Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

I’m pretty good at SMB3.
I can beat it without warping. I’ve done
this maybe twenty times in my life. Once I beat
it without dying. I’d like to say I can beat it
without being hit. That’s not the case, though.
Though I’m pretty sure I can beat it without be-
ing hit, I’ve never actually done it. Maybe I’ll do
it someday.
For the moment, as an “adult,” I take a
certain comfort in knowing that there are things
I do not know about the game, little quirks I
have not mastered or even awakened into a fully
aware sense of being.
My mom asked me, when I was playing
Final Fantasy VI on Super Nintendo, when I was
seventeen, “Do you think you’ll still play these
videogames when you get older?” I wonder
how much older she wanted me to get. I told
her, “I don’t think I’ll ever stop.” It was a quick,
self-damning statement. I like making those,
sometimes.
I haven’t stopped, yet. Maybe I won’t.
For all I know, some other game might
have flicked the switch, some other game
might have been the gateway, had SMB3 never
existed, had a certain Japanese woman bitten a
certain Japanese man on the shoulder at a dif-
ferent instant, had another sperm won the race
to the egg and Shigeru Miyamoto had been born
a woman who’d grow up to teach home econom-
ics at a middle school.
Yet, I think about it a little more deeply,
and it fills me with dread. I trust creative people
to be creative, just as well as I trust that as
long as men play baseball, deep into the future,
we will always, always see significant records
being broken every year. Yet, like international
immigration authorities, who deny a man a visa
unless he has twenty years’ experience in his
field or if he’s been married for five minutes,
I cannot doubt the nature of love. To doubt it
makes me - at this point in my life - a useless
human being. To imagine that what I had felt for
SMB3 had been less than love is to declare my
entire childhood a failure.
I can feel the game on my fingertips. I can
recall holding a Nintendo Entertainment System
controller the proper way for SMB3 - upside-
down, turned vertically, covering the left-right
rocker on the D-pad with the inner edge of my
left thumb, the B-button with the tip of my right
thumb (you never let go of that B-button, you
hear?), and rocking the meat of my right thumb
onto the A-button whenever jumps came up.
With just a blink of my mind, no matter where I
am, whether it’s waiting in line at the post-of-
fice with a broken iPod and thus no music to
entertain me, or sitting in an airport in Pusan,
Korea on a day when snow piles ever higher
than human knees, my hand gripped around a
sweaty two-liter of Lemon-Lime Gatorade, I can
turn the game on in my head and play it. I even,
sometimes, make mistakes in my imaginary
games. I was at an airport in Rome once, in
a big plastic dome with a frozen cappuccino,
headed back to London, when I first questioned:
are the mistakes I make in the game in my head
intentional? Is my brain throwing the mistakes
into my fingertips so as to keep the fantasy
real? The only way to test this is to play the
game on a television. Television is where video-
games take flesh and love becomes factual. With
another flick of my mind, I can change the game
to the Super Famicom Super Mario Collection
version, which I actually like better. I like the
tweaked inertia effects, and the controller layout
- the run button is located above and to the left
of the jump button, which is how I was used to
holding the controller anyway.
Riding a bike on a highway, boarding a train
into the Japanese mountains, again and again,
I can imagine Mario running to the edge of a
pit, grinding his heels to a stop, turning around,
running back, turning again, running faster, and
eventually taking flight. I can imagine hitting
a P-switch, and turning a room full of blocks
into coins, and then plunging into them, jump-
Life Non-Warp:DX 77