B4: Broadway

The first musical I'd ever gone to was a Straz Center production of Cats, which my sister wanted to watch for her birthday. While I don't consider Cats the most amazing musical now, its memory remained with me for a long time.

My first Broadway musical, in New York itself, took place in a tiny theatre of a few hundred people. I saw Chicago, a musical I'd wanted to see for a while, and again its memory stuck with me more strongly than any movie I'd seen in theaters. I became enamored with Broadway and the theatre experience, although I have little interest in acting or performance.

Broadway musicals bring to my mind the words of Dr. Jordan Peterson: "One of the things that struck me as near miraculous about music, especially in a rather nihilistic and atheistic society, is that it really does fill the void which was left by the death of God. And it's because you cannot rationally critique music. It speaks to you, it speaks of meaning, and no matter what you say about it, no matter how cynical you are, you cannot put a crowbar underneath that and toss it aside."

This quote speaks to me on many levels. The first time I saw Phantom of the Opera, a musical whose music I'd been listening to all my life, I immediately began weeping before a character even stepped on stage. The opening organ, which reverberated powerfully throughout the theatre, brought back all my memories of my grandfather blasting it through the house because he loved it so much, my friends crowding around the television to watch the movie adaptation, and above those, the tragedy and depth of the eponymous Phantom's character. 

Music and performance is rooted in the core of humanity's soul, where words are meaningless. Each rhythm bears a weight and meaning, offered freely to all who listen. I find this a more precious cultural commodity than any amount of social media vanity.

X2: ASCII

When I was a kid, my dad introduced me to the game Dwarf Fortress, which features ASCII as its main source of graphics. To some, this art direction may seem overly simple and opaque, difficult to navigate through when all of your dwarves are simple smiley faces.

In this image, we can see a lovely barn or stables in the middle of a field. A bridge crosses a coursing river just beside it. Through ASCII, this scene is relayed to the player, and each individual letter corresponds to a very specific component of the game, such as trees, bushes, downward slopes, walls, and solid rock.

To new players, this game seems very difficult, featuring many symbols to adjust to. ASCII used in this way is not intuitive, as modern graphics are. A cow is represented by a "c", a dwarf is a smiley face, and water takes the form of a blue tilde. These graphics are almost necessary, however, in order to allow for the random generation of each new world. This can be reflected in the game Minecraft, which perhaps took some inspiration from Dwarf Fortress.

The ASCII art, to me, represents one of the core philosophies of Dwarf Fortress and its fanbase: playing it well is an earned privilege. Not only is it difficult to adjust to the graphics, but the gameplay itself is a nightmare of sprawling menus and text, with no real explanation as to what anything does.

Despite all of these challenges, Dwarf Fortress has cultivated what I would consider to be one of the most creative and welcoming fanbases I've ever seen. From such a simple game with barebones graphics, the player is forced to create each location in their own mind, which in my opinion easily trumps the designs and concepts of any game developer.