So How Does That, Um, Work? or How I Engage in Guided Hallucination for Fun: “Watching” Blind, Part 2

The more I write my blundering way deeper into this attempt to describe my “watching” process, the more I see this process as one of hallucinating a version of an audio-visual narrative that works for me based on limited cues. This hallucination, the mental “picture” of the film or show I build up, isn’t just shaped by the audible impression I cobble together of what’s happening at any given moment and the visceral reaction I feel the audio content is urging me toward, but also the overall tone created by the plot and dialogue of the piece. I haven’t watched Babylon 5 in its entirety because I don’t have that kind of time this decade, so I feel a little uncomfortable using it as an example, but I think my reaction to it works well as an illustration of what I mean by “tone”. Babylon 5 is a space opera show about a human space station that acts as a diplomatic outpost for multiple very powerful alien species, and the opening narration sets the tone by asking us to imagine “humans and aliens wrapped in two-million five-hundred-thousand tons of spinning metal. All alone in the night.” That conjures a mental image of, well, a space station made of two-million five-hundred-thousand tons of spinning metal, so, okay, there’s a really big-ass wheel or ring or maybe sphere floating in the big cold black of space. But it also overlays a particular mood, of solitude and a certain gravity and theatrical grimness on that image to turn it into the B 5 station specifically and not just any old space habitat. And, with my exploration of the show informed by this tone, I find this initial impression reinforced by dialogue and by events: by one central character’s statement, in response to being asked what he wants in life, that “I want to stop running through my life as if I were late for an appointment”, by the failure of the show’s main characters to stop the tide of galactic politics turning towards war, what in Babylon 5’s inimitable melodramatic but evocative way one character calls “the long, twilight struggle”. In the absence of the ability to take the show in visually as other viewers do, this sense of melancholy theatricality shapes how I hallucinate the station and its people, dulls my imagination of the futuristic grandeur with a faint grime of wear and tear. The people loom larger than life in my mind’s “eye” in the way of heroes in space opera, but they look tired; their shoulders sag a bit; their eyes are haunted, because they have watched worlds burn. I have no idea whether the station is actually dulled by this sheen of realism — quite honestly I suspect the special effects in the early 90s weren’t good enough for us to tell one way or the other –, but I imagine it to be so when I hallucinate the show based on the cues I’ve been given.

Music can have a similarly major effect on my impression of a film or show’s tone and the picture it prompts me to build for myself and my dazed imaginings of the setting and the characters. Think the plaintive flutes and horns and drums of The Lord of the Rings that conjure up, at least for me, a sense of vast wondrous lands still to be crossed, or the inspirational yes-we-can strains of the Star Trek theme. Is the world all shiny? Or beaten down? Are the characters broken, tired around the eyes, weighed down by all the mopey violin getting cranked out in the background? Or are they energized by their mission and the sound of celestial trumpets? (These are extreme examples, of course.) Alternatively, music can provide an essential counterpoint that nuances the mental image, as the fast-paced, vaguely militaristic remix of the Babylon 5 fanfare used for the opening theme in the second season shapes the tone by acting as a contrast to the grave solitude and deepening crisis set up by the bombastic opening narration, sounding a note of defiance and futile optimism in the face of the inexorable slide towards darkness and war that plays out across the season. Music does all this for everyone, of course, the same way dialogue helps set the tone for everyone as well as conveying information, but I think I do rely on these things more heavily than many other viewers. Which is why I sometimes latch onto theme music so single-mindedly and repetitively and hum it for ever and ever. At least that’s my excuse.

I rely on the substantial dialogue most of all, of course. But these scenes sometimes have more pitfalls than you’d think. Even though dialogue-heavy sequences are much more my home turf so far as being able to understand things easily goes, particularly complex scenes of character interplay can actually be tougher to deal with than action, because of what goes unsaid and unmarked by the sound design. One of the key things blindness does away with that is really kind of tough to find a fix for is the ability to read body language and facial expressions. This difficulty is one of the most disorienting things about interacting with other people: Are they happy? Are they sad? How do they feel about what I’m saying to them? About the other things happening around us? Am I annoying them? Are they about to cut me? I really do not know. Of course a lot of this comes through in someone’s voice, but relying on voice only inevitably misses things, sometimes big things. So the long meaningful shots that certain types of films love, where people are sitting alone and thinking thoughts about the midlife crises they’re having and the camera is desperately tracking their every eye movement like it’s being held by someone who knows there’s a prestigious cinematic award in this for them if they just make us look at this poor fucker’s face for long enough, or two people are doing a lot of visual acting with loaded glances and fraught stuff like that, or someone is doing something sneaky without having the courtesy to vocalize their cunning plan, can actually be tougher to work out than a fight with two-hundred people on screen. More meaning tends to turn on these things too. How Elrond and Arwen are looking at each other in the film version of The Two Towers has more long-term significance for the decisions they make and what motivates them than the precise tactical details of how the uruk-hai breach the walls of Helm’s Deep do for the final disposition of the plot, epic as the battle is. (Admittedly this is a really bad example, because Elrond pretty much always sounds like in his mind palace he is seeing himself pissing on all these silly plebeians and their silly ring from a great height and he’s just too old for this shit and you know what? don’t even open your mouth because really there’s just nothing you can say to him, so the scene leaves a little bit of business to the body language but not much I don’t think).

So what about when I just miss these subtle cues completely? When I just can’t figure out any version of what the two people in the super-intricate spy thriller are doing with their sneaking around and their raised eyebrows and their facial innuendo? Well, okay, here are my super secret blindperson “watching” tactics for when the audio and hallucination fail me: 1: Sometimes I just let it go. Because life’s too short. 2: But, if it’s a narrative I’m invested in, then I generally go and ask wikipedia what happened. (These are real disappointing supersecret adaptive techniques, I know. Sorry about that.)

If wiki’s cursory plot summary does not provide, I have two options, only one of which I personally use if I have any choice. 3: I can look for a version of whatever it is I wanna watch with a descriptive audio track specifically for blind people. These are those things where the sound fades out every thirty seconds so a disembodied voice can tell you in pleasant tones what Indiana Jones is doing. I love that these exist, think they’re necessary, would certainly recommend them to other visually impaired people and use them under some circumstances, but I don’t really enjoy them, and would rather put up with a little bit of uncertainty about what’s going on than use them. My objections are several: Back in my youth, when VHS was the only format and we had to watch out for velociraptors and stooping pterodactyls whenever we left our homes, the issue was that the descriptive track was baked directly into the audio you heard on the tape and you couldn’t turn it off, so even once you’d memorized the damn Indy movie you still had the pleasant voice explaining it to you the twenty-seventh time you watched it. Menu-based home video options (DVD and blueray) have gotten rid of this problem, as they transform the descriptive track into just another option to be toggled, but there are still other difficulties. If you’re watching in a group it’s a fairly significant buzzkill for the other people, as the descriptions are probably quite annoying if you don’t need them. They are, unfortunately, also annoying if you do need them, as — while you can tell when listening to how the narration has been placed that every effort is made to avoid this — they sometimes talk over dialogue and important sound cues, which is too bad, and a dealbreaker for me personally. Plus they talk over the music. Which means they talk over John Williams’ Indiana Jones theme. Which isn’t cool. It’s also not easy to find exactly what you want to watch with a descriptive service provided, even if you’re willing to order it and wait. I would, kind of on principle, never opt to watch one thing rather than another thing because it was described. Starwars is great, but if I wanna watch The King’s Speech Starwars will not do.

So, having bitched and moaned my way out of using the resources specifically created for people like me by people who are very good at their jobs, I find myself restricted to option 4: Find tolerant friends who are willing to interrupt their viewing experience with description, and watch whatever it is with them. I’ll talk about the ways this shapes the experience in a separate post, next time I want to procrastinate and feel like writing about it.

So How Does That, Um, Work?, or How I Engage in Guided Hallucination for Fun: “Watching” Blind, Part 1

Whenever I talk about a movie or a tv show I say that I “watched” it. This word choice is unconscious, but on those occasions when I notice it I choose not to modify it. Even though there’s a very real sense in which saying I “watched” something makes me feel like a poser and a liar, because, well, I actually didn’t watch whatever it was, because I’m blind. There are two reasons I prefer the terms “watched” or “saw” when talking about my experience of visual media even though they’re not technically true. 1: I’ve test-driven sentences where I say I’ve “listened” to a movie and they just sound really incredibly stupid. 2: Saying I was “listening” to a film, in addition to sounding dumb — which it does, just wanna keep that front and center –, really doesn’t capture the way anyone, blind or otherwise, interacts with visual media; it’s not like, say, listening to an audio book. Because the visual experience is always there, even if I’m not having it; it’s an integral part of the text and I think it’s important to acknowledge that.

I’d like to think that talking through some elements of the process of “watching” from the perspective of someone who can’t see but likes film and tv — even if he doesn’t watch them that often — might provide some vaguely interesting different angles from which to think about audio/visual storytelling and how its parts work together. Of course, film and tv are often social experiences for lots of us, and I am no exception, and I’ll talk about how relying on the descriptions of kind, long-suffering friends when watching in a group shapes my experience in a future post. But I do watch stuff by myself sometimes (especially dvd box sets of shows I’m interested in and chronically behind-the-times about), so let’s start out by keeping it simple and assuming that there’s nobody around. So then: what elements of audio/visual storytelling do I think I experience differently than people who can see?

I think the place we need to approach this topic from, though I admit I tried to think up a way around it just because it’s so obvious, is my reliance on audio as a blind viewer. There’s a marked tendency, understandably, for people to assume that being blind makes you some manner of ear-ninja and I really don’t think this is the case. I do not, sadly, have super-hearing. I would say rather that if an activity, say kayaking, requires two paddles and you’ve only got one, you’re gonna rely on that paddle like nobody’s business whether you’re any good at using it or not. This sounds like whining to me, and I hope it doesn’t come off that way but rather as a statement of fact: audio/visual entertainment asks you to take in both audio and visual sensory input, and I’ve only got one of those so I use it lots. This makes comprehending action sequences, which are often prominent in the kinds of films I choose to watch, simultaneously frustrating and easier than you might expect. Yes, sure, chase scenes or fights or other action-heavy bits are some of the moments that most obviously confront me with the fact that the movie has not been made with blind people in mind — and of course it hasn’t been, it’s a film. But in a counterintuitive kind of a way action scenes are some of the easiest bits of films to get a general grip on, albeit a vague one, since as long as thuds and cracks and explosions keep happening I continue to have a pretty clear broad idea of what the characters are working on. Lots of the individual audible cues won’t clarify things, but there’s such a multitude of them to draw on that in many cases something will throw me some sort of reference point eventually. I can’t tell what’s exploding, for instance, but I can tell that something’s exploding, and sometimes if I’m lucky even the degree to which it’s exploding, like whether it’s collapsing in a long, grinding slide or poofing all at once. Is there heavy breathing? Then the character’s probably either panicked or running or working hard. I miss the visual stylings that make these scenes distinctive, the stuff that separates the (reportedly) choppy incomprehensible camera work of a Michael Bay film from the action poetry of, say, something directed by Brad Bird or Guilermo Del Toro, but the sheer bulk of audio cues usually present in an action scene makes it almost inevitable that I can get something out of what’s going on, even if it’s not always accurate or complete, and once I have that something I can start to build a narrative scaffolding around it.

One thing I think I lean on a lot more than other people during action beats is incidental dialogue. I get the impression most people don’t listen to this stuff very hard unless it’s one of those one-liners where the sound mix backs off for a second so someone can say something snarky amidst the mayhem. And why would they? Listen, I mean? Batman is flyin’! He has a cape! That’s what’s important! But I grasp at these throwaway lines like handholds, to provide the supplementary information that I need to build a version of the narrative that feels complete. For instance: as the climax to Abrams’ 2009 reboot of Star Trek is beginning, one of the Enterprize’s bridge crew mentions something about the enemy flagship being engaged near … the rings of Saturn I think, and off the Enterprize goes. It ends up being totally irrelevant to the narrative that Saturn is where the climax takes place, but I grabbed onto the useless information to help me mock up some semblance of the scene for myself, whether or not it resembled what was actually on screen. On the way home after the movie the fact that the fight took place near Saturn came up for some reason and my friend’s response was “Dude, you remember that? I was too busy watching the ships go weeeeee.” Are Saturn’s rings actually even in the scene? Damned if I know, but in the moment it doesn’t matter, because all I need is that little incidental bit of dialogue to start fabricating my own version of the movie in my skull and then I feel like I’m engaged with some version of the same narrative as everybody else who’s watching.

The sound design and incidental dialogue, and this isn’t meant to sound as ephemeral and flaky as it does, also provide me a lot of information not just about what’s going on but about how I should feel about it in the moment. The best example I can come up with for how this works is the differing reactions instances of on-screen violence evoke in me depending on how the audio’s delivered. Hits in a fight scene in The Wire or something else that’s focusing on the unpleasantness of the fight, the terrible violence done to bodies, impress themselves on the ear very differently than the punches and weapon hits in a James Bond movie or a Marvel film; where the former prompt a visceral wince, a sympathetic curling of fingers and stomach muscles, the latter may be heavy and aggressive but don’t give the same sense of bone-crunching, flesh-pulping damage. One type of hit is an “owowowowow oh this is awful” sound effect. The other is a “kapow!” “biff!” “woo!” sound effect.

But sometimes a sound designer gets aggressive and wobbles a bit out of tune with the movie’s visual message, maybe on purpose, or an actor really goes the extra mile with their reaction to a hit, and the audio sounds (to me) a lot more horrific than the visual shot probably looks. You know when Bane breaks Batman’s back in The Dark Knight Rises? That’s an R-rated noise (though I wouldn’t be surprised if the scene pushes what its rating can get away with visually; I don’t know). The Cabin in the Woods is an R-rated horror film, so will naturally tend in a more aggressive direction with its audio cues as well as its visuals, but my horror fan friends tell me it’s a relatively tame beast as horror flicks go. But that part where Jules gets dragged away and has her head cut off, and she’s screaming? I love the movie but I never wanna hear that noise again. Apparently the scene is no great pants-wetter by horror standards, but I can still remember that scream, panicked but still recognizable, and then rising, rising into this tortured mindless nails-on-chalkboard shriek that washes away the character’s individual identity and leaves only the pain. The imagining the scream makes me do is out of all proportion to what I’m told the scene actually shows us. This sudden onslaught of very aggressive noise that almost always accompanies jump scares is a large part of the reason I almost never watch horror movies: it inevitably works on me, because I don’t get the split second visual warning that the camera telegraphs — at least in the more formulaic kind of jump scare. That and I’m a wuss.

Obviously the opposite is just as true: I can lose the full impact if the audible cues choose to go for something a little less in-your-face — if the audio is largely drowned out by music, for instance. I’m having trouble coming up with good specific examples right now, but I know I have several times been surprised by declarations that such-and-such a scene was gross, because while I can recognize that there’s violence and bodies and it’s probably not especially pleasant it’s tough to get the full visceral kick, the thing that prompts my mental image machine to recognize and conjure up the violence and the bodies, without the audible reminder. Violence is far from the only area where the audio sends mixed messages — watch a sex scene with your eyes closed sometime and you will experience some scary shit, I tell you what; seriously, a lot of the time I really can’t tell whether they’re enjoying themselves or trying to maim and kill each other –, but it is one of the audible elements that most often skews my impression of what’s happening.

“You Must Gather Your Party Before Venturing Forth”, or Experiencing Videogames Blind, Part 2

Now, are there sometimes bad days, downsides to this use of games as social bridges I’ve been rhapsodizing at such length? For sure:

…

Flashback to high school: The glorious unthinkable is coming to pass. My dad wants to buy a console. There will be a console. In. My. House.

It’s early 2002. The X-Box is just a few months old. We end up with one of those. And, because gravity is a thing that works in marketing as well as in physics, we also end up with a copy of Halo. I am stoked. I’m gonna play videogames with my dad!

My dad gets lost on the Pillar of Autumn, the game’s opening mission.

As popular as it is and as much as it expanded the audience for shooters in its day, Halo makes some pretty major assumptions about gaming literacy. It assumes, for instance, that you’re basically comfortable with how to move around in these things. This sounds laughably simple. It is not. Not if you’ve never held a controller before, and you’re getting used to first person view, and you don’t really know how to move the camera, and it’s Halo so of course every damn hallway looks the same. Modern games can be remarkably hostile to any who are totally unfamiliar with their grammar.

I have absolutely no idea what to do. Coming up with a simple translation for “follow the little red arrow nav point thinger” into non-gamer-speak is entirely beyond me. Because I have never, in fact, done it. I have no visceral understanding of how to play the game. There are things gamers know in their bones, visual grammars, ways of manipulating physical inputs, that I may know OF, but can only ever be conversant with second-hand. This, too, is an issue of communication. Only this time I’m made aware not of how games facilitate that communication, but how I, with such a different experience of games, am constantly reliant on those I talk to about them to be down with the lingo, to translate my understanding of the games into something they, as those who experience them first hand, can understand. Watching someone unfamiliar with navigating these systems play, I am confronted with how much I don’t know and can’t share in my turn. The complexity and intensely visual nature of the game becomes a barrier to communication, rather than an invitation.

The whole buy-Xbox-as-family-funtimes-tool experiment doesn’t work out. I have rarely felt less able to see.

…

Boy howdy we’re game snobs in first year. We’re not, on the whole, fighting game people; they are just not the thing, you know. But we are Soul Calibur fans. We think it’s more complex for some reason; looking back I honestly forget most of why at this late hour. In the middle of first year Soul Calibur 3 comes out and we are basically pigs in shit.

And I learn the menu system, so that I can set up arcade matches myself. For about two weeks the power to simply be able to walk over to the couch, turn the system on, and reliably make it do a specific thing is like being given fire by Prometheus.

But eventually my practical inability to go beyond memorizing the cheapest moves and then doing them over and over again brings my skill level to what we might call its natural peak. Soul Calibur 3 has an irritating mechanic where damage dealt escalates beyond the effect that the move would normally have based on how many times you’ve been hit in a row, which means that once you start to lose you will probably keep losing, unless you make friends with the block button. Timed blocking is, however, rather difficult when you can’t see.

I hammer futilely at the horizontal and vertical attack buttons, which, when pushed together, perform Sigfried’s cheap four-hit sword combo thing, but all I hear coming from the speakers are hits landing on me. I lose. I screech something unrepeatable at the screen.

I cock my head, listen. I shut the game off. Never play it again on my own. I don’t like what it shows me about myself very much.

I don’t miss it, either. Well, that’s a lie; I do miss the thrill of independence derived from turning the system on by myself and sitting down to play when I individually have time. But that passes quickly, because I miss the thought that I could play more than the actual act of playing. Without friends, it’s only buttons.

…

Sometimes not being able to play the game myself makes me aware not only of all the cool communicating a friend and I are doing around the game, but also of when we cross the thin line and our only frame of reference for communication becomes the game, or we start not really communicating but just sitting in the same room while games are played. Gaming can be a robust frame, as I argued earlier, but it can also be an awfully narrow bridge. There has to be other stuff drawing us together, other stuff within the frame. Sometimes I am intensely aware of this narrowness: The stuff on the screen fragments, becomes just one polygon slaughter after another. And only now does it really hit me that I can’t see what’s going on; it’s just poorly-defined flashes of colour. All I can really tell you for certain is that improbably muscled men are shooting or otherwise enacting violence on other improbably muscled men, or aliens, or mythical beings who did something wrong, and anyway people are dying. All the gunfire and the hollow thuds of the grenades and the agonized screams start to sound the same, to blend together, to speak: “you have nothing to say you have nothing to talk about everyone is only pressing buttons for ever and ever press the button press the button press the button”. And for a little, angst-ridden while the world ahead looks very much like a long, circular corridor with TVS and chairs placed conveniently at intervals, filled with an endless succession of digitized slaughters and nostalgic references to the games of yore, when we were younger and these machines did magic, and endless reiterations of “what’cha playing these days?” and “what’cha gonna play after that?” constituting all there is of conversation. This is no longer a leisure activity. This is polygon hell. These times pass. But they happen.

…

I’m no longer in that dorm room with my friends. They’re living elsewhere on campus or in other towns. I don’t see them as regularly. Third year starts to get a little dreary; the walls of my residence cave close in. But wait … There’s this new thing. It’s a shooter, but a shooter with RPG elements in which you explore a failed underwater utopia. It’s called BioShock, and we go round for months saying “would you kindly” and referencing all the other contextually creepy crap the psychopathic would-be utopian capitalists in it say and do. I can still very clearly conjure up the feel of being hunched forward in one of those canvas captain’s chairs, in a tiny, darkened, stuffy dormroom, listening to the audio logs found throughout the game that chronicle the downfall of the mutant-haunted utopian experiment beneath the waves. Looking all around each area for the public service announcements and faux-1950s sales videos. Verbally abusing that fucking vending machine clown who tears you down when you can’t pay for stuff (this utopia crumbled for reasons.)

University persists in happening. Many papers get written. Many books get read. There’s a pretty significant amount of D&D. I drift in and out of gaming. Well, mostly out, really, but never totally away.

I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s been three years since I sat down properly with a Japanese RPG. No, probably four, five. I kind of miss them. One of my friends who I don’t know that well yet wants to show me one. The PS 2, that most hallowed piece of gaming hardware for the JRPG fan, is plugged in. The half-overcast midday light washes through the window, falls in pools across the two couches at right angles, the big footstool. We sit down on the couch. A new quest begins, and a new conversation.

…

I don’t know, and never will know, if I’d game if I could see and could just play by myself. My strong suspicion is that I totally would, and that some games would be every bit as capable of drawing me in as they have been when playing with others, but that this wouldn’t be very common. Despite having no real interest in online gaming, and despite most of my favourite games being staunchly offline and disconnected in their sensibilities, my experience and enjoyment of the medium is so inextricably bound up with other people that I really cannot imagine it without them. I think, I hope, that this position is at least a mildly interesting one from which to consider games and their power as facilitators of friendship, communication, and cooperation, rather than competition as it’s often experienced in the multiplayer space.

I don’t owe my entire social life in high school to videogames (there was, after all, also Dungeons & Dragons), and I certainly don’t owe my entire social life now to videogames, but in both cases I do owe them a sizable chunk of that social life, either as an ongoing point of reference for a friendship or as an instigating force. Had Atari and Nintendo’s takes on the home entertainment system not grown into the Sega Genesis not grown into the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation 2 and so on, … well, first of all I would never have gotten to explore Midgar in Final Fantasy VII, or learn the secrets of Athkatla in Baldur’s Gate 2, and as a narrative junky these things are not unimportant in and of themselves. (Computer-generated mayhem is also intrinsically fun; I have fond memories of hurling concrete donkeys down upon our enemies in Worms.) But it is also possible I would never have gotten to know some of my closest friends through the frameworks provided by discussing the challenges and stories these machines present us with, and it is for this that I most value the gaming form.

“You Must Gather Your Party Before Venturing Forth”, or Experiencing Videogames Blind, Part 1

I’m probably about nine when the question arises, maybe ten, over at a new friend’s house for the first time:

“Have you ever played Street Fighter?”

It is not an unimportant question.

…

I have a long and in some ways rather strange history with videogames. Strange because they formed an integral part of my play as a child and a teenager, and continue to be significant to me, … even though in most cases I can’t actually play them, because I can’t see. I mean, sure I can learn the controls and make some things happen, and that’s fun sometimes, but just pressing the buttons on the controller isn’t really playing — and it is always the controller, mouse gaming on the PC being beyond my grasp even in rudimentary terms, except for those clunky games with interfaces designed specifically for blind people, and while the thought is appreciated we don’t talk about those. In fact, some of my most disheartening experiences with videogames have come on those occasions when I’ve actually tried to play them myself. More about this later.

I once did an experiment where I sat down with Final Fantasy XIII and some friends, took the controller and just held the stick forward and pressed the A button for forty-five minutes without cessation, while we all ignored the game completely and had a conversation about something else. I even turned my chair away from the TV, just to get in the right frame of mind. I did, in fact, progress. But A: Final Fantasy XIII is a loaded example and not any kind of proof that blind people can play videogames too; this is the game that will navigate you around objects if you find that turning the stick to the right or left is beyond you, the game that will make the optimal choices for you in battle while you just sit there and press “accept”; if you doped a duck, tied it to a chair, and put a controller within easy beak reach it would probably finish Final Fantasy XIII eventually, if only by accident. Pressing buttons that give software permission to execute itself is not playing a game, it is helping a computer masturbate. And B: Even if FFXIII were a game that credited its players with the ability to do complex things like rotate a stick forty-five degrees to make their avatar walk round corners, and even if I had been, you know, paying attention, I still wouldn’t actually have been “playing” it. Gaming deals heavily in learning button combinations, and in muscle memory, and I can do that for you, sure. This muscle memory, however, is usually only useful insofar as it’s coupled with an understanding of and interaction with the visually-displayed systems. (There are exceptions for every trend, of course, including, in this case, one or two very cool-looking sound-based games for mobile devices.) And yet, I still spent a decent chunk of my leisure time in high school playing games, and continue to spend some time thus now.

But this is all very self-involved; why should anyone care? The reason I think that my ability to engage with games despite being completely unable to play most of them myself might be at least a little bit interesting is that it highlights the potential games have to serve as points of connection for people, to form entertaining frameworks to facilitate communication and friendship. Many (not all, but many) of my favourite videogames are very traditional, singleplayer pieces of business, yet I always have been and inevitably always will be an inherently social gamer. I have no choice; I need somebody to explain the game to me, to play the game while I watch / comment / pester them to try things they thought of five minutes ago.

…

The Sega Genesis controller is kind of like what would happen if you put buttons on a plastinated banana and then smooshed the whole thing flat. I hold it wrong. I’m kind of aware that the directional pad is there somewhere but I don’t really know what it’s for, don’t ask. Which means that the character I’m controlling doesn’t actually, well, move. This would be a bigger problem if we were playing something other than a fighting game (we are still nine or ten, crouched on the old threadbare basement couch with the one collapsed arm in front of Street Fighter 2), but you do have to duck and jump to avoid your opponent’s attacks in Street Fighter, of course, and the movement buttons are also tied to your special attacks. So whoever I’m playing is just standing there, wailing on thin air, and occasionally smacking the opponent when he or she happens to wander too close. I don’t care, I just think everything’s great, the buttons, the kapow noises, the warcries coming tinny and distorted out of the speakers, the rushing upstairs at lunch to gorge ourselves on cheese buns and talk about the characters, just everything.

This continues once every two weeks or so for a while. Buttons clicking frantically, just pressing whatever; a Genesis has six action buttons and I just hammer on all of them — something sweet’ll happen eventually. At some point I stumble onto how to do Blanca’s zirchy-zirchy thing, the thing where he electrifies his body, and it starts to occur to me that there are in fact specific actions one can perform. This box with the cartridge in it is captivating, but it is not magic. It can be learned.

“How do you do the hadoken?” I ask. “The thing where Ryu shoots the fireball from his hand?” Or maybe it was something else; I couldn’t tell you now. It probably was something else. I never liked Ryu that much. He beat me a lot.

And, at last, tentatively: “You, um, know you’re holding it wrong, right? You hold both ends. So your left thumb can go on the D-pad.”

And illumination begins slowly.

I need to know about the characters. What they look like. What their annoying little grade-school taunt captions are. So I have to ask, and my friend has to explain.

We move on to other games. I start to learn the intensely visual gaming form’s grammar to a degree, which buttons tend to be used for what, the genres, the secrets of individual games. And every step of this learning is intrinsically reliant on conversation.

…

I don’t think the simple fact that I have detailed conversations with friends whilst playing games makes the way I experience the hobby fundamentally different than the way other people do. Lots of gamers talk enthusiastically about games, play through them together or watch one another. But I cannot not do these things. Communication is imperative to the enjoyment I derive from the hobby. If I wanna play games, I have to interact with people, probably for some time, since making measurable progress in a lot of games takes quite a while. And this need to talk through games has helped me make and sustain friendships. And so to Street Fighter 2 I am forever grateful, and to FFVII and Persona 4. And to Baldur’s Gate 2 and Command and Conquer Generals and even Neverwinter Nights, you ugly misbegotten clickfest duckling you, and the list goes on and on.

Now, it’s important to qualify this: I don’t think that sitting down with a game has ever spun up a friendship out of whole cloth. An RPG takes a long time to play, and so does an adventure game or an RTS (real time strategy); you have to like someone to some degree already to sit on a couch with them for that long. But communicating about games has provided frameworks around which friendships just beginning can grow and persist, and in some ways it’s a pretty robust frame, because of the complexity of systems and the number of things that are happening in most games that have to be taken into account when describing them and asking questions about them. You don’t have to get all “this is how I believe the human soul works” or whatever to explain how the button combo battle system in Xenogears works when one person has no access to it beyond this talk and whatever good work the sound designers have managed to do, but to do this talking and enjoy it you do need to communicate with each other consistently in fairly sophisticated terms, and these conversations lay down soil.

…

Gaming becomes one of the most frequent things I do with the one or two friends I see regularly, weaves itself through our adolescence. I hum a theme from one of the games we play most often whilst clambering through caves in central America until justifiably annoyed family members mock me into silence. When the Nintendo 64 comes out, with its navigable 3D environments, I feel a little bit alienated. Navigating a 2D space and jumping and fighting when told to without dying all the time was tough enough in the Ninja Turtles games for the NES; trying to respond to the more nuanced demands of a 3D environment, where you have to turn left but not that much oh yep you just fell off, now climb that ledge, now dodge and roll, is pretty much the end of pretending I can actually play. But my friends certainly aren’t stopping. And so I have to learn to ask more complex questions, in order to get some sense of inhabiting the spaces they’re moving through in-game.

Is it always perfectly equal dialogue? Well, no. It is, by its nature, rather one-sided. I am very rarely the knowledge-contributor. And yes, it can make one feel like a fifth wheel. Very occasionally I’ll remember a factoid that’s been forgotten, a move combination, maybe, or the location of a quest objective, and be able to produce it triumphantly. These moments come to matter more than perhaps they should. This is why mid high school is our Command and Conquer period. Feng shui-ing impregnable bases. Harvesting resources. Building armies comprised of just the right types of infantry and vehicles and laser-vomiting death machines. Arranging our defense structures just so and cackling with glee as the enemy tanks come rolling with blithe optimism towards our base and get lasered to bits like the tools they are. We slaughter idiot AI opponents across futuristic desert wastelands haunted by army-devouring sandworms, Soviet-era battlefields, swaths of future Earth covered in monotizable goop. I eat this stuff up, because there are systems to explore, tactical decisions to be made (most of which come down to “bomb the shit out of them, or wait until later when we can bomb the shit out of them harder?”, but hey, we’re at the age and stage of mental development where this is just about our speed.) I can make suggestions in an RTS game like this. Choose the units, plan the plans, ask for advice and consider strategy with the friend I’m playing with.

University comes around and I’m in a dorm unit with two friends from high school. And I discover the RPG in a serious way, and again find the nerdvana that came with realtime strategy games, the combination of long hours spent on the couch talking through the game’s complex story and menu systems with the potential for a degree of real input as to how we proceed, since these things aren’t always linear. I honestly don’t remember all the organelles in a human cell from Biology 116, or much out of Psychology class other than that the hippocampus is super-important and deals with short term memory I think. But I can still whistle FFX’s main theme (poorly). I recall vividly the time I thought my roommate was going to murder me because I expressed amusement at his inability to finish one of the game’s ultimate weapon challenges (in his defence that one really is bullshit), and the afternoon we spent flicking through his game collection and starting bits of things just to see if they were still fun, all the while continuously flipping his PS 2 from its horizontal to vertical resting positions as it slowly died.

To be continued: How games can persist as life changes. And some talk about how gaming’s social frameworks can sometimes not work, because honesty is a good thing.