As we labored up Karakoram from Haramukh for want of silk, the water drought forced us around the Abakawakimaya in search of a nearby village. As I tried to extrapolate the number of hours my remaining stash of delicious Al Rifai almonds would last, our learned guide, a one eyed Urdu serf told tales of the wise man of Baltoro.
We found him under a glacier, pipe in mouth and latest blackberry in hand; his welcoming Haiku appropriately deleterious:
Here it is frozen.
Retarded tourists remorse
Blackberry is life
Urdu serf excluded, our collective jaw drop echoed across Wyinglang, and our esoteric host had already noticed our disbelief at the the device he so intransigently clutched. “Brickbreaker is the game of the ages,” he continued, “it is life in micro digital format…” As he passed around a rock bowl of concocted hallucinogenics, the sage of Baltoro began his LSD induced philosophical drivel.
“Brickbreaker, a simple game of reaction where the player moves a paddle to hit a ball that breaks a series of bricks. Bricks vary in durability, and as the game progresses, the ball starts moving faster, and the bricks move downwards, making it harder for the player to score points. The replay value is the obsession to beat your previous score, or to score higher than your friends. There is no end to the game. Once you finish the 34 levels, it reverts back to level one, with a faster moving ball and rapidly approaching bricks. As such, the object of the game remains a mystery, the high score board as the only indication of its purpose. A plethora of people play the game of Brickbreaker. Be it on an arduous journey, a boring teleconference call, or in a neurotic quest to beat friends, Brickbreaker is as ubiquitous as it gets when it comes to pointless undertakings.
Many scholars have attempted to deal with the grand absurdity that is the human quest. The absurd, as many a depressed Frenchman has put it, is the culmination of the human race’s realization that the need for purpose and reason in life is impossible to mollify in a universe devoid of meaning. The universe, in of itself, does not provide the human race with a moral authority, nor a final victory, nor a purpose of any kind. Any perceived meaning is but an illusion, a trick of sorts, brought on by the individual mind to appease personal needs and ensure continuity. Brickbreaker is thus the ultimate manifestation of all that is absurd in life, an electronified version of the Sisyphean tale.
Who is Sisyphus you might ask? The man who was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down when he reached the top, whereupon he had to start his mundane task again, ad infinitum. You have probably seen him in that red bull commercial, but never realized who he was. As is the case with Sisyphean tasks, Brickbreaker is a parody for the ridiculous. There is no hope of an end, no final victory, and as points are arbitrarily racked, the ball moves quicker and the bricks fast approach the ground. There is no absolute ceiling on points, as you can always score one more. Failure is inevitable, the game will end. And the sight of an end is more nebulous the further you progress. You are predestined, and will eventually die, every time.
Yet as is the case with life, the existential (moot) point of Brickbreaker is the experience itself rather than the destination. The chase for goals, regardless of their futility, makes the quest worth pursuing, thus reversing their initial hollowness. That is what makes Brickbreaker so absurd. The parallels between Brickbreaker and the story of Sisyphus are numerous. But what makes Brickbreaker more absurd is that playing the game is a conscious decision made by the player. Whereas Sisyphus was forced into his task, millions go out of their way to play Brickbreaker with a resolve and passion not overtly expressed by the tragic hero. There is a passion for choice, a passion for Brickbreaker, and quite possibly, a passion for life.”
As we awoke from our trance like stupor, the sage of Baltoro used his blackberry’s GPS feature to give us directions to the nearby village, but only after taking our pins. Our descent down K2 was a fist full of epiphanies. What we can hope for in life, and in Brickbreaker, is plenty of playing time, so that on our tombstones, they would inscribe: “He did the best he could. His high score was 33,678! Long live Brickbreaker, long live life!”
