on peace and quiet

Just back from four days in Barra.  Where?  Its the most southerly inhabited island in the outer hebrides off the Atlantic coast of Scotland.  Its a wee gem of an island with lots of unique features.  I know, this is always said and regularly an exaggeration, but Barra is unique.  The island is ten miles round it by road, beautiful white beaches of silica-calcium sand which are mediterranean blue in the sun, the world's only airport that is a beach, a growing population of locals and young returners, a strong Gaelic language and unbroken Catholic heritage since St Barr brought the faith to the island, prosperous, clean, friendly and welcoming.

I had thought of telling no-one as it is too precious a gem to share, but that would have been selfish; probably.  

These were four days of sun, spectacular views, sitting still, standing around, drawing, photography, chatting, eating, drinking and sleeping.  A wee bit of heaven on earth.

Now, I hear you say, "John - isn't this a video games blog?"  Aye. you're right, it is.  So, what do four days of r&r have to say about the world of video gaming.  Well, a few things.  Way back when I started video gaming, sitting in pubs at Space Invaders table-tops, pushing orange/red buttons as the audio went haerk-haerk then haerk-haerk-haerk  beneath the spilt beer, I seemed to like fast games.  Tank Attack was weird, but fast'n'fun.  PONG! was, frankly, fast but dull.  

Anyhoo, at some time I couldn't do the fast games any more.  All that rapid reaction wrist'n'thumb-flicking stuff set my nerves a-jangle.  Was it old age?  Was it been-it-seen-it mode?  Whatever it was I found myself more into engrossing entertainment rather than quick-fix stuff.  But, very few video games did this at all, despite well.

Wolfenstein, DOOM and Quake were reminiscent of studies in the barf zone in my virtual reality research work.  Everything went too quick.  Army of Two has this also, with men running up mountain paths at ridiculous speeds and breathfully running on to complete another killing assignment, accompanied by more uses of the f-word than a drunked Glasgow ned on a Saturday night out.  It just aint right; people don't move that fast.

Yep.  YMMV 'n' all that.  Lots and lots of gamers love the fast-paced, quick action/reaction games.  But, many of us do not any more.  We want it reflective, reflexive, pondered upon, considered.  And by 'it' I mean our escapism from the horrors of reality.  Give me a couple of hours with a shoot'em'up and then I am likely immediately to go out and shoot up the next Min&Henry doing 25mph on the open road in their little Suzuki from Pearson's of Largs!

You see, fast action games don't do it for everyone.  I sometimes wondered about asking these people what they do do to relax.  But, I haven't, so I only have my own experiences: draw, walk, run, listen to music, read, fish, etc.  I do lots of things, but fast action games aren't one of them.

Do games have to be fast action?  No.  It is often said that the most popular video games of all time are Solitaire and Minesweeper on the Microsoft OS platforms.  Everyone plays them.  Why?  Well, Solitaire is deeply dull, but is loaded to allow you to win around 10 times more than in a real Solitaire card game.  So, 1: you win relatively easily, so a sense of achievement and calm is gainen from playing the game.  Also, when you win the card roll down, one at a time, in a beautiful cascade.  So, 2:it ends in an asthaetically pleasing way.  You feel good because the game says to you: you are a winner, and because it is artistic.

Minesweeper is quite the opposite.  The play-board is dull, the play is loaded against winning (unless you go for the 5 mines on a 100x100 board option!), and you lose with an ouch!  It is a frustrating game.  You play because it annoys you.  When you do, accidentally usually, win, you win with a dull oh! sound in your head.  It is such a stupid game, akin, IMHO, to surfing TV channels in the forlorn hope that there is something worth watching in the numbing crudness that is TV hell.

Solitaire creates a sense of calm, often after just one play of the game.  Minesweeper is an addiction that creates tension and disappointment.  And here we have two sides - perhaps the two sides of game playing: tension and satisfaction.  The one drives up the body adrenalin, the other calms the spirit.

To draw a parallel, when stuck behind someone so old that they are almost invisible behind the wheel of their 07 or 08 registered tiny car, doing either 35mph on the open road or, annoyingly, 40mph in 30mph zones (let's not even consider how they slow down to 20mph whenever the road turns more than 5 degrees, or how they - aarrgghh!! - speed up as you overtake them) - where was I? - breathe in - breathe out.  Ah, yes, Mins&Henrys annoying the heck out of other drivers.

Well, you can either get so far up their back bumper you can count read the speed on their dash, shout, weave out, just miss a bloody great truck that unexpectedly came round the bend, peep your horn (waste of time; they're deaf too), gnash your teeth, etc. until you can road past them satisfactorily either to find another Min&Henry, a bus, a traffic jam, or see the telltale flash-flash as you hit 50mph in the 30mph zone.

Result: arrive at home/work, ready to kill.  Not the right thing at all. 

Or, you can pull into a lay-by, put on some Neil Young Unplugged (YMMV), and be be-calmed for a few minutes until the annoying Suzuki is gone away, away, away ...  Result: arrive at work five minutes later than planned calm, pleasant and deeply saintly.

Video games?  Reminds me of the only game that has ever had this effect: MYST.  The game was slow, thoughtful, rich, engrossing and deeply, deeply satisfying, like a Belgian chocolate drink at a cafe by a canal in central Gent on a July Sunday afternoon. Ahh ... I'm there ...

I well remember a friend playing it in a lab of an evening.  The lab was dark now and all was quiet.  he had headphones on.  We dropped in and he didn't see us.  The other researcher with me said, 'Lets creep up and tap him on the shoulder'.  I said, 'No.  He'd crap himself in shock.'  So, we left him alone, floating in the calm virtual world that was the puzzles of MYST.

There were more Myst's and a Riven, but they never captured the essence of the original.  The developers thought it was a game and made the puzzles so fiendish that only cheat sites could get you through the levels.  Which broke the charm of Myst, which was in the being there.  Even when puzzles were apparently insoluble, you stayed to think and try until you broke through.  And the failing and the breaking through were soooo calming and forehead-crumpling and pleasing.

Which is probably why I spend more time these days in the real world than the virtual ones of video games.  In the movie, Amadeus, the ArchDuke says to Mozert on hearing the Overture to The Marriage to Figaro, 'Too many notes, my dear Mozert.  Too many notes.'  On the other hand, Salieri reads the very few notes of the Laudate Dominum and drops it on the ground, lost in the beauty of the far-too-few notes.

Where and when will we get games that take us apart to a quiet place, to renew, refresh, re-calm and rehumanise.  To return to our work as little Bruce Almighty's bearing the odour of sanctity.  We might even wave nicely to Min&Henry as they hold us up for ten minutes on the drive home.