The time my dad let me play a violent video game

I remember the first time I played Wolfenstein 3-D.

I was seven years old, and my bedroom was across from my dad’s office in our condo in North Carolina. One day I walked in and saw him playing what looked like a video game on his work laptop (an ugly, chunky thing with a black-and-white screen that was nevertheless state-of-the-art for the time). Before I had even managed a close look at the actual game, I was floored. It looked great and, even more astoundingly, the graphics were moving fast. That just didn’t happen at the time; the computer games I’d played on our Macintosh SE, while fun, were chunky, slow-moving ordeals that were good for a moment of amusement but not hours of play. If I wanted my mind blown, that was our Nintendo’s department.

“Whoa,” I said, slack-jawed.

“Cool, huh?”

I nodded.

“Come on,” my dad said, getting up from his seat. “Give it a try. Just, er…don’t tell your mom. This game is kind of violent.”

That intrigued me. I sat down.

My dad pressed a button that brought up the title screen, and I immediately understood what he had meant. A man in a prison uniform held a pistol as he leaned against the wall. Around the corner, a Nazi walked in his direction. The prisoner’s face was full of rage and—I thought—just a touch of glee.

My dad pressed “New Game,” and selected the difficulty setting. The screen melted away, bringing my mind with it.

“Why does it look this way?”

“It’s first person,” my dad responded. “That means you’re seeing what the character sees.”

“Whoa.”

I was in a jail cell. A hand holding a gun hovered on screen. A man lay dead on the ground ahead. Pressing the up arrow on the keyboard, I passed over the body and through the cell door. I turned a corner. A Nazi soldier stood ahead.

“Press the enter button,” my dad urged.

I did, three times. The gun fired, three times. The Nazi screamed and bent backward, a spritz of blood gushing up before he fell down dead.

My experience with video games up to that point had been Mario and the Legend of Zelda. Enemies were stomped. They flickered inoffensively after being bopped with pixelated swords. They were never shot.

I was panicked. I was horrified.

I was hooked.

In the end, my dad had to tell me it was time to turn the game off. He had work to do. I don’t think I played a violent game again for three years. But the experience left an indelible mark; for the violence, true, but mostly for a perspective on what games could be that hasn’t been matched since. My appreciation for the game’s technical achievements would only deepen years later, when as an adult I read about the early history of ID Software in the book Masters of DOOM, by David Kushner.

Maybe two or three times in my life I’ve revisited Wolfenstein 3-D. I never play past the first episode. As much as I appreciate the game’s technical achievement for the time (it managed to run blazing fast graphics on machines designed to show static spreadsheets), it gets pretty repetitive. DOOM holds up better.

But I’ll never forget that moment I shared with my dad, when he gave me a brief glimpse into the future.

Why getting better doesn't mean feeling better

Image by Mohamed Hassan, via Pixabay

In the past few months, I’ve gotten back to the gym. Partially to counter-balance all the lazing about I did (and, honestly, still do) mid-quarantine, and partially to counter-balance all the moping about I did mid-quarantine. 

It helps. It really does. 

But it’s amazing to me how much my expectations of the benefits of exercise differ from the reality. My (still substantial) gut tells me that after a few months of regular exercise, I should feel great—supple, limber, full of energy. And, most of fall, hungry to get to the gym as often as possible.

Ha. 

The reality is that I’m tired, cranky, and constantly surprising myself with muscle cramps in new and exotic locations of my body. Sure, I enjoy a post-exercise endorphin rush. But my greatest motivator to exercise is that, when it’s over, I can do pretty much whatever the hell I want guilt-free. (By which I mean drinking one beer and playing video games on the couch; If my thing were strippers and blow, that might be a different story)

This isn’t just a matter of growing old. I wrestled four seasons in high school—two varsity—and felt the same way every damn year. I would begin the pre-season full of pep and vigor; but by post-season I would be convinced that my muscles were deteriorating and I would soon be in a hospital bed, begging my parents not to look at my browser history after I was gone. I compared notes with teammates, several of whom agreed the end was around the corner. At these times, we would begin looking at our coach Mr. W with a certain amount of suspicion, as if he were lacing our egg whites and whey isolate shakes with arsenic.

This attitude buried the truth: that in February we were consistently putting up weights and running sprints that would have seemed impossible in September, or even November. Asthma attacks always plagued me during the first workouts of the school year, but would disappear entirely to the point that I would forget they were a possibility. There were certainly things to criticize about the wrestling team experience—so many “character building” activities for young men are just the blind leading the inexperienced—but Mr. W poisoning us for our inheritance money was not one of them.

The lesson that I appreciate now, that I didn’t appreciate at the time, is this: Being better almost never means being comfortable. Progress is not pleasant in any immediate way, and often the only way to get any satisfaction out of it is to keep your eyes on the horizon, looking to the long-term.

I’d be lying if I said there weren’t days that I choose to zone out to a podcast on the elliptical. But for the most part, my go-to is the rowing machine. Rowing is a good aerobic exercise that also offers some full-body resistance, so I feel like I get all my working out done in a compact 30 minutes. I also like it because it’s a slog. It’s hard to do, and mostly unpleasant. So at the end of a session, I feel accomplished—a little bit tougher, mentally.

Even if there were no other benefits to rowing, I wonder if this toughening is enough all on its own. Life has a way of hitting us with hard times. It doesn’t pay to crumble when they arrive.