The worst thing about video games is also the best thing: their addiction. When you get it right? The rest of the world can go to hell. That helped me as a child: I could use them to escape the painful parts of growing up. Parents don’t fight in Manic Miner. You don’t have to worry about Stephen Gibson beating you up on the way home from school at Chuckie Egg.
As a parent of young children, I’m a horrible hypocrite, always saying they should be doing something better than playing Mario Kart – although, when they ask me “Like WHAT, Dad?” , the answer I can think of. it’s “the stuff other parents brag about to their kids on Facebook”.
Now that two of my children are officially adults and the youngest is 16 and going on 40, I am out of that phase. But last month I got back into video games for comfort. I was drowning in a sea of early adult problems, and instead of using alcohol and drugs to cope, I decided to use open-ended RPGs.
Some of the happiest moments of my life have happened in the virtual world. I lost myself in Final Fantasy VII, Deus Ex, The Witcher 3, most GTAs and Red Dead Redemption. Put a game with irresistible development in the hands of a good writing team and you have my undivided attention.
In an open-world RPG, you get virtual versions of all the problems you face in real life, only you can solve them. You have power. I fired up Horizon Zero Dawn, which has been on my to-do list for years, and even though I’m playing as a nomadic girl I’m looking for why her post-apocalyptic land is full of mechanical dinosaurs Nuts, I see a parallel. with my struggle for young parents in 2022. Once a shaman said to me, “When we teach young people to walk on ice, we teach them to put one foot in front of the other.” This may be cod philosophy bullshit, but it’s the kind of cod philosophy bullshit I needed last month.
Like all RPG characters, Aloy must make decisions about where to go and when. I have a big decision to make about working on the other side of the world. In a game you can make bad decisions, but you get a chance to do better. And in the 2022 horror reboot of life, sometimes we just need the self-belief that comes with making the right decisions, even in a world that doesn’t have video game stocks.
In one mission, Aloy helped find a cure for a sick child. I have two other family members walking around in bad hospital clothes. And you know what? The game didn’t help at all. There is nothing. But shooting a bad guy with arrows while he thought he was one of the next builders helped make me angry that there was a roll of emergency tape where the driveway next to my house used to be. Close to the hole.
Life gives me lemons, but Horizon Zero Dawn gives me a big bowl of fun, fun playtime: riding the Tallneck machine and watching the world; find the right strategy to take down the Stalker machine that can turn invisible; Running on a hill they were hunting for a rabbit, only to come face to face with an unseen gargantuan monster.
I’m left-handed and have always struggled with using my right thumb to aim shooters, so the arrow-based combat was a real bummer for me at first. I would say to myself, “Do you think putting an arrow in a metal dinosaur in a custom made video game is difficult? It’s not as difficult as hearing the children cry when our second pet dies within a year. “While I wouldn’t recommend this mantra to anyone – my kids aren’t fans – it helped me persevere until I got the confidence to point my thumb and now I’m no longer crying on the toilet seat. .
Also, the (absolute) difficulty means that within 50 hours, I’ve gone from kicking ass with my little bipeds to facing an attack the size of a screen literally full of monsters, blocking the sun, with and little old me in the middle. I was so tired and satisfied at the end THAT I watched the closing score of the game for the first time ever.
I’m not saying that video games are the solution to life’s problems. I’m just saying that if you need an escape from the things in life that you can’t control, sports can do that more than anything else, because they take so much attention. And maybe sometimes addiction isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’m addicted to running. And climbing mountains. And people always say things are good when I post THAT on Facebook to pretend my life is good.
Yes, it’s an escape: the problems are in the real world when you step out of the virtual one. But that’s one aspect of video games that links the player I was as a kid to a middle-aged version. Now, as they did then, they just gave me a break for a while.
