Fragged for Life

Gaming. It's a way of life... or so I thought until I entered the eve of my senior year in high school. It was during this time that I grew to dislike a former passion in my life, something that I poured thousands of dollars into over the past 9 years of my existence. Between the days of Gameboy Pocket and the many dollars spent on AAA batteries for that monochrome, grayscale LCD screen to the wasted dollars on XBox Live service that went largely unused, gaming has been huge for me.

I remember the days, long ago, when I was first introduced to consoles at my friends' houses. An old Nintendo system here and there, some Mario All-Stars, Duck Hunting, and what have you. But I specifically remember my friend asking me one time, "Hey, do you want to play some Playstation?" And it's all downhill from there. (Speaking of which, the game he had was some street luge, bike racing, skateboarding, and roller blading game.) The same kid introduced me to Doom, probably the first FPS that I've *ever* played. And all at the ripe old age of no older than eight years old. (Yes folks, I started blowing the heads off of monsters at a young age, but did I shoot up any schools in my life? No, didn't think so, so take your democrat propaganda bullshit elsewhere.)

Gaming on the PC started right around this time, when we bought a computer in about 1996 with Windows 95 on it. I believe it was a Gateway 2000 with Pentium 133, 32mb of ram, and 2.5 gigs of hard drive space. That sucker ran like a champ too. And to think, those were the days of like, DirectX version 2 and 3, with such games as Sega Bug, Myst and Rocket Jockey (just the demo though, not the actual game, of course.) I remember some of the good old days of multiplayer gaming as I moved to Illinois in around 1999. The days of Red Faction, No One Lives Forever, and Rogue Spear have certainly not escaped me. Those were some of my first online multiplayer games that I played with friends.

Over the years I acquired initially a Super NES, but my parents returned it and bought a Playstation, the first of *many* upgrades to my console life. Ah, the days of Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit. Good times with that game, started my days of traffic violations early in life. From then, we fast forward to about 2001 when I dropped over $300 on a brand spankin' new Playstation 2. More next-gen consoles appeared and more money was spent on this fetish of gaming. I can think of the days before PS2, with Nintendo 64 and Goldeneye, Super Smash Bros., and Mario Kart. The start of real social gaming in my life.

Then there was also the time I read about a thing called a "LAN Party" in a PC Gamer, or some magazine of the sort. It described this multi-day extravaganza of gaming, involving people just being scummified in a room for over 24 hours while fragging away, while such classic movies as The Matrix and Tomb Raider play in the background. Could it be? Yes, I was sick enough to want to emulate this party of nerdy proportions. I dropped over $70 on a 16 port 10/100 switch for this party and spent probably close to that on cat-5 cables, and it took place late in freshman year, actually, during the PSAE testing.

And that takes us to a few years ago, actually, in December of 2004, my sophomore year in high school, when I fatefully purchased an Xbox, accompanied by a copy of Halo 2. For my birthday party, I had a Halo Party, and it was just a mass of 10+ people playing Xbox -- Halo 2 and Crimson Skies, specifically, but it started a viral chain of events in my life. Halo parties were now the thing to do on weekends with friends, and this even continued into the summer.

The same year, I built a computer for Christmas, a computer well-equiped for gaming (and still is). Yet another source of my gaming funds over the years. Barring a few good months with games on that computer, gaming started going downhill after Halo parties jumped the shark, so to speak. I started getting disenchanted with this activity as I started to realize more and more that the people who played these games online were just douche bags. They were way too hardcore about it, and I wasn't.. like them. I wasn't spending hours pounding away in the battlefields of Mashtuur to get a Combat Service Ribbon, I wasn't wasting away in front of the 57" TV trying to up my level in Halo from 25 to 26, and I certainly wasn't staying up all night trying to perfect my create-a-team in Madden 2000-Whatever-the-Hell.

The nail in the coffin for my gaming experience was when a friend named Bar stopped playing BF2 online due to a trade of his PC for a Powerbook laptop. After this happened, it all fell apart. I had a LAN party after this that ended up being a major joke-ass situation that wasn't worth the $46 spent on food for the night. I went to Mock Trial Academy, and the gaming dropped off even more. I came back no longer addicted to Worms Armageddon, but almost repulsed by it. I just wanted to spend time with real people, not virtual entities of nothingness. I wanted to
experience life and play Ultimate Frisbee, not compete for the most frags in some unreal world.

I spent some time today playing Worms Armageddon online, just to simply pass the time with a friend I can't see in person without taking 3 trains over a 12 hour period. It turned out to be this giant clusterfuck of stupidity and it was the official nail in the coffin for me. Apparently I broke some arbitrary rule, so they broke rules and killed me, but not only that, they yelled at me because I broke this rule I didn't know about. I was treated in a condescending fashion, over a nonexistant rule not even programmed into the game. It was at this point when I realized, "you know, I could spend my whole life dealing with middle-aged losers playing video games, fanboy faggots, and 10 year old uber 1337 people who swear like sailors, or I could spend my time doing things actually enjoyable and not completely high stress. I could take my expensive computer and do productive things, like use it to further my knowledge of technology, film and edit machinima, write, photo editing, or anything practically."

Hello, my name is T. O'Brien, and I'm not addicted to gaming. I don't spend hours of my life dedicated to leveling up arbitrary beings in virtual worlds. I don't neglect relationships with my family or friends to spend it gaming. And social gaming is no longer of interest to me, it's essentially dead to me. The only gaming that I really do at this point is that of the occasional single player first person shooter from yesteryear, or perhaps Guitar Hero (because it's badass, and for Sony's Playstation 2, one of the only worthwhile consoles.)

What is Reality?

Reality bites. Or so the expression goes... I was thinking the other day about this very topic.. or rather, not so much that reality bites, but more so about reality itself. (We can all thank the Matrix for involving us in these thought provoking mental discussions.) All jokes aside, it's something legitimate to think about, because I mean, we all day dream, night dream, imagine things, fantasize about a better life, and watch movies or read books that seem to immerse us in a totally different universe.

Princeton University defines reality as 1. "world: all of your experiences that determine how things appear to you; 'his world was shattered,' we live in different worlds,' 'for them deamons were as much a part of reality as trees were.' By that definition, there's a really broad interpretation of what it actually is. If you think about that, I mean, all of this stuff about nature vs nurture comes into play. What if a child was brainwashing into thinking that people of a certain ethnicity are actually Satanic beings in disguise, for example? So, they went on to believe for the rest of their life that those people were indeed evil and connected to Satan. Obviously this isn't reality, or can we definitively make this statement, because for that peerson, obviously their experiences determine what their reality is.

Princeton also defines reality as; 2. "the state of being actual or real; 'the reality of his situation dawned on him.' By this definition, reality itself is something real, or somethign with verified existence. Verified existence... Well, for me that would mean something that I can confirm with my senses or logic. But then how come dreams allow me to both see, feel, hear, and maybe even smell and taste things that aren't supposed to be there? Maybe this assumption that dreams are not "real" is bullshit, and indeed, we're just sleeping all the time and when we "wake up" after a really weird dream, we just go to another layer of sleeping. Why do we have routine? Good question, maybe it's just some Groundhog Day phenomenon within one massive dream that we're either having naturally, or induced into (think Matrix). I mean, how do you really know that you're awake?

The reason why I think and discuss this at the moment is because I woke up Sunday morning around 8:00. Between 8:00 and 8:41, I was brushing my teeth in my bathroom, next to a fairly attractive girl who was most certainly not my sister nor anyone that would legitimately be in my house at 8 in the morning on Sunday, whom I brushed past on the way out of the bathroom. I could feel the warmth of that person's skin when I walked out of the bathroom and it was not only kind of a weird experience all in all, it was seemingly very real. However, I woke up at 8:41 that morning, unshowered, teeth not brushed. I don't sleep walk or anything like that. So I had to be dreaming, didn't I?

I've always thought it interesting to think about things like the whole giant-dream concept, which also brings up a lot of other interesting points about what is life but a transition from one place to another, be it earth to Heaven/Hell, or from one dream to another. Kind of makes you think, was that deja vu, or was that a symptom of some dreamlike state?

I mean, what honestly can you say about a dream? Is it our ID living out its innermost desires and pleasures. A drunken house-party in your mind, if you will, or are they possibly something more real than that, maybe a past life, or alternate reality.

To end on a geeky note, consider this comment made in a Mythbuster's episode. It was a joke, but no less thought provoking than something serious;

"I reject your reality, and substitute my own!" - Adam Savage