You can learn a great deal about people’s values and belief systems through playing incredibly simple games. Nibbles taught me that there are two kinds of people in the world, and the lesson can be summarized as “points are no good to a dead snake”.
Before there was Bookworm, before you could play Words With Friends, er, with friends, there was Nibbles. The game bundled with QBasic was the quintessentially simple snake game. Like Tron Light Cycles without Tron, and without the confusing sound effects of the light cycles.
The two-player mode pitted two snakes in heated competition for the lengthening numbers that would appear within the walls of the battlefield. Sammy and Jake had lives and also scored points based on how many numbers they had eaten.
A snake would lose a life each time it was forced to eat anything that wasn’t a number – a wall, another snake, or even himself.
So there were two ways to win the game. The game ended when either Sammy or Jake had no lives remaining, and you could argue that the winner was the remaining snake – the one with lives. Or you could say that having the most points at the end of the game made whichever snake had scored them the winner.
It depends on your point of view. For example, say you had a 10 point lead and one life left. You could then end your life and claim victory, to which the surviving snake could claim that “points are no good to a dead snake”. So if you see life a competition, is it about the accumulation of points, or is it about outliving the other snakes? Conversely, what good is a life that has no points – what is your purpose?
There may be a third model in which both snakes are actively interested in staying alive, and each tries to assist the other in amassing points. Perhaps the snakes work in tandem to each gobble numbers that are nearest to them, and to stay away from the awful fate of ingesting the trail of their fellow reptile.
I have to say that I never happened to play with the third model, which says more about my cold-bloodedness than it does anything else.
With the rapture fast approaching on May 21st, is it better to have points or to become a believer, or is there a third way in which you can do both?
