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Writer's pictureAishwarya Jayal

Video games & pimples

It’s blinking again

Waiting for me to spew words

Like a burst bulging pimple,

Disseminating its pus

Only to spread its poison

N spawn itself.


Survival.

The video-game and the player.

But it’s on pause now,

Blinking.

As if another living breathing me

Is waiting to live out

The life I’m yet to play by.


Death is just a reset away.

And where I’ve stopped

Is forked enough

For the reset to test me.

In this game of choices

Only he who doesn’t blink wins

And yet the screen blinks hypnotically,

Expectant

Dominant

Almost commanding me.


The general calls the shots

N the soldiers die.

Yet death is just a reset away,

Does that change my choices?


For in this life

I can only pick my pimples

To leave scars

New skin tries to valiantly survive

Where once nothing,

but parasites thrived.


I’m on pause,

But the blinker blinks

Blink

Blink

Blink

Blink

Black.

And just like that

The life I’d built blanks out

To the silence light leaves behind, when extinct.

Is it then the choice to let pause that killed me

Or the inertia to restart?


The pus has spread now,

and a forever scar

Like a tombstone

Stays behind

In mockery of what they thought was it's death.

And I,

I think about the choices

For our survival.

Would your life choices in the present change, if you had complete information on the kind of future you're leading to and memories of other paths taken by you? If yes, then what would a change of choices mean? Maybe a simple reset - death. Or maybe, greater uncertainty, because a change in choice would then make the known future incomprehensible.


There are of course as many possible views on this as we can allow ourselves to think of! And this is what we explore in the prose - the process of a simple story based video game where the player has an identity of their own and through choices can create and conquer worlds. One wrong choice, and they can just restart/undo, because they are able to live through the consequences of the decision and with this memory make a different one.


What intrigues me is how the theory of choices and consequent alternate realities derives and feeds into the search for meaning. If you're intrigued, and would like to choose an engaging conversation on this, feel free to comment/personally connect with me. :)

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