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In response to my friend Forrest’s Samsara Classic Anniversary Edition.

The original magic of first starting out, of being full of wonder and awe at this vast new digital fantasy world, was gone, and I couldn’t recreate the feeling no matter how many zones I travelled.

Nostalgia is written all over this blog. The first post on Cybertext was born from a wanting to understand my own media consumption; both the ether world and shared experience followed suit to explore the same ineffable ‘loss’ Forrest describes. Even when I respond to my friends, it’s for posts like this, or the lifeboats, where something has supposedly been lost forever and it can’t be recreated.

At the same time, even eight months ago¹ I was admitting that nostalgia had been my strategy, and it was one I was bored with. Since 2019 I had tried to socially inculcate a specific habit of technology–one where you returned to a portal infrequently, as contemplative gaps between the majority of your life outdoors–and I kept running into the same reality. You cannot do it by just recreating the semiotics, re-reifying the constraints of a technological system, and treating it as a rallying cry for a different way of living, a technological reaction against the omnipresent connection of postmodernity.

Forrest I think is tapping into a different pulse, somewhere between escalating stimulation and the hedonic treadmill, and tying it into the strange simulacra of the MMORPG. World of Warcraft Classic, or Forever, or whatever, is a captivating example, an ouroboros recreating itself in order to recreate satisfying systems of achievement alongside lower friction. Of course, some people love friction, and they play HorizonXI.

The story goes like this: for a moment, I was enraptured. That moment in time was written onto my soul, and those occasions, those places–where a new scripture erupts within me, a new vision I can visit and revisit as a definitive feature of who I now am–are so rare that I bang my head against the site like a futile pilgrimage, devoting myself to an empty thing, knowing nothing other than something occurred here–

see you next time

Wouldn’t it be a fun idea? Imagine re-entering the Rogue of life, adding on more and more difficulty multipliers, rerolling an increasingly esoteric ontology, stumbling onto moments with an increasing potential for memorability, yes, those moments where something threatens to forget you and to be itself in your place while you watch. Isn’t that what you want: not to purchase something, but to not be you?

This white noise, this dukkha, is what we all desperately try to drown out with bullshit like the false promise of GOING BACK. For me, back in 2019, that false promise was WoW Classic, which could not satisfy me because perhaps I could never be satisfied to begin with. Perhaps, if satisfaction is our goal, we can never be satisfied to begin with. Perhaps even thinking about satisfaction preloads us for dissatisfaction. Like a Smith & Wesson, we load up the chambers manually with our own bullshit expectations, when really the chambers should just be left empty because the gun is always pointed at our own heads. This was my experience with WoW Classic. ²

I have a terrifying secret: I only really get that same frisson from work. Not even just a job: any project at all. So, obviously, I constantly make projects. I renovate my house, I redo the website, I build furniture. I am motion, I am water. And for the most part, it’s supplanted media, because I’m still in the process of renegotiating what media even meant to me. I think in the same way I’m renegotiating what the internet even meant.

I remember being eleven, twelve maybe, and we got Pokémon Colosseum for the GameCube at home. I remember noting at the time that I had played it for six hours straight, and I basically didn’t give that kind of sustained attention to anything. I was indeed enraptured, because so many things were being reified at once: my relationship to a fictional world (and to its systems of achievement) had been consummated at a younger age, and here it was again, in a far more complex format than I was used to.³

But there’s a limit to the complexity of Pokémon’s mechanics, regardless of the romhack community, as a surrogate for a feeling of accomplishment and development. Pokémon post-scarcity has already been accomplished, and now it’s become pure database, a slime mold of affinities to pick up and put down. The appeal of Pokémon as a child is a sort of personalised struggle; you earn attachments to what you pick up on the way of a contained journey and carry it forward. Two or three generations later and you know how the journey goes.

Video games for me are least satisfying when I’m assessing numbers and achievements; and at the same time I refuse to play them without some sort of metric. Metrics are table stakes now. When I walk around Montreal, sometimes I sit and think, “was it that long ago that just sitting and playing something for an entire weekend was enough?”⁴

The metrics are now mandatory not because they’re stimulating but because they’re a journal; they’re social; they connect what I’m enjoying with the specific experience of playing.

taken, unaware

I have, in fact, still hit moments of rapture, those unforgettable images adding themselves to the register; it’s usually when I stop thinking and just embrace something new. Lately I picked up the Umineko series on a whim–while I could expound on any number of spoiler-filled directions, I need to restrain myself–and there have been not one but several moments that just seem unforgettable, now. There’s this one moment in the first post-game chapter of episode four where Battler is alone on the island just walking in silence for a full twenty-four hours, noting the state in which all the corpses were found, trying to piece together what happened. There’s something so eerie, so suddenly unmagical about that moment, that I felt stunned.

The series as a whole had me reading for four-or-five-hour sprints at a time, night after night. So evidently I could still experience something like that, right? I just wasn’t expecting to; I wasn’t hoping to recapture anything. I just forgot the underlying emptiness and took it as it was, and a new memory formed.

I feel likewise with technology now. There was a time in my life where I socialised online in specific formats, with specific groups of people. Maybe after all this time, it wasn’t satisfying even then. Maybe it never really made sense. Maybe in another ten years we’ll think social media was absurdly public and our private groups were the most natural formulation (Yahoo Groups, Facebook groups, newsgroups or otherwise). When I’ve felt belonging, it’s been from just seeing the same people in the real world, and carrying on idly online. In retrospect, I always had that. It was overreliance on the internet that was the aberration. It was thinking so hard about kindred that I stopped caring about the abundance of difference that made up my respective complement in the alchemy of belonging.

Deep down, you and I both know damn well that the thing is never the feeling. The thing is just that: some soulless, lifeless thing.

Forrest already knew it; though I think of it more like me-playing-World-of-Warcraft is itself a being, a unified machine producing signs that has a mutually derived amount of fuel before it can’t be tapped into. It is a very finite being.

Luckily, becoming a mutual being, a being-with, a being-in, is such an abundant possibility, that how could you ever get bored?