Shaking off Oblivion, rejoining the real world

  • Boy, I’ve been a lazy blog­ger lately. I kind of get the feel­ing that a lot of us out in the Ortho-blogosphere have been tak­ing it easy this sum­mer. No doubt we’re all pre­serv­ing the excess calo­ries we would burn up slav­ing away over a hot keyboard.

    In my case, I can’t hide behind that sen­si­ble sur­vival ruse, or even just say that it’s sum­mer and I’ve been out some­where hav­ing a life. The unfor­tu­nate fact is that I got com­pletely hooked on a STUPID com­puter game — “Obliv­ion,” the one that is fea­tured in this domino spill — and I’ve frit­tered away so many hours that decent peo­ple would be using to, oh, I don’t know, sleep or some­thing that I haven’t have enough left over for bloggy blovi­at­ing. I was amazed to find that I had no con­trol over how many hours I would put into try­ing to secure a higher alchemy rat­ing or get the Staff of Waba­jack. “I am TOO old for this,” I would say. And it’s true. I’m too old to be hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with my hus­band that include things like “I can’t fig­ure out how to get the kill all the gloom wraiths aboard the “Serpent’s Wake” so I can get the Spec­tral Greaves of Doom and return them to Count Varu­lae!”

    In the end, I sort of gave up on hav­ing a life, had my sleep­less nights and thought a lot about how closely it seemed to me to resem­ble the kind of change that peo­ple went through as first radio then movies then tele­vi­sion have come into their lives. For those that have thrown all those things out, bravo — although it’s just as well for some of us weak­lings to at least know what page pop cul­ture has got­ten to in case we ever need to talk to sin­ners with three remote con­trols and an X-box.

    The impulse to engage a fan­tasy world at the expense of your engage­ment in the real one has so many out­lets right now — and entire indus­tries and economies that depend on it — that peo­ple are just plain burn­ing out. Movies are get­ting less and less inter­est­ing, tele­vi­sion more and more depen­dent on show­ing “real” peo­ple act­ing like nin­com­poops for the promise of big cash or big fame. Heck, even this incred­i­bly com­plex game with more rules and vari­a­tions than this year’s typikon begins to pale after awhile. Hmm, more undead. Yawn, another elec­tro­cu­tion spell.

    As I said, I’m too old for this. Greg and I will have a cer­e­mo­nial unin­stall in a cou­ple days. Since my advanced years put me out­side of the mar­ket niche for these sorts of things, I can go ahead and won­der what the future will be for those who have grown up with these games. If I were a teenager or 20-something and my alter­na­tive to play­ing this game where I am The Hero of Cyrodil (no, really — want a sig­na­ture?) was to try to find a job or fin­ish my home­work, would I ever log off?

    In short, what is real­ity worth? This gen­er­a­tion is pre­sented with a world that is in a slow-motion train wreck. Given that the cur­rent world cli­mate seems to ren­der Old and New Tes­ta­ment words of love, hope and wis­dom more rel­e­vant than ever, and given that the false gods of sec­u­lar human­ism are drop­ping like flies, this should a golden hour for Chris­tian­ity. But those false gods did such a thor­ough job of trash-talking us — indeed, still use what lit­tle remain­ing power they have to paint us as the enemy of all intel­li­gent peo­ple — that the shift back to any kind of noetic san­ity has been tepid at best. Other worlds offer sense, vin­di­ca­tion, thrills, sat­is­fac­tion, dis­cov­ery, mys­tery and fun — and the only prob­lem with them is that they’re not real. After a while, given how badly human beings want to find mean­ing, will real­ity be able to stack up against fantasy?

    Hav­ing posed that ques­tion, I feel like step­ping back from the gloomy sound of it all. I recall a TV movie in the early ’80s that fea­tured Tom Hanks as a col­lege stu­dent (hey, it was a long time ago, remem­ber?) who hooked up with a Dun­geons & Drag­ons group and ended up los­ing his san­ity. I’m sure that thing is out there some­where, but if peo­ple saw it now, it would look like “Reefer Mad­ness” with big­ger hair. D&D didn’t turn out to send peo­ple into insane asy­lums, and games that are based on it — like Obliv­ion — won’t either. They take their toll on the cul­ture. They take us one more step away from what we should be and towards some­thing else, but they’re not the whole journey.

    At every new twist and turn on the road of our com­mon his­tory, we seem to turn fur­ther away from God, we seem to try to get alto­gether beyond His reach. There are always obsta­cles to His find­ing us, call­ing us, bring­ing us nearer to Him­self. It’s easy to get misty-eyed about how won­der­ful it would’ve been to have lived in a golden age when Chris­tian­ity spoke with a strong, clear voice and peo­ple lis­tened. But even in the cen­turies unclut­tered by adver­tis­ing, traf­fic jams and com­puter role-playing games, there was unrest, injus­tice, cor­rup­tion, slav­ery, famine and a level of pain and hor­ror that would’ve made it dif­fi­cult — I would think — to believe that the King­dom of Heaven existed and was worth going through hell on earth to acquire.

    There have always been many, many, many rea­sons not to believe in Chris­tian­ity. And yet some num­ber in every gen­er­a­tion always seem to dis­cover one rea­son to believe that trumps them all — that it sim­ply turns out, accord­ing to the evi­dence of their intel­lect, spirit and heart, to be true. More accu­rately, Jesus Christ turns out to be the Truth. That small thing which is every bit as frag­ile in appear­ance and incon­tre­vert­ible in fact as our hold on real­ity wins some num­ber of souls. It’s by the grace of God that the kind of pri­va­tion and hor­ror that were com­mon­place to ancient and medieval peo­ple are so greatly dimin­ished that we can even con­ceive of a world with­out wars. All of the cen­turies that we’ve been doing many fool­ish things may not have been com­pletely wasted after all, if we stand on the brink of a time when both the believ­ing and non-believing world will know a Chris­t­ian ethos so well that even if it doesn’t acknowl­edge Christ as Lord and Sav­ior, the obsta­cles to our sal­va­tion won’t be con­quest by ene­mies or faint­heart­ed­ness in the face of plagues and floods so much as dis­trac­tions by com­puter games and the other efflu­via of a well-fed, muddle-headed and ungrate­ful population.

    So … the game’s not pure evil, but there’s no way I can turn it into a good thing. And there are a lot of angles from which it looks like an unwhole­some waste of time.

    Cou­ple days to the cer­e­mo­nial unin­stall. I’ll see if I can use them to find my DVD player’s remote. (Kidding.)


    Related posts:

    1. VERY quick round-up
    2. Dumb Christ­mas presents

    July 30th, 2006 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 07.30.2006

    Good thoughts. I know how you can get sucked into “time sucks” as a friend calls them.

    Good to see you back, thank you for the edi­fy­ing quotes.

  • Grace

    Love your friend’s phrase for it. I often end up using the word ‘sink­holes’ to describe those things that steal time and energy and focus and are so hard to climb your way out of. Sort of like the sand trap at a golf course (as near as I can tell, being a non-golfer).

  • Greg

    The record needs to reflect that I *did* end up with the Staff of Waba­jack, and you didn’t. :)

  • Grace

    Boy, talk about a low blow! All right, go ahead and tell the world that I didn’t fin­ish all the Daedric Quests either. Man!!!

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