I could be doing a million other things right now.
It's Saturday afternoon and I have no plans to go anywhere. Consequently, I'm wearing the Slipknot shirt and boxers that I slept in last night, despite it being five thirty. Here's what I *should* be doing: some form of uni work at all, either on my classes here in Groningen, or on the dissertation I have to do before I get home. I should be doing my laundry instead of letting it vegetate in a pile on top of my suitcase. I should be clearing the Red Bull cans off my desk and actually admitting to myself that I've got a damn caffeine addiction. I should be going to the supermarket cause I'm actually kinda hungry and I'm all out of food and drink. I should be going for a damn walk purely to get myself out of the house and find that park that I know is around here somewhere.
Instead, I have been reading this.
I love Wil Wheaton. I want to go to PAX. I'm aware that flights to Seattle for PAX Prime are obscenely expensive. However, flights to Boston, Massachussetts for PAX East are about £350. This is much, much less. Still crazily expensive, yes. Still insane to fly across the whole fucking ocean for something like this. I'm not in any position to afford it, truthfully. But I don't care what I have to do or how hard I have to fucking work to earn, beg, borrow or steal this money, but I am *going*. Next year, ideally. The year after if not. Because that speech makes a point - games matter. Maybe not to everyone, but they matter to me. They've mattered to me since I was tiny and my uncle introduced me to Eye of the Beholder for the first time and I could not for the life of me think of a decent name for the Half Elven Fighter/Mage/Cleric he let me create and add to his party while he was home from uni.
This is the uncle who went to Sheffield, by the way. The uncle who's the smartest person I've ever met and who introduced me to the Amiga and bullied my cousin into letting me play on her Megadrive, and got me into Star Wars and Doctor Who and James and the Pogues and Blur and Pulp and who taught a five year old about communism and how Thatcher was a bitch and that if I saw a house with a Conservative sticker in the window, I should throw a rock through it. The uncle who gave me all his old Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and told me that it's a matter of honour not to cheat on these things. This is the uncle who is *still* to this day, trying to get me into 40K (all the painting and crap is a bit rubbish, but the stories are pretty good, honest mate) and insisting that The Smiths will make sense to me one day and gave me some of the best goddamn advice I've ever received in my life. The uncle who never talked down to me, never treated me like a little girl, taught me the offside rule and how to swear with feeling (but not where your Mum or your Grandma can hear).
The uncle who played Tomb Raider and Resident Evil with me and laughed when I got so scared by a Tyrant bursting through a wall, that I reflexively threw the jam sandwich I was eating at the screen, while he valiantly tried to kill it with what little ammo he had left and dodge my foodstuff throwing antics at the same time. The uncle who is never affectionate, has given me maybe one hug in my life and was never, ever like my other uncles who'd talk down to me and say things like 'little girls don't do that' and demand scores of kisses everytime I saw them, despite the fact that they smelt of cigarettes and stale booze. The uncle who doesn't talk much when he's proud of you, but just grins, nods and says 'Well done' and that's all he needs to say. The uncle who calls me and my sisters 'mate' and means it, because if we weren't related, he's about the only one of my family I'd want to spend any amount of time with. The uncle who pointed out that while weed might seem pretty awesome, in both his and my Dad's experience, it was a bit of a let down really and knowing my luck, it's genetic. The uncle who showed me Sheffield, away from the open days and all that business and grinned as he watched me fall in love with the city. The uncle who always, always competes with me academically. (Are you not done with that degree yet? Bloody hell, Sarah, I've earnt my second in the time it's taken you to get half way through yours and I'm working as well! Keep up!)
The uncle who takes me to the cinema in a bid to make me a bit more of a movie person everytime I'm home and always mocks me because I've not watched the whole of Trainspotting yet. The uncle who spotted each and every historical inaccuracy in Gladiator and who drags me up Pendle Hill as soon as it's sunny enough because he knows that I need to get out of the house and up a hill somewhere on a regular basis but I'm so horribly out of shape that I never take anyone else's offers up on it because I don't want them to have to wait for me and for me to slow them down. And when he does get me out, he never, not for a second, allows me to slow him down. He makes me keep up with him - and I find myself wanting to because he launches into these tales about the countryside and... do you hear that? That's such and such a bird, y'know. And over there, that village we can see, do you know which one that is? That's the village you live in, you dolt! How are you so directionally challenged that you can't tell that? What do you mean you don't know which way is north? Well, look at the damn sun! I dunno, students these days. You're all too busy staring moodily into your snakebite in the pub and talking about unicorns to learn proper stuff. Have you read any good books lately? Well, why not? There's a reason I always buy you books for your birthday, y'know. What games are you playing at the minute? Final bloody Fantasy? I do not understand how you can possibly play that load of tosh. I remember you lending me that one, that time. Which was it, seven? If that was the seventh incarnation, I'd hate to play the first one, with all the mistakes left in. Command and Conquer, that's what you want to be playing. Or at least a proper RPG. Speaking of which, when's the new Knights of the Old Republic out?
I'm gonna steal a line from a woman much more eloquent than me and say 'Who would I be, if he had been anyone else?' It's only recently that my memories of Eye of the Beholder came back to me - before then I could say with absolute authority that I'd never played D&D in my life, but for some reason I had more familiarity with the classes and stuff than I could ever explain. And then one day at Noddsoc, somehow Twiglets came up in conversation and I remembered how Uncle Sean's room smelt of Twiglets and how I put up with it in order to play this game and read all his old Amiga power magazines.
I go through droughts, when it comes to gaming. I had about four years where I didn't really play any games, in school and I was miserable. My best mate in primary school was the one other girl in the class who played games. When I met new friends in secondary school and some of the lads were gamers, I found myself falling back into old patterns. I remembered the days when Final Fantasy 8 came out - the first FF game I'd ever played and I would wake up for school two hours early, get myself ready to go in the dark, in total silence and spent the next hour or so getting in some game time before I went to school, where I'd spend all day thinking about where I was in the game and how I could get past that boss without the hassle of leveling my characters much/spending ages drawing magic and faffing with the Junctioning system. If I hadn't gotten to a save point before I left, I'd turn the TV off and leave the Playstation running all day, propped up on it's side so it didn't overheat, tucked out of sight so my parents wouldn't see any telltale lights glowing in my room.
I remember when I got with Chris, both of us ogling a second hand DS lite in CEX, both of us wishing we had enough money to buy it and get the new Pokemon game. I remember the look on his face when I suggested we go halves on it. I remember the glee that I felt levelling Pingu, our joint Empoleon. (we could only afford one game, too, so when we first got it, we shared a copy of Diamond. It was only later I got Pearl and then we just shared the DS.) It was a lot like the glee I felt with the very first level 99 Blastoise I had on my original, battered copy of Pokemon Blue, which is actually my sister's but I got way more into it than she ever did so I pretty much acquired it by common consensus.
Hannah is not much of a gamer. Sure, I think if she wanted, she could sit down and whup your ass at Halo, but she rarely wants to. Alice, on the other hand, is much more like me (although with an unfathomable like for Call of Duty). Alice is the sister who got up at 7am with me on the day Mass Effect 2 was released so that we could get a lift into town with our Mum and be standing outside Game when it opened, with our pre-order tickets in hand, ready to say 'Actually, it's the collector's edition, please' and see the eyebrows on the guy behind the counter raise ever so slightly at the fact that two girls have come in, excited and giddy that it's finally release day. Alice actually stroked the game box as she handed over her money and muttered something about the preciousss... I'd never really gotten on with Alice much, before she started playing games. But now she's old enough to drink and awesome enough to think that getting some beers in and trying for the fifty billionth time to show me how to play Halo while we both detail the soap operas that our respective love lives have become is a night well spent.
This is why games are important. This is why gaming is important. This is what Wil Wheaton meant. All the most important people in my life are gamers, or geeky, or music nerds or some combination thereof. Nearly everyone I hang out with is a Star Wars fan. With one or two notable exceptions, I only really fancy Star Wars fans, nowadays. (That's not intentional. But I am a sucker for anyone who goes on rants about how Karen Traviss can stick this here lightsaber in her thermal exhaust port and agrees that yes, Mara Jade is in fact, the shit.)
And... yeah. I miss games. I miss gaming. I miss being around geeks. I miss being able to say something stupidly nerdy and not have to explain it. I miss roleplaying. I've got an evening class here on Wednesday nights and I always, always leave it thinking 'If I were home, I'd be fiddling nervously with my dice about now.' I'm a gamer, before I am anything else, I think. It's a much bigger part of who I am than I sometimes let on - in part because of these memories and because of the simple fact that all the important people in my life are into games. I was talking to Chris about gender theory the other day and he only understood it when I made a KOTOR analogy.
The year abroad has robbed me of a lot of things - I've been robbed of the chance to be around my friends. Likewise my family. I've been robbed of TV that I wanted to watch and films I wanted to see. I've been robbed of books, because I couldn't fit that many in my case. I've been robbed of my sanity, my self esteem and for the most part, my joy. And also, I've been robbed of games. My laptop isn't good enough to play games well (although fuck knows I have tried hard enough) and beyond that, I have the DS. That's it. Wonderful though that is, when you go from playing games in some form or another every single day to not having that many outlets to do so (and worrying the whole time when you do that maybe some of the people you're missing so desperately have come online while you've been playing, in which case, then you feel like crap because it's like you're putting games before them) you find yourself slowly going insane. Or you do, if you're me. Especially when games you really want to play have been released and you can't talk to your friends back home about them because you're waiting till May to play them. That robs you of that wonderful feeling of 'Oh my god, guys, have you got to such and such a bit yet? It's so damn awesome, seriously. If you're not there yet, play more and get there.'
My way of making up for a year's enforced drought from the games and the people I love is to try my damndedest to go to PAX East, next March. I know I'm not the only one who has a dream of seeing a concert where the audience as one holds up their DS instead of their lighter, so this is in part a kind of call to arms to my geekier friends. I know one way or another, even if I have to sell a damn kidney on Ebay, Chris and I are going. I'm posting this here for a few reasons - to remind myself that actually, there are still things I care about enough to write massive long posts about them, even if I don't give a crap about my own rumbling tummy, to state my intent nice and clear and loud, so that it isn't just some idle dream, it's something I actually intend to do, dammit and as a kind of call to arms to my geekier friends. I know many of you want to go too. Let's try and make it happen.
Instead, I have been reading this.
I love Wil Wheaton. I want to go to PAX. I'm aware that flights to Seattle for PAX Prime are obscenely expensive. However, flights to Boston, Massachussetts for PAX East are about £350. This is much, much less. Still crazily expensive, yes. Still insane to fly across the whole fucking ocean for something like this. I'm not in any position to afford it, truthfully. But I don't care what I have to do or how hard I have to fucking work to earn, beg, borrow or steal this money, but I am *going*. Next year, ideally. The year after if not. Because that speech makes a point - games matter. Maybe not to everyone, but they matter to me. They've mattered to me since I was tiny and my uncle introduced me to Eye of the Beholder for the first time and I could not for the life of me think of a decent name for the Half Elven Fighter/Mage/Cleric he let me create and add to his party while he was home from uni.
This is the uncle who went to Sheffield, by the way. The uncle who's the smartest person I've ever met and who introduced me to the Amiga and bullied my cousin into letting me play on her Megadrive, and got me into Star Wars and Doctor Who and James and the Pogues and Blur and Pulp and who taught a five year old about communism and how Thatcher was a bitch and that if I saw a house with a Conservative sticker in the window, I should throw a rock through it. The uncle who gave me all his old Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and told me that it's a matter of honour not to cheat on these things. This is the uncle who is *still* to this day, trying to get me into 40K (all the painting and crap is a bit rubbish, but the stories are pretty good, honest mate) and insisting that The Smiths will make sense to me one day and gave me some of the best goddamn advice I've ever received in my life. The uncle who never talked down to me, never treated me like a little girl, taught me the offside rule and how to swear with feeling (but not where your Mum or your Grandma can hear).
The uncle who played Tomb Raider and Resident Evil with me and laughed when I got so scared by a Tyrant bursting through a wall, that I reflexively threw the jam sandwich I was eating at the screen, while he valiantly tried to kill it with what little ammo he had left and dodge my foodstuff throwing antics at the same time. The uncle who is never affectionate, has given me maybe one hug in my life and was never, ever like my other uncles who'd talk down to me and say things like 'little girls don't do that' and demand scores of kisses everytime I saw them, despite the fact that they smelt of cigarettes and stale booze. The uncle who doesn't talk much when he's proud of you, but just grins, nods and says 'Well done' and that's all he needs to say. The uncle who calls me and my sisters 'mate' and means it, because if we weren't related, he's about the only one of my family I'd want to spend any amount of time with. The uncle who pointed out that while weed might seem pretty awesome, in both his and my Dad's experience, it was a bit of a let down really and knowing my luck, it's genetic. The uncle who showed me Sheffield, away from the open days and all that business and grinned as he watched me fall in love with the city. The uncle who always, always competes with me academically. (Are you not done with that degree yet? Bloody hell, Sarah, I've earnt my second in the time it's taken you to get half way through yours and I'm working as well! Keep up!)
The uncle who takes me to the cinema in a bid to make me a bit more of a movie person everytime I'm home and always mocks me because I've not watched the whole of Trainspotting yet. The uncle who spotted each and every historical inaccuracy in Gladiator and who drags me up Pendle Hill as soon as it's sunny enough because he knows that I need to get out of the house and up a hill somewhere on a regular basis but I'm so horribly out of shape that I never take anyone else's offers up on it because I don't want them to have to wait for me and for me to slow them down. And when he does get me out, he never, not for a second, allows me to slow him down. He makes me keep up with him - and I find myself wanting to because he launches into these tales about the countryside and... do you hear that? That's such and such a bird, y'know. And over there, that village we can see, do you know which one that is? That's the village you live in, you dolt! How are you so directionally challenged that you can't tell that? What do you mean you don't know which way is north? Well, look at the damn sun! I dunno, students these days. You're all too busy staring moodily into your snakebite in the pub and talking about unicorns to learn proper stuff. Have you read any good books lately? Well, why not? There's a reason I always buy you books for your birthday, y'know. What games are you playing at the minute? Final bloody Fantasy? I do not understand how you can possibly play that load of tosh. I remember you lending me that one, that time. Which was it, seven? If that was the seventh incarnation, I'd hate to play the first one, with all the mistakes left in. Command and Conquer, that's what you want to be playing. Or at least a proper RPG. Speaking of which, when's the new Knights of the Old Republic out?
I'm gonna steal a line from a woman much more eloquent than me and say 'Who would I be, if he had been anyone else?' It's only recently that my memories of Eye of the Beholder came back to me - before then I could say with absolute authority that I'd never played D&D in my life, but for some reason I had more familiarity with the classes and stuff than I could ever explain. And then one day at Noddsoc, somehow Twiglets came up in conversation and I remembered how Uncle Sean's room smelt of Twiglets and how I put up with it in order to play this game and read all his old Amiga power magazines.
I go through droughts, when it comes to gaming. I had about four years where I didn't really play any games, in school and I was miserable. My best mate in primary school was the one other girl in the class who played games. When I met new friends in secondary school and some of the lads were gamers, I found myself falling back into old patterns. I remembered the days when Final Fantasy 8 came out - the first FF game I'd ever played and I would wake up for school two hours early, get myself ready to go in the dark, in total silence and spent the next hour or so getting in some game time before I went to school, where I'd spend all day thinking about where I was in the game and how I could get past that boss without the hassle of leveling my characters much/spending ages drawing magic and faffing with the Junctioning system. If I hadn't gotten to a save point before I left, I'd turn the TV off and leave the Playstation running all day, propped up on it's side so it didn't overheat, tucked out of sight so my parents wouldn't see any telltale lights glowing in my room.
I remember when I got with Chris, both of us ogling a second hand DS lite in CEX, both of us wishing we had enough money to buy it and get the new Pokemon game. I remember the look on his face when I suggested we go halves on it. I remember the glee that I felt levelling Pingu, our joint Empoleon. (we could only afford one game, too, so when we first got it, we shared a copy of Diamond. It was only later I got Pearl and then we just shared the DS.) It was a lot like the glee I felt with the very first level 99 Blastoise I had on my original, battered copy of Pokemon Blue, which is actually my sister's but I got way more into it than she ever did so I pretty much acquired it by common consensus.
Hannah is not much of a gamer. Sure, I think if she wanted, she could sit down and whup your ass at Halo, but she rarely wants to. Alice, on the other hand, is much more like me (although with an unfathomable like for Call of Duty). Alice is the sister who got up at 7am with me on the day Mass Effect 2 was released so that we could get a lift into town with our Mum and be standing outside Game when it opened, with our pre-order tickets in hand, ready to say 'Actually, it's the collector's edition, please' and see the eyebrows on the guy behind the counter raise ever so slightly at the fact that two girls have come in, excited and giddy that it's finally release day. Alice actually stroked the game box as she handed over her money and muttered something about the preciousss... I'd never really gotten on with Alice much, before she started playing games. But now she's old enough to drink and awesome enough to think that getting some beers in and trying for the fifty billionth time to show me how to play Halo while we both detail the soap operas that our respective love lives have become is a night well spent.
This is why games are important. This is why gaming is important. This is what Wil Wheaton meant. All the most important people in my life are gamers, or geeky, or music nerds or some combination thereof. Nearly everyone I hang out with is a Star Wars fan. With one or two notable exceptions, I only really fancy Star Wars fans, nowadays. (That's not intentional. But I am a sucker for anyone who goes on rants about how Karen Traviss can stick this here lightsaber in her thermal exhaust port and agrees that yes, Mara Jade is in fact, the shit.)
And... yeah. I miss games. I miss gaming. I miss being around geeks. I miss being able to say something stupidly nerdy and not have to explain it. I miss roleplaying. I've got an evening class here on Wednesday nights and I always, always leave it thinking 'If I were home, I'd be fiddling nervously with my dice about now.' I'm a gamer, before I am anything else, I think. It's a much bigger part of who I am than I sometimes let on - in part because of these memories and because of the simple fact that all the important people in my life are into games. I was talking to Chris about gender theory the other day and he only understood it when I made a KOTOR analogy.
The year abroad has robbed me of a lot of things - I've been robbed of the chance to be around my friends. Likewise my family. I've been robbed of TV that I wanted to watch and films I wanted to see. I've been robbed of books, because I couldn't fit that many in my case. I've been robbed of my sanity, my self esteem and for the most part, my joy. And also, I've been robbed of games. My laptop isn't good enough to play games well (although fuck knows I have tried hard enough) and beyond that, I have the DS. That's it. Wonderful though that is, when you go from playing games in some form or another every single day to not having that many outlets to do so (and worrying the whole time when you do that maybe some of the people you're missing so desperately have come online while you've been playing, in which case, then you feel like crap because it's like you're putting games before them) you find yourself slowly going insane. Or you do, if you're me. Especially when games you really want to play have been released and you can't talk to your friends back home about them because you're waiting till May to play them. That robs you of that wonderful feeling of 'Oh my god, guys, have you got to such and such a bit yet? It's so damn awesome, seriously. If you're not there yet, play more and get there.'
My way of making up for a year's enforced drought from the games and the people I love is to try my damndedest to go to PAX East, next March. I know I'm not the only one who has a dream of seeing a concert where the audience as one holds up their DS instead of their lighter, so this is in part a kind of call to arms to my geekier friends. I know one way or another, even if I have to sell a damn kidney on Ebay, Chris and I are going. I'm posting this here for a few reasons - to remind myself that actually, there are still things I care about enough to write massive long posts about them, even if I don't give a crap about my own rumbling tummy, to state my intent nice and clear and loud, so that it isn't just some idle dream, it's something I actually intend to do, dammit and as a kind of call to arms to my geekier friends. I know many of you want to go too. Let's try and make it happen.