The award-winning author on smuggling games past her strict parents, finding comfort in alternative worlds and why the art form remains a source of freedom and inspiration
Carmen Maria Machado: ‘The cultural baggage around gaming has shifted’
In my first memory of the medium, I am standing behind Eric and he has black hair. His mother couldn’t have watched me more than a handful of times in my childhood, but I can visualise the living room vestibule where we are standing as clearly as if it’s my own house. I’m probably seven. It must be around 1993. I remember that Eric is playing Super Mario Bros, but only because my little brother’s name is Mario and I make the connection with confusion. Eric offers to let me play, once, and I hold the controller like the alien object it is. I try to move Mario and somehow die immediately. Eric takes the controller back and keeps going. I watch. I am always watching. I was not allowed to play video games as a kid. My mother was scornful of them, talked about them the way she talked about all television that wasn’t PBS. (Only bad parents, she said, allowed their kids’ brains to rot that way.) It would never be allowed in our house. In her house, she clarified. By the time my brother came along – and got old enough to want, and ask for, such things – she had relaxed on this point, for reasons unknown. For him, anyway. My bad parents gifted him a Game Boy for some holiday; later, a PS2. Sometimes I borrowed the Game Boy and took it to the bathroom and played Pokémon all night. And sometimes he let me play alongside him. But it never lasted very long. I wasn’t any good. I didn’t feel a rhythm when I played; I had no intuitive sense of the process. It did not feel like reading or writing. It felt like being asked to perform a dance I’d never heard of.
But I still enjoyed it. I enjoyed the sense of being lost; the clarity of solving a puzzle; the pleasure of turning a corner into some new wonder. (It also cannot be denied that the fact that it was being discouraged – at all, and along gendered lines – made it that much more appealing.) I enjoyed it so much that when we eventually got a computer – I was 12, almost 13 – I took my babysitting and birthday money to Electronics Boutique in the Lehigh Valley Mall. Drunk with power – my parents didn’t quite understand that computer games were simply video games on the computer, and had not had the foresight to discourage it – I bought 3-D Dinosaur Adventure (came with its own 3D glasses!); Myst (iconic); Theme Park (when you went bankrupt, a cutscene showed your businessman protagonist jumping off a ledge in the reflection of a family photo on his desk); a series called Eagle Eye Mysteries (Encyclopedia Brown by way of the Boxcar Children); a historical mystery called Titanic: Adventure Out of Time; Oregon Trail (needs no introduction; I always started the game as a doctor and packed a harmonica and was notorious for misfiring my gun and injuring someone in my wagon party). In the college dorms, I lived next to a room of seasoned gamers, who played so much Halo 2 that I am certain the sound of its gunfire would put me to sleep at this very moment. The gamers, who became dear friends, patiently tried to help me play several times, but I found myself utterly unable to aim or shoot and would stand in a corner and fire maniacally at the walls until the scrimmage mercifully ended. Later, when a few of us moved into a house together, I got hooked on the Elder Scrolls game Oblivion and played as a fistfighting cat-person; I spent so much time on it I began to dream that I was my Khajiit self, running around the Cyrodiil landscape coldcocking every random character who crossed my path.
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