I encountered my first video game many years ago in an arcade in a beachfront town in Australia. It was amidst more than forty pinball games, with a few other games which were a sort of hybrid–physical-action games with video-game like narratives.
The game was neither violent nor nonviolent. It involved depth charges, but there was no implication that there were any living things involved.
And it was slow. Which I appreciated. I never have been a speed demon: I prefer to take things at my own pace. One of the problems I’ve had with pinball games is that there often is very little opportunity to control the speed of the game. I’ve learned since how to get better control, but even in my teens, with probably the best reflexes of my life, I was never able to do things at high speed.
Since then, I’ve played many video games. I learned fairly quickly how to determine if I was every going to get good at a game. It’s not so much a learning curve as a learning staircase: I’d start out at nearly as good as I was going to get, using general gaming skills to counterbalance my ignorance of what I was supposed to be trying to do. Then I’d start trying to figure out how to play the specific game, and my performance would go way down, as I devoted more and more attention to developing specific strategies and patterns. With time, I’d slowly begin to improve, and eventually I’d get to the point where I was able to surpass my original level…IF I was able to learn the game at all, as sometimes I could not. But there would be many plateaux along the way, even with games I was able to become good at.
At first, I wasn’t particularly concerned whether games were violent or not. Even the most violent games, at first, weren’t very violent. But slowly, the violence involved became gorier, and I began to become repulsed. I didn’t WANT more realistic effects in any kind of game. I always preferred cartoonish graphics to realistic ones. The worst visual problems I had were often associated with photographic realism–too much detail, too much bright light, too much flashing light, and clashing colors.
This especially applied to violent games. And to racing games. I wasn’t looking for action or tests of my reflexes. I already knew my reflexes were not fast, and that I was not dexterous–and that this would not change, no matter how much tedious practice I put myself through.
I still sometimes played nonrealistic violent games for a while, however. What probably caused my attitude to begin to change was a friend looking at one of the games and asking “Where’s the diplomacy button?”
Over time, I began to focus on nonviolent games almost exclusively. And I made a discovery. There are many different sorts of nonviolent games: card games, trivia games, etc. Most of them are puzzle-solving games–and many, truth be known, are maze games. It may seem a bit odd to describe a card game as a maze game–yet since card decks have a limited number of cards, the ‘maze’ element comes of trying to figure out what order the cards have fallen into–and trying to find a successful path through the disordered cards, according to the rules of the specific games.
There’s an exception, however. I REALLY dislike ‘slot machine’ type games. Even when such games work well (meaning almost never, since online games are too prone to freezing up and failing to work), I find them tedious and boring. They’re just not fun, and there are really few to no puzzles to solve. So I play them only when I’m required to, to free myself get to games I prefer to play–or to complete set tasks in order to build up credits to donate to charity. Then I go back to maze, puzzle, and other intellectual games, with pleasure.
For today’s more difficult to research problem, I can’t remember where I saw a (?fraternity?) house bearing the sigil βΘΖθ. At the time, I found it simply amusing. Of course I knew the names of the Greek letters: and read it first with the Greek pronunciation of the letters. And then, of course, as if the letters were Latin letters; the word they seem to spell, of they were English. But I still wonder: how seriously was the group name meant to be taken? Is there in fact such an organization? I didn’t get a chance to ask (it was the wee hours of the morning). But every once in a while I revert to it in my mind–and then I start wondering again.
treraia 