I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just bought myself an Achilles heel. On a whim, I bought Civilization: Revolution for the Xbox. The Game Informer magazine he received monthly offered plenty of new opportunities. The Minecraft era lasted for several years, as the Lego period had, but after a while we both got a little restless. We sat next to each other for hours sometimes, sharing a world, but also floating in our own. Being a quieter sort of game, I revived the big headphones and spun tunes while building. Building my own little compounds and castles, connecting them with bridges, watching the ivy grow, setting livestock and villagers about their business and seeing what happened. I did, and after blundering through for a while, I finally started getting those little triggers that made me look forward to getting back in. I couldn’t figure out what she saw in it, but she was very eager for me to sign on to her server and play alongside her. Having gotten into Second Life primarily for the music scene, but also to tinker with sculpting structures and landscapes in graphic detail, the blocky nature of Minecraft seemed a regression. Then, as kids do, my daughter started to outgrow these titles, and found an interest which baffled me at first: Minecraft.
I maintain that, for those reasons, and for the problem-solving opportunities presented in the games, they may in fact be more beneficial than harmful. Games could be played solo, yes, but teamwork was key, especially in those Lego games. Now, essential to the child-bonding justification was the two-player factor. It didn’t help that since my teen years, games had gotten so much more complex, feeding the dopamine receptors with well-honed efficiency. Sure, I could do it, but what did it mean about me? Shouldn’t I be doing something more productive?
The level of guilt I felt about it was on a par with my youthful shame about masturbation. I was ostensibly playing to have bonding time with the kiddo, but the fact that its influence held even after she went to bed was unsettling. It was terrifying as hell, feeling that pull after so many years of abstention. Indeed, sometimes when she was at school, when I would hit a wall in the studio, I heard the game calling. I found a used Wii, and picked a game that incorporated two of the kiddo’s fascinations at the time, Lego Star Wars. I sought high and low for relief, something to occupy the gears while also sharing time with my little companion.įrom the mists of my adolescence came a memory: Nintendo. Matching the repetitive, deliberate mental pace of a small child all day every day sent me into panic attacks as built-up ponderations got clogged in the works of mundane life. Nonetheless, the breakneck speed of my daily thinkening got pulled up short with the arrival of fatherhood in my thirties. This was my attitude towards video games as well: They got in the way of more important pursuits, ones that could be actively shaped by adroit minds untethered to a screen. My favorite comic strip of all time was and is Flowers for Trinitron, a Tom the Dancing Bug episode by Ruben Bolling, which adapts the Flowers for Algernon tale and follows a man’s progress from TV-watching zombie to intellectual powerhouse when the cable goes out one day. Hyper-focused on making music, spare hours were spent writing, practicing, reading up on studio techniques, and playing as many gigs as could be crammed into each week. Glaven.īut from high school through my twenties, I did not touch a single game controller. And it is true that in junior high, I could reliably be found in the corner of the living room, giant headphones cranking Simon & Garfunkel while my thumbs furiously battled Ganon onscreen.
#I master of my domain full
Nerdy, sci-fi focused, shelves full of Gaiman and Star Wars novels. From a distance, I fit the profile of a gamer.
0 kommentar(er)
