Erosion of the Will: Video Games

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.

-Seneca, from “On the Shortness of Life”

I once had a profound, or at least a fanatical, appreciation for video games. My summer of 1994 was spent in pained anticipation of the Super Nintendo release of Mortal Kombat II, mowing lawns for cash and practicing every character’s special moves on an unplugged controller. By the time I could actually touch the game, I was deadly. I wept after beating Lavos in Chrono Trigger, as I watched the game’s generous ten-minute credit sequence unfold before me. In sixth grade, I gained notoriety for playing two days of hookie after the Nintendo 64 hit store shelves, but the truth of the matter was worse than that: I had willed myself into a genuine illness so I could stay home and explore Princess Peach’s 3D castle.

Today, I regard video games as a profound threat to the maturation process of my fellow young men.

Rob Ager Interviewed by Andrew Dimitrov

Hello, this is Andrew Dimitrov for Shoestring Century.  I am privileged to bring to the fore some ideas and insights of Mr. Rob Ager, an independent film analyst, filmmaker and author who hails from Liverpool, England.  Mr. Ager is the mind behind Collative Learning Systems, a form of self-therapy which borrows from multiple psychological disciplines in a uniquely structured program.  Collative Learning Systems is the name of his self-published book, available on eBay, and CollativeLearning.com is the name of his popular website.

I first encountered Mr. Ager’s work about a year ago, when I stumbled upon his YouTube analyses of Stanley Kubrick’s films.  Mr. Ager provoked my intellect in ways untold by his careful analysis of minute diegetic details in Kubrick’s work.  His basic thesis of Kubrick’s canon is that Kubrick inserted a vast array of incremental structural details into his films that offer a concurrent dialogue to his overt storylines.

Two prominent examples are his review of The Shining, which suggests that Kubrick transformed Stephen King’s tale of alcoholism and familial collapse into an examination of Native American genocide by the white man, and his review of Eyes Wide Shut, which highlights the aristocratic fascism and patriarchy of millennial Manhattan’s elite, subsumed by the story of marital infidelity which forms only the tip of the story’s iceberg.  His reviews of both films and many others are available on YouTube and also at the website CollativeLearning.com. I give it my highest recommendation.

After some back-and-forth, I was privileged to submit to Mr. Ager some questions and we present them to you in interview format, for your listening pleasure only.  Mr. Ager, for various reasons, did not consent to an unrehearsed interview, but was gracious enough to send audio files of his voice so that we may simulate the experience for you.  So, without further ado, my questions and his answers:

The Interview

Andrew Dimitrov: Mr. Ager, you were the recipient of a lot of bad noise when you identified diegetic features of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange that dealt with conspiracy theories.  You didn’t identify yourself as a conspiracy theorist, but nonetheless received backlash for exposing features of the movie that may have supported the idea of global conspiracy.  In retrospect, what is it about your review that was so instantly polarizing?