Heading for quirkier.

Last week I played God of War: Ragnarok, and I uninstalled it 3 days later.

I remember how amazed I was by GOW 2018—I wasn’t a fan of this famous series before that—but that one just changed my understanding of the game industry. I’ve been looking forward to trying its successor for a long time, even though the opportunity was delayed.

I’m not disappointed by Ragnarok so much as unmoved; it didn’t even provoke any emotion in me. Everything was plain—the story, the action, the famous well-curated one-take shot—they simply couldn’t amaze me anymore.

It’s easy to deduce the cause: Ragnarok simply doesn’t deliver anything new, but there is another voice telling me that this ‘simple fact’ relates to a bigger picture, which depicts a world becoming quirkier and quirkier along the timeline.

Quirk is a concept I would analogise to the stock market: it’s not determined by objective law but by human psychology—an activity is called a quirk when it’s shared by only a small fraction of people. Judging Ragnarok by that measure, we can say that it’s not quirkier than GOW 2018—there are new weapons and maps, but they’re not quirky enough.

Is being quirky such an important quality that even a masterpiece would lose all its value when it’s missing? Not necessarily—I can tell not all gamers give up Ragnarok as I did—but I also held immense interest in this game before last week.

But during the play time, with a flash of light I changed my mindset and realised a fact: I need to find games that are quirky, which is now the only kind that could intrigue me again.

I have no intention to go deep into the discussion about which games become my new friends after that (I indeed found some candidates on Steam). The topic of this article is around this quirky preference of society, or of me at least, but I’ll start with society.

“Surplus-enjoyment implies the paradox of a thing which is always (and nothing but) an excess with regard to itself: in its “normal” state, it is nothing.”

This quote came to my mind almost immediately after my realisation regarding this quirky preference. Society’s preference for quirk has been amplified by social media and every content distribution system; people want extraordinary happenings across the globe, and the reason behind this is straightforward—who wouldn’t like another amusing story to laugh at or an outrageous incident to criticise?

It’s not beyond rational expectations that we’ve reached a point where the network is flooded with absurdity, which is heading for even more absurdity at ever greater velocity. The value of things has been judged mainly by subjective criteria, and absurdity has its share.

But here is a paradox: attention seekers on the network are mostly not true weirdos—they seek attention, not a quirky self—and neither do the viewers who indulge themselves in quirky content. In this way we have a split landscape, where people claim that they hate what they admire every day.

Kind of amusing, right? It almost reminds me of proletarians who actually worship the capitalists they claim to hate. No offence, and I’m not accusing all proletarians xD.

Back to the topic—we have pretenders everywhere in society—but do we have truly quirky people? Of course we do; we have every kind of thing here on the planet! Let’s talk about these highly valued people then—not about how they behave, but about how they come into being.

If everyone is merely pretending, then what does it take to become a true weirdo?

Referring to the definition above, we could say that weirdos do not share many traits with the crowd; given that people tend to mimic people around them (no deduction here), we could assume a weirdo does not like to be present in the crowd, even a quirky one—since if the trait ‘enjoying others’ company’ were shared between different weirdos, then that fact would reject their identity as weirdos.

There is an interesting nuance here: weirdos reject the company of others not because they dislike it, but because this behaviour is rejected by the ‘weirdo’ concept itself. The ones who seek company are cut off by the high concept itself, since they’ll become more and more alike; only those left are considered qualified.

For those left, they now have an isolated space to grow by themselves. Becoming quirkier and quirkier is kind of an unshakable norm at this point, because the chance of growing alike to something completely cut off is very slim. That’s why you have a strange ecosystem in Australia unlike that in many other places, or a planetary system that’s totally different from the solar system.

What would people do in isolation? First they will feel fear or pain, since humans like socialising; most people lose their potential when they decide to seek company after feeling the pain, but those who can’t escape (always behind sad reasons) have to endure and find a way to live out all the time on their hands, without the help of a party or prolonged conversation.

There is an advantage to this process: when no one can influence you from up close, you can become more and more yourself—or, in other words, you inevitably build a behaviour pattern that’s different from anyone else’s, which could be defined as ‘yourself’.

‘Becoming yourself’ is such a popular cliché that nearly everyone is talking about—does everyone want to see their neighbours becoming their true self in this way?

Seriously, what on earth does ‘becoming oneself’ even offer?

I wouldn’t try to answer this question in a manner that everyone could understand, since it would conflict with the concept of weirdo. But I would claim that the tendency towards quirk indeed exists for some individuals, and I’m not pointing to those common habits that you could show around without hesitation, like photographing.

I can’t conduct a mass investigation on this topic, so let’s take me for an example (sry—but I have to consider myself ‘quirky’ to a certain extent to continue the article).

Isolation for me is not a pleasant condition, I initially dropped into this state because my teachers had some opinions on me, my mood was so bad because of endless prejudices that I stopped joining groups in the class. And this state lasted long enough that it somehow altered my behaviour.

Then there was fear of loneliness—this is not a story in which a child lost his way because he was too shy to ask for help. There is a realisation for me even at an early stage of life that talking to people around me is totally useless; the question has to be answered by myself.

After some time (6 years maybe) I found a way to live with my isolation, and that’s the turning point. Once you’re not spending all your time being constantly tortured by the endless silence, you would have more space to figure various things out only for yourself—whether it’s your goal, your relationship (if you have one), or the mechanism of the stock market (which you could never figure out).

It’s hard to accurately weigh the ROI of this process—is this quirky mindset I ended up with worth all the bad memories I’ve experienced? Don’t know—this is something out of my control. It’s already too late: I realised things have gone so far that I don’t even want to change course, since the landscapes along this path are so strange, and thus attractive, that I want to see more of them ahead. By the way, I can still see what’s happening to my neighbours thanks to social networks, but I’m not that intrigued.

Realisation of the dullness of Ragnarok is only another lead, which entails another quirky exploration for me. Could I still recommend video games to my friends after this shift? I’m not sure, but in my opinion we’re still human no matter how quirky we become, so the difference in personality wouldn’t be an insurmountable barrier in the end. As long as we speak the same language, quirky people are still only a bit quirkier compared to others.