A game called Snake

Playing against yourself

At the core of Pakistan’s most popular mobile phone game Snake is a paradox: we are constantly manoeuvring to seek rewards that will make our lives harder.

Since the release of Nokia’s compact and sturdy 3310 mobile phone in 2000, we have been waiting for trains, wives, work and electricity playing Snake. We kill free time playing a game that mimics our lives until we are back in a socially or economically productive situation.

We would once spend that free time sleeping. “Lahoris are always sleeping,” comedian Amanullah Khan said in one of his routines. “Some in their shops, others on the street, one on the tonga, another in the park. One has missed his stop and is fighting with the bus driver, ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’ And when you ask them, ‘What do you do?’, they reply with a grin: ‘Nothing!’” Amanullah, Lahore’s most awesome cultural critic, was very popular in the 1990s. Since then, times have changed for many of us.

Innovation and creativity have often been associated with spare time. Many in Pakistan would argue their Indus Valley ancestors had the time to think about philosophy, mathematics and town-planning when many Europeans were hunting and gathering because they had surplus agricultural produce.

While modernity made free time possible, it also took it away very soon. Most of us who live in a postindustrial urban Pakistan are employed in the services, development and information sectors, and are part of a flexible cellular workforce that works more hours a week than medieval peasants. When we are not at work, we are available on the mobile phone and on email. We are a temporary workforce and constantly fear being fired. And that is why we want to be productive.

But like in the game Snake, the more we work and the better we get at the repetitive tasks we are asked to perform, the faster our life becomes and the harder it is to avoid hitting the walls or our own tail. Collapse is inevitable. We can only fend it off for a finite period of time. The longer we avoid it, the harder it gets. And if during that routine, we do end up with spare time, we “kill” it playing Snake.

The game is believed to have evolved from the 1976 arcade hit Blockade. Two years after its release, Atari developed a spin-off titled Surround. Sears sold the same game under the name Chase. The first known personal computer version of the game was developed in 1978 and was called Worm. A post-1980 MS DOS version was called Nibbles. The evolution of the name is also fascinating.

Nokia design engineer Teneli Armanto developed a mobile phone version in 1997 and his employer embedded it in 350 million devices to make it the most widely distributed game in the history of mobile phones. The other two Nokia games that came out in 1997 were Logic and Memory. The names of both were in line with the productivity paradigm. Why was Snake called Snake?

In 2010, YouTube embedded a secret version of Snake in its video player. It can be unlocked by pausing the video and pressing the up and left arrow keys simultaneously on the keyboard.

Teneli Armanto has said he had initially “wanted to take advantage of the infrared link in the Nokia 6110 – a first at that time – which would allow people to play against each other.”

But as another popular office game indicates, we are only playing against ourselves.

Set in the year 2010, Tuboflex is a dystopia that many of us live in. The simple flash game begins with this introduction:

“The need of mobility has grown to excess since the first years of the millennium. Nowadays, all the social guaranties and the bureaucracy of the traditional flexible staffing solutions are no more sustainable, because a single worker could be useful for different factories during the very same day. That’s why Tuboflex Inc, the world’s leading Human Resources Services organization, created a complex tube system that makes it possible to dislocate employees in real time, depending on the demand.”

“The repetitive and often mechanised work speeds up as the player progresses through the different workplace settings, which include a McDonald’s drive-through window, Santa Claus putting smiles on the faces of children (an instance of affective labour), assembly-line drilling, an office worker with a computer and a box handler at a shipping warehouse,” Rita Raley says about Tuboflex in her book Tactical Gaming. “But all attempts to play end with the central character begging on the street.”

The writer is a media and culture critic and works at The Friday Times. He tweets @paagalinsaan and gets email at [email protected]