Isn’t it amazing…

Isn’t it amazing – and a trifle frightening – how an intelligent and erudite adult person can spend (waste!) so much time wiggling a computer mouse, temporarily convinced that they are actually moving something around a (computer) screen. In fact, you’re not moving anything around the screen, you’re manipulating pixels to make it look as though you’re moving something around your screen. The lie to this is obvious when you see/realise that it’s actually the background images that appear to move, not the object that you think you’re moving. The aspect always stays the same. In a game like Rift, for instance, you may move your character left, or right, or jump up and down, but you will still see exactly the same view of the back of your character’s head. As you run through your game, slaying monsters, digging up ore, even swimming… notice your mouse hand. It actually doesn’t move very much at all…  So… what’s in a game? Why do we “gamers” play them so assiduously? How can we become so immersed in this manner.  Isn’t it just a gross waste of time? My mother would have said it was “unproductive”, and in theory, she would have been right. The only people who make anything “material” out of these games are the “gold farmers”, or people who offer “levelling services”. They’re the people who spam gamers offering large amounts of in-game currency for real time money, or who offer to do the hard yards levelling you up (i.e. playing your character for you), for real time money of course, while you’re at work… but I don’t think many people fall for that sort of spam any more (though I may be wrong – after all, they’re still around after the seven or so years that we’ve been playing these games!)

Well, you might say, it’s enjoyable, or you wouldn’t waste your time playing the game, would you? Or that it’s “relaxation”, “fun”, something to take your mind off stresses and worries… Once upon a time, a long time ago in a computer room far, far, away, we played a simple adventure game called “Monkey Island”. It was a single player game, and lot of fun, and now Julian is compiling (has been for a while, on and off, actually) a file of all the music we’ve enjoyed from the “old” games, even going back to the good old C64 days. One of the tracks is from Monkey Island, and it reminded me of the end credit to the game… while the music played, there scrolled down the screen a list of things that you could, or should, be doing instead of sitting there playing the game… like why don’t you “take the dog for a walk”, “help your mother with the dishes”, “tidy your room”, “do your homework”, “mow the lawn”, etc….  It strikes me that we didn’t listen then, and we still haven’t woken up to the fact that we are, in fact, wasting our lives. We still sit stolidly in front of our computer screens, wiggling our mouses to “move” our characters around.

Believe me, I’m not being negative about this, I enjoy playing, and I’ll continue to play/waste my time – until maybe something better comes along, like a trip to Italy, or something 😉 It’s just that it really does strike me as strange that even though we might be intellectually aware of the fact that we’re accomplishing nothing, we still do it. I just wonder why we do…

Philosophical Mood: OFF

Weigh-in this morning was this: I might not have gone up again (my wretched body is saving that for tomorrow morning!), but I didn’t go down, either. Still stuck firmly and annoyingly at 122.4kg. Oh well… everyone cross your fingers, toes, and eyes… and touch wood for me that tomorrow will be better. More then…