I recently faced an incredibly minor ‘problem’. Having bought Nintendo’s new Pokémon Pokopia videogame for the company’s Switch 2 console a few months back, I had to temporarily abandon it due to being busy with other things (e.g. playing Vampire Crawlers instead). When booting the software up again, I found I had forgotten precisely what the controls were. So I messed around with it for a bit, and then I remembered. But, rather than fiddling with my joypad for five minutes, should I have run straight off to see a psychiatrist?
It turns out that this month (like every other month) is Mental Health Month, a fact I only became aware of from the unexpected source of a videogame news and reviews website named Nintendo Life. Here, to tie in with the festival of fashionable dysfunction, appeared a feature called ‘Reviving Kanto – My Mental Health Journey Through Pokémon Pokopia’, which was every bit as fatuous as it sounds. Written by an American documentary film-maker Tim Rattray, whose surname resembles a Pokémon in and of itself, Tim claimed the game had saved him from spiralling into clinical depression.
As the game is set in a parched and ruined world named Kanto that the player must bring life back to, Rattray spied parallels between how playing it supposedly restored his own barren soul to full strength. When, at the start of the game, the player finds a small blue turtle called Squirtle lying half-dead on the floor in need
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There’s a Miss Marple short story where Jane Marple is recovering from the flu, and her doctor, who calls in to see her every day, drops by with a short mystery he’s written to buck her up and speed her convalescence. Miss Marple isn’t a wealthy woman exactly and when the story was written this was not an extraordinary premise. I’d like a health service like that, please.
These days, every day seems to be April 1st.
If kids are prescribed computer games and become addicted to them to the extent they refuse to go to school because they have to complete the next level, I’m sure that every game will have an almost infinite number of levels, are their parents going to be prescribed a lump hammer to try and cure the addiction?
Madness has a self-propagating quality about it. The moment you start behaving madly in one way, the chances you start behaving madly in other ways increase. That’s what I observe anyway.
So for example, if you condition a population to wear masks (which have gaps everywhere) when indoors, but only when they are moving around – when they are sitting down they can take them off – in other words, completely mad behaviour, then you are opening the door to more mad behaviour.
Particularly since COVID I see madness everywhere More and more of it.
The systematic medication of children with drugs – or with video games, just a different form of drug – is a severe form of madness (madness defined as evidently self-destructive behaviour).
I would that if the pain suffered by infant burns victims can be allieviated 50% by lobbing imaginary snowballs at computer generated penguins, that is a price worth paying.
But i get your general drift.