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February 02, 2005
Tetris
I pride myself on my game of Tetris. I gave many, many hours to it in high school and college. Embarrassing confession: Since Tetris games can last a while, I developed elaborate fantasies of attending Tetris tournaments, where crowds of Tetris experts would sit in a dark auditorium, watching some sort of projection of my game. People would talk about my shape-changing dexterity and elaborate stacking techniques. Analysts would discuss the complex statistical formulae used effortlessly by Tetris prodigies like me.
So when a bar with vintage arcade games opened up in Williamsburg, I was psyched. All of that time invested in Tetris should be enough to get me a free beer and my name up on the high score blackboard, right? I should have known better. The Atari version of Tetris, which is what arcade-style games use, is very different from the PC-based software I played on. It has weird levels and it stops the game and sends you to another level when you've gotten to 15 rows. The version I played just goes on forever, getting faster and faster. The Atari version also doesn't respond well to fast commands in succession, so my fancy changing stuff doesn't work and I lose pretty quickly. Nevermind that the Atari version is the original version and I was playing some knock off. It was depressing.
So my question is, is there anything useful gained from honing video game skills? Even if you become an expert in one game, another version will appear eventually and you'll have to learn it all over again. Does it help your fine motor skills or satisfy some need to keep your mind occupied with a completely mindless task? Is it any better than learning all the plot lines and characters in daily soaps? Is there any benefit to all the dedication and blisters?
Okay, one benefit. You can impress drunk people into thinking you're cool. It's how D and I met. We're both quiet, even when we're drunk (sometimes), but we played Space Invaders together in the basement of a bar for a while. It was sort of retro and fun and it kept us together long enough to figure out what to do next. So video games are like a dating service for really lame, antisocial people. How sad.
Posted by csageday at February 2, 2005 12:01 AM