The Unfairness of Games

I'm addicted again. It is sad but true: the slavering dope fiend side of my brain has yet again emerged triumphant and I'm spending hours and hours lining up those twee little animals and watching them go pop. And by hours, I mean HOURS. All this would be okay, however, since I love my addictive side and I love spending my life making things with a repetitive yet strangely endearing jangly soundtrack go *pop* while my brain slowly turns to goo, except for one problem. My daughter is better at it than I am. It's just so brutally unfair: my kids are always, always better at video games than me, and it makes me miserable. The only games I can beat them on are Tetris and Bookworm, and even I can't play Tetris anymore.

It's not like I'm the kind of parent who discouraged video games or anything. I love computer games. I was right there along with my son blowing away zombies in Doom and working my way through every single Tomb Raider. But my children easily, immediately surpassed me, and the other day, when my daughter tried my new game and got up to level 7 on her first try, I nearly wept. It took me days to get to level 7, and I still can hardly ever do it. It is a sign of my advanced age: we had to make our own video games out of mud and sticks when I was young. Hell, I never even saw Pong until I was about 9 years old and we were on one of those infamous family roadtrips and had stopped at a motel that had it in the lobby. My brother and I were fascinated; my father, not so much. "Goddamn," he said, "Stop putting quarters in that thing! Jesus Christ! That's real money, you know!"

So of course I let my kids play video games until their tongues turned blue and their eyeballs drooled down their faces. My son still does: he's enmeshed in World of Warcraft. I can't wrap my brain around WoW, although I tried: I created a limp green night elf named Celery, but by the time she had wiped out a few harmless boars and some sabertooth tigers (that's one thing I hate about Lara Croft, too: she's always blowing away snow leopards and mountain gorillas and other endangered species, sheesh) that weren't hurting anyone, I had lost interest. The last game I got into was Morrowind and while that was fun for a while, eventually I got tired of walking everywhere. Besides, M, who had already beaten the game, had decided to build himself a house on one island and settle down there with bags of loot, but he got lonely. Like the Sims, the fun is in building and furnishing your dream house, or, well, in Morrowind, your dream hut. Of course, games like Morrowind or WoW or the Sims or even Sim City, (which I used to adore - my best city ever was called Land of the Fat - the secret, by the way, to successful urban planning is plopping down a maximum security prison, a toxic waste dump and a casino just as soon as you possibly can, than sitting back and watching the accolades roll in,) are sort of winnable, unlike Tetris or Bejeweled or Alchemy, or even my youthful delight, Galaxian.

Those old style games are designed for failure: the computer always beats you and you will never, no never, ever actually win. Okay, I have heard that some people won Pac Man and in fact I think my old boyfriend used to win Asteroids a bunch, but all that you get are some lights, a few booping noises and the chance to put in another quarter and start over. There's a Bruce Sterling riff on that from one of his novels; what is it, exactly, in the human mind which would lead us to invent games which cannot be won by a human being? I mean, talk about defeatism: games that just go on and on until the computer finally conquers all. Tetris, for example, is unwinnable. It's like life, or the Bible, or something equally depressing: you just have to keep on going until you die. At least when you finally work your way through Tomb Raider you get to go back to the mansion and jump on the trampoline.