The Randomness of Bad and Good Things

I was at Guanghua Digital Market last night and I bought a train simulation game and air traffic simulation game that I really wanted. While I was on the shelf, I saw another game that caught my eye: A train driving simulation game through the beautiful autumn leaves of the Kansai region in Japan.

Maybe it was the hubris of earning a little more than I need right now or the pent up frustration of having been stuck in my apartment during the two months of post-surgery rehab causing a yearning for the foliage of suburban Japan, but I threw the game on the counter when checking out and didn't think much about it.

What a mistake! The game was horrendous. Train simulation games vary wildly in quality and this was the worst I've ever seen. Depending on the train's velocity, a low-fidelity video recording of a real-life cab ride would speed up or slow down. The video had so low of a framerate that at its slowest speeds, I just couldn't stop the train accurately; the train teleporting just kept forward once a second unpredictably.

I was mad, but I felt a strange wistfulness. As a child, I remember a visit to Fry's Electronics where my parents let me buy a game and I bought blindly based on what was written on the cover. I ended up with a CD for a game, SimCoaster, that I played once and never touched again.

Are you old enough to remember window shopping at a time when video game reviews only existed in specialty magazines and there was no such thing as a Let's Play or a review aggregator informing your every purchase? I'm mad about being duped, but it's an anger that I hadn't felt in years, one that's wrapped in nostalgia. The emotions felt so familiar: The excitement of coming home and unwrapping something shrink-wrapped in a beautiful cover and then the disappointment when what was printed on the glossy case doesn't match what I imagined in my head.

I'm not at all saying that those were better times, but they were simpler. In a time where fake reviews are bought and sold with alarming efficiency and the internet is filled with LLM-generated garbage, are we returning to what once was? I don't know.

I was sitting in a cab driving through Taipei recently and the generic mandopop on the radio gave way to the falsetto chords of the Bee Gees' "Too Much Heaven", one of my favourite songs. The next thing I knew, tears were welling up in my eyes. I wondered who curates the songs on this generic mandopop radio station, and what drove them to suddenly choose this song in the sea of everything else they played. What did this song mean to them? Even though we've never spoken and never will speak, in that moment, I felt a connection.

Taiwanese essayist Lung Ying-tai wrote about the distance between her and her son when he got his first MP3 player and how she could never reach him anymore because he was listening to "the music of one man". It's true that personalization has given rise to beautiful subaltern aesthetics, but part of me misses my music taste being only as diverse as the shelf of a radio station. My favourite Taiwanese indie acts are now able to tour the US, growing their following internationally through the advent of streaming platforms. At the same time, I remember growing up as a child in Sydney when Kylie Minogue's "Outta My Head" and Delta Goodrem's "Lost Without You" were the anthems of Australian pop culture. I remember begging my mother to tune into Mix 106.5FM Hit Radio on the short drive to school every morning, hoping that I'd catch one of those songs. I had a birthday party at a bowling alley where I asked if they could play "Outta My Head" on repeat for an hour. That my mother survived is a testament to the tenaciousness of parenthood. Everyone was obsessed with this song together. It felt like we were experiencing something together.

Everything I buy and listen to comes through the filter of social or algorithmic recommendations now, but lately I've experienced the highs and the lows of the randomness of our past. It's good that we don't buy Bad Games anymore, and it's good that so many music subcultures are thriving, but part of me still feels a wistfulness for Those Times, where we did; I feel a nostalgia for the times when we turned on the radio with baited breath, waiting for the possibility that a song we were obsessed with might just come on in-between a sea of advertisements.