Idle Thoughts on the St. Matthew Passion and Millennial Software -- 4/2/24 (Pt. III)

Continued from:

A culture of a kind was imparted by the Playstation 2, a false culture, captivating as it was, promoted with advertisements, online resources, magazines, word of mouth, and untold childhoods worth of time spent immersed in the experiences it contained. In hindsight, and in consideration of what ills social media has wrought on a wider demographic, there being fewer age constrains on social media use, our use of game consoles seems entirely quaint. Yet it played an outsized role in the suburban phobia to culture and thought. There was a period where I was, by design, without internet, but did have a handheld console that had somehow survived many years of moving here and there. Its availability, but also its limited potential for diversion, made for an environment that was conducive to progress in terms of attentive capacity. It felt almost consistent to go from writing literature to then turning to the world of a game that, often due to the constraints of rendered graphics, gameplay, and the economic imperative that the game work upon its player’s imaginations, as opposed to social media’s stark mimetic representation of reality in the form of images, memes, and short recorded media. Games at least provide me with enough room to think, whereas social media use makes me feel either anhedonic or purely reactive. To play a game like Final Fantasy VII allows you to notice the irony that a church is featured, in which the player can wander, approach NPCs, and have the same dialogue with them as many times as the player is willing to press X for the purpose of discovering what next they are supposed to do in the game. In light of listening to the St.Johns Passion on the same device that renders that church, Final Fantasy VII’s representation of a church in the lingua franca of the late 90s seems particularly lacking.

Those distributed entertainment systems provided young people around the world with a position in society, that of the gamer, as well as a skill to refine, however inane that skill was and remains, and we, without direct contribution of our opinions, provided feedback by way of purchases in large enough volume to perpetuate this paradigm and influence the kind of games that were created. We found the games entertaining in themselves, but we also had no concept of what it would be better to do with our lives. We had no choirs in demand of voices to sustain in performance the continued tradition of western music and the praise of God. The millennium drew the curtain on the folly of religion to a greater extent than perhaps any other time in history, but the criticism was on dimensional, failing to provide a positive notion of what should replace it, what it would be better to do than to offer worship, or what the mechanism should be for organizing society. It can feel as though all that the millennium’s criticisms revealed was how intolerable it is to live in a society where one of the most profitable industries does not do more than increase the sense of purposelessness of the user.