Peterson's 12 Rules for Life v2.0-- actual book discussion

[Rev. Rye]

And for those of us who didn't get my Desert Bus analogy, I'll explain it. It was part of a never-released Sega CD game called Penn & Teller: Smoke & Mirrors with six mini-games. The most infamous of them is "Desert Bus." Inspired by the moral panic surrounding video games at the time, they deliberately designed it to be as mundane and realistic as possible. The premise? You have to drive a bus 360 miles from Tuscon to Las Vegas. In real time.

You're not allowed to pause the game because, to quote the manual, "Does your life have a pause control?" There is bugger-all in the way of sensory input, and you have to keep going in a straight line, and the drive from Tuscon to Vegas somehow doesn't even include any sight of Phoenix (which the Greyhound version of this route passes through IRL), just rocks, signs, and maybe a bug splatting on the windshield. Except for the fact that you can honk the horn and make a door opening sound effect, that's it for sensory input.

You can't go above 45 mph, and, as mentioned above, you can't pause it. And if you get to the end of it, you get a single point, and, if you choose, you can do the return route and earn another point at the end. 

And if you have the bright idea of clamping the gas button down, well, the dev thought of that: the bus constantly veers to the right, and therefore, it requires constant supervision to keep it on the road, and if it goes off the road into the desert sands, well, it gets towed back to Tuscon in real time.

A short look at it:




A brave soul doing the whole damn 8 hours:




(also, on a side note, for a game that's supposed to be "stupefyingly realistic," they're pretty cavalier about which side of the road you're supposed to be on. Thank Jah for small mercies, I reckon.)

Honestly, that's a good analogy for how hard I think it will likely be to actually fix the massive inequality problems (and would be even if the Republican party weren't just a few Angstroms to the left of the NSDAP), and even then, I think some of them could very well be beyond fixing. Still doesn't mean they're somehow good or just.