What’s more fun than knowing that God is on your side and will give you all the excuses you need to engage in every kind of abominable act?
Why . . . Being God, of course!
Hey, you paid for the cartridge.
You worked for every dollar you spent.
Or, you know, maybe your parent or parents got it for your birthday.
Hell, even if you just illegally downloaded a ROM-well, shit, that’s an investment of time.
And time is money.
Time is way more valuable than money, in fact, ‘cause money comes and goes
but Time?
You never get that back.
No way, no how.
Go ahead: try to get it back.
I’ll wait.
Didn’t get it back, did you?
You didn’t even try,
‘cause you didn’t need me to tell you that,
you already know,
unless you’re just, like, super-fuckin’ eaten up with the dumbass.
So . . . better than being an unrepentant, hyper-aggressive agent of God
is Being the God.
The Universe is an open book to you,
and you get to push your followers this way and that,
so many pieces on the game board.
You raise the land.
You raze the land.
You designate one of your subjects-known as the Good People-as a great Thought Leader, and all the enthralled Good People rally to their side,
if you deem this thing to happen.
And your great opponent is the Devil.
And the Devil leads the Evil People.
And the Horned One and his gang are eating into your cosmic turf,
‘cause this is a game,
so you can’t God too hard,
yes, I’m taking Bucky Fuller’s advice to use God as a verb here,
you can’t God too hard
‘cause, uh, then you would just win at everything all the time,
therefore no game,
therefore no challenge,
because-comes the twist-to God is to play no game,
it’s just to instantly make everything so,
and this is not any fun,
when you really sit down and think on it.
It’s boring to God, to be God-ing, to have God-ed.
There’s no sense of earned achievement.
Therefore you’re not really the God, like you would invoke to shut down democratic processes or justify slavery or to give warrant to mass violence or explain the bogus science of your daffy Creationism Museum or to enforce rigid gender roles as handed down from on high,
nope,
you’re like one of them old Greek Deities or Thor from Marvel Comics,
something like that,
a very humanized Ultra-Powerful Type of Being
maybe like an X-Man or something,
so you have a lot of power
it’s not nothing,
but it’s not all the power,
which,
you know,
you might be a little bit let down by that,
so buyer or pirate beware.
You can call the Good and Evil Peoples to armageddon.
That’s some pretty almighty shit.
You can have some fun with that.
But you don’t quite get to speak the Universe into existence,
with your word being the beginning and all that.
You gotta buy the SNES port of SimEarth for that.
This is really a kind of mystical strategy and infrastructure building game, where you gotta have homes and food for your Good People, and then you gotta make their way of life just sustainable enough to eliminate all of the Evil People, and, in so doing, put Holy Egg on the Devil’s face.
Two Supreme Beings,
manipulating desperate humans
waging Proxy War Eternal,
‘til one wipes out the other.
I think the idea is that if you whack out all the followers, then the God or the Devil has no more Faith Power to draw upon-
-notice how there’s no Atheist option?
That would fuck up the whole game, wouldn’t it?
If the people-who are doing all the work-decided they were tired of just being cannon fodder for the endless struggle, and they just stopped believing, then both God and Devil would disappear, and then maybe the Good and the Evil People would realize that they have their toils and their needs and their wants in common . . . and later for all this religiously enforced mental servitude, eh?
I don’t think any of that is permitted in the actual game.
Maybe if you input the Konami Code?
I haven’t actually tried that.
5 minutes later
Nope. Doesn’t work.
So . . . like . . . there’s no hope?
Big shrug
Yeah.
-January 2021
