Ballistic

Tucked away on the official AARP website – the acronym formerly stood for “American Association of Retired Persons” – is an oasis of small arcade-style games; browser experiences perfect for an aging audience uninterested in metaprogression or buildcraft. Of these, Ballistic encapsulates the style: it reframes Breakout as turn-based actions, where the player shoots a stream of balls that ricochet off of walls and destructible blocks, waiting for each ball to land back at the bottom before firing the next volley. Instead of separate levels with fixed arrangements, all the blocks in the playfield shift down one row in an implicit grid after each turn, with the game ending when a block reaches the line the player shoots from. At the same time, a new row of blocks appears one row below the top, with at least one gap left for the player to sneak their shots in. Over time, this breaks the playfield up into two sections: dense blocks at the top, and stragglers creeping towards the bottom on every turn. A smart shot attempts to clean up both areas by trapping balls in a cave on the always empty top row behind multiple rows of blocks. Doing this while having the balls trickle down to the bottom section as they exit the cave keeps the playfield clean. Additional wrinkles prevent this loop from staling: ball pick-ups add to the number you shoot on every turn, and the “health” of the blocks (how many hits they can take before breaking) scale alongside your reserve, occasionally throwing in double-health blocks to ensure that some blocks actually survive down to the second layer. The simplicity of these aspects, the intuitive physics system, and a prominent scoring system (the game’s only goal, with a leaderboard prominently displayed) demonstrate why even nondescript browser games can still showcase the elegance of the medium.

Unfortunately, the above is not a joke. I accidentally stumbled upon Ballistic while looking up the PlayStation 1 game of the same name,¹ amused by the idea that AARP hosts games on their website. Ballistic and these other games are actually distributed by Arkadium, a casual games company that most will know for their work on the “modern” versions of Microsoft Solitaire and Minesweeper released at the start of the 2010’s. While I’m really not a fan of that bloated version of Minesweeper, these newer offerings (which can also be found on USA Today, the Washington Post, and others) are surprisingly gentle given stereotypes on modern casual games. Outside of one game (a ho-hum Puzzle Bobble clone) offering an optional score bonus for watching an advertisement, which is admittedly nasty, the other games I played had nothing of the sort: no microtransactions or other predatory mechanics. The quality varies considerably – another Puzzle Bobble clone had the bright idea to put the playfield around a cylinder, which accidentally removed the essential rebound mechanic – but serviceable ports of classic games like Centipede and Asteroids help shore up the original offerings. For games with the look and feel of something out of an Instagram ad, I was impressed with how thankfully plain the underlying games were.

However, what started as bemusement gave into slack-jawed, mindless play. For years I’ve maintained a hidden roster of games I play on the side while focusing on a video or sitting in a boring meeting. Alongside the usual suspects,² the most embarrassing of these is Doge2048, the first version of 2048 I found back in middle school. Although I have attempted to switch over to the original 2048, the specific colors of Doge2048 have burned themselves into my brain, and I find that I play much more efficiently and thoughtlessly with this particular version; I have thankfully weaned myself off it in the last few years, although sometimes I relapse. Ballistic quickly found itself in this roster, and soon it moved to the forefront of the pack. If I had a particularly good run going, I would find myself digging into my Watch Later playlist to accompany it and extend my playtime a little further, eventually finding myself wasting an hour after a work lunch or losing an afternoon until the natural light had escaped my room.

It’s tempting to make a mechanical case for why Ballistic in particular is “addictive.” My first complaint would be the lack of time bounding, the game’s most glaring divergence from the actual arcade formula. Perhaps if there was a time limit to make each shot, or if there was a global timer that restricted play, then the allure of a single run wouldn’t suck one in for hours at a time. However, I also know that quality alone wouldn’t hinder my compulsive play; I have spent hours glued to games with hard-capped time limits, such as Sega Rally Championship and Tetris: The Grand Master 2. A cap opens up more opportunities to exit the play loop (although Ballistic retains progress when closed, so stopping mid-session is no problem), but the higher-level compulsion loop revolves around the fight for skill progression; I continue to play because I want to invest as much time as I can into achieving a high score or lower time. While some games have mechanics that implicitly reinforce healthy practice habits, such as Crazy Taxi’s large-scale customer mapping making repeat runs difficult³ or various arcade rhythm games making physical fatigue a factor, these low action-per-minute games have intellectual value but have no way to deter the player from drawn-out play sessions.

And it’s this “intellectual value” concept that left me uneasy when wrapping my head around why Ballistic got its claws into me. I write to express the value, at multiple levels, of the games I play, which on some level I understand as a justification of me playing them in the first place.⁴ With that in mind, it’s easy to lean on this crutch to prove that the time invested in the games itself had worth. But telling myself this and actually wholeheartedly believing it are two separate things. Games with repetitive structures or immoral mechanics make themselves quick targets for my ire, but Ballistic doesn’t fulfill any of these. Its artless, anonymous presentation seats it with company that present those issues, but at its root it has little differentiating it from games I find mechanically appealing. That caveat isn’t to excuse narrative- or aesthetic-driven experiences either, as the time they hoover up equally begs the question of whether the ways in which they’ve evolved my worldview or asked worthy questions of me have excused my compulsion in searching them out and engaging in them, in juxtaposition to time I would be spending existing and engaging with the world proper.

All of this is to say that, for starters, my planned April Fool’s post going over different Arkadium games had to get canned; I could see myself sinking time into even more games under the guise of an elaborate (but accurately researched) joke, and frankly the juice was not worth the squeeze. This line of thinking then trickled down to my TGM2 practice, which had entrenched itself in my routine. Make no mistake: TGM2 is the greatest game I’ve ever played, but the mode in which I had continued playing it, desperately reaching to beat my personal best by a single line and reach 999, had made it empty calories in my life, no matter how many NFL podcasts I listened to at the same time. And then of course the easy changes: timers on social media apps, more walks without headphones, prioritizing games played socially rather than alone, and reaching out to some old friends I hadn’t met up with in a while. These changes weren’t sparked by Ballistic solely, and Ballistic didn’t make me have these realizations, but rather the game reminded me that in the natural flow of my life I had gotten into an art-centric space, and living in that mindset too long inhibits one from giving the art room to breathe and space to reflect.

With arcade-style games in particular, there’s a push to laud their purity and design finesse while defeating old narratives about their supposed crudeness. These games also have the benefit of clear artistic lineage and cultural heritage from the days of proper arcades and continuing into (what is at least in the United States) the modern gray-market boom, whereas Ballistic is raw and exists out of time, in a sense. What each have in common (and virtually all games) is the ability to create thoughtful play inside a thoughtless space, a space that consumes attention and redirects it to a puzzle, one that can be adequately reasoned through as compared to reality. Clarity and quality of design that erupts out of this exists but also must be deployed carefully, lest it leaves one (as it sometimes does myself) so engrossed that it makes one compulsively return to it to eliminate thoughts that cannot be solved so cleanly. The personal components of this can’t be understated – a person must approach their play lucidly as to not ignore when it’s begun to suppress outside thought – but critically ignoring this power is dangerous.