Rss Feed

The World of Video Games

I'm not the most coordinated person around.

This may be an understatement. My friends like to helpfully remind me of that time I set that girl's hair on fire in biology lab (which was an ACCIDENT), and that time I sort of chopped my cooking partner's finger with a knife in home economics (also an accident, I assure you), and maybe also that time when I kinda shot my gym teacher (but come on, that could have happened to ANYONE).

Whatever the case, you can imagine that my hand-eye coordination isn't the best, either. I use this as the reason for why I royally suck at video games.

Sometimes, however, video games are a bit unavoidable, like at the family friend New Year's party I went to. Some people were at wild, crazy dance clubs, running about in tiny, sparkly tops and nonexistent miniskirts, waving their arms and chugging beer. (...that IS what people do at dance clubs... right?) I, on the other hand, was in a large house sitting next to a bunch of Asian boys playing video games.

There weren't that many of us kids, so someone handed me a controller and started spouting off a long list of complicated motions. ("The 'A' button - no, that's the 'B' button, the 'A' one is the green one - makes you hit people, and the 'B' button makes you hit people in cooler ways, and the 'X' button makes you jump, and the 'Y' button also makes you jump, and that little thing you spin around with your thumb makes you move, and that red button makes the world blow up.")

I nodded like I actually knew what he was talking about, settling in uber-gaming position, and got ready to play "Bowl" or "Shawl" or "Brawl" or whatever the game was. Apparently before you could actually play you have to select a character. The other guys chimed in on what were "good" characters and what were "bad" ones, but I didn't really listen and just chose the cutest one I could find.

Come on, isn't that the cutest thing?

Once your character was chosen, the fighting began!

Yeah, that kind of stumped me too. So much thought went into the selection process, and everyone had nice characters (sort of? I mean, maybe if grizzly, evil, sort-of-human things with gray skin is what rocks your boat...), and then you just try to blow everyone up?

"So why are we fighting?" I asked, hitting random buttons.

After a pause, the boy who had explained the controls to me, eyes glued to the screen, said, "Uh, what do you mean?"

"Like, what's the backstory? The conflict, or whatever? Why are they all trying to defeat each other?"

He tore his eyes away from the screen long enough to give me The Look. You know the one I'm talking about.

Yeah, that's the one.

"Uh... there isn't any. Just fight people. Make them explode. Try to win."

I blinked. "Oh. Well. Okay... I guess..."

Apparently at first I was doing really well. I actually won quite a few rounds, mostly with the gameplay strategy of hitting random stuff and making the Gamer Face.
That seems to be the Gamer Pose, too.
But then, after five hours, I started to actually figure out what was going on. I realized what all the buttons do, exactly how to win, how to do a "Knock Out"...

And I promptly began to lose.

0 comments:

Post a Comment