A video game that I’ve played throughout all iterations and changes in my life is The Sims. Recently, through some strange error or gameplay glitch, the game I was playing had autonomy turned on—and I frowned at my screen when I found one of my sims was playing video games on the family computer. Only after I’d changed the settings and later quit the game did I realize the irony.
The first video games I played were on my cousin’s Game Boy Color: all of my other, older cousins groaned through each failed level of Donkey Kong, and later, they questioned my choices of Pokemon. I thought that was bad enough, to be watched and corrected disparagingly. Then I got a Play Station for my birthday.
I placed last constantly when my cousins and I would play Gran Turismo, and I was always swapped out first for consecutively losing fights in Tekken. For a while, I had no concept a story-driven video game, simply because I was never any good enough to get to the point of seeing any story unfold. That is, until I played Rival Schools.
Rival Schools was a standard fighting game, but it had a nifty mechanic of unravelling multiple stories depending on the character pairs you chose. It was my first time seeing cutscenes in a game, and it was my first experience of that kind of narrative storytelling. It has stayed with me since. They were best friends! Who had to fight other best friends!!! FROM RIVAL SCHOOLS!!!
I grew up dividing video games into two realms: played terribly with friends, and enjoyed alone at home. Playing video games with my friends brought out a competitive side of me that was exhausting—not only because I was bad at the games we’d play, but eventually just because being that keyed up wasn’t fun for me. Meanwhile, I’d played The Sims at home, or watch my dad play Red Alert. I just thought that solo-player video games were about managing things, which was fun enough—only much later did I realize what part of my brain it was soothing.
All of that changed in 2012, when J dragged me to her home and thrust a PS3 remote into my hands. We stayed up until three in the morning as she watched me play Dragon Age: Origins. I’d never been so emotionally invested in a video game before, and I realized after forty hours of playing that this was probably what everyone was going so wild about—the reason people said they loved playing video games.
Video games are the best kind of fantasy fulfillment for me, because in video games I don’t have to be good at anything. I don’t have to be good, or smart, or eloquent. I can just be a bunch of pixels that can be saved and reloaded.
I can be garbage at playing—and I often am. That’s why I don’t like playing with others, why I’ll never stream, and why I’ve replayed the Dragon Age Trilogy more than five times. My friends still make fun of me for the one time I played Left4Dead 2 with them and stayed absolutely silent over Discord because I was so tense. Then I managed to get my character stuck on the ledge of the building and couldn’t figure out how to heal anyone. And honestly? That’s hilarious to me, and I had fun, but I just can’t bring myself to play video games with other people for sustained enjoyment.
I prefer single player games exactly because it removes the competitive aspect, and leaves me with whatever ambition is left. There are no rankings to reach or maintain, no teammates to shout at me to hurry up. I can just play the story to completion, accomplish all side quests, and go for a walk in a made-up world. There are options to turn down difficulty settings, aim assists, and in-game tutorials.
My favorite games are the ones that have a perfect story ending, a happiest outcome. That there’s an ideal outcome, even if the whole point of story-driven single player games is that there isn’t a correct way to do it. It gives me comfort in knowing that there’s likely to be a guide somewhere, made by someone with more patience than me, to get it right.
I play games for the semblance of complete control, for the calm that settles on me in knowing that none of it really matters. That for a few hours at night, I can make mistakes over and over again, without any consequence of judgment.
My favorite video games
The Sims 2
Dragon Age series (I really tried to choose a favorite and you can’t make me)
Mass Effect 2
Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Bioshock Infinite
Portal 2
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Rival Schools
Pokémon Red
Witcher 3
(how could it be anything other than:)
Wild Geese — Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Something I totally forgot to add to my previous letter was that in 2020 I decided to get my act together and make a pen holder out of chopsticks and felt paper that I bought off of Shopee. I’m terrible at arts and crafts, so this was a True Feat and I should probably be prouder of myself for it, but I think it’s even more amazing that said pen holder has become so part of my life that I’d forgotten that I’d made it.