Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

us we had to wake up early the next morning
for baseball practice. During the afternoons, my
mother would leave Clint downstairs to watch us
play. He always wanted to watch us play.
My mom’s friend, one of our neighbors,
had a son named Heath. Heath was studying
computers at Wichita State University. He had
a Casio keyboard, long fingers, long curly hair,
long glasses. He worked the night shift as drive-
thru guy at Spangles, a central US burger joint.
I’m not sure if they’re still around. My dad got
promoted to major and we moved to Maryland
in 1990. I haven’t been back to Kansas since.
Heath used to come over and knock on our
basement sliding glass door, and we’d let him in
to play some SMB3. Deep in his studies, Heath
had no doubt missed out on “The Wizard,” and
found SMB3 as much a surprise as I’d found
Super Mario Bros., back when our Indian neigh-
bor Rohit had shown it to me for the first time.
Rohit’s dad later got a job as head of KGE’s
Wichita nuclear power plant, and they moved
to a swanky development called “Tallgrass.” Our
videogame-related free rides ended.
Now we had people like Heath mooching
off our NES collection. Sometimes he’d bring
over NG, and we’d revel in watching him beat
it in one life. We loved those long cut scenes
between levels, though hell if we even read the
words. We were just amazed - touched, more
like it, as only children can be touched - that
someone had gone through the effort to put dy-
namic scenes like that in a side-scrolling game.
That’s why we’d never noticed our scores; we
were just racing through to get the cut-scenes.
Heath, enamored of SMB3, bought his own copy,
making it one of only three games he owned for
his own NES, the others being NG and Super
Mario Bros / Duck Hunt.
I remember a lesson Heath had once
taught me with Ultima on his PC. He showed
me how the game offered the player limited
freedom. This was a rainy day, like many rainy
days in Wichita, before SMB3. One of the op-
tions offered to Ultima characters was the option
to attack any old townsperson. He attacked
a little girl. His warrior had twelve hit points;
the little girl had three. He slaughtered her,
and was rewarded one gold. When the game
screen returned to the town, the little girl had
been replaced with a big, blocky, brawny, brown
castle guard. He killed a young boy, then an old
man. Soon, the entire town was full of castle
guards. He attempted to engage one of them in
pleasant conversation, only to result in a battle
- his twelve-hit-point fighter against a three-
hundred-hit-point castle guard. He was snuffed
out quickly. I asked him why the game lets you
kill innocent people, if you don’t get anything
out of it. He told me it does this as a means of
teaching you a lesson. What lesson is it teaching
you? I asked him. He laughed and said, if you
have to ask that, you probably wouldn’t get it.
On that rainy day, the courtyard between
the townhouses at 202 N. Rock Road would turn
a sickly shade of muddy brown, rise up to engulf
all cement patios, and creep into all basements.
The water level would rise up to Heath’s high
waist. I remember him unplugging the power
strip when he sensed danger, and piling all the
cords atop the television. I ran next door to
move our Nintendo and our television, and when
I got back to Heath’s, he had his tower case on
his shoulder.
I guess I kind of learned a sense of justice
that day; from then on I didn’t take baseball
so seriously, and I allowed myself to sink more
deeply into videogames than I’d ever really in-
tended to. Maybe it was a bad thing, or maybe it
was a good thing; it’s not for me to say, because
I’m still here right now, as a human being who
is pleased by some things and upset by others.
One day, Heath treated us to free burg-
ers at Spangles, further cementing his position
as the coolest guy in the world. I always liked
Spangles’ burgers. The cheese was never fully
melted. Now I’m a vegetarian, and I’ve been
one for ten years. It feels creepy to talk about
liking burgers. I’ll admit I never liked the taste
of meat. That partially-melted cheese was the
icing on the cake for me, to mix food meta-
phors. (Actually, I hate cake icing, too.) Natural
Life Non-Warp:DX 75