Gamers

In eighteenth century England, the theory went something along the lines that the `inferior classes’ should be encouraged to breed like rabbits to increase the supply of workers, the competition for jobs, and to keep costs down. It seemed to work like a charm except for the problem of the inferiors occasionally getting out of hand and rioting and pillaging when they understood the exploitation they were suffering.

The gentlemanly class finally discovered a way to lubricate this system to both minimize the anger of their inferiors and to cut down on the damage when the workers got out of hand: gin. Gin became the cheapest way to keep up the breeding and to ease the fight in their inferiors when they got angry. Mothers’ Ruin, the appellation tagged on gin, was magic; it seemed to serve everyone with what they needed to get through the day, to breed the next generation of producers, to anesthetize them to their daily pain, and to carry them off to a better place before there were substantial societal costs.

In 1700, the annual gin consumption in England and Wales was about one and a quarter million gallons. By 1735 that figure had risen to 6.4 million gallons, and in 1751, when the conscience of the nation forced passage of legislation to curb the exploitation of the workers, something over 7 million gallons of gin were gargled and swallowed by the inferiors, a significant portion of this consumption was in the working class neighborhoods of London.

Some thirty or forty years ago, I became enamored with the novels of Kurt Vonnegut who was one of the first serious writers to consider the impacts of computers on the production process and what that might lead to in the greater society. While I haven’t gone back to reread these books, my impression was that of a world of a modern gin epidemic. Naturally, being young and an anti-Luddite, I wrote Kurt off as simply a brilliant eccentric.

But in our time, there is a phenomenon that bears a surprising similarity to the gin epidemic: video gaming, both home and internet. Last week, the Washington Post ran an article on the subject, and it had for me all of the earmarks of the gin epidemic. World wide gaming is apparently centered in South Korea but many of the symptoms have spread to Japan and the United States. Clearly the games are becoming a mass opiate and boys and young men are the target audience.

Anecdotal lamentations of parents, teachers, and college professors have reached the noise level of jet engines without ear protection, but the Post article shows that the problem is real and spreading more rapidly than the bird flu. This is a problem to be watched. The linked article hit me like an historical abstract straight out of eighteenth century London, but I leave that for your judgment.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052601960.html?referrer=emailarticle

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Wild Bill