On Context

This is quite possibly the silliest game ever. It's a little flash game where the words "candidate01" through "candidate05" come floating out from the center. The player controls a crosshairs and must locate and click on as many candidate02's as he can in one minute. The best I've ever done is 24 zaps in the minute. One person online claims to have gotten over 100, but I think he's lying as I don't see how that's possible given the speed of the words and the number that pop out in a minute.

Reason dictates that I should play this for about five minutes and be done with it forever, yet I keep going back to it. Why? Because I want to prevent an election from being rigged.

You see, this little game is part of an alternate reality game surrounding the Heroes TV show. The show hasn't been on TV for over a month, but the internet has been alive with a conspiracy. One of the heroes is running for congress, and we've (that is, those of us dealing with the ARG) found out that the villain has rigged this election. Everytime we zap one of those candidate02's, we're getting rid of a fake vote. If everyone manages to zap enough (and we have no idea how many are enough) then we will change the outcome of the election.

So I click and click, and after every session, I enter my email so I'll get credit for the 20 or so votes that I've zapped. I want to change the world. I want to be a hero. In the larger context, zapping those votes means I can.

On the other hand, I worry. There's no proof that I'm actually getting rid of bad votes. I could be helping rig the election. I don't zap votes for "Petrelli," I zap "candidate02." Who is he? I don't know. So while I've been told that I'm fighting for the good guys, there are too many layers of abstraction for me to be sure.

This game is remarkably similar to one of the first videogames ever invented for the home TV. On Ralph Baer's brown box, you could set up a game where one player controlled a red box, and the other player controlled a white box. The white player chased the red player around (using early joysticks) and tried to catch him. The game was over when you got caught, then you would switch.

35 years later we're still playing the same game.