Grenade! Grenade! Get down! Enemy in range!

I had a bad idea this past weekend. And I acted on it. And now I feel guilty.

Faced with a slow weekend, I was looking for entertainment, and my search for self-amusement led me to the dark world of video games. And even worse, it led to me to explore my curiosity about first-person-shooter games. And now I feel guilty.

I've always found the concept of first-person-shooter games to be pretty objectionable. Creating fun and entertainment out of shooting as many people as you can? And don't tell me that it's "just a game", because it's "just a game" in that any joke is "just a joke". It's "just a game" only in the sense that it's not actually happening, but make no mistake that the thrills of the game are the same thrills of the real thing: the thrill of trying to wipe out your enemy before they get you, of the fact that at any moment it could end.

But as objectionable as a lot of these games are, I'm at least curious if not desirous of that thrill, and it was this that led me to start thinking about those WWII games, the ones that put you in a landing craft heading toward Omaha Beach or navigating bombed-out cities in Germany. I was tempted, sorely tempted, as that kind of military history has always been fascinating to me exactly because I couldn't imagine living through it. But now I could, in completely safe, pixilated form.

I just couldn't bring myself to enter that world. I could get over my objection to first-person-shooters in the name of personal entertainment, but I couldn't accept that an event that caused enormous amounts of suffering is now "fun". My curiousity may get the better of me one of these days, but it wasn't today.

So I went with the game that was as far as possible from reality, and in a happy coincidence, it was also an extremely popular game and in a world that's as far, far away as we could get: Star Wars Battlefront; the first one, as I'd learned a while ago never to pay more than $20 for a video game. And I found that the thrill of kill-or-be-killed is, to both my chagrin and extreme entertainment, as engrossing and entertaining as I was afraid it'd be. The feeling of pushing toward your target with your comrades, only to be take out by a sniper; of charging towards an enemy who's firing at you, both of you trying to take out the other before he can finish you off...it's so wrong that these things are as much fun as they are. But they are fun.