Tuesday, June 7, 2011

In a delicious coup for all my efforts to rework gaming into my public persona, someone recently remarked that he would’ve never pegged me for a gamer. It was a relief to hear this, frankly, because it was independent verification that the months–years, possibly–of cultivating the “secret gamer” shtick had paid off. The kicker? The office would’ve been the perfect place to embrace this aspect of geek culture openly.

It’s a younger crowd, which means the act of logging onto Xbox Live is the vernacular, rather than the exception. There are also quite a few who have served in the armed forces, and playing, say, Call of Duty with them allegedly demands the whole nine yards–authentic military tactics, constant chatter, and, when you die, accurately identifying your assailant. They just don’t suffer incompetence from civvies like me. Fundamentally, though, digital congress continues to be minimally appealing, and the act of gaming, for me, remains an affliction to be borne alone. But yeah, I also don’t want to be scolded for getting, like, flanked.

So what’s been spinning in the Xbox? I just completed Dead Space 2, after finally working up the nerve to slog through it. “Slog” is a poor choice of word, because in truth it was a finely crafted piece of entertainment, with top-notch sound work and arresting visuals. The brand of horror burned onto the disc, though, was psychologically scarring, and that’s what made it a chore at times.

I mean, in the first title, you mainly fought adult-sized monsters cobbled together from human body parts. Fine. But in the sequel, you’ve got scenes where demonic children pour out of a futuristic toy store or a school auditorium, screaming at you with claws flailing. Later on, there are babies. Babies! Babies who roll toward you like Slinkies and then explode. Obviously. Honestly, what kind of fevered minds cooked up this shit?

You eventually adjust to the parameters posited by this fictional world, though. You find a new, terror-filled norm. That’s how I bore 12 hours of this stuff. At a certain juncture, you take up the mantle, and there you are, a Byronic hero, single beam of light flitting through the darkness as you stand your ground and stare down a vaguely humanoid monster barreling toward you. You go about your grim task, spent cartridge after spent cartridge ejecting from your space-age mining tool, and you settle into an almost workaday rhythm. Hey! It’s just another Monday in a horrific mining town.