The Geek Girl's Survival Guide #12

I’ve never been much of a video gamer.

I grew up with an Atari. Computerwise, I’ve played King’s Quest, and Doom, and shareware games--a little. I’ve also spent many babysitting hours being beaten by seven-year-olds at Mario Cart.

That’s about it.

Unfortunately, this puts me far behind most of my friends when it comes to the hand-eye coordination for console games. Maybe there’s something to the argument that games are good for brain development.

Though only if you’re developing your brain to defeat uber-evil through pushing little buttons. And how useful is that, really?

I do, on the other hand, have quite a bit of experience observing video games, probably because most of the gamers I know like to have other people watch them play, or at least don’t mind the company.

The frustrating part about being an observer is that if your player gets bored, you never find out what happens at the end of the game.

I’m about to admit ignorance here.

It wasn’t until a year or so ago that I found out that video games had storylines.

You have to understand; I was used to Atari games. Admit it. Pac man isn’t exactly plot heavy. So how was I to know there was more to these games than killing everything that moves and picking up random objects?

I had some friends who had a Game Cube. I used to go hang out at their apartment, because they were pretty cool guys. Incidentally, I ended up spending many hours watching them play game involving an Abominable Snow Furby.

Okay, so it probably wasn’t that exactly. But that’s what it looked like, which now that I think about it is kind of disturbing in its own right.

Our Snow Furby was part of the mystery of the game. Every once in a while it would pop up and do something random, and we didn’t know why.

Then my friends got sick of the game and quit playing.

To this day I don’t know what was up with the Snow Furby.

What’s strange to me is that this bothers me. A lot. It’s almost as if I’ve begun an intriguing novel, and then was forced to stop halfway through.

If anyone out there knows what’s up with that Furby, let me know. It’s keeping me up at night.

So, the next logical step would be for me to learn to play these games myself. Now that I know that at least some of them have interesting storylines, I wouldn’t mind learning to play.

This is easier said than done.

First of all, game systems are expensive. There’s no way I’m interested enough to get my own equipment. I’m also a people person, meaning that there’s no way I’m going to spend my time by myself, in my room, playing video games.

It’s only interesting if I have someone to play with.

I’ve had several people try to teach me to play, but unfortunately, 95% of gamers are afflicted with what I call the “Let-me-do-that” syndrome.

Take your typical gamer. We’ll call him Bob.

Bob has been playing video games since he was six years old and his mom told his brother to let him have a turn. He owns two systems, and a computer with gobs and gobs of RAM. He can’t remember what it’s like not to know how to work the controller.

Now let’s say that Bob is a friend of mine. Like most of the gamers I know, he likes to tell people about his video games. This works well, because I love to listen to people talk about things they are passionate about. I spend many hours watching Bob massacre poor, unsuspecting rodent-like enemies, and as a result we have a good, healthy friendship.

Bob’s a nice guy. I like Bob.

Then Bob says, “would you like to play?”

And I think, sure. Why not?

So he hands over a strange object covered in buttons and knobs. And I proceed to die. Violently. Over and over.

I turn when I mean to run. I run when I mean to turn. I throw grenades at walls and blow myself up.

With a player like me, who needs enemies?

Bob, on the other hand, turns into a twitching mess. His fingers push imaginary buttons. He cringes and yells and finally takes the controller back and says those symptomatic words: Let me do that!

My advice: don’t play with Bob. It’s not much fun.

To be fair, I’ve learned lately that not everyone is like this. Apparently the twitching epidemic hasn’t affected the entire population. (At least not yet. Lock your doors, people. I hear saran wrap and duct tape help.)

Recently, I’ve been learning to play Halo with some of said unaffected people.

And it’s a blast.

We were in multiplayer, and I ran over my friend with a car. Then she chased me with it. And then we managed to lose the car entirely. I hear we were supposed to be off shooting some enemies or something, but I’m still not entirely sure.

I shall have to investigate the matter further. Maybe we’ll make a gamer out of me yet.

Discuss it in our forums.

Written by MsFish on April 27th, 2006