About as good of a portrait of my disillusionment with the .io craze as can be was the first time I heard that Agar.io, the cute and simplistic game that teaches you basic biology with its game mechanics, had fucking GAMER CLANS with EPIC INTROS and COOL ASS NAMES/LOGOS, and predictably went, "What the fuck? WHY?" Let me tell you: if you wanted to satirize Gaming culture as a whole, you'd start with that as your logline. It's like if FAZE switched from Call of Duty to LittleBigPlanet.

I always viewed the idea of Agar.io as more artistic in nature. It's kind of like watching a giant white canvas try to give birth to something miraculous; kind of like the opening stage of Spore, but without a definitive win/lose state. The potential for .io games isn't just in simplistic games that you can riff on with friends during lunchtime, it's experimental games that break down the defined rules of what a game is and can be. In a way, I respect Agar.io for trying to be this. But I guess you can only be so experimental before the cute game you play with friends turns into an honest-to-god grudge match of tug-of-war where there are a million strands of rope to pick up on from any angle and vendettas abound. That description seems more befitting for something like a game show than a game about green circles eating magenta ones, but what do I know?

After this, there was snake.io, and wings.io, and a million other games before this until we landed on Zombs Royale using fortnite.io as a legitimate redirect without a hint of irony. Maybe I'm wrong about what art can be, and that's... disappointing.

back in high school, my AP composition and language class was among the easiest A's I ever earned. we wrote essays maybe once monthly, answered comprehension questions for books I had already read, and read from a book about syntax extremely occasionally. what I'm saying is: there was a lot of downtime. somebody must have thought we sixteen year olds would better osmose the material if we had days of nothing in between. and you know what, maybe they were right! I'm sitting here now, six years later, writing words in the English language; I must have taken more away from that class than I did pre-calculus.

for the entire year, there sat a cart full of school laptops at the front of the classroom. I don't know how or why they never left. teachers at my high school were supposed to reserve the carts for a day at a time. we didn't have that many carts! I suppose Mrs. Comp and Lang used her argumentative prowess to secure their long-term home. in any case, we were supposed to use the computers to... write? I guess? google historically important essays, and rub our chins in admiration of their stirring prose? feed our few free clicks to pay-gated online publications? well, we rarely did any of that. we played agar.io instead. every single day.

four friends and I arranged our desks into a row in the back of the classroom, turned in any homework from the night before, and unless it was a blue-moon-adjacent day of planned academic enrichment, we all logged on and embiggened our cultures for the full class period. my username was always "peenboi". if ever you had fifteen minutes of microbial growth gobbled up by a big dot named "peenboi", that was me, and I'm not sorry. it was more fun than reading the opinion section of the New Yorker.