Slopping the digital hogs

The entire game looks like a children’s book, something on the order of “Farmer Brown Buys a Cow.” I sneered at the game and said that if it had any sexual content it would be pornographic, because it certainly didn’t have any redeeming social value. But the lady showed me where, according to Facebook, which sponsors the game, there were 53 million registered users.

I wrote to one of my sons, in a fatherly, fuddy-duddy way, complaining about such time-wasters and he wrote back and said that many people at his office play FarmVille, but that he, at least, didn’t. The odds are, gentle reader, that you yourself might be a member of the FarmVille community.

And then, two days later, I saw a Wall Street Journal article about what are called “casual games.” The Journal article featured an Apple iPhone game called Angry Birds, the point of which is to load a bird into a slingshot and shoot it at a group of pigs. If you hit all the pigs you get a round of applause and advance to the next level. If you miss, the pigs grunt and snort at you in derision. According to the article over 12 million copies of this game have been sold, at ninety-nine cents each.

Of course, there are sociologists who study computer game-playing, and some of them have concluded that it is beneficial. It relieves you from the stress of day-to-day living. Game players have lower heart rates and blood pressure than non-game players. Well, yeah: anyone would be more relaxed and less tense with their brain turned off than when doing anything productive. Someone who is stone drunk has a low heart rate and is relaxed.

Here we are: a global community. The entire world is a competitive environment. American workers are competing with the Chinese and Germans. And how do we spend our time? We slop the digital hogs and try to kill them with missile birds. It is a sobering thought that FarmVille and Angry Bird players help select the president of the United States. But then, too, that explains a lot.

I’m not anti-entertainment. After all, as I said, my wife and I square dance regularly. And I don’t want to justify square dancing because it is healthy exercise or promotes sociability, although it does those things. But surely you can find some kind of entertainment, even a computer game that has come kind of minimal benefit to it. Do you remember Pong and Pac-Man? Now, those were mind-improving exercises!

Willis Cook is a retired electrical engineer who was born in New Orleans and grew up in the Mississippi Delta. He lives in Franklin County.