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Gaming Memories Helping to Heal Katrina Wounds
waterlogged writes "Lara Crigger writes a compelling account of the effects of hurricane Katrina on a person's sense of videogames in The Escapist. From the article: 'Hurricanes destroy more than just property; they destroy the sense of property, as well. They smash that universal belief that objects intrinsically carry some emotional gravity or weight. Acts of destruction remind us that physical substances are only equal to the exact sum of their parts: Plastic and cotton, metal or wood. What's left over is a painful buoyancy, an unbearable absence of feeling; you mourn not just your lost PS2 games or your Xbox controllers but also the fact that these once precious things have been proven completely meaningless. Even if they do remain intact after the storm (like the Samus poster), the only entity that really survives is you.'"
Because, in my mind, games can heal katana wounds.
All this is a good thing. Eventually you'll realize that even you don't exist. That'll be even better.
If they had any of the original controllers they could have climbed on them and floated to safety.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Deep. It makes me think that the lawless, gangbanging aftermath of Katrina in New orleans would make a compelling Grand Theft Auto scenario.
an ill wind that blows no good
I'm almost getting nostalgic for a Jon Katz article in this post Columbine^WKatrina world.
For fuck's sake, get some priorities!!!
So I stomped on his foot.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And that is why I play NetHack.
so it's a new thing that deriving your life's worth from your material possessions leaves you lacking in the long run? Don't feel sorry for these people whose stuff was destroyed: at least they have a chance at gaining perspective. Feel sorry for the guy that's still got his XBox and wastes all day, every day on it, or the guy that has a bright shiny car but no sense of personal worth.
Sounds like someone took the red pill...
"It's only after you've lost everything," Tyler says, "that you're free to do anything."
Which is why if a hurricane comes and crushes my console and sweeps away my games, I've lost nothing. The atoms don't matter -- I can buy another plastic console, and buy another piece of plastic and aluminum with some bits on it. I've lost nothing. The long numbers (a DVD with a game on it is just a multibillion-digit-long number) that, when read into a properly-configured piece of plastic and ceramic (say, an XBox or PS2), come to life as video games are of no consequence because they're easily replaced.
But if a hurricane sweeps away my only copies (and my not-remote-enough backups) of the somewhat shorter numbers (million-digit-long strings of bits) that represent my digital photo archive, and then we can talk about pain.
All numbers are unequal. But some are more unequal than others.
It's called a reality check. Believe it or not, stuff doesn't last. Not even big stuff. Life goes on...it's good to be reminded of what's important; we all need that from time to time.
Why did Katrina destroy PS2 and Xbox consoles? We know why.
It's because George Bush doesn't care about black game consoles.
The whole article is like that!!!
wow. seriously someone should tell this chick that not everything is an emotional rollercoaster. I get it, hes stoic marble man and your the sensitive girl that brings out his soft side, while probing his mysterious ways. just wow. This puts some of those homoerotic slashdot trolls to shame.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose"
--Janis Joplin
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Agreed.
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
Consider me insensitive, but how does it take a hurricane to realize this? You can get the same effect from having an SNES cartridge battery die, losing a memory card, or looking at a 200 hour FF7 game save years later and thinking about that lost excessive time. At least that's how I reacted to all of the above. I also don't understand how this is a specific to games. Any person who has survived a catastrophe (hurricane, fire, car collision) can realize the insignificance of material posessions when they walk out of wreckage with the important stuff, like their life and health.
I'd think any geek would have rationalized this. Why is it on Slashdot?
Wait, have we gone so far into materialism that this becomes a wake-up call -- holy crap, my copy of Halo 2 doesn't matter in the long run!
...but if you vote for CowboyNeal in the slashdot polls -- that, my friend, can lead to the cure for cancer. Keep that in mind next time you click on the other options.
Sure, I guess we all need that reminder one way or another and great disasters have a way of giving us that reality check...but Katrina linking us to reality through ownership of Video Games? How frickin shallow are we?
Just to get it over with, here are a few things to remember:
Material posessions don't mean jack in the long run.
Your SAT score doesn't mean jack in the long run either.
Your high score in Tetris, your Super Mario Brothers speed run, and your 100pct completion rating for San Andreas...all insignificant.
Really, when it comes down to it, stuff doesn't matter much at all.
the only entity that really survives is you.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
What's left over is a painful buoyancy, an unbearable absence of feeling; you mourn not just your lost PS2 games or your Xbox controllers but also the fact that these once precious things have been proven completely meaningless. Even if they do remain intact after the storm (like the Samus poster), the only entity that really survives is you.
:)
I dunno why, but I get this same sort of feeling thinking about nuclear war, or just any war really...thinking that the auto shops, the supermarket offers, the little gadgets etc...all completely useless to anyone in the absence of cars, crops and electricity. Just a weird thought I have sometimes...depressing, maybe, but that's just me
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
You get really good at a video game, then an alien coallition recruits you as a pilot. Then its life or death, the video game mattered, but no longer. Sounds strange? Metaphorically, it's not too far off my life.
God spoke to me.
...birds are dying!
We'd up the tempo, to make sure it wasn't us again. But I only live here folks, and I'm only one person. I'm not saying what I would or could do, just reporting what I think is an extrapolation of the attitudes around me.
is malarky, seemingly designed to give a patina of legitimacy to this article. Consider, a screw and a nut certainly have independent existences, but they're much more useful together.
Buy TWO copies of all your favorite games and store the second copy "off-site" in case of a natural disaster. This goes for memory cards as well.
Then once you get your life back together from the hurricane you can pick up where you left off in God of War.
Backups. The lesson is backups.
isn't that the whole point? having a good time with friends?
i remember realizing this some time during my ROM collecting phase -- it didn't take long before i realized that it wasn't the gameplay i craved but the memories of that time of life (childhood).
tell me how one's fond recollections of videogame playing--with brothers, sisters, neighborhood friends--are different from your grandparent's stories of fort building and crayfish hunting?
You know, written by some "artsy" chick who takes pictures of her feet.
The parent post was a quote from Bill Hicks.
You really should credit your quotes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So, video games aren't really that important when your personal Maslow Hierarchy goes Jenga.
Big. Fucking. Revelation.
Boy, I was drowning this one time and I sure needed air and not video games. Makes you think LOL!!111
"- You can do whatever you want!
... :-)
- It's been so long since I heard those words, I don't know what they mean
anymore. [...] Gambling no longer have any appeal for me, when every day
is a risk, cards and dices are not quite as interesting as they used to be"
- Vir & Londo, B5:"Darkness Ascending"
I'd like to see more of these articles on slashdot. Linux don't matter by itself, Macs don't matter themselves, Games don't matter by themselves. It's the ideals and values behind the actual physical incarnation that matters. The voyage is as important as the destination. Nothing is really yours, property is a convenient human invention. This is your life, ending one second at a time. What do you want? Who are you? And why do I keep reading slashdot many times a day?
Animoog.org
Yea, like every other country hasn't done the same thing? Shut up and get over it - you're alive during the United States' ride at the top. Most countries have had theirs atleast once, and they all fall, the only difference? The U.S.A. will go out with a bigger bang than the rest.
Psh, "Yanks", what are you from the 1860's?
X-box is HUGE!!! LORFL! Insightful!
First the disclaimer: I'm not an American, I'm not in the USA, I don't even have relatives there or anything. And I'll be the first to bitch and moan about contemporary American politics and about the occasional chest-thumping redneck. But this... you, sir, are a fucking lunatic and it's people like you that are the problem with the world today. Seriously.
For starters even if you make everyone who voted for Bush personally responsible for all of Bush's idiocies, only slightly less than half the votes went to Bush. So what's your problem with the other half, then? You're willing to dance on someone's grave just because they were born in the USA, or what? How fucked up is that?
And at that point, how does it make you any better? If you're willing to cheer for destruction and suffering inflicted upon civilians, just because they're in the USA, then how does that make you better than those who wish the same on people just because they're born in Iraq? No, seriously. What moral high ground can you claim, from which to look down on them, when you're as big an idiot as the most retarded bible-thumping rednecks they have?
And I'm serious about the "people like you" part. The whole vicious circle of inflicting nasty stuff upon each other is based on people taking the whole Us-Vs-Them thing too seriously. People willing to wish you a flaming death just because of where you were born or who your grandparents were. It's _precisely_ such people who thought it would be a great idea to fly an airplane full of innocent civilians into a building full of innocent civilians, or anything of that calibre. All the way back into ancient history, when an army entered a city and proceeded to rape, kill and enslave just to show them who's the new boss, it was just that mentality that was the problem. That it's "Us" vs "Them". That if you happen to be born in Carthage, you're personally to blame for what Hannibal did to Rome. Or that if you were living in Jerusalem, you're personally responsible for the Muslims' being in command there. (See the Crusaders slaughtering a ridiculous number of the very Christians they were supposedly trying to save.)
And you're willing to cheer for... what? For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, i.e., for permanent psychological damage? Because under the whole bullshit philosophy angle in the summary, that's the cruel reality. It's not that those people had a flash of Nirvana-like enlightenment that material possessions are worthless. It's that those people had the trauma of seeing everything they owned turned into junk or washed away, and went through some hell just keeping onto their very life. A lot of them are probably _affraid_ to get attached to any item any more, and are looking forward to a life spent in fight-or-flight mode, and of waking up in cold sweat after a nightmare about it.
PTSD is a bitch. Your brain gets switched into a semi-permanent mode of trying to learn how you should have dealt with the horror where you actually had no control and no way out. There is nothing to learn, but that's the only thing that would naturally end it. So you're stuck re-living it over and over again. And yet avoiding anything that reminds you of it. So, yes, a lot of them will be stuck fearing the very notion of ever getting attached to something or someone ever again. It's not just their gaming life that's taken a change, it's that their whole _Real_ _Life_ is fucked up now. Including any hope of a meaningful family life, social life, etc.
Yes, it's not fun for the people who got it in Iraq. (Both American soldiers and Iraqis.) But it's not fun for the poor buggers that got it from Katrina.
And frankly, I find it distasteful to use someone's hell to make some personal political point with. That goes for both you, and the pseudo-philosophy in TFA. Those people didn't reach some Zen enlightenment, they were scarred for life. And if all someone can think about is how it affects the gaming habbits, that someone is either a prick or completely out of touch with reality.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It is actually not surprising that disaster situations tend to change people's priorities when it comes to physical possessions and property. Would you rather have your intact XBOX (w/working controllers) but no power OR MREs, Jeep Wrangler (or other four wheel drive vehicle), jerry cans w/fuel, waterproof matches, and your trusty sidearm (w/box of ammunition)? Actually, getting Americans to be more self-sufficient in a survival situation is probably a good thing as opposed to the throw away, outsourcing, let someone else do it society that we live in today. It is unfortunate that people suffered and in some cases lost their lives, but perhaps this will remind people that the government is not responsible for the survival of any one citizen, but rather society in general. You have to be prepared to take matters into your own hands because the police, government, coast guard, etc...will not always be there to help you.
Lara Crigger.
aka Jon Katz?
This article is refering to games. Not just games, video games which are by nature very easy to replicate. If a hurricane hit your home to the point where compact disks did not survive, you shouln't be worring about video games.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
According to you, 'stuff' doesn't matter. According to you abstractions like 'high scores' also mean nothing to you. It seems to me that you must live an incredibly meaningless and valueless life.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
You've got it. The only question that remains is this; should you take advantage of other people's suffering to revel in hedonism... or not? It is the age old question of the inhabitants of empires.
The point of the feature wasn't that videogames aren't important, nor is it that videogames curaga mental wounds. More important was the memory of the time shared together with their brothers playing video games. Maybe some of you don't have brothers or friends that you played video games with, but I have both. I cherish the time I spent (and still spend) playing games with my brothers and friends much more than I care for the games themselves. It's more of the signifigance of what's attatched to the games than anything. We have an old Japanese copy of Smash Brothers 64 that's been with us for 9 years now. To me, it represents friendship, competetive rivalry (we've been playing this straight since 3 days after it came out in Japan, and if anyone cares/recognizes this name, the four of us would give Isai a run for his money), and a bunch of other things that I can't express very well on a forum full of trolls ready to [/ridicule]. The time spent playing the game is what I really care about.
I mean, think about it. You just lost your entire world to fucking water. Isn't it nice to be able to be normal, trash-talking brothers? Even without the games, you've still got your family, and that might be where the real fun was.
I wrote The Sims 1 Crowd Sitter to simulate the effects of Bush's (lack of) response to Hurricaine Katrina.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
if you have a samus poster hanging up in your room maybe you deserve to be hit by a hurricane. :)
"even when a person has an abundance his life does not result from the things he possesses" - Jesus, in Luke 12:15.
Psh, "Yanks", what are you from the 1860's?
That's how them folks over on the other side of the Atlantic talk, they can't hardly talk English too well.
...this chicks prozac was destroyed by the hurricane as well. *sigh*
Users... the only thing keeping 1st level support from being the bottom feeders.
Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me. That condo was my life, okay? I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME!
Didn't the author of the article ever see, or read, Needful Things? Where's a Satanic Max von Sydow when you need him?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Did anyone else notice the mention of HL2? Maybe I'm just being an awful nitpicker, but HL2 came out in Nov. 2004, and Katrina wasn't until almost a year later. Unless of course she means the Xbox version, which was released in November 2005. In that case, what was the deal with the mention of Steam?
And the glorious Brittish Empire did no wrong - ever. Genocide is great when you can ignore your own history I guess. In the meantime enjoy your taxes, and keep buying our crap and entertainment.
I'm struck by the cluelessness of the writer and probably most of her readers. Her country has been sending warriors around the world to cause this type of destruction and effect on people for the last century or so (Phillippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq; I leave out WW1, WW2 and Korea deliberately), and doing the same thing to its own Indian inhabitants for the century before that, and she's only just realised that this shit happens.
Anyone whose home is destroyed by forces outside their control is going to go through the things described in the article. Unfortunately, "forces outside their control" are often US foreign policies.
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." -Henry David Thoreau
This idea goes at least as far back as the Greek stoic philosophers, and probably further. It didn't make it's debut in Fight Club, and no, the hippies didn't invent it in the 60's either.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
"I love you, you love Free,
We're best friends as friends should be!"
- Richard M. Stallman
Of course it sucked! It was a low pressure weather system, after all.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Just wanted to reply to a portion of the parent statement. If just over 50% of the votes were for Bush, and 42.45% of the US voted in the last election (Uncited Wikipedia, YMMV), that would mean he only garnered about 21.53% of the nation behind him. This was a record turnout in number of people, and the highest percentage since 1968.
Yeah, it really is that sad.
Aaand we have a winner. The Mr Insensitive prize goes to noidentity (188756).
Now on a more serious note... Dude, do you even have a fucking clue what you're talking about or asking for there? Some people got psychologically scarred for life with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You think you can just tell someone "fuck, get over your goddamn self" and their psychological trauma will heal just like that? What else? Go tell people in a wheelchair, "fuck, get on your goddamn feet" and see them miraculously healed? Are you Jesus, or what?
PTSD is an actual brain dysfunction, complete with a change in hormone and mediator balance. It's not something someone chose as a lifestyle. It's a primal instinct of desperately trying to learn how you could have avoided a situation where you barely escaped with your life. Except there's nothing to learn, so it goes on for ever. How the fuck do you expect someone to just heal an actual dysfunction of their body? No, seriously, I'm curious. Please enlighten me. How is that supposed to work?
No, seriously, it cracks me up seeing people thinking you can just tell someone to heal, just because it's a psychological problem. As if someone had consciously decided to have a hell life with PTSD, and they only need your superior logic to see the flaw in that. In most cases they know they have a problem, and they alread know it's not logical, so pointing it out -- especially that distastefully -- achieves nothing more than being a slap in the face. In the worst case, it actually makes the problem worse: someone with depression will just get more depressed, someone with PTSD will get more stress than they already had, etc.
In a nutshell, the idiotic notion that you can just give someone a mental slap to get them out of PTSD or depression, is as stupid as thinking you can poke a finger into someone's wound to convince them to just heal. That stupid.
Plus, I don't know what Mr Tough facade you're going for, but something like that isn't "some trivial event". If seeing your whole life destroyed before your very eyes and going through a hell time of just staying alive for the next weeks counts as "some trivial event" for you, then who the fuck are you? Rambo? Do you get that happening to you every day? Do you routinely fend off psychos in a lawless city and dive into flooded ruins just to get something to eat or clean water, to the point where it's become trivial and normal? Or what?
Or lemme guess... you're just a self-centered idiot, sitting comfortably in your middle-class home, and decreeing someone else's tragedy as trivial just because it's not yours. As long as _you_ still have _your_ fridge full of fresh food and bottled water, it's "trivial" if someone _else_ had to drink mud.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
First, I want to thank the person who submitted this story to /.. I'm sick of hearing & reading & seeing videos & pictures & commentaries about Hurricane Katrina, but as a long-time gamer (early 80's) I really appreciated this piece.
I hate to sound elitist or anything like that, but unless/until you've seen first-hand the mass destuction that happened in New Orleans & the Mississippi Gulf coast you just won't get it. It's not about X-Boxes or PS2s, it's about a deep desire for a return to normalcy & the recognition that the old definiton of "normalcy" is selfish & breakable. Not that being selfish is always bad, of course.
Games & avid game playing ended for me on day 3 without power when the batteries for my NeoGeo Pocket Color (shut up) died.
I still play occasionaly. I had younger relatives stay with me this summer and, after dusting off my old reliable N64, we'd play for hours on end. I was amazed at how many secrets & moves I thought I had forgotten forever. Eventually though, the game play would end and reality slowly sank back in.
And yes, it's been almost a year since Katrina rolled inland, but the signs of the storm are still everywhere and there's no avoiding them. "Blue roofs" still dot the landscape, homes and buildings damaged beyond use are still easy to find as far as north as Hattiesburg (75 miles from the Mississippi coast), there's no shortage of tiny FEMA trailers parked next to a foundation where houses once stood, the twisted & fallen trees can't be ignored, and then there's "that look" in the eyes of people who either weathered the storm (no pun intended) or left behind everything to flee inland. Every power outage or gusty thunderstorm always ends with memories of Hurricane Katrina.
Always.
I've played games since I was 6 when first got an Intellivision for christmas, so I still consider myself a gamer. But the value I once placed on gaming has dimishished dramatically and the desire to own the latest next-gen system has gone because they mean little/nothing to me. Not after that. Call me a spoiled selfish American for whining about not having electricty for a month during summer in the South, or for having to wait 4 hours in line outside of Wal-Mart in the sun just to buy essentials (beer, cigs...oh, and food!), or not knowing when/if my university would re-open and my boss would call me back to work. Yes, people around the world live & suffer under much worse conditions than I could ever claim, but I (naively, prehaps) never imagined things could get so bleak and dire for so long here in the States.
The passionate game-player left this gamer and probably many others a while ago, but the fondness of games still remains. Actual game-play requires participation in the game and I and my friends just haven't felt like taking time out of my day to game. It's easier to pick up a book/newspaper/magazine or flip on the TV when I want to momentarily block out reality.
But I'll never forget Mega Man's theme song or the feeling I got when I first beat Super Mario Bros. or Marvel vs Capcom. And I'll never forget the kid at the hurricane shelter who cried when I gave him my GBA collection with tons of spare batteries.
Every self is a part of something else. A self is a member of a family, which is a citizen of a state or country, which is also a member of a species, a church, a club or fraturnity, or anything else a person connects to. So a person is more than just a self, and no self is truly independent, we are inter-dependent on other selves, our habitat, other life and other entities. Of course a selfish individual may act like the universe revolves around them.
The Brits and their Blair are fucking murderous twats too, but at least there is some kind of opposition to the brutality of their government over there... unlike in yankeeland where it seems like every last one of you fucks cheer on genocide after genocide.
I don't understand why you would think I'm a Brit though.
My GOD not ANOTHER MISERABLE FAILURE!
Signed,
A "Progressive"
If you read the article, the more important thing is that once you have a town to rebuild, or something really serious happens/has happened, you no longer seek the distraction of a video game. You have something more important to do, and games lose their appeal, due to some deep survival instinct.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Screw you commie, we have done a million times more good than harm. Flame away haters, it wont change the fact.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
At the risk of being labeled as offtopic, or flamebait, there is an old saying by Christians, "Only two things will survive this world: The Word of God, and the souls of men." The more I live, the more I come to realize this is so true. The material things of this world that we hold on to are so pointless.
Okay, back to work....
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
I guess in situations like these virtual properties, like ones in MMORPGS or a licence to download hl2 again, or other steam games(or similar systems) can really be of more value, since you don't lose it if everything in your city even, gets destroyed.
Right and of course you've shown your concern over Dafaur in the Sudan's genocide for the last 3 years. No wait - no you haven't, you don't give a shit about genocide at all - you just want to bash the USA. Cry me a fucking river.
Hey, guess what--hurricane season occurs every year, without fail, in that part of the country. On top of that, in this particular instance, the people were told to leave, well in advance. So my question is: why were these people living there?