Tag Archives: adults

Playing video games does not make me a child

Computer Games, , ,

https://medium.com/@duanegundrum/playing-video-games-does-not-make-me-a-child-a63ff7d5c707

I’ll let you in on a secret that’s not so much of a secret: I play video games. And I’ve always played video games. And thus, I’m probably always going to play video games.

I started playing video games when video games first became a thing. In my last years of high school, the personal computer came out and I immediately started playing video games. Back then, they were usually sold in plastic baggies, kind of like crack and heroin. The result was the same: We all got addicted and wanted more.

And that was a problem because at that time there weren’t any more. There was maybe one or two new video games a month. I went to the local video game store in the San Bruno mall and looked over the selection of new games that were contained in nice, cardboard boxes with really impressive, colored drawings which helped me decide what new game I would buy. And almost always, I would buy the new box of that game and take it home, ready to open it and slip that 5 and a half disk into my disk drive to load up and hope that it played. And then I would have my fix for the month, playing it until a new game came along.

But in the beginning, there was no store in San Bruno Mall (I think it had been a store that sold vacuums). Instead, computer magazines would publish full basic programming codes that we would have to type in oursevles into our computers and hope that the gods and goddesses were kind to us that time so that the program would actually work. And they never did. If you knew BASIC coding yourself, you might be able to figure out what was wrong and fix it yourself. Or you gave up after trying some fixing and then went on to another set of coding in the magazine that you hoped might work instead. That was gaming back in the day.

So yeah, once we got past that era of computer gaming, we got the nice cardboard boxes, which are still awesome today. I remember playing Richard Garriott’s first approaches to gaming back in the day (Ultima I and II). Then he started creating in an environment where the cardboard boxes were a new part of the industry (Ultima III and everyone that followed). I remember buying his games in plastic baggies and then in professional boxes after that. My, how that industry changed over just a couple of years.

But today, I still play computer games. Because I love them.

Nowadays, we buy our games online, and sometimes even play them online.

I play a couple of online games that I’ve played for over a decade. I made friends in those games, and some have stuck around while others have moved onto other games, or even in activities that have nothing to do with games. I remember a friend I made in Ultima Online who moved on to something else and then ran into him while playing Everquest (using the same name he used in Ultima Online). Meeting a friend again in a subsequent game is always a great feeling, and it’s happened several times.

In some online games, we have a discord server for our guild, and then that guild covers several different games, so you might just carry over that friendship into that other game, already knowing that person before you ever subscribed to that new game.

But the one thing I wanted to talk about his how people who don’t play games often make snide comments about childishness just because I happen to play video games. They talk about how I’m wasting a good deal of my time playing those games, while they don’t seem to have a problem that they spend more of their time watching sports on television.

At what point did watching a sports competition for practically every game during a season seem more adult than playing a video game?

One thing that never gets mentioned is that watching a sports game involves nothing more than just viewing. Not once do you get to pick up the baseball or football. Not once do you decide any play that is going to happen on the field. Nor does any thought of the game have any more impact than cheering for the team you like better. And sometimes it’s in front of a TV screen, so the players quite often don’t ever hear your input in any way, shape or form.

Computer gaming, on the other hand, requires your input in order to make the action move forward. If you play computer sports, you are controlling a large part of the game. Your inputs matter; otherwise, they don’t happen.

If you play a more action-oriented game, you are the center of the action, and whatever you do is a part of the narrative itself. Sure, someone programmed a great deal of the story, but that story doesn’t happen if you don’t actually make a choice of which way to lead that story. Most games today are beyond just observation with the story. Games require you to choose your own adventure in that what was programmed was your choice to drive the narrative forward.

A lot of the games are adult-driven stories. I don’t mean prurient in nature, but adult themes that probably aren’t appropriate for youngsters that haven’t developed the capacities to handle such stories. Recently, I’ve come across a couple of games that while playing them have made me decide what is the proper course forward when my choices are to let a civilization die or to sacrifice parts of my own breathren to avoid having to make such horrible decisions. No, not something young people should have to deal with, and even me, with years of experience and dealing with many bad situations, I really didn’t feel that even I was ready to make such decisions.

You don’t get those kinds of choices when watching a football game on television.

So, the point is: These aren’t the games we played when computer games were in their youthful period. I don’t remember thinking to myself that destroying individual asteroids with a ship that was only capable of turning and firing at rocks was somehow deciding the fate of anything other than should I make these big asteroids into smaller asteroids or just not do it. No, games have changed tremendously over the years, and I honestly think that people who don’t play them honestly think that they’re of the same nature today.

They aren’t.

So, when someone starts to think that my desire to play computer games somehow makes me more of a child than a man, I quickly tune them out. After all, I’m deciding whether or not I must wipe out a civilization in lieu of saving my brother.

Man, the decisions we have to make in My Little Pony are really complicated these days.

What’s the with all the old guys and child porn these days?

News, , , , , , ,

Am I the only one noticing that way far too many “responsible” adult males are being charged with child porn crimes these days? You can’t seem to go an entire week without a pronouncement of some politician’s career being destroyed by allegations of child porn, some college sports guy running a “charity” that seems to be another word for “access to kis for sex” and now we have some university professor of engineering who allegedly was viewing child porn on his laptop on a plane in first class when he was photographed by another passenger and asked to stop viewing child porn by the stewardess. I’m not even going to comment on the allegations, other than to say, what the hell is wrong with people? Okay, what the hell is ALLEGEDLY wrong with people?

Okay, a long time ago, about the time Socrates was put to death for influencing children, old men seemed to have this thing for little boys, and back then it was one of those not talked about “discretions”. Fortunately, we’ve evolved way beyond that to where using children for your sexual needs is now straight out illegal, and yes, wrong.

Now, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that when it comes to personal mating things, I’m not exactly the poster child for normality, but come on people. Why are grown men thinking it’s okay to go after children? And then when they get caught, after they lawyer themselves up, they act like they weren’t doing anything wrong, almost as if they really want to say “come on, everyone’s doing it, right?” No, everyone’s not doing it, and not too many things freak me out or cause me to think there’s something seriously wrong with our civilization, beyond the usual things that make me think there are serious things wrong with our civilization, but this one just simply continues to evade me for any ability to understand it. And again, I’ve done some pretty bizarre things in my time that would cause a church lady to faint (or pass me her phone number…call me), but there’s one point that should never be crossed by anyone, and that’s the idea of consensuality, and NO, a child has no ability to make a consensual decision, no matter how convoluted your thinking process may be to imagine that such a thing is possible.

I’m sure a psychologist could explain all of this, but I fail to understand how someone can find this appealing in any way. But even worse, I find it hard to believe that someone doing something like this doesn’t realize it’s wrong and still manages to do it without ever seeking some kind of help. If I ever found myself doing something that was hurting others without their consent, I’d be seeking medical assistance immediately. At what point of cognitive dissonance does someone allow himself to think something like this would ever be okay?

All right. My rant is over. I hope I haven’t hurt anyone nonconsensually who ended up reading this. If so, I might have to seek out medical assistance.

Being a Single Guy is Pretty Damn Tough These Days

Movies, Relationships, Social Networking, , , , ,

It seems there’s a new Muppet Movie about to open up. For those who know me, it’s not a surprise that I’m actually looking forward to watching it when it does come out. But there’s a problem. That’s kind of what this whole post is about.

You see, I’m one of those grown up kids who probably will never grow up. And I’m okay with that. That means that unlike guys who seem to think watching football, Victoria Secret lingerie specials on TV and endless porn is the definition of being an adult, that’s really not me. I’m a lot more comfortable watching Elmo, Scooby Doo, playing World of Warcraft or watching any and all kinds of science fiction on TV. Those are the kinds of things that men are supposed to kind of put behind them when they hit adulthood, right about the time they start thinking about marriage.

Me, however, not so much. I’ve never really given much thought to getting married. Never gave that much thought to actually dating, to be honest. I’m the kind of person who is comfortable living in my own little world, and up until now, this has been okay, as long as this lifestyle doesn’t seem to intrude on anyone else.

Unfortunately, the real world has kind of changed in a way that makes such a lifestyle almost impossible. There is no end to the amount of literature written about how people like me need to “grow up” or “man up”, or whatever stupid slogan they need to use to somehow diminish the fact that I still think legos are cool. And that brings me to the whole idea of what started off this article: The Muppets.

Years ago, I went to watch one of the Shrek movies. I was alone in the theater, because it was the middle of the day, and I chose a time when most of the kids wouldn’t be there (because they’d be at school, or their parents would be at work). Well, at one point, this woman and her kid show up to the movie, and as I’m practically the only other person in the theater (there were actually about four other people in various spots in the theater at the time), her kid wandered to a seat close to where I was, and that woman took one look at me, and immediately ushered her kid as far away from me as possible. It’s not like I’m some serial killer looking kind of guy or anything, but I immediately started to get self-conscious because I could quickly see what was going through her mind: Why is there some strange guy alone at a kid’s movie? It didn’t matter what my real reason for it was, somehow I kept thinking that she was constantly checking up on me to see if I was scouting out other children.

And that’s the mindset of a lot of people whenever a single guy shows up alone to a movie theater, specifically to see a movie that others deem as a “kiddie” movie. In our society, we have people so paranoid about children that they start to perceive that every other person out there has some secret intention to harm them if they can just get away with it. You see this same mentality whenever a porn star goes to read to children at a library, an adult venue comes anywhere near a school, or anything that involves “sex” ends up being in the earshot of someone who might think there are children around. There is such a fear of practically everyone else that otherwise normal people are no longer normal, but they are now suspected child molesters and abductors, and all sorts of other evil entities that I have not yet heard about.

When I told a female friend I was thinking of seeing the new Muppet movie, she said, “you can take my kid to see it”, which would then give me an adequate reason to go to a movie theater (because I would have a child with me). Other than the fact that the offer wasn’t serious, I kept imagining how bad things are when a single male has to “find” kid to drag to a movie just so he can go see a kiddie movie that he’d rather not see with anyone else.

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine a few years back about this because we surmized that even if two single guys went to a children’s movie, there would still be people looking at them strangely, wondering why two older adults were at a movie theater where kids were present. The idea that people might be there for something innocent, like watching a movie, seems to get in the way of irrational fear, however.

A couple of years back, I used to have a couple of close female friends with whom I would always go to these types of movies, because a single guy was always “okay” at a children’s movie, as long as you were there with a “date”, even if you weren’t dating the woman you were with. I used to drag my friend Kat to movies all the time (or she dragged me…not sure how it really worked out), and if it wasn’t for her, I never would have seen Wall-E, because I probably never would have gone to a movie theater to see it alone. It’s just not worth the stares.

But today, I don’t have a female friend I hang out with like I used to. Back then, while I was doing grad school, it was a lot easier finding a female friend who liked to hang out, who didn’t think you were trying to date her. Nowadays, in the real world, that just hasn’t happened for me. The last woman I asked to a movie wanted dinner to go along with that movie, meaning she expected it to be a “date”, not just two friends hanging out at a movie. And that’s okay, but that’s not the kind of person I want to see the Muppets with.

So, I’ll probably have to wait until it comes to dvd, which usually diminishes the experience of seeing a movie like that in an audience of people who are laughing as Kermit and gang do the kinds of things that only Kermit and the gang would ever do.