Terrible Analogies

I’m an admitted gamer.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I spend countless days indoors doing nothing more than eating Cheetos and guzzling Mt. Dew.  Those days are far behind me.  With a wife, child, and a demanding job I look forward to spending time outdoors whenever possible.  I guess I’m the natural evolution of a gamer who, over the course of a decade, has had to learn how to rearrange priorities and push gaming to the periphery of life.

Given this, I still manage to carve our 5-6 hours a week to play video games (right now Skyrim rules my world).

But even if you’re somebody who looks down the length of your long, narrow nose at people who enjoy video games, I still think you’ll get a kick out of this clip:

Heh…

I’ll come right out and say it:  I love video games.

Unfortunately I don’t have that many free hours during the day to spend time playing them, but I try to allocate an hour each night to play games.  And because I only have an hour (if I’m lucky) each day to play it takes me a long time to complete each game.

This year I managed to complete Fallout: New Vegas, Red Dead Redemption, and just last night I completed Borderlands and along with two of its add-on expansions. Yep, that’s right. I played a grand total of three games this year.

I only mention this because last night, a game that I’ve been looking forward to for years was finally released.

At midnight, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim hit the shelves and I was there, standing out in the cold waiting for the doors to open at my local Game Stop for my copy.

Bonus points for having Max Von Sydow do the voiceover for this ad!

If you played the earlier Elder Scrolls games Morrowind or Oblivion, then you know how intricate and expansive these Bethesda Game Studios sandbox games are. If you haven’t and you don’t understand the appeal of video games, then please feel free to label me a “geek”. Go on. I won’t care. It’ll be a stigma which I’ll gladly bear.

Happy Friday!

Karin and I found ourselves traversing the isles of our local Toys R Us curious to see if they stocked any interesting board games.  …Okay, that’s a lie.  I wanted to check out the action figures (they’re not dolls!).

Sorry, I couldn’t lie to you.

[HermanTurnip takes in a slow, deep breath...]

*Whew*  That felt good to get off my chest.

Anyway, we were wandering the isles like a pair of overwhelmed Communist-era Russians airdropped into the middle of a modern day grocery store, dumbstruck and staring wild-eyed at the sheer amount of food freely available to absolutely anybody stumbling in from the street, taking in as much as we could while trying not to trip over our own feet when we first saw it.

I’m not sure why it stuck out the way it did, drawing our attention away from every other gleaming, hyper-packaged toy on the shelves.  It just didn’t seem real.  It didn’t seem…right.

Is this a joke?  Was I really looking at a pink Ouija board, the very object employed by spiritualists and mediums worldwide to contact the dead, openly targeting the pre-teen set?  Is this an attempt to indoctrinate an impressionable segment of our society into the questionable ways of the occult and the paranormal?  The blatant color scheme given this product makes it painfully obvious who Toys R Us has their sharpened, brightly packaged claws aimed at.

If Toys R Us is so keen at exposing children to the mystical art of divination and transcendentalism then I have to ask, “Why stop there?”  This target demographic is far to valuable to stop at mere baubles and parlor tricks.  Why not hook them to a real habit early on to ensure a consistent source of valuable revenue for many years to come?

After giving it much thought, I think I’ve come up with a fool-proof way to market my favorite vice of choice to the youth of today:

All I need is a heartless corporation to back me.  Come on.  We’ll make a grip of cash…

A huge passion of mine that started in early childhood and continues on through today is my love for video games. As a kid I used to live in arcades, dropping quarter after quarter into Zork, Battle Axe, Defender, Joust, Donkey Kong, Robotron, Dig Dug, Tempest, Dragon’s Lair, Major Havoc, etc, etc, etc. I’ve grown up with Atari, Nintendo, Dreamcast, Turbographix, Colecovision, Play Station and X-Box. I’ve even gone so far as to build my own MAME arcade cabinet which houses thousands of arcade games.

Now that I have a child of my own I’m wondering if he’s inherited my love for games.  I guess time will tell…

Remember the game Perfection where the goal of the game was to place 25 strange shapes into 25 equally strange recesses as quickly as you could before the ticking timer exhausted itself and the board violently lurched with a sickening hollow plastic POP!, sending squiggly pieces skyward in all directions as if the game was struck by a mortar shell, proving once again that you were indeed not “perfect”, that you possessed inherent flaws that society deems unfavorable, and like a demented quiz taskmaster this game took sick pride in flaunting for all to see?

That game was single-handedly responsible for turning me into the nervous, neurotic individual that you now see before you.

I can’t wait until Tyler is older enough to play it.