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+jj: Dear Doctor, This is our fourth session and I am still excited and confused, I don't know how to begin. You asked me what I do in between my desperate quests through computer networks for my love NN who has disappeared - we have discussed that enough - and hopeless attempts to go back to the picture stand. In between, I play Tetris. Tetris is a computer game invented by an Alexei Paszitnov, a Russian scientist, and some people say it was his concealed intention to take over the brains of the Western world and paralyze them, and I believe it. The rules of the game are simple and few. You have to fill a row with objects, different kinds of squares that fall at random to the bottom of the screen. Have you completed a row? It then disappears and credits the player with points, and if not - the cubes pile up, row on row, until you reach the top, and that's the end. But why am I telling you all this? It's also like the question that comes up in writing, how much of it can be filled up with technical details, but I feel this is the interesting part. It's a simple, clean game. I do enjoy solo games and games for couples and I'm crazy about riddles and conundrums, but I've never before been so drawn by other computer games, even when they first appeared and became a general fad. To me quest games always seemed less fascinating than life itself and simulations of aircraft and cars always seemed unreal. I did not like the violent games - I didn't go for Ninjas and Star Wars or even PacMan. This game, Tetris, is so special and how I love to look at the world's order through it and its dynamics. It demands concentration and coordination, gives one a feeling of order, of things falling into their correct places. The player has to plan and make rapid decisions, under the pressure of the time that is set by the game level at which he has opted to begin and this in itself is an interesting point in comparison with manual games, and not just games, with them one never has exclusive control over the speed. And nevertheless, there is such an enormous, genuine feeling that there are no limits to success. The better I am at the game, the longer it lasts and the more points I gain. Only the sky, and that's a double entendre, is the limit. You could say I've become addicted to that game. Because through it I experience all those symptoms usually attributed to an addiction. In free moments or times I free specially, I avidly wrap myself around the computer and go on playing, on and on, until my fingers stiffen and my head spins. And I can't stop, to the point where I'm afraid that even if the wails of a siren were to rend the air, and even if my house were to be shelled, I would still be stuck to the keyboard, quite unable to break away from it. So my honor is split in two, playing the game of masters and servants with itself, sometimes the master orders his slave to stop playing and she, disobedient, carries on doing what she wants, sometimes he will order his handmaid to play on and on and she lowers her tortured gaze and plays unwillingly, the master will always win, and in any event I carry on as though hypnotized. You might think there is also something sexual in fitting in the cubes, with my fingers dancing like the Spanish legs of a fiery Flamenco dancer. Sometimes during the day when I'm busy with more existential things, humdrum matters, I'm already fantasizing and planning and longing for the moment when I can get down to the game, and if anything stops me playing - I am furious, my fingers itch, my pupils race around and my whole body is restless. By day and by night I dream a great deal, of cubes that slowly pile up into all sorts of shapes, marvelously arranged on artistic and pastel colored screens.
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The Dod
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