Interview with “Game Changing”

Here at Satiritron, we consider our job to be the curation of history, so when we get the chance to speak directly with a powerful agent of history, we jump at it.

Mosspuppet: First of all, Game-Changing, I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. I know you’re very busy.

Game-Changing: Unfortunately.

Mosspuppet: Great! My first question is, why’ve you been so busy lately? Working on any big projects?

Game-Changing: No, it’s — people keep over-using me. It’s exhausting. They just won’t leave me alone.

Mosspuppet: I guess one of the downsides to staggering goddamn fame is that you don’t get much time to yourself.

Game-Changing: It’s not that, you idiot. People don’t know what I mean, or what I’m about, so they think that it’s appropriate to use me all the time. Here’s a newsflash, assholes: if you think what you’re writing about is game-changing, it probably isn’t! You’re probably wrong, like normal, so please do me a favour and go back to writing about how great it is that Apple’s changed one icon deep in the bowels of OS X in some place nobody will ever see. But for god’s sake, don’t call it a game-changer!

Mosspuppet: Now, hold on, I’ve used you before, and I think I’ve used you more lately, but all of my uses have been absolutely correct.

Game-changing: No they haven’t.

Mosspuppet: Yes they have. Don’t you tell me they weren’t, I’m the goddamn Mosspuppet!

Game-Changing: I don’t care what your name is, you old bastard, you use me wrong. Everyone does!

Mosspuppet: I will knock the snot right out of you, Mister.

Game-Changing: I’d like to see you try, gramps.

Mosspuppet: Oh, if my hip weren’t currently broken, I’d ruin you properly. With my fists. Since my hip is currently broken, I’ll ask you this: don’t you think that the increasing use of you is due to the fact that technology is evolving at such an increasingly break-neck pace, rather than drooping journalistic standards?

Game-changing: No, it’s definitely the journalistic standards going into the crapper. Which is, coincidentally, where my lunch goes when I get misused so much it makes me hurl.

Mosspuppet: I know I won’t be in them, as all of my uses are goddamn perfect, but do you have examples of this horrible mis-use?

Game-changing: Look, just because something is interesting, it doesn’t make it a game-changer. Just because a new product is introduced and you like it, it doesn’t make it a game-changer. I am a very specific thing, okay? I have a very specific use, and the way people treat me, it — you know, I don’t actually have an ass, but still I feel like it’s being chapped all the time. I feel like I’m in a bad prison movie.

Mosspuppet: I’m not hearing examples…

Game-Changing: I’m getting to it, okay? I know you don’t have much longer to live, so everything’s all rush rush, but relax for a minute. Christ. The dictionary definition of me is “completely changing the way that something is done, thought about or made.” So an example of that would be the iPhone, when it was first released. It was game-changing, because it caused the mobile industry to be reshaped. By contrast, contrary to what some bloggers who’ve turned themselves into a mobius strip by jamming their heads so far up their asses would say, the inclusion of the ability on the iPhone to set a wallpaper image is not game-changing. Flipboard, while cool, isn’t a game-changer; it just lets you look at news that your friends link to, like a dozen other services have done in the past. Nor is a piece of electronics being put into a case with a different colour, or making your laptop slightly thinner, or adding milk to your cereal.

Mosspuppet: We’re just about out of time, do you have any final words you’d like to offer up to those people, who aren’t me, who misuse you?

Game-Changing: Yeah: this shit needs to stop. Please, just let me be. Don’t use me unless the rules of the game — whatever stupid game you’re talking about — are actually being changed on a deep, fundamental level. The ability to save 2.1 GB to a web server instead of 2 GB does not quality. Okay? Just leave me alone, you fetid, fat, sloppy journalists.

Mosspuppet: Thanks! I think you’ll agree that this interview was truly game-changing.

Game-Changing: I want to kill you.