Strategists Anonymous

Ever since I was set free from the euphemiasma that was my former job, I have had some time on my hands.  Happily, I have spent a decent portion of that time reading and writing, though still not as much as I should be.  Of course, my number-one priority at this juncture is procuring another job for myself, but that is a long process involving a lot of waiting.  Rachel and I have both been told the positions we're applying for have received anywhere from 40 to 100 applications for a single position.  I tried applying for unemployment, but I just don't have the energy to tackle that bureaucratic quagmire right now.

So I've got some time on my hands.  What have I been doing with all this time?  Being productive?  I suppose that depends on your perspective, but the answer to that question is probably no.  No, I've been immersing myself in the nostalgia and retrograde maturity of an old video game from my middle school years: Red Alert 2.

Here's the gist: the game came out in the year 2000, right at the end of that ten-year gulf of time in which the US didn't have a definable, polarizing enemy to unite against.  Too early for the Al-Qaeda party, RA2 is a real time strategy game in which the dubious enemy is the Soviet Union of alternate history.  And by alternate history, I mean that in the universe of RA2, Albert Einstein built a time machine and stopped Hitler from rising to power, leaving a gap for the Soviets to fill, becoming, effectively, the new Nazis.  Thanks to Einstein, Allied troops have time-jumping weapons and "prism cannons" (read: lasers) in addition to their standard incendiary weapons.  The Soviets utilize a psychic mastermind named Yuri to create psychic weapons, as well as deploying high-powered electric weapons à la Tesla.  Narrative gold, basically.

I loved this game in 8th and 9th grade, and Adnan, Ben, and I used to play it all the time.  Basically, you command facilities and manage resources to build up an army and destroy your enemy.  There's a pretty wide array of units, and if you capture an enemy base, you can build those of both Allied and Soviet varieties, giving you command of some kind of super-army, which I have to say, is my favorite part.

I rediscovered this game in NJ when I got my new MacBook and started emulating Windows.  I promised myself I wouldn't play it in Wilmington, because it's so all-consuming.  That worked.  For a while.  But as the weeks wore on, I felt the itch, and I started to play.  At first, I just played occasionally, when I was bored or whatever.  Then it became an everyday thing.  Soon enough, it was eating up whole hours of my afternoons.  I started daydreaming about it while I was at work or at night class.  A new strategy or combination of units would flit through my head while I was reading or buying groceries.  One night, I couldn't get to sleep for the visions of strategies dancing in my head.  I even downloaded an ancient user-made program that allowed me to design maps to play on in the game.  Then, I got fired and the last barriers were broken down.  It was hopeless.

A small view of a typical setup for one of my bases.

 The appeal of the game, both to 13-year-old me and recently-fired me, seems pretty obvious.  First of all, the game serves as a very convenient illusion of control.  You command a whole army who march at your beck and call, serve your every whim, make a suicidal charge with smiles on their faces when you give the word.  You get to dominate and utterly negate the existence of your enemies, the ultimate catharsis.  And since the computer-player enemies are pretty limited in strategic imagination, you can play with your food before you eat it.  For the disenfranchised and the persecuted, this game is great therapy.

The more I play, the more philosophical I get about it.  I've started seeing parallels and metaphors to daily life at each salvo, every volley of cannonade, each perfectly synchronized air strike.  For instance, I've realized how much a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of guy I am.  I much prefer taking my time to amass forces, strategically place them, and launch a coordinated attack over the throw-everything-you-got-at-'em approach that seems to be standard.  Likewise, I don't like to rush into things in real life unless I feel completely prepared.  For things I care about, I'm methodical in preparation, so that when all the dominoes are in position, I just have to flick the first one, sit back, and watch my Rube Goldberg machine carry out the task.

But the primary and most poignant of the analogues to real life comes at the very beginning of every game, when you start out with only a construction yard, a small amount of money, five tanks, and seven GIs.  If you don't work quickly at this stage to establish your base and build up your defenses, the synaptic speed of the computer-controlled enemies will quickly overwhelm you.  And as I play harder and harder levels and enemies, this becomes a more and more difficult task, sometimes requiring me to restart a level a dozen times before I can get a foothold.

And that's just what it feels like at this point in my life as I try to establish myself as an adult.  Getting fired was like a surprise attack at a vulnerable spot I didn't know I had, defeated before I had a fighting chance, a sort of crib-death.  It seems as if I had all my resources laid out in front of me, I knew my plan, I'd started to build some structures and amass some troops, and just as I was beginning to establish a home base, the Soviets rolled in with a couple Apoc tanks and Kirov airships and reduced my nascent fighting force to just a few retreating men.  Bam, just like that; back to square one.   Except that I can't just abort the mission and try again.  Somehow I have to take the scattered remnants of my forces and find a new place to put down, begin building up a new base of command, and start preparing for the next wave of attacks.

Anyway, they say the first step is admitting you have a problem.  I have since begun to scale back my game-play, apportioning my time, using it as an incentive for completing other tasks.  Someday, with luck, I'll be sober for good.