Seeing The Matrix

When I play videogames, especially big ones with Expansive Open Worlds &c., I tend to play them intensely for about a week or so, burn out, come back a while later and finish the story, then never play them again.

The initial break is the point where I’ve been playing them “fully” for a while: I’ve been doing all the sidequests and getting all the gear and I’ll usually get maybe half- to two-thirds of the way into the story missions and I’ll realise: oh shit! I can see the matrix!

And at that point I lose interest: all the cracks become apparent, all the mechanisms and artifice becomes impossible to ignore; I lose my suspension of disbelief and everything just flattens to a spreadsheet. I can only play it again when I've got a bit of distance and 'forgotten' that.

I think I did this to myself with social media. After a while, the bit of my brain that notices these things registered an appreciable lack of additional novelty in the system. I was kept going by the dark patterns in the design and stuff, but the thing itself had lost its succor; I started to be able to generalise types of post and interaction patterns and people.

Granted, I think this is more because the nature of the medium encourages people to make themselves legible in a small number of specific ways but even so: as ably outlined here, I try to reject thinking of people as types, and resent a system that induces me to do so.

I really do hate being one of those You Should Do Things In Real Life old people, but I guess I am now. Real life has a surprising amount of detail and real-life social interactions have a remarkable level of resolution. I'm open to there being online spaces that have more of it, but I've not found them yet.