Tonight the Patriots will try to complete a perfect NFL season. Or as perfect as we can perceive for the time being. They didn’t lose any games, although they came close a couple of times. It is probable that this will be the most watched super bowl ever.

However, I am kind of bored with perfection. I have been rooting against this stupid team all year and I don’t think they are going to lose. I am going to try and not watch the game at all tonight.

Heather and I recently watched The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary detailing these guys trying to best each others’ Donkey Kong scores. The movie is awesome. The rivalry is great and the subculture is fascinating and not a little disturbing. But the real draw for me is the pursuit of perfection. The way these competitors mine all the nuances and tricks of the game is really neat to watch. One of my favorite scenes involves talking about timing a particular part of the game, waiting for the right moment to break for the last ladder, trying to avoid the springs that Kong throws by adhering to mathematical principles(!) The sequence in which Kong throws the springs is random, but there is a small opening every few seconds that has to be executed flawlessly in order to advance.

I got caught up in this story because, sadly, I was just as impressed by these feats as all the other nerds in the movie were. I am no great gamer. I think I like video games and for a time they meant more to me than movies and music did. But I was never particularly good at them. Going for perfection is just too tedious for me. I die too often so as to make the experience less and less fun. It’s the starting over from the beginning, OVER AND OVER that makes me quickly lose interest. I think it’s evident that gaming companies recognized this trend pretty quickly and made games a little easier and less vicious so as to include the casual gamer. If games were as hard today as the hard core old school games of yore, I don’t think the industry would have taken off as it did.

The challenge that developers face today is to make games challenging AND fun for everybody at the same time. I’ve been playing the original Super Mario Bros. a lot recently, and the typical game lasts maybe twenty minutes if I’m lucky. I usually die around 8-2 or 8-3. I’m getting a little better and have beaten it a couple of times, but these seem to be isolated incidents.

I also started playing Super Mario 3, and from the beginning it’s clear that there is a more gradual learning curve, multiple lives and power ups, and an overall sense that fun is more the goal than challenge. Super Mario Galaxy continues this trend today, in which there are only a couple of parts that are actually ‘hard’, but it’s hard to notice when you’re having such a good time.

Here’s a Super Mario speed run that to my knowledge is the most perfect you can play the game…