On philistines and having a say in the games they play

EVEN THIS STARCRAFT II MEME IS BORINGZZZZZ. (Actually, it's pretty neat. Click for tee.)

My roommate lives in a dull, colorless universe, and I’m making it my problem.

No, let’s not talk about my roommate. But really, let’s.

He’s as devout a videogame enthusiast as I am — hour for hour, he probably plays more than I do — and he’s been my best friend for 15 years. I saved his life once (short story: narrowly averted aquatic disaster), which is why I’m chalking up my present irritation to straight-up beneficence.

Since he moved back to Pennsylvania in 2010, following a two-year Peace Corps assignment in Kyrgyzstan, he’s spent his itinerant hours battling online randos in STARCRAFT II. I tore through that game’s single-player campaign for review two summers ago and shelved it almost immediately, terrified of the Internet tacticians who had been prowling the battlegrounds of the first STARCRAFT since 1998.

From a bird’s-eye view, I get the attraction. Blizzard’s creatures are brimming over with personality and strategic potential, begging to be mixed and matched, practically (and often literally) salivating at the prospect of running through their animation routines in pitched multiplayer battles. For a person like my roommate, who grew up fascinated by World War II weaponry and military strategy, or for the hyper-competitive economist who wants to wring every proton of value from his or her purchase, the appeal is clear. These games are crafted with care and built to last.

But what about the rest of us? The weak, the downtrodden and, most pitiable of all, the people who cohabitate with these monsters?

I’ve spent quite enough column inches trying to rationalize my spending instincts with all of you, and I won’t dwell on them unduly today. Suffice it to say, a game doesn’t need to promise much to command my dollar. Heck, a cookie doesn’t need to promise much. I paid a buck for five minutes of jukebox dominance Monday night, and I considered it a valuable investment opportunity because I got to punish a certain West York bar with a Queen song that wasn’t “Fat Bottomed Girls.”

I’m drawn moth-like to new experiences and sensations, and videogames, with their high-resolution skyboxes and frequently impossible topography and careless disregard for Newtonian physics, offer those in their most digestible, addictive form. Some argue that they stunt imagination — that, by showing you everything you need to see, they aren’t engaging cognition centers in your brain the way a book does — but there’s something unifying and indisputably democratic about playing in another person’s sandbox.

Some people can get by on only a few very well-stocked, thoughtfully appointed sandboxes. I need an entire city block of them, and I need game developers — the public works department in this tortured metaphor — to replace the sand weekly.

What’s to be done about the divide, aside from more first-world consternation? I think about my friend’s STARCRAFT fixation with the same seething, barely concealed contempt I usually save for football dorks, but I know the rage is useless and irrational.

And sometimes hypocritical. There comes every so often a game that demands skill and compels me for more than a few hours — I remain absolutely enchanted by last week’s DUSTFORCE, a hybrid racer and platformer which actually insists you perfect its easy levels before it unlocks substantially more difficult ones.

People like what people like. I understand this. But just as an art history major lobbied me (successfully, it should be said) to take a second look at Rothko, I want my roommate — nay, I want everybody — to play DUSTFORCE. And OKAMI. And PERSONA 4 and BULLY and GOD HAND.

There’s a thin line between advocacy and proselytism. I count a few Ron Paul supporters among my friends, so I know this as well as anybody. But at the end of the day, friends don’t let friends play STARCRAFT II forever.