The Trouble with Games I Never Wanted to Play

A King Alone

This may not read as a review, but computer games, in the guise of advertisements, have invaded my space at certain times, and they have elicited social commentary that people might not have considered germane to their leisure moments.

Take Royal Kingdom: a king without a kingdom or courtiers, which is neither royal nor monarchical in any true sense, for what is a king without a court?

I can never imagine being a king in a kingdom of one. That lonely existence, without any sign that knights might come or subjects might intervene, already puts me off any idea of playing the game. It is an irritating diversion I must endure to reach the game I actually want to play.

Poverty as Entertainment

Gossip Harbor: Merge & Story visits upon us the direst exposition of falling on hard times. It is instigated by a divorce, after which a mother and child are left with nothing, forced to fight against the elements for shelter and sustenance, in a manner that makes a Dickensian situation look heartily luxurious by any standard.

If the purpose of this game is to conjure in our imagination an unspeakable penury that no Western society would, in this day, countenance, then I am unimpressed.

We seem to be visited, in computer games meant for leisure, with the societal deprivation we once saw in documentaries from faraway lands, though now it wears the unexpected visage of Caucasian faces.

The main developer even appears in the adverts, telling us he is on holiday with his family at some resort, that the game is free from advertisements, and that it has so many levels that, in my view, it bears no significance to reality.

I want to suggest that the developers have no inkling of life lived on the edges; this is the use of poverty graphics to titillate and to excite a sympathy of the sort charities rely upon, and my concern is that such depiction, met in the course of play, might inure us to real suffering.

Truth Told in Jest

You might say I am reading too much into a game. I would aver that the truth is most easily let loose in jest and at play; miss the cues at your peril.

If I were rating games, the lowest rated of all those I have encountered in the adverts that interrupt the continuity of my leisure time would be Hero Wars.

It has many variants, but the one that filled me with disgust featured a young man and a pretty lady for whom he gave limb, heart, and body to save her. Only for her to cast her eyes on a more personable, muscular hunk. The betrayal is not merely that she deserts the man who saved her; the two of them then spit on him before running off.

An AI-generated infographic on the blog content. (Click to enlarge.)

Betrayal and Redemption

It is only a game, you might say, and yes, it is. The young man then enters some mystical dungeon, fighting all manner of creatures and warriors to gain points and ascend to some level I have never cared to explore.

What I cannot abide is the humiliation heaped upon the betrayal, with the man having to seek some sort of redemption in battle. If I were to situate this in time, I would suggest it is mediaeval at best, and yet it is probably part of our human story. I suppose I simply do not like it as the opening of a game, regardless of the pleasure one might derive from playing it.

A Preference for Logic

Whilst I prefer board games like Scrabble and Chess, which I have not played in a while, I have never been able to transfer that enjoyment to playing online; there is no look and feel of the tiles or the chess pieces.

Yet, after I learnt to play Sudoku and completed many books of the puzzles some twenty years ago, I found some good versions online that I could play on my mobile phone. I like the straightforward logic involved. I usually play the Daily Challenge and the Expert level games.

In the early versions of Microsoft Windows, we had Solitaire, which was a good game for learning how to control a mouse, and then Minesweeper, the object of which was to eliminate the mines hidden under the tiles without triggering any, or you lost.

The Lure of Meowdoku

Then I found Meowdoku. It is not necessarily original in concept, but it appears to combine the rules of both Sudoku and Minesweeper. You are to find all the cats hidden under coloured tiles, such that there is one cat per colour region, no cats share a row or column, and no cats touch diagonally.

It is a kind of addictive logic puzzle, and quite competitive amongst the live players. We cannot interact with one another, but there is a leaderboard to which I have many times risen to the top and held my position for a while. In my view, a leaderboard makes no sense if you are not at the top.

Life at the Top

Last night, I noticed someone I had trounced a few days ago, now so unrelenting that, for all my efforts until I grew tired, they left me flailing in third position. I consoled myself that I still had a medal, which never goes to the fourth placed in any competition.

The leaderboard is reset every twenty-four-hour cycle, so your previous wins are not cumulative, apart from the few free hints you gain when you next log in. The world of these games is layered: some carry adverts, others offer a subscription, and some do both at once.

Even my Sudoku, registered and paid for, still runs an advert to unlock one special hint feature, which is, ironically, how I came upon several of the other games in the first place.

I avoid the advert-intensive ones where I can, but Meowdoku has no subscription model at all, so the adverts after each new game must simply be borne with patience, and you already know my opinion of the ones they show. Still, I cannot help but feel that these games, for all their faults, could be a lens on human suffering brought into the levity of leisure.

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