There are many kinds of crises. A crisis can be a conflict between a god and a religion like some Jehovah’s Witness guy wrote about that one time, it can be a moral crisis like the characters in the Dostoyevsky books, or it can be a misspelled FPS people use as a benchmark for graphical power. Crises can be humanitarian, financial, or oil-based. Some say fascism is capitalism in crisis. I say fascism is not a useful term and we should develop new language for new things, which is why I will call the next world war a warld wor.
In my case, the crisis may be one of a center of longevity, or for you people who insist on reusing words, a midlife crisis. These things can be hard to detect, however. Resurrecting this website may be the most obvious sign of a midlife crisis to those who know I first started it when I was 23, which was now 20 years ago. It’s true we came back in 2022 for a little while, but that was in a post-COVID period of jubilation and a lot of former writers were (supposedly) on board. This new burst of activity is different in that it’s just the core crew (all blogs need at least three people) and is borne of my newly discovered, and highly unpopular position that creating things in itself is rewarding. Of course, this doesn’t stop me from paying for advertising (despite having no way to recoup this money as we run no ads and sell no products) or making a posting schedule for myself and getting stressed about sticking to it.
There were two catalysts to the re-existence of videolamer; I read some of a Jack Handey book while on vacation and then read a bunch of old issues of EGM instead of working. The former’s joke-making and word-writing ability may be unattainable to me but it is the latter that points to a midlife crisis. I spent hours a day for weeks, maybe months, scanning, reading, and taking screen shots of issues of EGM. It’s unclear what I was looking for but it’s undeniable that those first 60 issues were part of my childhood. Usually I just recognized the games in the pages, but sometimes I remembered specific articles or even entire issues. Reading about Mortal Kombat at the Tottenville Library, which for some reason had an EGM subscription, is a memory I feel can physically feel. And I still remember the palpable dread of reading the Japanese coverage of FEDA for the Super Famicom and worrying the SNES would soon have a Shining Force killer. Prime midlife crisis material, it would appear.
But the counter argument to this old magazine obsession being indicative of a crisis is I read the issues with a degree of schadenfreude. The magazine was not written by poets, some of their opinions looked silly decades later, and the amount of coverage given to Bubsy made it clear Accolade had written them a check. I’ve already made hay of some of the flaws I’ve found in EGM and will probably write more posts disparaging them; truly a fly nipping at the heels of a mighty steed. Maybe, in the same way a near-weeb can save himself from going full otaku by recognizing the many shortcomings of Japan, a man in his 40s reading about video games from when he was 7 is not having a midlife crisis if he is sufficiently critical and skeptical.
The second smoking gun that may also be smoking because someone lit the tip of the gun on fire and not because a bullet has been shot from the gun is my new time and money outlays on arcade games. I’ve gone into painful detail on this and will continue to bore people with updates – everyone wants to hear more about a white guy with enough space and money to accumulate expensive, mostly useless, entirely unnecessary stuff. To summarize, I have spent over a thousand dollars buying multiple new arcade machines and FPGA devices (MiSTERcade to be specific) and expansion boards in order to make my uninsulated, always freezing or hellish garage some sort of mini-arcade. Obsessing over arcade games from the 80’s (back when things were good, as long as you weren’t living on earth) can only be seen as healthy, right?
Rick, who is the person actually doing all the work restoring my arcade cabinets, pointed out that it’s kind of unfair to suggest anyone middle aged can’t have a hobby without it being some sort of crisis. He makes a compelling point, even if he should be focused on adding wheels to my new cabinets and not talking so much. And, like with EGM, I’m acutely aware of these games’ shortcomings. They’re not mobile game garbage, but they’re definitely a shade closer to that than to the/my Platonic ideal of a video game. They’re short, cheap, often shallow, and designed to steal money from people. Luckily, there are some that are incredibly deep and offer a lot of playtime to those who have the time to learn them. I’ve also had old consoles hooked up in my living room since college, so interest in arcade games seems like a natural and not hysterical extension of my interests, which were possibly always pathetically mired in nostalgia. Or, as I call this specific new phenomenon, vidstolgia. So the new cabinets are a sign of a mental issue, but maybe not the mental issue we would expect from someone in their mid-40s.
David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap once said, “Well, I don’t really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how – what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you.” Besides accidentally being an intelligent thing to say as it’s kind of a riff on the ancient philosopher Zeno’s paradoxes, it encapsulates my feelings. What is the middle and what is a crisis? Can I see a crisis while I am in the middle of it? Must it be over to perceive that it ever happened? I don’t know, but I heard Spinal Tap II was bad and that’s a legitimate crisis.