Me - Walking Forward

As I open the front door of the dorms, I find myself wishing I had a thicker coat. It’s cold out here, and foggy, and still very dark. In roughly ten minutes, I’ll be in a warm room at work; but right now I have a shivering early-morning walk ahead of me. I work as the morning janitors’ assistant, or Student Janitorial Aid as the school says. That means I wake up every morning at four am, and at five I'm buckling on a backpack vacuum. During the first half of that hour between I pry myself out of bed, get dressed, and brush my teeth. I move slow at four am, I brush my teeth for almost 10 minutes, but that still leaves me with about twenty minutes every morning before I have to walk out the door. During that twenty minutes, I game.

At college I often have an hour long break (or more) between classes; too short to go back to my dorm and my laptop, too long to wait idly. Reading a textbook for the next class could sometimes fill that time, but not always. And I despise having nothing to do. It’s time being wasted, time that I’ll never get back. All during high school I read to spend that hated time, such as on bus rides or during Free Study Periods. Every week I stopped by the town library and picked up a few books. But here at college I would have to walk into town to find a library with a good fiction selection, which I was not prepared to do. So, I game.

When I talk about gaming, usually it involves my trusty Gameboy Advance SP, with its Cool Cobalt color, flip-open design, rechargeable batteries, and back-lit screen. My game collection includes: Chessmaster, an old Tetris cartridge with a dead memory, a couple esoteric RPGs (Role-Playing Games), most of the Pokemon games older than five years, a bundle-pack of two Castlevania games, an old Mario game, and almost every Legend of Zelda for the Gameboy Advance. By the end of my first year of college, I had played through every one of them to boredom. I needed something new to game on.

In my second year, I took a bus into town and bought myself three used games at a local store: Megaman Battle Network 3, 4, and 5. I had played the first of the series some years back, and remembered liking the battle system, how it gave me very fine control of my avatar’s actions, always a plus when you have quick gaming fingers. And the customization in the game was top-notch, with hundreds of different ways to play. That system was as much fun as I remembered, and some of the advancements to it in the later games in the series are brilliantly effective.

Number 3 took me all the way to the end of my second year (remember, twenty minutes every morning) and number 5 has been keeping me busy this year. There was a brief intermission between the two in which I played partway through number 4, only for the internal memory battery to fail and all my progress to be lost. I turned it on one morning, and my saved game was gone. I turned it off, back on again, same result. Turn off, take cartridge out, blow into it (not that this technique is even supposed to do anything), turn back on. Nothing. Just like that, days and weeks of time was gone, lost to the void. That experience chafed like I had fallen off a horse and been dragged along for a few miles. But, all in all, the purchase of those three games has been well worth it. My gaming continued.

But back to the present. When I open the door to the freezing outdoors at ten minutes before five on a Tuesday morning, I feel oddly happy; joyous, maybe even exuberant. No reason really, at least no good reason some might say. It’s cold, early in the morning, I’m headed to work, its way too early in the morning, and it’s excruciatingly cold. Yet I’m happy. I’m raring to go. I’m going to get so much done today. Why? Then I realize: because I just had a good gaming session.

In the twenty minutes between leaving my room and heading out the front door of my dorm, I have just had a very enjoyable bit of gaming while relaxing in the big poofy chair near that front door. I defeated a boss character, kept my own guy nice and healthy, wiped a bunch of the smaller enemies, and I even got some cool enhancement parts. Imagine driving down the freeway, jumping over a slowly opening bridge, then avoiding the cops who are after you for reckless driving, and finally getting a free set of tires; it’s a little like that. I don’t know whether it was luck or skill that made this session so satisfactory, but I do know that the euphoric mood will stay with me for the rest of the day. And all because I game.

But then I realize something else, walking down the steps. It’s a little weird that a game made me feel this good. Why should this game, which can go well or badly or even fail catastrophically due to happenstance beyond my control, make me feel so happy? More importantly, why should it make me feel ready to face the day? If I had done badly, if my luck had been rotten, then I would now feel the opposite. I would be miserable, angry, the same way I felt when the internal battery of number 4 completely failed on me, like my time had just been utterly squandered. Why should gaming determine my mood for the day ahead?

Sure, it could rain and I would have another reason to be a little miffed, but at least then my attitude would be due to something totally beyond my control. I could shrug it off and remember that it was just a completely indiscriminate occurrence. Gaming is not some chance occurrence. It was something I chose, possibly in the hopes that gaming would lead me to experience positive emotions like I felt today. I chose to game.

I suddenly understand that Zen idea, how we shouldn’t attach our mental well-being to material objects, that inner peace is more important than outer happiness. I can understand now why we should let go, detach ourselves from the material world. The physical world is so chaotic, so unknown. Number 3 was awesome and number 4 broke, there was no way to tell before-hand that either would be the case. Number 3 put me in high spirits and I “rode the wave” for several days, and then number 4 made me glum. Why can’t I be happy or sad for reasons other than such happenstance situations? Why can’t I just be happy for the non-random occurrences in my life? Why should my gaming hurt me?

From the bottom of the steps there's a path to work, which takes me up a long hill. Along the way, I start to see things from the other direction. Maybe it’s important to have these feelings, so that we know what to do with the real thing in the future. After playing number 3 and gaining a lot of joy from beating it, I took a while to cherish that feeling. I held on to it. And really, the purpose of the game is to be beaten; even if I have a bad day or two, I will almost certainly reach that final boss of the game someday. And as for number 4, sure I felt bad momentarily, but then I got over it. I dealt with that anger, I moved on, straight to number 5. I gamed onwards.

And really, what are those “non-random occurrences” that I was just talking about? Should I be proud of walking forward? That’s pretty non-random: I decide to walk forward, and then I do so. I’ve never felt joy from being able to walk forwards, certainly not like the pleasure of gaming. Maybe I could be instantly stricken with a disease that causes me to fall over instead, or walk sideways like a crab. In fact, let's pretend that I was stricken with a disease that caused me to crab-walk whenever I intended to walk forward. And if one day I finally managed to beat the disease and walk forward against all odds, I would be pretty happy. Something good happened, and I would get all the pleasure that I could out of that. And what if non-random occurrences can’t make me happy? Should I give up on them, just to avoid being sad? I wouldn't give up on gaming just to avoid that.

Now that I think about it, almost at my destination, how bad do I really feel about number 4 flaking out on me? Yeah, it sucked, but on the other hand I still enjoyed the time before it died. While I was playing it, it was a pretty good game. What’s more important, the journey through the game or getting to the ending? Seeing as my favorite part of the series is the battle system, I would have to say playing through the game. And after it failed I felt bad about that, but I also understood it was a risk going into buying the game used. Gaming holds that risk.

So here I am, Tuesday morning, standing outside of work. I’ve been thinking about this the whole way. And I realize, “My life is a lot like that game.” Okay, I don’t spend my day fighting evil robots, searching for new weapons, saving the world. But sometimes things go my way, and oftentimes they don’t. Sometimes the rooms I vacuum are simple, uncluttered, set on easy difficulty you might say. Or perhaps the rooms are large and have a lot of chairs. At times the sun is shining when I walk between classes and sometimes it’s dark, cold, and raining. I’ll be happy about the former, I’ll deal with the latter. Most importantly, I keep walking forward, because … well, because I have to. It’s walking forward that gives me happiness, or more precisely the new situations to deal with. And walking forward, with all it entails, is still better than not experiencing that happiness at all. Gaming is better than not.

In my old Mario game, Mario is always walking forward. He can’t turn around, he can’t return to where he was to get something he missed. Every boss he faces, he does so head on, always looking forward. Running through the level, sometimes I can just skip an enemy, jump over them, keep on walking forward. For me, the past exists; I can remember it, I can learn from it, I beat it already. But for Mario, that past is invisible. I cannot see what’s going on at a certain distance behind him. And maybe that’s okay for us, too; maybe we should stop looking at the past. Learn from it definitely, allow the good things to buoy us and ride that wave, but also stop letting the bad things hurt us. We should always be walking forward, gaming forward.