The USS Quad Damage

You kids and your video games

I refer to someone who refers to someone.

From The Escapist :

On the topic of play, and of age, and of how we grow, I’m often brought back to a simple, silly, and oddly touching comic in Randall Munroe’s minimalist strip xkcd. The particular comic is called “Grownups,” which to me is a wonderful word, describing adulthood in a play-pretend language of childhood. It’s all very simple – a stick figure man drops by on a stick figure woman, and finds she’s filled her entire apartment with playpen balls – those same balls that you might have waded through, hip-deep, when you were little. The art is simple as well, but there are visual hints towards the significance of the act: The world of xkcd is mostly of black lines on white paper, but each ball that spills out into the hallway is brightly colored. When asked why she did it, the woman says, "Because we’re grown-ups now, and it’s our turn to decide what that means."

The strip speaks to adulthood, and how we choose to face it, but I’ve always taken it as a lesson about games. We see a life, transformed by play, into something wondrous. And though it reminds me, most of all, of the medium of games, I find another word on the tip of my tongue. Another medium, an old one, perhaps the oldest – poetry.