I prefer not to tell my editors – including ComicMix’s own Mike Gold – how I spend my workday. They’re generally happier thinking my nose is always to the grindstone but, as the ever delightful Elayne Riggs has pointed out in her column this week, you can’t be writing 24/7 and that, sometimes, playing a video game helps clear and even focus the mind.

My Mary recently turned me on to a web-based game called Boomshine and I play it usually once a day. It’s a simple game: on the screen bounce a number of colored dots, like the ball in the old Pong game. They randomly float around, bounce off the borders, come back. There are twelve levels in the game and the number of dots bouncing around vary from five in the first level to sixty in the last one.

At each level, you can click only once and this creates an explosion – a boom, a circle of light. Boomshine. Any dot hitting that circle also becomes a circle of light and so on, often in a chain reaction fashion. You have a goal pre-set for you at each level of how many dots you must change, from one at level one to fifty-five at level twelve, before you can go on to the next level or complete the game. The goal is the minimum amount of dots that must change; you actually want as many changed as you can get to increase your final score. Your final score determines where – and if – you place on the list of daily/weekly/monthly high scores.

Music accompanies all this. There’s a vaguely New Age piano playing under the game or you can click the speaker icon at the start of the game and a single random piano note plays every time a dot changes, which is what I prefer.

The motion and speed of the colored dots are random and the “explosions” where they change to circles of light appear to affect this. It’s not really predictable and, outside of when and where you place your initial explosion, you have no control on what happens next. It just happens.

Like life.

I’ve found myself doing a form of meditation while playing Boomshine. I don’t do well with meditations that ask me to sit quietly and let my mind go blank and just open myself to the Universe. My mind has to be tricked. It has to think I’m doing something. There’s a whole series of meditations that are like that; I know them as “moving meditations.” My church has a labyrinth pattern where you walk a pattern in to the center and then out; the repetitive act of walking as I follow the pattern frees my mind. Same thing happens when I follow my walk around the block – at some point, my monkey brain shuts off and allows other thoughts to come. I’ve sorted out plots this way sometimes. Almost any repetitive act will do that.

As I’ve played Boomshine recently, some observations – perhaps insights – occurred to me.

You can try to plan when and where is the best spot to make the first “boom,” but the little dots don’t always do what you expect them to do. They slow down; the boom seems to send them away; they skirt the edge of the circle of light without actually touching it, without transforming, and escape. Control is an illusion. That thought touched another in my mind and – boom – another little explosion. That’s Iraq. Those who brought us into the situation thought they had it under control; they had a clear vision of how things were going to be. They still think they can make it what they will. However, there are all kinds of random elements at work and there is no control over those elements.

(more…)