Digital Tradition

For all the negative things said about the increasingly inorganic landscape of New York City, it begs to be said that there is much natural beauty here as well. Parks, miles-long streaks of green leaves and forest wildlife. Streams…Browning, babbling capillaries running perpetual laps from the Hudson to the gulf of the South Bronx. The sun, playing tricks along the tips of skyscrapers, and lie across the ground with imperfect perfection. My family…saw none of it. We were too busy playing video games. Eyes glued to computer monitors, television sets, flat panels, and flat screens. My family’s tradition was playing video games.
For all the skeptics out there thinking to themselves, “How can a hobby, barely forty years-old, be a family tradition?” The answer: Who the hell asked you? Video games became tradition when I realized that from the day I was born, video games were there. My mother, stepfather, older brother, and younger brothers are my immediate family. Our tradition is based in the ever-evolving technologies of the video game console.
At some point in 1967, Ralph Baer writes the first video game for television sets. My mother was seven years of age at the time. She was being raised on a farm in rural Mississippi. My mother’s strong sense of justice and inability to do anything but work would be key ingredients in the gaming gumbo of my family. Ralph Baer was an employee at Loral, a television electronics company. As fate would have it, my stepfather was an employee at Loral in the eighties, but I digress. In 1975, Atari releases the godfather of modern gaming: Pong. My stepfather gets a degree in information technology, sends his resume to Loral. The rest is my family history.
In 1985 Nintendo released it’s first North American console, the NES. I was two years of age, and totally unaware how this would affect my life. My younger brother, Ronald would be born four years later, on the cusp of the release of Sega’s Genesis console. It’s always been Sonic versus Mario in our household. This is the set-up. The beauty of this integration, this melding of man and technology, the summation of our social recombination comes on the heels of the most complicated political occurrence of the 21st century.
In 2001, Sony Entertainment released Metal Gear: Solid. A video game whose overarching theme is that of the gene, meme, scene and sense. I was sold on the graphics alone. The game’s themes were broken into three amazing sensory-blurring adventures. Metal Gear Solid dealt with genetics and the moral implications of genetic engineering, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty deals with how identity can be affected by the philosophies of one's society (a 'meme') and the effects of censorship on society, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater dealt with how the time and place one lives in (a 'scene') affects their identity and how politics change along with the times, and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots dealt with the 'sense' that people die, things move on and times change and that life shouldn't be lived fighting. We played each of these games for days, as in the hours we’d played could be measured in twenty-four hour increments. The technology premiered in this fictional world blew my brother and I away. My step-father would sit and watch us play. One day, he leans over to us, smelling explicitly of Drakkar Noir, and say, “You know, this game is only ten years behind what we’re working on now at L------- M-----." Here comes the summation.
September 11th, 2001. Some crazy stuff went down. The political climate was torn asunder. My brother and I were dismissed from school early. As latchkey kids, we made our way home, sat in the living room and did what any kid home from school would do: played video games. My mother would come home shortly after, angered at having to leave work early. Her sunset pink nurse’s uniform was soaked under the arms, around the neck, and across her back. She’d run into the house like she was being chased by the Taliban high command. She slammed and locked the door, froze at the sight of us placated by the video game during this extreme tumult. Right when our eyes met our mother’s rigid frame, a lion sat on the front steps and roared. At least, that’s what it felt like, but for the vibrations that shattered every glass table we owned. In reality, planes were flying overhead. My mother screamed, hit the deck like a Marine ducking mortar fire. My brother and I: perfectly still. Utterly calm. Zen-like. My mother jumps towards us, hugging the breath out of my still-changing adolescent body, sobbing hysterically. My brother, eleven years of age at the time, turned his head what little he could in mom’s grasp and confidently said, “It’s ok mom, those are just F-22 Raptors making a net formation across the city. The shaking is from the after burners, they’re going mach 1, breaking the sound barrier. That’s why the tables broke, calm down. That means we’re safe.” I was in shock. My little brother, memorized and comprehended the entire day’s events, lost his innocence virtually, then actually. Somewhere between his newfound fear of girls and understanding of nuclear proliferation, I’d noticed that video games taught my brother more than school ever could. Since then, my mom has mastered every form of Tetris.