My Life with Games: Introduction

Note: In light of the New Year, I was giving consideration toward a kind of retrospective, maybe a word or two about where I've been yielding to more recent exploits - something like the traditional Christmas letter.

I realized that there's more here.

Something about where I have been has recently been nagging at me; I am at a crossroads, and taking my life's work further means an exegesis of my past pivoted around a central point, in this case, games.

There are many stories to tell, all for different reasons, all contributing to the person I am now and what I can be in time.

I hope you enjoy these memories - this is the first in a set I hope to expand as the year plays out.

 

January 1990

I am nine years old.

It is cold, but very little of me – save the tops of my ears – seems to care. I am on a mission at the back of the playing field. I am in fourth grade, and in my hastily-assembled kit bag are the gadgets of high-tech spydom. A stocky, blocky semi-automatic pistol. A grenade. A basically-round thing that’s supposed to be a tracking device. Even a little listening device that goes in my ear.

The devices are all made out of construction paper. The gun is purple. The grenade is yellow. The bag is constructed from two sheets of paper stapled hastily together on the edges. This departure from reality matters little to me.

I have discovered Covert Action, a game developed by Sid Meier and released earlier in the year on those big floppy five-and-a-quarter discs. I am acting out the game. It is spying, surveillance, and sabotage, all for the good of the free world.

I am at that critical age that homogenization gives way to the diversity that will define subgroups in later years. We are giving way from being "just kids" to being kids in one group or another. This type of child, or that type of child. Readers, athletes, debaters, scholars, troublemakers.

I don't know what I'm becoming. I am aloof, almost deaf in a way. A year ago, I was running around the playground with my arms outstretched, channeling my innate desire to fly. The slipstream wind over my hands was almost enough for a breath of barely-discernible lift, and with that buoyancy, I fancied being sustained, weightless, forever.

At nine years old, I have a vague sense that, as a child of my age, that sort of behavior is unpopular, even touching the tangent of the symptomatic. My mother and father fight about money, about work, about time. I feel a desire to stay disconnected from their worldly problems, but I am losing the earliest comforts I had - I can no longer fly.

I turn toward video games, by no means a new pursuit, but one recently having gained some social prominence through the development of new VGA graphics, and so, for being there when the need arose, I settled into the simulations of the surreptitious, the underhanded, the camouflaged.

I would become a spy.

One student - Matthew - stays with my evolution. He watches me cut my functionless gadgets from multicolored paper. He listens as I outline plots against world targets, fed by descriptions of nefarious shadow organizations.

And, at his most devoted, Matthew faithfully tags along. Along to the playground, along to the playing fields. We imagine stalking targets in the sewers as we walk in the shadow of the bleachers. We climb fences and pretend to jump building rooftops in pursuit of shadowy masterminds.

Not one tracking device beeps. No grenades explode. I do not shoot any bullets from my gun, because it isn't real. We don’t know how to make guns that shoot. We are children.

But something sticks, something at the core of what we imagined we were. Maybe someone saw us. Maybe Matthew talked - certainly a punishable offense in the clandestine service - but word got around.

I know this, because it is January, 1990, and there sits atop my desk a rolled-up tube of red construction paper. I did not put it there. Matthew did not put it there, yet there it sits. It is adorned with the letters TNT - a child-sized stick of trinitrotoluene. Dynamite. Somebody had made pretend dynamite, for our pretend game.

Someone else wanted to play, too.

Use the Airbrush to Draw Such as a Hat

You know, it even bothers me when I post this infrequently, which is why I'm standing here in front of you (metaphorically) right now.

Honestly, I haven't even surfaced to see the light of day in a month, and it's looking tragically similar for the next month or two as I get a few things at work wrapped up for the benefit of you XNA fans.

The only notes from the field that have really struck me (I have nothing to say about Cucumber Pepsi) have been two particulars in that big lethal cross-marketing net we call the local Safeway:

I'm sure you've already seen the "new" Betty and Veronica; this lays to rest my theory that the Archie series has long been ghostwritten by the same machines that send you conversational spam. It's amazing to me to think that anyone still identifies with a highschool that doesn't have drugs, Glock 19s, or metal detectors prominently displayed in the hallways. Are we that nostalgic?

Second item up for bid - the Shrek The Third cross-marketing machine injected barely-relevant green ogre merchandise into brand-name cereals across multiple companies (man, that must have cost a bundle), but it's not the fact that Mike Myers was able to scratch up this role from the dirt for a third time, but that the items in the boxes are lights shaped - get this - like bluetooth headsets. They're lights, but instead of conjuring nostalgic images of ghost stories and reading comic books under the covers, they scream "overpaid consultant".

I'll stand by and watch adult America turned on its ass any day of the week - notice I haven't said a word about Paris Hilton, Iraq, or that douchebag Duke DA - but it's when they aim the cannon at the kids, using those familiar tools - comics and cereal - that I know someone's got their finger on the carotid, and going hard until there's no pulse left.

At least Veronica still looks hotter than Betty. Someone at Archie HQ still has their head on straight.

I just invented Photoshop,
-Charles N. Cox