Back in the olde days, there was only one game you could play with a mouse. How it worked was they built a big roulette wheel kind of thing with numbered holes around its circumference. They’d give the wheel a spin, and plunk some poor rodent down in the middle, who would immediately run to one of the holes in a vain attempt to seek refuge. You could put bets on which hole. You can still see this game at the fair sometimes, but they use rats now instead of mice, for three reasons:

1. Rats are bigger and easier for everyone to see.

2. Rats are more brazen than mice, which will sometimes just freeze, terrified, in the middle of the spinning game contraption and urinate instead of trying to take control of their destiny by running for one of the numbered cubbies.

3. No one gives a crap about rats, so the fact that this game is kind of cruel doesn’t seem to bother anybody the way it might if it was a cute, fluffy white mouse trembling and nauseated in the center of the turntable.

So now pretty much the only gaming mice you’re likely to see are not real mice at all, but cursor-pointing gizmos like this one here. Is the Razer Diamondback Plasma Blue gaming mouse have an adorable little sweet fuzzy face? No. Is it soft and warm? Not especially. But it does have seven programmable buttons, and is almost guaranteed not to poop in your hand.

Back to top