A Nice Game Of 'Flop & Drop'

The XBox is back. It was gone for a really long time. It got the dreaded 'ring of fire', a red light around the 'On' button that means Screw 'Off'. And, like an abusive parent, I took the lifetime of a sea tortoise to get around to sending for a new one while my children suffered. If it had been a choice between shelter and the xBox, it would've been no contest in their minds. Needless to say, they were profoundly disgruntled with my failure as a father to provide them with the necessities of life. They came within a whisker of turning me in for child neglect.

It finally came, though. You have to send the old broken one away and the Microsoft people send you a new one. It was delivered by Purolator, however, and so therefore it was ages before it got here. (PoorLater, I call them. Motto: Owing To Our Poor Service, You'll Get It Later.) It would've been here quicker if it had been delivered by the Pony Freakin' Express. I told them this, in one of my many 'discussions' with the so-called 'solution specialist', a quaint euphemism for 'problem maker', in which I endeavoured mightily to communicate the concept that they needed to bring the item to where I actually was, rather than to where I wasn't, a remarkable five consecutive times. "After all," I said at one point, "I don't live in Zimbabwe. And if there were a carrier pigeon large enough to carry an xBox, it would've brought it to Zimbabwe by now." So they marked the box 'Boot Hard And Submerge In Water'. (I actually wrote this on the box when it arrived and then showed it to my children. They were appropriately amused. They're the best audience ever.)

So now they can play Call Of Duty again, a war game in which the object is to kill and not be killed. Basic though that sounds, I cannot manage either of these goals. When I play with my boys, who are ten and eleven, I can neither shoot their screen characters nor prevent them from filling me with lead the instant I reincarnate from the fusillade that just felled me. It's so discouraging. That's why the game, when I play it, has come to be known in our household as Flop & Drop. (I don't think children should be allowed to be so sarcastic.) "Wanna play Flop & Drop, Dad?" they gleefully ask. They love it. I may have had them, but they own me.

The game looks like fun. It's photo-realistic, like operating a movie, except that in the movies, the hero doesn't croak the nano-second the film begins. That's all I do is die. There are many skills to master, like running and jumping and ducking and aiming and shooting and reloading and calling in air strikes, but all I've been able to master so far is the ability to expire with ever-greater speed. No matter where I hide, there they are, shooting me. If I run, they shoot me on the move. If I hide in the long grass, they come creeping up and shoot me. If I get on a bus and go to an entire different city, the second I get off, I'm shot. And then they cackle sadistically and say things like, "Nice try, Dad," which, of course, means, "You suck, Dad," but I always say thanks.

My guy automatically is reborn. And is automatically shot again. That's why they're called automatic weapons.

It's gotten so bad that the children have taken to making up new rules to make the game more competitive. "How about this time, Cole, you defend Dad while I try to kill him?" suggests Keith. Or, "Dad, why don't you have a rocket launcher and we'll have a kleenex?" Or, "Okay, new rule, Dad. We can't move or shoot and you can have a tank, okay?" But it's no use. Even if we amended the game so that the object were to stroll around the battlefield sight-seeing, I would immediately step on a landmine and be blown to smithereens. (Sometimes the kids shoot me up so thoroughly that it isn't even plural. I'm blown to a single smithereen.)

So technological entertainment marvel that video games in our modern age clearly are, they're also a sinister means by which children confirm that they are, in fact, toweringly superior to adults. When they were little, I was an all-knowing, heroically cool guy to them. Now, in their eyes, I'm a profoundly retarded, big, sad sack of uselessness.

When I was young, I played with a stick. And I was happier, let me tell you.