Sloane Crosley's "Bring-Your-Machete-To-Work Day"
While I was driving home today (yes, while I was driving, and yes, I know better, but the speedometer in my car is broken so it's not like I have to keep an eye on that), I read this essay from Sloane Crosley's collection of essays I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and found myself reminded of my own habits playing video games, especially back in the day when PC graphics were only capable of sixteen colors (and seemingly those sixteen were all variants on cyan and purple) and graphics were impressionistic at best. Crosley's essay concerns The Oregon Trail, a game about taking a covered wagon from Missouri to Oregon and facing all of the dangers along the way. She writes about naming all the characters in the wagon after her childhood enemies:
Like a precursor to the Sims, you were allowed to name your wagoneers and manipulate their destinies. It didn't take me long to employ my powers for evil. I would load up the wagon with people I loathed, like my math teacher. Then I would intentionally lose the game, starving her or fording a river with her when I knew she was weak. The program would attempt an intervention, informing me that I had enough buffalo carcass for one day. One more lifeless caribou would make the wagon too heavy, endangering the lives of those inside. Really now? Then how about three more? How about four? Nothing could stop this huntress of the diminutive plains. It was time to level the playing field between me and the woman who called my differential equations "nonsensical" in front of fifteen other teenagers. Eventually a message would pop up in the middle of the screen, framed in a neat box: MRS. ROSS HAS DIED OF DYSENTERY. This filled me with glee.
I know exactly how she felt. When The Oregon Trail first came out, I used to fill the wagon with myself, my brother, my two best friends, and whatever girl I had a crush on at the time (none of who would ever have ridden in a wagon with me in real life). Never mind the disaster inherent in loading a wagon with four unattached men of the same age and one teenage girl. This was apparently who I thought I would want to start a new life with.
I will say that while I don't recall purposely torturing my wagoneers, I can remember doing the same sort of thing in other games, getting attached to tiny pixilated characters in strange ways. Parties in Dungeon & Dragons computer games would be named after high school friends instead of Lord of the Rings characters, leading to Brandon the 12th-level mage and Joel the Barbarian and Matt, the half-elven Ranger (I was almost always a half-elven Ranger: solitary, highly skilled, trapped between the worlds of the humans and the elves... very dramatic). Any chance I got to change a game's characters name, I took it and put myself in the role of the protagonist and my own supporting cast into the rest of the game.
Another example: Every year, I would recreate my high school football team in the new Madden game, renaming all the players and giving them their accurate numbers, heights, and weights. This was thankfully before the true use of physics engines in games-- Our starting fullback in high school was five foot six and would have been killed by an opposing NFL player. My senior year, I weighed 190 lbs and was the second-heaviest guy on the offensive line. In real life, it would have been terrible but in the game it was great fun watching a tiny wide receiver leap over the best cornerbacks of the day.
Also, in Madden, I was the quarterback. If you're going to play a version of your own fantasy life, you might as well take a promotion.
I'm looking forward to reading the rest of I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and will probably be reviewing it down the road, if the rest of it's as good as "Bring-Your-Machete-To-Work Day." I'm looking forward to finding out.
NOTE: I've got an essay in the upcoming Games issue of Hobart that, like Crosley's, concerns a computer game that in retrospect seems important to me (including a small bit about my own subversion of the gameplay). In the end, it's a different style of essay that goes different places, but it's interesting to not that other writers my own age (according to her Myspace, Crosley's two years older than me) are exploring similar themes. For all the talk about how video games are warping kid's minds and turning them into dangerous, illiterate criminals, I think it's at least worth considering the fact that for people of my generation, we worked out whole fantasy lives while planted in front of our PCs, and probably solved some of our real world problems too.
Matt Bell
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Reader Comments (5)
I think Sloane hit a solid nerve with that Oregon Trail essay (well, actually with many in that collection, which frighteningly, I too happened to read a little bit from while driving), though the version I was playing on was pre-graphics at all, an MS DOS version if I had to guess, back in grade school.
I think you'll find most of the essays in the collection right up to that level of writing too.
Matt, have you read "Everything Bad Is Good for You" by Steven Johnson? He has a long section in there about the ways in which video games are actually making us smarter. (TV shows, too, but the subject of this post makes me think of the gaming sections.) Really good read, and I agree with virtually everything he says.
Dan, let's hope you and I are never on the same road at the same time, going in opposite directions. Just finished "The Pony Problem," another one that resonates for me (although I do not, thank you, have a pony collection). I have a feeling I'm going to like this book quite a bit.
Dave, I haven't read "Everything Good is Bad for You," although I've been interested to. Partly I haven't just because I'm sure I'm just going to agree with ninety percent of it, and reading just to confirm my own biases seems kind of silly. I'm sure I will eventually though, if for no other reason than I need some help explaining to my wife why it's so important that we beat the endless setlist on Rock Band, even if does take six hours of non-stop video gaming. She's very good at Guitar Hero and Rock Band (she's a much better drummer than I am), but she keeps insisting that studying for her PhD is more important than beating a game.
Maybe SHE should read "Everything Good is Bad for You" instead.
Brought back some great memories. Thank you.