We are not the masks we wear

But if we don them, do we not become them?

In a previous entry, I cited Shigeru Miyamoto's famous quote from an interview that first appeared in the Mario Mania player's guide for Super Mario World that "games are like favorite playgrounds, places you become attached to and go back to again and again."  To my seven-year old mind, it was more than a placating value statement to his loyal customers.  It was the rich, fanciful dream of a gentle toy-maker.  So as I grew up, Miyamoto's maxim was more than my belief as a gamer in the goodness and beauty my hobby could offer.  It was a law of nature: Sky is blue.  Water is wet.  The Chiefs choke in the playoffs.  Video games are playgrounds.

Goodness and beauty

So how do you play with the equipment?

Custer's trail of tears to squaw-sodomy is an apt allegory for much of the formative years of video gaming.  There was really only one way to play Pong, and if you wanted to finish Pitfall, there was a fairly simple progression of steps to follow to complete the game.

1. Identify pit 2. Don't fall

As games have become more complex, players have been given increasingly intricate ways to insert themselves into a digital medium.  If you really want to know what someone is like, look at a few of their gaming habits.  What kind of characters do they pick?  What kind of weapons?  How do they sit?  Do they lean into those long jumps in some desperate attempt to make Mario's jump just far enough?  How much time do they spend in Create-A-Wrestler mode making one that looks just like L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology?  (This one's real)

So, like the first time I got to play the doctor instead of the patient, its time to do a little digital insertion of my own.  Here are five of my own gaming idiosyncrasies.

1. The Love-Tap
It is a matter of public record that I play Street Fighter.  Hopefully one day Washington will change its antiquated sex offender registry laws to no longer come between what a man and Street Fighter cabinet choose to do in the privacy of a crowded arcade, but until then, public record.

You tease

Second only to launching a furious load of hot plasma with your stick tucked firmly between your fingers, there's nothing quite like throwing a hadouken.  Street Fighter legendarily revitalized the US arcade scene in the '90s and made dropping your two-dollar-a-week allowance into the machines and beating the stuffing out of every last member of Jeffrey Timmons' eighth birthday party back in that glorious summer of '99.

Fighting games are a much more personal context for skill-based gaming than most.  Without weapon pickups or item drops, each player has only their wits, character, muscle-memory, and finite set of resources to be the last one standing.  As the Highlander series so famously put it: "there can be only a lone victor."

As fighting games became increasingly intricate, shuffling a low weak kick into your opponent's ankle and sending them hurtling full-tilt across the stage didn't do anymore.  So fighters losing their last pixel of health to a meager jab or short kick soon received their own falling animation.  The great thing about this animation is, despite the fact you've already won, you can hit dat bitch again.  I call this, as you may have guessed, "the love-tap."  This was, for whatever reason, removed from Super Street Fighter 4, and suddenly those billions of gallons of wads I mentioned in my previous Street Fighter post became slightly less soggy.

What this says about me:
I don't win very often, but when I do, fuck you I earned it and I'm going to push as many free buttons as I can.  Also, beating up lifeless bodies is a secret fetish of mine.

2.  Mobility

Like most people, my first experience with getting to choose my own gender was at the doctor's office on my third birthday.  A couple years later, Super Mario Bros. 2 was released and I had the chance to see what I missed out on.

The power of flight, apparently

You know you all did it.  You either picked Princess so you could glide effortlessly over half the level or Luigi so you could skip it entirely.  It was a really novel approach for a game to take, especially the part about making its titular character far and away the worst of the four.  Similarly, when the Grand Theft Auto series introduced the ability to ride dirt bikes, bicycles, and motorcycles at blistering speeds, and weave seamlessly through gaps in traffic barely wide enough to floss between I was stoked.  With only the small trade-off of accidentally hitting a rock meant being jettisoned into oncoming traffic so hard your scalp exited your body through your sphincter.  Decisions, decisions.

Of course, I jacked the first one I saw faster than you can say "higher mortality rate than handguns."

In gaming, just as in life, the skinny ones are the best (but can't take a punch)

What this says about me:

I strive for perfection on a razor-thin margin of error, and when I fail, I want to wipe out in the most spectacular way possible.

3.  Attack, reload

I love light-gun shooters.  I think I speak for most of my generation when I presume that Lethal Enforcers was the game that got most of us interested.  Wandering through the Southglen 12's arcade with your friend before the movie started, when there, flickering off in the distance you saw the cabinet flickering with each muzzle flash and blood spatter, bathing the noisy surroundings in an aura of manliness and law.  Lethal Enforcers towered above the rest, the undisputed god-king of arcade machines, its steely eye ever-watchful over the chaotic twin plains of the air hockey and foosball tables, its Colt .44 magnums holstered, defying anyone to try and be tougher shit.

You turned to your friend, nodding solemnly.  Justice was a dish best served with piping hot lead and a wheelchair-bound eternity for dessert.  You reached down and grabbed the neon blue peacekeeper, twirling it on your finger and immediately hitting yourself in the face with the barrel.  The cords that kept it connected to the machine were really short.

Your mind races for some cool catchphrase as you reach into your pocket for a spare quarter--something  Dirty Harry might say--to inspire you buddy in the bloodcaked quest for law and order to come.  Something like-

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"What?"

"You can't have the blue gun.  Use the pink one."

"Fuck you I got it first."

"Yeah but you don't look right holding it.  Let me have it."

"Back off asshole, you use the pink one!"

"I swear to God I will break each one of your prissy little princess fingers and take it myself."

"Go ahead and try, asshole."

If you're reading this Michael, I used my prissy princess fingers 

on your mom's pink trigger if you know what I mean

Lethal Enforcers was great, but Area 51 was the light-gun shooter that made me like light-gun shooters.  Sure, Virtua Cop came out a year earlier and was probably a more sophisticated shooter, what with its polygonal enemies registering body damage in the location they were shot (and allowed you to follow up a subduing shot to the leg to be followed up with about four more very satisfying love-taps to the head and chest), but Area 51's use of full-motion video and pre-rendered backgrounds made the whole experience so richly satisfying.

I spent my childhood wishing I could be as cool as that guy in the S.T.A.A.R. jacket

But more satisfying than watching the same two palate-swapped alien types explode in the same animation hundreds of times was the fact that shooting off-screen to reload produced the most satisfying sound ever.  It is a habit that has carried over into every shooting game I played since:

1. Kill everything on-screen

2. Jerk your wrist to aim off-screen and pretend you don't look like a spaz doing this

3. RELOAD THAT MOTHERFUCKER AS MANY TIMES AS YOU CAN BEFORE ANOTHER ENEMY SHOWS UP

I like to imagine what this would look like if it were a real army situation.

What this says about me:
I don't know let's say autism?

4. Be a black guy and, if possible, a wizard

The first point--being a black guy--is in response to another game commentator stating that there aren't enough solid, interesting black protagonists in gaming.  And honestly, he's right.  Game developers have totally dropped the ball by relegating all of their black characters to being comic relief, gangbangers, or football players.

Or in some cases, all three

Sure, CJ from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was a good start, as a thief with a heart of gold.  But depending on how you played the character, he was also a fucking psychopath.  Somehow the warmth of CJ attempting to weed out the corruption and violence plaguing his neighborhood after skydiving out of a 747, allowing to to crash unmanned into said neighborhood because it was faster than taking a cab.

CJ later made up for it by cradling a baby in the ruins of a church (that he ruined)

As for being a wizard, I believe it was the great Gandalf said it best: "be a wizard man it's awesome."  Thank you to all of my armor-clad, sword-and-shield-bearing homies out for whom I am pouring this 40.  You guys do an excellent job of throwing yourselves in the way of swords, teeth, boulders, arrows, ballistas, dragons, lions, wolves, orcs, orks, axes, cubes both gelatinous and otherwise, slimes, puddings, oozes, skeletons, whips, pit traps, spike traps, pit traps with spikes in them, spike traps with fake floors that fall into pits (which possibly contain a skeleton wearing armor made of spikes, or perhaps his bones have been sharpened into spikes), and other wizards so we can do our thing.  And for that, we are eternally grateful for the working relationship you afford us.

We are all very happy for you bravely donning a metal shell and lumbering into the fray clanking like a '79 Olds after hitting a speed bump too fast, placing your life in jeopardy just so long as you don't fall on your back and need a boostie getting back up.  Not all of us can re-arrange the fabric of time and space with a gesture, and I'm glad that in spite of your handicap, you have still decided to try and be a productive member of society.  If it doesn't work out for you, there's always Wal-Mart.

And awesome it is.  Swords are for pussies.  Men use sticks.

Also, I know he used a sword.  Gandalf went surface.

What this says about me:

When I look in the mirror, I see a black man.  A wizardly black man.  Blandalf the Black.  Also that stuff I said about minorities being underrepresented in video gaming.

5.  Drink, pussy!  Drink!
Ah, the Megalixir.  Long has is its existence encumbered the hearts and minds of Final Fantasy fans.  


First introduced in Final Fantasy 3/6, the Megalixir has since become a series mainstay.  The Megalixir is the healing item in the Final Fantasy franchise.  When used in battle, it fully heals every member of party to maximum health and magical capacity.  Its use virtually guarantees a fierce pitched battle turning in the player's favor, with victory soon to follow.  It is the "I WIN!" button of Final Fantasy games.

But actually finding one the party supplies for one of these regenerative keggers is no small feat.  Most Final Fantasy games stash away one or two of these in anything resembling a conspicuous location.  Procuring a larger supply of Megalixir runs the gamut from impossible to outright insane, depending on the game you're playing.  It's up to the player to decide when to pop the cork on one of these bad boys, and therein lies the delimma:

Afraid of not having the Megalixir when they need it, many players never use it.

Me?  I'm the opposite.  X-Potions?  Elixirs?  Megalixirs?  They all taste like victory to me.  I used to dread being given equipment that required upkeep.  The thought of using all my special ammunition, or overpowered healing items, or condoms used to scare me.  But now I understand: that's what they're there for!  They look great stacked up in an inventory screen, but if you never use your resources, it's the same as not having them at all.  I'd rather use my Megalixir when I kind of need it than struggle thinking I can manage without it.

Except condoms because they feel weird.

What this says about me:
My entire life has been spent playing conservative.  Gaming is where I can cut loose and do anything I want without repercussions, from using every last gold piece in I have in Final Fantasy, to blowing all my mini-nukes
taking care of woodland critters in Fallout 3, to making fun of that kid with a stuttering problem in online Street Fighter.  "My mo- mo- mom says I t-t-talkkkk like thi-i-is because m-m-my guardian angel has the hi-hi-hiccups!"  Oh man that xXx-SePh33rOtH-xXx cracks me up every time.

6.  Game naked

Every day.

What this says about me:
Feels good man.

How about you?  What are your weird gaming habits and rituals?  Post them in the comments and I'll take a guess what they say about you. I've got a blog I'm pretty good at this sort of thing.