Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
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This is not the column I meant to write this week; that column was going to be about Nexon’s latest free-to-play, online, “You finished all the Destiny 2 content and now you’ve gotta play something, right?” third-person shooter The First Descendant. But the server instability gods have gotten firmly in between me and that game’s breezily enjoyable (from the little bits I managed to play of it) efforts to separate fools like me and their various elaborately tiered micro-currencies, and so I’ve had to fall back on a more evergreen topic, inspired by a recent trip back home: Plane games.
By this, I do not mean titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator, or even An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs. (Perish the thought of Aerobiz. Perish it.) I’m talking about games that exist primarily to be consumed while riding on a plane—in that liminal space where Wi-Fi is scant, time is decidedly un-precious, and constant low-grade stimulation is the only thing keeping you from realizing how little legroom you’ve got. Plane gaming has, obviously, gotten a lot better in the last few years, what with the rise of mobile games and the gentle hybrid brilliance of the Nintendo Switch. But as a child who came up in the handheld-heavy ’90s, my recent vacation travel was dominated by my trusty (if fading) 3DS, and my favorite plane game of all time: Game Freak’s Pocket Card Jockey.
As its name only barely manages to imply, Pocket Card Jockey combines those two most likely of gaming genres: Horse racing and solitaire. The details don’t entirely matter—you play solitaire to make your horse race gooder, in a surprisingly complex number of ways—so much as the reasons the game works so well as a pure, high-focus time devourer. First: It can be played functionally infinitely, with little quirks providing just enough variance to keep the solitaire gameplay fresh. Second, it is punishingly difficult, often to the point of unfairness—meaning, like a distant parent, you are constantly feeling the push to improve yourself and please it. And third, it contains just enough low-level RPG mechanics to make you feel a genuine sense of progress as you breed better and better horses for yourself, even though no horse is so good that getting completely fucked by the cards won’t put you smack dab at the back of the pack. (See, then, point two, and the compulsion to try to eke out an impossibly perfect series of races.)
Good plane games don’t have to match all of these exact criteria, of course, but they do need at least a few of them. They can’t be narratively heavy, because the goal here isn’t to engage the frontal lobe of your brain at all. (That’s busy contemplating the sheer insanity of a human body hurtling at hundreds of miles per hour in a metal tube through the sky, or, in my case, following the plot of old episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot that I’ve downloaded to my phone.) (Oh, Captain Hastings, when will you ever find true love?) And they need to be the right kind of repetitive, because god knows you’ve got time to kill as the Spirit Airlines flight attendants try to lure you, siren-like, into blowing $4 on a tiny bottle of life-giving water. And they probably can’t be mechanically very elaborate, because you don’t want to cramp up your hands or get weird looks from the seatmate you’ve become permanent thigh buddies with, just because you’re trying to play a first-person shooter on a handheld on a plane. There’s a very narrow window of simplicity and compulsion that exists primarily to fill this space, games you don’t want to give your head or heart to, just your hands, and they’re incredibly precious in the right (very cramped) circumstances.
I try not to ever play Pocket Card Jockey—which, I feel moved by the spirit to note, got re-released on the Switch earlier this year—at home, for pretty much those same reasons: It exists to eat my time in massive quantities, and I’m supposed to be using that time to be a person, or cook dinner, or write columns about how The First Descendent has spent more time “in maintenance” since it launched earlier this week than it has in an actual playable state. (Sorry, still a little annoyed.) But when I’m seeking a simple machine to turn the “now” I’m stuck living through into a better future in as painless a way as possible, it pretty much can’t be beat. Even if I’m going to lose my goddamn mind and chuck my 3DS across the aisle the next time my horse goes runaway, just because I got a string of like six useless 4's in a row when I’m just trying to clear the fucking board, Jesus flipping Christ Pocket Card Jockey, are you really going to do me like this?!