Vidyuh

      I haven't played video games in a really long time--for most of the middle of that time, I decided it was because they weren't for me.  I didn't play them as religiously as others and I felt I didn't play them for the right--the same--reasons as many of my peers either.  Gaming culture makes me feel shy and stumble-footed; a double blush born of feeling like I have no business being there and the mad love for the handful of games that brought me creeping in to begin with. For a good five years I took pride in the stack of slick Game Informer magazines I horded in my room.  I flipped through them for the pictures--concept art or a two-pose sprite on a lush unmoving townscape, it was beautiful.  I still remember the Baten Kaitos advert I tried to draw, the twisted Resident Evil and Doom monsters spilling from their screenshots and around the reviews I didn't read because who wants to read when you can look at beasties. And something about the smell of the zines--again, something slick and almost oily, altogether different from the chemical coconut-flower fragrances of Seventeen. I think the whole stack spanned only a year or two--but they were new to me for a couple after, since I rarely played the games that spawned the articles.
      This was how I accessed games that were fifty, then sixty dollars a piece when new.  Somewhere between high school and college, I realized that most of my peers bought video games as soon as they came out.  And my mind was blown.  My family had a careful ritual of watching a game come out, sometimes first in a magazine, or in a commercial, a great digital dawn.  Only then  then sunset came before the rise--you had to forget about it for awhile, until the price dropped and it showed up at random as a gift because shit you are a kid and you have no monies.  And now, well, shit--I'm an adult, and I still don't really have money.  Sixty dollars is a third of a gaming console A THIRD OF A GAMING CONSOLE. I just--I don't even.
I had a gameboy color (translucent grape--the badassest shit out there), a super nintendo, an n64, a playstation, a playstation 2, and a ds lite.  All of these things were bought at least a year after they came out--I remember the n64 we got when it was right about where the ps2 is now: great bins of discount games in the middle of Gamestop, no designated wall space anymore.  I didn't upgrade to a Wii, a Playstation 3, or an Xbox 360 because shit those fuckers are expensive.  They still are, because the ps3 started out phenomenally expensive to begin with, and the 360 keeps rolling out newer models that keep the price fresh.  And the Wii...is just the Wii.
      The other reason I can't justify this purchase (other than being poor as shit) is that I don't play all the games. Or a lot of games.  Or finish ones I don't like, sometimes.  Games scare me.  They excite me, too, and that's what draws me to them.  When I'm alone, or with friends, I can usually get past the scaring part, but I've never really participated in any sort of gaming culture because there's no way to say "hello I'm scared as tits of playing Super Mario World how are you today."  I don't know if it's because I can't distance myself from games or what--I feel like the good and the bad are forever locked together in this one--but what makes games so real for me, so desirable, is also what makes them terrifying objects.  RPGs I can usually handle better, because the pacing is rather controlled and shit don't sneak up on you.  Boss fights are usually what get me.  Hide and seek and tag are things I like that terrify me as well; so there's probably a theme in this somewhere.
      Husks still give me the serious goddamn heebie jeebies, especially those linebacker fucks that charge you in Mass Effect 2, but I pull out my particle gun, curse a lot, and get over it.      So it's something I can push pass, usually if I'm on my own, because it feels embarrassing as fuck otherwise.  The first day I played Mass Effect (the first first-person shooter I've played since maybe junior high), I died three times in the first mission and decided "FUCK this is just not going to happen."  Then I came back to it a week later and desperately ground past the disorientation until I was "in"-- that place where the world fits like a glove, in terms of it being manipulable, and the slight necessary distance the manipulable often demands.  They say the brain goes entirely blank during an orgasm; it's something like that when you're deep enough.
      There are still aspects I can't suspend, though.  Sometimes I feel like the characters in current playthroughs are aware of what I've done (in general, and to them) in previous playthroughs. When I'm Hawke, I help Zevran not just because I'm diplomatic but because, well, maybe I feel like I have to atone for my Warden's killing him.  As if he knows.  As if his uncanny reappearance is due to this unsettled issue and not the fact that I didn't import my Origins save.  I know I should try to diversify my choices in playthroughs, but--and it sounds ridiculous--it's like I worry about putting all potentials on the same ground; as if the new playthrough will efface, or at least dim, the previous (which is usually the first, and therefore the most strongly felt, and the most researched).
      I've been doing every last weenie side mission in Mass Effect 2 before the final battle because Thane threw all of my Garrus feels into question and GODDAMN, THE MAN(man-lizard?) IS DYING.  I've already resigned myself to having to make a new Shepard for ME3 (unless I creep over to my friends house every weekend to play it on her device in the utmost of creepy ways), so whoever I choose, it doesn't matter.  This story, this playthrough, ends, and I can make infinite others.  But fuck, what if they know?      Something small, the shock waves of a parallel self passing through all other parallel selves. I wonder if it stems from the recent decision I made regarding dream weight--but maybe they are both of some other slight influence.  As much as I want to see Malus and Celosia again, I haven't finished a second runthrough of SOTC because I don't know if I can do what I did while knowing what I'm doing; even if the game hasn't changed, I have.  I change it.
      The games I unabashedly love, to date, are: Twinsen, Draken, Digimon World 2, Pokemon Red and Gold, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy 7, LoZ: Phantom Hourglass, Dragon Ages and Mass Effects.  In twenty years, it seems a bit paltry, I guess, due partly to being stuck in console history.  But I don't know.  It doesn't bother me anymore--the what I am and how I do.  I'm calling it the Bioware Age of my life, because that's about when it happened.
       In this first year of the Bioware Age, no fucks are given and all my feels are valid.