Confessions of a gamer
gaming computers, and giant adult-sized sippy cup of Mountain Dew, who’d agree.
According to TechCrunch, however, 2.5 billion people play games on their phones, 51 per cent of them women and girls.
In 2019, mobile gaming became a US$68.5 billion (NZ$112.3b) business, accounting for more than 33 per cent of all mobile app downloads – even more than music apps. (That number went up by 50 per cent during lockdown, too, according to some reports).
Gaming creeps up on you. You have to be vigilant. I once lost a year of my life to GoldenEye for N64, so I won’t be caught napping.
With its clunky characters and laggy, stilted game play, it’s hard to imagine why it’s still illegal to sell the 1997 game to minors in Germany, or that it would inspire the kind of devotion it does in vintage game nerds.
But it was the first first-person-shooter game I played and the fact you could skip the story to just run around Moscow with a Kalashnikov taking pot shots at your mates had me hooked – like playing tag, except lying down in your pyjamas with a massive hangover, eating tatter tots.
You also got to be Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond, parachute into Russian military installations, drive tanks through crowded cities, and blow open escape hatches on high-speed trains with laserwatch-a-me-bobs.
If you could handle all that and a martini – shaken, not stirred – too, you got to pash a pixelated Izabella Scorupco before being unceremoniously flicked back to level 1.
Anyway, at the time I was living in a room above a pub in London where I did long, sweaty split shifts in the kitchen.
Naturally, I spent the time between my split shifts writing my novel that would go on to become a No 1 bestseller, so I never had to work again . . .
Oh no, wait, that’s right. I didn’t do any of that. I played GoldenEye until I was almost blind instead.
When I wasn’t playing, I was thinking about playing, planning a time to play, or replaying the stuff I’d played already in my head.
I played so much I got the jitters. Standing at the sink, scrubbing the day’s pans, I’d get a creeping sense of someone sneaking up behind me, piano-wire garotte or machete at the ready – two ways I seem to recall your character could buy it in the game.
It came to a head one day when I was late to work, despite it being in the room next door.
My boss poked her head in to find me furiously bashing buttons and swearing at the screen.
I was so close, just one more second and the floor would drop away and I could level up . . . one second and I’d beat the machine . . . ‘‘Shift’s starting,’’ she said.
‘‘F... off!’’ I replied, shouted actually, at the person who not only paid me, but put a roof over my head. Luckily, my boss cut me some slack. But the shine came off GoldenEye that day. Thanks for nothing, Pierce. Let that be a lesson to you about the evils of video games!
I’d go into more detail, but I just got a notification from Klondike that my logs have been milled, my Sim has a date tonight and Noobkiller69 – who kicked my butt last night – is back on Paper.oi 2.