GoRK's Journal: Videogame Vertigo

I have played videogames since I was a little kid. My folks had gotten a ColecoVision as an upgrade to their aging pong machine about the same time I could start to play some of the games, and so it began. I have owned a lot of the console systems since then and played a good number of computer games. I'm good at a lot of games and bad at others, though I haven't ever really played a game I couldn't finish if I really wanted to. I was playing a new game the other day when I realized that there are a lot of games that I really hate for one very strange reason: You can die by falling into infinite nothingness.

In real life, I'm not scared of heights. I can lean through the bars on top of the Empire State Building and look straight down. In video games, I can handle falling off of a building. I can handle falling into molten lava. I can handle climbing all the way to the top of some insurmountable peak and falling off just to do it all again. But I simply hate falling into infinite nothingness in a video game. It irks me to no end. I clamp up in Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine whenever I have to play one of those levels where you have to balance on narrow beams while you hop from block to dissolving block. I get sweaty hands so bad when playing Super Monkey Ball Jr. that I have to keep pausing it and drying my hands and the GameBoy.

Maybe the game companies could put some sort of option to add a floor in any game where it is possible die by falling into some infinite void. Instead of falling into a void, you would fall a short distance into a spike pit where you would be impaled instead. That would be better for people like me. Call it "Videogame Vertigo" if you want. I have it, and the current rash of 3D games give me the creeps. Won't someone put some warning labels on these packages?

Videogames, Signatures

[saunder3]

I do not play videogames regularly, so I cannot say anything about your vertigo feeling.

Btw, could you explain your signature?

Re:Videogames, Signatures

[GoRK]

The sig is the EICAR Standard Antivirus Test File [eicar.org]. Most antivirus applications should detect it as a virus, though it is harmless and created only to test AV applications. A few people have emailed me about it, too.

My idea was to put it in my slashdot sig and thus, it would get into many people's browser cache and firewall systems, throwing up all kinds of virus alarms and whatnot. Sadly, my prank was unable to be realized because slashdot automatically inserts a space in a long string, and antivirus progr