No More Continues: A Book Excerpt

My wife is traveling in Italy and Greece with students for the next two weeks and I'm at home with my two daughters, so get ready for some really weird, delusional posts.

This is an excerpt from my second book: it is still rough, so let me know if you see things that could be straightened out, edited, or rearranged.  

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The room was nearing 90 degrees for the third straight day, but it didn’t matter, Victor was used to the stagnant, acrid air by now.  The garage door was no longer operational, as his father Bert had converted the room into an apartment; albeit; he had left certain aspects of the transformation adjustable and temporary for the make-shift placement of his only son Victor.  That was six years ago. 

As it is, the only breathing the large room does now is through an attic fan, 16 feet up, rusted inoperable with time; gently breathing in and out through its idle blades at its leisure.  The cool July breezes would barely travel three feet through the small space before forgetting that cold should dissipate downward, instead opting for suicide at the first realization of its new dwelling. 

Many objects had committed suicide in this room.  Fleas, dust mites, dendrites, cockroaches, a few mice, legions of spermatozoon, and various varieties of bacterium, yet, despite the widespread loss of life dwelled a living, and surprisingly healthy being named Victor Mort. 

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Victor was struggling to stay asleep.  Deep in the recesses of his brain, he knew he had already missed his 12:30 p.m. deadline to join the Central European server playing a Call of Duty: Mi5 tournament.  He knew that there were probably 100 different players actively playing in it still, but Victor, or VctrSnipeAK47, wasn’t going to join in even if he could rustle up the energy to wake up.  Barely anyone in Europe would challenge him, and even the idea of embarrassingly annihilating Czechs and Italians with a crappy SPAS-12 shotgun wouldn’t improve his fame, and would probably damage his 5/1 kill to death ratio. 

Most of Europe would probably log off once they saw his VctrSnipeAK47 screen-name attempt to sign into the game queue.  Most gamers figured he had some sort of mod; a modified controller that allowed him to shot without aiming, some called it aimbot, newbs simply called it cheating.  But Victor wasn’t cheating.  He was just good; or rather experienced.  He had logged 47 days worth of play in the game in the five months since it was released.  And this was just one of seven active games Victor was perfecting. 

The Xbox 360 was probably the most mainstream of any of his platforms, followed by a seldom-played PlayStation 3; he hadn’t touched it since God of Gears 4 was released in November.  He grew tired of it in December. 

His main hobby, and the majority of his room was made up of four different 30” computer monitors, all linked in tandem so that he had a near 360 degree view of whatever room, or world, or universe that his software took place in.  He was always upgrading his PC so it would be at or near the top of the gaming pinnacle performance.  Parts, wires, screws, hard drives and components that had grown obsolete or burned up in reentry to reality laid carelessly on what used to be his living room coffee table.  His room could easily be subject to a police raid, as usually, at least two or three state or federal laws were being broken, although nothing past a misdemeanor status.  The violations could range from illegal downloading of copyrighted material to possession of trace amounts of controlled substances. 

Victor, despite his tech savvy connections and petty lawlessness, was not a hacker.  He experimented with it a little three years ago after he was frustrated by a clan of Japanese gamers who continued to school him at a popular game.  Victor was sure they were Modding, so he called a friend, Erik, who worked for the leading antivirus software company and together they hatched a worm based on the MyDoom virus, but one that could be shared on an entire network, so that anyone playing off that server would get infected.  Victor used an old computer, and routed through a myriad of IP addresses so that the whole operation looked like it was born in Baltimore, Maryland, over 3000 miles away from Victor’s garagment.  The virus didn’t work as planned, but it did its job of creating chaos and destroying that elite clan.  The next day, Erik was fielding phone calls from all over Japan, helping eradicate his own creation.  Evidently, the virus had reached some of the leading game designers of the industry who were frantic that their home computers, with vital R&D materials were being compromised.    

That fiasco cost Victor his game account, his back-up computer, his IT friend, and hours of lost sleep. He still felt paranoia at times for his role in resurrecting a zombie virus that still gives antivirus programs fits today, and hoped that no law enforcement agency was still searching for the root source.   

It would be easy for historians and biographers to look back into the life of Victor Mort and decide that this was the moment when Victor would crawl away from society and hide inside the shell that was his room.  But life, even in uninhabitable places like a Victor’s room, is much more complex than history majors or bad journalists give it credit for.  Even Victor didn’t know the exact causes to why he rarely stepped foot from his room.   Plenty of talented people hole up and have creative moments.  But more often recluses become insular and try to perfect something that is only beautiful to themselves.  Brian Wilson never wrote a song as beautiful as In My Room, even though ten years later he did actually lock himself into his room; J.D. Salinger never published anything after 1963, even though he continued to write for the last 47 years of his life; And Axl Rose neither brought democracy to China, nor a decent album to listen to, when he waited 14 years to deliver a new Guns N’ Roses album.   

Likewise, few would ever appreciate the kind of artist Victor Mort had become.  Innately talented were his instincts, reflexes, eye hand coordination, concentration, his dedication to his craft, his studying of the maps and weapons and skills of various characters with the dedication of the best generals to ever wage war on mankind.  It was a glorious sight, to see Victor’s CGI first person character in camo, warlock gear, futuristic garb, space suit, or whatever the game designers had established as dress, running through the visually stunning landscapes created on equally powerful computers by other skilled artists, casually, slyly, expertly dismantling the other teams game-plan, dispatching lives like a pest exterminator.  It was so cinematic, that every so often, game developers and producers would let Victor test their game platforms before they were released to the general public.  They would record his devastation of their gamebot characters and use it as a promo demo of the gameplay. 

Sometimes these demonstrations created controversy in the online world, as the lowest intelligence lifeforms on earth, YouTube commenters, would say that there was no way these demos were played by a real human being.  These same commenters, avid gamers with no educational sense, also claimed the holocaust never happened, cats the highest form of entertainment, and that Barak Obama was probably brothers with Osama bin Laden on other video clips.  These commenters were also recluses from mankind.  Not because of choice, they had been alienated because of their stupidity, pushed away to the side of society which had given up on disciplining their impulsivity, correcting their illogical delusions, and educating their wrong-thinking brains.  So now they sit in basements or attics or garages or state hospitals or correctional facilities and use their free time to spread their insanity like an internet virus through grammatically abhorrent and intelligence free posts on forums and blogs and any website with a comment section. They take pleasure in the anonymity of the internet.  They have no Facebook friends, as nobody who could put a picture or a name with the diatribes of these knuckledraggers would ever want to associate with them ever again. 

Unfortunately for Victor, it was these Cro-Magnon men who had made him a legend in the virtual world.  Their posts about his exploits, skills, techniques, potential ways he cheated, all turned Victor’s various screen-names into lore.   Victor had grown tired of these noobs; unskilled unintelligent gamers, and no longer enjoyed sneaking up and knifing them, or getting a headshot with a close quarters weapon just for the sake of the complete disadvantage it gave him.  Like an NBA player playing with his right arm behind his back against a middle school baller, it still was really no contest.  So once Victor mastered the controls and options of whatever game he was playing, he preferred to play in only closed server, invitation only matches against the best players in the world. 

Today’s match against players in Central Europe would’ve been a good teaser for tomorrow’s matchup against the English clan playing COD: Mi5.  Because the game used British secret service as its inspiration, it inspired every bored Arsenal FC hooligan, every Ian Fleming fanboy, every Guy Richie want-to-be to spend every weekend mastering the game to again prove the superiority of the British Empire.  The best had screen names with a clan name of –Bond or -007 or –Jaws, even

-pssyglre.   The best player Victor had ever played had the name WayneRooney#MU, and even though his clan stunk, that guy played Victor head to head as hard as his soccer famed namesake played for the British National Team. 

The room stunk.  Even Victor was aware of it, even in his semi-sleep state. He needed to take a shower.  Mentally, he had found a way to phase out the high temperatures, the stagnant air, the slow decay of microwaved food, but his own stink was bearable for only so long.  It could be forgiven in the midst of a tournament or timed level.  Rarely would the arms rise above the relaxed state, holding the controller or keyboard or contraption in the reclined position.  His body, however, still found the room unlivable.  Its glands expelled what little protein rich water was available through the pores (for Victor was often dehydrated), which rapidly invited bacteria, who loved to feast on the briny solution in dark unpleasant areas.  Animals are attracted to this smell, and even some humans believe that their mate’s chemical smell, or pheromones may have played a distinctive part in their pairing up.  But Victor’s smell was the leading cause of the suicidal tendencies in his room; no animal or mate would ever find it appealing, yet bacteria thrived on it. 

You Can Pry My Video Games From My Cold Dead Hands: Try Reading

I don't actually know any Joneses, but I know if I did, I wouldn't be able to keep up anymore.  I haven't bought myself any video games in over two years (besides free apps on the iPad), and while it has left me somewhat behind the times, it also has been incredibly freeing.  Gaming is an addiction, like smoking, or drugs, that takes over lives, especially boys, and it is nice to no longer be an online junky.

"Please, just two more minutes, I'm defeating the boss dog!"

The realization that I was not able to be a competent human and a gamer occurred somewhere in the 648th hour (or 27 actual days) of logged game time in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.  My wife had asked me a simple question for the fifth time, which I was not able to formulate a cognitive answer beyond "uhh" or "what" or "bacon," because I was in the midst of freeing the mythological world of online terrorists.  My wife, appallingly, shut off the game device (the first time she'd ever "confronted" my problem).

"What are you doing!"

I was losing it, like a second grader pulled off a quarter-machine horse ride in the middle of its two minute saunter.  Myself, a grown man about to throw a fit over a game I'd already conquered (I was a level 10 prestige, with the golden AK-47...ask a nerd what that means), stopped, and it dawned on me that I might have a problem.

So I hung up my Wii nunchuck and remote on my fancy plastic holster-stand, and walked away.

It doesn't mean I don't miss the old gunfights and strategy games and imposing my will on 12-year-old braggarts online.  Like any addiction, it is always there, ready for a relapse when a friend harmlessly shows me their newest operating system or a revolutionary new game.

I can never get good wi-fi in this park

Right now, some of those friends would be arguing with me.  "Chris you sell out!  None of this is true! We don't have a problem!  We can quit at any time!  Just cause you are fat and lazy doesn't mean we are!"  And if any of them actually read my blog (Troy excluded) they would probably say that. I hope they do. Most of them don't have time to read with all the gaming they have to do. It's time we as a nation have a serious talk about gaming culture and what it's doing to boys; including the boys or men actually doing the gaming.

I say boys, when many are grown adults.  I just hesitate to call anyone who logs more than twenty hours of video game time a week, an adult.  At least not an adult in the sense of what our grandparents were.  If our grandparents had twenty hours a week to devote to anything besides work, it was probably to work around the house, or repairing the car, or if time allowed, reading.

Games based on literature aren't much better:  You can
play this 1990 NES game online.  Not sure why I hit
butlers with my boomerang bowling hat, but...

I got into an argument a few years ago about how someone was trying to argue that video games are the new literature, here's the article it was based on.  Initially this makes sense.  Games have a hero, they follow a narrative (some more than others) and have many challenges that the hero has to overcome.  In basic, it is a story.  To gamers, they are better than books, because the reader (or user) can actually dictate the outcome through his choices, whereas a book has a predetermined layout.  I'd argue that the majority of games have a predetermined outcome as well, just many different ways to get to the end point, but that's not the point I'm trying to make.

You see, the reason I don't buy the argument, is because games don't make us think.  Oh sure, they challenge our instincts, and our problem solving skills, and force us to figure out the riddles that the game designers put in place.  Some evidence has shown that games actually increase vision,  mathematical and instinctual skills (occipital lobe, hindbrain, and left brain development) to some extent.  Making us gamers quicker reactors to stimuli, and maybe better drivers at night.

There's something wrong with your medulla oblongata 

But evidence has also showed that those who log many hours playing violent games showed less activity in the part of the brain associated with controlling emotions and aggressive behavior.  The frontal lobe, the area of the brain most responsible for our decision making, is de-evolving due to the images we see on screen.  And it isn't any surprise to me.  For years, I have controlled characters with no empathy towards either the character I was playing, or for the enemies I killed.  It's a kill or be killed world in video games, that rewards survival, but doesn't really punish one for their death.  Many games take points away for killing pedestrians, or for friendly fire, but don't really put the situations even close to their real life perspectives.

Most of us gamers have the ability to separate reality from fantasy.  I know that the "terrorists" or Soviet troops, or zombies or aliens or whatever I'm obliterating on screen is merely a creation of a graphic designer.  My Wii remote, or Xbox controller is not a weapon.  However, just because I have the ability to go in and out of fantasy at will, does not mean that the guy on the other side of the screen does.  How many Star Trek fans cannot separate their dream world with reality?  Just the same, many boys, especially those that are loosely parented, or suffer a social disconnects like autism or Asberger's don't possess the emotional or mental processing to travel in and out of video game worlds.

Bioshock was one a few games where reviewers lauded
its storyline.  Some games now have "moral" questions and
variable outcomes ... a step in the right direction 

I've taught a lot of kids with social disorders the last number of years, and all of them immerse themselves in video games: they write 12 page novellas based on characters from Halo, or draw anime versions of Link and Zelda all over their notebooks. Their math based brains thrive in pixelated worlds, and I'm not advocating a removal of games from their weekly schedule.  I think to some extent it is good for them.  But not as good as books.

A good novel makes us think about consequences.  We develop empathy for characters like Lenny in Of Mice and Men, who by today's standards would be characterized as a dangerous mentally handicapped individual (maybe like the kind of individual who might commit massive gun violence).  We toil over George's decision to mercifully execute Lenny at the end of the novel.  While the novel is predetermined, it makes the reader think about LIFE.  How important and fickle and interconnected LIFE is.  How simple actions and reactions affect LIFE around us.  How we might affect LIFE.

Games don't teach us that.  They don't teach us how to deal with the complexities of people's character, and how someone else may respond to a situation in a different manner than I might.  But books do. They make the reader respond to the main characters actions and reactions and get mad, get sad, get annoyed, get caught up, and question the entire story arc.  That's what we as humans are good at. Analyzing situations and coming up with appropriate responses.  We aren't supposed to be reactionary creatures that respond to stimulus (like games teach us).  The fact that the the hindbrain and medulla, the oldest evolutionary aspects of the human brain, are increasing in ability as a result of games, is proof that we are becoming more animalistic.

Survival. Gamers will be good at it.  Better than they are with relationships, and maintaining jobs, and friendliness, and smelling good, and staying active.  But we as a society, and guys my age who grew up playing games, who probably have addictive aspects towards games, need to think:  Is this how we want our children to grow up?  Unwilling to open a novel, and sitting stagnant for hours on the couch manipulating avatars on screen?

Sad this actually exists

I can already hear my dissenters:  Video games, like guns, don't kill people.  Yes I know.  People do.  However, access to games, guns, violent philosophies, consequence-less societies, bad parenting, socially isolated individuals...all of these are aspects of "violent" prone individuals.  Just because I am not that person, and my children are not those people, doesn't mean those people aren't out there in large numbers.

I'm not saying we need to outlaw games or guns, or sterilize bad parents, or arm teachers and retail associates.  Those all seem exactly like the knee jerk reactions that video games teach us will help us "survive" as a species.  We need to pause the game...

Obviously, we need to teach people how to find value in life again.  Give grace to the annoying kid sitting next to you in class, value the Lennie in your life--and what you do to help him, value the random stranger who walks in the mall, value the child whose parents don't.  Recognizing people, whether they are hurting or not.  Looking people in the eye. Complementing others.... 

That paragraph could go on forever, so I'm just going to get simplistic.  Open up a book.  Open up a lot of books. Challenge the concepts. Trade 25% of your game time to reading time.  See if you don't understand yourself and others better after reading them.  Find lists like this one I made on Goodreads.com, and lose yourself in a world that might better yourself.

Identity Crisis: Finding Oneself in the Digital World

 So my wife (feeling a bit of nostalgia) popped the original Legend of Zelda into the game console today, and my six-year-old daughter, Lily, excited because she’s seen the newer versions of this game, replied, “Oh, is that what it looks like? Yuck.”  “It looks like it was from the nineties,”  Actually, Lily, it was released 1987 in America, not that historical context means much to you, as you are SIX and have no idea what life was like even before Obama was president!!

Anyways, it dawned on me, that this is our generation’s, “In my day, we had to walk ten miles to school through two feet of snow.”  Instead we’ve substituted these lines, “Well, in my day, we had to blow on the cartridge, hope it registered, than watch as 2048 bytes of RAM (that’s 2KiB, almost 33,000 times smaller than the amount of memory in a standard iPhone 4) propel as many as 25 different colors onto the screen at the same time, that is, as long as you had an RF modulator to plug into the cable input in the back of our big bulky CRT televisions.”   Those of you who had a Nintendo NES, you understand this scenario.  I actually started with an Atari 2600, which looks a little like the shock therapy machine Bill Murray used to torture nerdy guys and woo attractive women in Ghostbusters.  

Yeah, we had it rough.  We still have it rough. 

          

Being a teacher; this is only too true.  

They say that the millennial generation (born 1980-1994) is now lacking more money for basic needs than any other age bracket in America.  We are laden in debt.  I pay over $600 dollars a month in college loans for the fancy degrees that I still struggle to find a job in the related fields.  I don’t regret going to college; I learned a lot of interesting factoids, listened to some really opinionated socially inept professors, and wrote a lot of five page papers that I don’t remember whatsoever.  Still, it forced me to buckle down and play the game of life, jump through the various hoops to get to where I want to be. 

And yet, career wise, I’m still not there.  I’m not the great success I hoped to be sixteen years ago when walked out of my high school with a paper diploma I knew meant nothing to the modern pixilated world. 

But does that matter?  As a man, I’m inclined to believe that my self-worth is constantly linked to my career path, or stock portfolio (oh, to actually have one of those), or professional title next to my name.  But my continual pride crushing career experiences have gradually convinced me that I’m important because of the other variables that make me who I am.  My daughters love me, even If I don’t buy them a PS3 and constantly make fun of their princess fairyland dreams.  My wife kinda likes me, even though I’m incredibly messy and continually annoy her with my weird humor (which does deserve more than the smirking smile she gives me after all these years).  My family still calls me, and so do my few close friends.  And we can all go out and have a good time without the need for alcohol or drugs or expensive outtings.  Overall, I guess you could say, I am happy.  What a strange concept, happiness.  Some of that may  be attached to my belief system, which is not of this material world, but overall, with all the smack and putdowns and pitfalls life has thrown my way: some deserved, some not, I still feel like a success because the majority of my days are filled with aspects of happiness. 

Happiness, comes at a cost though.  The Amish are happy.  And while I’m not willing to start helping my neighbors raise barns, I have given up some of my reliance of all things digital.   I stopped playing video games because they weren’t making me happy.  Even though I’m one of the best gamers of all time, It means nothing.  No video game accolades ever made me feel like a better person. Yes, that is the golden AK-47, and yes, I am a level ten prestige COD player: which translates to exactly zero societal value.  

"Mom, I'm 27 years-old, could you please knock on the
garage door before entering my space!"

And Money hasn’t done much:  I made more money a few years ago, doing a job I hated, and the money didn’t buy anything more than more trips to the doctor, more complaints about stress, and feeling like I should be doing more work, to make more money, to further my career.  The money has been tight since then, maybe I miss it ($), but I don't miss what I had to do to earn it.  

So yes, I…we, have it rough, our generation in this time.  It’s hard to find good work, good pay, or any benefits.  It’s hard to take a vacation, both monetarily and time-wise.  It’s hard to find an identity in the myriad of anonymity and animosity that the internet has falsely convinced us it holds the key to.  It’s hard to find authenticity in anything, as facts are so manipulated by agendas and creative internet presentations.  It’s hard to not just look for entertainment; escapism from the 9-5, the problems of real life and real people, and not live vicariously through other people on screen, or digitalized on a game, where the outcome is almost always happy and the characters heroic. 

So then there’s people.  Real flesh and blood humans with all their flaws and garbage and problems and character flaws and issues.  To some, people are too hard to invest in, too hard to deal with, too hard to empathize with, cause they just can’t seem to get it together.  But I’m learning to realize that “getting it together” or “monetary success” or “making good decisions” are issues we all are struggling with.  I’m hoping I can continue to look past these silly ideas of success and focus on each person as a person.  I hope maybe I can be a cog in their wheel of happiness; cause each human in my life, my kids, my wife, my parents and family, my friends, my co-workers, even some people I don’t particularly like, all are pieces of the machine-work that make me happy, and hence, prosperous.   

I think I'm missing a piece or two.  Is that going to have an effect?