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Psychology

Our lives on a Hard Drive

Just how much of our life can fit on a hard drive? (2 TB)

If you’re a writer, then your hard drive will fail long before you ever fill it up. At 1000 words per hour, with each word being on average 6 letters, and chugging mouth loads of caffeine trying to write until your fingers whither and die,  that means you’ll fill up a drive in roughly 3e8 hours or 38000 years. Considering the average lifespan of a hard drive is roughly 10 years, good luck writing. Thankfully, you don’t have to pass your Hard Drive off to the next 600 generations of offspring as their birthright to fill up the family hard drive with some sort of writing. Since they can’t actually go out and experience anything because of their need to type, it’s probably better off that they don’t write all day and night.

You see this? This is what you'll be doing when I die.
You see this, son? This is what you’ll be doing when I die.

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Forever a Fan: A game’s constant reprise to mind

A funny thing happens when I walk by an arcade. My neck cranes, scanning the room and if I gaze on a series of the flashing arrows scrolling up a screen my eyes lock onto the machine and my body tries to move towards the machine on instinct. The feeling intensifies if the machine happens to be part of the few generations that had the best track list, but regardless of the version there is always an urge and a rush of the good brain chemicals that get me feeling excited and anxious to hop on the machine and give it another round for old times sake. The machine, if you hadn’t guessed was a DDR machine. If you talked to 13-year-old me and told him that I’d be working at a place where there were several DDR machines in the area with easy access to, he’d be ecstatic because what 13-year-old me thought was that I’d be a fan of the series for life. Maybe that was immature thinking, but the more places that I pass where there’s a DDR machine there or the disappointment that I find when there isn’t when I’d thought there would be, the more I believe I had it right back then, though my reasoning was wrong for it.

You can call it nostalgia or not being able to let go of past experiences, but there are many groups among the community that live with their game of choice and have become “Forever Fans” of their game.

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On Creativity and Change

What is irritating is when you try to start something, but because demotivation has set into other aspects of your work, it creeps into work that you care more about. The creative energy comes from being productive all around, but by not putting full effort into one creative production it takes away from all creative productions. Maybe it’s a part of the self that worries I’m shirking responsibility causing myself to not write with a clear mind and further blocking the creativity to flow, or that I don’t deserve to be personally creative when I’m not being professionally creative. It’s not about being Creatively Stagnant or Creatively Irresponsible, but I feel that I’m being Creatively Demotivated. Bouncing around from idea to idea, but having little motivation to expound and fulfill each idea.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Whenever being creative comes up, I’m always brought back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I’m brought back to this more and more often because finding happiness from creativity and purpose comes as a very in-essential need of the human life. When I listen to podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience where the topic of Subsistence shows come up often, or “Happy People” from Werner Herzog where people live essentially with the tools and expertise of the 1800s, they emphasis that the people living in these communities that focus more on their physical needs than their psychological ones are living much happier lives than those in a more civilized, modernized community. I’m not going to say that I’m the first one to bring the two together, but I guess it’s a sign of how good our lives are. I have everything needed to live a physically stress free life. I have food, water, warmth. I’m healthy and have employment. Many of the base needs are already met, so we search higher on the pyramid to find things that are more fulfilling.

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Persistence to Play More

I remember a time when I was a kid where I would go to Toys ‘R Us once in a blue moon and pick up a game, whatever looked like would be fun, meaning something Mario, something Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, something Kirby, etc… I would go home, pop the cartridge into the console and play. Then the next day comes by and I’d keep playing. Weeks may go by without touching the thing, but I’d come back to playing it at some point. I’d even go back to games rented from Blockbuster. If the game seemed like fun at the time and they had a copy in stock, I’d pick it up again and keep playing it. After some time, my game collection kept getting bigger, games kept getting longer, and my time to play them kept getting cut due to the “responsible” things I needed to get done. Because of this, there arrived a time when I would stop revisiting old games. Games that were good got revisted more often than others, but even bad games were revisited in the past. Maybe because my selection is too vast, spending time on shitty games isn’t worth the time, and the mentality of “why replay something when I have another game waiting to be played” started to become the norm. I know if I had to spend $60 on a game in my early teens, I would have kept the game in my roster continuously until I accumulated at least 20+ hours for the game, unless the game was really just horrendous. But at what point do we start to abandon the games that we buy? And why would we abandon playing the game after only completing the game once or not even finishing the game at all?

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Attachment Issues

It’s a little but funny, but then again, no.

How we attach ourselves to characters in a television show.

I don’t have much to say, but if I did

I’d write a blog about it, where it would live.

                One thing that I love is getting wrapped up in a story. Getting wrapped up in the lives of characters who have lives outside of the story taking place. Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Doctor Who. It’s not just enough to have motivations of people inside a story but to know that these people have personalities, aspirations, or a psyche outside of what’s going on in the day-to-day moments of whatever medium the story is taking place. And some mediums have characters who persist for years, while other formats have characters who only show up for an hour-long episode before they go away. In spite of this, it’s sometimes easier to develop an attachment towards the hour-long character than the decade long one. But that’s counter-intuitive, don’t you think? If you’ve spent a decade following a character around, you’d expect there to be more of an attachment to these characters because you’d (hopefully) know their motivations to a better degree than someone who you’ve only known for an hour, where of that hour was also focusing on some event occurring around them so you can’t solely focus on this one-episode character the entire time.

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Nostalia vs Aging Well

Sitting around, shooting the shit with your friends and somehow or another an old game gets brought up. “Man, Final Fantasy VI was such a good game.” “I dunno, I haven’t played it.” “Why not? It’s one of the best FF games, if not the best FF game, ever. You should give it a try.” “Can’t do it. I can’t go back to old games. It just looks so old.” This happens to any game you bring up from the SNES generation, PS1/N64 Generation and the PS2/Xbox generation. For many, there’s a window that first time-players are willing to try a game and once that time passes, it’s hard for them to give it a try. This even happens to people who have played it long ago, but I think the window for replaying it lasts longer than for those that didn’t play it during its original time, but without hard numbers its only speculation and I might try to find this out in a different article.

Then why are some games easier to go back to than others? Funny enough, it seems easier to go back to games from the NES/SNES and even some PS1-era games than PS2-era games. Does this mean that the older a game gets, there’s some magical threshold that makes it easier, more desirable to try it instead of less? Well, I wouldn’t say that. Most of the games that I tend to find myself and find others going to play and replay are games that are closer in creation to SNES/NES type games, meaning 2D-Platformers and RPGs. I think the big ingredient to longevity is what was found in the many games of this generation of consoles.

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