consequences

that we cheat ourselves by cheating at a game, fail to "truly engage with the game systems" by robbing ourselves of consequence. if only!! but consequence can't be removed, only ever displaced. to play goldeneye with unlimited health, unlimited ammo, to vaguely go through the motions of the spy routine, screen flashing red as we're peppered with harmless bullets - this just means dealing with a different kind of "consequence", the consequence of following our desires in all their circular strangeness. without the escape hatch of being able to say "ah, without this obstacle - this guard, this limitation - THEN i'd be happy, THEN i'd be fulfilled".

artificial scarcity - is that consequence? it feels too close to the world i live in to interest me much. i always end up talking to people at work who'll insist that without a job, without the consequences of NOT having a job and the way those consequences frame and direct our behaviors, that we simply wouldn't know what to do with ourselves. to which i always think, well, maybe YOU wouldn't, man... failures of imagination projected as helpfulness, the small annoyance of someone announcing they've solved for us a problem that perhaps we wouldn't have minded wrestling around ourselves.

the freud line about moving from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. a similar distinction: interesting vs uninteresting forms of unhappiness. to want something, to lack shelter or respite from the blunt animal miseries of exploitation, scarcity and torture - surely part of the cruelty of these is how they overshadow all the other ways that we might be unhappy. and how meagre their countervailing images of happiness turn out to be, money, food, ammo or red potion. compare to the strange and elaborate unhappinesses involved in simply being alive, in the directionless abundance of perception itself, that stuck tap endlessly pouring out into a drain. isn't that something worth fighting for, something everyone deserves?

the beauty of cheat modes is that they depict a world where everyone has access to the higher unhappiness - freed from meaning, given tools and time to seek out ever more perverse forms of self-destruction.