The Dog House

Gaming Glories

Back in my days, nerds were treated like a subhuman species. A race of jumbled chromosone and genes which look vaguely familiar to the common homo sapiens and yet an inferior product which god decidedly wrote it off from his catalog of grand design. The large majority decides to put nerds in their place, like the blacks pre-Civil War in America.

Then videogame came along and everything changes. The status of nerds was elevated. Not changed or anything dramatic, just merely elevated. It still looks like shit, but smell different. Less stink, lower urea content, but still enough to call it shit and not a piece of rock that smells like shit.

If you ever told someone that you broke the record for Pac Man, all you will ever get is an indifferent stare or a dubious, but well meaning "Cool, but what's Pac Man?" Breaking the record for this classic game brings only glories to people that recognise its significant. It is a cult thing, where followers speak in codes and secret handshakes. It is a priviledge to be acknowledged in the club and be among your brothers. The level of understanding is undoubtedly deep, however, it is not a message you want to spread to the ignorant mass like your run-of-the-mill religion with the all powerful crazy hipster who runs heaven.

But now, with the introduction of this blasphemous piece of device called PSP, the status quo that gaming nerds has protected so hard -- has been shattered. Like a thousand piece of glass swept away in a tornado of marketing blitz, the very heart of the gaming pride was too swallowed. It is now a badass thing to possess a piece of this diabolical device. Never has the word "badass" been associated with gaming. A game could be badass, but playing does not make someone a badass. The status quo has been changed.

Imagine yourself, taking a public transport and you sit next to a well dressed senior citizen and you start small talks with him. Then, without a warning, he told you of his membership in this world controlling association and showed you his Illuminati member ring. That does not happen too often, does it? Then imagine, the next day, you sit next to a hippy and he repeated the same thing as the old man did. Shortly after that you noticed a large majority of people possessing the same ring. You will be asking yourself where you can get yourself a subscription form or should you walk in front of the incoming express right then.

When I tell a woman I play videogames in my freetime, I expect her to tell me to stop the car right that instance. I expect to see the heightened fear in her eyes as she stare at me and realize, deep down, I'm really a fucking psycho that would strangle her with a cat, dip her body in formaline and rape her corpse everyday for a year. When you tell someone you play games, they should not give you the benefit of doubt. It is the same as telling your best friend, "Hey, I groped your daughter yesterday." You don't joke about that. You don't talk about being a pedophile without meaning it. Someone who hinted about being a videogame player should be treated as an armed and dangerous criminal without prior evidence.

However, this black and sleek piece of aluminium and plastic changes all that. It takes away the ostracism associated with video gaming. You're not judged as a social inept, shut-in loser with no connection to the human world besides the rare occasion where you call for pizza. Far from that, this electronic device functions to bridge you with civilization. It provides you with a subject, a reason that relates to other human. It forms a bond with the common man that connects at a primal level. You don't even need to talk about 'it'. People observe you carrying the device and they will response with an acknowledging look and perhaps a wink. This is not supposed to be. It is unnatural.

Once, we were hated. We were the uncool, the sports jocks used to beat us up every now and then. We had to play a game of cloak and dagger when it comes to our perversion. The wall has ears and it informs the bitchy girls which will eventually lead to jocks heaving your body like a battering ram into a goalpost. With the reward of epic punishment at every turn and corner, exchanges regarding our habits has to be done in secrecy. One mistake will cause the whole covenant to lie in ditches, body battered and your Pokemon themed lunchbox forcefully flushed down the loo.

The risk for our activities was high. New members had to be screened before allowed to our small circle. Everyone is out to destroy us but we survived. It is a challenge that we will win. Perhaps paid with many a broken bones and destroyed gaming application, but we were confidence in our victory. We had our pride.

Alas, there is no great finale, no epic battle to be fought, no truce to be signed. We just won. All our small victories forgotten and wiped away from the face of history. We won. We wake up one day, hand moving all over our desk, looking for our battle worn glasses. Our pair who was there when we were pushed off thirty flight of steps, the glasses who witnessed our indomitable spirit when we were held by three guys and, cried together with us when the innocent, cute girl who held your trust for a fleeting moment threw your gaming cartridges from the fifth. We fucking won.

The victory is not sweet nor bittersweet. It is nothing. Empty. Like a bullshit nirvana without beautiful blue haired angels raining kisses on your skinny ass. It is like dying for your religion and realizing you got scammed by god. He is omnipotent but he doesn't even know your name.

Curse you Sony. You pissed on the graves of the martyrs. You're just like the fucking Jap government. The holocaust never happened, eh? Your soldiers just got a little wild during the Party of Nanking, right?

One fine fucking day, the nerds woke up, went to school and the jocks mosseyed up to them like they were brothers all along. They talked about games, exchanged tips, and the nerds are recognized as authority of the topic and everything is beautiful. It's just like a Walt fuckin' Disney movie. A fairytale ending. Bloody history is rewritten political correct.

Doggystyle is a syndicated columnist at Midgard Times. He is also the author of "Playing games and avoiding the authority" and "Getting Women Through Elaborate Whining" and the award winning, ultra conservative fiction "Ragnarok Vice."

Response for this piece can be found at Everyone loves Doggy

I should think of a way to rip the whole thing and preserve it, but here's a few good, well written one.

Stringfellow:
To summarize all this convoluted anecdotal mess, gaming have never been a cult ever since the day when it went mainstream. You could never acclaim such pedestal-high glory days of claiming you chomped all the pellets in Pac-Man or run through classic Tempest in record breaking time. Gaming have become mainstream, and from your post, IMO of course, you only pissed at the how the tables have turned from gaming for the nerds and occultish few only to those in mainstream. Sure, i miss those days of congregating with selected friends who gushed in how you could finish Space Invaders by claivoyant means , or how heart-rendering FF3 is during its endings, but with time, the whole industry have changed. There are some aspects of this that is negative(as exemplified by you in above post) but the possibility of sharing this with wider audience is a much sweeter victory than huddling in closed groups and proclaiming that you a God among the....few?

I was protective of how i go about my gaming ways once upon a time ago, but wanting the industry to remain closed, or static is selfish by all accounts.As for the jocks moseying to the nerds, i see that as a huge victory, without even the nerds having to lift a finger.Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo did all the job for them, and here we are in the 21st century revelling in a much wider, larger community which would force the acknowledgement of the fact that gaming is no longer for kids, or the thick-specky few, but for everyone.Is this a better world?Or would you rather see the nerds flocking among the nerds while the jocks continue with their brutish ways?

posted by PuppySlayer @ 12:20 AM