Excitable Boy

Carefree living in Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

I got fired playing a video game.

To be clear, I didn’t get fired because I was playing a video game, although I’ve come close.

I got fired IN a video game.

I was playing this game, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

It’s like a lot of Japanese Role Playing Games. Capitalized because that’s how we do things around JPRGs.

You accrue wealth and experience by carrying out Missions. You use this wealth and experience to Level Up your character so you can take on more difficult enemies. Combat can be beating folks up or shooting zombies or magically defeating demonic creatures, it’s all sorta the same beast. Beasts.

Kill things. Get rewards. Use rewards to pay for more tools to kill things. Kill bigger and more things.

But like most Japanese Role Playing Games, the gameplay loops are weird and there are a lot of them. You can lose your place if you walk away from the game too long and have to start over. You forget combinations of buttons or simply how to navigate the world and all its complex systems, minigames, weapon configurations, social upgrades, scavenger hunts.

And also like most Japanese Role Playing Games it has very fucked up ideas about women and men. And weird side stories about creepy dudes with strange fetishes. Some of these games are the kind of thing you’d be super embarrassed if someone adult or female saw you playing.

See: Catherine, which has you playing a sort of dreamland QBert while simultaneously navigating relationship difficulties, Shadows of the Damned with its revolver as an eternal series of dick-joke upgrades, Metal Gear Solid IV The Phantom Pain, with its unusual breast physics and characters who conveniently cannot wear clothing as it “hurts” their invisible burn injuries.

This is not for the faint of heart.

This is for the eternal 14 year old.

There are ridiculous variations on these games, from the Persona series, with high schoolers in a gameplay loop about friendship and relationships crossed with magic and demons and suicide and abusive adults, to Final Fantasy, the ultimate JPRG series, with bizarrely arcane combat mechanics, terribly stratospheric haircuts, overcomplicated component power systems and a rideable bird called a Chocobo; to these Yakuza games – Like A Dragon being an offshoot.

In the first few scenes of Like A Dragon; Infinite Wealth, your character, the main character, your video game avatar, loses his job.

Even in a video game, can a guy get a break?

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I used to love movies.

I know more about movies – horror and sci-fi movies especially – before 2010 than just about anyone.

That’s not casual bluster, I read Leonard Maltin’s video guide front to back - for fun - as a kid. I was insatiable in my quest for movie knowledge, probably because my dad wasn’t big on going to the movies, so I had to figure out what was going on in theaters by proxy.

Books about movies, film novelizations – I read Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET the Extra Terrestrial, Alien and Star Wars, all before I saw the movies.

Later, with my first paycheck from Mount Olivet Lutheran Retreat Center, I would buy my first VCR. And with that and a membership at the local video store, I watched 3 movies a day without fail. Sometimes more. I was piggish, insatiable, epicurean.

I haunted bookstores and video stores. I wanted to read everything and see everything,

And now, everything is available. Where previously you had to search, scouring record stores and video stores and the backs of magazines, to find those rare Hammer films, or exploring Hong Kong cinema, which you had to go to sketchy Chinatown stores to find, and hope they were subtitled.

Now, you can find anything with the help of a keyboard and a smart TV.

Recently I had a bout with sickness that, due to the medicine, made me tired all the time. I would fall asleep at 7pm without fail. Just knocked out. So many courses of antibiotics and steroids and uppers and downers. My immune system was and is still shot.

I couldn’t keep up. I tried to watch TV shows, I tried to catch up on Agatha All Along, or Severance, or whatever the flavor of the week was. I’d fall asleep, assuming I could even pick one to watch.

The overwhelming choice of where to put those two hours. And two hours without agency. Two hours that I can’t spend doing anything else.

I want to keep being creative. I want to build things.

Reading felt like I was doing something of value

Playing video games felt like I had some agency in the experience

Watching a movie that anyone with a remote and a shitty Visio TV could easily access, where was the mystery in that? What was unique about that experience?

As I drift further from being potentially on the vanguard – am I smart enough? Connected enough? Do I offer enough value? – agency is more and more important.

I didn’t know that til I started to write this down.

We are fed so much information so fast, it’s a miracle our heads don’t just blow up, like that dude in Scanners.

You have to understand that when Star Wars hit, science fiction fandom had been an ongoing sub mainstream concern for years. The counter culture had the luxury of an ignorant mainstream and the arcane lingua franca of a hidden tribe.

You had to hunt for cool things. You had to be in the know.

As Sam Valenti IV says in this recent Substack article on the Insane Clown Posse, quoting W David Marx:

“Unambiguous distinction requires tall fences, and there must be high signaling costs to keep out normies. Subcultural and countercultural styles require significant expenditures of time, money, and reputation… When groups have anticommercialist tendencies, like punks and hippies, the requirements may instead focus on extravagant changes to appearance, such as body piercings and mohawks. Members themselves don’t see their lifestyles as mere counterimitations, but perceive them as direct expressions of personal feelings.”

Fans had decades, generations, to toil in obscurity and be abused by their peers for being nerds. Can you blame them for being over hyped about their secret teenage loves suddenly made impossible flesh? Or Iron, man?

And now, with corporations scouring Tik Tok and Instagram to alert them to the latest trends and everything moving at the speed of the internet, nothing has the time to grow in secret and develop critical cultural mass.

(Except, perhaps, the aforementioned Clown Posse, although can you see an ICP Cinematic Universe in your future?)

What’s underground today is blase normie culture tomorrow.

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Immediate, aggregate access to all of pop culture has devalued it.

The speed of information is overwhelming.

The quiet, contemplative act of watching a movie is replaced by binging Netflix.

I suppose you could Netflix and chill, if you were dead inside.

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I sat down with my wife and a pal and watched Nosferatu this week.

Robert Eggers’ films are so inarguably stylized and personal.

He’s like a humorless Tim Burton. Every image is a gorgeous postcard, but they don’t exactly add up to a compelling story.

Even if he’s taking the bones from existing material, like this film.

But I made it through the entire movie in one sitting. Without jumping up mid-movie to go read a book — my chosen act of reflection these days - or play a video game instead.

Although said pal and I did spend several hours whooping each other’s asses in Mortal Combat 11, to be fair.

Also watched the Yacht Rock documentary. Made it through that in two sittings.

I’ve set up the guest room downstairs as a sort of mini theater. A projector, a hand-me-down screen, a Denon receiver I found on eBay, old but solid speakers.

I’m preparing myself to re-enter the world of cinema.

Am I slowing down? Necessarily?

Doesn’t that sound nice?

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Thanks for reading Are You Experienced? I’m Nick Tangborn and I’m a little late this week! I blame birthday hijinks and the inescapable lure of Too Many Projects™

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