My back hurts. The pad on my right thumb is sore. My vision is a little blurry and I got less than 5 hours of sleep last night. My wrists are stiff and I have a permanent crick in my neck.
But at 2 am this morning, I killed the Behemoth and I could finally leave Hollow Bastion.
My name is Kristin, and PlayStation 2 has taken over my life. ("HI KRISTIN!")
Don't panic if you don't know what I'm on about here. Count your blessings and consider yourself extremely fortunate not to have gotten caught up in the life-draining downward spiral that video game addiction can become. Oh sure, it starts simply enough. Your friend enjoyed a game, maybe let you play it a little or lent it to you. Maybe, as happened to me, your friend talked up the game so much that you just had to give it a try, although as a rule you're not very good at video games - they frustrate you too much. But you finally cave in and buy a set-up and then make your husband spend countless hours adding the game console to your already far too complicated TV arrangement. A word to the wise - a TV, VCR, DVD, Tivo, cable box and PlayStation were not all meant to live together in harmony without major electrical reworking and a schematic on par with that of the Empire State building.
When you finally sit down and pop in the game CD, however, you're transported. And so it begins. One hour turns into three. "Just let me finish this world" becomes your mantra. And before you know it, you're staying up well past midnight running vicariously through mazes and cursing yourself for falling off cliffs that don't actually exist anywhere in nature.
It's been a long time since a video game has captured my life and held it hostage this way. The last time I was stuck on a game like this was in the 80's, when SuperMario Brothers was all the rage. I got dangerously good at Mario. I could clear the entire game in about half an hour. And you only got 3 guys to start with - you could only screw up a couple of times before you had to start the whole stinking game over again. I hated that.
But video games have come a long way, and the story-telling aspect of the things has exploded into full-scale entertainment. Assuming you use your save points early and often there's not much to fear from dying anymore. Maybe you have to watch a scene over again. Perhaps you were close to completing a battle or mission but you were killed. Do it again. You don't have to start the whole game over and over just to get a little farther each time.
I love that.
My own addiction to Kingdom Hearts isn't too surprising, really. It's a game that combines Disney with Dungeons and Dragons so seamlessly it's shocking. The art is amazing, the music is catchy, the story is engrossing. It's just damn fun to play. Because it follows the Dungeons and Dragons formula and I used to play D&D, it felt immediately familiar. D&D, Disney style - it's brilliant.
But if role-playing games aren't your style, may I suggest the ultra-violence and extreme hilarity of the Grand Theft Auto series. Dave plays them and I watch. Really, I do. The story unfolds like the plot of GoodFellas and it's just incredibly fun to sit back and see what happens next. When he passed his real estate appraisal test I bought him Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which is set in 1986. Basically, your character (voiced by Ray Liotta) runs around Vice City, jacking cars and running missions for the town's various underworld influences. There are something like 10 radio stations to listen to while you're driving around town, everything from 80's New Wave (my favorite) to heavy metal to talk shows. The music in Vice City is all by the original artists and the talk shows and advertisements are all written for the game and are hysterical.
By watching Dave play Vice City, I've found out a few things about myself. One of the main things is that I'd make a lousy car-jacker's girlfriend. Every time Dave steals a new car in the game, I ask him to change the radio station. If I were a real car-jacker's girlfriend, my life would constantly sound like, "Oh - a Lamborghini. Nice. But could you put it on Wave 103, hon? I liked that song." I wouldn't last long in the underworld.
Or then again, maybe I would. I never thought I'd hear myself tell my husband, "Can't you just take the golf club in and bludgeon the guy to death?" but I said that in front of witnesses last week. My friend Eggman and I were watching Dave work a particularly tricky mission and we were both giving advice. "Try pulling that guy out of the golf cart and beating him up before you go up the stairs. Then he won't be there to chase you later," we'd say. Or "What about buying some body armor so the AK-47's don't have so much effect?" Or "There's nothing for it. You have to run over the old lady."
Make no mistake, the Grand Theft Auto games are violent. Extremely violent. A few weeks ago I watched as Dave's character executed a contract killing and then he led a high speed chase through the city. By the time he was cornered, there were helicopters and FBI agents targeting him. He was shot about 50 times before he died, and he took about 5 cops with him.
Now before you write me in an outrage, let me assure you that I do not condone or encourage cop killing. I do not approve of contract murders or cocaine dealing or car-jacking. I don't under any circumstances think these are games for kids. But my husband is over 40 and the worst crime I think I've ever seen him commit was to snag a Jelly Belly or two from the bin at Safeway. I'm relatively certain that his impressionability is minimal and that playing Vice City isn't going to turn him into a Miami Vice reject in loafers and no socks (although come to think of it, he is wearing more Hawaiian shirts lately… but that started long before PlayStation came into our lives).
I don't think Grand Theft Auto is for anyone under 18. In fact, 18 may be a little young, but I'll go with it. I don't think movies like Reservoir Dogs or GoodFellas are for anyone under 18 either, and I liked both of those movies immensely. I would no sooner let a 13-year-old in my care watch Pulp Fiction than I would let him or her play Grand Theft Auto. Is it different because with a video game you're controlling the action - because it's you making the character shoot a cop in cold blood? I highly doubt it. Kids are smart and most kids have no desire whatsoever to kill anyone, let alone a cop. The ones that do have such a desire have something going on already - you can't convince me that they got the idea solely from video games.
Video games are an escape. They allow players to be something or do something that is otherwise impossible. I don't see anyone freaking out because kids play Kingdom Hearts and then think they can fly. Why do we assume that kids who see a car-jacking in a video game are going to run right out and start a life of crime? It's not as if the world was overrun with mustachioed guys in white overalls during the Super Mario craze. Oh, yeah... Halloween 1988... hmmm, that argument doesn't help my case, so let's move on.
In short, while I don't think it's the greatest idea to let kids play the ultra violent games because the images can be somewhat disturbing, I also don't think there is anything intrinsically wrong with the games themselves.
Except that now I've beaten the Behemoth, the monsters just get harder from here. That's just plain wrong.
- KNP March 16, 2003
