Videogamecatgirl

Location of cat: Fur-ball on the bed.

Our father had the unusual, for him, foresight to attain an AMIGA game station in the early 1990s. The foundation for my fascination with gaming lay mostly in my admiration for my older brother and my desire to play with the same toys as he (which is also, in an effort to play with my younger brother, I have an eclectic collection of Ninja Turtles and My Little Pony’s). This love for videogames was cemented one fine sunny day in spring (incidentally it was that very same day I ended my career as a football player) when our family got a Super Nintendo and the tunes for Super Mario World chimed in.

As the gaming technology grew more advanced, so did our collection of gaming stations: from Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advanced, (which kept us entertained through the many summers spent in car-trips along the stretchy coast of Norway) Nintendo DS, Super Nintedo, N64, Nintendo Gamecube, Playstation 2, Xbox, Xbox360. To think about amount of coin we spent on games that now lie and gathering dust under the bed, which my cat favors, makes my wallet churn. I carry a torch for a renaissance in retro-gaming and hope that our 8-16 and 32 pixeled collections may someday bring us a fortune.

I have held on to this tradition of playing video-games, albeit I stay clear
of any involving driving cars around a circular track or killing zombies (killing aliens, monsters and Nazis is perfectly acceptable. I am currently ambivalent about mutants, or zombie-Nazis). What it is about videogames I like, you may wonder. And the truth is: (and here is to hoping there are no psychologists reading this), I like sniping monsters. Preferably in the head or the groin. Puzzle games vexes me with their ability to leave me confounded ( and I am still convinced that cake is a lie) and feeling intellectually inadequate, but my ability to hit a robot in the head across a well-lit storage-room, fills me with a sense of achievement that is only echoed by my cat’s approval of my ability to open the door to let it out (yes, it has trained me well). My cat quite likes it when I play video games, because it sees this as the perfect opportunity to steal my attention away from the mutant/bandit/giant-lizard-dog-thing/alien/harvester that is trying to kill my protagonist.

Yet, the cat is simply too cute to chastise for getting my character killed, (though there is an urban story in my gaming community about a parrot biting the hand of a player, causing his character to jump into a deadly electrical trap and killing the majority of the other players in his party). After all, we can always load a previous save, experienced by our failure and knowledge of how to defeat the monster, but not marred by them in any way. Sometimes, however, you just need to call your brother in to defeat the Fatman on rollerblades who is throwing bombs at you.

This is a feature I dearly would like Real Life to have (the ability to call your brother for aid and reload to earlier points in your life, not the Fatman on rollerblades who throws bombs at you, though I suppose that'd make for an interesting event!)