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06.18.06
The Fireworks Factory
posted by Absinthe | 3:17 AM
I have wasted far too much of my life.
Far, far too much. If you took out the portions of my life that I’ve spent playing videogames and instead assigned that time to significant skill- and character-building exercises, I would estimate that I’d own approximately one-fourth of the Western Hemisphere by now. I’d be the President of the United States and be making coy glances at Ottawa, secretly assigning a composer to work on an anthem for the Great Nation Of Canadusa. Or Usanada. Amerinada. Camerixico if I was feeling particularly expansive that day.
I’d be packing up my Nobel Prize for literature to make room for a real Nobel, the Peace Prize I got for solving the world’s energy crisis with the Zero Point theorem I came up with after I slipped in my hacienda-tiled shower one morning. I should have gotten the physics prize for that as well but it was a good year for science, what with the guy who discovered how to control the flow of tachyons in cooking appliances and made Rachel Ray’s 30-Minute Meals twenty-nine-point-nine-nine-something minutes more irrelevant. Coincidentally enough, he also had his eureka moment as he slipped in the shower. But my shower is nicer.
I love videogames. Too much. When I grew up I whiled away far too many afternoons, holidays, summer vacations and ostensible sick days (to be fair, allergies were murder on my energy level, but so long as you’re not trying to play Activision Decathlon you can hold a joystick pretty well) hunched over in front of whatever console I could get my hands on. For most of my youth this was an Atari 2600, which was hooked up to an ancient black-and-white set that took a good forty-five seconds to warm up and had the sonic reproduction capabilities of a tin can attached to a gramophone. I also had a Commodore 64 with an off-brand, external floppy disk drive, which could usually handle an Infocom game but routinely crashed after an hour or two of straining to keep up with The Bard’s Tale. This was not the ideal way to experience this (or any) game. But I kept reloading it, which took even more time away from the usual childhood activities like biking, playing with other children, and learning to smile in a way that doesn’t give the impression that you have an unnatural and rather untoward interest in exposed necks.
Take those games away and I’d have had a college degree by fourteen. Twelve. I was on a pretty good pace by age eight, but then I discovered a method of entertaining myself that didn’t involve reading two or three hundred pages a day. (Given my already tenuous relationship with libraries vis-a-vis their prompt return policies, and my masochistic one with bookstores, it’s possible my parents viewed the ridiculously expensive VCS and cartridges as a tradeoff – Space Invaders was a heavy investment compared to a paperback, but it would probably keep me busy for more than three or four hours; also, if I read fewer books, I would still be a precociously annoying know-it-all but one that they could occasionally teach a few things.)
This is the sort of thing I think one is supposed to outgrow. Or at least that’s what I keep hearing. But I mostly hear it from people who can recite sixteen-year-old box scores or Queensryche lyrics or the name and/or – probably or – measurements of every SI swimsuit model since 1987. Which, coincidentally enough, is a) the year I accepted that I was going to be a nerd and that was that, and b) the year I would have been accepted into a Masters’ program for whatever I would have been studying had I not instead been sharpening my twitch reflexes and finger-eye coordination and otherwise developing skills that would not, under any circumstances, get me laid in my first score years. (I still managed. But it was by no means easy.)
Also I had a mustache. There are pictures. For now. Non-videogame me would probably have done something about them by now. And one way or another wiped the memories of anyone who’d ever seen them. But then non-videogame me would have had plenty of time to learn how to shave, too.
The pitiable thing, I’m now learning, is that I’m no longer particularly good at videogames. I could hold my own in the arcades back when a buck would get you anywhere from five to seven tokens, probably because the place I spent most of my time playing – seven tokens for a dollar, forty for five dollars – cranked up the difficulty ratings to the maximum in order to cut down the play-per-coin time. Crushing your opponents in head-to-head Street Fighter 2 is fairly easy when you learned against a circuit board that had instantaneous response times and, let’s face it, cheated all the fucking time. I could kill half an hour in an airport with one quarter on a Xevious machine before I got bored and wondered where all the bullets that were supposed to be flying at me had mysteriously disappeared to.
But these days, I just don’t have the devotion. I don’t have the hours to devote to learn how to camp near spawn points without getting caught, or come up with fancy tricks to lower my ping so I can PWN U WIT MY SNIPES. (My wife will, predictably, beg to differ, at which point I will be forced to counter by suggesting that, had she traded all of her life’s moisturizing time for sessions with a competent sensei, I might be able to take her more seriously when she threatens to punch me in the nose if I don’t stop scooterjacking virtual delivery boys so I can drive-by in style.) I still love videogames too much to ever give them up, but the monomaniacal passion that drove me in pursuit of ever-higher scores to photograph and send in for game patches has left me. (Though perhaps if someone reinstated the practice of actually giving out the patches…)
So now I am an extremely crappy practitioner of the virtual arts. I suck at most games too much to enjoy playing them online, and don’t enjoy the ones where sucking doesn’t really matter. I have wasted huge chunks of my life to be not very good at something that’s essentially useless anyway.
Meanwhile, alternate-reality me has a mansion, a yacht, a harem (a platonic harem, he swears, they’re all just muses), a substantive leadership role over a good portion of the free world, and an eye toward putting a new wing on the moon colony he founded in his mid-twenties. Something for the kids. With a ball room. He has an athletic build, an Olympic-size swimming pool (as befits an Olympic-champion in water-gliding, a sport he invented one day while waiting for a ferry; growing bored, he decided, what the hell, it’s a nice day, I’ll walk), and three well-behaved cats that never, ever throw up on the carpet. Or wouldn’t if he had carpet. He’s more partial to new-growth hardwood and imported artisanal tile.
I hate him so much. My only consolation is knowing that if ever we met on Live, and I said “Hey, how ’bout a deathmatch?” that, well, the fucker would never know what hit him.
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Topics: General Geekery | 8 Comments »
June 18, 2006 at 11:34 AM
Except that he’d have a dozen real snipers aiming at your head waiting for the moment things went cock-eyed.
June 18, 2006 at 6:05 PM
I guess you’ll just have to comfort yourself with your tournament wins.
Gee, darn.
June 18, 2006 at 7:57 PM
Awesome bit of writing, Ryan. You should submit this to NPR.
June 19, 2006 at 6:31 AM
Dude, you can’t play decathalon with a joystick…needed the rollerball thingy for optimal play. Had the Atari 5200 and a Commodore 128…HA! Nice memories! See you at one of the upcoming blogger events. Best of luck.
slb159
June 19, 2006 at 7:49 PM
I agree about submitting this to NPR. I can see it as part of their “This I believe” series.
I wouldn’t mess with the Nobel Peace guy, he’ll probably come back and take your version of your wife.
June 21, 2006 at 9:42 AM
Ahhh….Bard’s Tale. That brought back some memories. I think that is still the only game I completed with no help from anyone.
If you had C-64 you had to have Elite and the Ultima games. Both of which you can now find in their entirety on the web.
June 24, 2006 at 11:40 PM
Not only did I laugh at this, a lot, and enjoy the good writing, but I also related to it, and that’s very sad to me.
January 12, 2009 at 5:16 PM
i’m not sure how the hell i missed this piece, but suffice to say, tis a great writeup. can i relate? more than i’d ever admit.