Video Games And Me

Here we go!

Sorry, I’m not going to be writing a blog tonight. You see, I just received my Xbox 360 from Amazon, and as you might remember, I’ve been waiting a good six months for this, so… Yeah. Sorry. Grand Theft Auto IV won’t play itself, after all. Run along, now! Go enjoy some other part of the Internet – Zero Punctuation updated today, and you could do well to start reading Achewood or maybe The Expiring Leader.

Well, go! Go away! There’s no blog here, alright? Don’t look at me that way! You think I wanted it to be like this? I didn’t plan for the game system I’ve been impatiently waiting for for so long to arrive today – it just kind of happened, and now that I’m on the cusp of the video game world, certain sacrifices will have to be made. I won’t get out of the house as much, and I might not do as much writing as I’d intended to, and maybe I’ll let petty luxuries like eating and hygiene go by the wayside.

This has happened before. The year was 1996, and the console was the Nintendo 64. Remember the Nintendo 64? It was the system Nintendo made that didn’t involve any of these new fangled disks, and it had less processing power than your cell phone, and when you played it you actually pushed buttons instead of waving a little white thing around. Until the Nintendo 64 came out, I’d had little interest in video games – I was a fat and lazy 1st grader, and rejected the notion of having to react to images and push buttons, as I felt that watching Wishbone and eating Cheez-Its at the same time was hard enough work already. However, one faithful day my father bought a Nintendo 64 on his way home from work, and my life was forever changed. Much in the same way that heroin sounds disgusting and dangerous up until you try it, the Nintendo 64 proved to be a highly addictive force that dominated me through most of elementary school.

For years, my parents and I spent every evening playing Mario Kart 64, gleefully shouting and whooping at one another in what the neighbors surely thought was some of the most rambunctious spousal abuse they’d ever heard. At first I, the 8 year old, had a distinct advantage, because the relaxed pace of my life allowed me lots of time to practice. However, my father eventually started working from home, and while he denies it I feel certain that he spent literally every moment that Mom was at work and I was at school playing Mario Kart, because he got a lot better after he started his new job.

Games begat games and I was well on my way to becoming the accomplished nerd you see before you today. I honestly don’t remember anything about the summer between 3rd and 4th grade, save for the fact that I spent more time playing Super Mario 64 than I have ever spent on any other commitment in my life (apologies to my professors, my trumpet instructors, and my ex-girlfriends). I logged serious time in Pilotwings 64, a remarkably simple game that could have just as easily been called Fly Around In A Gyrocopter Doing Stuff 64. However, it was when I first started playing Goldeneye 64 that video games stopped being heroin and became crack. Filled with gold. And delicious, delicious Crunchwrap Supremes.

Goldeneye, based on the 1995 James Bond film of the same remarkably silly name, is one of the best selling video games of all time, having sold over eight million copies. The basic premise of the game was that you, James Bond, have to shoot a lot of different people in a few different settings in order to save the world – and man, was that ever a concept to base a game around! I was an 8-year-old boy; I loved James Bond and I loved violence. My friends and I spent many afternoons brutally murdering one another over and over again in multiplayer, I talked endlessly about the best weapons and strategies for each situation, and I started drawing pictures of guns and explosions the likes of which you might see drawn by a hollow eyed Serbian boy sitting in the burned out husk of what had once been his elementary school. All of this was rather concerning to my Mom and Dad, who subscribed to the belief that, if your kid runs around drawing pictures of AK47s and eagerly discussing multiple homicide, you probably fucked the pooch pretty bad somewhere in the parenting process.

Now, it’s probably too soon to call whether my parents did in fact screw up bigtime during my upbringing, but one thing is certain: I kept on playing violent video games as I progressed from elementary into middle and middle into high school. My philosophy was, and is, that video games are all about fulfilling your dreams, which is why racing and sports games never interested me. However, I have always felt a deep-seated urge to rescue the president’s daughter from zombies, and video games gave me the chance to do what I feel I was made to do. That’s the beauty of video games: They allow you to do something that you want to do but never realistically could. As soon as a good sex video game comes along, you can bet that I’ll buy that, too.

It’s awkward being a fan of violent video games. I’m pretty sure the media doesn’t blame your favorite hobby for mass murder (unless your favorite hobby is mass murder). The entire genre that I favor – the first person shooter – is all about shooting people until they’re dead, and thus people tend to assume that were it not for self restraint, I would be shooting them until they were dead. Games of this genre are commonly referred to as “shooters”; crazy people who take a gun into a shopping mall are also called “shooters”. My hobby walks hand in hand with psychosis – pretty much every emotionally stunted teenager to ever go on a shooting spree at his high school has the same taste in video games that I do. It’s like if your favorite color is green, and then you find out that Hitler’s favorite color was green too.

Not only do I have to contend with the fact that I play the same games as the criminally insane, I also have to contend with the fact that I play the same games as the criminally stupid – males aged 18 to 35. If you’ve ever met a young man who claims membership in a college fraternity, I guarantee you that within the last 48 hours he was playing a first person shooter called Halo; a highly mediocre, highly successful game that is as much a part of manhood these days as the possession of testicles. First person shooters tend to pander to the violent emotions of manly men – thousands of years ago, we gents would be hitting one another with rocks and dragging women around by the hair, but now we’re content to push buttons in sequence in order to hit one another with bullets and drag the other team’s flag around by the hair. I find it just as offensive to be lumped into the same category as macho JV football players as I do being lumped into the same category as psychopaths.

The simple fact is that I like violent video games because I like the story they tell. A good video game to me is an interactive movie – you’re as much a part of the plot as anyone else, and your actions determine the outcome. I can’t help the fact that I like stories that usually involve people shooting each other (not a lot of that happened in Cat’s Cradle, but I doubt that any of Vonnegut’s books will get receive video game adaptations), and video games give me the chance to live in the world of the stories I find the most interesting. Now that I’ve got an Xbox 360, I’ll be able to live in beautifully rendered stories, complete with flashy particle effects and capacity for online play.

And that’s why I’m not updating my blog toni…

Well, shit.

Truman Capps wants his parents to know, should they see him killing any hookers in Grand Theft Auto 4, that the hookers totally had it coming.