like crap yesterday, I am lazy.

Cheers.