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.

Thank you for being a friend: A tribute to sit-coms and their stars

Celebrities die in threes, we’re told.
So far, 2010 is shaping up to be the year we mourn actors from sit-coms. It’s only June, but we’ve already lost three.
Back in February, it was Andrew Koenig, best known as “Boner” Stabone on “Growing Pains.” Recently, only weeks apart, Gary Coleman and Rue McClanahan both passed away.
Coleman is best known as the wise-cracking Arnold from “Diff’rent Strokes.” McClanahan played the senior citizen sex pot on “The Golden Girls.”
These last two hit me the hardest. The characters they played always cracked me up when I was a kid, from Arnold’s trouble with The Gooch, his school yard nemesis, to Blanche Devereaux’s syrupy Southern belle seduction of elderly gentlemen callers.
That’s right, I watched the “Golden Girls” when I was a kid. I’m not ashamed to say it. When I was younger, like many of my generation, I watched a lot of television. Hours and hours of it. So much that it was sometimes too easy to forget the people on TV are actors playing characters. And while the characters will live on infinitely in re-runs, the actors end the way we all end.
In life, though, these three brought a very important gift into our living rooms, that of laughter. Watching characters struggle through “situations” in the half-hour comedy shows, no matter how unrealistic or how far they differ from our own lives, always makes us feel a little less alone in the universe.
They also help divert us away from whatever our own troubles may be: getting lost in a character’s problem on a TV show, a movie or a novel allows our own problems to temporarily drift away.
Talented actors are the vessels through which this process is possible.
So, I’d like to take a moment of silence for these three diverse actors.
I’d also like to take a moment of silence for the sit-com itself.
Now that I’m older and that I’ve had my own “growing pains,” and found out that “different strokes” do rule the world and that my friends and I are very much like “golden girls,” I don’t watch much television.
I don’t have cable, which in Manistee means you don’t have any television thanks to the new digital way it’s brought to us now.
But I don’t need it to know that great sit-coms are a thing of the past. I’m talking about the good old-fashioned sit-coms where families and friends sat around a living room cracking jokes you knew to laugh at because of the laugh-track.
Now, the laugh-track is dorky. Less sit-coms premiere each fall and are replaced by “reality” television, the cultural sign that the end is nigh.
Hit half-hour comedy shows like “The Office” have to pretend it’s a documentary to get people to watch.
Reality shows are vulgar, not only because they’re just as scripted as any other shows, but because they appeal to an audiences’ worst gossip-mongering tendency. That itch to look in through your neighbor’s blind to see what they’re up to. That desire to feel better than people when they’re down.
Half-hour fictions allow for the creation of great characters. They allow the creators -- the writers and the actors -- to participate in an artistic exchange with the audience.
In reality shows, it’s watching to see if “Joe” or “Donna” is going to slap whoever just called them a nasty name. Reality shows are nothing more than middle school on tape. Unfortunately, I doubt programming will change in the near future.
But I will be interested to see if anyone will be mourning Richard Hatch, the dude that won the first “Survivor,” when he dies?
What praises would we sing? What did he or anybody on reality shows bring to us that was special? Did they really have a part in bringing diversionary joy to our lives?
Maybe I’ll keep watching to find out.
Maybe.