The Further Away

IMG_4808, Sarah Zucca, 2013

Back in 2007 I wrote that Christmas had lost the meaning it once had. Given our earliest Christmases are as children, the meaning it has is invariably material. A decade ago as I was approaching the end of school, receiving lots of presents or even money in lieu was very little to get excited about. Where once there was unwrapping at 5am, I now struggle to get out of bed at 1pm. By the time I got a job and started generating income I could buy all the CDs and DVDs I wanted any time of the year. Asking for them, because you've been asked what you want, reveals a massive void at the core of the materially-orientated 25th. Currency is just being cycled and because requesting an object requires no consideration on the part of the purchaser, the present isn't really personal so much as a financial obligation to avoid being the one taking more than giving. So come the material crisis in my later teenage years, I began to realise the spirit of Christmas was seeing relatives.

Unfortunately, when I wrote up that realisation it was actually the last time my relatives came over from the US in December. For the past two years they've come over in late October for a pre-emptive combination of three birthdays in November, two in December, and Christmas rolled into one. Still, that leaves Christmas itself rather sparse with only my uncle joining us from down South. This compounds the sense of meaninglessness since the 25th is pretty much like any other day except very few people are working. Since I'm working right up to the 24th and back to the coalface three days later for the stint before the New Year holiday, it feels little different from an extra long-weekend. A far cry from the build-up in primary school when in the final few days before finishing up we'd bring in board games and videos to watch. My traditional viewing of the Muppet Christmas Carol is down to that. In fact, that too reveals a change in perspective.


When we used to watch the VHS in class some fifteen years ago it included the song 'When Love is Gone'. This was excised from the film in later releases for reasons of pacing, and as a child I thought it dragged on - bring Gonzo and Rizzo back on for some more antics. By the time I revived watching it on Christmas Eve in 2006 (along with Speed the night before, because the terrestrial broadcast was in 1998 the night before school finished up when I was in first year - it's essential you know that) I actually found its absence problematic. Spoilers, by the way. When the first spirit visits Scrooge and takes him to his childhood he shows little outward sign of being affected. After replaying the event in which Scrooge met his fiancée, the spirit remarks on another Christmas he spent with Belle with the intent on showing him this. Scrooge pleads for the spirit not to show him this. Now in the edited versions; conversing with Scrooge, Belle simply states she believes their love is over and walks away. The music has been swelling to what is now an anticlimax, and Scrooge, Gonzo, and Rizzo are in tears. The song in which Belle expresses herself and the breadth of her sadness is gone much like the love. It's arguably the linchpin of the story since it's clearly what breaks Scrooge's composure, forces him to come to terms with Christmas of his past, and forges the path to redemption. It's explicitly invoked in the finalé which reprises the tune with the altered lyrics extolling 'When Love is Found'. The studio version of 'When Love is Gone' is found in the latter half of the credits.

So how we view Christmas is really a reflection of where we are in life. At it's most cynical you could say kids love getting things and adults bask in their children's delight (assuming the day goes well). Being in neither of those camps, but having been a child myself I look back at the 25th in the 90s and cringe. I would have said thank you and enjoyed what I got, but it's really impossible for a child to understand the money being burnt to generate the perfect Christmas. It can't be helped though. Part of growing up is the brain developing away from an egocentric world-view to being able to empathise and understand other's viewpoints. One set of people who know better than anyone are those working in marketing.

As a child of the 90s I can remember when Sony burst onto the console scene with the PlayStation. Two years ago I dropped a diatribe onto this blog that detailed the unbelievable success they had with the first two iterations of the console and then how badly they fucked up my desire to ever engage in financial transactions with them again. Then I unexpectedly got a PS3 for Christmas which was awkward. Regardless of how late I'd joined this hardware generation, in the first half of 2013 the manufacturers ploughed on with revealing the PS4 and the X-Bone (sic). Also this year some boyband called One Direction released a cover of a Blondie song which came very close to literally making my ears bleed. Literally, not figuratively, it was literally going to make me rip them off. On the news it was unavoidable to hear about screaming hordes of fans clamouring to see this group. I have the vaguest notion of who JLS are/were so I had to ask if they weren't the biggest boyband anymore. I like to play up the fact that I don't know or care who these groups are - I'm acutely aware I lived through the Spice Girls era. And that's the point.

The problem with multiplayer.

What do new consoles, the ephemeral world domination of boy and girl groups, and children not knowing any better have to do with each other? - that they don't know any better. The Spice Girls were not original. We only thought they were because we weren't alive when Bananarama were around. One Direction are not original. Their fans only think that because they weren't alive when Boyzone et al were dominating the charts. That's not to denigrate them, as Boyzone fans weren't around when The Bay City Rollers were recording, nor their fans when The Beatles first emerged. The lesson from the Twilight Saga (that's the online struggle between fans and haters of Twilight, not the name of the film series) is that people identify with aspects of culture they use to define themselves. In the case of console fanboys, these are inanimate objects which provide convenient opposing camps. The inane rivalry of X-Box and PlayStation fanboyism goes all the way back to Sega's aggressive American campaign in 1989 - "Genesis does what Nintendon't". Back then there was a real race toward, primarily, better graphics and a generally better gaming experience. Today you're just being played like a puppet.

I suppose it's called 'getting older'. I'm not going to pretend that Sony created the PlayStation out of sheer love of entertaining people, rather than making a lot of money off this new entertainment medium; but their money-making has never been more transparent. I'm not the only one who believes this. I virtually ignored the PS4 and X-Bone launches, but what I gleamed passively from the omnipresent marketing campaigns is that if this is gaming, then I'm not a gamer anymore. For starters, these consoles have gaming as a secondary consideration. They are, in fact, platforms for pushing media consumption as smart-phones have largely ate into the medium with casual games. How is this obvious?

Have you ever heard of an optical drive that cannot play Red Book Standard audio CDs? It's a world first for the PS4, because what you really have to do is sign up for Sony's cloud music service to buy everything all over again! Sony is a global media conglomerate, and this console has been designed to funnel your money into the spreadsheet black hole they created when they followed through with the design of the PS3.

Why do you need to plug all your existing set-top boxes into the X-Bone? Because in order to be the centre of your living room it has to run a marketing analysis on the media you watch in order to serve you targeted adverts. MicroSoft (via the Bing subsidiary) wants to compete with Google for advertising revenue and the future of that is in monumental data-mining. The new X-Box is little more than an advertising platform, less a media platform, and barely a gaming platform. It is, however, also a good spying platform.

The marketing droids would have you believe it's between Sony and Microsoft. However, don't forget that each console generation is a three-way choice. Interestingly, it seems the market can only support three top-tier manufacturers (see Sega's spot being edged out after the Dreamcast). While the Wii-U isn't something I'll be signing praises about, nor did the Wii interest me much; you can always choose not to play the game. By that I mean, buy a decent video card for the PC - it'll be cheaper than buying any console and graphics have plateaued since the introduction of the last console generation. PC sales might be in decline, but the PC itself is doing fine - it's just that hardware demands also plateaued so a PC of a few years age will do fine with a new graphics card. Hell, the PS3 can't (or rather won't because they want to sell it to you again) emulate PS2 games - something a PC can do. The smart-phone and console manufacturers don't want you to know the power of the personal computer because there's no money in it for them. Phones are still on the easy incline of Moore's Law and consoles are, especially in this new generation, mysterious black boxes that actually contain locked down PCs. Unfortunately software publishers also want you on these decrepit devices because of their fear of piracy. I already own GTAV for the PS3 and would buy it again for PC if only to play with all the mods that fans will create.

Some revolution.

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