You Won’t See Me Coming
Until I strike!
Today I want to defend something pretty near to my heart: video games. Oh, they rot your mind, people say. Well that may be, but I think I’ve been helped in life more than hindered in my hobby of video games. For the sake of this entry, I’m going to count pretty much all games played on a computer or gaming console as a “video game”. I also played a heck of a lot more games than I’ll actually mention right now, because not all of them changed my life. (Maybe those were the mind-rotting ones!)
Anyways, let’s start at the very beginning. I could use a mouse long before I could hold a pencil, so my first game was Sesame Street Colouring Book. I don’t know if this would widely be considered a video game, but I don’t regret starting the mouse-usage at a young age. My job right now requires some pretty precise mouse movements at times. And think of all the paper I saved! (Okay, but I used more than my fair share of paper as a kid, I admit.)
The second set is a big one: my dad had my brother and me play tons of games by The Learning Company, and for a while they were more or less the only games we had available to us. We played Reader Rabbit ad nauseum, along with Math Rabbit, hours and hours of Gizmos and Gadgets (my brother credits this game for his choice later in life to become an engineer), Treasure Mountain, Outnumbered, and many more. Now, it’s kind of impossible to say how much these games helped us in life, but both of us always got pretty darn high marks, and I don’t remember either of us having an ounce of trouble with elementary school. For sure, my brother learned how to read by playing Sierra’s The Incredible Machine.
The next phase is when the strategy, gore and violence started. Doom 2 was a wonderfully fun game! Our computers were networked so Mike and I could blow up the forces of evil along with dad, or our cousin Dustin when he visited. This is really what made it fun. Dustin had this rule that we had to wait for him before opening doors so that he could protect us from the monsters on the other side (or so he said). If we didn’t wait, he always said, “Hey! No partying without the man!” I remember that so clearly for some reason! Still, my finest hour in Doom came a bit later when I was playing with one of my dad’s friends one time. He declared “Deathmatch!” when we’d killed all the monsters, surely thinking that a seven-year-old girl in pigtails couldn’t possibly beat him at a first person shooter. Oh, how very wrong he was. He couldn’t even kill me once. (That was the day I learned the word ‘Turd!’) This whetted my appetite for being a girl gamer, beating guys at their own games. Playing Doom gave way to playing Duke Nukem, Rise of the Triad (extra gibs mode), Heretic and Hexen. FPSs were so fun on the computer, but I could never get the hang of them on consoles. This is a crying shame, because I think I have the preconditioning to beat every boy in youth group at Halo. It just never happened for me!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Around grade four or five, my very favourite game was Sonic 3 and Knuckles. I played so many hours of this game, it probably doesn’t bear thinking about. Sonic didn’t help me in life as far as skills go, but it did give me a common interest with my brother at a time in our lives when we weren’t exactly best pals. Together we played through the levels and tried to beat the game with all three characters. I remember, trying to beat one level with Knuckles was taking forever because the boss was so hard. We failed at it for days, and then Mike went to science camp. I told him I’d keep trying. When my mom picked him up, before he even said hi, he asked “Did Colette beat Launch Base?!”
I did beat it!
Eventually I beat Sonic enough times that I decided to take a break. That was alright because we’d discovered the next amazing game: Diablo. I love everything about this game. The story is great, the quests are great, and it had (for me) a feel about it that has not been matched by any other. It is so gothic-looking and amazing. I’ve disclosed this to a few people, but this is the truth: not a day goes by even now that I don’t want to play it again.
When I get stressed at work, I play the Tristram music on my iPod. It seriously mellows me out. I think my brain has tied it to the thought, “You’re safe now, nothing can hurt you.” After all, haven’t we all opened a town portal in blind panic as Deathspit and his minions rapid-fired acid boogers at us? Being in town is wonderful!
So, video games… lots of people think they’re just a waste of time. But really, they’re that plus so much more! As long as they are balanced with real life, they’ll probably help a child more than they hinder him. At their purest, they act as a link back to those white-hot childhood days when things were simple. I think it’s partly why I so enjoy Video Games Live. A lot of those songs have really, really good memories attached to them.
“How am I supposed to remember trivial facts like who the Prime Minister of the UK is, when my brain is filled with actually useful knowledge? I know the name, quote, and effect of every Shrine in Diablo!” – Mike
