많은 수의 게임이 리듬 게임으로 환원될 수 있을 것처럼, 혹은 적어도 리듬 게임이 게임의 어떤 본질적 면모를 드러내는 것처럼 보인다는 데 있다. 예컨대 유튜브에 많이 올라와 있는 〈슈퍼마리오Super Mario〉 시리즈의 타임 어택(-최단 시간에 게임을 클리어해서 엔딩을 보는 플레이) 영상들에서 고수들은 〈슈퍼마리오〉를 마치 리듬 게임처럼 플레이하는데, 이때 횡스크롤로 진행되는 〈슈퍼마리오〉의 스테이지는 〈비트매니아〉의 악보와 아주 유사한 무언가가 되어버린다. 스테이지의 설계를 속속들이 알고 있는 〈슈퍼마리오〉 고수는 악보를 외운 〈비트매니아〉 고수와 다를 바 없다. 둘은 모두 자신이 플레이하는 게임을 완전히 소진시킨 이들이다. 리듬 게임의 경구를 비틀어 인용하자면, ‘거북이가 오기 때문에 마리오가 점프하는 것이 아니라 마리오가 점프한 자리에 거북이가 오는 것’이다. 비단 〈슈퍼마리오〉의 경우에만 그런 것이 아니다. 단순한 부류부터 복잡한 부류까지 모든 게임에는 타자와의 동기화를 통한 소진이 전부인 국면, 즉 리듬 게임을 닮는 국면이 존재하며, 이는 게임의 재미 일반을 설명하는 건 아닐지라도 오로지 게임에서만 합법적으로 수용되는 쾌감이라는 점에서 게임 특유의 것이다.

타자에게 나를 한 끗의 오차도 없이 딱 맞췄다는 감각, 그래서 내가 더 이상 내가 아니게 되었다는 감각은 곧 나를 가장 굳건하게 속박하고 있는 ‘자기’가 소산消散되는 감각으로, 게임 외의 영역에서는 거의 느낄 수 없는 것이다. 리듬 게임은 빈곤하고 유한하고 폐쇄적이기 때문에 우리로 하여금 독특한 자유로움, 자기 자신으로부터 해방되는 이 자유로움을 맛보게 만든다.

두 선수는 언젠간 교차하게 될 것이다. '페이커'가 내려가는 지점과 '쵸비'가 올라가는 지점에서. 하지만 그 순간이 언제가 될지는 아무도 모른다. '페이커'는 여전히 승리와 트로피를 원하고 그만한 가치를 자신의 손가락에 지니고 있다. '페이커'는 오랜 평행을, '쵸비'는 당장 교차를 원할 뿐이다.

On May 8th, Elon Musk announced Twitter would be “purging accounts that have had no activity at all for several years.” And so I’ve been going back to her account a lot lately. Obviously, Musk is a compulsive liar and nothing he says ever happens the way he says it will, so there’s a possibility her account stays up, but the threat was enough to have led me to start researching ways to archive it. But there really aren’t any good ones. There are ways to archive an account’s most recent 3,000 tweets, but she posted A LOT. So I’ve resigned myself to the idea that one day I will search her username on Twitter and it just won’t be there anymore. But it’s not just Twitter that’s updating their policies. Image-sharing site Imgur announced that they’re “removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to an account” and, just this week, Google announced a similar plan to remove Google accounts after two years of inactivity. I’m sure you’ve heard the old aphorism that everyone dies twice. Now, it seems, we die three times. First, when you stop breathing, second, when a corporation deletes your account, and, third, when someone says your name for the last time. I’ll be realistic here. I don’t think we should expect every company to keep our content forever, but I also don’t think they should get to unilaterally shrink the internet because they’re tired of being responsible for its upkeep. The internet shouldn’t be a handful of company towns that can pull up their stakes and leave when the data mine is tapped. Erasing old content is, also, a fundamental betrayal of what the internet was created for. It was meant to be an infinitely expanding space of unlimited discovery. One that exists beyond what was possible in the physical world. You could be whoever you want, talk to whoever you want, and interact non-linearly across time and space. And a lot of companies got very rich by offering us the opposite: walled gardens and passive algorithmic recommendations jammed into linear feeds, which they marketed as more secure, more convenient, and more entertaining. But there also really isn’t “inactive” content. Not really. It’s just dormant. As long as it’s online, it’s still just as alive as it was when it was first posted. For instance, my friend was once posthumously “canceled” by far-right influencers. She tweeted a lot with people who would eventually work in media and her extremely wild tweets got swept up in some culture war bull shit that no one cares about anymore. The morning it all started kicking off, I opened Twitter and there she was again on my feed. No one seemed to have noticed she had been dead for years. I know she would have gotten a big kick out of it. And, yeah, the whole thing was definitely surreal, but it was also sort nice. Because on the internet, you can, in some sense, live forever. The signals we broadcast out into the void don’t have to fade away if we don’t want them to.

Stealing lines from people who can articulate it all better. Being more of an amalgamation than an anomaly.

Sometimes, when I fall in love, I convince myself that being toyed with means to be touched regardless. I can learn to live with it.