BeeBop said:
The emphasis has long ago shifted from the culture to the individual, and has now shifted to the individual as god. This is exemplified by the lust of the individual to erase other individuals. Isn't that why we play video games, the first person shooters?
I'm gonna have to call you on your interpretation of FPS games, at least if you can grant that the popularity of such games is tied closely to their multi-player capabilities.
This is a tricky analogy to make, but I'm going to give it a try anyway. Take one part overly militaristic society (such as the U.S., but it's not the only one, and this isn't a nationalism thing, so bear with me) and add it to one part institutionalized homophobia. What do you get? A system that at once promotes fraternity and competition (i.e. the army) while attempting to surpress any homosexuality (because it's contrary to the army's religious belief, or more importantly, is a threat to the nation's ability to produce more babies, hence more soldiers).
So where does the FPS tie in? Those games come about partly as a direct or indirect product created to indoctrinate new soldiers, but moreso as a result of the cultural inertia created by militaristic obsession, ergo limiting the populace's imagination in terms of what it perceives as entertainment. The means through which an audience derives entertainment are inextricable, and this plays a part in the inertia of the audience's imagination, so despite arguably diverse activities such as war games or p*rnography the population (largely due to a desire and necessity for convenience) will opt to use the same medium for both: the Internet. This choice of medium will inevitably blur the lines of distinction in the activities it translates, due to the lack of or loose reasoning for doing so. The result is that an FPS game becomes so abstracted from any military training purpose as to become unidentifiable as such: it loses all value insofar as training soldiers (just think of the excessive retributive fragging in FPS games), and instead becomes its own entity, with its own pupose. The bigger the gun in an FPS the better, and that's no stretch to identify the gun as a phallic symbol, and to identify targets such as headshots as orifices. Given FPS games are played largely by 100% male participants, it all sounds kinda gay to me (and incidentally, makes the NRA look like the YMCA). But then, perhaps Freud would've said, "Sometimes an FPS is just an FPS."
The suppression of perversion by the army is symbolized in the "Black Grease" video, although arguably the army is the perversion if you consider the alternative (i.e. infinity) as the inevitable - it really doesn't matter which is which, it's just opposite sides of the same coin, a polar narrative. So is the destructive kid's expression of frustration an exercise of his individuality, or is it perhaps just the symptom of something else? He wasn't good at his game, or for some reason wasn't able to play it, and as a result was excluded from the social interaction the game permitted, whether it was indoctrination into the army or an opportunity for him to publicly explore his homoerotic inclinations. Human defence and sexuality are essential to who we are both individually and collectively, but the same things can only be learned, shared, and experienced in social settings. Take away the opportunity or expectation for those two things from any one person and the result will be what we call madness.