"When I was in fifth grade, we were sometimes allowed to use the computers in our school computer lab to play games. We were allowed to play them not because of them being fun or exciting but because they were “educational,” because they were supposed to teach us things about the world, things that would help us in the future, as we grew up. Most of them weren’t really games, it didn’t feel like, even if that’s what they were technically called. Just because you called typing or doing math problems a “game” didn’t make it a game, I didn’t think.
The game the boy is playing is an early arcade fighting game called Double Dragon in which two brothers kick and punch and grapple their way through hordes of anonymous enemies. When buying the bus ticket doesn’t work out, the brother pulls the boy away from the game to go but then, glancing back at the screen, he notices that in the short time he’s been playing, the boy has scored 50,000 points, an almost impossible amount. “How did you do that?” he asks. The boy is silent; he stares at the screen as it flashes his score. A young girl sitting nearby watches them, her face hidden behind an advertisement for sunscreen in Cosmopolitan.
“He didn’t regard himself as a tragedy; he thought, among other things, that his unusual personality enabled him to concentrate better than other people. All of it followed, in his mind, from the warping effects of his fake eye.”
FB: A beautiful essay that's hard to describe, sort of about a boy and the way his mind works and his obsession with video games and later his adulthood obsession with the stock market and it's all perfectly interwoven to really be about human systems and power and knowledge?
"My brother and I became addicted to cheating. After a certain point, to us, cheating was synonymous with playing; there was no separation between the two. At first we took out the Game Genie after every time we used it, only inserting it into the system again when we wanted to cheat on a particular game. After a few weeks, though, we just left it in there and didn’t take it out anymore. It stayed plugged into the system forever, its codes changing all our games and the way we played them. Once it was in the system, ultimately, there was no point in taking it out."
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