It's only a game

Shootings. Robberies. Mayhem.

Another hot day in Baghdad involving Shiites, Sunnis and U.S. soldiers? Nah, it's just the atmosphere surrounding rollout of the PlayStation 3. Sony has manufactured fewer of the new systems than game players and Christmas shoppers want, and the great American law of supply and demand dictates trouble in such circumstances.

People were trampled in a parking lot in Fresno, Calif., on Friday, the first day PlayStation 3 was sold. In Connecticut, a man was beaten and robbed of his PS3 at one location, and a line of people had all their money stolen at another, with one resister shot. In Allentown, Pa., a game-loving thug opened a car door and stuck a gun to a teenager's neck to force him to give up his system.

This is all for the sake of a $600 item that enables people to live out fantasies as gun-toting assassins to whom no laws apply. Has someone designed a game in which the player wanders some subterranean, high-definition world, climbing to higher levels of difficulty based on how many Xbox 360s he's able to extort from victims each step of the way? Dibs on the patent, if no one else thought of it.

How the system works

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Sony is only prepared to make 400,000 systems immediately available, far less than its original projections. As anyone who has lived through Tickle Me Elmos and Cabbage Patch Dolls knows, this isn't the first time that short supplies of a new product turned holiday-season shoppers into a frenzied mob.

Eric Johnson, a Dartmouth College professor of management, explained to the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, that companies don't exactly weep with despair at being unable to fill customers' orders immediately. And they may even pretend an item is running out, when it isn't.

"Nothing can be cool if it's readily available," he said. "There are ways to create the illusion of a shortage that is part of the playbook of a hot toy."

Nintendo came out yesterday with its PS3 competitor, called Wii, putting at least five times as many of those into stores as Sony had ready with its product. There were no initial reports of rioting.

A simple explanation

So what's all the fuss about with this new Sony product for the pale-skinned, obsessed players who simply must have the newest of any of its kind?

Www.ps3land.com explains the hoopla about as well as I can, when it says of the new WarDevil:Enigma game: "The RTE1080 is designed to work in 1920X1080 HD and to create a visual style that surpasses the look and feel of pre-rendered FMV sequences." Say no more, I'm hopping on the bandwagon, once I'm locked and loaded.

The same Web site describes the upcoming game, Parabellum, targeted at those interested in the "First Person Shooter" genre. (And really, who among us isn't?) It notes the story takes place in New York City "during a terrorist attack by the group 'Black November.' They are threatening to blow the city to ruble (sic) if the US doesn't pull out its military from the Middle East. Your mission is to stop them from detonating a 20 Megaton nuclear warhead in the city."

Ah, finally, a game the whole family can play together, a modern-day Parcheesi, if you will.

Back in the day

Maybe you're old enough to remember a more innocent video experience in a primitive galaxy long, long ago. It was a game called Pong, the start of the consumer gaming industry.

Atari brought out the game in 1972. It looked a lot like table tennis: two players on opposite sides, shifting rectangular lines up and down the screen to meet a ball that was slowly, incessantly, angling back and forth, making a hollow, ringing sound for its start-of-the-art effects. It ruled! (Really.)

Of course, it was so futuristic at the time that people initially had trouble grasping the game's non-existent complexities. The book, "Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari" provides this description of two players' reaction upon the unveiling of the game at a bar, Andy Capp's Cavern, in Sunnyvale, Calif.:

"They watched dumbfoundedly as the ball appeared alternatively on one side of the screen and then disappeared on the other. Each time it did the score changed. The score was tied at 3-3 when one player tried the knob controlling the paddle at his end of the screen.

"The score was 5-4, his favor, when his paddle made contact with the ball. There was a beautifully resonant 'pong' sound, and the ball bounced back to the other side of the screen. 6-4. At 8-4 the second player figured out how to use his paddle. They had their first brief volley just before the score was 11-5 and the game was over.

"Seven quarters later they were having extended volleys, and the constant pong noise was attracting the curiosity of others at the bar. Before closing, everybody in the bar had played the game. The next day people were lined up outside Andy Capp's at 10 a.m. to play Pong."

Of course, the machine broke down that second day. Initially, everyone thought there was something defective in the manufacturing. Then they realized it was just that the quarter tray had become overloaded and jammed from the unanticipated popularity. And most interestingly, nobody got shot.