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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Points of Sale
Save & Continue? Save & Quit?
Tuesday, 2008-04-01 | Politics, Videogames, Zona Roja
| Casualty numbers are rising / Now it's time to raise the stakes |
If I had to explain life within the contemporary Consumer-space to someone who was stuck in the year 2000, I would suggest the videogame trope of "recording your progress" or "saving your game."
Basically, it reduces to this: you do whatever it is that you're going to do--get the tickets from Grinder's file at the morgue, bludgeon the devils like an iron hammer, use the Floater to raise the Airship--then save your game and power the console off. Next time you turn it on, you're right back where you left off.
If you don't save your game, however, it's not like you never did what you did, but you can't pick up where you left off. You basically did whatever you did for your own benefit: in the eyes of the Game, you're still wherever you were the last time you made it to the designated game-saving location and initiated the data-saving procedure.
Expressions of whatever progress you have recently made as an individual agent acting towards whatever end only truly matter if they take place "on the record."
And here in the year 20XX we have something a lot like that: we call them Points of Sale.
We phase in and out of existence, so far as the statisticians and demographers are concerned, not unlike a firefly on a starless night; when we check in at a Point of Sale, we send them the signal that we exist in a particular time and place. At X time on Y date in Z year, we purchased P at the price of $N.
And then we vanish utterly. We might as well have died, for there is no assurance that we will ever appear again or, if we do reappear, that our next data transmission will bear any resemblance to our previous one. If we never make it to another point of sale, then we simply haven't made any progress, so far as they're concerned.
If you die before you save your game, does the game know about the progress you've made? It might and it might not. But it will certainly not have recorded that progress.
It is these same statisticians and demographers who are, in a very literal sense, the architects of the consumer-space we inhabit; they are "the Game", as far as we're concerned. They are the (generally) inaccessible information system that sets the rules by which we abide. From collision-detection to NPC behavior to color palette and so on, the corporate interests that gather data from the websites we visit and the purchases we make set the rules of the game we're playing.
Those 3000 discreet advertisements we see on a daily basis did not, of course, come into existence of an unpredictable sudden. Nor is the fact that they change with the tides any kind of accident.
And so, if I had to explain life within the contemporary Consumer-space to someone who was stuck in the year 2000, I would tell him that it's a lot like saving your game; it is your actions that determine what the Game knows about who you are and what you're doing. You can save your progress, i.e. check in with the Mega Corps, as often as you like.
Or not at all.
