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analogous statements
November 2008 
Harvest Moon
Posted on Apr 13th, 2006
by 
Brondu
Brondu
Song of the day: Robbie Williams - Your Gay Friend
Word of the day: exotic (lol)
The name Harvest Moon is synonymous (at least for me) with a franchise of role-playing video games, created by Natsume, where you play a character that operates a farm. The farm is generally adjacent or in some ways close to a town. Most of the titles feature a marriage option, a horse-back riding option, and a diverse farming experience including the ability to raise cattle, sheep, chickens, crops (of all kinds). The first Harvest Moon title for the Gamecube is the title that I will be performing my sacred (later-to-be-described) injunction upon. An injunction sanctioned and perfunctorily blessed by the most dysfunctional face of Divinity ever to grace a non-descript Wal-mart: Teddy-the-titterbear. Now, if you’ll excuse my proclivity towards fragmenting the Sacred into easily dismissed, loosely defined personas we can move on to the heart of the matter.
I plan on spending an average of 1 hour a day on this video game over a period of two months and if I’m to do that I’m going to have to derive a deep understanding of what I am gleaning from such a commitment. Hence, I am putting the video game on trial, so to speak.
The game, for me, represents a complex enigma that has persisted with me throughout all my formative years, right on into these glory days of relative old age. The question, the very average question, has stuck with me all this time: Why are you playing a video game which involves petting and riding an imaginary horse, interacting with imaginary people, creating imaginary relationships, engaging an imaginary interpersonal, and milking an imaginary economic structure when all of these things are imperative to what makes a functional, acceptable human being in today’s North American society? Why are you continuing in this irrational, seemingly unethical use of time? (the one ‘real relationship’ that this type of question/questioner might permit validity to is the relationship I would have to the video game creator whom I would feel an instant kinship for based on the fact that the video game is a pretty complete exterior correlate/reflection of/manifestation of that particular individual’s interiority)
The justifications to using my time this way are too many to count; the first of which being that the indulgence of myself in this video game brings about these very writings, this very inquiry. And the value of these introverted introspective musings cannot be taken lightly. Or can it?
Let me start by broadening the scope of the video game with a few valid perspectives, lightly held and not necessarily mine:
- the video game is an exterior mechanism in which certain economic propensities are impersonally measured
- the video game represents an opportunity for contrasting the two seemingly different spiritual methodologies of self-transcendence. Judaism’s conscious immersion as opposed to Buddhism’s unattached realization of impermanent transient/illusory-natured reality
- the video game is a means by which line-specific hierarchies can be derived and corresponded with/seamlessly integrated into stage-specific hierarchies; the integration process of bringing a model of hierarchically ordered streams into a model of hierarchically ordered centres of gravity is a large cognitive step and would initially require an assessment of a given stream’s psychospiritual calibration (implying that one line of consciousness development has a higher relative value than another) and would follow with a cognitive requirement of close, holistic observance of what emerges as a result of contact with a given line (which would determine the line’s correlating stage value)… e.g. the desire for travel brings about a de-centering from a semi-ingrained (obviously unexamined) identification with ethnocentricity as a result of a great deal of contact with said ethnic groups.
- the video game is a complexly drawn analogy to Earth (evidenced in that it opts to be more of a model of reality than a subset). As an analogy to Earth my relationship to the game becomes a part-holistic representation of my relationship to the Manifest universe. In a many ways, however, this isn’t quite accurate, because the manifest universe has more to offer and engages more senses than a pale video game, but in other ways it makes perfect sense.
So now you see how the video game can be more than a video game and more than an incomprehensible relationship with either one person or a load of imaginary people and animals (people and animals that are available to me in ‘real life’). But have I answered the real question yet? No. I’ve just offered alternative viewpoints.
Still.. I feel good about it all, for now. So I’ll run along.
PS: For my zaadz friends, I will be continuing to post my learnings on Harvest Moon on my Harvest Moon learnings site. check it out
Access: PublicTagged with: harvest moon, video gaming, video games, learnings, analogous statements, sexy bronduality
just beware, if you give your blue feather to Muffy(who lives at the bar) you’ll have a wife that doesn’t really help out much around the farm!
-Rob
I would like to see how you like the game after about a month. The need of the generation X and beyond to “play the game” is a way to get back to the Earth in a way, but not do the hard work, bcz they are raised on games and technology. Sure thing, this is my singular opinion, so not sure how to rile up your generation (except you - who is already DOING so much) to love NATURE, not just to play virtual games. Light to you, Brian, Harmony
to Rob: lol, it’s too late for me. When she said, “I think men who work hard are sexy.” I was smitten. Do you play the game or did you do some research?
to Harmony: I don’t know any gen Xers who are under financial durress (or even are tawdry contributors to ‘Earth’ or Earth’s society) because of a low work ethic… yet…
I see that there is a problem in cutting NATURE out of the equation of one’s life, but I don’t see the problem in cutting out WORK. Does this mean I would never be a construction worker or a clerk at 7-11? Yes, but that’s not the point. My aversion to such jobs do not stem from an aversion to get my ass in gear and get a job done (which I’ve done when it has been required of me - and to clarify, the requirement is always placed by me on me… after factoring in the exterior pressure and calibrating the meaning of such pressure, it’s wholistic validity, in my interior).
Perhaps the rise of video game sales represents an emergent psychology required for understanding/motivating today’s youth. We don’t want to look at the sixty years of our adulthood as a great big obligatory job which we somehow got suckered into because we were born into the wonderful side of the world where everybody has food. We start looking at and questioning the institutions raising us (because our parents generally step back and step out) when we’re eleven years old and we don’t stop when we graduate (which I haven’t done yet, simply to exemplify the uselessness of public education in actually educating anyone…). The way we do want to view or adulthood is as a ever-unfolding path of potential/function where we meet the seemingly infinite possibilities with a playful and adaptable attitude, determined not to dabble, to be specialistis as it were, but to, in our specialization, not abandon a larger scope. The thing of it is my scope, my generation’s scope, is not the same as your generations. We don’t believe it’s enough to take out the trash and realize how greatly you’re affecting the whole. Because while it is truly blessed to serve society we aren’t as interested as PRESERVING it as we are in CHANGING it… Taking out the trash allows the same people to do the same thing they’ve always been doing, staticly, for their whole lives ad infinitum. So while we’ll take it out cheerfully we aren’t going to be happy about it until we find a way to innovate the trash business into something that is going to work for the emergane of a new civilization, because we can see the old one crumbling all around us, giving birth, as it were, to something as-yet ill-defined but no-doubt vibrant.
Now, I know that looks like it’s just MY experience, but I guarentee if you presented that to people my age they would like the sound of it. I could be very out of touch, but I choose to believe that if nothing else the vibratory frequency/harmonic resonance of the words would strike some sort of a chord. Because I’m not just speaking for myself, I’m speaking for an energy field that I have had the unique oportunity to tap into, the energy field that is my own generation.
Please discuss this further with me. Throw some contradictions at me because at this point I barely even know what I wrote….
Now, regarding nature: what’s amusing is that I have access to numerous differentiations of what is arguably nature in it’s finest form just outside my door. So why do I play a video game with that same nature depicted but not done much justice on a TV screen? It’s mystifying isn’t it?
excellent post Brondu. you really are growing up. i say continue harvesting the moon but don't forget that the moon is not to be fingered. hmmm. i think i mashed up the wrong quotes on that one.
anyway as a (former) video game junkie (who kicked my friends's ass in Super Mario Bros. Quake, Tekken, and Resident Evil), i can relate with your musings. i've heard of Harvest Moon but i haven't played that sucker yet coz i don't have tolerance to play simulation games.
not that i don't care about simulation games or even MMORPG. oh no! in fact, i have so high respect for them that i avoid them like the plague lest i get sucked in and render myself useless in the “real” world. so in short, it's my personal inadequacy and not the video game that is the issue here.
having said that let me offer you this Evil Koan. if playing the video games can indeed expand one's awareness since video games are like dream machines. but what more if YOU ARE A CREATOR of game engines generating worlds within worlds within universes within wormholes with their own physics and laws and rules and metaphysics and characters and objects and matrix codes all wrapped into enigmatic assembly language and binary codes? (no wonder game developers are called sometimes woshipped as gods!)
brood upon it and blog about it once you get a glimpse.
~C (for Code)
P.S. ”Most of the titles feature a marriage option, a horse-back riding option, ”
hmmm. sounds like enumcl… nevermind.
P.P.S. Super Mario Brothers still rock!
P.P.P.S. Pacman is dope!
I see that I didn’t clarify how video games facilitate or are a reflection of this desire to change society and innovate new institutional paradigms for the extremely long term good… the way video games correlate with this claimed truth about my generation is that they are
A: an emergant art form
B: an ability to see and equate LIFE with PLAY as opposed to LIFE with WORK, they are a reflection of our desire to look at life differently then our parents and our parents, for the most part, just don’t get it.
C: video games often go on over long periods of times and the most popular video games are of the non-linear variety, such as massively-multiplayer online RPGs. This type of video game takes in a massive amount of variables and equates them all to give you your result day by day. These video games require planning, strategy, foresight, and, well, often times they require just plain work - but they always remain a game, even as operational society remains a game in our eyes to some degree….
But maybe we’ll all (or just me) will grow out of this soon.
I should say more but the OC is on and I’m riveted, as always.
P.P.P.P.S. i you still haven't seen these yet, check them out. i'm sure you'll get juvenile orgasms just by reading these.
Game Studies - the international journal of computer game research
PlayOn - Exploring the Social Dimensions of Virtual Worlds
and i have more of those here. so get a freakin' Ma.gnolia account so you can help in collecting these nuggets, jeesh!
thanks ~C4 Chaos. I intend to keep harvesting the moon but you really cracked something open when you talk about being the creator of game ENGINES. My thinking was trapped in terms of working inside an already created framework, in which some aspects of the ‘code’ were alterable but generally not to be screwed with. Now I have some things to think about. Good work.
P.P.P.P.P.S. don't waste your time defending your gaming fetish! focus on the task at hand! generation gaps abound and people who didn't immerse themselves in games wouldn't understand!
i say carry on with your fascination of gaming and get as much wisdom from it as much as you can. go deep into that rabbit hole, just remember to emerge out of it a little bit “more” whole.
your links and your advice are hitting the spot. hitt-ing the spot! although it was fun to defend my fetish. it forces me to take closer looks. it would seem I must look oh-so-much closer than I have as yet.
LOL, well, my brother plays it, and I play a few virtual days of his game every now and then…he married Muffy, and then the next day my 8 year old cousin, Quenton comes over and says “Don’t marry Muffy. She never does any work at the farm.”
I played the one that came out for Nintendo 64…got all the house/farm expansions, a wife, and a kid, etc. in that one….all in the span of just 3 virtual years.
Now I’ve been watching my bro play Prince of Persia…and waiting on my bud, Jeremy to finish ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ so I can have a go at it(I seriously played the demo of that game for 4 hours straight once….and there’s only one bad guy in the whole thing…just riding the horse around in that one is a spiritual experience, ha!)
One thing about video games that makes them particularly amusing to me is that they really reinforce the illusion of control. Pretty hillarious.
-Rob
So many things are culminating to make me want to buy a PS2… but that’s OK. I shall refrain. Hilarity doth indeed abound in the realm of the virtual.
I watched a trailer for Shadow of Colossus and my heart desired to experience its gameplay.
hilarity of the fourth kind……
Rob said: “One thing about video games that makes them particularly amusing to me is that they really reinforce the illusion of control. Pretty hillarious.”
nice. substitute “life” for “video games” and…. you know what i mean.
life is the illusion…videogames reinforce the illusion….but yeah…heh.
-Rob
If life is an illusion, why am I enjoying this fruit leather so much? I’m sucking on CLOUDS and I’m absolutely LOVING it.
Must we always flee the many and find the one?
What happened to:
The world is illusory
Brahman alone is real
Brahman is the world
that seems like a workable, integral, acurate non-mystical mysticism to me…
in fact, as I’ve didactically stated before, it seeeeeeems to be the way things are…
but what sort of ground am I standing on here (literally, figuratively, ecumenically, and interrelative to structures and maps of meaning)?
of course a branch of that [earlier stated quote], if we were to examine it in the light of illusion of control, is that illusion of control could be a very seperative, illusion-bound thing, therefore in the nondual framework of ‘Brahman is the world’, it could be possible that the reailty of the situation is made manifest, which is that your undifferentiated ego is doing Spirit’s work unconciously, and then later it does it consicously, in a framework of infinite choice but a transpersonal reality of singularly singular options…. hmm… just an idea…
the world is real and lllusory at the same time. that's buddhist logic to you. when i'm having sex it is sooo real.when i sleep at night or when i get hit by a truck the world is none existent to me. i'd say the mystics are all deluded! except U.G. kidding.
it's all about the ripples…
Wow, AC really took it to ET and ET represented himself beautifully.
I like AC’s interviews. Now I must buy myself a subscription to that site.
speaking of video games, the April 2006 issue of WIRED (14.04) is all about THAT. check it if you still don't have a copy.
i printed out all of those articles, put them on the floor, and danced in a paganistic ritual around them because they were so AWESOME. seriously…
LOL. nice. so your next big-time novel better be centered around GAMING dawg!
My new novel is the Garden of Eden all over again with half the Utopian aspect and twice the Explorative aspect.
Actually that’s probably not true. It’s mostly pretty provocative same-old. lol…
But here’s an EK42DP (that’s for TWO day plural):
Why make a novel ABOUT videogaming when I could make a GAME?
nice. that's a Super Cooooolossal EK42DP is you ask me. just let me know. i'm a good game tester. i've heard that game testers make like $40/hr.
dude, you so have to see this Spore video @ YouTube. that is all.
Man I saw a 40 minute demonstration about that very game! I don’t remember the exact link but I was significantly stoked about the significance replotting evolution in a game format could have! I mean… we’re really figuring stuff out and whatnot. That’s all I can say cause I’m dead tired from my 9-5.