Cliched Confessions of a Video Game Junkie

This is the third installment of what you could call my "Greatest Hits from Facebook." The following, originally posted as a Facebook note on 7.30.08, deals with my unfortunate obsession with video games. In case you're curious, I'm no longer in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and I do deeply regret using the term "internets."

For the past couple of months, I’ve been heavily involved in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Empress Theatre, which, by the way, is still running for two more weeks. Call (801) 347-7373 for tickets. Now the obligatory advertising is out of the way… Ever since we started performances, I find that I have a lot more free time in the evenings. Of course, with performances every Friday, Saturday, and Monday night, my most “valuable” evenings are still shot. And, as much as I love answering phones and checking my Facebook profile like an OCD hacker for eight hours every day, my job generally robs me of my desire to participate in socially-constructive activities, like miniature golf or playing Frisbee or whatever it is kids do these days. You little scoundrels, you.

Now, I DID spend some time outside this past weekend – I went swimming in a friend’s outdoor pool. It’d been almost 8 or 9 years since I’d actually been swimming (or even been outside without a shirt on), so my ivory-white skin is now… well, I was about to make some crack about how my skin is now redder than Bill Engvall’s neck, but, frankly, I don’t want to encourage him.

So I spend a lot of my time these days playing video games (it’s a good thing I still have the play to keep me busy on Friday nights; after that little confessions, my chances for getting a date probably went down about 63%). Just before graduation, I went out and bought myself a knock-off of the old 8-bit Nintendo system I had from childhood. I’ve got fond memories of our old Nintendo. On Christmas morning, 1988 or so, I got to unwrap the large black box that held the little grey box that played those other little gray boxes and filled my days with vaguely human-shaped sprites and epilepsy-inducing flashes. Yeah, the Nintendo was supposed to be for all of us, but I’M the one who got to unwrap it, and, when you’re four years old, that’s a big deal.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d have been better off without ever taking up video games as a hobby. I know that NES is supposed to stand for “Nintendo Entertainment System,” but I think it would be better as “NES Eats Souls” (yay recursive acronyms!). Video games have devoured more of my time than almost any other single pursuit. I feel especially driven to this question as I’m currently running on four hours of sleep as a result of staying up until 1:00 trying to figure out how to get my pinky up to that stupid orange button on Guitar Hero…

…which leads me right to one of my major complaints about video games. I imagine myself sometimes at a party, playing against a cute girl in Guitar Hero III, and I totally wow everyone watching (and there is quite a crowd gathered around the telly) as I proceed to get 100% accuracy on “Cliffs of Dover.” The girl, too, is quite impressed, and therefore taken with me, as you all should be, ladies *condemning stare*.

(On a completely unrelated note, comedian Demetri Martin claims that the best way to sound like a complete creep is to just add the word “ladies” to the end of everything you say. Not sure why I thought of that).

Once upon a time, I used to fantasize about being a rock star – a fantasy shared by many mentally-healthy men, I imagine. But now, rather than actually PLAYING the guitar in my fantasies, I’m mashing brightly-colored buttons on a cheap plastic toy in front of grown-ups, and I’m not ashamed of it. Video games are taking over my fantasies.

Now, good storytelling captures the imagination, and I’m all for this. And there have been some very commendable efforts towards turning video games into a real art form. For your consideration, the game Psychonauts, which gets props from me for having a quirky, compelling story with a dozen or so fully-developed and deranged supporting characters. Plus, you get to condemn squirrels to a blazing eternity in purgatory by lighting them on fire with your brain – which I’m pretty sure falls squarely into the “Things that are Totally Awesome” category on the Jeopardy! board. As much as I love the game Psychonauts, the public at large doesn’t. According to that great Oracle of the Internets, Wikipedia, Psychonauts is on the list of the biggest commercial failures in video game history, a little fact which supports my theory that video gamers are all mouth-breathing twits.

But I’m not really talking about “good” storytelling. Believe it or not, there actually IS a plot to Guitar Hero III – something about dueling the devil to see who rocks harder – but that storyline exists solely to give the programmers an excuse to create cut scenes in between song sets, which are kinda funny, but ultimately pointless – like Brendan Fraser.

And then there are the images. I’m the type of person who likes to lie awake in bed at the end of the day and, well, “daydream,” if you can call it that when it’s dark out. Sometimes I indulge in a bit of idle fantasizing, like when I imagine myself as a superhero (given a choice of superpowers, I’d pick flight every time). Sometimes I flesh out ideas for novels that will almost inevitably not get written. And sometimes I somehow come up with a great idea for a poem, and that’s generally enough to drag me out of bed to get it written down. This, by the way, explains why I write so many poems in my underwear. Not, of course, that you needed an explanation for why I write poetry in my underwear, because most of you probably didn’t KNOW that I write poetry in my underwear, so… umm… never mind.

Video games don’t allow for free thinking. If I’ve been playing games before going to bed, when I close my eyes, I see nothing but images from the game. If the game’s visually exciting, like, say, Psychonauts (heh, burning squirrels), I won’t be too bothered. But I’ve spent hours in bed replaying, in my head, Tetris, Solitaire, and Bejeweled. And nothing will make you feel like a bigger waste of human flesh than losing at a game of Bejewled in your own head.

I suppose I could forego video games altogether, spend some time outside, get a bit more tan so I don’t have to worry about those redneck burns anymore (curse you, Engvall!). However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from video games, it’s that nature is actively trying to kill me. I could just be walking along, minding my own business, and then, all of a sudden, a Blue Slime, Giant Rat, Ocelot, or some other cartoonish monstrosity will jump out of nowhere and proceed to bite on my ankles. Worst of all would be a bird – doesn’t matter if you’re a ninja chasing drug smugglers through the mountains or the son of a blacksmith in a Transylvanian castle, all the birds in the vicinity will immediately dive at you like (insert your own tasteless suicide bomber/kamikaze pilot joke here).

Besides, there’s still a way to get the social interaction every growing child needs: the second-player controller.