I am playing Lumines. I am in the groove. The whole board is basically clear. I am already at my previous high score and I am quickly taking off for the stratosphere. If life were NBA Jam, I would literally be on fire. My hands are moving with a precision that a concert pianist would envy. There is nothing that can stop me. When Masterlookas sees this score, honest to god, tears are going to fall out of his eyes.

And then bloop blip.  I’ve got a message from my friend.

I shrug and pause to send a reply.

Bloop blip; another message from another friend. I sigh and send a quick reply.

I un-pause the game and get back to it, only now I am out of the groove. I am making stupid mistakes. Moves that a moment ago would have cleared the board are now horrendous mistakes that are quickly piling up. I scramble as my nerves begin to fray. I could still come back from this. All it would take is one piece. I set everything up for this one moment as I prepare to come back from all of my little mistakes. I can get the groove back, I just need this one piece.

Bloop blip; another message at the exact moment I am rotating the block to clear everything.

The little bloop blip somehow causes everything to stutter and hiccup for just long enough for me to miss placing the one piece that can save me. There is nothing I can do now. As I watch the last piece begin to fall, I let out a cry of frustration so loud that my dog thinks I am signaling him to attack my cat.

And so my dreams of glory are dashed and I feel like Samuel Taylor Coleridge as he was composing Kubla Khan; my masterpiece brought to a halt by a mundane distraction.

This is not the first time that this has happened.

Messages have caused my death numerous times. The all time best (and worst) came courtesy of Masterlookas.  I was going through the silos in Call of Duty 4 on veteran, which is by far the toughest section of the game. Masterlookas knew that I was having a bit of trouble so, like the great friend that he is, he sent me a message.

“I hope this message distracts you and you die!”

Ah, friendship is grand isn’t it? Sure enough, his message did distract me and, sure enough, some crazy Russian trooper shot me in the face and I had to restart.

I love that I can send messages to my friends no matter what game they are playing. I have used the messenger service to interrupt my friends in the middle of a movie so I can tell them that I had just made a hilarious joke at their expense (don’t want to talk behind someones back without letting them know that I zinged them). I had no qualms about firing off messages whenever I see they are online. I didn’t really care if they were on the last boss or trying to beat an impossibly hard level. Who cares what they are doing? I have a mildly amusing joke I have to tell them.

However, I (like all reasonable, rational people) have decided that it is completely unfair when a message distracts and/or kills me. Xbox Live should include a feature where the system knows that you are in a cool or difficult part and waits to deliver the message. I have no clue as to what sort of programming stuff would be involved in this, but I do know there are all sorts of hertz and gigabytes and other make-believe words inside of Xbox 360′s, so maybe a couple of those could be used to keep messages from popping up when I am “en fuego”.