Before I sit, Josh Larson is careful to make one thing clear: “This is a game about Ryan and his wife’s four-year-old son, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer two and a half years ago,” he explains. And then this: “He’s still alive.” (more…)
Exactly six years ago I bought a Nintendo Wii – came home from Toys “R” Us, plugged it in. (The box is still there on the floor of my girlhood bedroom, right where I left it in another November.)
“Can you imagine, Al?” my mother asked my father. “In our lifetime?” She was standing around marveling as I – ahem – went bowling.
Then I saw the Wii’s “pacemaker” warning and now I was pushing my adoptive dad out of the room. “Out, out!” I commanded him. I was not going to be the one to murder my father, thank you. (more…)
My father’s heart stopped not too long ago. His body, wracked by an infection he was unaware of, just gave out. His eyes closed and he fell over. If a neighbor were not visiting it is very likely my father would have died. Thankfully she and my stepmother, both tiny Puerto Rican women, were able to drag my father’s 6’5″, 250-pound body into a vehicle and rush him from their remote rainforest compound at the base of El Yunque to the nearby Veteran’s hospital. (more…)
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and something was different. Perhaps it was the late hour, or the bourbon, or the harsh lighting, but there seemed to be a gauntness in my cheeks that I did not recall. The change was infinitesimal – no one but me could possibly notice – but I could see it. (more…)
I play videogames because they put me into a space that feels entirely separate from reality. For years, when I was in the throes of depression and using marijuana to self-medicate, I abused this aspect of gaming. I’d get high and spend hours playing Wing Commander or X-Wing, ensconced in the experience and trying to ignore the outside world for as long as I could, even fighting sleep to delay stepping out of that safe, distracting space playing videogames. (more…)
I keep having this weird dream.
I’m on a rocket ship in outer space. Sometimes I’m strapped into a seat, but often I’m in free-fall. Often there are other people on the rocket ship, but sometimes I’m alone.
Sometimes the rocket ship isn’t floating through space. Sometimes, instead, it’s on fire and trembling – it is reentering Earth’s atmosphere, presumably because of a mechanical failure. Sometimes it isn’t a rocket ship at all: sometimes it is an airplane that is crashing. A few times I’ve found myself inside a flooded submarine. (more…)
GlitchHiker is a game that died.
Consider what it means for a game to die, because it doesn’t happen every day. Normally, everything except the game dies. Consoles die because they were cheaply manufactured for third-world wages. Mario dies because, well, he’s a video game character. One day the high scores will be wiped from the pinball machines at the bowling alley, but the machine will live on. Once in awhile, the save battery will go dead on an old game cart, or a disk is scratched to death. But short of an especially violent apocalypse, the only way I see that games will become extinct is if they are programmed to self-destruct. (more…)
