THE MASTER
PLAN OF ELECTRONIC ARTS: “TURN PEOPLE INTO INSOMNIAC ACID BURN-OUTS”
by Tom Dempster, Our Foreign Correspondent
So it has come to this. We live in an age where information rules
our lives and the only escape is through entertainment. It should be duly noted
that the very word entertainment comes from Latin – whatever the ur-word
is – meaning ‘to hold between.’ Information, of course, meaning
‘those ideas, stories, or issues cleared through the NSA for semi-immediate
release to the populace fortunate enough to own devices upon which we can be
entertained.’ And the lines between information and entertainment are
becoming more and more blurred to the average schmuck, and while we’re
in a tizzy about semantics, let us throw in the word education, from Cypriot
Greek and Neo-Spanish meaning ‘to toss about a slough and flurry of random
bits and pieces of information made entertaining as though words themselves
became humanoids and decided to run amok and slash throats with factoidal scimitars.’
Nearly half of all American households own a computer. Well, if it were 1994,
it would be called a computer. But we don’t do much computing on these
things anymore. The days of monochrome monitors perching on giant Tandy boxes
are done for all but a few school districts in Alabama (God bless their four-day
school week, by the by), and the populace on the whole has no fucking idea what
DOS, QDOS, or “command line” means. Yet they use these machines
daily and grouse and moan when things explode, when digital anarchy arises,
per se, and have no idea what to do to fix the box, to quell the black-scarved
wanks and bits and bytes telling your mother of a board to resist the power
of being told to do every single goddamn thing you want it to do. And there
are reasons for this: take, for instance, the relatively obscure yet insidiously
and diabolically brilliant idea of planned obsolescence. There will be uprisings.
There will be bionic bloodshed and brimstone and creeching about how you want
to shove a chainsaw into several of Bill Gates’ or Steve Jobs’ or
Woczniak’s orifices. This is what they want. And you have no choice until
the next fix comes out.
I am one of those fools who thinks owning one of these devilish machines is
worthwhile for some reason. Rather, I do not think so – I would rather
not acknowledge my own babbling incoherency of nerddom. I purchased my first
wintel machine in 1998 from the father of my former high school band director,
and old guy who worked for IBM designing mainframes and working actively in
the department of planned obsolescence: he maintained and denigrated FORTRAN-based
mainframes for the State Bureau of Investigation in North Carolina. He used
to work in Austin, Texas, doing the same thing, except he used COBOL and worked
for the Texas Board of Health, subcontracted out by the company known as Big
Screw. Blue. Yes. No. He did not need my money, but there I was, in a suburb
of Raleigh, North Carolina, handing four hundred of my hard-earned dollars from
a pig-farming job I held over the summer for what turns out (unbeknownst to
the neophyte that was I at the time) to be a reeking steaming pile of beige
shitplastic. It ran at 133 Mhz, comparable to the top speed of a Segway when
paired with a Ferrari 240 in a dream race; it had a whopping 32 MB of RAM, or
the equivalent intellectual quotient of chimps running around in a nicely-decorated
house with expensive and fragile knick-knacks and bric-a-brac. Paddy whack.
So he threw me a bone with no meat. I had to gnaw and chomp and lick everything
I could out of it and eventually placed it into a vat of vinegar while I learned
on my own the ins and outs of technology!!! I learned what RAM is and how it
works and processors and coprocessors and BIOS and even taught myself some command-line
lingo in case the demons came to roost within. Which they did. And, if you are
one of the 100 million Americans reading this who has a machine, you still don’t
know what the fuck I’m talking about when I say “Bus speed”
or “pipeline cache” or “AGP Aperture Size.”
You illiterate slug. That’s what I would say. Then, then, anyhow. Because,
you see, I knew. I knew. And what not.
And I thought I knew what I was talking about, too. I was fine for a while,
coasting along. And then I did it: recalling my overtly-everything-is-ok childhood,
yet rather secluded, solitary, and censored childhood, I invested twenty simoleons
into a game called Sim City 2000. For the uninitiated, it is, basically, a map-drawing
game. I drew maps of imaginary lands as a child, with fabricated names, climates,
linguistic dialects, traffic patterns, and topographies. A decade between had
passed and I did not think twice about it. Mistake number one.
Sim City 2000 was developed by a smarmy wank called Will Wright. I made a fortune
off the game from suckers like me. The game came out in 1995 and became one
of the most popular games ever developed and sold in the United States. In 1997,
Will Wright, the sole owner of MAXIS, a game company responsible for nearly
every Sim-game every written (well, he did not, obviously do all the work; just
as Matt Groening no longer draws every frame of the Simpsons himself), including,
but not limited to, Sim Farm, Sim Tower, Sim Hospital, Sim Copter, Sim Porn
Star, Sim Executive Assistant to Gene Roddenberry, Sim Migrant Onion Harvester,
Sim Alcoholic With Two Ex-Wives and a Dead Kid, et cetera, sold his company
as a subsidiary to Electronic Arts. Hereafter known as EA. But I am getting
very far ahead of myself.
So, I was busy during my freshman year chain-smoking, acting like a parrot-raven
perched on a concrete pile-on in front of my dorm, and doing my best to get
back at my nymphomaniacal and slovenly rat-whore of a roommate. In between these
times – oh, the memories that I forgot when I discovered pot – I
made it a point to play SimCity religiously. I woke up, went to class, drank
coffee, practiced, masturbated, and sat in front of a monitor, filling my head
with imaginary nowheres and highly-potent ionic-magnetic radiation from the
IBM surplus monitor I bought from Old Man Planned Obsolescence. Hours on end,
days upon days. There are whole weeks blotted out – periods of time I
don’t remember – because of the omnipresent, time-voracious shiny-color-electron-hooker
taking my brain deeper than anything, making me forget to shower or eat or masturbate.
I missed classes, started sucking quite severely in my performance areas, and
was falling into the trap. And then something happened.
MAXIS, a subsidiary of EA, had released Sim City 3000. The long-awaited sequel
to Sim City 2000. Although 2100 through 2999 never surfaced, I was certain to
have this lovely contraption. By then, I was finishing my sophomore year of
college, which meant this: wake up, drink coffee, shower, masturbate, eat, get
high, go to class, come home, repeat ad infinitum. And eventually come home
to sleep. The novelty of SC2K had only recently worn off, with nothing really
replacing it. My mind was turning vapid, visions of megalopolises spinning in
my head with a pained love-hate relationship with a machine that, because of
planned obsolescence, was now far behind, had been updated numerous times, and
small, unexplained fires began breaking out inside the beige box of death. Unemployed,
the semester drawing to a close with summer school around the corner, I broke
the bank and bought SC3K.
And there was something still noticeably wrong.
I installed the game. Rather, I attempted installing it. Each time, the machine
hung up or died just as the shiny blue bar dictating the “progress of
installation” neared the end. Like you do, I figured out the problem.
My machine couldn’t handle the spiffy new graphics, the CPU-chugging game
engine, the RAM-intensive sound and DirectX bullshit.
And then baby did a bad, bad thing: what I paid for the game I paid tenfold-plus
for a complete overhaul. Bear in mind that, aside from the occasional paper
to write or midget Bukkakke scene to watch over dial-up, I rarely used the machine.
Except to get my game on, as it were. And I was consumed with a fiery and fierce
passion to re-outfit my machine with the latest, most flashy hardware –
within my meager budget. A few days, a few headaches and a few missed appointments
later, I was back on track: I had most eagerly given myself over to the steel
clutches of electronic-pixilated sex of Will Wright’s money-making brain-shrinking
machine.
Now I will digress briefly. The SimCity games are hailed as being educational
and informative. One has to manage an invisible, imaginary city with invisible,
imaginary inhabitants and keep the place from sinking into the sea or dipping
into the budgetary red. One was supposed to learn about the ins and outs of
playing God-meets-city-manager as well as the ideals of topography, urban planning,
and accounting. Earthquakes would leave fault-lines, and if one was so inclined,
would go and learn about fault lines. Heavy industries would set up shop and
pollute the living fuck out of your green jewel of the forests primeval and
it was up to the consumer – err, player – to go find out about the
main sources of industrial pollution and the effects on the nearby ecosystem.
So, we have a new word here. Take information, entertainment, and education
and force them to procreate. And, we are left with a bastard of a speak-able:
entermacation. This game was supposed to be entermacational. What rarely happened,
however, was the intention of entermacation: I, and no one else I have known
to play the games, have gone out and educated or informed themselves of such
big issues like ecology, urban development, or geology. Frankly, most people
find those dull enough as it is without having to be coaxed by the allure of
bright colors and tall buildings flashing up on a computer screen.
My mind was being sucked back into the nexus. My wallet was filled with red
ink. Visa was already starting to call about why I dropped several hundred dollars
at a computer store that had its own wires crossed and billed itself as “Digital
Escort, Inc.”
And so passed the years 2000 to 2004. At some point in there, EA started developing
all sorts of games: first-person shoot-em-ups (a genre I’ve never quite
enjoyed, being a peaceful urban planner and all), sports games (is it bad enough
I have to watch this on TV without playing make-believe hockey?), adventure
and strategy games, et cetera. Somewhere during this time period, one of my
roommates owned a Play Station box with many games designed by EA. Indeed, another
way where any sense of self-discipline, and decorum and tact of intelligence
were assaulted: hours upon hours playing this or that, wasting away.
Surely you may think that drugs played a part in this. They did, but remember
that I was riding the pale horse of digital crack long before I took knife hits.
Miraculously, I made it through college and moved out west for graduate school.
My IBM-based machine that I bought from Old Man Planned Obsolescence had finally
died and acquired a Macintosh-based machine. A good move, I thought, since Macs
aren’t so good for games.
Until three weeks ago when SimCity 4 was released for use on Apple computers.
And during these three weeks, I can’t tell you what else I’ve been
doing. I haven’t slept. I haven’t thought any independent thoughts
about any of the current issues. I couldn’t tell you what I had to eat
this morning. I have had nightmares about comets and B-Science-fiction-movie
monsters eradicating all traces of my cities. I certainly haven’t showered.
But I certainly have not gone out and robbed banks or found myself in bar fights,
either. And, to the best of my knowledge, I am a lot calmer than four than four
weeks ago. Maybe it’s money well-spent. Or just part of a plan to create
the largest cadre of brainless geeks to inherit the status-quo of a shitty Earth.
Only time and further releases and add-ons to the game will tell.
Next time: What Happened When I tried to talk to the people at AspyrMedia,
a company here in Austin that ports EA games to Mac.