After many years, I’m now a casual gamer. I used to be far more formal about my gaming, but after I found that I loved it way too much, I had to stop playing regularly. It was one of those “I could easily eat ice cream for every meal, but I’ll spend a fortune on hot fudge and pants with elastic waists” kind of conclusions. Sad, sure, but an important step in becoming a mature adult.
Like any good addict, I still keep a little stash accessible whenever I need a quick fix. This comes in the form of a game called Bejeweled that’s kept and played exclusively on my Treo. (I also downloaded a version for my computer, but found it inferior so I never played it.) When I first played it, I was hooked. Badly. I wasn’t able to go a day without playing it at least a couple of times. Ultimately, I had to delete it, and, with it, my obsession.
A few months later, a very good friend of mine re-installed it on my phone after I told him how hard it was to stop playing it. Pretending I didn’t have a choice, I started playing again, but this time it was different. I didn’t have the same desire to play as I did before. I was getting a lot better, and as a result, I think it was getting boring. It got to the point where I wouldn’t play it for a week or two, and even then, just a short game. I had weaned myself.
The final nail in the coffin came when I upgraded something on my phone that slowed everything down by about 10%. Not a lot, just enough to seem like my phone was saying, “Hey. You there. Why such the hurry? Take a minute and relax. That e-mail will still be there in 30 seconds. In the meantime, why don’t you think about flowers you find pretty?” Also affected was Bejeweled. Just a bit, but enough to get me to write about it. See, my early good scores were in the 20-30,000 range. Sometimes in the 40,000s, but not often. My top five scores were all in the 50,000 range, except for my highest score, which was about 60,000. Considering the amount of times I’ve played (486 since the last time it was installed), I thought I was fairly competent, and that those were pretty good scores.
Not long after I up/downgraded my phone, I found myself bored on my train, so I started a game. When I eventually stopped playing (because I had to go to work), my score was 1.6 million. As I was playing this waste of time, it occurred to me: this was a waste of time. The game is impossible to win. All I could do was beat my prior scores, but how long would that entertain me? (About 8 months, I guess.) Maybe I could break the game and cause it to overflow by getting to 10 or 100 million, but that hardly counts as a victory. It got me thinking about why I was playing in the first place.
Turns out the whole idea of points is a weird incentive that seems stupid and antiquated, yet somehow still works. I don’t think I ever paid attention to how many points I scored in other games; all that mattered was getting to the highest level, or beating the game. But along the way, points were counted for every bullet that hit its mark, every time my sword cut off a tentacle. I don’t think I would have been quite as motivated if I thought my progress wasn’t being monitored in some arbitrary way. It was a form of validation. Always has been.
So maybe playing it isn’t as big a waste of time as I thou- okay, no, it’s a huge waste of time, but at least the game was programmed to give me a bit of an ego boost. 1.6 million, eh? Not bad.
knitting and nitrous 