Those who say cranking a drive 320 yards down the fairway, using only a rollerball, a timely hip shift and perhaps the bag of chips in your other hand for balance against the video game is not a sport to be played at the Bold Center are blocking the digital revolution. Video golf takes skill, accuracy, timing and money. Just like getting a membership and using exercise equipment at the Bold Center. Likewise, Deer Hunter games and Dance Dance Revolution not only develop hand-eye coordination, they also help work up a sweat, either from the nervous energy of stalking a pixel-perfect stag through the Kentucky mountains, or from following little digital footsteps as House, Trance or Trance-House music and flashing lights pulse into our dilated pupils and slightly agape mouths. Please folks, before you start spouting your Footloose-like sermons on the evils of an arcade in the Bold Center, first try a game of Halo, Call of Duty, MarioCart, or Assassin's Creed. You'll see. Crazy action, furious movements, life and death situations, bright colours, and lots and lots of two-dimensional landscapes that really look like you're in the digital world being played in. What? Don't see the relevance in comparing that to a full workout, running track cool down and a quick game of 21 with a buddy on the basketball court? Well, Mr. Bold Center member, maybe you should give your brain a workout instead of your biceps. The video game experience of today is life-like. Gone are the slow marching drones of Space Invaders, inching across the screen like an archaic typewriter. Now we have worlds so realistic they actually interact with the user. Game worlds are better than our dreams or our imaginations. Why plod, step after step, on the treadmill, pretending the view out the window of the parking lot is actually a scenic mountain trail. Or why push another pedal on the elliptical bike pretending you're rolling through a Parisian village when you're actually staring at the sweaty back and clenching and unclenching buttocks of the guy on the leg curl machine beside you? Plug in a loonie and get a workout of the senses as you shoot aliens, dance to world-famous Djs, and watch the 'digital you' walk the fairways of Pebble Beach. You'll be out of shape and covered in potato chip shrapnel, but that pixel person with your screen name on the video monitor will be looking trim and fit. Stay in that world. After all, a world where people scoff at a video arcade being put inside a $55 million recreation facility with an attached high school, is not a world you belong in anyway. Game on, baby. Game on.
