This dolphin is ruining my life

Dolphin Olympics 2. That elusive title, as you can see, is a hyperlink. But do not click on it, for there is a serious possibility that doing so will lead to the evaporation of hours and hours of your precious time, and, in addition, will cause you to hallucinate, well into the night, images of a tiny dolphin bouncing around on stars and soaring among planets. Here's a little video to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about, assuming that you heed my advice and don't actually play this game.

I have mostly avoided the video game obsession that I've noticed among many of my similarly-aged male peers. As a kid, I loved Nintendo, and spent an inordinate amount of time playing all the Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man, and Mario games. I was good at them too. But somewhere around the time when I discovered competitive debating and girls, I just sort of dropped out of the video game culture. By the time X-Box, PS2 and all those systems began cycling through the market, I had lost all interest, and never got into the first-person shooters that define modern videogaming. So I've been surprised at how severely addicted I've become to Dolphin Olympics 2.

It has something to do with timing, I'm sure. I'm winding down the last month of my current job, and I've accepted an offer to begin a new one in August. That being the case, I have very little incentive to be productive at my current job. So I'm especially susceptible to anything that can pass the time. And DO2 does that too well.

I read a little bit about the game, and it was apparently created by a group of designers competing in a challenge to create games for the "casual gamer," i.e., people like me who don't get into the ultra complex first person shooters and neverending role players. DO2 is quite simple indeed. Basically, you use the arrow keys to control this little dolphin, who you guide from the water to the surface to complete jumps, flips, twists, and other tricks. If you land the dolphin back in the water at the right angle, he continues to build momentum and acceleration, so that subsequent jumps become higher and higher. The jumps can eventually become absurdly high, and, once you figure out a few tricks that allow the dolphin to suddenly and rapidly increase his acceleration, you can reach planets and stars, wracking up millions and millions of points.

It takes a while to learn the skills to get this high, and, to be sure, there is an element of luck to it all. Once you reach the speeds necessary to gain these heights, it becomes more and more difficult to control the dolphin, and, therefore, more difficult to aim the dolphin toward the "power rings" that will give him a burst of speed and send him to the most distant planets (Pluto is the last planet . . . with an elusive "restaurant" lying somewhere beyond that--something that I've only seen in youtube videos of gameplay). The thing is, though, while there is certainly a learning curve, its not so steep as to lead one to throw up his hands and give up. Each game draws you closer to understanding how to control the dolphin in a way to reach maximum height and speed, and the spectre of reaching those distant planets and attaining the absurdly high scores listed on the game's website is irresistible. (I've reached 98 million. . . There are a few who have made in past the 1 billion mark).

Nonetheless, I really need to find a way to stop playing this. It's too easy to use it as a "brief" distraction from work, but it invariably turns into one "just one more game" after another, until I've wasted hours. There are a lot of things I'd like to accomplish now that I've got this lull in my workload. I started a novel some time ago, and I'd really like to dedicate some time to that. However, as I look at the screen right now, I detect tracers of this dolphin sliding down rows of stars, and when I close my eyes to sleep, I see that damn dolphin, racing along the water's surface, dipping and diving into the blue. It's honestly making me a little depressed. I'm honestly writing this blog in the hopes that it might be the first step on my 12-step program to a Dolphin Olympics 2-free life.