Gaming Vicariously

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After getting my Wii last autumn, I played it a fair bit, especially after I got Wii Fit for it. (Like with my dance games, though, I really don’t think of Wii Fit as “playing a video game” because for me it’s exercise.) As much as I don’t like using my Gamecube controller to play Virtual Console games, there’s no denying that the downloadable games were one of the main selling points of the system to me. I’ve bought more than a handful of Virtual Console and WiiWare games, whereas apart from Wii Fit, the only packaged game I’ve bought for my Wii so far is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Not only are the downloadable games a lot less expensive, but they’ve been a lot more fun for me as well.

Unfortunately, video gaming just isn’t as enjoyable for me as it once was. I hardly played any video games at all from February through April — this included breaking my use of Wii Fit, much to my chagrin — and my systems are, quite literally, collecting dust in a corner of my room right now. After ending this past semester, though, I fired my Wii back up and downloaded a few new games, most notable Dr. Mario Online Rx. Dr. Mario wasn’t exactly my favourite puzzle game when I was younger, but it was definitely up there. I’ve really gotten back into it — I’ve had some games go close to two hours long — but at the same time I’ve tried playing online, and I keep getting slaughtered. (Worse yet, when I am about to win games, quite often my opponents disconnect, rendering the game a draw.) I know that I should expect that my video game performance should degrade as I play games less and less — I’ve blogged about this before — but for some reason there’s still a part of me that feels sad, and sometimes gets irritated, over this fact. Even if video games don’t matter that much to me any longer, it still bothers me that I’m not that good at them. (Not that I was ever in any contention to be a video game champion in my prime, but at least I was a lot better then.)

What I’ve found myself doing lately is gravitating towards videos of people playing video games on YouTube. In addition to just watching people play through the games, I’ve become fascinated by tool-assisted speedruns, or TASes, where players literally slow the game down frame-by-frame and exploit every bug in the game to run through a game at superhuman speed; they’re quite astonishing when replayed back at “normal” speed. I’ve also enjoyed videos where the players add their own commentary, although, like so many other things, Canada seems to have cornered the market on quality in this regard, with Proton Jon and Azura being the two who entertain me the most.

At the same time, though, the fact that I’ve been watching people play video games more than play them myself makes me wonder about how I’ve changed these past few years. Although I still play video games, it seems that by focusing more on watching these videos, in a way I’m kind of saying to myself that my video game-playing days are over, and video gaming is something more for “other people” to do now. Granted, I have much more serious things to worry about than video games now, but it wouldn’t be that hard for me to make more time for video games if I wanted to. I don’t want to, though. I’ve found many other things I’d rather do than play video games, and while some of them are quite enjoyable (stop snickering), most of them aren’t as meaningful to me and my past as video games are. It seems like everywhere I look, I find more evidence of how I’m changing as a person, and although I know that change is a huge part of life, I still want to fight it, especially as I’m watching the trees I played on in my childhood be cut down day by day right now. I guess it’s only natural that under these circumstances, I’m pining for other things from my childhood right now.

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