Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

Gaming By Proxy

I play a large amount of video games every year. After a while however, I can come to feel jaded with game. I have been gaming for so many years that I rarely get that "shiny new" feeling when I play a video game. Very few games do something that is truly new and innovative and with having gamed so much, I have seen so many of the tricks there are out there. Lately, I have been gaming by proxy.

I have really been enjoying see games through the eyes of friends and family that have never really had deep experiences with gaming before. The current target of this is my mother. While she grew up with me gaming in the household, she never really played many herself. And the game she did play were mostly throwaway games. When I moved out, I left my extra PS2 with her and she started buying games that she though she might like. One problem she had was the same problem many people new to gaming have. She thought "if the box art looks good, the game is probably good, right?"

Most of the gaming experiences my mother has had involve movie tie-in games. She has played games like some Nightmare Before Christmas games, some Shrek games, a Wall-E game. She would become frustrated with games since first of all she has never really worked on her gaming twitch reflexes and secondly, movie tie in games are mostly garbage that are overly punishing. Since she is a pretty new gamer, she has a tendency t0 panic in games. When a monsters come at her, while any average gamer would shrug it off, she panics. This causes many additional deaths. She also is not that good at jumping and platforming.

About six months ago, she picked herself up a Wii and WiiFit Plus. When she asked me if there were any good Wii games out there, I had to give her the unfortunate news that 99% of Wii games are pure garbage and the few that are of quality are mainly the first party games like Mario and Zelda and involve a good deal of fighting and platforming. She recently picked up a Nancy Drew game and a game that is a puzzle mystery on the Titanic and has been enjoying both of those. It warms my heart to say this, but her genre of choice is essentially point and click adventure games. Unfortunately, not many ones of quality exist on the Wii. I would get her to play some of the Telltale games on the Wii but she would not enjoy Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People or the Sam and Max games. I might try to talk her into getting the Tales of Monkey Island from Wiiware.

There is one game of substance I did get her to start playing recently. After hearing high praises about it on the Game of the Year Giant Bomb podcast, I purchased Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for her. My mother loves horror movies. She has probably watched more horror movies than total movies I have watched. She uses Netflix and was at one point getting 8+ movies a week. To this day, I think she has over 15,000 movies rated on Netflix (whereas I am at around 2000). One problem for her was most horror movies do not really scare her anymore. Just as very few video games 'wow' me every year, very very few horror movies ever scare her.

I figured Silent Hill: Shattered Memories would be a perfect game for her because it had deep story, fun puzzles and there was no combat. Unlike previous Silent Hill games where you are given a gun and often have to shoot enemies, in this one you just ran away from them. At this point, she has had the game for about a week and a half and has not progressed more than about a half hour in the game. She has not even reached the point where she can save her game for the first time. She has played the game about six different times now, but she says every time she starts playing she is completely paralyzed with fear. She talks about how this is a kind of terror she has never felt from a horror movie and after about a half hour she is so completely terrified that she just turns the game off. She goes back to the game almost every day and every day progresses maybe five minutes deeper into the game but still has not reached the point where she can save (which is only a little more than a half hour into the game).

Talking to her on the phone about the games she has been playing is one of my new favorite things. I know not everyone enjoys listening to the the stories of other people playing video games (but if that is the case, why are you reading a blog? ) but I am an often jaded gamer and she is still so new to gaming. Hearing her talk about the games with such passion and vigor helps me remember a time when it was all new to me.