I deserved it

Kismet. Destiny. Inescapable fate, whether it's the thread of aViking's life as spun by the blind Norns, the store of a man's days as set down in the Book of Life... or the operational lifespan of a piece of electronics as determined by its warranty period. Hidden actuaries project these things out, and their voodoo math makes reality: a warranty is a death-spell, a terminator gene like the time-bomb killswitch coded into Blade Runner replicants...

... except, unlike Rutger Hauer, my iBook didn't get to have a dove flutter heavy-handedly skyward as it took its fatal plunge to the tile floor, less than a week after its AppleCare period elapsed. It's time was up; the power of warranty expiration basically shoved it out of my hands and into eternity.

And so. You know what happens now. Out of retirement, out of necessity, comes the old war-horse, the beaten-down ThinkPad that'd been put out to pasture (i.e. coffined in a banker's box and shoved in a closet) so many years ago. You pick it up, and... you know the feeling of exquiste delicacy you get when you pick up a really old cat? That's what it's like to handle my laptop.

A creaking, crashy bit-rotten install of goddamn Windows ME, the system restore discs long since lost in a seires of moves; no wi-fi capacity; a single functional i/o port (USB) and an unhinged monitor; some kind of deep, deep trouble that makes opening any web browser impossible so I have to type URLs directly into the address bar of an empty folder, force the desktop itself out onto a Web that's ten years beyond its comprehension... every minor hang, hiccup or crashlet requiring rebooting.

You've got to be a silver-lining type in these situations, channel a little Pollyanna for the sake of your own sanity. A half-dead, unreliable, breeze-fragile laptop from the Clinton years? Well, its lack of now-basic functionality will actually enhance my productivity! All my online time-wasters are dead to me -- even a whiff of an embedded YouTube video sends it to crashland, only the cleanest, simplest of sites come close to functioning properly,and the six-versions-ago Flash player eliminates the possibility of playing any of the browser games that've been eating up five or so hours out of evey day. The only thing on this machine that actually works realiably is WordPad, the stripped-down text editing program. There's nothing to do here but write, right?

You'd think so. But the truly dedicated -- maybe pathological? -- procrastinator, work-shirker and gaming addict will always find a way. And so, a way was found.

One of the cool/interesting things about pulling a years-ago machine out of closetbound dotage is that, if you're like me and didn't do any housekeeping before shoving it into the darkness, is that it's kind of like a time capsule. There's the last things you were working on, the last photos you uploaded, the last sites you visited. Memories, nostalgia... maybe a little bit of heartbreak. In my case, just past the old reviews (I'd forgotten how much I hated the Minority Report game) and sunny pics of distant girlfriends was an old, familiar doom: when last I used this machine, I still hadn't worn away the novelty of NES emulation.

So, there was the emulator -- NESter.exe, public beta 2, (c)2000 -- but... where were the ROMs? For some reason -- maybe in the poorly-thought-out disc-space-clearing frenzy that originally destroyed my web-browsing capacity -- I'd ditched my library of ripped Nintendo classics, the Bionic Commandos and Little Nemo the Dream Masters, and left myself with exactly two titles: Snake, Rattle and Roll and Phantom Fighter.

Now, these are both more-or-less terrible games. Phantom Fighter is a frustrating, repetetive, side-scrolling kung-fu adventure that's only interesting for its weird ancient-Chinese-vampire-hunter premise; Snake, Rattle and Roll is a mechanically interesting isometric action game rendered nearly unplayable by some of the most aggressively, purposely, sadistically aggravating music I've ever heard. But I took what getaway I could get: midnight of my first day of enforced "nothing to do but write" found me with my dust-crusted old gamepad in hand, grimly kicking the digital shit out of vampire after pink, hopping vampire.

Destiny... kismet. There are some things that simply must be; they're part of the Math of the Universe. A service plan expires, and a laptop must die. His laptop dead, the true vidiot (this term must make a comeback!) finds a way, any way, to snatch empty entertainment from the jaws of productivity.

The circle will not be broken.

Food, water and medicine as treasure

No game has ever made me this thirsty.

Wandering around the earthquake-shattered ruins of Stiver Island, shouting into the evacuated silence for help that never shouts back, dodging falling rubble knocked loose by aftershocks, one thought lies above and around everything else: water. Dripping taps, stagnant pools on cracked asphalt, bottles forgotten in ransacked convenience stores… any and all nontoxic moisture is a treasure to be seized, hoarded, dripped as sparingly as possible down my parched throat.

Yeah, Disaster Report, the PS2 quake-survivor adventure from out of '02 – another happy recovery in this, the New Golden Age of bargain-bin diving. All the Wiitards and XBoxers and… and PlayStation 3 Owners… have been dumping the last-gen B-listers from their collections for credit towards the latest and greatest, and the used-game stockpiles overflow with quality titles at everything-must-go prices. There’s a lot of forgettable crap – twenty copies of Mace Griffin, anyone? – but lots of gold, too. Thus I rebuild my library of swapped-away favorites. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be Monster Rancher 2, or Suikoden. Or maybe… Bushido Blade? Too much to hope for.

Anyway, Disaster Report. Developer Irem took the survival-adventure genre and removed the zombies, creating a man-against-environment game that presents some ye-olde-fashioned puzzle solving (i.e. MacGyvering) in a disturbing setting in which the eerie silence of the deserted city is punctuated by moments of rumbling terror – collapsing walls, exploding tankers, and lots of terrifying dangles. Sprinkle it with an unfolding conspiracy backstory, and you’ve got some pretty unique gaming.

It took a non-gamer, though, to point out one disturbing aspect of this thirsty crawl through virtual rubble: is Disaster Report a post-catastrophe training simulator? The idea that videogames are, either by conspiracy or through unconscious cultural genius, conditioning gamers for real-world scenarios is as old as games themselves. Remember the schoolyard rumour about Zaxxon and/or Gorf and/or any other game with a flightstick-style controller? That there was a secret direct line to the Air Force coming out of every cabinet, and that high-scoring players would be visited by men in uniforms and recruited to do battle with Commie air aces when the shit came down? That’s some powerful terror/fantasy, right there; ever 80s arcade dweeb dreamed/nightmared The Last Starfighter.

There’s no doubt games can be powerful trainers and conditioning tools; anybody who’s logged enough time on any game knows how in-game reflexes creep into daily psychology. A Tetris juicer friend of mine describes the sensation of seeing all geometric shapes – buildings, cars, people – as pieces of a packing puzzle to be solved; when I was playing Duke Nuke’m heavy there for a while, I couldn’t see a ventilation grille without twitching to kick it in and crawl through. That the US Army uses videogames for recruitment and subsequent training is no big news – multiplayer squad simulators are an essential part of readying modern gunts for combat.

So. If Zaxxon was getting getting us ready to shoot down Russian MiGs and Tu-160s, and first-person shooters are cutting months off basic combat training, what does that say about Disaster Report? With global warming a surefire reality, was a relatively obscure Japanese game publisher prepping us for the war against – or, more accurately, the desperate holding action in the face of – nature itself?

Well, let’s not get carried away. For one thing, though the game’s environment is supposed to be a disaster area, it hardly corresponds to what anyone could expect in a real catastrophe zone. Stiver Island is crumbling, but it’s mostly clean and seems more-or-less unlooted, and it's totally emptied of people – the fact the evacuation was so near-perfect actually makes the fact your dude got left behind rather crazy-improbable. Think of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina: the chaos, the confusion, mad looting, the near-total unreliability of official authority, the health crisis, the formation of gangs and mobs, the hellhole of the Superdome. In that context, the only thing Disaster Report really simulates is the critical importance of water supplies… and, depending on who you believe, the presence of an amoral conspiracy of greedheads at the top of the blame ladder.

The more of I think of Katrina/New Orleans as a sim scenario, though… Jesus, that would make for some intense play! A massively multiplayer post-catastrophe urban survival game? Survivors gathering into clans for protection or raiding… guns and ammo being coveted as magic weapons… food, water and medicine as treasure… inter- (and intra-) gang politics and warfare… unpredictable cops and militias… fear upon fear... jeez.

Now, there’s a game that could have real-world training value, given enough accuracy in its modelling of civil-defense and survival techniques. Even if it gathered only a few dozens of thousands of players (half-decent numbers for a MMOG that’s not World of Warcraft) that’s a few thousand more citizens with serious VR training in coping with a massive disaster scenario – and we’re going to need every one of them, sooner rather than later.