I’m having a hard time functioning today
because I spent the last two nights playing Skyrim
until 3 in the morning because I am an idiot. I recently bought a copy of this
fucking nightmare time destroyer for $5 at a garage sale because some 12 year
old kid was in the bathroom at the time and his drunk dad didn’t give a shit. “He
bought the damn thing with my money anyway,” said the drunk dad. Good point,
drunk dad.
Skyrim is a video game. It
came out 2 years ago. If you’re into video games, you’re probably a little
confused about why I’d just start playing it now. Skyrim is one of the “Holy Shit” video games that people who play
video games go “Holy Shit” about. If you’re not into video games, it’s the one
with the dragons, like in the commercial where everybody’s like “Run, it’s a
dragon!” And then the one dude walk towards the dragon and you’re supposed to
be impressed.
That’s what I’m doing with my time now. All
of it. I’m pretending to be a guy who walks towards dragons in order to impress… myself, I guess. That is what I’m doing with literally all of
my time. Including at least two of the hours I usually spend sleeping, and many
of the hours I could spend doing things like bathing or eating.
Why?
Not a rhetorical question. I am asking you to
tell me why I am doing this.
Video games are horrible. When I was growing
up my mom wouldn’t let me have a Nintendo because she didn’t want me to rot my
brain playing Nintendo all the time, and she was dead right about it. I would
have a rotten brain right now if I’d had a Nintendo in the house growing up.
Can you imagine? A Nintendo in the house? I would still be back there, not
getting laid.
Skyrim is often more like a medieval
-themed stress dream than a fun thing to do.
Here’s what happened to me last night: I had
to climb up a mountain to go up to see the elders, but I died a few times
because there’s a frost troll up there, so I had to learn how to sneak around
the frost troll. Then I saw the elders, who taught me how to dragon shout, but
then they wanted me to go get this thing for them from a cave that’s far away
and full of zombies. So I walked all the way there to the cave, and when I
finally got through the zombies, somebody took the thing I wanted. Then I had
to go all the way back where I came from, but then there was some weird glitch
where the walls were glowing green and everybody wanted to kill me. So I looked
up on the internet what to do and some nerds on a message board told me to find
a quiet little village to get arrested in so I could pay off a bounty, and also
the internet nerds said that maybe I might be a vampire which is a serious
disease. I started to get all upset like oh no I’m a vampire now, oh no this is
bad, but it turns out no, I just had to pay this guy 5 dollars because I was
breaking into somebody’s house and I was so happy to see him because he didn’t
want to kill me. Then I got the thing and went back up the mountain to give it
to the elders so they could teach me more dragon shouts. The end.
That’s was really what happened in the game,
a thing I chose to do with my time. If that was a day of your real life, it
would be one of those days when you’re stuck in line at 7-Eleven and you want
to stab a guy to death in his gross hairy neck because he’s buying a lottery
ticket. But in the video game, hey, it’s fun; it’s voluntary and fun. I was
wearing armor. I was shooting a bow and arrow. Fun.
Here are some of the boring, mundane things you can
do in this video game: catch butterflies, pick flowers, cook soup, tan a deer
pelt, mine iron ore with a pickaxe, chop wood, harvest vegetables, serve jail
time, seek treatment for illnesses, take a nap, sit in chairs, eat, drink, do
drugs (I defy you to come up with a bigger waste of time than doing video game
drugs), get married, read video game books about the video game you are in, buy new clothes, go to
college, buy property, pay a guy to give you a carriage ride, use a grindstone to
keep your tools sharp, fish, pay a guy to sing you a song, and have boring
small talk with everybody everywhere all the time. What’s fun about that?
Oh, sure, you get to fight dragons and kill
zombies sometimes, but mostly what happens is the dragons and zombies kill you
and you have to go back and start over like the last 20 minutes of your life
never happened. Sometimes a fucking saber-tooth tiger jumps out and just rips
your guts out, and you’re like “that sucks, now I have to go back and talk to
that guy about his son again.”
Right now I’m enrolled in Wizard College. It’s
like Harry Potter except all the parts they don’t show you where you’re just a
regular person in school and it’s second period at 8:20am and Mr. Grossman is showing you a sin
wave and you have a big zit on your head and nobody wants to fuck you.
Why am I doing this?
Seriously. I’m a mess. I look like and feel
like shit. The only way for me to stay awake and alert enough to communicate is
to drink so much caffeine my head turns into a throb chamber. I’m confused and cranky and I
smell bad. And I can’t wait to go back home and play the game some more because
the more I play it, the better I will get at some supremely useless skills,
which I want because the more uselessly skilled my guys is, the sooner I will
be done playing this stupid game. It’s like I’m giving myself calculus homework
as a way to kill time until I graduate high school.
You guys ever have dreams where you’re back
in high school still? I do every once in a while. Usually in the dream I’m like
“this is weird, I don’t have to do this” and I walk away. I wish I did that
more often in my life. Or also my fake video game life where I always have to
buy a secret key from a guild member so I can file my video game taxes in time
for the reaping. Or whatever.
Anyhow, I'm done. I'm done writing this. I'm done with life. Real and fake. Forget it.
