Becoming Gamer Thoughts (Part 1)

I've been obsessed with the notion of using my time wisely for the last number of years. I believe it probably started when I stopped smoking cigarettes and using hard drugs, as right around then I began to develop the urge to actually stay alive and actually do something with my time. I realized that I had lost a lot of that, time, in the blurry years prior. The blurry, fun, memorable, life changing, personality developing, lesson learning, insane years prior, but in that time was lost.





I feel that when I look around to the people of my age group and now the people younger, and see what they've accomplished, what they did while I was fucking off and it doesn't feel that great. But I let that feeling run its course and I try to let it go and I try not to let it eat me up inside or make me feel like I'm shit, but that is hard. It's one of the reasons why I've tried to stay far away from social media, I love that I have successful friends and friends who live life on their own terms, but I feel so far from that, so trapped, and so deserving of my stasis.

So with that in mind, it might be curious to learn that I decided about 6 or 7 months ago to become a gamer.

Well not a full blown gamer, not a "all the things" gamer with all the...you know...things? But I realized that I had been short changing video games for years. What made me realize it was a program by the Brit Culture Dissector/Celebrator/Analyzer/Masturbator/Terminator Charlie Brooker called How Videogames Changes The World. In it I realized not only that far more people were playing videogames than I thought, but also some fairly successful people were as well (that's successful, not happy, let's keep our 21st century personal achievement guides close at hand).

I's always come down on the wrong side of the "Are Videogames Art?" question, which is strange for someone who's spend so much of his life in the geek/nerd worlds of fandom. It wasn't until Charlie's program that I began to seriously think about videogames, their impact on people, society and everything. So I got a PS3 (because I'm not a mountain dew drinking, motorcross watching, mullet wearing weirdo) and for awhile things were good. Things were very good.

I was trying to find my way into the somewhat terrifyingly huge world of videogames, since while Brooker's program was informative, the vast majority of the games weren't for the PS3 so I couldn't just follow his list for guidance. I bought Bioshock without knowing it was a horror game. That was a fun revelation. I legitimately thought it was an undersea adventure game, when you first get your first glimpse of the underwater city my jaw was on the floor and all I could think was, "MAN THIS IS GONNA BE SO MUCH FUN! I CANT WAIT TO EXPLORE THE SHOPS AND SEE THE SIGHTS". And then right as the little undersea elevator ball stops, I get attacked by an insane zombie creature. And I realized that I had no idea about videogames.

So I went out looking for games that were not scary, but also not sports related (which pretty much narrows down the field to games for little kids or military based games, which are scary in their own special way). Along the way I got Arkham Asylum which I loved, but then I got Arkham City, which I didn't really enjoy at all, making me the only one I think? But then I was saved from tedium by the Assassin's Creed series.

I was immediately hooked and devoured game after game, beating them week after week, reveling in my lucky starting point at AC fandom, being a fan now meaning that I already had loads of games to play, without having to wait years while they develop them. "Those poor fools who followed it from the beginning!" I thought cackling wildly "I have supped in mere moments what they waited eons to enjoy!"

And it was good, for a time. Until I got to Assassin's Creed III and it broke my PS3 habit to pieces. A habit I still have not yet recovered and that was well over a month ago. I had heard that it had its issues, but I wasn't prepared for how truly, unplayably shitty the game was. How all the controls had been messed with for no sensible reason and now the most basic of actions were irritatingly difficult or how badly the characters moved or how dull and obnoxious the few missions I undertook were.

I've heard ACIV is great and totally redeems the franchise, so once it drops a little bit in price I'm going to check it out. A friend of mine who knows games tried to get me into two popular RPG-type fantasy games, Skyrim and Dead Souls. However he chose, both times(!) to wait until we had been drinking for hours to introduce them to me, making the games become in my mind, hazy, unintelligible, confusing weird things that I come back to a day later totally baffled by and they sit on the shelf staring at me sadly while I stare back at the ACIII case glowering for all the pain it caused my developing gamer ego.

I bought CoD:Modern Warfare 2 because that was one of the games on Brooker's list that I could get cheaply that would play on the PS3 but I haven't played it yet (see earlier section of entry re: mountain dew/motorcross). I have the next few days off and while I have plenty of plans of the serious and grown up variety, I'm going to take another stab at rekindling my PS3 habit because it was so so good before it was so so bad.

-louie-