Where's Waldo
So it has come to this. Throughout the course of my life I’ve seen the barf of wrong-headed-tweed-coat-with-leather-elbows-wearing-poindexters on hundreds of editorial pages. Just honking and bleating about the youth of today and the video games that stole their literacy. I’ve always felt the connection between video games and illiteracy was tenuous at best, the product of people who have never played a video game taking an easy shot. Today I played Where’s Waldo and it has rocked my beliefs to the core. I am forced to wonder if maybe I wasn’t the fool all along.
During the 80’s, the Where’s Waldo series of books took elementary schools by storm. They stripped all of the confounding words out of books and gave the ‘reader’ a simple task to complete. You could pick up a book and with little brain-power and no reading you could get a feeling of accomplishment. You could almost hear millions of brows unfurling. Sweet Chicken Poxed Christ, there were even boobs. To add the game element to books, and then go on to take the same concept out of the library and onto the Nintendo reeks of the sort of ‘gateway drug’ tactics that D.A.R.E. warned me ‘dopers’ and ‘pushers’ might attempt to employ.
Furthermore, the plot of Where’s Waldo the video game was incoherent and downright bizarre enough that one can’t help feeling like the entire enterprise is an assault on everything books stand for. As far as I can make out, Waldo needs to get to the moon. On his way to his rocket’s launch pad he gets lost in a train station, a forest, a cave, fairgrounds, a city and a castle. He loses his glasses in a subway, and when he finally gets to the rocket it is revealed that the controls are a slot machine. When Waldo’s rocket touches down on the moon he walks around for a couple of seconds and it’s game over.
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