Games

"I'm going to have dreams about that huge sword tonight. And I'll be angry in every one of them."

She's not lying. She speaks on both our behalves.

"I'll be better next time, I'll kick your ass."

"I think I'm retiring my character.”

I want another chance at him.

“I can’t believe we just played four hours of video games.”

I can’t believe I played four hours of video games. I couldn’t even drag myself away. I loved it. I reveled in it. I swore too much. I got my ass kicked and I kicked some ass.

The adrenaline is still pumping fresh. I finished off the night in dramatic fashion taking down ‘TheGame’, Chad’s Self-Made Special Creation who just so luckily managed to get the longest sword imaginable, which made him practically unbeatable. I must admit now - as honesty is heightened also by ‘TheGame’… *but, more on that later… You all lost by the way, just now- that my advantage was somewhat increased by my never-ending energy supply. Of Course Chad could have always thrown me off the edge in typical Chad fashion, so there was still a challenge involved; I just had to eventually tire him out and try to stay in the ring. Maybe if I had gotten the special stick turn ramming log, but luck wasn’t with me. Let Chad have his glory tonight.

Soul Caliber III
hasn’t seen the last of me.


I have grown quite attached to the character Astaroth. This picture doesn’t do him justice. Despite the tough exterior, he has a sort of friendly protector thing going on. and one huuuge axe. We bonded.

I was initially going about it all wrong. Mashing away at buttons, not paying attention to patterns, and basically watching my characters sporadically pull a great move while I hadn’t the slightest idea what they were going to do next. I was just playing around. I wasn’t taking it seriously. Gradually I learned that you must stick with one character and eventually you start to notice the patterns and you can begin to progress. The most important realization upped my game substantially: You don’t watch yourself play, you watch the other guy and you just kind of feel your reactions and be one with the game, and suddenly your hands are very naturally pressing the correct buttons. It must be that someone very accurately mapped the motion of the fingers to some kind of process in the body that imagines the action. It’s incredible, and mind boggling. How could someone actually code something like that. Either that, or the result on the screen has little to do with the buttons on the controller and more to do with the imagination. Both explanations are hard to believe.

Before tonight I hadn’t played video games in years. The last time was a brief stint during first year of University when someone conjured up an old MarioKart game. We remembered then, the reason why I had stopped playing video games at some point in my youth – in fact, most games at all. I’m too competitive. Not only do I love to win, and act out violently, but in my egocentric mind I believe that everyone would be experiencing loss in the same way that I do so that when I win I feel bad for what they must be going through. It’s a no-win situation. I’ve managed to subdue the violent rage or, more accurately, direct it onto more inanimate objects.

I learned a valuable lesson in the arena of game playing: laughter. It’s simple and it very efficiently releases a lot of negative energy. Chad was instrumental in this area. He kept his head. He kept us calm. He kept us laughing.

Sarah is also very competitive. I love her for it. It’s much easier to play games with other competitive people. You are on the same page. The string of gibberish cursing and temper tantrums into the air are more appropriate, less embarrassing and, it should be noted, when not repressed to hide this ‘flaw’ – though of course, flaws are all relative – are quite a cathartic release. Teamed up with laughter, the tension is sufficiently eased while still maintaining that edge necessary to dominate in this particular arena.

During extra tense moments, I spent my break immersed in my guitar. This worked to quickly take me away from the game - *we just lost again, by the way – and the somewhat pleasant frustration that often came along with it, but it also removed me too far from the game, so when my turn returned I had to waste precious time getting back into the game. My energy was often drained three times over before I got my bearings again. It’s hard to get into that Zen mindset.

It’s all practice.

Another way to practice this is to play what is called *‘The Game’ – or so that’s what we call it. Basically, you play like this:

1. don’t think about ‘The Game’; and


2. when you do think about ‘The Game’ you have lost the game and you have to tell everyone else that you lost ‘The Game'.

It’s simple, and it runs on the honour system and it’s kind of continually running. You are probably like me and are thinking right now how dumb the game sounds. But once the idea is in your head, it’s kind of hard to stop it. Basically, the game starts to get good when you play it with people you see a lot, or talk to a lot because when you think of ‘The Game’ and tell everyone you lost ‘The Game’, essentially everyone is now thinking of ‘The Game’ and everyone lost. When you start losing because someone else lost and told you, you realize how attached you are to the game, cause you are slightly peeved that you lost ‘The Game’… and you are addicted. Just see for yourself. Apparently, it’s a game started up a number of years ago and it’s going on in lots of places in the world. That’s random information sort of pulled from hazy memories of the evening, so I don’t know how much of that is true… but sounds true enough. I just started playing, but apparently it becomes a pretty big game and a source of purpose in even the most meaningless of tasks.

Voicemail message: “We’re just calling to say that Sarah and Chad just lost ‘The Game’.”

We’ve been losing all this time, damnit!

Not only does it become quite a fun game, but I believe it is also a good mind workout. After playing for a small period of time, you quickly notice that you realize you are thinking of ‘The Game’ much faster than initially – you learn to recognize your own thoughts much faster. Also, you learn to clear your mind faster – at first, it takes a short while for you to get thoughts of ‘The Game’ out of your head, before you can officially start ‘The Game’ (basically, someone announces the loss, and then people are thinking about it, and then you don’t talk about it and eventually you aren’t thinking about it anymore). Eventually, ‘The Game’ drops quickly from your mind. Essentially, meditation, which takes great mind control, teaches you to quickly recognize thoughts and disregard them quickly, enabling you to hold onto a state of conscious thoughtlessness for longer and longer. Alongside mind control benefits, this game also begins to strengthen the honesty reflex. Originally, I thought to myself ‘this is a dumb game and these guys are idiots, because I am going to win by just not saying anything’… if you think that, you just try to play ‘The Game’ by not thinking about ‘The Game’ when you are trying to not think about how you are cheating at ‘The Game’ the whole time. You develop an honest reflex, or you go mad. That and you are peeved at yourself for losing the game and want to bring the rest of the players down with you. All in all, fortifying these habits through this game, ensure greater mind control.

It’s all practice.

Eventually we’ll have the whole world onto ‘The Game’. You’ll be standing at a bus station amongst strangers when someone mumbles forcibly, “The Game, damnit,” followed by a collective groan and everyone will go back to work erasing their minds – a universal bond. We’re all in the same race, we might as well be playing the same game.

Can you hear the hum?

It’s called collective Zen.

We’re all a part of it.