Lost in the Miasma
Prologue
“They say that the golden age is gone, never to return. But I believe that we can somehow bring it back. I must believe... if I am to carry on.” —Narrator, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Between the verdant hills of Arcadia and the rainbow falls of Shella, the cleansing fires of Kilanda and the wheat fields of Fum, the tranquil streams of Tipa and the crystal blues of the Jegon, even between the burning sands of the Sahara and the majestic geysers of Yellowstone, there creeps a sick miasma, snuffing out the golden glow, slowly killing us all.
You can try to fight it, hold your heart high like a crystal chalice filled with myrrh, try to banish the miasma with memories of the golden age—but your chalice is running dry and the memories are fading fast and you’re all alone because everyone around you has already dropped dead and you’re starving for myrrh and the miasma is closing in faster than ever before.
How long do you think you can survive by yourself, lost in this monstrous fog?
Eventually, you’re going to need someone on your side, because you can’t banish the miasma alone.
So pack up your caravan and dust off that old magic racket, because we’re heading to the unnamed fantasy world of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles to collect some myrrh, banish the miasma, and maybe—just maybe—bring back the golden age.
I, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
“Miasma hindered my steps, and monsters struck at me from behind. Still, I’ll always look back fondly on the warm smiles that greeted me in villages I visited, and it was always a joy to meet other caravans on the long, lonely road.” —Player’s Diary, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Long ago, there was a golden era: a great crystal shone its light on all things, banishing the darkness—until a great meteor fell from the sky, shattering the crystal and leaving behind a thick miasma that poisoned all it touched. But all hope was not lost, for massive shards of the mother crystal were scattered across the land, repelling the miasma. In time, villages formed around these crystals. But the crystals’ powers waned each year, refreshed only by an offering of myrrh, a rare dew found all across the land. And so, at the start of each year, each village sends a caravan out into the miasma to gather myrrh in hopes of powering the village crystal for yet another year.
Or something like that.
In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, you are a caravaner. You carry with you the weapon of your tribe, some armor, some food, and, most importantly, the crystal chalice, used both to repel the miasma and collect the myrrh. On your hunt for myrrh, you will trudge through maze-like dungeons fighting monsters and solving puzzles that often require the aid of a second person, because the fate of your village rests not solely upon your shoulders but also on those of up to three friends—or a moogle—as teamwork is key to surviving the miasma.
And that’s the entire premise of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, originally released for the Nintendo GameCube on August 8, 2003, and later re-released on August 27, 2020, for nearly every era-appropriate console, including the Nintendo Switch, which was the version I played before writing this essay.
Crystal Chronicles itself is a deceptively simple action role-playing game hiding under a quilt of obtuse gameplay mechanics that are barely explained, such as the artifact system, in which your character progressively gets stronger through the collection of artifacts in lieu of a traditional experience-based system; or the mail system, in which your family sends letters that you can choose to reply to with a canned positive or negative response, of which the benefits are totally nebulous and probably irrelevant; or how the entire story is told through short cutscenes triggered seemingly at random, with the contents of those seemingly random cutscenes themselves also seemingly random, only hinting at a deeper story rather than telling one outright. In fact, most of the cutscenes are inconsequential to the overall plot, existing only to serve the cozy, community-focused ambiance of the game; for example, the numerous cutscenes of your caravan providing helpful advice or trading items or telling stories to other caravans. It’s all very wholesome, pastoral, nomadic stuff; one gets the feeling when playing Crystal Chronicles that all the residents of the game world have put aside their differences to focus on the bigger, extinction-level threat: the miasma.
The mechanical vagueness of the game is so vague that it reminded me of the SaGa video game series, of which the backbone is literally obtuse vagueness—and I was so reminded of SaGa that, at a certain point, I was convinced that Crystal Chronicles must be, in actuality, a secret SaGa game. So when I looked up details on the game on the old World Wide Web of Miasma, I was not surprised to find that Crystal Chronicles was indeed created by the king of obtuse vagueness himself: Akitoshi Kawazu, the creator of the SaGa series. So, somehow, without even consciously seeking it out, I had found myself obsessed with yet another SaGa game, almost as if I am drawn to them by some unknown obtusely vague force—as if the games themselves spew a sort of obtusely vague miasma that magnetically draws in obtusely vague people (i.e., myself).
Thankfully, none of the aforementioned obtusely vague systems seem to impact anything important in the game, and those that do—such as the artifact system—are forgiving enough that you just kind of stumble into figuring them out, meaning you can’t really screw yourself over like in so many other 2000s-era role-playing games. And, besides, the real meat of the game lies not in the vague cutscenes or odd mail system but in the dungeons—wooded streamside paths, log-bridge swamps, lizardman hideouts, fungi forests, caverns of jade and wind, even an ogre’s manor—which are presented in a charming, vibrant, three-dimensional Arcadian low-poly-pastel overhead perspective, wherein you just run around whacking monsters with your sword or racket or spear or whatever until the monsters go poof and drop items or money or artifacts or magicite, the latter enabling the casting of all the classic Final Fantasy spells. And all of this is done with like two or three buttons, meaning it’s very simple stuff. In fact, the combat itself usually boils down to a bait-the-monster-into-attacking-you-but-dodge-at-the-last-second-so-you-can-hit-them-three-times-during-their-idle-frames kind of thing, which is the kind of thing that turns action games into rhythm games when you think about it too hard.
And while Crystal Chronicles’ combat is basic—mundane, even—the whole experience never manages to become dull. In fact, thanks to the presentation, the game is relaxing, almost a zen-like experience at times. The charming, low-poly whimsy of the game makes you want to crawl right through your television set and hop into a crystal caravan yourself—and the remaster is upscaled in such a way that it sacrifices none of the original game’s charm. Not only that, but the musical score perfectly sets the mood with its melodious mixture of breezy strings and pastoral flutes that sound as if they could blow the miasma away all by themselves, entirely composed by Kumi Tanioka, a virtuosic pianist-slash-composer who has created music for nearly thirty games as of the writing of this essay, including Final Fantasy XI (my video game equivalent to crack cocaine).
So while the combat can be boring and some of the mechanics can be vague and obtuse, the whole Crystal Chronicles package is a once-in-a-lifetime something-special kind of thing that you just can’t find anywhere else. It’s the closest thing to a digital nomadic Arcadia that you’re going to get in an action game that is also a role-playing game that is also a Final Fantasy game. It’s idyllic and sylvan and all sorts of majestic. It's like a small-town farmer’s market as opposed to a Publix or a handwritten letter as opposed to a Facebook comment or a backyard jam session as opposed to Coachella or a faded Polaroid as opposed to a heavily-edited Instagram photo or a relaxing bike ride as opposed to riding a Greyhound or a hug as opposed to a heart emoji. Basically, despite the miasma, Crystal Chronicles is a halcyon game.
But the most important thing about Crystal Chronicles is that it’s a game about community. It’s a game about banding together with the ones you love to banish the miasma: the crystal villages thing, the whole caravan thing, the putting-aside-differences thing, and the probably-pointless-mail-system thing. It all serves to reinforce the theme of community. And, by extension, it’s also about friends and family. It’s about working with others despite differences, building trust and friendship with the real, fleshy people around you, and then, when all the myrrh is gathered, going back home—where the heart is—to wind down and spend time with the ones you love.
And the gameplay itself reinforces this community theme because, at its core, Crystal Chronicles is a multiplayer game. In fact, the game was intentionally designed from the ground up with this multiplayer-component in mind; there’s a spell fusion system that allows two or more players to cast spells simultaneously, fusing them into a stronger spell; there are numerous dungeon puzzles that require more than one person to complete; and even traversing dungeons requires someone to carry the crystal chalice, which serves as the protective barrier between your party and the miasma. Meaning that, without someone on your side, you will succumb to the miasma.
In the original GameCube version of Crystal Chronicles, up to four players could join together by connecting their Game Boy Advance systems via GBA-to-GameCube link cables. And this couch co-op aspect was, back in 2002, the game’s most heavily advertised feature. Even the original 2002 North American television commercial made it a point to emphasize the multiplayer aspect, showing four live-action teenagers holding crystals atop a skyscraper, all surrounded by miasma, with the words “who are you?” between them, as if implying that you—the viewer—are literally nothing without someone on your side, hence reinforcing the whole teamwork thing and the whole community thing.
“Use the crystals to expel the mist that poisoned your world. Battle alone or with friends by connecting up to four Game Boy Advance Systems. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, only for Nintendo GameCube. Rated T for Teen.” —Narrator. Original Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Commercial. 2002. *
The original Crystal Chronicles became a cult classic for a reason: it inspired thousands of millennial kids to put aside their differences, fuse spells, poof monsters, collect myrrh, solve puzzles, and banish the miasma—all while huddled around a single CRT television set with some Mountain Dew and a couple of hand-tossed pepperoni pizzas from Pizza Hut. In fact, being able to say, decades later, that you played Crystal Chronicles with three other people all huddled very close together—adolescent spit and sweat and who knows what else splish-splashing back and forth—while sucking in fantasy-flavored CRT electrolight through your eyeballs and poorly controlling a blurry hero in three-dimensional space with a mushy little GBA d-pad that caused severe blisters over prolonged play is pretty much a badge of honor in the retro-gaming space these days. And while many arguments were had around the GameCube—mainly over who got which artifact at the end of a dungeon or who got the last slice of pizza or whether so-and-so’s mom was truly so fat that her blood type was indeed “ragu sauce”—Crystal Chronicles on the couch with the gang was always a good time.
In short, the original Crystal Chronicles was one of the great couch co-op unifiers of the 2000s—which is why it’s such a shame that Square Enix killed the couch co-op with the 2020 remaster. That’s right: they removed the core in-person multiplayer functionality around which the entire game was built, the same functionality that reinforced the game’s narrative themes so perfectly; they removed it and replaced it with a cheap online substitute.
Solo, the Crystal Chronicles remaster is still enjoyable, and the game is still beautiful peak arcadian cozy times, but the most important element is missing; the thing that tied everything together, the thing that made the game so special: the community element; the way it was designed to basically force you to put aside your differences and play with real-life fleshy people in the same room together; the way it fostered real-life communities. All gone. And this couch co-op aspect reinforced the main themes of the game so well that it’s pretty much mandatory for the full Crystal Chronicles experience, something feels seriously wrong without it—and this is obvious to anyone who has played the original game, so it’s almost as if the remaster team at Square Enix didn’t play the original game at all.
Multiplayer still exists in the remastered version of Crystal Chronicles—but there’s absolutely no built-in local co-op of any kind, which is the important thing here. Instead, there’s only online multiplayer facilitated by Square Enix’s lobby system, which means that A) each player needs their own system and copy of the game, B) each player needs an internet connection, C) each player needs to pay an online subscription fee (depending on the platform on which they play the game), and D) each player needs to contend with some of the worst online play ever implemented in a video game, including frequent rubber-banding that I can only imagine is what orbiting a black hole feels like, frequent disconnects, and a communication system that consists of only a few pages of canned messages that cannot be altered or reliably sent in the heat of the moment, as the teamwork elements of the game require quick coordination with your friends, almost as if the multiplayer was designed around using your voice, which was, in fact, the intended gameplay experience of the original fucking game.
And yes, technically, you and a friend could both buy the game on Nintendo Switch, get in the same room, and then play the game together through the online functionality using separate systems—but even in that scenario, you’re still subject to the stipulations outlined in the previous paragraph’s lettered list. Not only that, but the remaster also removes the ability to explore towns, check family mail, and trade items with other players—so forget about all those thematically relevant gameplay mechanics that reinforce the sense of community that the original game tried so hard to cultivate; instead, the only thing you can do in multiplayer is run dungeons and kill things—that’s it. Needless to say, this all amounts to a pretty much dead online multiplayer experience, so even if you go looking for people to play with online, you won’t find any.
And yes, because there’s some semblance of multiplayer in the Crystal Chronicles remaster, one could argue that there is some semblance of the real-life community element still in the game—but I would totally disagree, because online communities are not real-life communities at all: online communities are faux, fake, pantomime; they’re bullshit, loveless moshpits that tear at the soul and turn us all into monsters.
So yeah, obviously I’m pissed about the lack of couch co-op in the Crystal Chronicles remaster, but it’s bigger than that; it’s not just an unfortunate slip-up on Square Enix’s part—it’s a goddamn tragedy; and it’s a goddamn tragedy not only because it misses the thematic point of the game, but for so many other reasons that go way beyond video games entirely: it’s actually a matter of the self and the soul; it’s a matter of human isolation; it’s a matter of this virtual reality we are constantly being pushed into.
It’s a matter of how the internet fucking sucks and is slowly killing us all.
II, Thesis
The miasma was unleashed upon humanity in August 1991, and ever since then, we have been slowly but surely dying. None of us are immune. First, the miasma turns us into warped versions of ourselves—monsters—and then we die.
We die miserable deaths, surrounded by so many people but still feeling so very alone.
And yes, I’m talking about the internet: the World Wide Web of Miasma. We are all lost in this miasma, starving for myrrh, dying.
At this point, you’re probably rolling your eyes, thinking something like, “Oh boy, here he goes again.” But I am not exaggerating. The miasma is real and it’s killing us. Our flesh may not be decaying any faster than it normally would, but our humanity sure as hell is.
And that’s the thesis, that’s what I really want to cover with this essay—not Crystal Chronicles, not Square Enix dropping the ball, not Nintendo’s shitty online service; none of that.
I want to talk about how the internet is fucking killing us.
III, Miasma’s Effect on Community
“The sun once smiled on this village more than any other. But one day, their crystal's blessing faded. The villagers eagerly awaited their caravan's return; but for them, the crystal would never shine again. It is said that not a single one of them tried to escape. All stood fast waiting for the caravan, hoping to the very end.” —Narrator, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
Back in the early 2000s—I must have been eleven or so—every summer break, every day, I would bring my N64 controller—that classic grey mass with the three handles that everyone held differently and the thumbstick that caused severe bleeding—over to my friend Miles’ house and just sit on his tiny twin-size bed playing Super Smash Bros. on his small CRT television for hours. I remember the room; it was painted white, thick blue clouds near the top of the walls, wooden beams across the ceiling, huge windows with these white gossamer drapes that somehow amplified the sunlight instead of blocking it out, and the whole room was filled with nautical imagery: little anchors all over the walls, paintings of whaling ships and the whales they whaled, even a ship in a bottle resting atop a dresser on which the knobs were colorful fish and the handles were arched dolphins. His dad worked as a waiter at a five-star restaurant, kept a little fishing boat in the garage, but the boat never moved from that spot. Miles' mom later banned Smash Bros. from the house because she felt the violence was giving her son nightmares. When we were a little older, we played Halo on the Xbox in that same room; sometimes half of the neighborhood kids would come over and play with us, taking turns killing each other on that small CRT screen split four ways to eye-watering agony, using those big original fat-boy Xbox controllers that made it feel like your hands were being stretched by some medieval torture device. We even played Crystal Chronicles in that nautical room, on his brother’s GameCube, the three of us each with a Game Boy Advance plugged into the thing, our faces pushed real close to the phosphor, practically becoming one with the electron gun; I remember the first time we defeated the Malboro in the Mushroom Forest: it was early in the morning, like 5 A.M. or something—when the sun just barely hatches from the horizon like the burning chick of a mother phoenix—and we screamed so loudly that their mom woke up, sent me home, and grounded Miles and his brother for a whole week. That was one lonely week. I must have been thirteen or so when that all went down. Eventually, Halo 2 came out, and that consumed our gaming habits for nearly two years, during which time my friend relocated his entire room up to the loft above his garage. So much happened up in that room that it has become an anchor point around which all my teenage memories swirl; it is a place that I am now always trying to capture picture perfect in my mind, remember exactly how it was, recreate the feeling of being there. How I long to return to that loft above the garage. I remember Miles’ mom bought him a huge flat-screen television for that room, and we would all just veg out in front of that thing, eating junk food, playing Halo 2. There was a big couch in there, giving literal meaning to the phrase “couch co-op,” and there was a hatch into the attic, which was full of pink foam and cardboard boxes. We did some serious growing up in that room together, during that Halo 2 phase, around 2004 or so; we got serious girlfriends and started experimenting with weed and alcohol, but we always made time, almost every summer night, to gather around that massive flat-screen television and play video games. Other kids might have had sports or fishing or walking the mall as their pivotal growing-up community experience, but we had video games: multiplayer video games. And when the Xbox 360 arrived, we all got Xbox Live and goofy gamertags and migrated to online multiplayer gaming. We got so lost in that miasma. And while we still played together in that loft-turned-bedroom from time to time, with the introduction of the miasma, something changed, something was different—and I like to think that it wasn’t just us getting older; suddenly, kids who used to come over and play Halo with us opted to stay home and play online instead, because it was easier and they didn’t have to deal with the split-screen aspect of in-person gaming; eventually those kids stopped playing with us entirely, but the Xbox friend list still showed them frequently online, doing their own thing, not responding to our funny voice messages and invites. We didn’t know it at the time, but these online conveniences came with a heavy sacrifice, the sacrifice of something very special. More and more, we opted to stay home, playing online with each other rather than on the couch. We sacrificed community—real, in-the-flesh community—and replaced it with some facsimile of community. A facsimile that felt good at the start but ended up leaving us feeling lost and empty. At the time—I must have been sixteen or seventeen or something—it was easy to rally around online gaming, as it was the hip, cool, convenient teenage gamer zeitgeist, but we weren’t thinking; we were mindlessly following the corporate gaming trends, which were: everything online all the time with a subscription fee forever. We were not thinking about what online gaming might do to us as a community of teenagers who bonded over multiplayer games and how the miasma would ultimately tear our gaming community asunder. Sure, we had a few days here and there, some sleepovers in which we kept the couch co-op dream alive, playing that old bloodshot split-screen, but we never regained that “we’re going over to Miles’ house to play Crystal Chronicles” feeling ever again. And we also got into some big fights, because it was so much easier to be nasty to each other when we weren’t sitting together in the same room, as if we had lost some sort of equalizer; suddenly, kill counts and skill levels and achievement points and which “clan” you were part of became more important than you as a real living breathing human being. And if you didn’t keep up with your friends or meet some arbitrary online-gaming standard, then you “sucked”—and not in this “you suck lol” kind of way, but this serious “you suck as a person and should die” kind of way that seemed totally unironic because no one could tell who was serious and who was just playing around, as our normal in-person tells and quirks got all lost in the miasma. Offline, we were cool; online, we hated each other: we didn’t see each other as real people, and the further we walked into the miasma, the more we lost our humanity. Eventually, we identified as the characters in our profile pictures more so than the people staring back at us in the mirror. And that’s the story of how my childhood gaming community got lost in the miasma.
This whole gamer coming-of-age story serves as a microcosm of what the miasma has done to the gaming community worldwide. Because while the internet has made multiplayer gaming more accessible and, consequently, more popular ever before, it has also made it toxic as hell and more disconnected than ever before, too.
Yes, more people than ever are playing multiplayer online games—competitive shooters, battle arenas, sports stuff, MMOs—but do we actually treat the people we’re playing with—the human beings behind the screen—as real people? Do we extend them the same level of courtesy we would to someone walking by on the street? And if we do, do we think those we’re playing with treat us with that same level of courtesy? Or do we think that, instead, those people might think of us more like non-player characters with funny names, existing only to virtually dominate through the casting of facsimilized fireballs or the gunfire of an ersatz AR-15? And then, do we think that might be why so many people online have no qualms about calling us a “retarded bitch” when we beat them in a game of Call of Duty? Is it then any surprise that, ever since the appearance of the miasma, cooperative multiplayer games have pretty much dropped off the mainstream gaming market, replaced entirely by competitive kill-the-other-player games? And could this be because we’re all shrouded by the miasma, which feeds on our darkest impulses, makes it easier for us to hate each other, and causes us to sling slurs as if we’re in some sort of wild west slur saloon?
Grown adults all over the world are calling each other “retarded bitch” (among other, way more terrible things), throwing controllers, and threatening to kill people—all because they lost in an online computer game. In short, pixels on screens are throwing grown adults into fits of rage. Why is that? What the hell is wrong with these people?
No—what the hell is wrong with us?
The internet—with its ability to connect everyone instantaneously—has turned multiplayer gaming into an impersonal, sit-alone-in-your-room type experience. We have become our gamertag and avatar—not only to others but to ourselves. We identify with our pixelated personas, giving them power over our emotions. And while we are technically playing online with other real people, we are actually playing solo, by ourselves, in our lonesome, single-player, seething in anxiety and rage and loneliness, while pixelated husks bounce around on the screens to which we are hyperfocused on high scores and hedonism. And the real people we’re playing these games with are so numerous and so far away and so easily replaceable and so faceless that we all might as well just be sophisticated computer-controlled bots—alive but dead, there but not really there—and anyone who has played online multiplayer games knows what I’m talking about: that feeling of being digitally surrounded by so many people yet feeling so very alone.
And yet we keep inhaling the miasma, surrounding ourselves with these digital miasma people, tricking ourselves into believing that these online facsimiles of real people can provide real connections, real myrrh, real community. We have turned to the miasma for the very community that the miasma has destroyed, as if the poison is the cure. But we, as individuals, are not solely to blame. Because despite knowing deep down that we’re slowly dying, something in the miasma has monopolized our willpower, making us collectively more resistant to logging out and spending time with each other in the flesh. The miasma has tricked us into thinking that if we were to log out—if we were to banish the miasma—we would be pulling the plug on the only community we have: the very same faux community that the miasma itself facilitated. And thus, by pulling that plug, we fear we would become lonelier, more miserable. Because it’s easy to think that online miasma people are better than no people at all—but are they, really? Why, then, has multiplayer gaming become more about killing digital representations of each other than about cooperating to overcome hardship? Why are we calling each other cruel names, threatening to kill each other over lost games of Halo? Why are we huddled into online voice-chat channels, supposedly surrounded by so many real people, yet simultaneously feeling so disconnected and angry? Why, then, are we more desperate than ever in our search for community if we are already part of a thriving, myrrh-filled community, as the miasma would have us believe? Would not this quest for community within the very thing that harmed community only further facilitate the destruction of community?
Alas, we’re trapped in this paradoxical cycle of miasmic torment: wanting to banish the miasma—regain the in-person communities we’ve lost—yet believing that we have nothing better to replace it with, so instead of banishing the miasma, we continue to rely on the miasma to build these pale digital communities, hoping that one day they might be just as good as the in-person communities we lost to the miasma. So, we let the miasma fester unchecked, believing that it’s better than nothing, believing that there is no other way.
We drink the poison as if it were the cure.
IV, Miasma’s Effect on Us
“So many memories from earlier adventures have dimmed, from the joys of chance encounters to the suspense of my first battles. It would be a pity if the goal of gathering myrrh became the only thing that drove me forward.” —Player’s Diary, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
The miasma is not just destroying gaming communities—it’s destroying all communities.
We all know that mega tech companies have built their entire empires by utilizing the corrupting power of the miasma. And we all know that these tech companies have engineered the miasma in such a way that it algorithmically feeds us what they (the tech companies) believe we want to see based on the things we click, type, or search for on their miasma-enabled devices, as if they are trying to capture our souls for the purpose of turning them into cold, hard cash. And we all know that they use the miasma to collect and share everything about us with other big tech companies with the same profit-driven motive, without regard for how that data is actually being used. And we all know that we are willingly using their miasma-enabled products because they have led us to believe that, without their miasma-enabled products, navigating modern life would be impossible; thus, we begrudgingly persist in this miasma-ridden world because we are led to believe there is no other way—for how would we be able to pay our bills or watch television or listen to music or talk to grandpa or farm dopamine from screens without some sort of miasmic wave going from point A to point B?
But, really, we would all be better off without the miasma.
Consider social media: it feeds on our latent desire to be loved but never actually succeeds in making us feel loved at all—and this is by design, because the moment we start feeling truly loved is the moment we no longer need social media. And social media does this through its most basic functions: allowing us to broadcast our thoughts to potentially billions of others and, importantly, allowing those billions of people to like and share our thoughts. The more likes and shares we receives, the more followers we gain, thus the more popular we become, thus the more quote-unquote loved we feel, and so likes and shares are perceived as validation of our character, a measure of our social worth. This desire for validation is not inherently wrong—it’s actually very human—but it becomes problematic when the validation we seek comes from digital representations of people we do not know personally; these people cannot touch us, they cannot look us in the eye and say, “I really like you,” so that we know that they do, indeed, really like us. And the more we tie our sense of validation to the number of likes and shares and followers we get, the more we reinforce the idea that the people behind the profile pictures are nothing more than a number, a number to be added to our follower counts; thus, the miasma tricks us into dehumanizing each other, which, in turn, makes it easier for us to persist in the dehumanized miasma world we call “social media.” It’s a dehumanization feedback loop. And due to the sheer scope of social media, our digital voices become lost in the massive cloud of digital people, so the majority of us go totally unknown, posting into the void, hoping for some sort of engagement but never actually getting it; and even if we do get engagement, we start to wonder, “Why does this other person have more engagement than me? What’s so good about them? What do they have that I don’t have?” And so we are left comparing ourselves to digital representations of people. And since engagement is the main goal of social media, we present exaggerated versions of ourselves, artificially min-maxing our coolness stat, so that other people will think we’re interesting, all in an effort to drive engagement. In short, on social media, we become fake versions of ourselves, all while comparing ourselves to fake versions of other people, so we end up chasing a fake goal that can never be attained because it’s fake to begin with, thus we all become more and more fake the more we use social media. It’s a feedback loop of fakeness that results in feeling eternally starved for validation, forever reaching for this impossible fake goal, wondering what the hell is wrong with us when we can’t attain the fake goal—when in reality, nothing is wrong with us at all: we’re only engaging in the natural human desire for community, we’re just doing it in a miasma-ridden pit of fakeness.
Eventually, we realize that if we mold our fake online personas to fit into a certain social group, we can extend the reach of our posts and thus gain more likes and shares and followers, supposedly gaining the validation we seek by adopting some of the style, rhetoric, and beliefs of the community we are trying to mold ourselves into. And one might argue this is not so different from real-life social groups, but it differs in one crucial aspect: scope. There are just so many damn people on social media. And this raises the question: are we wired for this level of exposure? Can we stay healthy—mentally—when potentially millions of eyes are on us at all times? This question is especially important when we consider that the miasma has dehumanized us to a point where it’s easier than ever to be cruel to each other online; and, being the sensitive social creatures that we are, we often take negativity more personally than positivity; a single negative comment can dominate our thoughts for weeks, spiraling us into despair; and misery loves company, so we are more likely to be cruel to others when they are cruel to us, thus our cruelty just begets more cruelty, and thus we contribute to a feedback loop of cruelty.
And that’s the rub, really: the overwhelming negativity that the miasma brings out of people. But it’s worse than that because the miasma doesn’t just draw negativity out of us; it also encourages it, strengthens it, and then spreads this superpowered negativity across the entire world. This happens because, in the short term, negativity feels better than positivity, as if we’re expressing some sort of righteous anger over a perceived wrong. But, in the long term, this negativity builds up and makes our lives worse by pushing away the people we love and fostering a deep cynicism of all things. And since the miasma has effectively destroyed our attention spans by allowing us unfettered access to new content (and pushing it to us automatically), it’s easier than ever to give in to short-term satisfaction (i.e., negativity), as negativity elicits more immediate online engagement and, thus, more immediate validation, whereas positivity garners less engagement and, therefore, less immediate validation, even though positivity yields far better long-term results on us as real living people.
Positivity begets positivity; negativity begets negativity. This is neither deep nor profound—it’s the golden rule, a basic principle we seem to have forgotten under the influence of the miasma.
And, as proof that I’m not just talking out of my ass: If we go on Reddit or Lemmy or Twitter or Mastodon or any other online social platform right now, we’ll find that the most popular content is always negative. For example, the top post on Reddit (as of the moment of writing this sentence) is “Alliance between Meta and Trump is likely to create informational, economic, and geopolitical conflicts around the world” (and when I came back a day later to proofread this paragraph, the top post was “Boris Johnson brands Vladimir Putin a 'f****** idiot' over alleged imperial ambitions”). The rest of the top-posts list was (and still is) dominated by Trump stories—a person who is supposedly despised by the online progressives (who make up the majority of Reddit), yet the online progressives just can’t stop constantly talking about him for some reason. So, for someone we supposedly despise, Trump sure as hell owns a lot of our mental real estate. And considering this obsession with people we supposedly despise, is it really so surprising that online discourse is dominated by negativity? And what does participating in this negative discourse really accomplish? What does sitting behind a computer screen while typing up angry posts about Trump really change in the world? Does it make Trump less popular? And, if so, why did more people vote for Trump in the 2024 U.S. presidential election than they did in the 2016 and 2020 elections? It doesn’t seem like screaming and crying about the people we despise actually succeeds in harming the people we despise—if anything, it seems to make them stronger. And these online services and news networks know this to be true but continue to spread the negativity anyway because it’s profitable; CNN, for example, whose entire business model at this point is basically complaining about Trump, to the point that Trump may as well be bankrolling their entire operation. The same could be said about Reddit or any other news aggregation service powered by miasma; the leadership of these services does not care about our mental health; they care about profits, and negativity is profitable. So, the more we use these services, the more negativity we are exposed to, thus the more negative we become.
This is all to say that our whole approach here is totally backwards, as if we are operating under the mathematical assumption that negativity plus negativity equals positivity—not just more negativity. And, considering how backwards all of this is, is it really so surprising that this negativity just keeps spreading, as if we are powering some sort of dark battery that itself keeps the negativity flowing? It’s definitionally another feedback loop: the more we focus on the things we despise, the more those things gain power over us. Common sense would dictate that we should, therefore, try not to vocally despise anything—we ought to move on with our lives, focus on the positive, and stop letting the miasma amplify our negativity. And yes, that means that I am, indeed, suggesting that we totally ignore people like Trump and, instead, focus on driving real positive outcomes in our society rather than hooking up dark battery electrodes to our heads and screaming real loud.
But there’s more; we’ve really only just scratched the surface of the problem—we haven’t even covered the most harmful tool in the miasma’s repertoire of evil tools.
The most dangerous aspect of the miasma is the algorithms. These algorithms learn surface-level details about us—like our entire search histories—and then use this information to serve content and advertisements that they believe we will be most likely to engage with. This process radicalizes us in whichever direction proves most profitable for the corporate dragon overlords of the platforms on which these algorithms run. But not only does this fill the treasure room of some nasty corporate dragon, it also reinforces harmful stereotypes and spreads negativity, which has the additional effect of polarizing humanity more than ever before, as is self-evident from just watching the news or scrolling social media for five seconds.
Take YouTube, for example: Watching just one Fox News video turns your suggested-video feed into a hellhole of far-right propaganda, watching one CNN video does the same just on the opposite end of the political compass, watching one smooth jazz video makes the algorithm think you’re some sort of jazz pianist who wants to watch technical jazz breakdowns, one Cowboy Bebop clip suddenly means you’re a basement-dwelling otaku obsessed with large-breasted cartoon women, one Lego tutorial assumes you want to watch adults in bowties talk about “rare bricks” and Bionicle lore, one Lilo and Stitch clip means you’re suddenly a Disney adult who wants to watch videos on saving money at Disney World by having groceries shipped from Amazon to your hotel room, one Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles tutorial means you want to watch ProSteve speedrun every Final Fantasy game while he sweats profusely through his wife beater while breathing real heavy into a $400 Green Yeti microphone or whatever, and one video on how to change the oil in your car means you want to watch videos on how the January 6th U.S. Capitol riot was actually a peaceful protest and then a video on how schools want to install litter boxes in the bathrooms for kids who think that they’re cats or something and then a video about how different races have different average IQs thus should be treated differently and then a video about how trans people aren’t real because gender is purely biological and then a video on how liberals are trying to mutilate your kid’s genitals or whatever—because now the algorithm has reached the point where it assumes, based on your original interest in changing car oil, that you're also interested in other barely-adjacent things because some other users who share your interest in changing car oil also happen to be interested in some of that vile stuff listed earlier in this egregious run-on sentence. So, the algorithm basically says, “If you like fixing cars then you must like far-right propaganda videos too because some other people who like fixing cars also like far-right propaganda videos.” And in this way, the algorithm not only pushes people into dangerous extremist echo chambers but also reinforces the very stereotypes that fuel these dangerous extremist echo chambers. They put us in a box, then they shake the box. The algorithm isn't designed to see us as individual people; instead, it views us as a collection of data to solve a math problem, which, if written as a question, would be: “How do I (the algorithm) make as much profit as possible for my corporate masters by keeping people hooked on YouTube for as long as possible?” And to this end, the algorithm treats us the same way the miasma has conditioned us to treat everyone else: like numbers. Dehumanized. On top of all this, YouTube autoplays these suggested videos for us, so we don't even have to click on anything—the garbage is just beamed straight into our eyeballs automatically—making it easy to slip into a hole of the algorithm's choosing. We're at a point where our interests are no longer decided by us as people, but instead by complicated lines of code that have run wild. And so, our free will is being subverted by machines. No one is immune. It's not just YouTube doing this—nearly every popular online platform is engaging in some form of automated algorithmic stereotyping. This stuff is in our pockets right now. And, considering that negativity is such a strong driver of human interaction online, the algorithms pick up on this negativity, assume it’s what we want to see more of, and just keep sending us more and more negativity, and, in this way, the algorithms ensure that the dark battery of miasma never runs dry.
And because of this polarization, we can’t separate fact from fiction anymore, as the algorithms don’t care about truth; they care about clicks and popularity. Any online news story can become popular and spread like wildfire, regardless of its veracity, as long as one of our polarized miasma camps engages with it enough times. Take the United States, for example: half of the country believes one thing while the other half believes something totally contradictory about the same thing; take the January 6th Capitol Riot, half of the country believes that it was actually a peaceful protest subverted by bad liberal actors (or something), while the other half of the country believes it was a real riot incited by the President of the United States himself; take the 2020 election, half the country believes the voting was rigged and can cite articles containing quote-unquote proof that it was rigged, while the other half believes it was a fair election and can provide articles with proof backing that claim. We are so polarized about what is “true” and “false” that truth no longer even matters—truth is whatever our polarized camp wants it to be. Half of the country believes that Haitian immigrants are sneaking into people’s homes and eating their pets, despite no evidence supporting this and the original source having fully recanted the story. We don’t know what truth is anymore because there is just too much conflicting information out there, all of which gets equal engagement because we gravitate toward whatever quote-unquote truth our camps want us to believe, otherwise we risk ostracizing ourselves from our camps. In short, truth is dead.
Some of us like to think we’re immune to all of this. Some of us claim that we only use the miasma to find like-minded people whom we can relate to, for community. Some of us might even refuse to use platforms that run malicious algorithms. This is all a noble pursuit: attempting to use the miasma in such a way that bypasses the negativity, the endless validation-seeking, and the polarizing aspects of it. But while this pursuit is noble, it is also incredibly naive because it’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both the purpose of community and how the miasma itself operates. Seeking community is the same as seeking validation—we seek like-minded communities so that we can feel assured about ourselves, to validate the part of ourselves that wants to feel loved by others, and that’s fine because we are social creatures; that’s what we do. But the problem is, we will never be happy solely relying on the internet to provide us with a sense of community, because online communities are toxic as hell regardless of whatever common ground binds these online communities together, and this is because online communities are communities built upon a foundation of negativity within the miasma, which itself is fucking toxic as hell. And even if we filter ourselves into a community of anti-algorithm, anti-miasma people, we are still operating within the miasma. And that hypothetical anti-algorithm, anti-miasma community is still built on negativity: negativity against the algorithms and the miasma itself. So, when we huddle together in these anti-algorithm, anti-miasma, “bring back the golden age of the internet”-type communities, we are only being tricked by the miasma into continuing to use the miasma. The miasma is making us think that we are somehow above the miasma because we keep saying how awful the miasma is—but we’re still lost in the goddamn miasma.
We can’t expect to banish the miasma by using the miasma itself. The poison is not the cure.
But I realize that I am just as lost in the miasma as everyone else—even this essay exists within the miasma and is doing the very thing it is criticizing: using the miasma to criticize the miasma. I also realize that this whole essay has indeed been pretty negative and therefore might just contribute to the feedback loop of negativity described herein. So, instead of continuing to power the dark battery of miasma, I’m going to focus on the positive things going forward.
I’m going to focus on what we can do about it.
V, Banish the Miasma
“Remember, you journey not for yourself alone, but for everyone in your village.” —Sol Racht, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
To put it in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles terms, we are our own crystal chalice. The miasma swirls all around us, trying to break through our crystal barrier. Over time, our barriers, powered by myrrh—compassion, warmth, love—weaken. Our myrrh dries up. So we venture out into the miasma, collecting myrrh from within its toxic fog, all to bring this myrrh back to our village, to keep both ourselves and the people we love alive a little while longer. But the myrrh we gather is corrupted, tainted by the miasma. And so, our crystal chalices continue to run dry, forcing us to repeat our quests for myrrh, and thus we venture out into the miasma once more. But the more we search for myrrh within the miasma, the more we expose ourselves to the miasma’s corruption, and so, over time, we become more corrupted ourselves.
So the question becomes: how do we banish the miasma?
And with the remainder of this essay, I’m going to attempt to answer that question by offering some prescriptive advice on how to overcome the miasmic problems outlined in the previous chapters, those being: the dark battery of negativity, the feedback loop of fakeness, the problem of polarization, the truth or lack thereof, and the erosion of community. And I’ll try to keep it short, as my suggestions are simple in words but difficult in practice, requiring significant self-control and introspection. (And, to be clear, I’m not claiming to be a paragon of self-control or introspection myself—this advice is as much for me as it is for anyone else.)
Negativity begets negativity, so the first step to removing negativity from our lives is to recognize the things around us that are negative, and the second step is to exorcise those things with extreme prejudice. This may be certain people, like a racist friend, or it may be certain online services, like mainstream news feeds and link aggregators like Reddit, as these services thrive on negativity as a business model. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if we spend all day on websites that only tell us how fucked up everything is, we’re going to think about how fucked up everything is; and that’s going to put us in a bad mood, which, in turn, puts those around us in a bad mood, which, in turn, comes back around to put ourselves in an even worse mood, and so on and so forth.
And the final and most important step to removing negativity is recognizing that positivity begets positivity and that, largely, positivity is a matter of perspective. Yes, there are terrible things going on in the world, but really, what can we do about every little terrible thing? Dwelling on these terrible things is only going to put us in a negative mood for ultimately no reason, as many things are outside our control. So, unless we’re actually going to do something about Trump’s most recent stupid thing, for example, there’s really no point in paying attention or engaging at all—complaining about him online is not going to produce any positive outcomes; it’s only going to make us unhappier. Instead of thinking, “Wow, this sucks, we’re all doomed,” we ought to be thinking, “What can I do to help in this situation?” And if there’s nothing we can do, we ought to instead focus on the positive things in our lives—which will be different for everyone.
I realize that things like illness or extreme hardship can make it hard for us to be positive, but even in those situations, bemoaning our hardship instead of trying to overcome it will only make our short lives more negative than they need to be. Hardship plus negativity equals hardship with negativity, whereas hardship plus positivity equals hardship with positivity. The math is not complicated. Of course, being positive is much harder than being negative, as negativity often feels justified in some selfish, woe-is-me sort of way. It takes real self-control and mental fortitude to remain positive in the face of hardship, and these characteristics don’t just magically manifest by reading an essay or self-help book or whatever; instead, these characteristics develop over time, after a total reevaluation of one's self and then prolonged conditioning through sheer force of will. But using the difficulty of positivity as an excuse not to be positive would be foolish and harmful to the people around us, as positivity is contagious; our positivity will make those around us feel positive as well, which, in turn, powers a bright battery as opposed to a dark battery.
The feedback loop of fakeness, too, vanishes in the presence of positivity. Online, we are inclined to appear as cool as possible, presenting our lives as ideal, as if we have everything figured out. We do this fake, performative song and dance so that other people engage with us, validate us, and provide us with some sense of community. Then we compare ourselves to other fake people, perpetuating profound fakeness. But this all stems from a place of negativity—a dissatisfaction with the self that causes us to feel lesser than other people. Part of this negativity comes from the very fact that we are using the miasma—social media—to begin with, as it’s designed for this sort of fake comparative analysis, in which we are comparing ourselves to people who are going to great lengths to seem as cool as possible. Thus, we are comparing ourselves to an impossible, fake thing; an unobtainable goal that only leads to despair. But we don’t need to compare ourselves to anyone, because we will never be comparable; we are all different people, and trying to be like someone else ignores this simple fact. And, knowing that social media inspires this fakeness—this worship of numbers, this dehumanization, this negativity—we ought to exorcise it from our lives with extreme prejudice, because any community we find on social media, in the miasma, is a false community built on negativity; it is not, and never will be, a replacement for in-person community.
And, as social media facilitates a dehumanization of us all, exorcising it from our lives not only helps with our own personal mental health but also addresses the problem of polarization. Because once we exorcise social media, we will start to see each other as real people again, not as fake avatar people who are just left or right or black or white or whatever. Yes, polarization will still exist—as it always has (a topic for another essay)—but, if we remove social media, we will become less polarized, because, at present, it’s far too easy to call for violence when we view those we’re targeting as fake, dehumanized avatar people instead of fleshy, real-life people that actually bleed.
The miasma has used all these tools—social media, link aggregators, news networks, and algorithms—to trick us into believing that, if we don’t use them, we will be stumbling around in the dark of modern life, uninformed about what is going on around us, lost and hopeless. The irony, however, is that the more the miasma informs us about what is going on around us, the less we become informed about what’s going on inside ourselves. Because the news that the miasma delivers to us is often so fraught with misinformation and half-truths that it’s nearly impossible to tell fact from fiction, and the information that is accurate is either inconsequential to our daily lives or outside of our sphere of influence, serving only to make us fearful, which in turn makes us more negative. But these truths—or lack-thereofs—are the miasma’s truths, not ours. The only truth that matters is the truth of ourselves and those around us; understanding ourselves, becoming wiser, gaining knowledge—not physical knowledge of tangible things and events, but metaphysical knowledge of ourselves—is truth. The more we understand ourselves—why we do the things we do, why we feel the way we feel—the more we will, in turn, better understand the people around us; a radical self-interest that produces a radical empathy. Knowing the latest Trump scandal will not bring us closer to the truth, because truth comes from within. So, instead of focusing on the news or the top-rated social media posts of the week or whatever, we ought to focus on understanding ourselves and the people we spend time with in the fleshy world outside of the miasma.
But people aren’t going to just stop using the miasma—so simply saying, “stop doing the bad thing!” is a naive solution to these complicated problems, especially when considered on a global scale. However, this essay isn’t really aimed at a global audience—despite some of the exaggerated language used herein—instead, it’s aimed at anyone who feels disconnected from the world, despite being supposedly connected to so many people; it’s aimed any anyone who wants to stop feeling so negative all the time; it’s aimed at whoever needs it.
The beginning of this essay mentioned “the golden age,” a time before the miasma—a time when people were good to each other. It asked, “Can we bring back the golden age?” But this was sort of a rhetorical trick, because the golden age didn’t actually go anywhere. It’s still in the same place it always was: in us. “The golden age” is a construct, something we make ourselves—each and every one of us—a byproduct of our own personal behavior and how we treat one another. It takes a crystal village. And while the miasma has made us more monstrous, the golden age is still right there, inside all of us; all we have to do is step outside of the miasma.
But that’s another trick, too—the miasma—because the miasma isn’t really evil at all. How could it be? It’s not conscious. It has no intentionality. The miasma is just a thing we made, a powerful thing we made that has a powerful effect on us—but it’s something that we can control. Each and every one of us, every day, makes a choice to engage with the miasma. So, to banish the miasma, we just need to exercise a little self-control. That’s it. The next time we feel the urge to look at our phones or doomscroll at our desks when we could be doing literally anything else—like interacting with a real person—we only need to recognize that that urge exists and refuse it. We can step out of the miasma whenever we want.
So, for the final problem—the erosion of community—we’re not going to find the solution in the miasma, which means we’re not going to find the solution here in this essay, which itself exists in the miasma. Because the poison is not the cure.
But the solution is nearby—it’s actually really close, within arm's reach.
In fact, it’s right there, just beyond the screen.
If this essay made you feel something, please let me know via email at f0rrest@pm.me.
#essay #FinalFantasyCrystalChronicles #ComputerGames #autobiographical #ethics