Beh. I have a love/hate relationship with those things.

A month or two ago I sucessfully, though narrowly, avoided sliding into the time-pit of a brand new video game release. I-and much of the gaming world at large-had been looking forward to this particular title for a number of years. When compared to the rest of the entertainment industry, where new movie and book titles appear weekly, the number of video game releases is extremely small, and as with any area of human endeavor, the '95% crap' rule is strictly followed. As such, note-worthy games releases come along very infrequently; maybe only two or three times a year. This particular title was one of them.

Here's how that works.

In the case of this game, which was a long anticipated second installment of a series, the primary interest I allowed myself was to see how the designers were going to advance the story line from the first 'chapter'. But this isn't to say I wasn't also eager to play the actual game; game play, as a general rule, I find very attractive and as such often takes a painful level of effort for me to avoid. Self-publishers of comic books really don't have the time to be messing about with video games, and I am no exception. Unfortunately, having grown up with the medium, having seen it born from "Pong", and having been entranced and fascinated with it since my youth, I find it difficult to remain impassive in my adulthood. I once heard Ray Bradbury advise that it was imperative to allow oneself to remain in love with the things one loved as a kid, and I heartily agree. But balance is a factor! The simple fact of the matter is that I don't have very much time to spend on games.

I find two tactics very useful after buying a video game...a)Cheat and finish a game in record time, and b)Erase the game and mail the disks to Carson. (Luckily, as I've said, only a couple games come out each year which deserve attention, and I usually only bother looking at one, or fewer, of them.) But, nonetheless, Carson has acquired a colorful selection of game packages from me over the years. He keeps them on a bookshelf.

While it does dramatically diminish the experience, hacker-designed cheat software and backdoor codes implemented by the original programers allow one to zoom quickly through a title, jump immediately to the story inserts without having to spend time actually playing a game all the way through, which with today's games can take hundreds of hours to do properly. Thanks to these tactics, I have terribly compromised the carefully planned entertainment value of many games, but managed only to lose a couple of days to Tiberian Sun, (the title of the game in question), while discovering in the process that James Earl Jones was sorely pressed to perform well against the backdrop of such a young and dinky medium. I'm sure, given another fifty years, we'll produce works to be proud of, but right now it seems to me that we're making the video game equivalents of Keystone Cops. -Without the benefit of Charlie Chaplin.

Anyway, after dancing on the edge of time-waste canyon, and after going through the whirlwind process described above, I began to wonder what the heck was really going on here. Unlike reading a book which can also take up a lot of time, a video game requires a good deal more out-put energy and the effect it can have upon somebody is entirely different. -My hands certainly don't shake after reading a Dumas novel.

Carson once commented that video games seemed to have the ability to make people 'work uncontrollably'. I have certainly witnessed friends display many of the same traits one might associate with alcoholism when playing video games.

After considering it, I began to think along certain pathways. I've gone down before; that the things wefind entertaining as a species are often connected to old and deep rooted survival-based instincts. Certain games, I think, are able to engage ancient genetic programming; the bits of our brains which at one time drove us to hunt. -As well as those parts we still use today, the bits which cause us to obsessively build and organize our world. And unlike the real versions of those activities, which might have required a hunter to be away from the tribe for days at a time, or which can see a builder work for months before a project takes shape, a video game simulating those situations can deliver vast reward in seconds. And as such, the brain juice, -or whatever it is that drives us and keeps us motivated to perform the real versions of those tasks, can through video games be delivered on demand in high levels, having almost narcotic-like results. Anybody who has played a video game into the wee hours knows this!

Interestingly enough, Tiberian Sun is a game which incorporates both fighting and building. Construction and Destruction; like playing football and Lego bricks at the same time, completing the full circle of human desires in one package, with artificially heightened levels of reward. As a direct result, video games can equal big,big money, and the media giants have taken notice, and pour greater and greater resouces into exploiting this relatively young market.

So I can't help but feel a little frightened. While I have witnessed the birth of video games in my life, I have also witnessed the death of things like model train and car sets. Toys like Lego and Mechano don't sell nearly as well today as they once did. When I was twenty, I built my own art studio, and knew how to fix pretty much anything mechanical on my own. Ask somebody in their early twenties today if they can do the same...When I graduated from high school, every kid my age had used an oxyacetylene torch, and had turned wood and metal stock on a lathe, but shop class today is no longer mandatory in Canadian education.
 
 

The statements one can make about society based on these sorts of trends is unsettling. I heard a quote which went like this: "We are a society of wolf-like, pack animals, yet through technology we are building fro ourselves a world more closely resembling and insect, hive structure" -Perhaps our outmoded animal drives will all one day be sated artificially. We've been doing it for centuries through sport, (or numbing ourselves with alcohol). It' jsut we've been getting very good at it recently.

I wonder though...Who will build such a world if everybody has forgotten how to use the screwdriver?

(See y'all in #30. -Wow! The comic will be older than me! What cosmic significance will this have? Only time can tell!)