Social Gaming

I got into social gaming through Facebook. I've done the rounds, logged in daily, checked out hatching eggs, planted stuff in gardens, watched pet pigs and penguins grow, gathered coins and watched the debates and arguments when gold real-money items began turning up.

There was always some sort of incentive to get people to spend real money to buy gold coin credits to pay for the items you could not obtain through just the normal woolgathering and harvesting.

In the case of SPP, the harvesting came from a daily playdating round of going around the friends ladder, visiting each friend and playdating or feeding them. Once a day, you'd get 20 coins from each friend you visit, and coins buy items in the pet shop. And every few hours your pet would need feeding, tickling, playdating or cleaning. Each time you clicked on the little icons, you'd get 15 coins, or 40 when you'd filled the little progress bars off to one side.

Then you had Quests.

Every now and then you'd get a Quest turn up. Visit X friends and playdate them, or go to the shop and buy a specific item and decorate your habitat with it. Whoever clicked on the item would get a prize, and if X people click on your item you get a different prize. Crap stuff like that, that kept people interested.

As you might imagine, this became an addiction. You could spend hours staring at a screen, waiting for something to happen; a friend to come along and click that item just once, one more time, to you could qualify for a badge to show you'd finished your quest.

Well, as of today all that is over for me.

I have grieved over the loss of two pets, just random bits of pixels to some, but that would be as trivial as me saying that a friend who died was just a random collection of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other atoms. They were taken away from me, made to cease to exist, because the firm that made them and created the software that brought them into the world decided that they had had enough of this.

My pleasure - the bonding I'd felt - was at the behest of another. My happiness was a commodity generated by someone else, in measured doses, and handed out or withdrawn at the whims of someone other than myself.

And that ends now.

I vowed that after this, I would never play another social game on Facebook or indeed anywhere. I've just outlined my main reason why. I was lax. I let others be the generators of my pleasure. I outsourced my sense of fulfillment in what I can only describe as a failure to withhold Stoic ideals.

This is like working off an addiction, where the source of the addiction has been suddenly, irrevocably, destroyed. I can't bring back that sense of joy I once had when completing a quest, nor the pleasure of watching as the daily login bonus wheel landed on a jackpot like 20,000 or 50,000 coins. And truly, for the life of me I realise now that even if I could, I wouldn't want to.

In their absence, I can only go back to what I had before I'd even heard of these social games. I can go back to blogging, and writing, and deriving joy from creating stories and settings that will, hopefully, bring pleasure to others. Not following someone else's template, but carving out my own templates. Not writing stories that are like other kinds of stories others have written, themselves faded Xeroxes of others' milieux and oeuvres, but trying to write my own, about people who just get on with their lives and the things that happen to them.

Because in writing about people who are not trying to be cool, but just to live out their lives in the fantasy settings I create for them, I have the key to my truest pleasure; the source of the greatest addiction, an addiction I create and enjoy for myself.

Fetishization - The Making Of Fetishes

I just popped into a couple of bookstores in town, and browsed the items on display. Just killing time. No particular wants or needs burning away inside me.
 
I have that kind of a mood on me today.
 
I noticed something that I'd only really observed, never codified or put into words. The items on display can't really count as books, as such. More like fetishes.
 
Some definitions of the word "fetish" -
 
- "An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices."
 
"An object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence."
 
"An object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion."
 
You won't believe the difficulty I had, just now, in getting the library computer to generate definitions of this word. They control Safe Search on Google, which means nothing they don't want you to know gets heard. Awful, censorious, Nanny State nonsense.
 
In a way, making a fetish out of safety and "Teh Kidz."
 
I looked at the cookery books. Remainder stores and Waterstones alike have an overabundance of them. In fact, Waterstones has so many that, in addition to occupying a whole three shelves right in the centre of the shop floor, they have had to put in an overflow shelf to accommodate a surplus of them, each book carrying a happy, smiling celebrity face or bearing a celebrity name.
 
Reading a Jamie Oliver book won't somwhoe magically make your bad, lousy, tasteless cooking over into a banqueting masterpiece. I can only imagine that people buy these useless books so that, somehow, a book carrying the smiling face of a celebrity chef will magically do the job and transform you, or simply the trash you microwave, into something as juicy and tasty as the crap they serve on the television.
 
The television. Pixels glowing on a screen. Cookbooks. Just words and pictures books. The pictures and dancing pixels, the words, won't feed you. Even if you tear open the pages and eat them, it's just paper.
 
The pictures won't transsubstantiate into magic food when it hits your belly. Nigella Lawson won't magically walk into your kitchen and transform you into a master chef. But people want to believe it.
 
This is why people collect art, and will kill or steal for originals, and why they go apeshit when something turns out to be a skilful forgery. It isn't the money, even though an obscene amount of it does change hands. It's the possession of the Thing that counts.
 
Or perhaps it is the Thing, the fetish, imbued by the mind of the owner with mystical properties, that is doing the possessing.
 
In the end, who's the property? Why do we call something a "belonging?" People belong to groups. People identify with a group. We belong to our associations. Perhaps this is a more abstract form of possession, too.
 
But who owns us, if we are caught up in our need to have things? Is it we who own a thing, or is it the thing that, in the end, owns us?