The Virtual Sloth is Not an Endangered Species

The sloth is an animal with little muscle definition, even less locomotion, and still less cranial capacity. It is an animal that is listless, useless, and lazy. And yet it survives. In fact it survives only due to its own slothfulness. This is because its stillness has incurred the growth of a moss within its fur that serves to camouflage the animal thus leaving it without potential predators.

The word "sloth" has become the definition of indolence and laziness due to the infamous inactivity of the animal and it was just the other day that some of the true quality of this characteristic was shown to me.

Internet cafes dot the horizon of Bangkok as plentiful as fish off the coast of Newfoundland. One cannot walk half a city block without bumping their nose into at least two internet cafes. There are literally about two dozen of them within a two-block radius of Cheryl's and my apartment alone. Obviously there is a demand for this service to be so omnipresent, otherwise it would not exist. But what is this demand exactly? An army of businessmen finishing their work after the office is closed? Computer programmers run amuck? A mass internet uprising of the working class? No... its just the gamers.

They sit there with their eyes glued to the screen, their mouths agape, and their brains frothing over. The sound of the cafe is a general hum of cpu fans drowning amidst the racket of dance revolution music, virtual gunfire and startling verbal taunts between gamers. The gamers busy themselves with saving the world, levelling up their imaginary personas, and killing their virtual friends. You know, the important stuff in life.

Who are these gamers you ask? They are every school-age child in the country. As my parents noted whilst here there is frightfully little real estate in Bangkok reserved for outdoor recreation, thus leaving the school children with three options for after-school; engage in extra-curricular education, go to the staggeringly large malls to shop, or hit the internet cafe to kill your friends until bedtime. And thus, we have identified the ravenous demand for the 5.7 internet cafes per one-city-block capita.

Most of the internet cafes are exclusively for online gaming and do not carry cd-roms, usb ports, or even Microsoft Word to accommodate anyone who might actually be attempting to use the facilities for productive work. The key demographic focus here is the slothful gamer.

The slothful gamer books into the game café immediately after he has finished detention. He proceeds to play games online whilst taunting his friends around him in the cafe who are also currently online attempting to murder each other's virtual selves. Their virtual survival is contingent upon their ability to sit in the chair long enough that the survival skills of the internet will eventually settle upon them and proceed to grow similar to the moss on the fur of the sloth. This moss serves a similar purpose; whereas the sloth’s moss makes it invisible to potential predators, the gamer also becomes invisible and blind to the world around them. And I’m certain if you look close, their must really be some sort of fine parasitic life-form spreading microscopically upon their skin and slowly consuming them (at least the look on their faces certainly appears to be that of a mentally consumed individual) Once again we are confronted with an animal whose survival depends on the ability to sit still for long periods of time.

I am told that when a sloth attempts to cross the road it can take all afternoon resulting in the sloth choosing to never cross back. This is due to its complete lack of muscle definition due to extended bouts of, well, slothfulness. The internet gamer also avoids any and all mobility whenever possible. They slowly saunter in, choose their favourite easy chair, park it in front of the computer, and proceed to sit, play, eat at the computer, and generally avoid any physical movement as they tediously trek through their cyber-horizons. As a result, the slothful gamer much like the sloth itself lacks any form of healthy muscle definition shy of the strong index muscles required to click a mouse.

This is the world of the gamer and it burns roughly 2 calories a second whilst frying 1.4 million brain-cells per shot fired. But don't worry about the poor lads survival; anyone who can kill until 3 a.m. and still have virtual blood-thirst for more must have some sort of stamina. After all, even a three-toed sloth can hang upside down for hours. Of course that's only because of their trusty hooks. As for the gamers, well, their just hooked.

When running before the sun rises I watch weary gamers exiting the café after a long night of online rampages and I am thankful that unlike the sloth I am engaging in exercise. Although I do miss playing a game now and then, and plan to do so when I return home, I can only pray that the moss of the sloth will not settle on me and make me invisible to my wife.