I play games with street lamps

24 July 2000
James plays games.

I play games with street lamps. Is this because I am Grorg, mighty ancient Giant, finally emerged from my hidden magic Cave in the Andes, eon-dormant until awakened by cosmic alignment, and there is nothing I like more than trampling some Scandinavian hamlets, and plucking the edge of a bahn or two to play nocturnal pick-up-sticks at the summit of Table Mountain?

No, it is not. The lamp game can only be while lying supine on the back seat of a moving car at night.

The game is played thus, and it is a very good game. Each street light is an enemy, and you are the hyper-turbo laser gunner. Specific raindrops on the window (it also must have recently rained in order to play) form your cross-hairs. Therefore, you aim by writhing around until you align your cross hairs with the target instantaneously. You must destroy each enemy that passes (by consciously making some form of sudden physical movement) in order to ensure that your ship survives and the child-queen is safely delivered, and the accession ensured. If five get past your vigilant watch, you die a death of instant vaporisation as the hull of your turret-pod is breached, and every cell of your body instantly evaporates due to the immediate pressure release. You may be glorious, or gaseous.

This is a good game, because it makes sense. If you do not play the game, and play it well, it is the end of civilisation as you know it, and the evil tyrant dynasty will begin their reign. It is not real, of course, but that is immaterial. It makes sense. Games are about good and evil. Game is soft war. While you (probably) survive at the end of the game, to have won is a victory for justice, and a future of peace and harmony for your people is ensured.

To lose is to have bowed to the powers of Lucifer to pillage the smouldering villages of your vanquished civilisation to find any remaining impressionable virgins to take back to their stinking capital and enjoy during their festering, drunken sinful celebrations of ill-gotten victory. But such are the spoils of war.

To make a game 'good' is to make it feel that it is important to win. Physical sports do this the best. Tennis is a joust. Two face each other alone - only their skill and the gods of fate stand between victory and honour, and defeat and disgrace.

Football is a curious mixture between a Roman colosseum, as your team of honest righteous slaves take on the pack of hungry stupid beasts with large teeth, and a medieval battle ground, where archers send volleys forward, pikemen form supposedly impenetrable lines, and the swift cavalry dash up the flanks in the vain hope of cutting across the opposition for victory. The crowd chants on their team, feeling like they are the reinforcements on the hill, waiting for the order to charge in and seal victory. Football is unnaturally fair - why have eleven men each, when you could have eleven thousand? Now that would be a game.

Computer games are the most obvious pretender to the throne of true war. They have to make up their own little fantasy of importance, and so are the very good games. From the almost sexual frisson as the Space Invaders drop zig-zag bombs onto your five meagre defences, to the long-term planning and plotting required for Civ II, all computer games create some sort of imaginary battle between good and evil, where you must pit your wits against adversity in order to gain some full-motion-video giving you the satisfaction of knowing you have saved the day.

Some games take a while to understand why they are 'good'. One of these is golf. I don't get golf, and so it is a bad, stupid, waste of space and excuse for dumb clothes. And is boring on TV. This is because for me it is pure frivolity - no reference to any sort of primal need for victory and survival, apart of course from the obvious progenitive references of trying to get your ball in the far-away hole with your big stick.

But I do get snooker. The dark rooms in which it is played, the silent deliberation of the mutual enemies, snooker is the game of the pure strategist. Always thinking several moves in advance, a snooker player uses Machiavellian cunning coupled with pin-point physical skill to vanquish his opponent. A snooker game is not a battle (like most other games) but a full scale war, played over many battles, horns locked in the ultimate tense conflict.

But face it, not as good as Giant pick-up-sticks. If you're an enormous neolithic one-eyed palindrome. Did I not mention that Grorg is also a cyclops? He is.