Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

one time in World 6, where they give you a free
Hammer Suit during a stage.
That meant I hadn’t been hit.
Luigi hadn’t been hit either. He still wore
a Tanooki suit from World 4. Though I wanted
Mario to kill Bowser with his hammers, I didn’t
want to spoil the perfect game by intention-
ally killing Luigi. What’s more, some part of me
still harbored the childish dream that the game
would explicitly stand up and reward me for
beating it pristinely. I was doing a “she loves
me, she loves me not” in my head as I counted
off the final stages, wondering whether Luigi or
Mario would be the one to step into Bowser’s
castle.
It was Luigi. He did admirably.
The woman had not moved from my side.
The page of her brochure had not been flipped.
“That was wonderful,” she said, smiling.
She had one crooked tooth. To say which one
it was would be to say too much. She put her
head on my shoulder.
The next morning, when I woke up, we
had sex again. She told me, “Welcome back to
Japan.” We went outside, and got lost. We didn’t
remember how we’d gotten to the hotel. We
ended up at the crossroads housing the famed
“Gates of Kabukicho.” Six in the morning; that
place hit the eyes like a box of fresh crayons. I
was homeless, the morning after accomplishing
something I’d only dreamed about accomplish-
ing as a child.
I remembered something my dad had told
me long ago, about baseball. He spoke this as
a US Army soldier who had never been sent
to war, the son of a man who had fought the
Japanese in World War II, and the grandson of a
man who had fought the Germans in World War
I:
“In this world, there is no glory, only the
glory we make in the context of games.”
I recalled the question, from a while
before: were the mistakes I made in the game,
in my head, merely details I’d invented to
make the experience seem more real? I had
my answer, as the woman hurried to get on the
82 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #3
subway and head to work, not looking back at
me, though I waved. Of course they were. In
my head, the game has every right and every
rhyme and every reason to be utterly perfect.
That it wasn’t perfect was merely my own
means of compensating for my own flaws as a
human being, knowing that to have no flaws
would be to be told a lie.
I saw that woman a few more times as we
gradually drifted apart. I ended up somewhere
else, with another woman, and now I have
another girlfriend still. I’m neither good nor bad
with women. I create conflicts because to not
do so would make things too boring. To me,
everything has to be a game, and every game
has to be SMB3. I catch my magic wands while
jumping while crouched, and if anyone thinks
that’s childish, it’s like they’re disputing the fact
that water is wet and the sky is sometimes blue.
I’ll admit, I have some problems deal-
ing with people. Sometimes, when I don’t like
the look or sound of people, I lie to them, and
sometimes they get their feelings hurt. If I
apologized for that, I’d be hurting myself, so I
won’t apologize. I’ll just say I’m sorry. This habit
isn’t so bad, and it’s hardly noticeable when I’m
alone, or when I’m playing SMB3.
She emailed me one night in September,
during Tokyo Game Show, when I was deathly
ill with an ear infection and had to sleep sitting
up. She said, “I saw you on Tokyo Broadcasting
System interviewing [Kazunori Yamauchi,] the
producer of the Gran Turismo games. I liked
what he said about the helicopter in Choplifter.
Your hair was perfect.” I replied with “Oh yeah?”
It was meant to prompt her for more. She never
gave me more. God, it’s been almost a year
now, and she never gave me more.
Would the game continue? Did I have any
reason to play SMB3 ever again? I couldn’t tell.