I Confess my Nerdy Little Secrets

I emerge from the forest, all sweaty and reeking of pine-tar, and damned if I don't find myself on the outskirts of some picture-book village, all flowers and trees and slopey-roof cottages. Christ, there's even a broken-down cart, off to the left, with irises growing on it. Irises, no less! People are wandering about with donkeys and covered baskets, and there's a couple of kids chasing each other in neverending circles round a well. Every porch has a grandma, and every courtyard, a dog. And somewhere, just out of sight, somebody's playing the flute.

I trudge up a weedy dirt road (again, with the greenery!)--and find myself under a big sign. "Rivabianca," it says, in picturesquely peeling letters, and underneath, some skyvey berk's parked himself in a patch of forget-me-nots.

"Ey," I go, toeing this berk awake--"ey, I'm a bit lost, what?"

"I hope the war doesn't reach Rivabianca," he says, amiably enough.

I'm puzzled. "Beg your pardon?"

"My son wants to join the army, too."

"Right you are. That is to say, I was wondering--"

"I hope the war doesn't reach Rivabianca."

I blink a couple of times. Didn't he just say that? "So I've heard."

"My son wants to join the army, too."

"That's a shame. You ought to send him to university, instead. War's a bit pants, if you ask me. Besides, pardon my cynicism, but what business would the war have here?"

"I hope the war doesn't reach Rivabianca."

"Knock it off, mate. You're giving me déjà vu."

"My son wants to join the army, too."

And that's when it hits me: dear God! I'm in a videogame! Clichéd pastoral setting, dogs running about without chains on, mad floral excess--it's all here. Not to mention the midday loiterers. Have they never heard of work? It's the dialogue that's the dead giveaway, though. No matter what you say to these people, all they do is grouse about the war*.

"I have a peculiarly cavernous vagina," I tell Sign Guy.

"I hope the war doesn't reach Rivabianca."

Blimey.

I promptly invade every home in the village, helping myself to people's valuables. They don't mind. Before I know it, I'm walking round Rivabianca with ninety-nine potions, thirty tents, and a sword shoved up my arse. (I always wondered where they stuck all that stuff, these game characters. You rarely see a videogame protagonist with an ox-cart in tow, or even a knapsack. So, it's up the arse, is it? No wonder they're all so...pugnacious.)

The day We Love Katamari came out, I caught myself playing it with my upper body held stiff and rigid. It was the first time in recent memory I'd played a videogame without an ice-cube balanced on my head, see, and it just felt wrong.

Why would I play videogames with an ice-cube on my head? It eases the agony of living, that's why! The profound existential angst! The--the--that is to say, it makes me feel a bit better when I'm under the weather. A videogame and an ice-cube, that's the ticket. Gets my mind off my discomfort. I like the little rivulets of ice-water trickling down my face and into my ears, and the soothing vibration of the game controller. If I only had some device, some contraption that'd secure the ice-cube in place, I'd be in heaven. For a while, I tried balancing my specs on my head, then the ice-cube on the specs, but I kept falling asleep that way, and getting my specs all bent up. You can find me almost every night, nowadays, curled into the corner of the couch with an ice-cube on my head and a controller in my hands. Every so often, the ice-cube comes unbalanced, and slides down my shirt. The controller goes flying, and, depending on my condition, I scream, curse, or whimper.

There was a time when games were just for fun. I played them with friends, and they got all tied up with silly memories:

BELOW THE ROOT (Windham Classics, 1984)

Was it 1987, the summer of Below the Root, or had I upgraded my hardware by then? I don't remember. I'm awful with dates. But it was a good summer, that year, with hardly any rainy days. The sea was warm enough for swimming, and everyone's nose was red with sunburn. Mine in particular--I've always burned easily, with my fishbelly skin. It was prime bicycle weather, and fishing weather, and strawberry-picking weather, but we turned our backs on this golden paradise, us dorks, us nerds, in favour of the Commodore 64.

Me and my best friend, we were videogame addicts, type A. (Being the consummate nerds we were, we'd come up with a classification system for our ilk. Type A gamers, like us, we were the gourmets of the electronic entertainment world. We took the time to enjoy our games, hunting down every secret door, every hidden quest, every playable character. We spent hours looking for the War Mech in Final Fantasy, and working out the gnome's name in the original King's Quest. We drew maps, took notes, made diagrams, and loved every minute of it. Type Bs, those were the filthy gourmands, sucking down games without savouring them--quantity over quality, sort of thing. A Type B gamer usually had rich parents. He got all the new games before anyone else did, and rushed through them so he could get on with the next ones. Then, he ruined the endings for everyone else. Us Type As hated and envied Type Bs, by turns. Type Cs, the lowest of the low, were Type As gone terribly wrong. Nowadays, these would be cosplayers, I think, or possibly fan-fiction writers. Back then, they were folks who drew game characters in the margins of their school notebooks, and dressed up like them for Hallowe'en.)

Back to us, though. Some games, like Quest for Tires, we'd trounce in a week. Others, like Below the Root, held us rapt for months. There we'd be, sprawled out on the floor with an eggtimer, taking three-minute turns with the joystick. I'd always stick the timer on the lumpy bit of carpet when it came my turn, so the sand would run out more slowly. Every so often, Mother'd come in: "Ey! Open the blinds! It's a beautiful day!"--and a dazzling light would pour in, glaring out the screen. If we whined about not being able to see, that would inspire Mother to boot us out entirely, so we'd squint and bear it till she left.

Not that there was a whole lot to see, of course. Below the Root only had a handful of colours (various shades of brown, green, purple, and grey, with occasional blue and yellow cameos). It wasn't the visuals that had us hooked. It was the ambience, sort of thing. It seemed like a real adventure. It was set in the world of Green Sky, where people lived in trees and had magical powers. You could talk to just about anyone, including the animals, and visit the elders to learn spirit skills. There was murder, and intrigue, and magic that let you read people's minds. If you put on a shuba (a large, floppy shirt, I think--the game wasn't terribly clear on that, owing to lousy graphics)--if you put on a shuba, you could even fly. A kid could get caught up in that sort of story...and, boy, did we ever. Sometimes, when nobody was looking, I'd run around the back yard with my arms out, pretending I'd found a shuba of my own. Other times, on our way to the corner store for sweets, we'd shove each other into the ditch, shouting "Your shuba has torn!" Or, if we were playing checkers, and one of us made a particularly boneheaded move, the other would intone "You lack the spirit skill."

Years later, I tried to play Below the Root with a C-64 emulator, but even with my CPU speed slowed hugely, I could hardly walk ten paces without collapsing from exhaustion. I hate games where the internal clock is regulated by CPU speed, rather than actual time.

ASTEROIDS (Atari, 1979)

We used to call this game Haemorrhoids, because you bleed if an asteroid falls on your head. Actual haemorrhoids, we referred to as ass-teroids. We thought this was terribly funny and original. (We were seven.)

In the autumn of 1997, finding myself too broke for commercial games, I rediscovered the joys of asteroid-blasting, courtesy of shareware.com. I couldn't afford heating, so I played it under a blanket. I couldn't afford furniture, so I played it on the floor. If anyone'd walked into that room, all they'd've seen is this tatty satin hump, boxy at one end and bony at the other, shoogling about, screaming "Fuck off! Go away! That so never hit me!" Oh, and there'd've been garbage all around, too, because I couldn't afford a dustbin.

ALGEBRA DRAGONS (Date and publisher unknown. I'd guess early- to mid-80s, seeing as I played it on the C64.)

No-one ever wanted to play this one with me. (Wonder why?) I loved it, though. I loved it so much I ate dinner in front of the computer every night for a week. I loved it so much I brought it to school with me, and tried to play it in the computer lab. I loved it so much I learned algebra--and that is true love, indeed.

In retrospect, I can't imagine what the appeal might've been. Algebra Dragons was a formulaic dungeon crawl, with a side-dish of maths. Every level had, if I recall correctly, a key you had to find in order to advance to the next. Then, you had to find the stairs, while avoiding bottomless pits. And every once in a while, you'd come across a dragon, who'd ask you an algebra question. If you got it right, the dragon went away. If you didn't--fwhoooosh! Crispy you.

There wasn't much of a story involved (or if there was, I've quite forgotten it). It was just you, this endless grey dungeon, and the algebra dragons. Sometimes, when I get that uneasy feeling--you know the one I mean, where you sense something bad's about to happen, but you're not quite sure what--I think to myself "You feel a draft." That's what it said in Algebra Dragons, when there was a bottomless pit nearby. It didn't say which direction the draft came from, though, so you had to pick an exit and hope for the best.

MYST (Broderbund, 1995)

I used to play Myst with my mother. We thought it was just the bee's knees--fun, intricate puzzles, graphics like nothing we'd seen before, and, lurking somewhere beneath, some unimaginable horror. Games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, they've never scared me. One expects horrible things to happen in games of that nature, so when a zombie crashes through the window, or blood pours from somebody's eyes, it's par for the course. I'm more likely to curse the leaping zombie for taking a bite out of my hit points than jump out of my skin.

Myst was different, though. We'd never seen anything quite like it, and didn't know what to expect. After a few hours of Myst, we'd be jumping at the slightest sound. It wasn't that anything particularly frightening ever happened--quite the opposite, in fact. There you were, walking around this alien, vaguely menacing world all on your own, with nothing but creepy ambient noises for company. You expected something to jump out at you any minute, breaking the tension. As hour after hour ticked by, and still nothing jumped, the suspense built to unbearable levels. When we opened that one box in the Mechanical Age, and saw the corpse looking out at us, we just about died.

My enjoyment of Myst was marred by a stomach virus, though--a stomach virus and a snowstorm. It wasn't me with the virus, of course. It was my sister, and, later, my mother as well. It was a particularly bad one, which went on for more than a week. And the snowstorm, it came at the same time, descending with the fury of a thousand giants. Overnight, the entire city was covered, and some time around six in the morning, the power lines went down. That was when the vomiting started--there, in the armpit of morning, with the house plunged in darkness. I shivered and suffered, and covered my ears. Outside, everything ground to a halt. The roads were completely impassable, and the pavements were too slippery to navigate. I was trapped in the nest of vomiters, with no hope of escape. I poked my nose out the window, meaning to make a jump for it, but a freezing wind blew sleet down my collar. I changed my mind. None of my usual hiding places would protect me from that sort of cold.

The week that followed was one miserable, protracted panic-attack, for me. I played Myst to escape the House of Vomit. I haven't played it since. I hear the ghosts of vomit noises in the soundtrack. I'd like to play Myst again, to recapture the spirit of that time (it was, otherwise, a very good time), but even the sight of the Cyan logo fills my head with the memory of wall-muffled puking sounds. Can't play Duke Nukem, either--I played that during another of my sister's stomach viruses. She seemed to have an awful lot of them, back then.

Q-BERT (Jaleco Entertainment, 1983)

Some time after the summer of Below the Root, but before the King's Quest winter, there was Q-bert. It was a game with a simple concept: you, Q-bert, were dropped on a grid of coloured cubes, and you had to get them all to change colours by jumping on them. Jump once, and the cube turned red; jump twice, and it went blue again. Once all the cubes were red, you could move on to the next level. Complicating your effort were various imps and wotzits, out to bollix things up. If any hoozit touched you, you would die.

One particular goblin-guy, a pointy-nosed little fellow, was the target of our venomous hate. It wasn't that he was any more lethal than his dust-speck buddies, or anything like that. It was the thing he did after you finished a level that made him obnoxious. It was horrible. He flew by with this great ugly Instant Replay sign, and then you had to watch, well, an instant replay. Bo-ring. We gave that goblin-guy the worst name we could think of: Verne. Then, everyone started calling me Verne. I can't remember why. The name stuck through sixth and seventh grade, and my first year of high school, to boot. One time, at the fair, we came upon a can of soda marked Vernors, and I was forced to drink it, amid much hilarity. It was almost as bad as Tab. Bloody-damn Verne.

Even with an ice-cube on my head, fifty milligrams of promethazine hydrochloride coursing through my veins, and my breath coming in chokey wee puffs, I still managed to roll a 3,633m, 30cm, 1mm katamari. And I did it in nine minutes, twenty-three seconds. Ha! Beat that!

* Aside from the flowers and the mood music, being in a videogame is much like being in a left-wing blog. Who knew?