Even more Elvis….

 I keep getting Elvis songs stuck in my head and it is very hard to figure out how much of this is an intended part of the “Infinite Wealth” experience. I also keep being impressed with how much I end up liking Elvis, when I play the song that each chapter is named after.

I feel like I am more aware of Elvis than a lot of people playing “Infinite Wealth” mostly because I imagine that 1) I am on the older end of the RGG fanbase and 2) I have a kind of half-assed knowledge/interest in the history of American music, particularly as related to race-relations, which is probably not true of everyone playing this game. A lot of people, including Japanese players, probably know MORE about it than I do, but I would guess that I am at least in the top half when it comes to knowledge/awareness of the history of rock n’ roll among RGG gamers. That’s just a guess.

I wonder how many human beings have 1) played “Infinite Wealth” and 2) saw the King perform live? Around a hundred? That was my first guess. Then I thought that if Elvis ever did a show in Japan there might actually be a couple hundred people who saw that and stuck around for “Infinite Wealth.” BUT Elvis never performed in outside of the US and Canada. I still bet there are at least a hundred people in the overlap in the Venn diagram, just because there are that many goddamn people and some of them are really weird. 

But, for the most part, you are not going to get a ‘caught in the wild’ Elvis fan playing an RGG game, or doing much of anything these days, because they tend to be dead. Everyone who grew up playing video games grew up after Elvis because, for all practical purposes, video-games were invented after the King died. 

So, I wonder if your familiarity with Elvis, in 2024, really has anything at all to do with your own temporal relation to Elvis? Someone born in the 2000s can put on an Elvis album (or, uh, pull him up on YouTube) as well as someone born in the 1980s. Admittedly, being older you know more older people who would themselves have personal connections to past culture, and, I think with the King it still matters, but due to the universally accessible nature of media-- ‘the past’ is increasingly indistinguishable from itself-- the fact that Elvis and The Beatles were forces that existed in a sort of opposition is increasingly irrelevant and obscure. 

Which is to say: I THINK I am more engaged with the Elvis aspect of the “Infinite Wealth” experience than most people playing it-- but I could be wrong about that. 

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