Some scant meditations on the nature of travel, the common language of games, and life imitating art written on Friday, July 18th.
I’m sitting in Penn Station and the pedestrian traveler traffic is unusually heavy for 2:30pm on a non-holiday weekend. There’s a strange thing that starts to happen to you if you’ve lived in this town for long enough, particularly if you spend the majority of your time in Manhattan. You start walking like Sonic the damn hedgehog, moving just a little too fast alongside other people moving just a little too fast, dodging left and right, always looking three steps ahead, finding the quickest path. Living in New York is like playing an RPG; you’re always holding down the run button.
I’ve been playing a lot of Shiren the Wanderer. It’s the first time I’ve ever played a “roguelike”. Rogue was new to me about a year ago, a tiny little hole in my gaming history, and one more brutally difficult classic from the days when playing a videogame was akin to learning an entire new language as opposed to an alphabet. Shiren’s a little bit more palatable to a modern gamer than Rogue, its large, expressive sprites and detailed random dungeons make the game’s vicious learning curve more inviting than its inspiration’s forbidding abstraction. Its repetitive play and variable environments make playing it while traveling feel almost farcical. You don’t know exactly how the trip is going to go, so you prepare as much as you can and bring only a select number of support items. I have a bag with me and it’s full of clothing (equipment), this computer (the menu, options?), a bottle of water (hunger is a stat in Shiren), and books (tutorial).
My life’s imitating art, my art’s imitating life, but there’s no in-game corollary for the actual game device. Shiren doesn’t carry a Nintendo DS and it’s a shame because I think it might make the journey a little easier on him. Personally, I’ve never found meeting people on the road an easy endeavor, the usual small talk of where-you-going-and-why makes me want to take a nap more than hold a conversation. You’d think that playing videogames would exacerbate the problem, but I’ve found the DS to be the quickest route to meeting people nowadays. People ask what you’re playing, they ask you if you want to race, have a match, trade pokemon, etc. A guy, about thirty years-old and wearing headphones, is playing Tetris slightly down the hall in the New Jersey Transit waiting area and I’m already hoping he’s on the same train I am so I can ask him if he wants to play. A few weeks back, I spotted a young woman playing Phoenix Wright in the 30th street train station in Philadelphia and I’m still lamenting that I had a ride to catch; I really wanted to ask her where she was in the story, what she thought of the characters.
My 3 o’clock train is going to be boarding soon and I’ve got a long trip ahead of me. One of my earliest gaming memories was the old man in Zelda, offering up a wooden sword for protection. It’s dangerous to go alone. I’m equipped and slowing down, finger off the run button, ready to cross paths. Wish me luck, dear reader.