POGs (yes, I’m actually posting about POGs)

The other night, I actually took a break from work to hang out with people -- one of those self-enforced, “if I don’t do this I’ll go completely insane” sort of breaks, and man was it incredible -- and at some point during the night we wound up looking up POGs on wikipedia (I’m not going to bother explaining why), and that led us to this site, which offers a number of options for playing POGs online.

So of course we did. The most entertaining option turned out to be “Battle Mode,” which sets the POG match in a Mortal Combat sort of interface where you face-off against the computer in a ring, and each time you win you progress to another face-off against a more challenging character. You can choose to play different characters of different genders, and then you throw your “slammer” by lining up various moving target buttons along different axes. Aside from its entertainment value, which was sufficient to occupy us for a good twenty or thirty minutes, the relation to our class was this: the consensus amongst everyone who played was, “oh man, this is SO much better than playing real POGs ever was!”

As someone who never got all that into the POG fad, that statement doesn’t hold a lot of weight, but this is an observation that has been made in our class before about games as well as other mediums -- there are certain ideas and activities and modalities of expression that just work way better in a virtual, online space/reality than they do in real space/reality. I guess we can add to that list, on a place of very low consequence, honing one’s POG slamming skills.