The Watusi. The Twist. El Dorado.: Computer game walkthroughs

I played computer games as a kid. Not very many of them, only a few. I stopped playing them when I was 15. Actually I still play PC games like solitaire, minesweeper, freecell etc but I only restrict myself to them. I thought that there are a lot of other things you can do with your real life other than play games.

It was never a straightforward thing where I just enjoyed playing computer games. I always had at least some guilt about playing them. Maybe they detracted from my spending every possible hour studying, or maybe it was just my having a little more fun than my parents thought I had a right to. Whatever. To give a sense of perspective, I feel less guilt jerking off nowadays than I did in those days playing computer games.

It used to be that my mother would give me a hard time for playing computer games too much, yet at the same time she is one of the most compulsive players of computer games I have ever seen. She would play bridge with people online until 2 in the morning, and yet when I come back in the wee hours of the morning, after finishing off 100 pages of books (you may laugh but I’m a slow reader) she says that I’m not living a decent life. In another day and age I might have taken her comments to heart but I’m old enough to see those comments as what they are – absolute nonsense.

Anyway I have since concluded that computer games don’t really do very much for you. They shut you away from people. (But those were the pre-internet days, so I’m not sure now.) They take up your time. You don’t really accomplish much. A game does suck you in. The colourful graphics seduce you. It’s called “adventure” even though you are being holed up in your room as you play.

I play platform games, even though my hand co-ordination is not very good – people out there can finish 3 or 4 games in the time I take to finish one. But it’s the discovery of secrets that fascinate me. (This is one reason why I still believe today that I should be a scientist.) Hidden trapdoors. What happens when you pull this lever? Secret rooms. Secret weaknesses of powerful monsters.

Sometimes I suspect: is my preparation for the marathon nothing more than a glorified computer game? I finish level 1 (half marathon), I try level 2. If I finish level 2 I win a medal, and then I have this medal to brag about for the rest of my life. That’s pretty much it. I think about what I have achieved when finishing a computer game. The end of the game scenes for computer games are notoriously disappointing. You spend hours – 30? 40? – of your precious time and energy trying to get to the end, and all you get is Mario Plumber getting the princess. OK, you know that Mario is a plumber and will inevitably end up checking out her pipes but it is a letdown. The only reward for finishing a game, is the getting there. Is this the same for my attempt to run a marathon?

I seldom date people. But there was one time on the afternoon before I was to meet Teapot, I finished playing one computer game. My reasoning was this: even if nothing further took place because of our encounter, at least I could claim to have saved the world. I felt good about myself.

A blogger friend of mine (actually he’s my old classmate) wanted to fulfill an old dream of his and started a game software company. I wonder how he’s doing now.

When you play world of warcraft (and there were a bunch of guys who used to play WOW during lunchtime at my place even though I wasn’t one of them) you will see a lot of gold miners. If you study history, then you might find that when Columbus discovered the New World, and subsequent Spanish discoverers found that those lands had plenty of gold, all the Indians were enslaved and made to work full time mining gold. In a way, the quest for gold in computer games can be considered a celebration of genocide. But I digress…

I found a new hobby: when you go looking through youtube, for many computer games you will find “walkthrough” where most computer games are solved, and the action recorded down. It’s a crazy feeling, seeing all those puzzles you agonized over – 10, 20 years ago solved in front of you, just like that. It is a wonderful feeling. There is a lot of closure, as though something, somewhere clicked, and you feel like you can move on.

I think that once you have finished with something you must turn away and never go back. Old computer games. Old girlfriends. Old hobbies. (I will never write another play, or run another marathon.) You will have the memories, but they have to remain as memories.

Conan Volta
A shitty little game but I liked this one. Always wanted to know what lay beyond level 3. Who would have guessed that Conan is now the Governor of California?