SurrealPolitiks S01E038 - Shall We Play A Game?

When I was a kid, my parents bought my younger brother and I the original Nintendo Entertainment System, and I loved it. I later owned a Sega Genesis, and my friends and I used to play Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for hours upon hours on a near daily basis for some years. Our girlfriends hated this, and when I discovered that people were streaming games online, I thought this was absolutely bizarre because that had previously been the limits of my experience with people's interest in watching others play video games.

On the PC, I spent a few months back in the early 2000s playing a multiplayer hack of Grand Theft Auto 3, and offline I got quite a kick out of putting this into "God Mode" and seeing how long I could last in battles with the police.

I own the consoles I do because, as I mentioned above, I had bought them largely for the entertainment of a prior girlfriend. I liked having her around all of the time, but I would have to deprive her of my attention for long periods of time so I could get work done. She enjoyed playing Call of Duty and Fortnite on the PS4, and this seemed like a very worthwhile investment to have her nearby when my work reached a point I could take a break for some cuddles.

She had introduced me to Wii Sports Resort, and we much enjoyed the bowling game together. I'd later obtain the Wii Fit board and the game named after it, which would become my first introduction to Yoga. While on house arrest in Virginia, I found Mario Party to be a low stress time waster, with the notable exception of the fact that I find wasting time to be, in itself, stressful.

The Switch I purchased with the same idea of entertaining a (now different) girlfriend in mind, after she had gotten me addicted to Pokemon Go on my cell phone. I thought maybe both of us would get some enjoyment out of the Pokemon games for that system. Having obtained Let's Go Eevee and Pokemon Sword, I was unimpressed, but I did find that Fitness Boxing went well with my exercise goals.

Before I got much enjoyment out of this, the FBI broke my door down and dragged me off to prison.

All of which is to say, I am not much of a gamer. I tend to view these things as terrible wastes of time, and as mentioned, I do not like that concept. If I were playing video games without some kind of business purpose in mind, I would be consumed by feelings of guilt, and anxiety over what else I ought to be doing to achieve my goals and be worthy of the financial support I receive from my audience.

Giving myself this excuse has allowed me to enjoy the experience more. I am pretty impressed, even using these now years old systems, in how far gaming technology has come since I was playing a two dimensional fighting game, high on marijuana in my teens.

The largest TV I ever owned before getting out of prison was 32". I primarily use TV to watch the news, and I could get 99% of the information I need from this without any visual element at all. It didn't make much sense to me to spend money on a larger screen, but after three years of fighting with blacks over the television, now having one all to myself, I decided to take advantage of a sale at Walmart to get my first 55". Given the detail of modern video games, I am glad to have done this.

My brother owned the first PlayStation, and managed to obtain what was then a very difficult to come by copy of the first Grand Theft Auto. This was the first exposure I had to adult themes in video games (aside from the violence we now consider it uncontroversial to expose kids to), and we thought it was absolutely hysterical back then to run around stealing cars and assaulting prostitutes.

Today, gaming has largely caught up to the rest of pop culture in its degeneracy. Sex and profanity and crime are ubiquitous in gaming now. This is admittedly very amusing to me, although it does give me some apprehension about branding concerns as I mix this with my media business.

I have been running the Radical Agenda name and font as a watermark on the videos, and playing the SurrealPolitiks music as an outro, which as an aside, has a very cool effect to it as the character gets into his car and drives off to end the show. My original idea was to use the game streaming as a way to bring new eyes and ears to the political content, so from this perspective it makes sense to mix the brands, but as I'm running around as a black car thief in Grand Theft Auto 5, I find myself tempted to register a new LLC and domain name to separate these things from one another...