Games People Play

We all have our little games, don’t we? Even as adults we still play tag, kick the can, and hide and seek. Tell me if I am wrong, but my guess is that you have played at least one of the above recently. As an adult, maybe you have played the game with different rules, but the same principles apply. As a blogger I like to check my stats and one of the most visited posts I have is the one about games. Thanks Alex. I bet you get a lot of hits on that as well. So what is this fascination with games? There are so many of them to keep us occupied. Computer games, video games, board games, card games, sports games, drinking games, mind games, sex games, and party games like plain old “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.” I bet you have tried each and every one of these games at least once. Some of you might have even been addicted to some of them.

We play games to amuse ourselves and to escape sometimes. Sometimes games can even be a mind drug. Oh yes they can. I have seen it first hand when “World of War craft” came out. There is even an addiction center in Switzerland for that game. Across the street I have a neighbor who plays games 24 hours a day. I know because I do not sleep well and his computer is always on. I have children and friends who hop up and down whenever a new computer game comes out. They spend hours there shooting and going through mazes that do not really exist. As if life was not hard enough already we search for a way to make it harder, or should I say, a way to make it more creative, a safe place to fight our demons and escape.

You might ask why I am bringing this all up now. Yesterday a well-educated and intelligent man who had everything going for him named Anders Brevik was institutionalized to a mental facility. You might ask who he is. He is the man responsible for killing over 70 people in Norway this past summer, many of them children. He does not have to go to jail; you see he lived in another world so he was not responsible for his actions. Just like in Monopoly he got a "get out of jail" card. He lived in the world of war craft where it was OK to shoot and kill your enemy. He lived in a game and it made him insane so now he gets to drink milk and eat cookies. He was mentally abused by his computer the poor guy. Yes, the games people play. What  ever happened to “Pin the tail on the donkey?”