Don't Open the Box: Columns

Face it: dodge ball is the Dark Souls of recess. Maybe the stories don't have any truth in their brittle bones, but I hear that its being banned across schools in the US for being too unfair and promoting violence.

I remember dodge ball in elementary school. It was both infuriating and a lot of fun. People singled me out. Fights broke out. Kids were massive dicks. I think it did me a lot of good. I learned something valuable: sometimes the world is out to get you and its your job to get out of the way until you can do something about it. I like the unfairness of not getting to play at all if you're not good enough, especially when I could inflict it on others.

Dodge ball is a game where you can let out your inner jerk. The greatest of Greek catharsis can be channeled into that ball. Dodge ball should be enshrined as a wonderful little microcosm game for teaching children how harsh life can be.

But instead of having children play games with unclear life lessons where they might have to internalize, reflect and come to their own conclusions, I think we should invest in 3DSes preloaded with the virtual console release of Columns. The easy mode on this sucker is so easy, it reinvents the easy mode. It a shining innovation amongst easy modes. The most inept child could get extremely high scores. Think of the self esteem it would boost! Think of the smiles on millions of improperly diagnosed children on the autism spectrum! And it has shiny jewels that mesmerize as they fade away, symbolizing the fruitlessness of material collection. What else do you need?

Columns is one of those early puzzle droppers. Its fuel is the endless hunger for a better score, not vs. play against the computer or humans, or experience leveling in an RPG tunnel, two roads people would have us say the puzzler evolved into. The score you see up there was easily procured within 20 minutes by messing around on easy. As long as you vaguely try to arrange the gems together into patterns of three or more diagonally, horizontally or vertically you are bound to run into combinations of pattern completions sparkle and disappear that can last for a minute or more of you simply watching the unexplained mass disappearance of gems unfold. Your score blossoms. Your self-esteem grows.

To the left you can see what happened after I triggered one simple pattern erasure near the top of the screen. It looked like I was going to wipe out, but no. It was gem genocide. The Hitler of precious rocks would have been proud.

This could be so valuable in a school setting. Think of the life lessons it could teach! If you bumble along with the basics for long enough it doesn't matter if you get any better or put any effort into anything; matters will clear up all around you with no real punishment. Obviously, this is a much more realistic lesson than dodge ball could ever teach. A great deal of these kids will go onto jobs re-arranging the valuables of others where their effort and hard work will never be properly appreciated. It's best to let them know they can get by through putting in the cool minimum and not think about anything else too hard, except maybe the weekend.