Sonic Mania is a game about revolution.
So a long time ago I was a noob video game tester (God I love imagining the collective groan after people read that. It's great to have phrase that puts people off faster than when I say, "The thing about the black experience is...") fresh off the splash screen and ready to take on the gaming world.
I had a plan and everything. Like, I bought a binder, I wrote the plan down, it had citations, I put the little... uh, sticky arrow bookmark things in between sections. It was serious business. I was going to learn how to sail, take over the ship, then steer it to... Uh, gold or something I don't know point was to get the ship. Figured the destination would sort of reveal itself over time.
Boy was I wrong. Turns out a destination doesn't just reveal itself, you have to steer to it. Also turns out that if you sail in one direction long enough odds are you will find land, but not a destination, probably just some random place, which puts you in pretty much the same situation as when you departed. Such is life.
I realised I wasn't sailing to any particular destination one night while standing in a dark room full of random souls working on a test plan for a card battle game. To play the game users needed a waist high flat surface. We used the cafeteria tables, which made us many friends. On the flat surface sat a cloth mat separated into nine sections. The game console's camera would display the mat as a battle arena and any card placed in those nine sections as 3D visual representations of the cards avatar.
The goal of the game was to conquer five of the nine squares on the mat. Our job as testers was to make sure the computer did everything the user asked them to do, and to ensure the user could win or lose in all the ways they were supposed to win or lose. A starter deck of thirty cards, a booster deck of eight cards, and a hundred different spells rolling out monthly through DLC. I loved that game, the overtime was crazy.
Anyway, a couple of days ago I was at Gamesync sitting in a dark room full of random souls while my PUBG avatar was sitting in a bathroom holding a shotgun, listening for footsteps. Somone taps my shoulder and asks why our company is named Default Tester.
The only answer I ever have is that it's the name we started with.Then I realised at that moment I was doing the exact thing I had been doing at the start of my career in an eerily accurate recreation of a quality assurance test bay. Then I realised the destination was the ship. Then I realised I had sailed in one direction with no map and stumbled ass backward into exactly what I was looking for, which was the ability to play video games in a dark room full of random souls that like to play video games as much as I do. I had no idea that was actually a thing.
I hope information understands that yes America is a shitshow right now but we have good stuff going for us too! So many things I don't have to really mention them right now because there are so many. It's not like I can't think of any, it's just there are so many it's hard to choose, damn near impossible. No of course I'm not dodging the subject anyway have a good one oh wait did you see Elon's new space suit? The guy has time to lobby against the upcoming sentient robot war, makes solar cars, and still finds time to sew spacesuits, goddamn tryhard. So jealous. Oh and also yeah JOBS.
The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Trajectory
