I'll refrain from making the obvious joke here
This post is kinda-sorta prompted by people talking about the
effect that Outer Wilds had on them, but also I just felt like writing this down. Play Outer Wilds if you can, btw.
The defining characteristic of my childhood was being completely insulated by absolutely nothing. Nothing was stopping me from going places or indulging in current media so I could understand what the other kids at school were on about. I just... didn't. This leads to having a good number of nostalgic moments that don't really make any sense. In a way I feel both robbed and guilty, though maybe that's getting a bit self-indulgent.
This is going somewhere and that somewhere is stupid. In short, there was one of those X-games-in-one CDs that I was convinced was perfectly normal and not widely derided. I only remember a minority of the games on it, but one of them stands out in my mind, and I don't even remember its name.
There wasn't a lot standout about the meat of it. I'd call it a Starfox clone but I never actually played Starfox so I couldn't tell for sure. You're in a low-poly spaceship, you move in 2D, and shoot asteroids and aliens in a 3D space. So simple, so derivative, it didn't even need to give you instructions. It was reasonably hard, by the standards of 9-year-old me, and I'd take turns with my cousins trying to get through it. The game itself is unimportant. What's important is that once you defeated the final boss, the game would throw some text up on the screen.
As I was a particularly stupid 9-year-old, I didn't know the word "genocide," and furthermore my brain decided to transcribe the word as "genicode" and I figured it meant something similar to "genome." (As particularly stupid 9-year-olds go, I was a comparatively well-read one.) Still, it was obvious what I'd done.
With even a bit more historical context who knows what I would have done. I am speaking, semi seriously, of the potential to off myself. By that age I'd already internalized that I was an evil person bound for hell, and I don't mean in the jokey edgy way but in the "no, seriously, I am the sort of thing that shouldn't exist" way.
Because, after all, "I was just following orders" isn't a defense, and I didn't even have that as a parrotable excuse. I was not following orders. What I would now know to refer to as "game literacy" picked up enough cues to piece together, those are your target, shoot them. And I did, and got fully invested in this single fighter craft's quest to eradicate an entire species.
Here is what I am not saying: that killing some pixels in a game should somehow be afforded the moral weight of killing things in real life, or that this simple knockoff game I forgot the name of is evil in some way, or that Tenochtitlan didn't exist.
I'm saying that a cheap bargain-bin game left an indelible imprint on my soul by not going with a simple congratulations. Seriously, I'm haunted by those two simple lines of text to this day. Not an especially intrusive manner, but it comes up.
A few days later, I saw my cousins again. Not keen to tip off the fact that I didn't know what the word "genicode" [sic], I stayed quiet about having beaten the game and asked if they wanted to play [game name].
"Oh no, we came in a few days ago and he beat it." When I inquired further: "Yeah, when you win it doesn't do anything special, it just says 'congratulations you beat the aliens.'"
I don't have a way to end this. Seriously I don't know if I'm being an over-influencable twig here or what. This is an anecdote, not an essay. This is the end of the post now.
The defining characteristic of my childhood was being completely insulated by absolutely nothing. Nothing was stopping me from going places or indulging in current media so I could understand what the other kids at school were on about. I just... didn't. This leads to having a good number of nostalgic moments that don't really make any sense. In a way I feel both robbed and guilty, though maybe that's getting a bit self-indulgent.
This is going somewhere and that somewhere is stupid. In short, there was one of those X-games-in-one CDs that I was convinced was perfectly normal and not widely derided. I only remember a minority of the games on it, but one of them stands out in my mind, and I don't even remember its name.
There wasn't a lot standout about the meat of it. I'd call it a Starfox clone but I never actually played Starfox so I couldn't tell for sure. You're in a low-poly spaceship, you move in 2D, and shoot asteroids and aliens in a 3D space. So simple, so derivative, it didn't even need to give you instructions. It was reasonably hard, by the standards of 9-year-old me, and I'd take turns with my cousins trying to get through it. The game itself is unimportant. What's important is that once you defeated the final boss, the game would throw some text up on the screen.
ALIEN GENOCIDE COMPLETE
HUMANITY IS NOW ALONE IN THE COSMOS
As I was a particularly stupid 9-year-old, I didn't know the word "genocide," and furthermore my brain decided to transcribe the word as "genicode" and I figured it meant something similar to "genome." (As particularly stupid 9-year-olds go, I was a comparatively well-read one.) Still, it was obvious what I'd done.
With even a bit more historical context who knows what I would have done. I am speaking, semi seriously, of the potential to off myself. By that age I'd already internalized that I was an evil person bound for hell, and I don't mean in the jokey edgy way but in the "no, seriously, I am the sort of thing that shouldn't exist" way.
Because, after all, "I was just following orders" isn't a defense, and I didn't even have that as a parrotable excuse. I was not following orders. What I would now know to refer to as "game literacy" picked up enough cues to piece together, those are your target, shoot them. And I did, and got fully invested in this single fighter craft's quest to eradicate an entire species.
Here is what I am not saying: that killing some pixels in a game should somehow be afforded the moral weight of killing things in real life, or that this simple knockoff game I forgot the name of is evil in some way, or that Tenochtitlan didn't exist.
I'm saying that a cheap bargain-bin game left an indelible imprint on my soul by not going with a simple congratulations. Seriously, I'm haunted by those two simple lines of text to this day. Not an especially intrusive manner, but it comes up.
A few days later, I saw my cousins again. Not keen to tip off the fact that I didn't know what the word "genicode" [sic], I stayed quiet about having beaten the game and asked if they wanted to play [game name].
"Oh no, we came in a few days ago and he beat it." When I inquired further: "Yeah, when you win it doesn't do anything special, it just says 'congratulations you beat the aliens.'"
I don't have a way to end this. Seriously I don't know if I'm being an over-influencable twig here or what. This is an anecdote, not an essay. This is the end of the post now.
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