Here's an idea, bullet hell shooters are meditative.
Imagine for a second that instead
of trying to find a needle in a haystack
you are a needle in a haystack, and in order
to be found you must travel from one end of
said stack to the other without once touching any hay.
No hay touching.
No touching.
Such is the difficulty of bullet hell games.
Usually top down but occasionally side scrolling,
bullet hell games test a player's pattern memorization,
twitch muscle reflexes, and epileptic seizure resistance.
Generally, you control a flying ship or warrior dodging
an impossible onslaught.
Hundreds, if not thousands of electricity orbs, energy
spheres, lasers, bullets, and a crazy colorful assortment
of fast moving whatnot the TV Tropes collectively
refers to as "dakka," for the sound that a machine gun makes.
You know, like dakka, dakka, dakka, dakka, dakka, dakka,
dakka, dakka, dakka.
And there are a lot of games that fit the bullet hell
bill, the Touhou Project games, Ikaruga, Gundemonium,
we'll put a list with links to some
of our favorites and some favorites
that people share with us via Twitter in the Doobly Doo.
And yeah, they might look a little stressful.
But remember, media is a mirror, and if an angry stressed out
button masher looks in-- I guess what I'm trying to say
is that there's more than one way and attitude with which
to dodge a thousand magical ice crystals fired
at the speed of light.
You can King of Kong your way to the top
and memorize all of the patterns, all the gaps,
know exactly where your hit box and strike opportunities
are, or you can let all of that go and just become the ship,
melt the game and the rest of the world
away into a veneer of existence.
Do not react, just to do.
Act without acting.
Play the game without actually playing it.
I mean, the look alone of bullet hell games
is so intense, so crowded, and nuts,
that actually paying attention is tough from the get go.
Like when you're walking the streets of San Paulo,
do you pay attention to every moving object?
Of course not.
You'd lose it there's so much going on.
So maybe you focus on one thing here,
one thing there, you focus on yourself
or you go on a kind of autopilot.
This auto pilot in the face of complexity-- thinking but not,
doing but not-- has its place throughout lots of video game
history, Contra, Donkey Kong, Castlevania,
all kinds of racing games, Guitar Hero,
and depending upon how much self respect you have,
maybe even Dark Souls.
And games like Canabolt and Super Hexagon
can be played in this zone beyond the zone.
It's not being in the zone, because it's not temporarily
enhanced awareness or momentarily improved decision
making, but deciding without the decide, the removal of self
from action.
It's actually almost like meditation.
In Taoism there's something called Wu Wei.
Meaning a non-action, Wu Wei describes
a complete and natural harmony of being, absent of intention,
but no less devoid of purpose.
Rivers flow without flowing.
Trees grow, but do not themselves intend to grow.
Rain falls, but does not itself fall.
And your heart beats without beating.
Wu Wei is all of the doing but effortless, without all
of the messy intention.
Now, yeah, there is a disconnect here with shoot 'em ups which
are not exactly a natural or spiritual pursuit, at least not
for most people.
But this way of talking about taking action
and being present within a moment
is applicable and applied to so many
other non-spiritual endeavors.
It's turning off your intention and allowing something else
to guide you, or being unconcerned with guidance
altogether.
There's flow and momentum in dance
and even some kinds of visual art.
There's being in the moment when improvising music.
For instance, percussionist James Muir,
in talking to Derek Bailey for his book "Improvisation"
said, the way to discover the undiscovered in performance
terms is to immediately reject all situations
as you identify them.
The idea being that whatever it is,
making music, dancing, shooting at spaceships,
and maybe even living, they are all at times
absurdly complex endeavors that take place
within a system that is either fantastically
contrived or naturally, wonderfully impenetrable.
And given that, maybe the best way, or at the very least,
a way to get any kind of purchase
on sense or success, whatever that is,
is to reach for some possibly uninhabitable liminal space,
sometimes with the aid of scatter guns and smart bombs.
There's a tendency to think of meditation
as a kind of shutting down or turning off,
but there are lots of ways to meditate.
Sure, you might sit quietly, but you might also
perform a set of flowing, repetitive movements.
Maybe you focus on your breath or your heart
or the sounds of your environment.
But meditation isn't solely and doesn't
have to be a quiet and serene activity.
The goal of meditation isn't singular,
and doesn't have to be accomplished
through one set of actions.
Chanting and even shouting can be meditative activities.
The Whirling Dervishes of Sufi Islam
are a powerful example of active meditation.
And while it certainly might not have the same spiritual import,
I wonder if a meditative state reached
while listening to noise music or scrolling
through your Tumblr dashboard or dodging a heck ton of dakka
isn't meditation nonetheless.
What do you guys think?
Can bullet hell games or similarly modern pursuits
be meditative?
Let us know in the comments and click on the Power Up
to subscribe and also to get the special double laser beam
cannon twice.
You know, I have referred to myself
as being from the internet on occasion,
but I think that's different from digital nativity.
Let's hear what you guys had to say about digital natives.
Yo252yo attributes the existence of digital nativeness
to youngsters being more daring as a whole
and wonders how that is going to change
when technology continues to be made for wide adoption.
And you know, this is-- I agree with this.
Actually, I just bought my dad an iPad
and he's someone who's normally not great with technology,
but he got it right off the bat, like it was so easy.
So yeah, some things are probably going to change.
Ryan Getts says that there is a digital native/digital
immigrant divide, but it doesn't demarcate
some kind of technological understanding,
rather the understanding of social norms
that happen online.
I wander to what degree digital native and digital immigrant
has to do with like social experience and community
and not just familiarity with technology.
This is a really interesting distinction to make.
And I think I totally agree.
But of course, it's a much smaller, right,
a much smaller nugget. within the larger digital native idea.
To Jackball25, I hope never.
Because if I'm getting things wrong
that means I'm learning stuff.
And that's kind of the secret plot of the show
is that I just get to learn about things.
Relatedly, to Jack McKay and everybody
else who let me know that the Doctor is
British and not English, I actually
do know the difference.
That-- it was my misunderstanding.
I thought that actually it was canonical that the doctor is
English, mostly based on the fact
that David Tennant doesn't use his real accent.
So it's really interesting to hear
that Peter Capaldi might be using his,
and that is, he's going to be maybe a Welsh or maybe
a Scottish Doctor, I don't know.
Yeah, so sorry.
Sorry.
Fracassio writes a really interesting comment
about the problematic nature of generational divides
in the first place, and saying that most of these things
are very middle and upper class centric Western ideas
of what groups of people have available to them.
And then Joshua Travis goes on to sort of make
a supporting point in saying that digital natives do exist
in some sense, but it is largely socioeconomic
and resource based and not nearly as generational
as most of the literature makes it to be.
These are really great comments, some
I'm just going to pause here for a second for some extra time
so you can read them.
Robert Jones wonders whether or not
digital nativity is best defined as someone's willingness
to dissolve the dividing line between their online self
and there meat space self.
I wonder.
In my experience, someone who might
be called a digital native is still
likely to sort of hold onto the like digital dualist
idea of the internet being a different place,
being a different self.
But um, whether or not that's actually
how they behave is I think another question entirely.
So this is a great, yeah, this is a great question
and a great idea.
Jon Bolinger says that he is a sandwich native.
While we're listing things that we are natives of,
I think I would like to be a t-shirt native.
I have an innate preternatural understanding
of how t-shirts work and what they're for.
Yeah, t-shirt native.
Either that or maybe a microwave native.
Really good at microwaving things.
Jared Spencer says that the digital native/digital
immigrant divide doesn't describe a familiarity
with technology, but an understanding of what
certain pieces of technology are for.
And the example he uses is Snapchat,
a thing that he might not have use for,
but which teenagers understand immediately what
it might be great for.
I wonder, maybe combined with what Robert Jones was saying,
this is-- we're heading in a road down a path that I,
that I think I maybe kind of like.
This is an interesting idea.
KyleTheAwesome, I cannot do a handstand actually,
but I can do this.
[DRIPPING NOISE]
I know, it's very impressive.
This week's episode was brought you
by the hard work of these punctilious individuals.
We have an IRC and a subreddit, links in the description.
And in light of a tweet of the week
you should spend your time checking out
Project from Awesome which has been going on since yesterday
and is smashing all of the records, as far as I can tell.
Go check out Project for Awesome if you haven't, and DFTBA.
And finally, fair warning, since it is at that time of year,
there will be no episode next week,
and then the week after that there
will be a short New Year's episode,
and then finally back to full episodes the week after that.
But I'll still be online to talk to you guys.
I'll be in the IRC and hanging out on the subreddit.
So say hey, and if I don't hear from you, have a happy holidays
and tell your family that I think
that they are smart and charming, just like you.
You guys are oh, you guys are the best.