A lot of my childhood videogame memories can be divided into two categories: the first group is fictitious, because I learned about most games secondhand through like, a physical book, and had to envision what they might be on the premise of a blurb and a screenshot no larger than a postage stamp; the second group is grotesque, because most of the games I did own were a complete fucking disaster. More interesting than either category on its own were the ways they’d meet in the middle.
Most of what I had was shovelware. I was (re)playing Shamu's Deep Sea Adventures for the Nintendo DS while I assume most people were starting up The Orange Box for the first time. I had a library of terrible little licensed games and was, for sad reasons that aren’t worth elaborating on, often entirely confined to my room with no other source of entertainment other than some books, my imagination, and some shit like M&M's Break' Em. This probably goes a long way towards explaining my semi-adversarial relationship with the medium today.
During these numbing stretches, I tended to treat games more like literal toys instead of prescribed entertainment. Usually, this entailed imagining that I was having some kind of fun: I would move the character around the screen and envision that something was happening, since nothing usually was. Like, I’d play a Garfield platformer and pretend a crazy (Garfield-themed?) wizard showed up to start blasting projectiles everywhere, and I’d use the normal controls to leap and hop over a bunch of glowing balls that only existed in my head.
When I wasn’t inventing the bullet hell from first principles, I was usually just looking for places I could hang out in. I wanted to exist somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t around me. Plenty of people can attest to having a tougher childhood than mine, but I bet some of them got to practice escapism with good games, so it probably balances out.
One thing I remember playing a lot was Army Men: Soldiers of Misfortune. It was a third-person shooter on the DS, and I recall just enough of it to say that it’s probably one of the worst games I’ve ever played. But it was my first — and for a long time, only — exposure to the concept of an “explorable” environment in a ““3D”” game with an “““immersive””” camera. A dream wrapped in a nightmare. Look at this shit.
(These are still the funniest enemy pain noises I’ve ever heard. I could steal them for a game and never get caught. I should.)
Something I remember being kinda striking was that, when the enemies were dead, they usually never respawned. Unless killing them was the objective, their absence meant you could linger around until you wanted to move on. This meant that I’d often load up the first level, clear it out, and then just fill in the empty space with whatever came to mind.
I liked to pretend I “lived” in this weird brick structure. I’d go out on vague adventures by walking somewhere else and then pretending something happening there. When I was done, I’d come back, and the cycle would repeat until I finally got bored. I guess Minecraft was another game I managed to invent in this way, because I would occasionally stand in any structure that was vaguely house-shaped while imagining that I’d built it. I’d periodically restart the level to respawn all the army guys under the pretense that I was fighting to regain my territory. Heavy emotional stakes.
It’s weird to see these memories as playful nostalgic kitsch, when at the time they were inescapably dreary and claustrophobic. Obviously, you don’t do this kind of thing unless you’re pretty desperate to be doing literally anything. There were moments even at the time where I think I resented it, understanding on some level that it was like a second layer of confinement for somebody whose life could already be measured in square meters. I couldn’t leave, but I couldn’t stay, so I could only retreat inward.
Hopefully not a bummer addition to the thread — I have a lot of happier memories but I found this one interesting to ponder for a bit. It seems rare to see anyone talking about the digital spaces they associate with more negative emotions: a specific level in a game you happened to be playing right when you received some really terrible news, or a location in an MMO where a bad argument happened and somebody stopped being your friend. There’s probably a good bit of longform writing in this but it’s also pretty fun to communally microblog it to an audience of around twenty people.
Anyway, fuck Danny Birch, who loves Anime and Games almost as much as he loves Misinformation. A bold-faced lie. Hit the road, buddy.
