Video Game Zen

Here’s another nifty game that can be picked up for a pithy ten dollars on Xbox Live: Ikaruga. It’s a clever re-imagining of the old-school top-down shooter.

The game is 2D, and you have a bird’s eye view of the action as you pilot a ship through a futuristic battlefield. There is an impressive variety of enemies, but they all come in one of two forms, dark and light. Your ship can switch between dark and light forms. In dark form, you will do extra damage to light enemies, and you can absorb any attacks from dark enemies and use the energy to fire a special homing laser, which can just about wipe the screen when fully charged. Your light form has the opposite advantages.

Simplicity itself, really. Turn dark to escape shots from dark enemies, turn light to escape shots from light enemies. Of course, when there are twenty or thirty enemies on screen firing a mix of light and dark shots at you, it becomes impossibly complex to know when to switch, and when to dodge.

I’ve just felled the game’s final boss, and I believe that in those final moments, I experienced what can most accurately be described as a video game zen. The final boss was launching wave after wave of missiles, lasers, and bullets at me, alternating between light and dark too fast for me to keep up. And then I reached a point where I just couldn’t consciously follow his attacks anymore. But I kept dodging them. As if my hands had a life of their own, I swerved, dipped, and shifted at all the right times. In my mind, it was perpetually three seconds ago, and by the time I realized that I hadn’t died yet, some ethereal force had guided my hand to dodge several attacks I hadn’t noticed, counterattacking in perfect rhythm.

And so, I bring you today’s vocabulary term:

Video game zen: A phenomenon whereby the complex process of interpreting visual stimulus, conceiving a response within the context of the game, translating that contextual response into the requisite physical response, and enacting that physical response, is all performed continuously without any identifiable cognitive effort.