In 1993 I bought an Amiga CD32. In fact, I was 10 at the time, so I had it bought for me. Wasn’t I a lucky boy? Well, yes I was. It was a lot of fun, but it was the beginning of the end for the gamer in me. It took another 7 years for me to truly take to heart the indisputable fact that:

Video games = fast forwarding your life

I read this aphorism on the back page of CU Amiga in about 1993, and I made the font big just there because although I understood what it meant, I didn’t really get it until I was an undergraduate. These things take time.

But if gaming is pressing x2 on the remote control of life, what is watching television? Possibly x4, because of the total passivity of it. But then reading must be around x4 too. And blogging is probably x128. Alas, there’s no pause or rewind button, the play and stop buttons only work once, and the whole system is obfuscated and DRM-infected so you can’t back it up to more reliable media (our best hackers are working on it though).

But isn’t the aphorism just another way of saying time flies when you’re having fun? Isn’t having fun supposed to be a good thing? I think it’s is trying to say something about an activity being worthwhile in the long run, but in the long run, aren’t we all dead? (One of the few things Keynes got right)

OK, that’s just a cop-out excuse to say nothing is worthwhile. Perhaps nothing is, and equally perhaps we really don’t have free will, but in both cases it makes no sense to act like those facts are true even if they are.

So what is important in the medium run?

The last post was a sort of excuse to explain why I phoned Toys R Us before Christmas to ask if they had any Nintendo Wii’s in stock. They said they were getting some in tomorrow (the 16th of December), so I went down there at 8am. There was a queue of 200 people who had been there since the previous evening.

I’m clearly a rank amateur at this.

Nevertheless, when the supply squeeze eases (maybe in February?), I fully intend to get one and chalk it up to a technophilic desire to test out the VR-like interface possibilities of the Wiimote, and not at all to use it as a fast-forward button. Oh no.

I also have a great desire to see Sony crash and burn, with the Wii killing the PS3 the way the DS is killing the PSP. Sony is one of the chief architects of jokes like Vista’s crippled media playback capabilities and the whole stillborn HD midden. The only downside to a total failure of the PS3 is the probable ascendancy of HD-DVD. At first I was disappointed at the format split, because it seemed to doom both to obscurity, but now I hope it continues so they can battle each other into their own shallow graves alongside Laserdisc.