(tl;dr video companion to this article):

Within the idea of the everyday, we as individuals have such a vast array of choices we can make, both in big and small ways, that can have a drastic number of outcomes that can change the course of our lives and transform the world around us. Why then, do we so often choose to do either something selfish, or no good thing at all?

As is always the case with my writing, I am here for the games, as I feel that they represent one of the best ways of personal discovery to a whole swath of people who may otherwise not find more meaningful ways to do so. Obviously, there are a ton of other ways one can go about doing this, even without access to higher education or being able to travel, or having money to spend on experiences and the like: being exposed to, discovering, and or just generally experimenting with things like creativity and artistry of any different flavor is highly beneficial to anyone with a brain, and to that point, exercising ones mind through self-reflection and critical thinking are vital to a healthy outlook, philosophy is infinitely applicable to the everyday, books are never the popular option, but will never go out of style, music is excellently self-exploratory and expressive….just to name some of the more transcendent ways one can add to their toolbox of cognitive development, within the consideration of the realm of “becoming”, or merely the essence of what entails when one speaks of “being human”.

I think on some level, when I usually reach this far into my bag of existentialism, it’s because I’m personally going through it, as to say, existence, and truly feeling the crushing weight bearing down on me with all of its fathomability. I want to say this is partially related to the idea of why I kind of rejected the notion of being a professional gaming journalist at one point, though truly, the list related to the number of reasons why is drastically lengthy in that regard, and has likely no true end in terms of finding the “bottom of reason”. I’ve always disliked the notion of “gun to the head optimism”, where it seems like one’s job is to be the eternal ray of sunshine, piercing through dark clouds of the everyday, so prop up this notion of everything good with the concept of something, never really being able to talk about the bad parts about something in the process. That is obviously an oversimplification of events, but ultimately, when one works in an enthusiast press kind of role, the idea is to be low key coerced into selling a product rather than discussing a piece of art, the dichotomy of which are at, or at least should be, at completely opposite ends of the spectrum.

I further run into these issues even in the online space, as there are a number of hurdles, that are not even just financial, in being seen, heard, noticed, acknowledged etc. These reasons are related, and not entirely separated from those that plague the gaming space, though as is the case with much involving the internet and online spaces, “the problems of the real” get magnified, codified, dimensionalized, abstracted, deconstructed, reassembled, blown of proportion, misunderstood, miscomprehended, totally blown out of proportion, utterly dismissed, eternally mangled, and spun out into a bad joke a thousand times before it even reaches your own ability to comprehend what the truth of the matter even is, and these are just a handful of the issues of being one who is a passive user/consumer of content on the internet: imagine being a creator in the matter. Though, ironically, a lot of what the core issues at heart here, is of course the financial, as the internet has essentially just become one huge cesspool of advertising, and the angular aspect that most people are either being quantified as or quantifying others is quite simply “what will this cost me, how much can I make?” in terms of the brass tacks of the situation, and that is whether they are conscious of this happening or not. Ideology is a hell of a drug, and one so nefarious in its own design, one does not even realize they are getting high on it while being fiendish addicts all the same, even if just from a metaphysical standpoint, but that is apart of the allure of the addiction itself: peddling it and using it are effortless, and keeps one in a constant state of perpetual delirium, never needing to ask an important question or realizing there may yet be a problem to solve, as long as the system involved keeps running as planned.

Just, as a quick point of reference, I was suppose to sit down and write about a game I’ve been playing recently, and maybe with enough time and effort, there might have been a way to blend some genuine sense of idealism involving existential philosophy, the negative effects of consumer culture, the overbearing excess that internet culture represents, and how modern day culture seems to be drowning within the misery of finance, but I’m not sure it would have been the “best of all possible worlds”, within the realm of considering how an old philosopher named Leibniz, as I don’t think that write up would have done justice to any of the topics at hand: not the game, the development team, not the man writing about it, not the people reading it, not the culture that spawned them, not the ideas behind it all that reinforces the notions that props it all up, however toxic of a systemization all of that represents. Cause if this represents the best possible world, and the result of which is just an obligatory nightmare of reaching devastation, and the main product of which represents the perpetuation of suffering, selfishness, and sadistic sensation predicated on the whims of the profoundly disturbed or fundamentally unaware, I’d say given the choice between the best possible world and no world at all, we would all better ought not.

~Pashford