Snark Attack: Insert Additional Quarters

As a man in his late twenties, I am an outlier, at least when it comes to videogames, a subject many of my peers will happily stop their lives to play (or wait in really long lines for midnight releases). I have a PlayStation 3 console, which I use for its superlative Blu-ray player (all the better to watch the new Criterion edition of “Rosemary’s Baby,” my dear) and a Nintendo 3DS, which occasionally makes my train ride to New York seem shorter, thanks to a pocket-sized dose of “Mario Kart.” Neither get much action. And I remember one time I pulled out my Nintendo 3DS before bed. There was a girl in the same bed. When she saw me flip it open, she immediately said, “Now this?” Which meant two things: 1) I was not going to have sex of any kind that night and 2) I should really grow up.

Because, if you are in bed with a hot, mostly naked girl, the last thing you should be thinking about is where you place in a race for Mushroom Kingdom supremacy. In other words: put the fucking joystick down.

The games that people my age play are mostly high-tech shooters, where you traverse the galaxy blowing away half of its population. Either that or sports games, which might be the only thing I can imagine is more boring than actually watching sports. Unless you’re at a Nets game and see Jay-Z and Beyonce and somehow you make eye contact and they decide that you would be an amazing babysitter for Blue Ivy. That would be incredible. Watching little pixilated basketball players dash around a television screen carries little of the excitement and none of the possibility of becoming a superstar nanny.

I also have never played a video game online, which is the de facto mode for most of these high-tech marvels. I think for most gamers, especially the ones in their advanced years who feel at least a slight twinge of shame booting up “Halo 4” instead of cracking open “Back to Blood,” see this as a way of “socializing.” This way, they make the game-playing more of a group activity than what it really is — sitting alone in a basement or living room with some nerdy headset attached to your head. But this seems to be just as shameless and shallow, since topics are never elevated above what bunker that horde of venomous space reptiles is holed up in. Also, I have enough self-esteem issues; I don’t need to have my ass handed to me by some tween in Biloxi while he squeakily calls me a “fag.”

There is, however, one game that I will very much get behind — “Michael Jackson: The Experience” for the Nintendo Wii. Modeled after the popular “Just Dance” series of games (the fourth of which recently came out and includes a downloadable level set to K-pop meme-sation “Gangnam Style”), it features a bunch of awesome Michael Jackson songs that you dance along to. Yes, you even have to do that crazy lean from the “Smooth Criminal” video.

Doing it by yourself, it’s a hoot, but getting four people in the same room, each with a Wiimote in their hands, bopping along to the King of Pop, and it’s downright irrepressible. It goes against everything modern videogames stand for — you’re not alone because, obviously, putting the disc in makes for an instantly magnetic dance party; the levels are as long as the songs, so you can’t get involved in some “Myst”-ian days-long quest; and instead of horrible violence, you’re celebrating joyful pop music. If you’re going to invest yourself in a videogame, it should be one as brief and gleeful as this.