I'm not a snob. Really, I'm not. In fact, most of the time I'm the exact opposite of a snob: happy in dirt and clutter; unfailingly choosing comfort food over frou-frou nouvelle cuisine; insisting to all the world that while I may be special, I'm no more special than anyone else, and certainly no more special than you are...
*points nose in the air*
"oh, you listen to/watch/play that? Really? How...interestingly boring of you."
I don't necessarily shun popular stuff outright, but the really massive cultural phenomena, like Harry Potter and most of what's on TV and today's blog topic, I'd rather ignore it for a while...I don't like to be seen doing something just because the rest of the world is doing it too. The "stand out/fit in" battle I've been waging all my life shows no signs of abating any time soon.
And so Harry Potter wasn't embarked upon until the third or fourth book came out, at which point Eva brought home the first instalment (I couldn't see it, my nose was too high in the air) and started reading it, remarking after every chapter about how good a read it was. Eventually I consented to dip my toe into Potter's waters, ready to jump back if the twin stains of stain of popularity and ugh, kids' book took hold.
Both did, of course. There's a reason that series was so popular.
This happens over and over again in various media. I ignore the popular thing in hopes it will go away and leave me alone; eventually somebody breaks down my resistance; I love the popular thing to pieces; the rest of the world has moved on and I'm yesterday's man. Sigh.
TV: with one Iron-Throne shaped exception, I don't watch it. I like my entertainment more interactive, more interesting, more...internetty. Now, I recognize that TV has improved beyond measure in the last few years, and I'm certainly not suggesting I'm any better than a common couch spud just because I'm using my iThing to access Faceplace instead of gluing my eyeballs to a boob-tube. It's just a preference: I've never watched much television, not even when I was a child. It's gotta be something pretty special to demand all of my attention for a whole hour, you know?
(Yes, I watch Game of Thrones, the most popular show in HBO's history. In my defence: I read the books first. Also, Eva loves the show too--that our television tastes should overlap anywhere is something of a miracle.)
People are always and forever bringing up TV series I Simply Have To Watch and I'm sorry folks, even watching Thrones, much as I enjoy it, feels like dead time to me: I'm not learning anything. I really don't want more dead time in my life.
And videogames? There's a whole world--or rather, a galaxy stuffed to the brim and overflowing with worlds--of games I've never played. I hear about them from gaming friends and I occasionally see a commercial for one that I invariably mistake for a movie trailer. Those games amaze me and I'd like to keep them well beyond arm's length in case one of them sucks me in. I've read far too many accounts of people losing their lives to video games: if not literally, then at least the part of their lives that matter. No thanks: the Internet is addictive enough as it is.
There are a quartet of other reasons I don't play those games besides the admittedly unlikely scenario of one taking my life completely over. First of all, I'm not good at them. I don't mind being not good at things in private, or in the company of my wife and a select few others who won't laugh themselves into a hemorrhage, but I'm not into public humiliation, even if the public is virtual. Second, these games seem purposefully designed to make it impossible for me to get good at them. From the controllers, which require more eye-hand co-ordination than I'm ever going to have, to the intricate gameplay ferreted out from 400+ page manuals...ugh. Too much like work. Third: competition. I used to be a very sore loser when I was a kid. I'm no longer sore about it, because usually, nowadays, I choose not to compete. There. You win. Be happy.
And fourth: violence. Can't stand it in real life, can't stand depictions of it, don't understand why people have this deep-seated urge to kill things. I don't share that urge; I hope to Christ I never do.
Along came Candy Crush Saga.
If you haven't played it, your resistance to Things Popular is admirable and I wish I were able to match it. I held out for a while--really, I did!--but eventually the sheer number of Facebook friends I had playing the game overwhelmed me. Many of them were completely sensible and rational people who had lives. Until they didn't, and they had to ask me for one.
Fine, I'll check it out. But only for a bit.
Well over a year and 319 levels later (barely halfway, for now: they keep adding more)...
In case you're completely removed from the world of Candy Crush the way I am from, say, World of Warcraft: it's a simple match 3 game like Bejewelled or any one of a dozen older variants. You match candies, fulfill game objectives, score points, and that's it. But unlike Bejewelled and most older games in this genre, every level is different. Between the wildly varying board layouts and the different obstacles the game throws in your path, the levels sometimes seem infinite.
I don't play this game as obsessively as some. One good friend has completed the game, and keeps completing the new levels they add, as well as completing a bunch of knockoff match-three games as well just for shits and giggles. Usually he uses his iPod rather than a reasonable sized screen. I downloaded Candy Crush for my iPod, played one attempt at one level, and have never played it since. Honestly, people, how you can prefer pin pads to keyboards and itsy bitsy three inch screens to a monitor....it baffles me.
But I play a fair bit. I usually burn through five lives a day. That may or may not win me a level, at this point: some of the levels I've been stuck on have taken fifty or even a hundred attempts to beat I'm told there's one level up in the 400s somewhere that will make every bitch-level I've been stuck on so far look like...candy.
That's the fresh hell of this game: the levels DON'T get progressively more difficult. The overall trend is certainly towards the more challenging, but level 317 is not necessarily any more difficult than 316: it might be considerably easier. You'll whip off three or four levels without losing a life only to come up against some real bastard level that saps your will to live. You try and you try and you try and every once in a while the game mocks with you a "Fun-O-Meter" for you to report back as to how much fun you're not having. I've tried everything with this. I've slid the dial to "this sucks hairy rotting moose balls" thinking the game might give me some mercy (nope) and I've slid the dial all the way over to "this game is fulfilling fantasies I never knew I had" in the hopes that blatant kiss-assing might work (nope).
Back when I was more heavily addicted, I used to dream the sound of chocolate forming. It's a kind of squishy schlapuck noise that puts you in mind of popping zits (or popping your monitor one, if the chocolate just ate up something important). The game gets under your skin if you let it.
Several times I've almost given up. Once I left the game for a week (and came back and knocked off ten levels in half an hour). Now I've dialled it back to those five lives a day--if I go up a level or two, great, if not, great.
Why do I love this game so much? Because by the standards of videogames today it's an anti-game. It's supposedly competitive in that your friends' scores are shown for each level, but I don't pay attention to scores in this game unless I need a certain score to beat a level. I'm not competing against anything except the machine (and myself if I choose to replay a level, though why I'd do that I have no clue. The nasty levels, once they're gone, I never want to see them again as long as I live.)
There's no violence, beyond, well, crushing candies. The gameplay itself is as easy-to-learn as it gets: no need to go take a university-level course in what button does what and that's a Class IIIG goober, you can't move him that way.
I'm still not very good at it, though. Ultimately it doesn't matter: Candy Crush requires just as much luck as skill: some levels are 176% pure shit luck.
I have not spent a penny on "in-app" purchases to speed my progression through the levels: the day I start spending money on virtual world things is the day they wind me in my shroud. Given how much money King is raking in off this game ($633,000 a day from one platform alone as of December 2013), I'm something of a rarity.
But I have spent a great many hours of time I should have spent doing something, anything else. All for the price of an Internet connection, which I was paying anyway, so...free. Pretty good value, I'd say.
Now if you'll excuse me, there's a brand new sequel called Candy Crush SODA Saga...
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