“Cyberpunk Kid Infinite: The Poison Apple” by Dinuka Mapa

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A book about Gaming, Social Reform and Schizophrenia melted together.

Video games and me go a long way back. My love for them is rooted in early childhood experience, when coming home from a busy day of school, I would switch on my N64 and feel engrossed in the duty of collecting all 128 power stars or even traveling in time to save princess Zelda and Hyrule from a dark, tyrannical fate. The thing with me and video games is that I really never did grow out of them. Most kids are fascinated by them, by their avenue for adventure and creation. The sad thing is that as they grow older it becomes ingrained in them, by their parents or even society, that video games are nothing more than a waste of time, a disreputable enterprise, ‘Only drones play video games. Do you want to be a Drone?’ Those that survive all this and become adult gamers claim to still love video games; they lose any raw interest, but consume video games like mindless zombies, their wow deriving by graphics and other bland things like ‘character creation’ or optimized ‘class selection. If a game has little or no intros or cutscenes, they become frustrated and say, ‘there is barely any story told’. They pay very little attention to the in-game queues and dialogue. They fathom very little about the context of the game world, and prefer to call it a ‘backstory’. All they really care about is mashing buttons and unlocking achievements. They affirm themselves as gamers because they have learned all the technical dribble. They immerse themselves in paraphernalic terms and phrases such as ‘good game’, or ‘gg’ or ‘noob’, not realizing that they are noobs themselves. They point their cursors at the AI enemies to trigger and click at. They are mindless idiots. They do games a great disservice because they fail to see past these forms of ‘AI’ and witness the real artificial intelligence nested between all the lines of code, things that are truthful and beautiful. They are mere consumers of video games, not true nerds, or ‘philosophers’. They become citizens of MACHINE CITIES. I explore this transformation in this eBook subsequently titled, ‘CYPERPUNK KID INFINITE 2022: THE POISON APPLE’. I hope you enjoy it and are inspired to play more video games.

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