by Mark G. McLaughlin

These are books. They are like portable computer games. You can take them anywhere. They even have a great save game feature (called a bookmark). They do not require batteries or power packs or a wall plug. (Although they do require a light source to activate; they are not solar-powered). They run on any operating system, sound or video card you have installed in your brain, regardless of your RAM or storage capacity. Even the oldest and slowest machines with fragmented memories can run them at near-top efficiency. Amazing. I think the trend may catch on.

I am not being totally facetious. I spend a lot of time with computer games and with books. I am constantly subjected to advertising that seeks to lure me into buying a game by telling me it will take 20, 60, 100 or more hours to get through the game. This is a selling point? Do you realize that for every 20 hours spent playing computer games you could read a great work of literature – or two not so great works, or even a couple of dirty novelettes? Or see ten movies (well, ten normal movies or six Titanic-size flicks or watch the Sorrow and the Pity five times – but only if you have been very bad in a previous life or were a rather nasty person in Europe in the 40’s). Such endless possibilities!

Telling me that a game is good because it will take 100 hours to play is like selling me art by the foot. (Oh that Mona Lisa is quite charming, but don’t you have something a bit wider, after all, it has to go over the sofa in the living room.) Bigger is not always better (well, maybe in Playboy…)

Bigger also means more pain. Now, I love gaming. I live it, breathe it, feel it crunch beneath my toes (well, maybe not that), but it is just that computer gaming, despite its many wonders (and I do enjoy those wonders) has four serious drawbacks.

I am talking about the carpal tunnel burn, rotator cuff grind, finger joints crackle, neck crick and spinal tap (not the band) kind of pain. Add to this menu of self-inflicted torture serious, blurry eye strain, brain-in-a-vice headaches and, yes, lower back stabs and flat-bottom / sweaty pimple butt melancholia.

To this agonizing and unrelenting physical pain we have to add another malady: long sleepless nights. This is the second drawback:

Face it, when else can you put in this 20 or 60 or 100 hours required to find the foozle, conquer the universe, build Cleveland or complete the Daytona Disc 500 except late at night? It is either then, or give up family time or work time. Even if you set aside a time: "Oh honey / kids, dad's gonna go play on the computer for the next six hours," it is not the same as "honey / kids, dad's going over to Charlie's house to play games with the guys." It does not ring true.

You of course pay the price at work or with the family, as your bleary-eye sleeplessness makes you grumpy and irritable, and of course robs your body of the rest it needs to recuperate from the pain you inflicted upon it by staying up all night to rescue Princess Metal Bra from the evil wizard or to once again prove that Ole Virginny could’a taken them heights in Pennsylvania! (At about four in the morning they all kind of merge together, so it could be the Louisiana Tigers fighting to climb Princess Metal Bra, for all you can remember.)

This leads to the third in our litany of pains:

Unlike board games, miniatures, cards, family games or sports, computer gaming is almost totally devoid of the face-to-face, exchange a joke, look deep into the eye of the opponent kind of experience that make other kinds of games more social events than contests or puzzles. On-line gaming, even with someone you know, is a bit better, but only in the way phone sex is a step beyond solo sex. Playing solitaire with a computer game is a lot like playing solitaire with... ahem. (I’d better stop there; I don't want to wind up before the Congress.)

Were this all the pain, we might say "Lay on, Macduff" but it is not. There is the greatest pain of all. The fourth and final step into the void:

When things go wrong in a computer game, it is hard or impossible to fix. You've watched games crash. You have been unable to restore positions you've worked hard and long to acquire. You have run into some bug or (even worse) some intentional block placed by a sick designer that makes you want to scream or call tech support (which often costs, or else may require hours or days of waiting).

When you fail to get a satisfactory answer or are told you have to restart and write off the last ten hours of your life, you are likely to do as I have done and hit the door on the drive, pop out the disk and play Frisbee. (Or load the CD in the toaster for the "flaming CD poptarts" effect as in Small Soldiers).

You think I am kidding? Panzer General is still imbedded in the dry wall on the other side of my office. Ask my wife.

[Editor’s note: A particularly heinous (and sadly commonplace) crime of computer game makers is the Bug-Fix Patch Of No Return, that you install (sometimes these are necessary to complete a game) after you’re countless hours into your glorious saved game. Oh, the agony! - when you discover that the fixed version won’t run saved games from previous versions of the game, and/or the patch replaced all of your saved game slots with blank entries!]

Now, many games are a joy, are enriching or are just plain fun and relaxing. Others are or get to be a chore, especially those which come with the top four downsides listed above. The frequency and degree of occurrence in 1, 2, 3, and/or 4 can really get you to the point where you curse yourself for wasting so much time. You wish you could rub the lamp and get a wish to turn back time, or start to pray for a power outage just so you can STOP the PAIN.

Now, lest you think I have gone waaaay off the deep end (instead of just wading a bit and dipping my toes in the river of no return), let me reassure you that I love gaming. I especially love board games, card games and miniatures. Eleven of my board games have seen shelf life. I continue to design board games. I have been doing computer game columns and beta testing since the days of the 48K Atari 800. I have many favorite computer games and there are many other computer games of which I have wonderful memories of playing alone or with friends – on-line, hot-seating or, my favorite, "us against the computer." My son, Campbell, who is 8, is especially fond of "me and my dad against the computer." Proof that quality time and computer gaming are not necessarily exclusive of each other.

Rest assured, I love games. I will keep gaming. I will keep writing about games. I will keep introducing others to games. I will keep designing games and, yes, I will even keep buying games.

BUT, I am tired of the pain. I also need to sit down, peacefully, with a good book – nay, a GREAT BOOK – and enjoy that most wonderful of all video cards, RAM chips and operating systems: the imagination. May my motherboard never fry.

For more editorials head over to View From the Turret.

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