4 Things Video Games Taught Me About Myself

I’ve learned a lot about creative work from video games: puzzle-making, entertainment design principles, and plot construction. But video games have also taught me about other important things in my life. Namely, about myself. And what have I learned?

Well…

1. I am not patient.

“But, Sarah,” you might protest, “you should already know this! Didn’t your parents spend forever when you were a kid teaching you that instant gratification wasn’t always possible and sometimes you had to wait?”

Yes, that’s true. But as an adult, I pride myself on my ability to be patient when I have to. Three hours in the walk-in clinic? Enh, that’s OK. They’re treating lots of people; I can’t jump the queue, so I might as well be relaxed about it. Read the world’s most boring and/or abstruse book? No problem — all my formal education up to now has prepared me for this moment. Three subway trains in a row pass by stuffed to the gills? Whatever, I’m not in a hurry.

Because I’ve learned to cope with unavoidable waiting — and because many acquaintances assume that activities like writing novels and academic research require tons of mental stamina — I do think of myself as patient. But I’m not. I’ve just learned to avoid situations where I get impatient.

Video games remind me of this because occasionally during a game I otherwise enjoy, I’m forced to be patient in order to proceed. I have to wait and time my jump exactly right instead of blindly dashing through a level. I have to sneak around the guards instead of running through the dungeon. I have to grind in exactly the right way and research on the Internet to build my character’s stats in order to do the fun things I wish.

I don’t enjoy any of those things. If they take me too long, I’ll put the game down. If the first (or main) thing I have to do in a game is wait, I will probably not play the rest of that game.

2. I’m not good at puzzles.

Once, for a treasure hunt I did for my business, I froze a clue in a block of ice. Most of the teams co-operated to figure out ways to melt the ice and extract the clue — they put it in running water, used body heat, etc. Not this one guy. No sooner was the block of ice in his hands than he whipped it at the asphalt ground and yelled, “Reveal your secrets!”

In the treasure-hunt::life analogy, I am that guy.

Sure, when I got into gaming, I started off with high ideals: I won’t check online walkthroughs — that’s cheating. I’ll solve every single puzzle by myself, and I’m definitely smart enough to do it easily.

To be fair, I often can. But after I’ve lit all the torches in the room and pushed all the blocks and talked to all the NPCs AGAIN and STILL nothing’s changed, we-ell, GameFAQs starts to look pretty good.

The fiction I love trained me to believe that loving puzzles is the coolest character trait one can have. A sense of intellectual curiosity and the courage to satisfy it — that’s what Sherlock Holmes shares with Dr. Watson and the crew of the U. S. S. Enterprise. It’s difficult to face the reality that, were I confronted with the red-headed league or strange, new worlds, I’d probably give up trying to solve the mystery after approximately five minutes of trying. On a similar note…

3. I hate exploring.

“Open-world game”. These are the three words developers enunciate with pride.

I hate them.

Some would argue that the purpose of video games is to immerse the player in a world unlike his or her own. What better way to do that than to create a sandbox (buzzword alert!) in which gamers can play? Let the user decide which parts of the private school, epic fantasy-world, or violent urban spread to interact with and how. Create the toys, the rules of toy interaction, and let imagination run free!

I love this idea in theory. I even sometimes wonder how it would be possible to pull off a similar artistic feat in real life, with extremely intricate environmental theatre. But like other ideas I adore in theory (see: audience participation in live theatre), I hate actually having the experience.

I want the game designer to give me a clear objective. If the plot of the game isn’t fun, I don’t care how many exploding ambulances I can hit with my rocket launcher. Without a sense of progress, I feel like I’m wasting my time.

4. I always remember the past as better than it was.

When I was in eighth grade, I hadn’t grasped that you can’t re-create past happiness; each joy you find will be a new one, and expecting certain activities or circumstances to make you happy is, in fact, the quickest way to make sure that they won’t. This is why I was puzzled each time I set out to re-create a treasured memory only to find myself not collapsing in hysterical laughter with my friends the way we did the first time.

Likewise, I’m always certain I can re-create those fun-filled visits planted in front of Super Mario Kart with my cousins and sister, taking turns trash-talking each other in battle mode. I expect the games I loved on the SNES when I was almost thirteen to instill the same joy in me now that I’m almost thirty (wooo… thunder and lightning!).

But my memory trumps the reality.

I can beat 150cc on Mario Kart 7 or Mario Kart 8 no sweat (okay, maybe a little shvitzing — when women do it, we glow), but when I try out the series’ first installments on Virtual Console, the controls feel imprecise and difficult. I miss the new power-ups — those same new power-ups that I regarded with suspicion because they weren’t like what I knew. And the graphics are clunky, not retro.

Maybe those who can’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but those who can remember the past are doomed to never experience it again. Well, as long as they’re me.

Art is said to hold the mirror up to nature. If the converse is true, then video games are definitely art, because in them, I see my reflection — evidently, warts and all.