Game over: Video games are relaxing black holes of time

I wasn’t John Counts this weekend.
I was Bond. James Bond.
That’s right. I didn’t spend my Labor Day weekend at some boring, banal barbecue. Instead, I was massacring henchmen in mansions and scouring Italian rooftops for devious villains.
Virtually, that is.
In reality, I was alternately standing and sitting in a living room staring at a television screen in my underwear playing the video game “James Bond: Quantum of Solace,” derived from the movie of the same name.
By the end of my 15-hour binge, my skin was a bit pastier. My eyes were burned out, glazed over. When I finally slept, I dreamed in the same jagged images of the game.
All holiday weekend, no one could get between me and my Wii.
I don’t own any video game console for this reason. They are addicting. They are addicting because sometimes it’s easier to get to the next level in a game than it is in life. They are addicting because you, the gamer, are in complete control over the universe before your eyes. They are addicting because while the games are all-absorbing, there is nothing truly at stake. When you see “Game Over” you can always hit reset and keep going. You can go back and redo things you messed up the first time.
You can’t do that in real life. Not yet, at least.
For those reasons, real life events begin to become less important. That’s when you find yourself at 3 a.m. reaching for a Code Red Mountain Dew to keep you awake for a few more gaming hours. You’re brain is usually too busy to question how you got there.
It’s not a pleasant place to be. Once your eyes wake up to reality and things begin moving at the speed of life again, there’s guilt. There’s remorse.
It’s why I’ve ignored video games for the past 15 years. The systems have come and gone. PlayStation 1, 2 and 3. Xbox. GameCube.
As the gaming systems have gotten better, the more intoxicating they’ve become.
They sure have changed since I was a lad in their nascent age of the 1980s. First, there was “Pong,” a game in which a dot moves back and forth on a screen and the player controls “paddles,” basically a thick, simple line, to bounce the dot back and forth. It amazed and stupefied us back then. Wow, we said.
Now, it compares to a monkey dipping a stick into an ant hole for dinner.
But beginnings are always quaint.
We were never the family that rushed out and bought the new gadgets when they hit the shelves. We’d wait until the hype died down -- along with the prices.
I remember the excitement surrounding the arrival of the Atari 2600 when I was about 6 years old. My older brother and I played “Donkey Kong,” “Frogger” and a game based on the “E.T.” movie for hours.
But we always played outside for hours, too.
When I was in middle school, we got the first Nintendo. We devoted so much time to the completion of Mario Brothers that the music is easily hummed and the images conjured to this day. Large amounts of my young life were also spent unlocking the secrets and mysteries of “The Legend of Zelda.” By the time I finally beat it, the map that came with the game was in tatters.
So were my nerves.
And what did I have to show for it?
“Dude, I beat Zelda,” I probably told my friends.
“Sweet,” they probably said. “Let’s go to the mall.”
I danced ever so briefly with Sega Genesis and the first PlayStation. I’d play them at other folks’ houses, but never gave in to the temptation to plunk down the hundred plus dollars to get one myself.
This would have been in the late 1990s. I’ve been relatively game-free since. Until now.
I knew where I’d be spending the holiday weekend had one of these newfangled Nintendo Wii systems. So, I went to the Family Video, and rented this James Bond game for what I thought would be a few hours of amusement.
By the time I was stripped down to my shorts and yelling obscenities at fake, two-dimension representations of people on a television screen, I knew I was lost.
I was back in the same mode I was in when I was 12, trying to figure out “The Legend of Zelda.”
In fact, I don’t even know where I found the time to write this column. I hope you all had a good Labor Day, Manistee, but I’ve got to go for now.
The game’s on pause.

Running on empty: Oil spills will continue as long as we drive

Sometimes, we need to shelve the microscope and look at whatever falls into our scrutinizing eyes in large view.
Sometimes, a column needs to be a thought experiment.
So, what’s a thought I want to experiment with?
A world without cars.
Cars make us fat.
Car crashes kill more people before their time than anything else.
Cars are fueled by a resource that is not inexhaustible.
Cars pollute.
Looked at like this, it’s a wonder why tobacco and fast food companies get picked on the most as a threat to our health.
Last week’s oil spill on the Kalamazoo River (800,000 gallons!) has me thinking about all of this. Just as we finally plugged the last oil spill, another one pops its cork right here in Michigan.
The usual chatter in the media has followed. It will continue for months. It’s a narrative we’re all intensely familiar with after having gone through months of the Gulf oil spill.
The company’s at fault. The government didn’t regulate them enough, so it’s their fault. There will be a lot of devastating pictures of wildlife covered in oil. There will be pictorial diagrams of the pipe system my non-engineering mind won’t understand. There will be inscrutable acronyms. A line from a media report might sound something like: “Authorities of the GAA said the pipe wasn’t inspected by HDAD officials in over twelve months even though YWE codes call for them every eight months in odd calendar years. The HDAD is now casting blame on the GAA for negligent oversight of the YWE.”
Blah. Blah Blah.
The faux acronyms (and sarcasm) are all mine.
This is fine. The sad situation should be put under a microscope and examined in-depth so it can hopefully be prevented from happening again. Big businesses who run pipes underneath us have responsibilities to the public. So does the government, who we elect to protect the common good from “accidents” like this.
But in a broad view, how about we look at it this way: The oil spill is the fault of each and every one of us who plops our large rumps in a car each day. Myself (and my prodigious rump) included.
You can’t eat oil. You can’t build anything with it. It’s main purpose is to keep our cars running.
And America burns through some gas.
Think about the last ten times you hopped in the car. Where did you go? What did you do? Was it a necessary trip?
Probably not. If you’re like me, you hop in the car to run over to the Wesco to get an ice tea, even though it’s only a few blocks from our newspaper office.
Sometimes, we’re just riding around in our automobiles with no particular place to go.
We make needless trips because we can, because it’s our God given American right to be wasteful. That’s what liberty’s all about, right? If by pursuing our happiness we destroy the world, then so be it. Maybe man was meant to ruin the earth.
Don’t get me wrong, the internal combustion engine is a miraculous feat. Without it, our lives would be limited. There would be no Motor City, cross country road trips or the car chase in Bullitt.
These would all be bad things. Without the automobile industry, my grandparents wouldn’t have had jobs to support having children, thus no me (a negligible bit of the argument in the large view, but of vast importance to me). All we would know of the world is where our feet could take us, which slows down economic productivity and opportunity. And who doesn’t love the romance of Steve McQueen zipping around the streets of San Francisco in a muscle car.
So, alas, I know this is not a feasible, real world argument, but nor is it some liberal, hippie doomsday prophesy.
It was just a thought experiment.
But we can also experiment in real life.
This week I’m going to try a strange new thing I just discovered that doesn’t need oil, doesn’t make us fat, doesn’t kill you if you collide with another and does not pollute.
Walking.

OMG, Granholm: Texting ban sends the right message

When I was a teenager in the early 1990s, socializing was mostly done through parents’ telephones or, if you were desperate, pay phones.
The term “landline” was still reserved for the military.
Getting directions somewhere meant pulling out a slip of paper and writing down the various roads and turns, or having someone draw you a map.
Then along came pagers, which more or less directed you to the nearest phone.
None of these things affected the way we drove as teens, because they all took place out of the car.
But then Al Gore, armed with a pickaxe and a miner’s helmet, went underground and dug the tunnels for the interconnected World Wide Web (thanks, Al).
“Just give me the address,” you now requested, usually over a cell phone, and then punched it into the Internet, printed out the directions and off you went.
Until, of course, GPS navigational units appeared in cars and directed you where to go with robot voices.
The state government has now deemed the biggest pain brought on by all this new technology is text messaging while driving. Amid much fanfare (it was broadcast on Oprah!) Gov. Jennifer Granholm signed into law a ban on texting while driving.
Starting July 1, texting while operating a vehicle will become a primary offense, which means police can pull you over if they see your busy thumbs typing away. The first offense is $100. The second offense can cast $200.
The thing Democrats aren’t even taking into consideration is that even without the distraction of cell phones and texting, teens aren’t always the greatest drivers.
When I was fifteen, a friend of mine was seriously injured in a car accident. He broke both arms and several bones in his legs. He was in a wheelchair for months afterward. Scars still trace down both forearms and his knees.
How did the accident happen?
He was reaching for a slice of pizza.
So, do we ban pizzas in our cars while we drive because the savory smell might be so distracting we lose control?
Do we ban putting on make-up, smoking and talking to other passengers?
More and more, the government is passing laws on how an individual chooses to live their day to day life.
It’s mostly coming the liberal “control-everything” camp, the same good folks who brought you political correctness in the 1990s. Liberals like this always haughtily take the moral high ground on such issues.
“You should live the morally ‘right’ way, and we’re going to show you how,” they seem to say.
With that said, I’m actually leaning toward being in favor of the texting ban, despite the voice on the other side of my brain saying that it’s an infringement on personal liberties.
I confess that I’m an occasional driver/texter. Not only is it distracting your thoughts, which are having a silent conversation with whoever is typing away messages on the other end, but it diverts your gaze away from the road and onto the tiny little screen.
I couldn’t count how many times I’ve been behind or beside an erratic driving vehicle only to see that they’ve got one hand on the wheel, and the other holding their phone up to their nose as they type really important missives to their fellow texters.
So, I’ll reluctantly go along with the law and keep my phone in my pocket where it belongs when I’m on the road.
Ttyl, Manistee.

No ‘iFad’ for me: Public is fooled by new whiz-bang gadgets

Ford. Edison. Alexander Gram Bell.
These are just a few of the visionary inventors and businessmen who shaped our world. They conquered physical distances and allowed us to see in the dark.
Automobiles, light bulbs and telephones changed the way we live. Other advancements in the fields of medicine, farming and the food industry eventually made our lives better.
So, what are our current so-called innovators like Apple’s Steve Jobs coming up with?
Different ways of talking on the phone and watching TV.
The iPad was released this past Saturday amid the same circus hype that accompanied the debuts of the iPod and iPhone. People in cities nationwide waited in lines to purchase the gizmo, which costs around $600. It’s essentially a tablet-sized computer that connects to the Interwebs. I won’t go into too much more about what it does, because I’m sure you’ve already seen the blitz of commercials and media reports.
The iPad tablet seems to have been delivered to the masses with the same fervor that accompanied another tablet in ancient times. But whereas Moses’s Ten Commandments gave humans some rules to live by, the iPad is nothing but a reworked medium that supplies an endless stream of substance-free novelties: sport scores, the new Rihanna video and the YouTube video of the kid high on gas after a dentist appointment.
The messages on stone were a little bit more thought-provoking than the amusements, novelties and distractions flashing on the bright, electronic screen.
If you hadn’t guessed by now, I did not wait in line to buy an iPad (or an iPod or iPhone). I think the iPad is completely unnecessary and irrelevant. I’m no wacky Luddite who advocates subsistence living “off the grid,” I’m just saying all the newfangled “iFads” and “iPhonys” aren’t worth the attention they receive.
Someday, I hope the public will wise up and the “iFad” will pass. Steve Jobs and crew are fooling them. It’s nothing but technology for the sake of technology.
Granted, I’m still skeptical about the relevance of computers and the Internet. They have sped up the way we do things and made previous inventions more precise, but how have they really altered our lives?
There’s more access to information, most of which we don’t need (pornography, narcissistic MyFace pages). The Internet changed the way we do things, but it hasn’t changed the lives of millions in the same way as, say, Gutenberg’s printing press did in the 15th Century.
The things you can use an iPad for are fun, but they aren’t fulfilling any basic human need or making any sweeping cultural changes.
Maybe this is the problem with our economy: America isn’t making anything new. And what people are buying, gadgets like flat-screen TVs and video game systems, are nothing more than sleek, high-concept equivalents to junk food.
The iPad is nothing more than a GameBoy for adults. In the end, it’s a toy. A very expensive toy.
Even cell phones, which I was reluctant to get, are mostly pointless. They’re nice for emergencies, but how often are they used for that? Most of the time, I hear people having inane conversations about who kissed who’s boyfriend yesterday, or the play-by-play of what the person is doing.
“I’m at the gas station. Now, I’m walking out of the gas station. Now, I’m getting into my car,” as if they need to supply narration to make their lives meaningful, to give importance to every monotonous move.
A week ago, I had a bunch of people in Manistee from the Detroit area to steelhead fish. One of my friends, who is usually loud and uproarious, was uncharacteristically quiet while we had post-fishing drinks at a local watering hole. I looked over and saw him fiddling with a shiny black object.
“My wife just got me this iPhone,” he said when he caught me looking. “It’s awesome.”
Those were about the only words he spoke the rest of the evening because he was so busy with his new toy.
I’d seen it before. Every person I know who has an iPhone would rather be looking up who played Raj on “What’s Happening!!” (Ernest Thomas) than interact in their current surroundings.
They aren’t present in the tangible world.
These are a few examples of how people are so terribly afraid of being alone with their own thoughts. The more you think, the smarter you are. The smarter you are, the more engaged citizen you become.
But in the end, most of us are just playing games.