Lost Affection

A development that has only worsened as I find myself growing up is a disenchantment with video games. I am currently 20 years old. Now some will say, “Oh wow, you’re growing up! Welcome to adulthood, dumbass!” and those, while being a bit dickish, would not be wrong, it doesn’t make it any less saddening to me. I find myself on occasion feeling sentimental, lamenting of days where I was totally fixated by the screen.

My first video game that I fell in love with was Pokemon Leaf Green. I got the green cartridge on my sixth birthday along with a brand-new Nintendo DS. Not the thinner DS Lite that came out years later, no, I’m talking about the bulky, brick of a thing that was the original DS. At the age of six, my entire existence changed. I loved that game. I loved that cartridge. I loved that sticker on the cartridge. I loved my little sprite. I loved my Pokemon team. I even felt a fondness for my rival that went so far as to give the very prestigious name of Poop. This game consumed many of my six-year-old waking hours where I caught and trained many Pokemon—my starter Pokemon Charmander saw a tad more love than any other though. Unlike some of the later Pokemon games I played, Pokemon Leaf Green was unrelenting, ruthless, and taxing on my dumb brain. Making my way through Seafoam Island pushed me to my mental and physical limits—the physical limits being my bladder and bowels which my focus made me slow to attending to. When I finally got to the end and found myself face to face with the legendary bird Pokemon Articuno, I was elated, filled to the brim with a sense of self-accomplishment. Much later when I was naively facing the elite four, I was met with many futile attempts that no amount of intermittent training would fix. The only reason I was able to eventually defeat them was because of my dad’s aid. Even so, putting Poop’s team six feet under was satisfying, and putting my team into the Hall of Fame more-so. I remember the endless love I felt for my Pokemon who I’d been through so much with. I also remember how I sobbed when I innocently deleted my save file, not comprehending the consequences of my actions until it was too late and my sprite named "A" and my Charizard named "AAAAAAA" were gone forever.

There were many other Pokemon games that I played throughout my childhood: Ruby, Fire Red, Sapphire, Emerald, Pearl, Diamond, and the Mystery Dungeon games. They were all great games that were very near and dear to me, but none could quite amount to the feelings that I had felt for good ol’ Leaf Green, that is, until Pokemon Platinum. Pokemon Platinum was the first Pokemon game since Leaf Green that I felt so enthralled with that I could not possibly put my DS Lite down—at this point I think I was on my third or fourth DS because of me being a clumsy idiot of a child, and I couldn’t help breaking them like Lenny with rabbits. With Pokemon Platinum, I thought the plot was amazing and needed zero corrections, but the additions of certain Pokemon like Duskull and Ralts made the games lineup of Pokemon perfect, and the post-game islands you could go to were by far the best post-game content of any of the Pokemon games I had played thus far. My sprite named A—had to keep up tradition—and I spent many hours together catching, training, and battling.

The Pokemon games following, up to X and Y, I played and thought were great—I will mention that me being a helpless Pokemon fanboy made it so that, in my mind, if it was Pokemon-related and wasn’t a shitty pinball game or about a Pokemon Ranger, then there was no choice, it had to be the pinnacle of video gaming—but the luster the games had always had prior was slowly losing its sheen. It might have been because over the years other games had entered my world and distracted me, but I don’t think that’s the real reason or at least the whole reason.

I did become involved with game series like Halo,Call of Duty, and Smash Brothers, however, I would not say it was ever a loving relationship. As much as I would have liked it to be so, my beloved Pokemon games weren’t a big success at parties, with only a few being as zealous as myself, so multiplayer fighter/shooting games became the games of choice. I will be 100 percent honest with you: I absolutely fucking loved playing those games with my friends. I have memories from Call of Duty: Black Ops that make me feel just as sentimental as my memories of Pokemon, but for very different reasons. With Pokemon, it was just me and the game. There was a sort of intimacy to it. Split-screen shooting games were different. It wasn’t the game that made it what it was, but it was being among friends, yelling and laughing at the top of our lungs as we all played in some stuffy room all crowded around a television screen, drinking the cheapest sodas we could find and eating the cheapest barbecue flavored potato chips that made it the best of times—all of our time spent playing was LAN because none of our parents would let us have Xbox Live subscriptions. After I moved away and the distance was too great between me and my friends, those games fizzled out for the most part. Later in life, when I bought Xbox Live, I didn’t really get into it, mainly for the reason that while I could hold my own against my neighborhood friends, I wasn’t shit compared to the elite killers that I faced online.

A game that entered my life around the same time that shooting games did was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and that game was responsible for my mom deciding that a limit on my video game time each week was an absolute necessity. The addition of Oblivion in my life was not love at first sight like it had been with the Pokemon games. My dad had bought the game when we had first gotten our original Xbox 360, and it just collected dust. The Xbox 360’s purchase was not intended for my play—except for a car game called Burnout Revenge that I would play a couple rounds with my parents some nights—but rather my father’s. He had bought four games: King Kong, Oblivion, Burnout Revenge, and one of the early Call of Duty titles. Out of those four games, he only ever played King Kong because he had absolutely adored the remake by Peter Jackson—that was one of the few games I have ever seen my dad play to completion—and Burnout Revenge, which he would occasionally play with my mom and me. When I first picked up and played Oblivion, we had already owned it for around a year. I had not been impressed. I didn’t even manage to get through the beginning tutorial; the dark caves with goblins had not seemed all that enticing at that point in young Andreas’s life. So, it went back into its case and collected more dust. Then, later when I had a few strands of what might be considered hair under a microscope on my chest, I revisited the game for reasons that I cannot recall, and this time, I fell head over heels in love with it. For all the game’s faults that are now so glaringly obvious to me, I was blind to them back then. I thought the quests and storylines were on par with that of any fantasy novel I had read—no scratch that, any novel, movie, or show that had crossed my path—the combat was fantastic, the world felt so immersive, and even the character creation, which I now realize could only create the most ugly-ass abominations known to humankind, seemed beautifully perfected. Playing that game was the closest I’ll probably ever get to Heaven. Sadly, not many, if any, of my friends could appreciate the work of art that was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and that was not from a lack of trying to indoctrinate on my part; any friend that came over to my house, alone and unprepared, in those days would hear me speak about my lord and savior Oblivion. Few were ever swayed by my words or by my gameplay. The only followers I was able to convert were my childhood best friend, a Mormon friend—I’m not sure if he actually liked the game or was just fine playing it at my house because his family was a lot stricter than mine and limited pretty much all gaming at his house—and my little brother.

The next game in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, was a great game in its own right that I spent many hours playing just like its predecessor, and while in the midst of playing it, I definitely thought it was an equal of Oblivion. For whatever reason, however, I find that I’m now severely less sentimental about Skyrim than I am towards Oblivion. Maybe it’s because I played Skyrim later on in life where highs were already becoming harder to reach, or maybe something was missing from Skyrim that was present in Oblivion. In the end though, Skyrim just doesn’t hold a memorably special spot like its older brother, but that’s okay, it’s in no way a bad game, just a game that didn’t click perfectly with me.

The last video game I got extremely intimate with also turned out to be the most complex relationship I’ve ever had with a video game: League of Legends, a game I look back on with equal parts fondness and regret. I had first heard of the game when I was in ninth grade at my junior high. The memory of my first learning about it sticks in my head like a piece of gum to the bottom of a table. Everyone that took morning classes at the high school was getting off the bus that took us all back to the junior high. As we all ambled our way into the cafeteria to wait for our second periods to start, I was chatting with two casual acquaintances about a game they were addicted to: League of Legends. The conversation wasn’t all that interesting to me; in fact, the way they described and talked about the game made me want to yawn. The only reason I downloaded it that night was because I thought that it might be a fun game to play with my old neighborhood friends that I had moved far away from—the same ones that I talked about earlier. First getting into the game, I just kept dying over and over again. I had no idea how to play and I wasn’t really trying that hard to learn how to play either. My friends a state away that I was playing with, though, wanted very much to improve, so as they vastly improved, and I felt like it was my obligation to at least become a fraction better than I currently was. Here and there, we would occasionally meet people that we would play on the same team as and they would want to play more with us after that game ended, so we all ended up queued up for the next game together. Then, after a few more games, the one or two other random people we were playing with would friend us. We all accepted. Then after another a few more games, they would want to Skype with us. I was reluctant, but my friends had no reservations so these random people started Skyping with us. Some were cool, some were weird, and some were batshit insane. Some we ended up playing many many games with, some my friends became romantically involved with, and some we blocked pretty quickly in both the game and on Skype. It was quite a journey. There were super high highs and super low lows, as I’ve found all multiplayer games to contain, but it was a fun bonding experience for all my friends and I. That all changed when our accounts reached the highest level that they could get to: Level 30. After that, my friends and I slowly went our own separate ways in League of Legends because while ranked showed us that we could all make it out of bronze tier, only one of us could make it up to diamond and beyond. No longer having my friends a state away with to play on my team, I started queuing up for ranked with a close friend of mine that I’d met in high school. We played so much ranked, traveling from one tier to another, going up and down over and over again. I remember it as tiresome, but fun, constantly joking the entire time. My friend remembers it differently. He remembers it as a time of depression where we would win two games in a row followed by four losses and a bunch of toxicity—win or lose. The toxicity is finally what did it for me. Well, that and the realization that I was wasting massive amounts of time to no avail. I’ve spent what still echoes in my mind as an eternity playing that game, and if my memory wasn’t clouded with outrageous amounts of farfetched positivity, I would see that a lot of it wasn’t even good.

League of Legends is the only the game I have ever played that was as shitty as it was fun, giving me as many bad times as well as good times, and maybe my sour ending with League of Legends is the catalyst responsible for the widening distance between myself and the world of video games now—or it could be that I’m just growing older. I hope it’s neither of those things. I hope this is just a phase and that my engrossment with video games returns one day, although to a lesser degree. If it never returns though, I think I’ll be okay with that too. Video games have given me so many irreplaceable memories that I will cherish for as long as I live, and if I can’t create any new memories with video games, I will always have my childhood memories to fall back on.