May 22^nd Tuesday

So I suck at all video games.  When I was a high schooler, I had trouble beating Madden on Rookie mode.  Mario?  Only after a couple of years.  Zelda?  Forget about it.  What about first person shooters?  Forget about it.  Hell, I could barely beat Pokemon and that game is meant for grade schoolers.  Video games are fun, no doubt.  I’m just not all that good at them.

I mention all of this because, as I told you all yesterday, I got a Nintendo Switch.  I should say that I haven’t really played all that many video games since I moved to Japan, which meant that the graphical jump between the last time I played video games and when I played them for the first time today came as a major shock to me.

Playing Super Mario Odyssey, a couple of things hit me: (1) open worlds are now huge and open open and (2) years of not playing video games hasn’t made me any better at them.  My experience thus far playing the critically acclaimed game has gone somethign like this:  Stephen things “oh that looks cool”, Stephen gets distracted by cool thing, Stephen fails to succeed at basic game tasks, Stephen dies.  I think one of the problems about having an open world thingy is that it’s hard to find where the open world closes, leading to death after death.

Do you think Mario feels pain?  As graphics get better and better and programming improves to such a degree that artificial intelligence outpaces human intelligence, why is it hard to imagine a digital avatar feeling pain?