Three disclaimers before I begin:
1. I am not a gamer. I can barely say I've dipped my toe into the ocean of gaming, it would be more like a part of a toenail, like if I had a hangnail or something. That is the level of my exposure.
2. I am NOT saying that playing these games WILL make you a bad person, or that people who play them ARE, but these are some games I've had experience with that make it kind of tempting to lose your soul.
3. No, Grand Theft Auto is not going to be on this list. I've never played it, but had a boyfriend who was adamant that it is not what the general populace has branded it, "that game where you run over hookers," but either way, I can't even drive in real life, I can't even drive a Go-Kart without running into the wall and a park employee having to rescue me (true story), so I shall abstain.
And now, let's delve into the world of video games that let you be a total jerk without even realizing how far you've fallen down that slope, shall we?
#5: MORTAL KOMBAT
My introduction to Mortal Kombat was an eye-opening one.
I had never heard of Mortal Kombat - the game, the movies, anything. I'd never played arcade games growing up. I did not realize competitive video gaming was a thing.
But I was hanging out with one of my coworkers, and he mentioned he was going to be playing in a Mortal Kombat tournament the following weekend. I said, "Oh, I'll come see you! What's Mortal Kombat?" He said, "Ok ... are you sure?"
I told my friend Mike that I was going to a Mortal Kombat tournament and didn't know what to expect. He said, "Oh, expect you'll be the only girl there. You are going to be hit on SO MUCH."
Mike was wrong. Oh, how Mike was wrong. Well, he was right that I was the only girl there, but I did not get hit on, unless you count the multiple people who SHOVED ME OUT OF THE WAY if I was blocking their view of the currently active game in any way.
This was my introduction to fighting games, and I caught on quickly that you are fighting another character to the death (hence the name of the game), but that's not how you lose your soul. There's an optional thing you can do called a "babality." In addition to killing your opponent like in a normal fatality, you reduce them to a baby version of their character and humiliate them. Most of the people there are very attached to their characters. It's not like, "Hey, I'll be this character, they look fun," it's like, they ARE that character. My coworker had never played as anyone other than Johnny Cage and never would.
But anyway, babalities are apparently a huge **** move. Here's a video compilation of them; you do not have to watch the whole thing to get the gist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaLflkIApJU
Someone pulled a babality at that tournament, and his opponent threw down his controllers and STORMED out of the room. I asked my coworker afterwards, "What happened?" He responded, "The guy did a babality. That's kind of a **** move, you're embarrassing your opponent as you beat them."
So, you can be a jerk in Mortal Kombat, but even aside from that, this game has a fandom that scared me sometimes.
So, the day after the tournament, my coworker asked me out. I wanted to be a part offff his worrrrld so when he went to a practice tournament at the arcade that sponsored him one night, I asked him if I could tag along. He'd taught me the very basics of the game and I'd picked a character, Baraka, cuz he had kewl teeth. So my boyfriend taught me some Baraka moves and said, hey, you might get through one round, maybe. And I joined the tournament.
Here is where the guys there who were kind of his friends/teammates are happy that he brought his girlfriend and that she's taking an interest in something they like and maybe they even want to help teach her so she can play too!
No.
Here is where everyone is extremely annoyed that this girl who doesn't know what she's doing entered their practice tournament because that could have been an actual game, obliterate her immediately, and rearrange the bracket so she's not in it. I'm not a competitive person AT ALL; I don't like strategy games, I only like games that are, like, fun. I realized that night that these guys are not playing for fun.
I get it, I guess. You're really into this game. You don't want someone weighing you down and getting in the way of a game you'd actually really cared about, perhaps even impeding it, because they are trying to be a sweet girlfriend and spend more time with their boo. But, I learned my lesson. Mortal Kombat is not a game for me; probably no game that competitive is. But as someone who's been in the "No Mandies" version of the "No Homers Club" in so many capacities throughout my life, I hate the idea of a fandom that excludes you from the very beginning if you don't know exactly what you're doing or talking about. Fandom does not offer entry level positions. This is part of why I'm incredibly wary of anything with an aggressive fandom. Like, I like Star Wars, but do I know stuff about it? No. So I don't say anything around Star Wars fans, especially because if I say the movie I enjoy most is "The Force Awakens" I will be told I'm an idiot and should be canceled from earth. Even the thing I'm the biggest fan of, The Simpsons (I am bilingual; I speak English and Simpsons quotes), I can't talk about because people who label themselves classic Simpsons fans will tell me, upon learning I still enjoy the new episodes, that I am stupid and wrong and should be canceled from earth.
So, to summarize:
-Building "babalities" into a game so you can further humiliate the person you're already defeating seems mean, especially for a game targeted to adolescent boys
-I probably should not have tried to join that tournament, but, I kind of still stand by my opinion that games should be fun. Maybe this is more of a sport than a game. Maybe I'll see my old boyfriend represent the US in Mortal Kombat in the Olympics someday.
#4: THE WALKING DEAD
The guy I dated after dating Johnny Cage was very into video games. My heart sank a little when I realized the extent of his enthusiasm, because I had learned that I am bad at video games, as my prior lament illustrates, and felt ostracized from that community. To quote something I've heard before somewhere, "A bird and a fish may fall in love, but where would they live?"
But something intrigued me about the type of games my new boyfriend played. He was into indie games, and also story-based games. Possibly ... video games could have a place for Mandie.
I told my boyfriend I would like to learn the ways of the video game. He wisely started me out on Gone Home. It's completely story based and does not require any quick thinking, dexterity, hand-eye coordination, or mad fightin skills. However, I needed help from him even on this one, because I also have no spatial reasoning and no sense of navigation and kept getting lost in the house, and also I wasn't used to using keyboard navigation. I mean, until I made my brief and tragic debut in Mortal Kombat in my twenties, I had never played any computer game or video game that required any kind of gaming skill, unless you count trying to shoot buffalos in my #2, which I was also bad at. I might game more if I were just ... better at it. I've been frustrated so many times to buy a game and then get held up because even though I was invested in it, it was just too damn hard and I didn't have the skilz to get very far in it. Example: Limbo. I could never get past the very first scene in that one, and I was disappointed, I mean, man, I paid for this, but I'm video game disabled. I mean, I even had to have my friend Naomi help me with the arrow shooting challenge when I played that Trogdor game on Homestar Runner in high school.
I guess I get it, if all these games were Mandie-level easy, who would want to play them?
But, I digress. Anyway, unlike me, my boyfriend had never watched The Walking Dead or read the graphic novels. And, unlike him, I had never played the Walking Dead Telltale game. If you don't know what Telltale games are like, I shall let Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers educate you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EWUY-MJt9A
This is a pretty brilliant parody. In the Walking Dead game, you have a single POV character, but you'll occasionally get little hints, like in that video, stating, "X is growing suspicious" or "X will always remember this." Throughout the game, you are given a number of choices, much like our favorite principal was, and a limited amount of time to make a choice, so you have to think fast when deciding what you're going to do or say, and that alters the course of the rest of the game. Like my #3, this game probably has a plethora of possible outcomes.
The thing with the Walking Dead game is, even just in season 1, which is as far as I got, there are multiple "you can save only one" situations where you're actively killing whichever character you don't choose. This game does not follow the same plot or include the same characters as the Walking Dead books or show, so you don't know what's going to happen. I ... don't remember there ever being a "you can save only one" scenario in The Walking Dead, but there probably was, it's been a long time. This is more like Sophie's Choice: A Fun Zombie Game. (oo I'm going to write that down and TM that)
So yeah, you kind of have to be an ***hole in this game, because you're choosing to kill someone in your lil survivors clan in order to save the other. I played this game while my boyfriend was sitting next to me but I was calling all my own shots. He'd disapproved of my choices overall, but it was when I chose to save Shawn instead of Duck that he told me in frustration that I do not have a soul.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a9VsUGGESo
So you're in a zombie apocalypse situation, and you have the choice of saving the skilled, able-bodied, helpful young man or the idiot child who got himself into this situation and is more of a liability than anything, sitting there being all annoying and ****. To be clear, IRL, I would save the child, because he is a child, but this is a game, Shawn is more likely to help me win the game, and that animated child was annoying me from the first time he showed up and I wished to have him removed from my gameplay.
My boyfriend told me I didn't have a soul, but what he knew and I didn't know (but YOU know if you watched that video) is that whatever choice you make, Shawn still dies and Duck still lives. And whatever choice you make, the group is still going to blame you for Shawn's death.
But come on. Shawn is pinned under a tractor. Duck could very easily run away from the zombies if he weren't just sitting there looking like an 8-year-old with the brain of a 1-year-old who just came out of a 1000-year coma. (Children are generally liabilities in the Walking Dead universe. I mean, Carol just starts taking 'em out in the show. Telling them monsters will eat them, telling them to look at the flowers, giving them cookies, etc etc) (I think I like the clingy, horny Carol from the books more than whatever she is in the show) (Have you seen the episode where they think Carol died or left the group, but then she comes back? Wait that's all of them) (I digress)
I could have known what the outcome would be, if I'd just looked up a playthrough guide of this game. Shortly after the Duck/Shawn dilemma, there's a Doug/Carley dilemma, and you can look up what the outcome would be based on which of them you tried to save.
Pretty much every game I've ever played has a playthrough guide. I know I relied on them heavily for Night In the Woods and that one zombie comedy game, I think it might have been Australian, if you know what I'm talking about tell me, otherwise someday I might be able to get back into my Steam account.
Anyway. Walking Dead, the video game. Kinda interesting. Makes you be Sophie.
#3: UNDERTALE
Where to begin about Undertale. I have more history with my #2 and #1, but this is objectively the best game I, in my limited experience, have ever played. But it still allows you to, perhaps even unknowingly, be a ****.
When this game came out, it became my boyfriend's w3rld. His computer background was Annoying Dog. Even though Annoying Dog plays a very small part in Undertale, if any, I guess it was his favorite. I didn't know anything about this game, so when I asked him what he was doing tonight and he said "I'm gonna play more Undertale," I had seen the doglike background and I assumed this was a video game about dogs and actually thought, for a couple months, that he was saying "Under Tail." I really thought that was the game's name.
Anyway, he continued his love for this game, and was so eager to share it with others that he would get on group calls when any of his friends were starting the game, and would give them tips and do all the voices.
I felt left out.
I asked him at one point if we could play the game together. He said, "I can't restart Undertale on my Steam account." I asked him why. He said, "I just can't." I would understand this later.
When I was cat-sitting and needed to occupy myself one weekend, I watched some Honest Video Game Trailers, and saw the one for Undertale. Wait - this is not a video game about undercover dogs solving mysteries?
I was intrigued, and I bought Undertale and started playing it.
The concept of this game is that you're playing as a genderless human child that has fallen through a barrier between the world of humans and the world of monsters. You journey through six different realms, encountering various monsters along the way. Some are friendly, some pop up and try to attack you with no real bearing on the plot (EXCEPT ... well, we'll get there), and some, depending on how you play the game, could end you, become your friend, or change the way the story unfolds entirely.
The boss fights in Undertale are Toriel (the kind goat-woman who tries to keep you from going any further for your own good), Papyrus (an aggressively stupid skeleton you can defeat if you can make him think you want to go on a date with him), Undyne (militant girlboss), Mettaton (inadvertently created homicidal robot who can morph into an emo-sexy game show host - I swear I'm not making this up), and Asgore (the sympathetic, grieving king who reluctantly accepts that you will need to fight to the death).
So how can playing Undertale make you a ****? We're getting to that.
In order to get through Undertale, you have to be good at video games. In addition to the boss fights previously mentioned, there are a lot of minor monster characters that show up out of nowhere (e.g., Annoying Dog) and want a lil fight. When fighting, you have to be able to dodge their attacks, which takes mad skilz and increasingly madder skilz as the game progresses, and then you can attack them or you can spare them and keep taking damage. There's a trick to beating each of them - sparing them enough times, or there's a sequence of actions you can take on each of them (for example, you can pet Annoying Dog, but that is basically forfeiting your turn and you still have to keep dodging his attacks until you've petted him enough).
So you have the "choice" of killing each monster you encounter or letting them live, and that's kind of the crux of the game. Only, it's not a choice if you're not good enough at video games to dodge the attacks, and you have no option but to try to kill the monsters. And also if you thought that the point here was to kill to win, like so many a Mortal Kombat, you'd have no way of knowing that this was the point of Undertale.
You don't win if you kill the monsters. There are a multitude of possible endings based on what monsters you do or do not kill, but they fall in three main tracks: the pacifist run (you don't kill any monsters), the neutral run (you kill some, but not all, of the monsters), or the genocide run (you kill everything).
If you do a pacifist run, which I have nowhere near the skilz to complete, you get a happy ending. If you do the neutral run, you get an ambiguous ending and have the chance to start again. If you do the genocide run, the characters cease to be funny, they basically call you a horrible person full of blood lust (one of the characters who would be lovable if you were not on a genocide run tells you to burn in hell), and you don't have the option to go back and get the happy ending.
But how could anyone know that starting this game? I wonder how many people have accidentally completed a genocide run, thinking they were doing what they were supposed to.
I got stuck on this game when I got to the boss fight with Undyne. I was stuck until my boyfriend was able to help me. I'd already killed some of the minor monsters along the way, and he informed me that I wasn't going to get the good ending, but he'd help me get through the rest of the game. When I got to the neutral ending, we restarted my game and he helped me do a pacifist run, by which I mean I just watched him do it, but I was still engaged enough in the story that I cried toward the end. That's how good this game is.
I also need to shout out the soundtrack. I used to have it downloaded on my phone. All the fight songs are so playful and energizing.
The music during the Papyrus boss fight is infectious and also gives you a taste of the humor in this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU9Nv5aM5aY
Anyway, Undertale. Fun, amusing game that might cause you to inadvertently become Hitler. Is not about dogs.
#2: THE OREGON TRAIL (we're getting to the ones I actually still feel bad about now)
Oh, what a game. It teaches you about history, about American geography, about what plants you can and can't eat, it - who am I kidding. If you were a little kid who played this, you don't remember ANY of that stuff. You only remember possibly the word "dysentery," and also that this game may or may not have enabled you to be a huge ****.
When I was in elementary school, computer time was a common reward, and one of the most popular games was Oregon Trail. All the kids used the same computer (I'm old, and also I went to a crappy small-town public school). So, you can name your wagon team after your classmates, and if your team dies, you can write an insulting epitaph. And everyone in the class will eventually see that epitaph, because I'm sure you remember that while traversing the trail, you get notified when you pass a grave and have the option to read it. So there were plenty of epitaphs along the lines of "Chad lo-oves April!" or "Kimmy died of stupid." I think I contributed to the mean once, by leaving the epitaph "Daya has a boyfriend" because, at least for my generation, 3rd and 4th grade were when the worst insult was that you did like like someone, and 5th grade and onward the worst insult was that you'd never had a boyfriend/girlfriend. It was quite abrupt.
When my family got the Oregon Trail game a few years later, there had been some updates. For one, you could now save a copy of a "trail log" that I thought was really fun. It automatically logged events like "you lost 25 pounds of food due to spoilage," but, you could also write in it yourself. So, you could cast some characters (people you knew, fictional characters, celebrities, whatever), and log their reactions to what was going on, and then save the log. My sister and I, and even my dad, had an absolute blast.
I wish I still had access to any of these logs, but I don't. We mashed up fictional characters we'd created, kids at school, George W. Bush, the Backstreet boys, I forget who else. You were even able to go in and edit things that were auto-logged to the trail log. For example, you could edit "No grass for the oxen" to "No grass for the AJ (we have him on a very specific diet)."
Things took a darker turn when we picked up a different version of Oregon Trail - 4th edition - from a bargain bin at some point.
So, I think it was leaning more into the educational game thing rather than the kill your friends thing, and rather than being able to name your wagon party, you choose two people from ... I wanna say four ... characters played by I sure hope amateur actors who are as hammy as anyone in a small town murder mystery dinner theater times ten (speaking as someone who's been in one). So those two people are your crew, and they communicate through live-action video clips based on what's going on in the game. There's no longer a log option. No more writing epic stories about George W. Bush succumbing to a piece of cheese he kept on the wagon so long that the mold became sentient.
So, out of the four characters, the one that was the most baffling/annoying was Alliteration T. Meriweather. I was hoping I could find a clip of just him, but I couldn't. There's this clip of an entire playthrough of the game where he's one of the chosen partners, but I do not care enough to watch 90 minutes of someone playing Oregon Trail; I'm including this simply so you do not think he is a fever dream I had: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjtra9rT2OU
Alliteration had virtually no skills, survival or social wise, I think he was there for comic relief, and he spoke entirely in alliteration. For example, when you run into another wagon train and choose to get advice from your partner, he says, "We shouldn't be shilly shallying with strangers! Shun them, I say!" (Yeah, even his alliteration was lazy.)
Anyway, Mollie and I wondered how fun and chipper and alliterative our pal Al would be if things got bad. So we purposely played a game where we left way too early, or way too late, I forget, brought virtually nothing with us, except for useless items like a grandfather clock, and never went hunting.
Anyway. When things were looking dire, we saw a whole new Al. This is when we saw the struggling actor who could have been a star if his college production of Hamlet had a role for him, facing the abyss and trembling. The alliteration was gone. We saw an Al begging us for his life, bewildered by what we had wrought. "Partner, are we going to die out here? I don't want to die. Not here. Not now. Partner, please, what's going to happen to us?"
Mollie and I were both SHOOK and immediately started trying to salvage the game. We stopped to rest and trade some stuff, but Al ultimately took off in the night with the grandfather clock and we never saw him again, and I don't think we played that game again.
--- OREGON TRAIL TAKEAWAYS ---
1) I don't know if this game is available anywhere, but if it is, I would love to play it. The original version. I can't look Al in the face again.
2) There is a game called "Organ Trail" that is a whole lotta fun and I would try again to get through if I still had access to my Steam account. Oregon Trail but zombies. Check it out!
3) Let me recommend to you the book "The Indifferent Stars Above." It's one of the best literary nonfiction works I've ever read (I place it above In Cold Blood and Devil in the White City), and it's about logistics of the Oregon/California journey in general but specifically the Donner Party. And, no, the Donner Party were not all a bunch of cannibals. The few who partook ate only of those who had already frozen to death after succumbing to one of the worst winters in recorded history. But, reading that book makes you realize how ... real the Oregon Trail game you blithely played as a child really was. The Donner Party made all the wrong choices. They started their journey too late. They trusted the wrong people. They made the wrong turns. They did not ration properly. And, as a result, about half of them died, much like the likely result of playing the children's computer game over a century later.
So, this game, started as an educational game, kind of became a running cultural joke. I got very excited when I saw an Oregon Trail card game a few Christmases ago, with the tagline "You Will Die of Dysentery." I bought it for my sister and her boyfriend and we played it together. I died of dysentery on my first turn.
#1: THE SIMS
How, in this post Black Mirror society, can I address the atrocities I committed in The Sims? I shall try.
The Sims, like Oregon Trail, is a game I really miss playing. I might be able to play it again if I can get back into Steam. My sister and I played this game obsessively throughout high school. Like, I remember a bleary-eyed 8-hour Sims session one summer night, after which I stumbled over to the couch and turned on the TV to see the 12:30 a.m. rerun of 3rd Rock from the Sun, and literally thinking, "How could Dick talk to Sally if he didn't click on her to interact with her? Why isn't her face in the corner of the screen?"
But when I played The Sims, I was a ****, In many ways. Let me count the ways.
1. MANDIE USED THE EASY BUTTON
In addition to making my sister Mollie do the house-building for me, I constantly used the cheat code to give my Sims money.
Were I to play this game nowadays, I would actually try to achieve their daily goals, get them those promotions, you know, try to play it like a game that has some kind of strategy, not one where you're creating fake people and then seeing how weird you can make things. But as a high schooler who has not been in the real world yet, gimme dem cheat codes and let's buy them a home recording studio and a Diet Mt. Dew machine, who needs werk.
2. MANDIE AND MOLLIE MADE FUN OF THEIR FAMILY
You might think by this I mean we made a Sim version of our family, which we did (their last name was "Kittywiggles"), but we went much further than that.
The Sims allows you to create wallpapers and even paintings from images you have saved on your computer. So, when decorating the house that always Mollie built, the walls could be papered with a picture of that time your dad fell asleep on the couch and you put a plush Pillsbury Doughboy under his arm, the floor could be the picture of that time you and your sister were miming what cable TV violence is like on the way home from the airport (we were jet lagged), the outside walls could be that picture of Mom that Mollie did in Microsoft Paint trying to capture her facial expression when she does not approve of something, the ceiling could be the Balrog from Lord of the Rings, and you could hang up a painting that is the Microsoft Paint rendition Mollie did of our corgi, Max, vomiting a rainbow after eating Mollie's colored pencils.
My god, the monstrous houses we created. Also, when you enter something into the Sims marketplace, you can give it a description that you'll see when shopping for your wallpaper or whatever. Most of our descriptions were Linkin Park lyrics, I think.
3. MANDIE BECAME AN INDIFFERENT AND SOMETIMES VENGEFUL GOD
So. Sometimes I did actually try to play the game and do the stuff I was supposed to do. Sometimes.
Other times, I purposely put my fake people in situations where they would fail, cheat on each other, and/or fight. Like, if there's an uptight Sim and a Sim that likes to tickle, that ****ing uptight Sim is going to get tickled like ****.
I'm kind of reminded of this Malcolm in the Middle clip, except, I wasn't smiting my Sims, I was just making their lives reality show bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_p6WI4V8N8
Sims could take actions that were outside of your control. You'd see their queued actions in the corner of the screen, and there was one time two of my Sims left the world. Like, the queued action that I did not initiate and could not control said "Leave World." And those two simulated characters were gone. They made the right choice.
The Sims let you create a virtual Real Housewives of Whatever. I remember the review I posted for the book "Black Chalk": "You create six soulless people and put them all in the same room until they start screwing and murdering each other, it's like Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' had a baby with The Sims."
4. MANDIE AND MOLLIE COMMITTED MASS MURDER
For some background. I wanted to be a cartoonist throughout pretty much my entire childhood. That didn't pan out for me, but Mollie does still write comics (https://www.thrivingmurtle.com).
We had a comic strip we co-wrote from when I was 9 years old all the way through my high school graduation. Our fictional town had a cast of characters that rivaled that of The Simpsons (and, we borrowed a lot from The Simpsons, tbh). In addition to the comics that we wrote and showed to pretty much just each other, there were a few board games and some spin-off works, including an apocalyptic trilogy where the third entry is over 100,000 words.
Twice (only twice, because this game takes several days to play), we did Survivor with these characters.
How did it work? Mollie and I divided 10 characters randomly into two tribes. Then, we'd start playing board games against each other whenever we were both free, each playing for one tribe. The tribe that won had immunity, and we'd write "tribal councils" detailing how the other characters voted.
When we got down to 5 and merged tribes like Survivor does, the first challenge was always the Sim challenge.
There are ways you can kill Sims, which seems sketch for a game marketed to children, but you can put them in a swimming pool and then delete the ladder, or you can start a fire. The two easiest ways to start a fire are to set off a rocket inside (inevitably starts a fire) or to have a Sim with minimal cooking skills try to use the toaster oven.
So we'd create 5 Sims, and then we'd set a fire. The Sims will not try to put the fire out unless you click the fire and tell them to put it out. So, the Sim that survived the longest had immunity.
We turned these Sims adventures into canon in our apocalypse trilogy. See the following excerpt from book 3:
---
“Yes, it is that, and yet it is so much more. There are rough times ahead. Now give me your palm, Amber, child of the wind.”
“That would be Karen, actually.”
“Oh, yes. Well, let me read for both of you.”
It turned out Amber would move in with her friends and Karen’s cousin Sandra, become a talk show host, fall in love with all of her new roommates except David, and buy a vibrating bed. Rob had to go into another room for several minutes before he came back with Karen’s fortune, not even bothering to look at her hand. She, sadly, would die in a toaster oven fire along with four of her military-school-bound love children.
No comments:
Post a Comment