How I lost my gaming virginity
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
It was a cold rainy day not too long ago. Blair, my boyfriend, was completely glued to his Nintendo DS, and I was tired of studying. I couldn’t go outside and ride my long board. For one, it was raining, and second, we now lived out in the boonies and our driveway was gravel (though off-road long boarding proved pretty sweet!). “Here honey, you should try out this game. Do you want to start an account? You can make a character.” Blair had been pushing me to get into RPGs (role playing games) for a while now. So I thought to myself, “Hell, why not? There’s nothing better to do.” And so began a long journey to save an imaginary world from the monster of the underworld in Dragon Quest IV. I’ll admit, I used a walkthrough, but in my defense it is my first RPG. In this game you follow a story. You do one mission, which then causes another mission. Then you have missions within missions, and you encounter monsters along the way. When you beat the monsters you gain experience points and gold, which you can use to buy armor and weapons to raise your defense and other attributes. Experience points make you gain levels, which also make your attributes improve. There are other cool things in the item shop, too. You can get medicinal herbs to raise your hit points, or antidotal herbs to cure your self of poison, or even a Chimaera Wing to get to a city quickly. These are things you can also find in various places when you break baskets or pottery, or find a treasure chest. I proceeded to type my name and choose a character. The prologue started with my character (MaryAnne) finishing a long day of warrior training. Then I got to sit down and have dinner with my parents, all the while trying to pretend that my fate is flowers and rainbows, about the fate I may encounter when I’m grown and enter the world outside the hamlet, foreshadowing the battles I must soon fight in. As I played through chapters one, two, three and four, I was amazed that it wasn’t just a “kill the bad guys” kind of game. It was a story that I was a part of. I felt like I was in “The Never Ending Story”. In each of the first four chapters I was a different character, and in chapter five the character, MaryAnne, which I chose and played in the prologue was my lead character. MaryAnne found the other characters one-by-one in various places and circumstances. My favorite part so far is the casino. You actually get to buy tokens and play a few of the games (video poker being the best). Then the unthinkable, inexcusable happened. I awoke on Thanksgiving morning and before I could get out of bed, Blair had something to tell me. He accidentally saved over my 38 hours and 47 minutes of play. But I was in chapter five and finally at level 20! Now what? You can delete, but you can’t un-delete. At this point it’s been five days since I had to start over. I’ve progressed a lot faster this time around. It’s not as interesting, but it’s still fun. It’s probably for the best that I lost interest this week anyway. After all, when you’re playing video games, God knows you’re not writing that ten-page research paper.
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