How many science fiction stories are there, that warn of the replacement of the human race by robots?
It doesn’t look far-fetched to me. Keep shootin’ up with puberty blockers and see what happens to the birth rate.
But really! Having robots play games for you, so you can brag about the games you’ve won? What profound dishonesty. No wonder we’re ruled by Democrats.
If you’re new here, you may be wondering what you’ve gotten into. Like, is this one of those awful blogs where everybody always tries to one-up each other?
We like to think we have a safe harbor here, a place of refuge, a gathering of friends. We may not be able to sit on the porch together, but we can pray for one another.
Yeah, I know, I’ve gone all sappy on you. But I don’t care. You can be sappy when you’re among friends.
Remember when the motto of any successful business was, “The customer is always right”? Kiss that one goodbye.
Let me vent about this while I have a few minutes between assorted medical errands. For years, one of my favorite forms of relaxation was to visit Pogo Games and play a harmless little game called “Mahjong Garden.” I went to the same chat room every time, and over the years made many friends there. Nothing could be more soothing than moving the tiles around while chatting with my friends.
Recently, because the technology had changed, Pogo found it necessary to make changes in many of its games, including Mahjong Garden. All right, we understand. But they also made a whole raft of changes that they didn’t have to make, for no reason at all. They changed the appearance of the tile sets to make them hard on the eyes, changed the names of all the chat rooms, and moved the chat to the bottom of the page instead of the side so that you can no longer play and chat at the same time. I must stress that none of those changes I have mentioned was at all necessary. It was just change for the sake of change.
Mahjong Garden was one of Pogo’s most popular games, and for no reason anyone can see, Pogo trashed it. Sort of like Microsoft getting rid of Windows 7, although at least they thought that making a successful Windows obsolete would make them money. I can’t imagine what Pogo was thinking.
Many, many of the players are disappointed, disgusted, or even totally fed up. I’ll be astounded if Pogo doesn’t lose customers because of this.
Oh! And because so very many players complained about the New Improved “Traditional” tile set (the one I used) and wanted it back the way it was, Pogo announced that it would do that for us.
Lie! All they did was change it some more. There’s nothing of the old familiar look about it. They must think we’ve all got amnesia. They pee on your leg and tell you that it’s raining. Was it so hard to do what their customers wanted them to do? Having injured us, why did they decide they might as well insult us, too?
When car companies do that, they wind up losing boxcar-loads of money.
So why do the tech companies keep on doing it?
I want my freakin’ Mahjong Garden back!
I like to play games on Pogo. I like to chat with my Pogo friends while we’re playing. It’s relaxing. It’s nice.
My wife plays a lot of Pogo, and she likes to win “badges.” A badge denotes that you’ve achieved something or other in the course of playing a game. Players like to collect badges. I’m not into that, but that’s me.
As I play, from time to time a certain advertisement appears in the chat box, offering you the power to “complete and win hard badges quickly”… by signing up for robots, “Badge Bots,” to play the game for you.
It reminds me of someone I knew long ago, who was too lazy to go to the unemployment office to collect his check. We called him “Clams”–although the average clam was a lot more dynamic than he was.
Sheesh! Are we grown too flaming lazy even to play our games? Where’s the fun in having some robot play your games for you? Are we too dull, too inert, even to relax? And what kind of gavone brags about all the badges he “won” by letting Badge Bots win them? Where’s the achievement? How many of us, really, are that dishonest with ourselves?
Other robots turn our lights on or off–you have to shell out for “smart” lights that will obey the robot’s order–because we’re too torpid to flick a switch.
I heard somewhere that the civilized world has an epidemic of obesity. I wonder why. Well, at least we still have the energy and the drive to stuff our faces non-stop. Is that the one thing we don’t want robots to do for us?
I’m reminded of a story Ray Bradbury told in The Martian Chronicles, a poignant, somewhat poetic piece in which all the human colonists on Mars are dead and gone but their robots mindlessly keep performing their now pointless tasks of housekeeping the now uninhabited houses.
Let’s not go there, okay?
A lot has been said, lately, about simulated sorta-friendships on the Internet and social media taking the place of real, face-to-face friendships, to the detriment of society. As someone in a Pogo Games chat room once said, “But we’re only Pogo people!” It was a true cri de couer, even if I still can’t explain exactly what she meant.
As a thought experiment, let me remove all the “cyber-friends” (for want of a better word) from my life and see what’s left.
Family? Well, almost everybody’s dead. Those who are left have all moved far away from here, and we see them only on special occasions.
Old friends? Well, I hung on to those longer than most–but in all honesty, my boon companions, my bosom buddies, are not really the most wholesome company for the Christian that I want to be.
My wife is, of course, my best friend, and we are inseparable. But apart from her, if you take away my friends that I’ve made here on this blog, in the course of my work for Chalcedon, and on Pogo–well, there’s hardly anything left. For some people, online friendship is what’s on the menu.
But I don’t feel deprived. I’ve met wonderful people from all over the country, even from other countries, met them here and in my Chalcedon work, here and there and elsewhere–and I have grown quite fond of them. (That means some of you who are reading this: you know who you are.) I profit from my exchanges with them. I draw emotional support from you all. I am thankful for you.
Because of course–of course!–“just Pogo people” are real people. Man, I know happily married couples who “met” in a Pogo game room! If I could travel, I’ve got invitations from all over. Some of you, I’d love nothing better than to sit down and have a cup of tea with you–maybe even sit outside on a nice day and have a cigar. I may never meet you in the flesh, but you are my friends and I treasure you.
All right, enough of the sappy talk. You all know what I mean.
Yeah, constant texting, etc., a narcissistic urge to have strangers know the moment-to-moment boring details of your life–obviously that’s not what I’m talking about. I know some of you have come to enjoy the little community that’s growing up right here on this blog.
So, yes, we are all, in our fashion, Pogo people! And deplorables, too. Ich bin ein Berliner!
Let us wear our badges proudly.