Would You Like To Play A Game?
Tuesday, December 24, 2024
We don’t have a lot of plans for Christmas Eve, or Christmas, or the New Year’s. I’ve been told there’s a trip to Cidercade today, following a foray into a Costco to provision a meal with a few friends who don’t have family here, either. If there was a case for the death of capitalism, it would be a Costco the day before Christmas.
I rarely played video games as a kid, except when the neighbor would invite me over on occasion to play Pitfall on the Atari. I don’t have many memories of that one way or the other, and my own home was without electronics thanks to my parents belief that television and related accessories were tools of the Devil.
To have something to talk about with the other kids, I’d devour the Sunday supplement TV guide in the paper, reading the one line summaries and then pretending I knew what the other kids were talking about the next week at school.
I had a brief flirtation with video games as an adult, when a PS2 and a Gameboy Advance figured highly into my off-hours recreation during a 2004 deployment to Iraq. Even then that was done in solitude, because I hadn’t gone out of my way to make friends in the battalion, and ultimately I returned to books, a refuge from the earliest days.
Places like Cidercade, with their shameless pull of nostalgia coupled with the hipness of alcohol and axe throwing, are like clowns, described to me once as children without the innocence. These places aren’t as unsettling as an adult who opts to put on grease paint and pretend to throw water on people to entertain children, but they’ve lost that essential element of games, any game: to achieve something like victory.
There’s no accounting for a high score, nothing’s at stake beyond an entry fee, and no one’s stacking their quarters up as you battle Pac Man’s ghosts and your own sense of mortality, staving it off a few pixels at a time surrounded by acquaintances you’d like to think are friends but know little about you except your name and who you let them think you are.