The Joy Man

Buckshot Roulette, and why it doesn't bring me joy in the face of death.

“I'm not going to go out pointin' that at myself. If I die, it'll be because I pointed it at him.” - Markiplier

In Buckshot Roulette, outside of certain circumstances, you should never shoot yourself. In a helpful video explaining the odds, and the way future chambers go, a youtuber also points out multiple cases where you might shoot yourself. Half the comments are those condemning those who always talk of shooting themselves as incapable of further rounds or not taking into account the full chamber; In the midst of these is the quote above, sitting there, a starling singing to the insects, but the insects receive a warning. They can bury themselves, they go not need to count the shells, they live for the day and swim through dirt like digital nomads.

See, that’s the issue with Buckshot Roulette, I get addicted to gambling easy, but this isn’t gambling. It is a false pragmatism, masquerading for shallow ass rationalism. For stats people to be suave and stick some sign values on their profile. Russian Roulette, however, is a ritualistic defiance, a tribal sacrificial energy fuelled precarious dance where the revolver becomes a tool of transcendence.

So, the gun is passed person to person, the faces tremble, energy is expelled in simple acts as they become nomads drinking chaos and refusing to be bound by fixed identities or predetermined paths. It becomes an act of perpetual becoming, a gamble with the self as the ultimate stake. The revolver serves as a symbol of deterritorialization, a weapon not only against the physical body but against the territorialized mind ensnared by societal contacts. Madness, in this context, transcends its conventional pathologization and emerges as a potent force of liberation, opening doors to alternate realities and possibilities.

Russian roulette, at its core is a becoming. A relentless pursuit of the outside, the beyond, and the uncharted territories of existence. It stands as a testament to the radical potential inherent in madness, in embracing the chaos within and without, and daring to confront the abyss of uncertainty with audacity and defiance.

Real pragmatism, real rationalisation, takes a different form.

That’s why you should always face the firing squad. You objectify yourself, but you are not an object. You gain thingness, but out of yourself, you have not made a new thing. There’s no labour, in it either, or the shame it is dressed in punishes the soul more than the longer  “humane” humiliation of prison. Everyone with a gun is marked with the now, not the future, they are marked with the ritual game and learn a deeper role. It is not by chance like Russian Roulette, it is not by statistics like Buckshot, no it is completely order out of unknown chaos. With that you reinforce the intimacy of the life, death, and one’s dance in the symphony of society. There is no profitability in the firing squad, there’s no scoreboard afterwards docking your joy because of cancer bills. It’s a catastrophic waste of energy, and that’s the point – the thing that Buckshot Roulette doesn’t get.

A Crown of Beer Cans

Bataille talks of the Aztecs treating their sacrifices as incarnations of the God’s themselves. They would be worshipped by the civilians, treated as a son of the family that captured him. An intimate relationship, “even the slaves would sing from their breasts”¹ – terrified or not. The human mix of emotions, imbues it the chaos with the blurring between the realms. The player is killed from the wounds on their lungs and alcohol poisoning at the end of the game, but that is when they are free. The player is set free beholden only to himself. You are a lone god, with a waiver and a magnifying glass. Wars are for consumption, not conquest – but you beat the dealer. You go on the highscore board.

It’s pragmatism. Fire and the sun both require something filled with energy to burn. So, blood should fuel the sun. Metaphor crumbles down into a raw economics. The god of agriculture wears flayed skin because the corn sheds its skin, so the sacrificial skin is worn by the priest. Phenomenology, pragmatized.

But that’s why you read the bullets, right? You’ll count two in one, weigh up the percentages. You’ll be pragmatic like that, call the AI stupid for it’s 50/50. Hell you might even make a smarter brute forcing AI that might keep the game going. In the end you’ll keep counting though. That’s that rationale after all. You’re a pragmatist. Phenomenology, rationalised.

The Aztec God-incarnation would snap his flutes that he had played through the nights, the player smashes the magnifying glass to see the bullet. A man is given mead to be merry and sing, the player cracks a can, it ejects out the uncertainty even as a prisoner in this ritual – this game.

But for the Aztecs, it was intimate. Father-son. Profane. The dealer stands opposite you. He says you and me, no machines, to play for real. Double or nothing. He’ll cut off the barrel to put two in you, but the two colours of the maiden are painted together. The Dealer’s in control, he’s always uncertain 50-50 to shoot himself or you, only if he knows the bullet will he evade this. What, do you think he uses the interceptor to take your items? They never touch. There’s no father-son. All that’s on your walls is “afraid.” The scoreboard is your real enemy, you want the money. Oh yes, endless mode because death has to be stayed away longer, rig the bullets, count them. Make a video essay on the statistics. Immolate yourself with your miscount, a mis-glance, but you know it happened. You know the process.

No longer then is the death sudden or unexpected. The ambition of money, the scoreboard, it all holds down and excretes from the man - even with calm and even temper – an anti-death, anti-life fulfilment. The warrior on the battlefield who dies, is burned, and decorated with flowers by his Aztec peers, gains fulfilment in the tearing apart of his man. The gambler cannot lay claim to greatness when it depends entirely on chance, so he turns to rationalisation – he turns to efficiency just as the Aztecs did with their turn to military warfare, where a softening of the ritual occurs. And so, the player rejects the violent resolution of Aztecs, sets a bar for bliss, and into the binary; yes or no, win or lose. At least the Aztecs in their military might tore down the king and kept a cycle of never equilibrium, never bliss, where action and power entangle.

An internal system, but do not be confused that this is the same for the roulette room.

For the player signed a contract.

The Slave and His ~Object~-Orientated Programming

I wrote my MA dissertation on whether a piece of computer software could be theologically significant or not. It walked from maths and logic as divine to the meditation of weaving logic the way a monk weaves his loom. From Buddhism to Chaos magic, from burnt offering to the Buddha’s missing finger. That just like the Mandelbrot set of for Penrose and Caroll gave alethea, the illusive illumination could be crunched within the numbers. For all the cosmology in the Buddhist sculpture, could be in a software. It scored like shit, and I tell you all this because I will now tell you why Buckshot Roulette cannot give you death: You are an object, contracted to the engine and can never be nothing but a slave.

Contracting is everywhere. Deleuze in his Nomadic Thought points out that even the act of buying a book is a contract. I give you money, you give me entertainment. You buy game, you get play (yes even visual novels.) In The Trash Man, I wrote of it as a Thunderdome, I give you money, you let me fight your challenge in the Thunderdome. This all, however, has a purpose to “code” the world and “map” the world into these codes and eventually code the world up and down. Everything gets codified, even down to the number of bullets in Buckshot Roulette. Against codification, against the freedom of the videogame, the programmer does not enter the Thunderdome but instead commits suicide. You can speedrun, you can make a video essay, you can make challenge runs or play pacifist or even overflow the buffer by playing for eighteen billion years. For Deleuze then what is transmitted is not the “code” of the “game” but ‘a current of energy,’

But this is not the energy of that Bataille writes of – It is not violent. The codification of the game, is not just inherent in the object-nature of the GODOT engine, no there’s external factors – two of them – which enslaves the player; The hard-coded probability, and the hardcoded of a person’s own mathematical counting. As in the Dealer using items in certain orders enslaves the Dealer down to "that which is" to the order of things, but also to the player’s own rationalistic calculations. Bataille notes this in a contracting sense: “Slavery is abolished, but we ourselves are aware of the aspects of social life in which man is legated to the level of things, and we should know that this relegation did not await slavery” And external from the code of the game, we introduce the player’s projections, the players rationalisations, thus displacing the Thunderdome-style intimacy. You get articles trying to socialise games into being a certain type of thinking, or style, rulesets, or culture no matter where the origin point is. All this external-programming is helping codification beyond the code with its rational progression, where what matters is no longer the “Thunderdome of challenge” and play but just the outcomes of operations.

The player in Buckshot Roulette cannot ever escape attempting to “game” the objects of the real order for the game contracts you to the future and then codifies it with the score. The Dealer, however, never becomes a further “thing” because he is wasteful consumption insofar as it is not tied down to “work” - only it’s “nature” in it’s code. The Dealer isn’t teleological, and he’s not laboured, but chaotic on the chance, it is not the perfect “outsideness” that Deleuze would’ve wanted but it affords a waste expense of energy more than the author-suicide. The Dealer, unlike the player is freed from "what will be" and plays against the player who is trapped and confined in "what is”. I can see comments arising from the fact that there is a better dealer AI mod, but ah ha! You have fallen into a trap; for all the better AI does is not “solve” anything but a type of brute force of which even Godel understands to not be anything close to a human-solving. While being less random it still, if anything, increases disorder and now portrays an almost instantaneous consumption of all that that the player may now and still make the wrong choice. This useless consumption grants the Dealer so much more power, makes him different because even then he still, forsakes concern for extra rounds or carried items. He continues consumes his items more, wider, more varied all in an instant except now with more of a brutal, violent churning through possibilities. And the catch, with all of this. The dealer passes his calculations, his consumptions, intimately with the engine only.

You, the player, are not invited to this intimacy. You can die, escape, “win,” cure your cancer from smoking. Choose to not drink a beer for better score, but the Dealer does not. The Dealer is the only one in this game is free to consume. The code with you entraps you only into a contract and can never be anything more than slave labour. The Dealer is free. The Dealer smiles with the brightest eternal malice.

“I picture myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in harmony with the world, at the same time a victim and one of the jaws of TIME, which is constantly killing and constantly killed.”

1. All quotes from this section come from the the capture The Accursed Share, Vol. I: “Sacrifices and Wars of the Aztecs”