Binary Doldrums: The Strive for Love and Oppression in the Digital Sphere
Momma’s basement has been effectively replaced by a vast bleakness of coordinated and strategic ambiguous tethers of light and pixels, the unification across the expanses theoretically impossible, yet relatable.
While ChatGPT has evolved into a blundering psychobabble addiction of end-user trust in many instances leading to the simulation of a 45-minute therapy session under the watchful inputs of an AI bot, the experience aims to mends wounded hearts and inspire the soul. If entrusting software engines with the deepest and darkness secrets is not an already disconcerting self-driving vehicle collision between logic and the precarious ideals of hope, the faith and time video gamers are investing in a role playing fantasy world is at a magnitude of dystopian hysteria.
Already saturated with pop-culture mediums such as music and entertainment, developers have aimed to lure a sustainable core audience into the digital space. Counteracting the descent of certain facets of society into the abyss of irrelevance, digital fantasies are taking on a bold and new course enhanced by none-other than literary fiction. The fusion between classic books and the gaming world has spawned a new breed of sentiment and fills the insatiable void of emotional and instant gratification among the younger generations. However, the novels themselves are becoming obscure as the term transfixed has become the new condition for the zombie-style grooming of impressionable minds incongruent with imagination.
The subsequent visceral trajectory of commercially hijacking the senses through advanced gaming platforms and storylines crosses the border of the silent and gasping ethereal, the impersonal characteristics of deep space in the absence of time and perspective daunting and confusing at the onset of primal lusts intertwined with the faintest notion of happiness. Combined with the narrative of the trials and tribulations faced in everyday life, the once-reliable escape from reality into books has only been enhanced by the symbiosis with software, as the tech industry takes a stranglehold on perception.
Cyberpunk 2077, a next-gen role-playing video game, exemplifies this coordinated effort to morph cultural norms for certain tactical geopolitical advantages. Written and developed by a team of Russian software engineers (CD Projekt Red), the electronic quest caters to the senses through an intoxicating mix of ultra-violence, intrigue, sex, choreography, and a plethora of unexplained 20th-century science fiction literary references and themes, but also delves into politics, morality, and economics, which displays how the values of the tech world are infiltrating the gaming scene.
Real life and the arduous trials of sweat, blood, tears—the eternal struggle between mortality and facing the ultimate finality — is no longer relevant or conducive to the synapses and instincts of existence, as the digital paradigm has usurped the long journey home with the artificially implanted enhanced ebb and flow of digital prose. The biproduct is punctuated by fabricated memories replacing the mundanities of the average human experience. The future shock inclinations of the Information Age are both poignant and reflective as dreams that could never be achieved without the current generation of interface tools available to consumers. However, at the same time, the contrived experiences are comprised of inexplicable nightmares born of ambiguity and uncertainty that aggressively mime reality. In this universe, William Gibson meets Russian programmers head-on in a self-driving vehicle collision measured by ramifications and a heavy frequency of tears.
As a stimulant for imagination, a reverse engineering project has been undertaken by society, as the video gaming dream world now complements fiction, as the same cannot be said for the next couple of decades and the fate of literary plots lost among the tumult of diverse content delivered by multitudinous platforms to nearly 8 billion human beings. Electronic gaming has achieved at least the threshold of an enthralling symphony containing elements of the intriguing and the maudlin released in sculpted dosages, as gamers truly experience an immersive moment connecting with the surreal. Within this dynamic era of blinding jump cuts and brazen segues, cerebral visualization is overtaken by a swarm of vibrant stimuli oversaturating at least three of the senses. Not only is the electronic ecosystem overrun by captivating facets, but along with heisting the collective fleeting attention span, the end-user is at the mercy of the software team’s bias, and propaganda is viral. Unlike books, the medium gaming world perpetually changes similar to an organism adapting, as each generation of mutates to apparent desires of the players. The addictive and trendy alternative to the traditional process of reading words printed on pulp and manually constructing visions of the author’s creative essence and critique of life and the cosmos is swiftly cancelling the foundational concept of the need for libraries and publications, word for word, and line of code by code. Why endure the rigors of reading and transforming text into visualizations when an immersive experience is served hot to go.
Delving into the inconsequential realm of pulsating lights, fabricated and normalized impossibilities, the shimmering mural to the future shock that is the present is experienced though micro-devices, flatscreens, and virtual reality with all the subtlety of an electronic spiritual breakthrough. The future has inquired about the potentially lucrative future marketplace for inducing and harvesting endorphins, as what cannot be achieved by mankind in reality is now available on a console for less than $500.
Among this travesty of a bargain, the games are now writing the plot and thus rewiring the brain as AI’s, deep fakes, and programmers create the narrative and rhetoric, as literature dissolves into nothingness, a painful sight to retro-enthusiasts and those not born affixed to the umbilical cord of devices and mental implants.
