A Thanksgiving Day Analogy - 11/27/2008
I've often daydreamt about going back in time to the days of infenity and showing them a game like Halo for the first time, as Halo is the best FPS ever, and a halo was our official logo. Also, we used to team up and play Goldeneye back in the day, and that was an outrageous amount of fun, so playing Halo with the boys would've been unbelievable. However, I think that introducing a game as perfect as Halo back in the day of 64bit choppy graphics, slowdown, and a stuttering frame-rate would be detrimental to the appreciation of just what a staggering achievement Halo was when it was released in 2000. We had to get there in stages, and a game like Halo could only be fully realized after an evolution of inferior FPS games.
Likewise, I've thought about travelling back to the golden days of Hollywood, the twenties or thirties, and showing the audiences something extraordinary like Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings just to see their reaction. But perhaps they wouldn't truly understand the revolutionary technical achievements nor fully grasp the size and scope of what they were seeing. Maybe we can only really recognize something magnificent if it takes awhile to get there, enduring various levels of mediocrity until we reach the pinnacle of perfection. Now of course I'm not saying we can't enjoy the ride. Certainly there have been amazing works at EVERY level of progress, as is evidenced by the Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Tetris, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and so on and so forth. But my point is that I doubt an 8 year old me would be as blown away by a game like Super Mario Galaxy if I was unfamiliar with the original Super Mario Brothers and the whole 8-bit / 16 bit / 32 bit/ 64bit and 128 bit generations that proceeded it's conception.
I'm dying to show both of you (I assume I'm talking to my two girl friends here) Once More, With Feeling....the irrefutably best thing that television has ever created. It's the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it comes in season 6 after a world of drama and phenomenal story-telling. Unfortunately, I'll never show either of you this episode....even if it is the greatest thing you'll ever see. . .because there's no way you'd appreciate it on the same level as someone who understands just how genre-defying, unique, and spectacular it is. The only way you'd truly GET how brilliant Once More, With Feeling was is if you watched every episode that lead up to it.
In any event, my analogy is probably pretty obvious by now, but I'll state it anyway. Maybe enlightenment can only come after various successive stages of being unconscious. Evolution is necessary so that we can inherit our grandeur experientially.
And when the journey is finally over, only then can we truly appreciate how overwhelming and beautiful the realization of our unity is.
