Why I Can't Play Video Games: An Arbitrary Childhood Rule

The other night, my parents and I were discussing just how cool computer games for kids were in the late 90's/early 2000's. We can all agree that any era that features heavily in Carmen Sandiego computer games is probably the golden age of said activity.

WHERE IN THE WORLD did she get that trenchcoat? I want it. 

Not, mind you, that my parents particularly relied on computer games to calm me down or keep me out of the way. As an only child, I was skilled in the Art of Entertaining Myself With Books to the point where it was more like, "Hilary! You've read through that Harry Potter book TWICE today! Come solve some puzzles on the computer!" than it was "Hilary, you've been playing computer games ALL DAY, come do your homework!"

In fact, my mom liked to play some of the computer games even more than I did. One in particular, called the Zoombinis, featuring essentially blueberries with hair, feet, and varying style accessories, was one of her favorites.

"I hated that game," I said, vehemently.

"Why?" This from my dad, who worked during the day while I was homeschooled and had not been around to witness several Zoombini-related meltdowns.

"Because," I said, "Sometimes they fell into abysses or got smushed or died, and I couldn't handle being responsible for that. I couldn't be responsible for not all of them making it home. I felt too bad about it."

It's hard to believe these ridiculous blueberries caused me so much distress.

Both my parents laughed about it, and my mom said something along the lines of "you were always a tenderhearted kid," according to the affectionate script that she relies on when talking about my childhood eccentricities.

This was, in fact, not isolated to Solving Puzzles with Blueberries with Hair. This happened SEVERAL TIMES when my dad brought home a GameCube, insisting that "Video games will be FUN!"

The first video game I ever played on the Nintendo Gamecube was a racing game called Super Monkey Ball. If you know me, you know that if I can't  do something well the first time I do it, I get a little embarrassed and offended by my own incompetence, which is probably a bad habit I learned due to the fact that certain skills like reading and swimming came to me like I'd been born knowing how to do them. Video games were not immediately easy. I remember sitting down to my first round of Monkey Ball, in which I picked the character who was a baby monkey, complete with a diaper and cinnamon roll-ears. It was all very adorable.

NO ONE CAN SAY NO TO THAT FACE.

Predictably, I lost. By a wide margin. And that was embarrassing enough, but the BABY MONKEY CRIED. There were tears.  So now, not only was I forced to deal with the fact that I was Bad At Video Games, but that I HAD INFLICTED PAIN ON SOMEONE ELSE WITH MY UTTER LACK OF SKILLS.

Which of course makes no sense to the people who can disconnect virtual characters from actually having feelings, but I didn't have that ability as a child. There are several screws loose in my brain, but one of them definitely has to do with the understanding most people have that fiction isn't reality.

I was inconsolable. I started crying. Not because I'd lost, I could deal with losing, but because the monkey was crying. I think my family, or at least my dad, was somewhat confused by this reaction, because he kept trying to tell me that if I practiced at video games I would win eventually, to which I would loudly and wetly respond "NO YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND I HURT THE MONKEY, I MADE THE MONKEY CRY, I SHOULD HAVE WON FOR THE MONKEY SO I DIDN'T HURT IT" and I'm fairly sure he was thinking "no I don't understand why are you reacting like this," because he took me for a walk to get me to calm down.

And then when we got home I made him play the video game as the baby monkey avatar so that it could win and be happy. Several times.

Once my parents figured out that nobody was ever going to get me to love Monkey Ball, they moved on and bought a few other GameCube games, a few of them first-person solo, which I could get into a little more because there was less competition and crying involved. However, when they brought home Pikmin, stuff got real again.

Pikmin as a game is brutally honest about what it's like to be on the low end of the food chain, but not for the protagonist. The protagonist is this tiny astronaut with a bulbous orange nose, and nothing bad ever really happens to him in this game except his spaceship crashes on an alien planet and he may never see his family again. The goal of the game is to rebuild the spaceship with the assistance of tiny, slightly mindless but maximum-adorable sentient root vegetables.

I cried extra-hard when the blue ones got eaten.

These root vegetables--of course, called Pikmin--have unwavering loyalty to the tiny astronaut, and follow him around wherever he goes. But, like in the real wilderness, there are predators. The pikmin can (and DO) get eaten by horrible mushroom-shaped dogs with chicken legs. Or die. And these sad little ghosts rise up every time they do, making pitiful little gasping noises of grief and disappointment.

I have no idea who thought "We should give this game to a small girl who got violently upset by the sad feelings of a fake baby monkey the first time we introduced her to video games, but let's give Kill or Be Killed a try." Probably someone in my extended family. Or my dad, who often brought video games home on the basis that "they reviewed really well!"

I played it once, for maybe an hour on Christmas morning, and got so depressed at my ineffectuality as a leader of tiny squeaking root vegetables with a primitive cult mentality that I couldn't emotionally handle it anymore and (no surprise) my mom started playing it instead.

I'm more rational, of course, at my *cough* advanced age. I know logically that the baby monkey isn't actually crying because it's not real, and that the Pikmin and Zoombinis didn't actually die in the real world, and that it's a game, but these are all reasons that when someone asks me if I want to play MarioKart, I look at them a little bit like they've asked me to skin a cat. I'm sorry, I want to say, You want me to watch Yoshi cry because I can't play video games? I can't be responsible for that. Have you SEEN Yoshi? He's too cute, and my hand-eye coordination has never been good. There's no way this is going to end well.

And it's not like I'm a sore loser. Well, there are times I have been of course, and I think it's safe to say nobody actively enjoys losing.

And I knew this. I turned down going into competitive swimming for a lot of reasons, but one of them was "I don't want to make other people feel sad like I feel when I lose, if I win." Looking back, I suspect that I was secretly a tiny socialist disguised like an eight-year old.  Or just a pacifist. To some people, they're the same.

Rather, my dislike of video games boils down to this: I don't like watching the effects of losing, especially when they're tied to me. I've never really been comfortable with winning at the expense of other people losing. Even now that I've fostered a healthy sense of competition and like being able to be the Best at Certain Things, I can never quite shake the sensation that someone else who thought they were The Best at that Certain Thing got humiliated or disappointed by me winning.

Not that this is really relevant when you're casually playing video games with your friends and family. That's supposed to be fun. And when I say "fun," I do realize that video games with family members or friends can just as easily turn into a bloodbath as a convenient evening on the couch.

And on those occasions, you can find me in the corner, saying "I'll just watch you guys play for a few more rounds, really; no really I'm good," secretly wishing I could just give Yoshi a big hug so that he'd just freaking stop crying already.

I'm not saying I'll cut you if you make Yoshi cry but
I WILL CUT YOU IF YOU MAKE YOSHI CRY.