“Ur-ges”

I fucking hate the Ur-Casinos, and all the loud, moronic games that leak out of their neon-lit corridors. Living in an Agrarian-occupied Heaven means that we all have to put up with them, since they are a staple of their shallow entertainment culture.

Here, we see a young girl enthralled with the latest mobile-targeted match-3, “Anthropology 2,” which is a matching game where you try to stack dead bodies into a mass grave in such a way as to make them disappear.

As someone from the 21st century, this game is damn near incomprehensible. Though the still image doesn’t betray it, it is one of the most numbingly complex video games I’ve ever seen, with elusive goals, constantly changing and expanding win conditions, and a stream of Pavlovian bonuses/achievements that keep people hooked.

According to some articles analyzing them, the Anthropology series of games are actually impossible to understand, and were built by disgruntled professerfs trying to make a statement about the labyrinthine nature of totalitarian bureaucracy. Whether they succeeded or not is up for debate (though making a statement like that to a mostly-illiterate population that burns books for warmth seems like a waste of effort to me). Like most Agrarian-made video games, this one uses the cameras of the device it’s running on to spot suspicious eye movements that would give away readers (and to upload sweet High Score selfies!!!)

The Choir of Numerals now says that 83% of all Agrarian soldiers (and nearly 95% of all child soldiers) use these games to de-stress after combat, with casino addiction on the rise. I feel like this is a little different from the images of army dudes chilling in Iraq somewhere playing Call of Duty that were around when I was a kid.

Why?

Well, for one, I have yet to ever see a smile on the face of any Ur-Casino patron. Fist pumps of conquest? Sure. Frothing anger at a bad playthrough? Absolutely But joy? Never.

It’s unusual—and personally alarming—that most of the young soldiers I’ve seen here find more glee to be had shooting stray dogs than in experiencing a video game. What has become of the youth?