Saturday April 26 2008

Much of our time with Aakarp was spent sat on her sofa, staring at the screen of her laptop. This comes very naturally to anybody who plays World of Warcraft. The average person might find gazing at such a diminutive screen a little disappointing, but we geeks are so used to deriving entertainment from our PCs that we don’t find this to be a problem. It was thus that we found ourselves playing a strange little puzzle game named Bejeweled. For hours. And hours. And hours.

Bejeweled is a curious species of videogame. The best way to start is to describe how it works. You begin with a grid filled with coloured jewels. Click on two adjacent jewels and they swap places briefly, with the aim being to line up three jewels of the same colour and make them disappear. The jewels above then drop down to fill the gap and new jewels plop in from the top to fill the grid back up.

I hope you’re still with me because there are two more things to mention. Line up four jewels at once and you make a special exploding jewel, which suicide-bombs itself and any nearby jewels when you decide to use it. Line up five at once - very rare – and an amazing electrical hypercube style jewel is created, which sits there undulating until you use it, and then it destroys all the jewels of one colour. It's like a smart bomb (if you like shoot-em-ups) a supermove (if you like beat-em-ups) or an invincibility power-up (if you like platformers).

The odd thing is, if you’re playing Bejeweled, there’s a strong chance you’re not familiar with those types of game. There’s a strong chance, in fact, that you’ve never played anything besides Bejeweled. That’s because the game is, essentially, designed for bored housewives. It’s like a two-dimensional, digital version of Valium, except instead of helping you do the hoovering by coating reality in a vague, emotionless fluff, it actively stops you from doing the hoovering by creating a morphine-like dependency

Masquerading as a puzzle game like Tetris or Puzzle Bobble, Bejeweled is in fact so idiotically simple that it functions as a trojan horse. Furnished as it is with fewer rules than a barnyard fistfight and a control method so basic you could play it with your eyelid, it successfully dupes bored middle aged women into thinking they aren’t really playing a videogame. It’s a traditionally impenetrable demographic, the kind which thinks the sum total of mankind’s achievements in the realm of interactive entertainment amount to a handful of copycat killings and a series of loud bleeps, so fooling them onto a computer is a stroke of genius.

Videogames have guns in, or monsters, or people punching each other in the face - some kind of violence, at least. They’re only allowed to not have any violence in if they’ve got cars, or failing that, some kind of ball. Very occasionally, some fringe activities, like pressing buttons in time to music or raising a pet puppy, will be allowed. And it’s important for games to stay within these boundaries, otherwise everybody gets confused and starts thinking anything count as a videogame, then starts trying to beat their previous score while doing the washing up or having a poo. That’s not healthy.

So Bejeweled isn't a videogame. It's brightly coloured smack for stupids. And, being stupids, Brodos, Aakarp and I sat playing this thing into the early hours, swapping control every time we completed a level, while those without the mouse remained glued to the screen in an advisory capacity. I do not know where the time went. But then again, there have been many days in my life of which I can say this. It’s a familiar feeling for the online gamer, and a disheartening one at that.

However, I wasn’t disheartened in Lund. For some reason, if it doesn’t feel bad at all to watch time evaporate if you’re not alone.

Next week: Planning the hideous train ride to Serbia.

Read from the start:
A Geek Adventure

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