Headline November19,2012

INTERNET GAMING: 

''A BIT LIKE BEING DEAD!''

Two young poets dropped in on TS Eliot. They found him alone playing patience. They asked him why he liked playing it. Eliot thought about it. ''I suppose,'' he said, ''it's the nearest thing I can think of to being dead.''

It's an interesting category!!: things you can do that are a bit like being dead.

Being there without being there; occupying time without occupying it. The state of almost-deadness is subtly different from just wasting time. It is not the same thing as seeking distraction or entertainment, both of which are very easily done.

Technology offers a gazillion ways of interacting with others or distracting yourself, but not so many that offer a pure state of almost-deadness. Hahaha!

The challenge, I think, is this that if you can talk about it afterwards, it fails the almost-dead test. No one ever talks about the time they spent playing patience.

The closest technological thing to patience and its state of non-being is to be found in Flash games on the Internet. Flash is the technology developed by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe, that allows Websites to make animations that run on the user's computer. It's the technology behind YouTube, and also behind the pointlessly elaborate animations that use as an instrument of ''slow-loading torture''. Hahaha! Flash can also be used to make games, and it's these that are the web's purest glimpse of Buddhist non-being.

The games tend to be low budget, low tech, and non-competitive. The best Flash games make a virtue of their own non-utility. They are free. They are not like serious games, full of machismo about difficulty and levels; its much more gentle.

A web designer called Ferry Helim has a beautiful site called Orisinal which features over 60 charming Flash games, most of them starring animals.

Flash games have moved and have somewhat improved. A site loke miniclip has dozens of similar,repetitive, bashing-jumping-dodging games. These stretch the definition of being like patience, but they are as pure and definitive a waste of time as you'll ever find on God's green earth.

Lets not panic. There are still some good-new patience like Flash games to be found. In which you can escape for as long as you can from enemies trying to Zap you. The future games will be for sure fun and heroically, sublimely pointless.Or rather like patience, it's not so much pointless, as point-free.
TS Eliot would love it!

Many thanks to !WOW!

Good Night & God Bless!