BRADBERRY: Bejeweled, bothered and bewildered

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Columnist Bill Bradberry

February 21, 2012

By Bill Bradberry Niagara Gazette The Niagara Gazette Tue Feb 21, 2012, 08:18 PM EST

Column by Bill Bradberry — I thought at first that she could not hear me, so I called out her name again, this time a little firmer, a little louder. No answer. I tried again more slowly, clearly pronouncing every letter singularly including her middle name the way my mother did when she was upset with me and really wanted to get my attention without shouting; still nothing.

Feeling a bit ignored but not yet perturbed, I struggled my way over in her general direction, trying to get a little closer hoping that this time I’d catch her attention, but nothing. She neither heard nor saw me — she was completely and totally lost in another world, a cyber world where sight, sound and apparently all of her senses had been absolutely seized, her entire being overtaken by forces I had not heretofore realized were so powerful, so unimaginably all consuming.

She could not even smell the still fresh onions and garlic I had consumed minutes before, and I knew that I had eaten enough of both to ward off any vampires who might be lurking anywhere within 10 miles of the place, but she did not notice me at all until I touched her, and even then she never took her eyes off the computer screen in front of her; she just nodded her head to let me know that she knew I was there.

I shook my head to let her know it was nothing important, I just wanted to know if she had seen or heard what I had just witnessed on the television screen. I had been watching the evening news. It’s political season again and the candidates are saying some pretty disturbing things this time. I wanted to know what she thought about it.

But we did not get into it at that moment.

I went back to my screen and she to hers, but I was not really paying much attention to the television any more, not at that moment anyway, instead, my thoughts turned to what had just happened and I wondered: which screen matters more, or for that matter, does either really matter at all?

I learned later that she had been absorbed in a game called Bejeweled. Developed and published by a company I had never heard of called PopCap Games, Bejeweled was, according to Wikipedia developed for browsers in 2001, selling more than 75 million copies and downloaded more than 500 million times.

How could something that HUGE have gotten past me all these years?

I’m no gamer, and as far as I know, she is not really into computer games big time either, but this one apparently has broad appeal as do many others like something called Angry Birds that have popped up in recent years, landing on smart phones all over the world.

Angry Birds? Yep!

Anyway, as I was later taught, the objective of Bejeweled is to, “swap one gem with an adjacent gem to form a horizontal or vertical chain of three or more gems.”

Simple enough, right?

Apparently not, this game keeps her and millions of others very intensely busy for hours on end just in the most unlikely hopes that they can eventually win enough bonus points to achieve higher levels of play and, I guess, keep on playing!

I am certain that I’ll never convince her or any one else that what is happening on my screen is any more relevant, interesting or important as what is on hers, but since I do I have some time on my hands these days I’m going to try to learn what is so dad gum bedazzling about Bejeweled, what the Angry Birds are so angry about, and hopefully in the meantime, I’ll try to gain a better understanding of why our national political campaigns have so ridiculously personal and outrageously unattractive, and in the process, driving otherwise interested participants completely out of the game.

Maybe the objective of politics should be the same as it is in Bejeweled: “to form a horizontal or vertical chain of three or more gems.”

Hmm ...

Contact Bill at: bill.bradberry@yahoo.com

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