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Outtakes from the WoW letter
- —a white kid whose name was, hilariously, identical to that of a very very famous Black actor; I won’t tell you what it was, but imagine a pasty, freckly, very muscular 5’8” seventh-grade starting fullback named, like, Chris Rock or something—
- Mechanics in the Age of Artistic Reproduction
- Video games, for the most part, document adventures.
- As frightening as it is, one must move on. This is often hard to do.
- A year or so later, I entered middle school. In baseball terms, I’d call this a forced error.
- that wanting something is worthy of thinking through, even if we ultimately hope to slip free of our desire.
- To play an MMO is
- Mass media provides the illusion of perfect reproducibility.
- The first novel I tried to write in college centered on a fictional massively multiplayer video game; I spent hours and hours laboring over several scenes outside a fictional stand-in for the video game store I hung out at sometimes.
- Art, frequently, imitates life, but since art is inside of life, art is also a part of life. One part of life is imitating another. What this means is that the existence of art, or at least art that's mimetic in some way, is predicated on life being internally divided: not integral. [ed. - I wrote this high on an edible and really felt like I’d figured out the entire thing. Was this an accurate judgement? Well, dear reader,]
- Life doesn’t need to be perfectly integral—though I think the world can do better than this—
- Briefly, for context: the process of habit formation is often divided into three parts. First, there’s a trigger; second, the trigger motivates a behavior; third, the behavior is rewarded. All three parts are essential. All of this is neither here nor there, in a way. This just the way things work. It’s value-neutral.
- Freud was deeply mystified by the human animal’s compulsion to repeat. If, as the saying goes, a functional definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, it might not be a stretch to say that human beings are fundamentally insane.
- More generally, I do not know how to metabolize ephemerality. I do not find the art of losing easy to master.
- The problem is not that it is a Warcraft game; the problem is that it is, as it purports to be, a world.
- My sort-of friend
- weird older guy who worked there sold kids cigarettes