[INFORMATIVE DISCLAIMER: This post includes a number of illustrative video links designed to accompany my words. If you're the sort of person who never really takes the time to let those things speak to you, or can't be bothered with the complexity of multiple ideas all coming together to form one woven point, you'll probably not get the maximum intended effect of this post. That isn't to say they're all meant to be watched start to finish (though I did mostly choose palatable 1-2 minute clips, when I had a choice). But if you can spare the time and attention span, let the whole thing speak to you. *shrugs* It's really up to you, though.]
Today I'm thinking about stories, and the woman of my dreams. Here's a diagram that allegories my quest for her hand, which I hope comes attached to the rest of a woman or I probably won't keep it even if I do get it:
Last night I wrote this:
"You know what makes my life worth living? *Stories.* Nothing
more, nothing less. Everyone thinks I love video games, but it's stories I love. The game is just the supreme medium through which to tell one."
Roger Ebert and I would have one hell of an argument about that one, I'm sure. Maybe I'll bring it up at our next celebrity poker night. He bets more carelessly when he's upset, you know. 'S how I got that yacht I haven't told Sister about just yet.
At any rate, I was touching on a thought I've had semi-frequently over the years, usually whenever I encounter someone a bit too comfortable categorizing others and making tandem assumptions based on those categorizations. A person who plays video games more than once or twice a lifetime is now acceptably called a "gamer," which I guess started off as a description of a person who played a great many. Soon that became known as the modified "hardcore gamer," with the less-frequent devotees being known as "casual gamers." These denotations seemed odd to me from the very start, I have to admit. If you enjoy watching movies, as most people do, are you a "film buff"? A "movie nut"? How many movies a week would you have to watch to be known as either of these? They all carry the connotation of uniquity through excessiveness; the only reason it's worth inventing a specific term to describe is because it's understood to be an anomaly that someone likes the thing that abnormally much. Another common (and particularly pet peevey, for me) butchering of my native language that people tend to perpetrate in this sphere is the adding of the suffix "-holic" or "-aholic" to the end of a word to indicate excess or exaggerated addiction to that thing.
Lemme 'splain something to you.
You are an alcoholic if you are afflicted with an addiction to alcohol. That is a word, "alcohol," combined with a suffix, "-ism," conjugated to a noun as "-ic." Alcoholic. Alcoholism. There is no suffix "-holism," no matter how new-wave online-ordained priesty you may be about things. You cannot be a "chocoholic," even if you enjoy the everloving pantaloons off of chocolate at every turn and have a secret love affair with the fruit of the cacao tree in your neighbor's back yard. This is not possible, because that word makes no inherent sense. Unless you dip your Hershey's bar in a snifter of the finest bourbon before each and every bite, in which case you are riddled with addictions and food combination fad diets and should seek help squared*, you cannot make any kind of case for that word making any sense whatsoever.
Anyway. Gamers. Yes. I have a theory that this term didn't originate externally at all; that is, I don't believe the first person to refer to a human as a "gamer" was a non-gamer, but more likely a person who enjoyed video games and felt a need to self-define based on that aspect. This isn't all that hard to understand; most of us present at the beginning of the Nintendo wave are of a particular generation who discovered we had this brand new tool to retreat to whenever things got tough out there in the real world. For a long time the people who played the poop out of some video games were also, by and large, the same people who were regularly stuffed into, slammed against, or lifted first and then stuffed/slammed into lockers at school*. Naturally, these folks eventually felt a need to embrace something internally as a source of pride, and what better than the escape hatch itself? Besides, I don't know if you ever got your chops with video games back in the Nintendo era, but them shit's was hard. I'm not even joking. This is a thing. Even without all the armchair psychology I just Boomer'd out above, anybody who's ever played and beaten the goddamn Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES deserves some actual pride. Terrorists use that game during waterboarding to make the whole experience even worse; you get dunked, you think you're drowning, you're upside down and it's going in your nose, then suddenly someone's roughly shoving a tiny controller in your hands and there's a goddamn underwater TV down there with TMNT on it. And you're on stage 3. And you've already lost Donatello.
And yes. I have beaten Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES without the use of a cheat device. And I have a witness. Nobody's offered to pay me (yet) to do video game reviews, so I won't go into all the gritty detail about this game's inherent bastardy. Besides which, no one could possibly do it better than the esteemed James Rolfe, a.k.a. The Angry Video Game Nerd. Watch his awesome review here, if you're curious. Not Safe For Work, though; hilarious language. Fair warning.
I want to travel. Widely. In the future, if and when I'm not eating cereal out of the box with one hand while I type to stave off malnutrition, I see trips to Europe, to Japan, to Australia and New Zealand and Hobbiton. I imagine long plane flights with tiny pillows and never quite enough space to spread out, or a week-long trip on a passenger ship with the crispness of salt air laden with spray ever evident, or idly passing hours doing pencil sketches of a woman's eyes while sitting in a comfortable train seat. I imagine those adventures in a dozen different forms... but no matter how I daydream it, someone is there with me. I can reach over and enclose her hand in mine while she sleeps. And I even gently wipe up a bit of drool, and never tell her that she drooled a little, because the secrets that make people feel better without ever knowing it when they're kept forever are the best secrets of all.
Lemme 'splain something to you.
* Help x help = thehell'samattawithyou
Anyway. Gamers. Yes. I have a theory that this term didn't originate externally at all; that is, I don't believe the first person to refer to a human as a "gamer" was a non-gamer, but more likely a person who enjoyed video games and felt a need to self-define based on that aspect. This isn't all that hard to understand; most of us present at the beginning of the Nintendo wave are of a particular generation who discovered we had this brand new tool to retreat to whenever things got tough out there in the real world. For a long time the people who played the poop out of some video games were also, by and large, the same people who were regularly stuffed into, slammed against, or lifted first and then stuffed/slammed into lockers at school*. Naturally, these folks eventually felt a need to embrace something internally as a source of pride, and what better than the escape hatch itself? Besides, I don't know if you ever got your chops with video games back in the Nintendo era, but them shit's was hard. I'm not even joking. This is a thing. Even without all the armchair psychology I just Boomer'd out above, anybody who's ever played and beaten the goddamn Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES deserves some actual pride. Terrorists use that game during waterboarding to make the whole experience even worse; you get dunked, you think you're drowning, you're upside down and it's going in your nose, then suddenly someone's roughly shoving a tiny controller in your hands and there's a goddamn underwater TV down there with TMNT on it. And you're on stage 3. And you've already lost Donatello.
* Who's brilliant idea was it to line the walls within nearly every public school
in the country with hollow metal spaces that make an incredible barbarian-
pleasing clang sound when a human body strikes one, anyway? That person
deserves a swirly, and no lunch money. And then another swirly.
I am, by the common definition, a "gamer." I might even be considered a "hardcore gamer." I have been known to complete all sidequests, just to do so. I have been known to obey a hidden OCD urge to collect at least one of every item possible just to punish my pretend character's pretend spine from the pretend weight of his pretend backpack and make him pretend hate me a little more. I have bred a gold chocobo. I have killed Crawmerax the Invincible. I have collected 120 stars and met Yoshi on the roof.
 |
| Splinter never turned back to a human anywhere in the TMNT storyline but in this stupid game. He wasn't even originally human at all in the comics! |
These and a hundred other particularly notable video game accomplishments are things I can provably claim... but I don't really mention them very often (he said ironically; yes, I am talking rather a lot about them right now, but I'm pretending to make a larger point, so shut your hole). This has two major reasons.
1. Who really gives a crap? I mean, seriously. If you're not really into video games, you aren't gonna know what the hell I'm on about anyway, all you're gonna hear is that I spent a collective number of hours holding a little thing with buttons that made a thing do a thing for pretend. That's not terribly impressive, and it doesn't really translate. And if you are really into video games, I'm genuinely sorry to say it, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred I don't really give a damn about impressing you. It's an uncomfortable reality, but a true one: the kinds of fellows who define themselves vocally by their fantasy accomplishments aren't generally the same people whose opinions about things or people move any mountains. So yes. I play games. I even tend to excel at them. Yet you will pretty much never catch me standing around in a Gamestop nonchalantly tossing off my accomplishments to another "gamer" in lieu of a real conversation. The paper-thin wispy castoff shadow of the illusion of actual prestige is not the reason I play games in the first place. Which segues directly into the other reason...
2. That isn't why I play games. Xbox 360 and PS3's development of an online network connecting players inevitably spawned a system of in-game achievements, little nothing trophies visible to every other player that range from fun to chase after along the way you were going anyway, to ridiculously specialized herculean trials of patience and time investment. Either way, though, they're still just digital trophies, without secondary function or value beyond pride and braggadocio. I like earning achievements; most of them are spikes of fun amidst the already-fun game itself. But I don't really get anything out of having them afterward. I don't buy a new game with the thought "there's another thousand potential points for my Xbox Gamerscore!", I buy it because it looks like it would tell an intriguing story. Nothing more, nothing less. As I said before.
Later on, after a few people had responded to my original post above about stories, I penned this lengthier followup:
The best written, filmed, or audio adventures still impart above all else the wish that you, the one reading/watching/listening
Only in a well-made video game can the story transcend that tactile barrier of immersion, where the enjoyment doesn't have to stop at "I love this and wish I could touch it, change it, interact with it. I wish I could be a *part* of it."
People tell stories. People ARE stories, walking living tales of where they've been, what they've seen and heard and done. But in the end they're really just audio tracks of those stories, unless they write something or paint a picture. You can't go back in time and live an already-done story alongside someone else; you have to join your lives and go forward in synced stride to find one together. There's such beauty in that idea, so much so that we idolize it as the crystallized perfection of what human interaction can be, and call its basis "love," and it's execution "marriage." Yet through a video game I can sit down, log in, and immediately be sharing an adventure with the person sitting one couch cushion away. Is that any less beautiful of an experience?
I wrote in the original post that stories are the reason I most identify as making my life worth living, but I may have been slightly off-center. I think sharing stories, a hundred, a thousand adventures both real and animated, films, books, and absolutely video games, with someone special out there whose heart soars at the thought of taking her mind on a brand-new rollercoaster ride alongside someone she can forever count on to grin and be at the ready...
That's her. That's my wife. "Where are you, oh Princess?" I write here sometimes when I'm feeling lost and lonesome or whimsical, and it's she of whom I speak.
Only in a well-made video game can the story transcend that tactile barrier of immersion, where the enjoyment doesn't have to stop at "I love this and wish I could touch it, change it, interact with it. I wish I could be a *part* of it."
People tell stories. People ARE stories, walking living tales of where they've been, what they've seen and heard and done. But in the end they're really just audio tracks of those stories, unless they write something or paint a picture. You can't go back in time and live an already-done story alongside someone else; you have to join your lives and go forward in synced stride to find one together. There's such beauty in that idea, so much so that we idolize it as the crystallized perfection of what human interaction can be, and call its basis "love," and it's execution "marriage." Yet through a video game I can sit down, log in, and immediately be sharing an adventure with the person sitting one couch cushion away. Is that any less beautiful of an experience?
I wrote in the original post that stories are the reason I most identify as making my life worth living, but I may have been slightly off-center. I think sharing stories, a hundred, a thousand adventures both real and animated, films, books, and absolutely video games, with someone special out there whose heart soars at the thought of taking her mind on a brand-new rollercoaster ride alongside someone she can forever count on to grin and be at the ready...
That's her. That's my wife. "Where are you, oh Princess?" I write here sometimes when I'm feeling lost and lonesome or whimsical, and it's she of whom I speak.
I call her Princess out of in-advance affection, and as a strong (if subtle) signal that I seek a woman of steel and inner quality worth genuflecting to from time to time, but in reality she's probably not a monarch's daughter, which is good because I'm far more Aladdin than Prince Ali*. Actually, she's probably just a regular woman, by most approximations. Maybe she has red hair. She's probably short, but has a closet full of tall shoes. She might have a passion for something I don't have the slightest idea how to do, but we'll both laugh a lot when I give it a first honest try (secretly believing, of course, that I am about to reveal myself as the supreme lord of the activity). The one thing I do know is that she will see the value of stories the way that I do: with endless hunger and almost childlike, wide-eyed wonder. An insatiable desire to cuddle up to me and watch a movie together, or play a lengthy epic RPG from end to end, maybe taking turns or divvying up characters to control, reading (and laughing) out loud in affected voices all the dialogue if it's a game without voice acting. Going on a journey, hand-in-hand, over and over again and every chance we get. And when there isn't an easy chance, we bloody well make the time.
* Fabulous he, Ali Ababwa
This is what that real-life love story should look like, done in combat allegory. All alight with united thought and incandescent magical light and perfect tandem motion toward a shared victory against all the demons and hardships of the world:
 |
| I'd love you anyway, droolyface. ...I have no idea who the girl in this picture is. |
It's real-life adventures I crave. But right now I'm fairly poor, and have no manner nor method nor means to travel much of anywhere, so the number of true adventures I can undertake are sadly limited. Not to mention there isn't yet a Princess of my heart to go with. So I sometimes ask, Where are you, Oh Princess?, but time and again there is no lasting answer. Yet. Whichever way I turn in real life, the pieces just aren't in place right now. Not yet. Maybe not terribly soon, either, unless someone reading this blog finds my nigh-insufferable sarcastic wit and general amazing character to be of such quality that a well-paying job writing funny columns materializes out of thin air. (This would be absurdly acceptable to me, just so you know, Senior Editor sir/ma'am.)
It's okay, though. I'm not an impatient man. I hardly have anything to offer at the moment anyway, save some wit, a lot of heart and a rakish grin. Yet in the meantime, before all of the expenses of real-life adventuring can be met with the means I'm already casting huge fateful dice on earning for myself... there are always simulated adventures to go on. Stories to experience, just for the beautiful sake of the journey through them. And to share, if I can just find a woman who isn't afraid to dive completely into ideas the way that I do, and who doesn't see a story as nothing more than a way to spend a couple of hours and then proceed to start forgetting immediately.
We are sentient beings. Our stories are our goddamn legacy. Every ounce of beauty and sheer horror that has ever come forth from the hands, hearts and minds of our entire species since the dawn of time has come through the stories that we live, craft, speak and write and film and animate and tell. This isn't idle entertainment to me. It's the cornerstone purpose of my entire existence, and whether you acknowledge it or not, it is the very foundation of yours as well. You are living a story every day, one all your own, and someone somewhere thinks that it is the most beautiful story ever told.
So where are you, oh Princess? You who can see the endless potential beauty, the story just sitting silently and waiting to be told in every porcelain figurine in a roadside gift shop? In every person sitting, head-down, with their back against the front of a strange building on a clammy, drizzly day? In every single hand-crafted, visual extravaganza ever put onto the screen with a place carved right front and center, exactly sized for you with a controller in your hand?
I'd sure like to make your acquaintance, wherever you are.
And don't worry. I'll never stop looking. You're just too worth finding.
Stay tuned.
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