“JEEZ, IT’S FOUR O’CLOCK ALREADY,” I said to my colleague Andrew Ferguson recently. (At four o’clock yesterday, in fact.) “What am I going to write my Casual on?” “Why don’t you write about that stupid video game you’ve wasted your whole day playing?” said Andy. “Sploodge.” He is referring to Snood. When it was installed on a computer down the hall a year ago, I made the mistake of mastering it. Today, there’s no one in the office who can touch me on it. On-screen, five varieties of clown face are randomly arranged in nine rows that hang from a kind of ceiling; the player gets to fire more clown faces at them out of a tube. Every time you cluster three similar clowns together, they evaporate. Pockets develop, and by banking the little clownie-things through them, you can cause great masses to calve off with a satisfying krzzzh! It’s to this technique that I owe my high score of 44,545. If there’s anyone in the entire WEEKLY STANDARD readership who’s matched it—and I rather suspect there is not—I’d love to hear from him. I’d also love to hear from anyone who can tell me how to stop. Because Snood is starting to eat up whole afternoons. The thing fascinates me. It tantalizes me. I begin to understand that relative of James Thurber’s who would tinker with a broken piece of machinery for hours, before shouting, “Will somebody please take this goddamn thing away from me!” I also begin to understand for the first time what an addiction is. It’s a desperate need to simplify. An addiction is a gravitation towards anything that plausibly mimics life while being less complicated than life. I used to laugh at those who said you could be addicted to an activity, like gambling or shopping. Not anymore! I know what a gambling addict is. He’s someone who—rather than think about the mortgage, how big a raise he’ll get next year, what the old lady spends on groceries, what’s happening to the stock market, and whether to consolidate his debt—decides to roll a pair of dice, which is a way of addressing exactly the same problems. (Not the best way, of course, but certainly the simplest.) Same here. Rather than navigate my way through a complex idea by making twenty phone calls and outlining and writing ten paragraphs, I navigate my way through a complex make-believe landscape by pressing a button and watching clown faces tumble from the ceiling. What a con. What a waste. What an empty, sterile, deathly experience compulsion is. You know those hayseed Southern Methodists who evoke snickers in every urbane novelist of the last two hundred years for saying things like, “Obadiah! A deck o’ cards on the table is like ta settin’ a place at dinner for the divil!”? Well, they’re right. And boy are we legion. The other day I flew home from Europe on Virgin Atlantic airlines. It was just terrible—a full plane with seats that would be real comfortable if you were a jockey or a member of the Romanian gymnastics team, or if you played a member of the Lollypop Guild in The Wizard of Oz, but otherwise not. I wouldn’t wish that airline on cattle. So how come everyone I’ve ever met has recommended Virgin as a particularly comfortable airline to fly? Because Virgin has taken the two great narcotic instruments for coping with modern discomfort—the television and the refrigerator—and put them to maximum use. The seats may be so close together that you can’t even open a laptop, let alone use one—but there, lowering five inches in front of your cross-eyed face, is a TV screen which shows not just two movies but all the brain-numbing junk that the most lacking-in-inner-resources adolescent could desire. As for the food, it seems an unnecessary expense to have stewardesses distribute it. It would probably be more efficient to fire it at the passengers with a hose. I counted four meals—not snacks, meals—in the course of our seven-hour flight, and they were all sad goody-meals, the kind of thing bulimics eat standing up at 3 o’clock in the morning with the only light in the otherwise dark kitchen coming from the gaping refrigerator door. At one point the guy next to me had on his tray a chocolate tart, a scone with clotted cream, Coca-Cola, beer, lumpy yogurt, some kind of cheezy-cheez snax, and a piece of cake. Late in the flight, I noticed that there was a unison, a kind of synchronized-swimming aspect, to the way the passengers were shoveling the dainties into their mouths. A few passengers, however, about a quarter of those on board, were sitting calmly. Well, at least there are a few people on this flight, I thought, who aren’t appetite-driven automatons. Then I saw one of them go into a momentary agitation, a paroxysm. I looked over and saw him clutching his Game Boy in both hands; on his screen little clownie-looking things were tumbling off the ceiling.
