17 Hours

I used to be an avid video gamer. Perhaps an addict. I would play them [games] from as soon as I got home from school until the time I went to bed. I played them for hours at a time non-stop, negating food (but drinking myself to hell-bound with Mountain Dew). Hunter S. Thompson, I must say, there’s actually nothing more depraved than a man who’s on the depths of a Jake Ball-esque video game binge, and that will either send you into a state of sleep deprivation or to a domain of mind warping.

I’m a writing fiend, but I know when to call it quits. I can write for hours at a time. Sometimes I’ll fire up my laptop and begin a 5,000 word tome on how Randy Moss and Cris Carter would have worked out as a much younger receiving tandem with Tom Brady at quarterback in 1998 (a Brady in his prime). But I digress.

Video game addicts amuse me with their unremitting button mashing skills that poorly translates to the screen they morbidly stare at. And I say morbidly because it’s almost deathly how the eyes both become dry due to avoidance of blinking. As thousands of pixels flash every millisecond, gamers mash the triggers, buttons, and twirl the joystick to victory.

Are you playing the games or are they games playing you?

My video game playing days started becoming hazy in 2006. I still played, but not as much as compared to how much I used to play. Everything become dull and dense. The same trite shit I’ve put up with in other games. I started taking interest in writing and a potential sportswriting career thinking, “Hey, this is something I can and will do. And if somebody asks me, ‘What would you do if you weren’t a sportswriter,’ I would have to tell them unemployed, because it’s my niche.”

The fact that the originality of video games seems to have plateaued, considering that war games are still war games. Maybe they plataued over the last year. Perhaps they truly haven’t — maybe it’s the fact that games still bore the hell out of me that triggers my disdain for the video game industry as a whole.

Next-generation — is that it? I remember watching a trailer for NBA Live 2006 for the XBOX 360, remembering the Detroit Pistons and Seattle Supersonics appearing on the trailer, with Ray Allen missing a shot and Rashard Lewis slamming it in on the rebound, right over Detroit’s Tayshaun Prince. The announcing was crisp and the graphics were unreal. The game released along with the XBOX 360 on November 22, 2005 and it was pure garbage. The false advertising in the commercial instigated quite the buy from gamers, but complaints began to augment over that and the other EA Sports title Madden NFL 2006.

Next-generation, my ass.

I’m still waiting to be mesmerized by what these nerds from Microsoft and Sony can construct. As of now, I’m bored out of my mind and would rather play Rockstar Games Presents Ping Pong instead of try to be convinced otherwise that any true progress has been made.

As for now, I’m going to save myself from the mind corrupting circulation that seems to be incessantly perpetuated by the abysmal video gaming industry.