Everything Old Is New, And Worse

A disclaimer, to start. I am 23, nearly 24. I only barely recall a time before the Internet took its modern form, where everything is strained through a narrow mesh of websites. I am definitively not old enough to understand the original time of the things for which I am nostalgic. I was 6 when the subprime bubble popped, and all I know is the way down from there.

As I try to gather my thoughts for this piece, I am starting by trying to synthesize how it feels to write about the Internet. There are few wholly incorrect ways of elucidating that experience, but they all are like looking at one face of a kaleidoscope. Everything that continues to exist in this age, which has crossed the boundary from one type of Web to the next, is fighting against a great entropy.

I bring this up because the weekend before last was the Halo World Championships. I’m not much for esports otherwise, nor am I a particularly skilled player myself, often hovering around an 850 CSR (Professional players are usually at least double that). But it’s a fun watch.

Halo was my entryway into video games, a fandom which I have carried across fifteen or so years. It’s never been the biggest thing in my life, but always up there. If we tie ourselves to cultural symbols, then I’ve certainly cast a line in its direction. I read the books, I listen to the soundtracks (and try to keep the politics of its composer out of my mind as much as I can), I have seen the director commentaries for Halo 1 and 2 more times than I care to admit.

Much like me, Halo has undergone an identity crisis in the intervening years. As part of the deal to allow Bungie, the original developers, to go independent, the franchise was sold to Microsoft in 2010. The entries in the series since then have been all over the place. Some good (Halo Infinite (multiplayer)), some bad (Halo Infinite (campaign), some unfulfilled (Halo 5’s original Hunt the Truth campaign), some catastrophic (Halo 5’s actual campaign). Always marred by changes in studio leadership, script rewrites, and a fear of living up to the tradition of a departed generation, the original trilogy are still held in higher regard than their sequels. Attempts to bridge this gap often feel unstuck in time. Community remakes of 20 year old maps with new geometry and mechanics is occasionally a fun twist, but often unsightly. The dead are best not reanimated. We already have their traditions.

This is not an unfamiliar story to a fan of any long-extant franchise. Star Wars is the obvious example. Nothing can replace the experience of loving something as a child, and every attempt to drag and reconstitute the cultural signifier into modernity is met with something I am almost inclined to call IP Body Horror. Cultural fracking is probably a similar enough description of the same phenomenon, but IP Body Horror is to me about the evidence of Dr. Frankenstein’s scalpel as the monster shuffles into a shareholder meeting. The monster is put to work, upholding an aged franchise from one shoulder, and the latest culture war flashpoint on the other. In this case, it was memes from Gamestop and the White House weighing one side down, and on the other an announcement of a remake of 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved. The trailer was a sort of fever dream for me. A recreation of the famous beach landing from the original game, with slick modern graphics, altered weapons, things that felt just out of place. I watched with an unease about whether I was wrong for not embracing the renewal of something I loved, or whether to feel disappointed by it being dragged back in front of me for a third life, considering it was already remastered the first time in 2011.

Nevertheless, the shale is still shaken, and the monster continues to shuffle. The mediation of our relationship to the monster is the most obvious change. Halo is a game that made its name on fostering community. The LAN Party is largely a thing of the past, but every story I hear told of the good old days is of people lugging their CRTs across town to play with their friends. With limited exceptions, I play Halo alone. The experience of gaming is largely alone for me.

This brings me to a point I wanted to make about self expression. If I didn’t spell it out in another piece, or if you didn’t know, I’m a trans woman. How long I’ve known, what it means to me, are questions I’ve increasingly found myself farther from answering. All I know is I’m here now, and so often I am here alone. I can talk to my friends about the shared experience of being trans in this time and moment, or read articles and watch documentaries about what it’s like to be someone like me, but the one-sidedness is unbearable if you stop to peer around the corner.

I talked to a professor the other day. I am considering a PhD in my field, that being urban planning. I always have a hard time explaining what planning is. One ridge of the kaliedoscopic rock face says that it is a vast and interdisciplinary field which bridges every social and hard science into the outcomes which we see in the city. Another says it is a technocratic and incrementalist profession that tries to reconcile the imperatives of capital and the people who it erodes. There are other views, but mine is that I care about the experience of cities, what they are. This professor shared those views, and so we talked about the program he teaches in. We went back and forth about how urban space is treated now, how it allows for narrow expressions of the self and relatedness to others. They restrict the contact outlined by Delaney in my prior piece, and they allow for the reproduction of the forces which created them. I mentioned to him that a famous gay bar where I live was bought out by a shadowy firm, who intends to franchise the brand. I could not think of something more oxymoronic than “franchise gay bar”, but clearly someone saw it a good enough place to frack. I didn’t go there many times. I won’t go there again.

In the intervening time, I was invited by a friend to an informal weekly bar takeover, and have gone a few times. It’s pretty good. I am still my horribly awkward self. I didn’t instantly become friends with everyone there. But it feels better to be in a space where we are there because we decide to be. Sidestepping the monster, fresh off the operating table, to place my time and comfort somewhere else.

A Correction On Last Time

I got the release dates wrong for Bale’s filmography. American Psycho came out in 2000, and Equilibrium in 2002.

Something I Saw / Read / Did Since The Last Post