FREE PC GAME GIVEAWAY!

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Leviathyn.com has just offered me a trial position as a writer for their website! In celebration, I will be giving away copies of all the Tex Murphy games courtesy of GOG.com!

You can win:
- 1 copy of Mean Streets and 1 copy of Martian Memorandum
(they come together)
- 1 copy of Under a Killing Moon
- 1 copy of The Pandora Directive
- 1 copy of Tex Murphy: Overseer

Comment here and say which one you want, even if you want all of them! I’ll stop accepting comments at 8:30AM Thursday, the 20th. If more than one person wants the same game, the winner will be chosen randomly via random.org. Thanks for being fans of Pantsless Shorts, and we WILL keep producing content for you to enjoy!

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – Infamous

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There are people all throughout life who are just going to rub you the wrong way. Besides poorly-trained masseuses, I mean. There were kids in school, students in college, and now, co-workers at work, all who seemed genetically designed to get on my nerves and fray them until they snap.

And those are real people. Ever want to tell a fictional character to shut the fuck up and die? Don’t ever do it in a crowded hospital, because all it will get you is an unwanted visit to the psych ward.

I’ve been playing a lot of the sandbox superhero game Infamous lately, and here’s the setup. You play Cole MacGrath, a courier in a mythical American city situated on three identically sized and rounded islands. You’re given a package to deliver, and approximately halfway there, the package explodes, destroying about a third of the city and killing everyone in the blast radius. Should’ve gone with FedEx.

The entire city is quarantined, and Cole himself survives somehow and winds up in a hospital in a coma for a few days, watched over by his best friend Zeke and his girlfriend Trish. When he wakes, they’re all startled to learn that Cole can now inexplicably control electricity.

Cole helps to protect a supply drop from a vicious armed gang of thugs called Reapers by repeatedly and hilariously zapping them all in the groin, at which point some hipster douchenozzle hijacks the TV broadcast to inform everyone that Cole is the ‘terrorist’ who destroyed the city. Zeke stands by his friend, albeit a little uncomfortably, but Trish’s sister died in the explosion, and she leaves without saying a word.

I haven’t finished playing the game, but I can easily tell you that I wish she had stayed gone, that miserable, aggravating bitch.

For the entire first third of the game, she treats Cole like absolute shit, no matter what he does to make things right, and to make matters worse, he keeps trying, when after being rebuffed twice, and hearing, “It’s your fault my sister is dead,” I would’ve said, “You know what, slut? It’s actually not my fault at all, but since you’re so determined to take the word of an obnoxious douchebag over the word of the guy who once-upon-a-time genuinely cared for you, go ahead and believe whatever you want, because I don’t want you in my world anymore.” Then I would’ve walked away like a boss, ignoring her shouted replies, and not entertaining any thoughts at all of spinning around and zapping her in the happy flaps as an immature but extremely fulfilling goodbye.

I can’t even say why she gets on my tits so much. She’s likable enough, her body’s good but not perfect, and her voice actor’s not annoying at all. Well, her hair is stupid. But that’s about the worst offense she causes. And yet, every time I hear her voice, I have to stop myself from going Emperor Palpatine on her narrow ass and lighting her up like the world’s brightest Christmas tree.

And she’s not the only annoyance, just the biggest one. After her comes Cole’s ‘best friend’, Zeke, who I swear is the biggest mooch alive. I can’t really blame him for it, if one of my friends was a celebrity, no matter how minor, I’d be trying to sell t-shirts with drunken photos of him on them. But at one point, and I SWEAR this is true, he asks you to put yourself in mortal danger just so his chances of getting laid with a particular girl MIGHT increase slightly.

And then there’s the two ‘news’ factions in the game, one of which, the aforementioned hipster prick, is trying pathetically to be some anti-establishment ‘voice of the people’, and he occasionally hijacks all the TV’s near you so he can mercilessly and ceaselessly denigrate your heroic efforts, still trying desperately to sell you as a villain. Hilariously, at this point in the game, the common people pretty much love me, and are all happy to see me and take my picture, so it’s pretty clear that nobody’s listening to this half-wit.

And the other ‘news’ faction is a patriotic news channel, spinning furiously like a top in a centrifuge, shamelessly giving credit for Cole’s rescues to military units that were never there, ignoring the truth, and only saying what furthers their political agenda. They might as well have just dropped the pretense and called it Fox News.

And the only other things that ever appear on the televisions in this game are silent advertisements. So you pretty much HAVE to watch these things when they come on, because there’s literally nothing else interesting on TV in this world, you know, just like in real life, OH SNAP!

Even Moya, your FBI controller, who I desperately want to give a pass, if only because her name is a Farscape reference, but she’s so completely emotionless that I’m kind of hoping her story that she’s just trying to find her husband is a false one. That would make sense, and it would mean that the voice actor and director were both on top of their game, but if not, it would mean they likely spent most of the day eating paste.

With all these annoyances, on reflection, I’m finding this game an awesome metaphor for life. Because you are going to have to deal with people who annoy you in life. You are going to have to deal with complete jackholes, idiots, and the emotionally dead, all on a pretty consistent, if not daily, basis.

And how I deal with them in games differs sharply from how I deal with them in real life. In real life, I’ll do whatever is necessary to get my job done/get what I want with a minimum of interference from people like these, even if it includes playing nice, or worse, sucking up to them. In video games, if I’m playing a good character (and I’m never NOT playing a good character) I’ll save the game, and then IMMEDIATELY TRY TO KILL THEM. More than once, I’ve thought, if real life had a save feature, I’d kick my co-worker in the vagina so hard that I’d lose my shoe.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t come with a magic “that-didn’t-actually-happen” button. That’s why I’m so grateful that games do, because it’s incredibly easy to blow off steam by doing something tremendously violent and over-the-top to somebody over a relatively minor infraction.

In Fallout New Vegas, I was instructed by some scientist to go to a Vault and bring back some samples of an experiment. When I got there, I learned that the experiment was highly dangerous. It had gone completely off the rails and killed everyone involved with it, so to protect everyone else in Nevada, instead of collecting the samples, I set the reactor to overload and blew up the Vault.

When I got back and informed the scientist of what I had done, he flew into a rage, saying terrible things about me, my parents, and my likely future offspring. Now, this guy was a douchebag, but technically, he worked for the good guys, so I technically couldn’t kill him without the entire faction getting pissed at me.

So I saved the game.

I spent the entire next half an hour killing him in all kinds of various creative ways and then reloading my saved game. I shot him in the head with my Desert Eagle. I aimed my shotgun at his groin and pulled the trigger. I stood back and lobbed grenades into the room. I mined the floor just behind him and waited for him to finish his work. I filled him full of lead with a minigun, turned him into a pile of glowing ash with a plasma pistol, disintegration, vaporization, you name it, I did it. My two favorite kills were when I hit him in the head with a rocket at point-blank range (which I somehow SURVIVED), and cutting his head off with a sword, which by some miracle, DIDN’T raise the alarm, so I picked up his head and carried it through the base, showing everyone I came across my new trophy.

Video games don’t make me violent. They never have. I’ve never punched anyone in my life, and I’m afraid of real, working guns. And I will never become violent, unless given absolutely no choice.

But by the GODS, does it feel good to do some violence to annoying douchebag fuckwits in video games. Best stress reliever EVER.

ONE KNIGHT IN SKYRIM – Chapter 1 – Bound

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I awoke, bleary-eyed, to find myself tied up in a cart with some other prisoners. A couple of them spoke to me briefly about some empire and some rebels fighting against it, it sounded like something happening in a galaxy far, far away, and I couldn’t get the grasp of it. Truly, I had a hard time caring about any of that, considering I couldn’t remember anything before waking up just then.

Anyway, we got wheeled into some town I’d never seen, and the Imperials let us out of the cart, lined us up, and asked our names. I couldn’t remember mine, so I just made one up on the spot: Setzer. It sounded totally original and had probably never been used in the history of anything before, so I was happy with it.

It was then that I was walked a short ways from a headsman’s block, and I finally realized they were just going to kill us. And with no memory, I had no idea why, but I knew it didn’t seem fair. One of the other prisoners agreed with me, and he tried to run away but all that got him was ten or twelve arrows sticking out of his newly-dead ass.

A swift decapitation seemed a better way to go than sharp metal anal penetration, so I didn’t resist. I listened as they pronounced my doom and led me to the block. I closed my eyes and prepared for death.

I was not wholly disappointed.

A fothermuckering DRAGON showed up from out of nowhere, and started breathing fire over the length and breadth of the town, killing most of the people in seconds. Most everyone with any sense had legged it, so I did the same, thoroughly crapping my pants as I went. After several close calls, I found myself forced to choose between following one of the prisoners that had been friendly to me on the cart, or following one of the Imperial guards who thought my head should be detached from my body. Second easiest decision I’ve ever made, right after running away from a dragon cooking a city to perfection.

The fellow, named Ralof, untied my hands, and he and I worked our way through an underground passage of sorts, and at the first available opportunity, we ransacked a guardroom for equipment and supplies. The fact that I was incredibly efficient at looting, at instantly being able to discern exactly what any given item was worth, all that hinted to me that perhaps I was on that cart for a reason.

I didn’t have much time to reflect on my thieving past, because some Imperials showed up and again tried to kill me, whence I learned that I’d picked up some rudimentary sword-fighting skills at some point. As for the Imperials, I had to admire their dedication, at least until I killed them, obviously, not much point in admiring a corpse. Looting a corpse is an entirely different story, though, some of these Imperials had better equipment than what I was wearing.

It wasn’t long after that that I got my hands on a spellbook, and to my amazement, I could actually read and understand it! I read that book thoroughly while Ralof patiently waited (fortunately it was a rather thin book, like every other book in the land), and when I was done, I could shoot flames from my hands! Now I was eagerly hunting for another enemy to try it on, though I noticed in passing that my flaming hand didn’t noticeably brighten the area around me any. I shrugged it off, thinking it a property of this “magic” flame.

In any event, I was setting Imperial guards on fire with one hand and stabbing them in the nipple with the other in no time. And the fact that I enjoyed doing so led me to believe that I was at least partially psychotic. Perhaps I’d done something far worse than thievery to get put in that cart after all, but I doubt it. I certainly FELT like I’d by and large want to do the right thing, so I put my enjoyment of nipple-stabbery as a byproduct of the thrill of battle.

Just when it seemed like we were about to get out of those labyrinthine corridors, Ralof spotted a bear. He suggested we sneak around, but my bloodlust would not acquiesce. I snuck up on the bear as it slept, and set all of its fur on fire at once. To say I’d gotten its attention would be like saying sex is kind of fun. But just as it turned to strike, I thrust my sword through its lower jaw, piercing its brain. The dead beast collapsed, smoldering.

Shortly thereafter, Ralof and I found the exit, at which point he suggested we split up and find our own way, I would’ve complained, but he gave me a map showing where I was located, as well as the nearest town, Riverwood, and to top everything off, on top of that, he pretty explicitly told me to hook up with his sister when I got there. It’s pretty hard to be mad when a guy tells you, “Hey, I’m going to leave you hanging, but in return, you can bang my sister.”

Ralof ran off, and I was left to contemplate the reality before me. This was a beautiful land, filled with flora and fauna, but it was also expansive. I’d be doing a LOT of walking. I sighed to myself and started out.

It wasn’t long before I realized something else extraordinary about me: I could ‘sense’ notable locations in the terrain, like houses and caves and the like. I wasn’t sure if this was some magical power, or if I’d been extremely well-traveled when I was younger, and dormant memories of these places were just rising to the surface, though it is notable that no one I met seemed to know who I was.

One of the first places I ‘found’ was a house called Pinewatch. It appeared to be a totally normal home, with crops growing out back, at least until I found the corpses. Some bandits had killed the original inhabitants and left. I considered burying the dead man and his wife, but my brain was too busy screaming “FREE STUFF!”

I picked the lock on the front door, solidifying my belief that I’d been at least a passable thief most of my life. I picked over the place, but despite the locked door, pickings were slim. I was about to call it a day, maybe catch some winks in the bed before heading for Riverwood. But something struck me as all wrong. Who murders two people, loots their house, and then locks the door on their way out? I took a second look around, looking for something out of the ordinary, and I spotted an odd projection on tha basement wall, next to the bookcase. I pressed it, and the bookcase slid aside to reveal a hidden passageway!

I readied my sword in my right hand, and prepared my flame spell in my left. I squared my shoulders and walked into the darkness, as the bookcase slammed shut behind me.

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – The Socialist

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Some years ago, I read somewhere that one in ten men are bachelors for life. While I can’t remember where it came from, Google seems to back me up on it, and this fact has stuck with me for a while. I get laid about as often as the U.S. takes a census, and I get into relationships half as often as that. So it’s looking more and more like I’ve rolled a 1. Botched it.

I can hear my friends now, “oh, here he goes again”, thinking I’m going to whine and complain about being single, which in their defense, is a natural assumption to make. I’ve been so annoyingly whiny and complainy lately, I’m kind of surprised none of them kicked me in the urethra just to shut me up.

But that’s not why I’m here, not why I’m writing this. If the last week has taught me anything, it’s that everything in my life is better when I don’t give a shit about women at ALL. I had an absolutely brilliant week, with lots of fun times from video games to booze fests, and it wouldn’t have been a tenth as awesome if I’d been mired in self-pity. Now if only this life lesson will stick; personally, I give it a month before I become a whiny and mopey bitch again.

So I’m not focused on women right now. It’s still a goal – despite being ridiculously wealthy and sexy (ha, ha, ha….sorry), I ultimately very much want to find “the one” and settle down. But one thing has been made abundantly clear to me. Unlike what Hollywood is convinced actually happens, she will not magically appear in my life. I need to go looking for her. And this means dealing with something I hate: other people.

One of the funniest people I’ve ever met floored me when he told me he was the most introverted person HE’D ever met. He could get onstage and have an audience rolling in the aisles with laughter with his wacky characters and witty lines, but at home, he’s intensely private and he doesn’t go out much. And this struck a chord with me because I’m exactly the same way!

I don’t like going out. I never have. Going out to a club or a bar always leaves me completely drained. Even if I’m surrounded by ten or fifteen friends I trust, I wind up emotionally and physically exhausted within an hour. And forget the idea of strip clubs, when I’m in one of those, my shields are up so hard that Scotty’s in my brain, screaming, “She can’t take much more of this, Captain!”

And numerous people have tried to tell me I just need to get used to it. Bullshit. That’s like telling one of Jack Bauer’s informants that they just need to get used to torture. It IS torture, for me, an agonizing slog that has me checking my watch every minute or so, waiting for an excuse to leave. One mental deficient suggested this might be a psychological problem, and while I imagined throttling him with his own intestines, I calmly explained that I wasn’t a psychotic.

There are two prominent reasons for this, the first being that I have never liked everything everybody else likes, which includes music, or what passes for it nowadays. Exactly one time in the history of ever, I have been to a club and asked someone “what song is that?” because I actually liked it. When I threw a party of my own, I went through the Billboard 100 lists for the last five years and made a playlist of songs I hated the least, which gave me an hour or so of music. 20 songs in the last five years that didn’t make me want to chew off my own face. So, no, I will not deliberately subject myself to the unmusical caterwauling of entitled dipshits who are richer than I am for absolutely no honest reason. It’s also why I’ve never watched a single episode of Jersey Shore.

The second reason is that I don’t trust strangers and never really have. My childhood is rife with incidents where people I don’t know or had just met treated me like absolute shit on a biscuit, and things have only gotten mildly better since then. My ‘shields up’ analogy from before is not 100% accurate, it’s more like radar. When you force me to go out, I am expending a TON of energy keeping an eye on everyone and everything, waiting for someone to try something or say something awful. You can tell me to ‘get used to it’ all you like, but I don’t trust people, and for good reason, I feel.

So where is all this leading, and just what the hell does any of this have to do with video games, you ask, between thoughts of how awesome I am, and how you want me to see your boobs. Patience, I’m getting there.

Naturally, it occurs to me that with these safeguards and prejudices in place, it will be next to impossible for me to meet someone in the real world, unless I get lucky and meet my future wet-t-shirt-contest-winning nymphomaniac gamer wife at work or at a pizza joint or something.

Did you catch the important word in that last sentence? Besides nymphomaniac? That’s right, gamer. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realize that I don’t think I should be chasing any woman who doesn’t game, or at the VERY least, any woman who doesn’t have ANY interest in gaming at all. The more time I spend online, the more I see things like the uber-arcade machine some guy’s wife built into the shell of a Super Nintendo for his birthday. My first response upon seeing this was to say “MARRY THAT GIRL”, gleefully ignoring the fact that he already had.

But if I want to meet a gamer girl, I need to get more social. And here the problem rears its extremely ugly head once more – again, the social gaming experiences I’ve had have been by and large awful. I played World of Warcraft for all of two weeks, during which, the people I met only seemed interested in dueling. If I said yes, they’d unceremoniously kick my ass, go, “LOL NOOB”, and leave. If I said no, they’d call me a fag and leave. Which I’ve always taken offense to, because I don’t think I look anything like a cigarette.

My experiences with other multiplayer games haven’t been any better. I played Halo 2 online exactly once. After the third time I got insta-killed and teabagged, I asked myself why would I ever consider this fun, and never played the game again. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare went a little better, but I constantly muted everybody so I wouldn’t have to hear pre-pubescent idiots shouting sexist, racist threats at each other. So I never got to know anybody, for any reason, they may as well have been robots with Down’s Syndrome.

But unlike socializing in real life, socializing in a video game is something I can see myself doing, for a number of reasons. For one, the most horrible thing someone can do to me in a game is call me names. Whoop-dee-shit. That stopped having a genuine effect on me right around the day I realized I had a bigger penis than most horses.

So, I’ve decided to give it another try, though I’m concentrating for the time being on co-operative experiences like Left 4 Dead 2. I spent a couple of hours last night, playing an internet game with total strangers, something I haven’t done in years. And I had a good time! Nobody was a douchebag, though a couple of them were playing like idiots, but I kept that thought to myself. We were all in this together, and it was an awful lot of fun.

I couldn’t tell you any of their names, so I probably might want to work on this plan if I expect to meet people, but I figure, what the hell, worst thing happens, I meet some new people, and we all get eaten by zombies together.

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – Spec Ops: The Line

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[WARNING: I’m going to spoil the HELL out of this game. If you have any interest in unique video game experiences, you owe it to yourself to go rent this game, and play it all the way through before you read this. Seriously, do it. I cannot recommend this game enough, and you do NOT want this spoiled for you.]

As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a hero. Save the girl, save the city, save the world, make things right. I’m not sure if that desire propelled my love of video games, or if video games are what set off that nugget of inspiration, that’s going to be a chicken-or-the-egg argument.

And lord knows I don’t have much in my actual life to fulfill that need, my crippling fear of death keeps me from entering any service in which I could save lives, like being a fireman or policeman, or joining the armed forces, I’m also incredibly squeamish, so I could never be a doctor, and being perpetually out of shape and naturally clumsy indicates that I wouldn’t do well in those professions anyway. My current profession is about as unheroic as it gets, the best I can do to make it more heroic is to say that I occasionally rescue battered paper from vicious, killer printers.

And I don’t have a wife or girlfriend who would call me her hero, and it’s becomingly increasingly more unlikely that I’ll have any children I could be a hero to. And I’m sure one or two of my friends’ first instincts is going to be to comment on this article and say I’m their hero, but that’s kind of like shooting a corpse and claiming you murdered someone: it doesn’t really count, and I’m going to look at you like you’re crazy.

But who needs all those things when I have video games? In just about every video game you can imagine, you are a hero of some sort, or at least you can be, excepting perhaps a couple of Rockstar games and some puzzle games. Sometimes you’re saving the princess, sometimes you’re saving the galaxy, sometimes you’re circumcising a prince while the king and his advisor look on with their jaws dropped straight to the floor, but in every case you are making things right. (Okay, maybe not that last one, but they did save the kingdom in the end of that game….or get drunk in a bar, I honestly can’t remember)

And I love video games for this…there’s a great poster making the rounds saying something like “as a gamer, I don’t have a life…I choose to have many”, and the picture depicts some of the biggest heroes in gaming, like Link, Adam, the Dovahkiin from Skyrim, Commander Shepard, and it thoroughly encapsulates how I feel about being a hero in these games. These characters are, or at least, CAN BE true heroes and I cannot overstate the feeling of genuine pride overtaking my system whenever I beat these games. I can’t even play the evil paths in any games that have them, because they never hold my interest for very long. I love being the hero in video games.

At least I did until Spec Ops: The Line came along and kicked me in the balls so hard that there’s a permanent boot imprint on my scrotum.

Allow me to give a little backstory here: I was aware of Spec Ops as a franchise way back during the Playstation era, but shooters were in something of a slump at the time, and I was far more interested in JRPG’s and survival horror games, so I never gave the Spec Ops games any more than a cursory look, but from what I knew, they were only mediocre shooters, and I still don’t even know if they’re first or third-person. Needless to say, I gave them a pass.

Then, last month, there’s all this hype and marketing like Spec Ops is going to be the next big thing in modern military shooters. “Oh, great,” I thought, “another Call of Duty wannabe.” I recognized the name, but I just figured they were resurrecting an old franchise just for the sake of the fans it might still have, and AGAIN, I gave it a pass.

But suddenly, the internet was abuzz about this game. I saw articles on Reddit about how the designer deliberately tried to make a game that would have players angry at the developer. James Portnow’s Extra Credits is one of my favorite webseries on the internet (not to mention at least partial inspiration for this series of articles), and when he mentioned on the Extra Credits page that he’d been blown away by the game and was going to do at least one episode on the game (he only devotes entire episodes to a single game if it’s really, REALLY good, or really, REALLY bad, and he would wind up doing TWO episodes on Spec Ops), I knew I had to play it, but it was still $60, which was more than I was willing to part with. Then Amazon had a sale offering it, and including Bioshock 1 and 2, all for $20, and the last of my defenses crumbled like a cookie under an elephant’s ass.

I quickly installed the game, and started playing. It’s a fairly linear third-person shooter, with some outdated shooting mechanics, and some rudimentary squad tactics, but the writing was solid enough that I could understand there was some serious potential here, so I kept playing.

About an hour into the experience, I started to get a sense of unease that I couldn’t quite pin down. Something was seriously wrong in this game. I wasn’t sure if the first enemies I’d encountered were actually the bad guys or not, and the further I played, the murkier it got. I thought, “Ambiguous situation, don’t know who’re the bad guys or the good guys? Brilliant!” Perceptive readers will note I’d just made a massive assumption.

A few hours of gameplay or so later, things SEEMED to become clearer. The rogue American military unit were the bad guys, or at least, were trying to stop me from helping the people I’d come to save. And you face a steady stream of them until you run across a huge encampment of them. There’s no way you can take them on with your guns, there’s too many of them, and a number of tanks besides. Your character, Walker, despite protestations from his unit, decides to use white phosphorous. Google it if you want, it’s nasty stuff, burns people alive. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I understood the necessity – without it, we were dead.

The player is then shown a black and white screen, an infrared top-down view of the battlefield. Heat sources, enemies, show up in white, and you guide the cursor over them and pull the trigger. Towards the end, there’s one last tank in your way surrounded by a bunch of enemies, so I pulled the trigger again. I actually smiled because I managed to get all of them with one shot.

Once the zone was clear, you trek through. It was horrific, but I had expected that. Then you check the valley near that tank, and find a soldier horribly burned, but still alive. “Why?” he asks. Walker replies, “You gave us no choice.” He says, “We were helping…..” and dies. You turn the corner.

There were 40 or 50 burned bodies. No weapons, civilian clothing. My mouth popped open. The other members of my unit start arguing. Innocent men and women had been burned alive, and had clearly died in agony. My eyes finally come to rest on a mother who had apparently desperately tried to shield her child with her body to no avail. They were now locked in their death pose forever. Like Walker, I just stared, slack-jawed and numb at what he’d done. At what I’D done.

That was the biggest punch in the gut a video game had ever given me. Until the end of the game, that is.

You find the leader of the rogue American army, and he talks to Walker about how everything would’ve turned out better if Walker had never shown up. And he delivers a line that may as well be delivered straight to you, the player:

“The truth is, that you’re here because you wanted to feel like something you’re not. A hero.”

I cannot count the amount of times I’ve tried to do the right thing and managed to fuck everything up. This was like that, only on a MUCH bigger scale. My flubs had only ever caused temporary rifts in friendships or employment that healed in a short length of time. This time, I’d doomed an entire city to death.

But I’ve never had a game take me to task for trying to do the right thing before. In essence, the game is pointing at me and laughing, calling my need to be a hero, and trying to fulfill that wish by playing soldier games with guns, entirely pathetic. And in one sense, the game is right, if I wanted to be a hero, I could volunteer, or give blood more often. Hell, I could try anything OTHER than playing a video game, pretending I’m a big tough manly man wearing a cape who eats danger and shits bullets, always doing the right thing for truth and justice and puppies.

No, in this case, I am not a hero, I am a moron that somehow came into possession of a gun. In fact, it paints my enjoyment of similar testosterone-fueled FPS’s like Call of Duty and Battlefield in the same “you’re not the righteous gunhand of God” colors. I can’t imagine playing one of those games now. It’d be like witnessing someone getting burned to death and then immediately going home to cook a steak; it would be incredibly poor taste, and would probably make me nauseous.

But on the other hand, I do not agree that the base desire to be a hero is pathetic. I think there exists real nobility in the human spirit, and for those of us who can’t express it in our real lives, video games are a great outlet. And I think they can become a powerful tool to motivate people to do real, non-imaginary acts of small heroism in their real lives.

I will continue to do the right thing, where and when I can. As long as I keep that in mind, I can be, will be a hero. And who knows, maybe someday, I’ll even actually save someone’s life. But you can bet I’ll be thinking twice about simulating being a “war hero” for a long time to come.