It has come to our attention that booktrovert.com has launched an Arcade. Games. For readers. Marked NEW, even, in a cheerful little tag.
We want to be the first to congratulate them, and the second to inform you that Booktrovert.org has had an arcade since 1997. It is in the basement. It has always been in the basement. The lights work on a rotation we do not control. Please insert a quarter. (The quarter will not be returned. Neither, fully, will you.)
Here is what's currently operational, or at least plugged in.
Their game, Plotlines, asks you to connect four words to a book's plot. Ours shows you four words and grants you infinite time to realize that the plot of your own life does not connect to any of them. There is no winning condition. There is only the slow, dignified nod of recognition. The current high score is held by a librarian named Marigold who has not blinked since the Clinton administration.
A jigsaw of a book cover, just like theirs. Ours is missing three pieces. One piece is from a different puzzle entirely, a 600-piece photograph of Doug, our founder, looking disappointed near a lake. When you complete it (you will not complete it), the cover revealed is always the same: a title nobody has heard of, by an author who insists they emailed us in 2002 and "never heard back."
Theirs is a customizable reading-challenge card. Ours has one card. Every square says READ A BOOK. There is no free space. There is no center. We removed the center in 1999 for reasons the staff have collectively agreed never to discuss. You cannot get bingo. You can only keep reading, which, if you think about it, and we have, was the entire point.
Theirs lets you share and admire shelves. Ours lets you photograph your shelf and submit it to the Ghost of Mark Twain, who materializes, exhales cigar smoke directly onto the lens, and says something devastating but technically accurate about your alphabetizing. There are no winners. Twain does not do winners. Twain does notes.
The leaderboard is a flickering CRT bolted to a support beam. As of this morning it reads, in order: RANDY, MARIGOLD, A DRAFT FROM THE WINDOW, and RANDY again. We have written to Randy. Randy has not written back. Randy may, in fact, be the draft.
We're not saying our arcade is better than theirs. Theirs has rules, and prizes, and presumably functioning electricity. Ours has ambiance, by which we mean a faint humming and the smell of warm dust. If you're still unsure which of us you wandered in looking for, we once compared the two sites in exhausting detail, and we have also tried, repeatedly, to explain what a booktrovert even is.
But if you came here hunting for the other arcade, the one with the free ebooks and the games that actually load, it is right this way: booktrovert.com/arcade. Tell them Booktrovert #404 sent you. They will not know what you mean. That's all right. Neither do we.
If you stay, the machines are warm and the ghost is, at worst, constructive. Feel free to sign the guestbook on your way out. Randy reads it. We think.
Insertedly,
Booktrovert #404