The Nature of Resets
Necessary, not great
I’ve been playing video games almost as long as there have been video games, to this day they’re my main form of entertainment.
Many of my favorite games are MMOs — Massively Multiplayer Online games. These are games where hundreds or thousands of players can play in the large game worlds and interact with each other. There have been a lot of different MMOs over the years and I’ve played most of the major ones to endgame or beyond.
In most MMOs, as in most video games, you start as a low level newbie with a low level gear and only a few skills. You wander around the world doing various things, growing in level, skills, gear, and power. Eventually you reach whatever the level cap is. In most single player games, that is where things would end — you beat the game and move on to the next one. MMOs are different, they’re meant to be played for years, even decades.
In an MMO you reach the level cap and that is when ‘endgame’ begins, in many games that’s really when the real game begins. In endgame most MMOs have some way to continue growing in power and capability as you continue to play. The developers will continue to release increasingly hard content with increasingly greater rewards.
The longer you continue to play the game, the stronger and more powerful you get. This presents a bit of a problem, though, because it makes it increasingly harder for new players to catch up and be competitive with veterans of the game.
Most MMOs have some way of dealing with this issue, those few that don’t pay a steep price for it. The ultimate solution most reach is a periodic kind of soft reset, usually when a new expac drops.
Every year or three most MMOs have what’s referred to as an ‘expac’, an expansion to the game. These expacs often come with changes to game mechanics, new or previously inaccessible play areas, new features, new classes, new baddies and story lines, and a few more levels to grind out.
Typically even BIS (Best In Slot) gear pre-expac will be replaced with quest greens in a few levels. In essence, everyone start out on an even playing field the day an expac drops. Veteran players have more money, mounts, mini-pets, transmogs, or whatever, but most of that is cosmetic and has little or no effect on actual gameplay.
Gameplay-wise, this reset serves a critical purpose. Without it newbies would never be able to compete on anything like an even keel with longtime players. Soon there would be no newbies and the game would fall into a death spiral of population loss.
It strikes me that something similar has to happen to human societies. The longer a government goes on, the more it accumulates power, the greater the differential between the rulers and the ruled, the less chance anyone starting out ever has of catching up.
Without periodic resets that seems inevitable.
Really, when looked at that way, much of human history is a chronicle of such resets. It usually goes one of two ways.
The people who are fed up pack their things and go somewhere else. They kick out, kill, or absorb — usually some combination thereof — whomever happens to be there, and start their own new thing.
Alternatively, sharp and pointy things come out and people start losing essential body parts until eventually the old system is dead, usually along with most of its adherents, and a new system is formed.
The problem is there is no where on earth to go, nowhere that isn’t claimed by one or another of the very kinds of people you’d be trying to escape, and the power differential between the ruled and the rulers has become so great as to make outright revolution almost unthinkable, if by no means unwinnable.
And yet, without a reset where do we go from here?
Klaus and his buddies at the WEF like to prattle on about a Great Reset, but what they’re talking about isn’t a reset at all. A reset is what they fear the most, it would be their necks that would, with good reason, inevitably meet the sharp and pointy things. What They mean by a “Great Reset” is a great entrenchment that, they hope, would prevent a reset from ever happening.
Good luck with that.
Something Klaus, Gates, and the rest of the Bond Villain Cosplay Squad don’t get is that human societies, languages, and cultures are organic. You can ride the wave, you can pretend to yourself that you can predict where the wave will go, but try and direct it, try and steer it, try and control it and you will find yourself very quickly pounded into the sand.
Anyone here speak Esperanto?
Yeah, didn’t think so.
It still gets pushed and it is still going nowhere so fast it violates several laws of physics.
The problem is that in pushing their “Great Reset” these Führer wannabes not only make a real, and almost certainly very bloody, reset likely, they are quickly making it almost essential.
To quote The Deceleration of Independence:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
It is their right, it is their duty…
In their haste to cement themselves as the ultimate rulers, those pushing a “Great Reset” worldwide are making a real reset all but inevitable.
And that is a lot scarier than the Wuhan Sniffles.
