Sometimes I wonder what would happen if someone could turn the process of curing all the world’s major diseases into an online flash game. I can’t help but think if said game had leader boards, we’d all be disease-free in the span of a few weeks. But while we’re waiting for someone to invent the AIDS-curing game, an inordinate number of people are pouring an inordinate amount of time into games that don’t have quite as much perceived benefit to society.
Don’t get me wrong – thanks to the excessive number of hours I’ve spent playing flash games online, I have developed a number of useful life skills. I know exactly how to respond in the event of an attack by amorphous blobs, a penguin-launching competition or a zombie holocaust. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?)
However, there are some games I have a hard time assigning any real-world value – games like “Click the Button” (can you guess its objective?), in which the top-rated “player” has a score of over 4,000,000 clicks. Congratulations, I guess.
Just to be clear, this means someone actually sat down and clicked a button for somewhere in the vicinity of (by my calculations) 800 hours. Or maybe they hacked the system to make it seem like they did. Either way, why? Is a high score on the “Click the Button” leader board really worth that kind of effort? I suppose if your highest ambition in life is to out-click the rest of the American people, maybe it is.
And it definitely seems like some people possess that kind of ambition. As a matter of fact, for pretty much any game which keeps score, it’s usually not difficult to find someone who will take it far too seriously – someone who has no problem neglecting insignificant things like personal hygiene or getting a job, if it means making their score slightly higher.
For instance, Absolute Entertainment, an ironically-named video game producer from the early ’90s, developed a game called “Desert Bus” in which the objective was to drive a bus in real-time from Tucson, Ariz., to Las Vegas, Nev. This takes about eight hours.
The game cannot be paused, meaning that it requires eight hours of continuous play; if you leave the game unattended, the bus will veer off the road and will be towed back to Tucson (also in real-time).
The reward for getting all the way to Las Vegas? One point. To get another point, you must spend 8 more hours returning to Tucson, from which you can drive back to Las Vegas for a third point. And so on.
This might be the only game ever made which is actually less interesting than the real-world situation it’s trying to simulate. And yet, at least one group of people playing the prototype version reached a score of 6.
Had the game actually been released (thankfully, it wasn’t), there would have been people with scores in the 20s, maybe higher.
But it gets even worse. Recently, a video game called “Lose/Lose” was made available online. Now first, if you’re offered a chance to play a game with that kind of name, you should pretty much always decline. You’re not going to win – that’s clear from just reading the title. You only have two options, and they both involve losing.
But let’s pretend you’re illiterate and decide to take a stab at “Lose/Lose” despite its title. You’ll find it looks a lot like Space Invaders. The player assumes the role of a little pixilated space ship with a little pixilated laser, and little pixilated aliens move down across a little pixilated screen. If you get hit by any of the aliens, you lose. Also, the game deletes itself from your hard drive. (Apparently the game developers of “Lose/Lose” take losing very seriously.)
Fortunately you have a laser, which you can use to shoot the aliens. Shooting an alien not only eliminates a threat to your ship, but it also increases your score by one point.
Also, every time you shoot an alien, the alien explodes into a file path, which indicates a randomly chosen file on your computer. Or rather, a randomly chosen file which used to be on your computer, since shooting the alien permanently deletes the file.
In other words, your options are to either get hit by an alien and die or to shoot the aliens and gradually delete the entire contents of your hard drive. And then, get hit by an alien and die since the game never runs out of aliens.
As I recall, the idea behind “Lose/Lose” had to do with questioning the morality of using a gun in a game just because you have it. Or something like that. I didn’t read the explanation very carefully because I was in a hurry to get to shooting the aliens. But then I glanced at the high scores and gave up on the spot. The top scorer of “Lose/Lose” has slaughtered an astonishing 4,912 files. Sorry, aliens. Presumably, the only reason he didn’t keep going was because the 4,912th alien deleted a system file that disabled the “shoot” key.
That’s commitment. Someone is actually willing to ruin a perfectly good computer in order to make the top spot on the leader board. I can’t see how anyone would think that’s a good idea.
I mean, I suppose if your computer has a virus, and you’re going to have to do a system restore anyway, maybe it’s worth giving the game a shot just to say you tried it. Hell, you might get lucky and accidentally delete the virus.
But even so, killing almost 5,000 aliens would take at least an hour of continuous play. Getting the top position on the “Lose/Lose” leader board is not worth that kind of time.
So what conclusions can we draw from all this? Well, for one, shooting aliens is a lot of fun. Also, some people have too much time on their hands and don’t seem to know how to use it. Seeing your name at the top of a superficial high-score list simply isn’t worth an investment of hours upon hours.
If you ever do get the urge to attain the highest score in some pointless game, please do yourself a favor and reinvest your time in something more productive, like, say, finding cures for all the world’s major diseases. I hear there’s a market for that.
McNeill Williford is a senior majoring in industrial engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].