The Addiction
I'm addicted to competition, fairness, inclusivity, social interaction and lots of bell and whistles.
One of my brothers brought a video game to Thanksgiving in the ‘90s called Marathon. It was a “first person shooter” with a plot - which was noteworthy and rare at the time - but the most important aspect was that you could play it on a Apple MacIntosh computer. We installed it on my Dad’s fresh-out-of-the-box Mac and quickly became enthralled with the originality of the game, the problem solving needed and the three dimensional, though somewhat cubic, rendering.
My brother Mike was one of Apple’s greatest proselytizers and my family, on the whole, deferred to his judgement. After spurning anything related to a computer growing up and during college (very much to my chagrin) I bought my first boxy Apple computer in the early ‘80s for my business and vowed to use it strictly for crunching numbers and accumulating data. I wanted to keep it at arm’s length and use it only when I needed it.
I made a promise to myself there would be no games.
For the first decade, it was easy. Nobody made a game worth a damn that you could play on a Mac. After a while, there were simple and cheesy games but I remember being bummed that you could not play something sophisticated like Civilization by Microsoft on a Mac. (And, for the record, I have never played Civilization to this day.)
Marathon changed everything for me.
Action combined with sleuthing out clues as to how to open doors or airlocks or crates, and puzzling out how to effectively get by dozens of aliens without being terminated, fascinated me. There were plenty of surprises along with tongue-in-cheek humor. The game was good at engaging the mind as well as my ever-deteriorating ‘twitch’ muscles.
What made me think about how I got sucked into video games, and my always too late reaction times, was seeing the headline that one of the world’s best esports stars has retired at the age of 23. The South China Morning Post refers to him as the Shaquille O’Neal of Chinese esports. His name is Jian Zihao and he was a star in a game called League of Legends.
In a post on microblogging site Weibo, Uzi (Jian Zihao) said that he has decided to retire after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes last year. The condition is a result of constant stress, obesity, an irregular diet and staying up late, he said.
“My physical condition doesn’t allow me to keep fighting,” Uzi said in the post. He cited shoulder pain, which has troubled him for years and prompted him to consider retirement as early as 2015, when he was just 18.
To try to improve his health, Uzi said he’s been taking medication over the past six months and gradually changing his daily routine, but it hasn’t worked. He also said the medication has negatively impacted his mental state.
Esports - in case you are blithely unaware of their growth, or existence - has grown so popular that the NBA had (has?) plans to launch their own virtual league with esports stars playing a season of professional basketball as NBA players in the Xbox version of the game. With the pandemic this may be the only way to watch a sports league like the NBA until the virus abates.
One seventh of the documentary called 7 Days Out follows League of Legends esports stars as they prep a week out for the world championships in Florida. Dozens of teams gather in Seattle annually for the DOTA (Defense of the Ancients) world championships with prize money in the millions. Esports may very well be bigger than actual sports.
Marathon was my gateway video game drug.
After my Marathon craze ended, a friend talked about an online game where he built things, gathered resources, sold items, battled with monsters and other players and wandered about a virtual world. It piqued my interest but I doubted very seriously my Mac could handle it.
He was a dedicated PC person who worked in a real world occupation that involved an extensive knowledge of computers. I plied him with questions for a couple of years about the game because I was genuinely baffled about the interactivity he described within the game. This game seemed way more involved than Marathon. With each query, he encouraged me to give it try.
Once again, it was a return trip to Texas where I got hooked playing World of Warcraft, the mysterious online universe I’d been hearing about. Once again, it was my older brother aiding and abetting the hooking. Because he had a WoW account and a Mac with a speedy enough processor. He had been playing WoW for a while.
The online world in Warcraft was light years beyond the Marathon game and I found the music, the ambient sounds, the landscape rendering of each separate ‘world’ within a world and the various characters you could play from warriors to sorcerers to mages to priests - absolutely - mesmerizing. I stayed up each night late into the night discovering worlds and completing “quests” as much as doing battle with virtual enemies.
I sank a lot of time into getting lost in that game.
An unhealthy amount of time because, like Uzi, aka Jian Zihao, the League of Legends pro athlete now retired, my shoulder took a beating. I had already spent a lifetime repetitively aggravating my right shoulder by paddle guiding. I gave up softball in the early 2000’s because I woke up one morning and I couldn’t throw as I had done since I was child. I played World of Warcraft on a desktop with a mouse and the repetitive motion caused my damaged shoulder to stiffen even more.
My competitiveness is well known and no secret. It’s hard not being able to compete as I once could in physical activities and sports that I grew up loving. And, even though I’ve found it easier to subsume my competitiveness as I’ve grown older, I still require an outlet.
Thus, when my softball career fell victim to my cantankerous, aging joints, I turned to horseshoes and video games.
And when the desktop and mouse failed me and I had to step away from the lushly rendered worlds in Warcraft and the scintillating player versus player battlegrounds which I had learned to excel at within a certain range, all I can say is, thank goodness for iPads.
There are some rich online worlds to get lost and compete in on an iPad.
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My favorite gun fight in a Western was from the movie Open Range starring Kevin Costner, Robert Duvall and Annette Bening. It seems more authentic than most with the antagonists and protagonists stalking each other around the one-horse town missing each other as often as hitting each other. I also enjoyed how Costner’s character evens the odds right from the start by neutralizing the “hired” gunslinger from the get-go. Perhaps not fair, but it was two against a half-dozen.
Also, my favorite non-gun fight in a Western is Paul Newman fighting a guy twice his size in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This is worth a watch for the dialogue. Paul Newman and Robert Redford at their finest. When this movie came out, I sat in the theater for five straight showings. Ah, those were the days.