When you play a game, you fail…a lot. It’s part of the reason I and researchers feel that gamers are better at critical thinking and problem solving. When you’re having your ass handed to you by a tough boss fight in Dark Souls or you’re being perpetually tea-bagged by a 13 year old in a military shooter, you force yourself to take a good look at your style of play and admit you’re doing it wrong. In Street Fighter you may kick all kinds of ass spamming Ryu’s fireball, but as soon as you face a well-seasoned opponent, the ass kicker quickly becomes the ass kickee. So what, I ask, would a gamer accomplish if they were to continue spamming fireballs and blame the game for their shitty performance against more skilled opponents? Well, you’d have the gamer equivalent to Donald Trump.
A quick history for anyone who doesn’t know about adderall-sniffing Reality TV Star, and Current President Donald Trump: He’s never lost at anything. It’s common knowledge by now. Because the rules of the game don’t apply to him. Those are the basics. There’s much, much, MUCH more detail to go into about him, but for the premise of this piece, let’s stick to the below:
We all know Mr. Trump has a penchant for…bending the truth. And by that I mean completely bastardizing it, living in a world that fits only his senile view and attempting to beat people up who don’t agree with that view. Since the rules don’t apply to him, he’s free to wander off the map into territory that exists on the fringes of reality. His largess and sizable legal team afford him this gift.
The system that we’re born into is one of law. In the U.S., the Constitution acts as the boundaries of the playing field. Right now, the U.S. has installed the “capitalism DLC” where the main objective is to amass as much wealth as possible. Wealth, being a manmade construct, fits perfectly within the analogy of a video game. The capitalism DLC basically did a “find and replace” for the word “Monarch” and swapped it with “CEO.” And the player characters (us) were changed from “peasants” to “consumers.” The objective of the CEO is to provide the virus of consumers with enough “stuff” to keep them alive as long as possible. Whereas the consumers spend the game trying not to die.
Basically, Donald Trump started the game using the Konami Code instead of trying to play through Contra with the three lives the rules dictate. That means that failure doesn’t apply to him the same way failure applies to the rest of the people. His ruling method is to charge through, absorbing bullets because he knows a bevy of safety nets are ready to catch him before it’s game over. Therefore he never learns how to strategically adapt. Because, in his mind, he never loses.
Think about it for a minute, this is a man who has never cleaned a toilet, pumped his own gas or held a snow shovel. He’s like the guy who buys a new Battlefield game and purchases the $99 unlocks so he can start off the game winning by being a higher level than other beginning players. There’s no lessons learned, no observation and understanding how to properly play the game.
If Donald Trump wasn’t born with a gilded spoon in his mouth, he’d be the relative at the table who always has to talk and has nothing to say. We’d still be under the “Capitalism DLC,” and at the whimsies of a slurry of white men who are actually slugs-in-human-skin, but at least we wouldn’t have this Boss character with infinite health.
So, to the president who definitely won’t read this, maybe the next time you take to Twitter spouting bullshit to a very empowered and willfully ignorant base of conspiracy theorists, why don’t you instead pick up a controller and learn what it means to fail? We’d all appreciate it.
The Heady Gamer 