Before long she was playing 6 or 10 games at a time, against people all over the world. My wife, who had never been a serious gamer, got one and became addicted, almost immediately, to a form of off-brand digital Scrabble called Words With Friends. It was not only a phone and a camera and a compass and a map and a tiny window through which to see the entire Internet - it was also a pocket-size game console three times as sophisticated as anything I grew up with. Then, midway through the dark forest of my adult life, the iPhone came out. So I cut myself off, more or less cold turkey, and as a result I was more or less happy and productive. I knew that, if I had daily access to video games, I would spend literally every day playing them, forever. I had aspirations of capital “c” culture, and so I started pouring my attention into books, a quieter and more socially respected form of escapism. They had, I recognized, a scary power over me - an opium kind of power - and I was hoping to cultivate other, more impressive ways of spending my time. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.Īt some point late in my teens, in a spasm of post-adolescent resolve, I decided to renounce video games forever. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect - in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 - and its game play reflects this origin. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s - it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. The pairing went on to sell more than 70 million copies, spreading the freedom of compulsive wall-building into every breakfast nook and bank line in the country. Tetris’s graphics were simple enough to work on the Game Boy’s small gray-scale screen its motion was slow enough not to blur its action was a repetitive, storyless puzzle that could be picked up, with no loss of potency, at any moment, in any situation. You were both building walls and not building walls if you built them right, the walls disappeared, thereby ceasing to be walls.) This turned out to be a perfect symbiosis of game and platform. The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks - over and over and over and over and over and over and over - in order to build the most efficient possible walls. The new product was the Game Boy - a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades. In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |