Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Difficulties!

I am wandering through the passages of Rapture, pistol drawn. I am watching for any sudden movement, any sign that I need to mash buttons swiftly to draw my wrench and give a few splicers the one-two punch to save the bullets I’d waste firing at air as they leap and scream at me. I listen carefully for their footfalls, listen to the whale-song and the drip, the creak of steel, the beating heart and collapsing lungs of the city at the bottom of the ocean. Suddenly the sound crackles, then goes dead. I am deaf in my right ear.

I reach up and grab my headphone, gently adjusting the wire, listening to sound crackle in and out of my ear, and the game falls away. I am back in my parent’s house, biting my lip and carefully engineering my escape to somewhere else. I am learning how to hear again. I am fixing my broken headphones blindly, without looking away from the screen. The game is still on so that I have a constant stream of sound informing me of my progress. I am doing this because the alternative is to send my headphones away and be without them, to rely on speakers and ear-bud headphones to immerse myself in Rapture. Not acceptable. Between the booming aerobics music and the startlingly loud late night television my parents insist on blasting through the house each evening it’s hard to drown out enough sound to truly feel like I’ve gotten away without big cup headphones.

I should also mention that I’m playing Bioshock on a Dell Inspiron 8300, which is a lot like using cheesecloth to remove dense solids from liquid substrate. It takes more effort than it needs to, it’s slow and uneven and makes you sore and tense. Moving is like moving through water, and occasionally I’ll miss out on things that may or may not have been important because of my computer’s lurching speed.

But despite all these problems, I am the happiest I’ve been in almost a year. For the first time since graduation I am not depressed. Life is alright at the bottom of the sea. I’m enduring these circumstances not because I enjoy them thoroughly but because the experience is worth this protracted price of admission. They’re the incredibly difficult puzzles that make the humor of Monkey Island so worthwhile, the Hard Mode objectives in Thief that let me unlock those little nuggets of story and feel like I’m really a rogue stalking the galleries and ruins of a steampunk city.

Enduring them doesn’t refine the experience per sec, but it characterizes it. It adds a layer of struggle, a layer of actual challenge to the entire thing. Or so I tell myself. But the reality is that this specific set of difficulties is a combination of my poverty and my stubbornness. Were I less headstrong and less poor I’d fix the whole set of problems by buying a new computer and a pair of working headphones. But as it stands I enjoy myself more than I ever had, because there’s something wonderful in front of me, even if it is a challenge to hold it.

This is the same struggle that has always been reflected in my personal relationships. I seem to avoid easy, healthy relationships the way most people avoid snakes. I’ll look at them, consider them, and then move on without touching them. Sometimes, almost instinctively, I’ll go to great lengths to avoid them. I’ve never had a relationship that could be defined as overly healthy, and I’ve never thought my relationships were particularly odd at the time. The fact that my friends can’t relate to offhand comments like “Well, she means well, but her anxiety issues kind of force her into making excuses and keeping her from experimenting in bed” or “Sometimes she stops breathing at night and I just have to hold her until she remembers how. It’s kinda scary” never really bothered me.

I’ve never felt like my relationships were particularly odd, and I’ve never found them unfulfilling (aside from one particularly dysfunctional one with someone who was largely incapable of intimacy and strung out on meds for disorders she may or may not actually have). Anything important in life, after all, is worth busting your ass over. If you turn tail when things get difficult and settle into an easier pattern then you don’t deserve any sort of reward. It’s that simple.

And while it is difficult the reward, the story, is that much better, that much more personal. No one will ever have the relationship that you had. No one else will hold her in the summer tundra to keep her from freezing, no one else will stand with their arms around her, stripped to their bottom layer in a Minnesota bus stop in mid November, trying to get her feet to stop burning with cold. No one else will ever have to deal with these things. No one else will ever have done what you’ve done for these simple, unclear goals. No one else will understand what the two of you have.

This is a great deal more personal than most of my essays. Perhaps it’s the depression. Perhaps it’s the subject matter. It’s tough to get much more personal than personal experiences, and no personal experience seems more shameful and awkward to share than stories of romances gone awry and the problems that dot your daily life, the obstacles of your routine. When everything goes wrong you come to see shit going wrong as a sign that you’re doing something right, that you’re setting yourself up for a good fight. Maybe that’s why I haven’t quit yet.

See I have atrocious luck with tech. Beyond my continued relationship with my incredibly unreliable headphones I’ve had a lot of piss-poor experiences with my various gaming systems. My old Dell, for example, once lost a hard drive containing a veritable shit-ton of saved game information and almost half a decade of my writing. I still have it on my book shelf, awaiting the day I can spare the cash to get the data restored. It also lost a video card when I once left Dawn of War running for five hours while I was out and about. Shockingly the card seemed to have developed some sort of heat issues after that and needed to be replaced.

More recently my home-made PC has suffered no fewer than four catastrophic failures. I’ve lost my power supply, my video card and my motherboard. I’ve lost two of those three things twice and have now, after finally getting the balance right, corrected the issues with my PC. Our relationship has been fine since around May at this point, but there was a solid eight month period where my computer was failing just about every other month. I have, consequently, learned quite a bit her hardware and hardware issues in general. I’ve also learned a lot about various company’s warranties (word of advice: Mushkin and BFG are both excellent companies with marvelous warranties and incredible customer service staff. ASUS is okay).

And this even extends to hardware I buy explicitly so it will work without stress. I’ve had two full-failures on my X-Box, a box that I purchased second-hand that had already endured one red-ring. I once induced a red-ring so I could have the system repaired and, eventually, purchased a new post-red-ring core system so that I could reliably play console games following one last post-warranty failure that may or may not be tied to the GPU. I still have the old box stored in its original packaging and, as with the hard drive, would like to have it repaired at some point. Then there’s my Wii which, while mostly good, no longer has a working controller-charger. The controllers hold, at best, a brief charge and then have to be switched out. The end result is that I’m constantly hot-swapping controllers whenever I want to play a game.

I put up with a lot of bullshit for my fun. I treat the most basic things in life as a labor of love. And it’s a fine way to be, I think, because it teaches you a lot about what you’re willing to deal with for what you want. Having to work for the most basic things is a great way to learn more about yourself. Stacking boxes on loading docks in the Pacific Northwest because someone thought rich people deserved a bigger take-home, for example, teaches you quite a bit about what you’re willing to do to be free (like beg your parents to cover your rent while you try to scare up some work and learn that stacking boxes on loading docks is both depressing, back breaking, and pays terribly). Wrapping yourself in a plastic sheet to keep from freezing to death in the woods in the midst of a New England winter teaches you about how frail your life really is, and how close to death we all truly are on a daily basis.

One of my favorite one of these “hero stories,” where I press myself into completely unnecessary adversity, is about my experiences with Baldur’s Gate 2. Baldur’s Gate 2 featured a number of romances, most of which were easily accomplished. Play through the game, choose the right dialogue responses and you’ll get a quick bit of dialogue and a post-coital discussion set in the often incredibly dirty world of Forgotten Realms. The shit those drow get up to, man. But scripting errors plagued the Jahiera romance. They were so severe that people created home-brew patches and mapped variables that you needed to set to complete her romance. People wrote guides on how to trick the game clock to insure that the scripting worked as intended. I spent around two years working on “getting” Jahiera’s romance, learning the back-end language of the game and letting the game idle to trigger variables. By the time I finally finished it I was in college, and I’d actually made my first girlfriend jealous with my efforts. But it was done, and even now I barely remember the experience itself. I just remember the challenge.

The experience that made think of writing this essay happened more recently. While playing through the expansions for Fallout 3 I hit a huge hurdle in Mothership Zeta. See, the game would shift objectives that I hadn’t completed to complete at irregular intervals during a certain period of time in the game. This would make the quest unplayable and, given the heavy scripting of Mothership Zeta, the level itself inescapable. I didn’t catch this fact until I’d already sunk hours and hours into playing the game, and when I first discovered it it came just before a particularly devastating real-world series of events centered around a friend’s wedding which has left me about as bad off as I’ve been during the last decade. Suffice it to say I wasn’t too excited to go back to Mothership Zeta and deal with all this bullshit, however much I love Fallout 3.

This morning I sat down and worked around the problem. It involved setting up save files. Lots and lots of save files, hoping that the mystical energy that caused the scripting to malfunction wouldn’t take hold until I’d accomplished some new goals. It involved checking my objectives screen to make sure that the game hadn’t had a scripting error every time I investigated a crate or killed an enemy and then quick-saving immediately to keep myself from having to deal with that particular issue again. I spent almost five hours on thirty minutes of game-play this way until finally I reached the death ray room, overloaded the generators and unlocked the next area of the game where, in theory, the bug will no longer persist.

I worked on solving a problem that I’d been unable to approach for months at this point. I came back and took the game by the horns and dragged it to the ground, and now I’m actually excited, for the first time in a while, to see this latest bit of DLC to the finish. I’m excited to try and be a little less sad in my life in general. I’m excited to maybe drink a little less and write a little more. I’m excited to bike around town. And I’m excited to try my next challenge, to work around the technical bars which are keeping me from my next gaming experience.

Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. Maybe I have some sort of complex that makes me make my life harder than it needs to be. Maybe I need to learn to quit more easily, to leave things and move on. But that’s not really who I am. I’ll keep my broken headphones, my cracked heart, and my sputtering Frankenstein computer. I’ll keep my aging car and burn-scarred desk. And I’ll keep trying, desperately, to get past that fucking boat sequence in Call of Cthulhu, even if I have to download a save file to do it.