We do not come with tree rings. Instead of punctuated markers of age, our bodies ship with incremental evidence of the Oncoming Old. Trembling hairlines. Skin the pallor of #nofilter. I think of aging and what comes after because of the recently launched PlayStation 4 and the upcoming Xbox One reveal, the latest salvo in a maddening battle for the living rooms of those who can still afford living rooms, and I have a confession to make: I buy video games because I don’t want to die.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the words aren’t mine, not entirely. They belong to Umberto Eco, who, in a 2009 interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel, suggested our fondness for lists was an act of survival:
“We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
To list is to accumulate—to make sense of our world by giving it shape, because it is infinite and we are not.
Eco could very well be speaking of me. I don’t play video games—I collect them. I list. I can think of no other way to reconcile a hobby spanning one PS3, two Xbox 360s, one Wii, one PS2, two Gamecubes, two DS Lites, one iPhone 4, one iPhone 4S, one iPad (first generation), one ZX Spectrum, and almost every configuration of PC. Like Smaug on his pile of gold, I nest atop an embarrassing library of titles and still dream of more. (The nadir might have been a brutal bidding war for a rare copy of Siren: New Translation, the Japanese language edition. I don’t know Japanese.) I collect, collect, collect, hoping a future archivist will unearth my hoard and, with it, me. “We’re not sure who Anshuman was,” a tendril will note, “but he owned BioShock: Limited Edition With Sealed Big Daddy Figurine.”
The big console makers—Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony—understand this. So do game-making behemoths such as EA and Valve. It’s a known model of consumer behaviour used even by the smallest, indie-est of development studios: exploit our desire to leave behind some record that we were here.
This is the heart of mainstream videogaming, a contradiction that will undoubtedly continue on in the era of the PS4 and Xbox One. Our anxieties are used to sell us the promise of great things—sensual technologies, 1080p, better garbage—at a rate none of us can afford. Those who can, to varying degrees, will rarely have time to enjoy them because of what the hobby asks: a steady paycheck, a constant devotion to work. There are only so many hours.
At what point does buying into yet another console generation become an advanced form of BDSM? All we can do is fitfully, urgently comply, and hope this will dull the feeling that something isn’t quite right. Perhaps. In the weeks leading up to the holidays, do me a favour: resist temptation. Do not buy a PS4 or Xbox One. There is a gaping sadness in every one of us, and no magical box of wires and cores will slake its thirst. Your lists may live forever, but death is coming for us all.
Screenshot courtesy of Sony/Guerilla Games
