Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe
Hark, mom, unto the pitter patter of tiny cloven hooves upon the kitchen floor, and the scattered detritus of goatish hair upon the linen! Of course, John Milton had it as all this being human business and the grand, savage ceremony of pride, and a bunch of other somewhat obfuscatory allegorical allusions to kissing. Meanwhile, somewhere in Orange County, California (truly the last refuge of intellectual rationalism. And custom shop motorcycles.), Marla Jo Fisher says it’s those darn video games.
“I truly believe that video games were created by Satan to turn otherwise normal children into his drooling, glassy-eyed stooges,” writes Marla Jo, with all the unequivocal authority of someone who cites dark age superstition (and a Wikipedia link to an article on Satan, because she’s academic like that) as the reason anybody would want to have fun. Because obviously there’s some supernatural reason kids are playing Peggle.
“If Sir Isaac Newton had been playing a DS,” she goes on to say (with a blithe disregard for expedient substitutions like “doing something, anything else”), “I’m sure he never would have noticed the apple falling from the tree, so he never would have formulated the theory of gravity.” I could make a sly observation about a particular event having possibly not occurred between her parents because they’d been too busy playing Pokemon Diamond, and its (happy) implications for gamers everywhere, but I won’t.
She also claims she’s some sort of professional journalist, then references a heap of highly questionable “studies” into game addiction, the inexorable disintegration of family values, and the coming apocalypse as evidence that she’s got it all right. Then she retracts the Satan bit, and says it’s all Lord Voldemort’s fault. You know, that bad wizard from the Harry Potter books. Critically, of course, Lord Voldemort’s a fictional bad wizard – although one might reasonably enough assert the same of her former suspect. She also quotes that recent news story of some parent ringing 911 because her kid wouldn’t switch off his PlayStation as though this were a case of a kid who wouldn’t switch off his PlayStation, and not a case of some thoroughly ineffectual parent abusing emergency resources because she doesn’t know how to say, “No.” and mean it. O tempore, o mores indeed, but not what Marla Jo’s thinking.
It’s a kind of tradition that every decade has its own ambassadors from hell, whispering subversion and ruin into the ears of thoughtless, instantly corruptible children everywhere – comics, heavy metal, Dungeons & Dragons, skinny jeans, whatever they’re into. And it’s a kind of tradition that every decade has its stupid moral panic placard-wavers spoiling it for everyone else.
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
I vote a transgalactic colony ship that’s never coming back. Maybe someone should stop wasting their time with Eve Online and invent one of those.
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