On Wasting Time in a Lockdown

I’ve resurrected this blog to talk about some of the media I’m consuming during the shutdown. Here’s a piece about Nintendo 3DS game Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon and killing time.

In Luigi’s Mansion, a Nintendo GameCube game released in 2001, Luigi wins a mansion in a contest he did not enter. When he tries to collect his prize, he’s bamboozled by a bunch of ghosts and his brother Mario is captured, because the mansion he won is actually haunted. Yes, Luigi is your uncle who got an email about a free trip to Vegas, and he replied to it.  

From there, Luigi runs into Elvin Gadd (or E. Gadd if you’re nasty), a scientist with a very limited Rolodex, who basically tricks Luigi into vacuuming up the ghosts, and (cleaning the mansion!) in order to find Mario.

It’s reasonable that Luigi would act heroically to save his brother. But in the sequel, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, Gadd has another ghost problem and just up and calls Luigi, a plumber, to vacuum a whole neighborhood of mansions. That’s crazy. Luigi should’ve hung up and blocked the number.

He doesn’t because then there’d be no game, and so Luigi vacuums the ghosts, and it’s fun, but it got me thinking about how we’re spending our time in the quarantine.

With some extra time on our hands, are we reading more? Are we cooking more? Are we vacuuming every square inch of our video game mansions? Oh, we definitely are doing that. I started playing this game as a diversion for the times I wasn’t eating, drinking, walking the dog, or eating again, and it has been weirdly comforting to clean so much virtual muck.

For a game ostensibly about busting ghosts, Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon is basically “Marie Kondo: The Game.” Dark Moon has five mansions to clear, and each mansion is split into a handful of levels with a single quest. Each quest asks Luigi to vacuum about a dozen ghosts. But the quests aren’t timed, and you have to figure out where the ghosts are (aided by a very handy map on the 3DS’ second screen) so much like you might find yourself wasting time as you shelter in place, Luigi can kill time by walking around and vacuuming every square inch of the game’s mansions.

Do the curtains spark joy? No? Suck ‘em up.

Sick of this rug? Suck it up, and pull off that strip of peeling wallpaper while you’re at it.

You also spend a lot of time vacuuming piles of dust, spiderwebs, or snow, depending on the mansion. You clean SO MUCH in a game about busting ghosts.

There are gameplay-related reasons for this. Namely that the game mechanic you use to bust ghosts is fun, but not infinitely so. If that was all you did, Dark Moon would need to be shorter. As it is, the game’s difficulty borders on non-existent until the last mansion, where it suddenly gets almost jarringly tough compared to what came before.  

Ordinarily, something being longer than it needs to be drives me crazy (two and a half hour movies, I am looking at you), but this was the perfect way to spend a week.