Category Archives: Zen of Video Games

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.

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.

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – Easy Mode

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I’m forever looking for excuses to write these days, which is a good thing. If I want to do this for a living someday, then I need all the practice I can get. But coming up with a topic that is both relevant to gaming and to my own self-improvement continues to be tricky. It feels like I’ve already gone over the major possible topics of discussion, and anything else would just be pushing it.

Maybe I should start over with a new series of articles. But I have no idea what the hook would be, I gotta make it stand out from the rest somehow, preferably without resorting to my endless supply of penis and poop jokes.

I wish there were an easier way. *snaps fingers* That’s it!

Thank the heavens for difficulty selection. It’s available in just about every game ever nowadays. I almost always start with easy mode and move up the difficulty in subsequent playthroughs. Easy frequently is TOO easy, but I tend to enjoy it anyway, because it makes me feel like a ridiculously unstoppable badass.

Which is a feeling I do NOT get to enjoy in my daily life. Right now, it feels like I’m barely hanging on by my fingertips. Right now, I could be easily stopped by a gentle breeze, or a poorly-timed fart.

But I’m not sure if that’s the only reason why I play games on Easy difficulty the first time I play them. And I can say for certain that I play a lot of games on higher difficulties once they’ve proven too easy – we play NHL 11 on the hardest difficulty now, and I can’t imagine playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band in anything OTHER than Expert mode.

There’s something about that slow progression from novice to adept to experienced to veteran that can hook me in as much as a good story or great gameplay. There’s something about confronting a challenge that continually gets more difficult to beat. Of course, that could be said about the rise in difficulty through the natural progression of the game – naturally the 4th level’s going to be harder than the 3rd – or at least it should be.

Yet, at the same time, the challenge is familiar and comforting. I’ve already bested a stage or a boss just like this, and even though it’s harder now, the fact that it’s similar is a confidence booster. Even if I fail, I will try again, because I know I CAN defeat it. And I think that’s what the whole difficulty-selection thing comes down to for me – confidence, my eternally brightly-glowing-red weak point.

I’ve never, EVER been confident in myself, not ever. Comes from a lifetime of extremely poor self-esteem. Even with my recent surge in success and self-improvement, I can’t really call myself confident. The problems that keep getting in the way don’t help, but even if everything was copacetic, I still think I’d be a shy fellow who tries to blend into the walls when I’m around people I don’t know.

I’m more confident as a gamer than as a person. I know with absolute certainty that if I pop Mass Effect 3 into my Xbox 360, that I will likely perform well, and given enough time, I will definitely beat the game, even if I struggle with a few parts here and there, I know I will ultimately triumph.

As a person, I know no such thing. In life, I seem to repeatedly fail, no matter how hard I try, and only recently have I met with any real success, though that has been more due to luck and the kindness of friends rather than any real growth or extra effort on my part.

I’m still, as I’ve nearly always been, woefully single, and no woman I’ve ever actively pursued has ever wanted anything but friendship – the most frustrating gift ever. That’s not to say that I’ve always been single, I’ve had several girlfriends, but they all pursued ME. I only recently realized that I’ve never successfully wooed a woman. Not one.

But life doesn’t have an EASY mode. There’s no real way to turn life’s difficulty down. At least the difficulty curve is somewhat consistent. But that seems to vary from person to person.

Of course, life isn’t a game, but it’s astonishing how easily it compares to one sometimes. You spend the beginning learning, and then you use what you’ve learned to clear challenges, deal with a succession of bosses, and then you can rest and enjoy the ending. I’m just not clearing the challenges very well. And the boss is less trouble than my idiotic A.I. partner.

Still, I think that’s one of the main reasons I am and have always been a gamer. I choose the challenges I want to face. And I choose how challenging they are.

I can’t control how difficult my life is. All I can do is keep playing, doing the best I can, and hope to eventually see the pants-tighteningly fantastic ending. Where I’m completely covered in women. And chocolate.

THE ZEN OF VIDEO GAMES – Self-Insertion (As Dirty As It Sounds)

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One of the greatest strengths of video games as a medium is fortunately one that books and movies haven’t mastered, and probably never will – the sense that you, the viewer, the reader, the player, have a real impact on the story. You’re the hero, or at least, controlling the hero. Without your input, the hero would fail, the world would be doomed, the princess would be imprisoned for the rest of her life.

And yet, video games still have a very real hurdle to clear to master this strength. While first-person games are getting more and more graphically realistic, increasing immersion more and more by the year, there’s one thing games could use to increase the immersion substantially: self-insertion.

Imagine playing a first-person adventure game. You’re wandering around an abandoned mansion, and you spot a dirty mirror. You walk over, pull out a cloth, and wipe the mirror down….and you see your own face staring back at you.

Some games at least allow you to attempt this, with character creation tools that allow you to tweak every facet of your character’s facial structure, but only the most skilled are going to be able to create passing dopplegangers of themselves.

I, myself, have attempted this with several games, most notably WWE Smackdown 2006, where I made characters based on my friends, so we could watch our characters beat each other up as some sort of incredibly entertaining sadistic fantasy. I was more successful with some than others, but in the end, even the best model I made is pretty much a caricature of the actual person he was based on. Even in the games where I tried to create a character based on myself, the end result is a character who has a vague resemblance to me at best.

While LAN gaming with several friends recently, when we played Left 4 Dead 2, I jokingly suggested that WE should be the survivors. I realized shortly after that I could probably do it for real – I have the ability to record voice work – yes, the survivors have a LOT of lines, but it would be doable. But I quickly realized I’d be completely out of luck when it came to making character models – the game has no character creation system, so I’d have to do ACTUAL 3D modeling, which I know absolutely nothing about.

But today I came across a program that will generate a 3D model of one’s head using one or more pictures. It appears simple enough to use, and now my brain is on fire. I can hardly think of anything else. I want my friends and I to be in that game, I think it’ll make the action more intense, the fear more genuine, and the desire to protect the other survivors stronger than ever.

And then I thought, why do I want this so much? Why on earth is this so important to me? I have so many other things in my life going on right now that mean a lot to me, why am I so incredibly focused on this?

The first, and entirely bullshit answer, is that it would be a singular experience I haven’t had yet, and new experiences in gaming are pretty much what I’m all about. I call it a bullshit answer because even though it’s true, I know it’s not the real reason I want this.

No, the honest truth is that I’m desperate for the chance to have an impact on the world around me. I don’t feel like I have much of one in reality. I can’t solve my own problems, and I’m not much help to my friends. I have an internet video series few people watch, and a blog/article series even fewer people read. I have no wife, no children, not even a girlfriend. I’m not exerting much influence on this life, on my world.

In video games, this is about as untrue as you can get. Everything I do matters. I matter. I have enormous influence on the world. Of course, in games, the player is generally PLACED in a position where they have power or influence. I have no such luck in real life. I can give Rochelle a first-aid kit when she’s wounded. I cannot give a good friend, father, and husband a job when he’s unemployed.

Do not confuse this with helplessness – I know I’m not helpless. I’ve been making a dramatic impact on myself as of late, and I expect that trend to continue. And I know my friends and family are grateful for my existence, and I for theirs. I just wish I could do more for them sometimes.

If I put them into a video game, I can save their lives, I can make them rich, I can team up with them to take down the greatest threat mankind has ever faced, and I’d never stop smiling. Obviously, it wouldn’t be real, it’s all just enhanced wish fulfillment, but damn it, I want to be a hero for them. For you. For anyone.

In the real world, all I can do is keep trying. Maybe I can make more money, or get a job that would give me power or influence. Then I can help my friends have the lives I feel they deserve.

Who knows? Maybe even writing these articles could lead me to such an opportunity. I can always dream.