I’ve had my share of obsessions in the 50-some odd years I’ve been around, only a couple of which were actually damaging. One of the more benign was my obsession with video games, in particular the 10 months or so when I couldn’t go to bed unless I played through certain scenes of Star Wars Battlefront II on the PS2, or, alternatively and somewhat embarassingly, a series of Webkinz games.

It was the only way I seemed to be able to wind down at the end of my day. My kids would finally go to bed, as would my ex, who snored, really really badly. He definitely had (maybe still has?) sleep apnea. You’ve heard the term sawing logs? He chain-sawed them. Deforested entire ecosystems in his sleep. He was noisy, would stop breathing, then start snoring again. I couldn’t take it.

Anyway, for a while, I thought if I went to bed really late I could sleep through the worst of his snoring, which was absurd of course. Without fail I’d end up in the spare room. But I’d play the games anyway, it was my way of zoning out for a while. What was weird and slightly unreasonable was that for a while, I’d play the same things, in the same order, night after night.

We played these games together as a family, too. And Battlefront II was fun because you could pick different scenes, with different soldiers, and play opposing sides. There’d be Non-Playable Characters, or NPCs, running around too, as part of your army of rebels or-gasp-storm troopers. After everyone went to bed, I’d set up solo games. The rebel sniper was my favorite, and I’ve find a good spot and see how many storm troopers I could pick off. Your character would talk now and then. Every once in a while he’d say, “I hear something” and that’s how you know someone is nearby, and hopefully you spot them and shoot them before you get shot. A lot of times I’d be the only soldier left on my side, and I’d pick everyone off until there would be only one soldier left on the other side. And then I’d have to leave my safe spot and go running around this terrain, which was now very quiet as everyone was dead, my man eventually saying “I hear something” “I hear something” over and over and then, you know you’re close. Plus, you can see the little dot on the map, which signifies the enemy. And then, finally, this dude in the video game jumps out from behind a rock or whatever, guns blazing, and hopefully I’d pop him off before he got me. If it was the last game in the series, I could go to bed. If it wasn’t, I’d play the next one, and the next, and the next, sitting alone on the couch in my dark, quiet living room. My eyes would feel like little dried up raisins from staring so intently at the TV. But I’d soldier on.

Then there was Webkinz. My kids got Webkinz for their birthdays or maybe they saved up money to get them. Eventually, I got my own. Webkinz are little stuffed animals that you buy at a physical store and “adopt”, and then go online to make it official. You get an actual certificate. In the game, you can make your critter a little house, visit friends, that kind of thing. Also I’m pretty sure the game teaches little kids how to gamble. There was something called the “wheel of wow” which you HAD to log on to at certain times to spin it and win things. If you missed the time, you were out of luck. Literally. I’d set time limits for computer time for my kids that worked maybe half the time, mostly because of the wheel of wow. My kids would have near-breakdowns because they had to log on. Webkinz also had lots of puzzle type games that were fun and fairly mind-numbing, and that is where I’d spend my time. My favorites were Cash Cow, Cash Cow 2, Home Before Dark, Stardrops, Color Storm, and Smoothie Moves. There were a lot I didn’t quite get into, like Booger Gets an A, but I could get into Tile Towers, the Webkinz version of Mah Jong. Stardrops was another fave. And color storm… drops of color falling out of a moving cloud and you had to organize the falling drops by color or something ridiculous, clearing them away.

There were other games, through the years, of course, Toy Story, Toy Story II, Tony Hawk ProSkater III, Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Star Wars… eventually we got an xbox, and a WII Fit… so there were dancing games and exercise games and at least I wasn’t sitting around for hours on end. I’d play Fruit Ninja until I couldn’t move my arms. Wii Fit Games would make me sore in micro-muscles that seemed like they’d never been used in my entire life. The dance games were fun, and my kids would just sit on the couch watching me, my own little audience. They were teens by then. The hip hop dance game would let you record yourself, and I’d play it back and be like, oh my god is that what I look like? And we’d have a good laugh at my lack of hip hop moves which are indeed a 1/10.

Oh and let’s not forget about MINECRAFT. Minecraft would become a real family affair during COVID. We had a server that everyone would hop on from their respective abodes. For my nephew’s birthday, my kids built this whole world in minecraft complete with this castle and a tower hundreds of feet in the minecraft air, that you could dive off of, into a little pool of water. Trying to get my 70 year old mother to the top of that tower was the real feat. All I could think of was, oh my god is this what it’s like for my kids to explain game mechanics to me? And yes, it is like that. That’s just the circle of life. My kids still play Minecraft now and then. We’ve logged hundreds of hours on that game. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Minecraft and Discord got my family through COVID.

Nowadays, I squeeze in some time here and there for games. Mostly I play a scrabble-like game on my phone, but even that is not much of a time sinker. My kids are PC gamers, and play these complex games that are completely lost on me. Games that take an hour to just set up. My daughter finds me little indie games now and then that she’ll think I like, that are very low-key. Like the one where I ride around in a cart and take photos of weird creatures, and then assemble them into a scrapbook (Penko Park). Or the one called I Love You, Colonel Sanders!, in which you are in cooking school with a young hot anime Colonel Sanders. It’s terrific.