Grounded Video Game Quotes

Where Is Your Sanctuary? Where do you go when you’re hurting? Let’s say it’s been a terrible day at the office. You come home and go — where? To the refrigerator for comfort food like ice cream? To the phone to vent with your most trusted friend? Do you seek escape in novels or movies or video games or pornography? Where do you look for emotional rescue? The Bible tells us that God is our refuge and strength, our help in times of trouble — so much so that we will not fear though the mountains fall into the heart of the sea (Ps. 46:1 – 2). That strikes me as a good place to run. But it’s so easy to forget, so easy for us to run in other directions. Where we go says a lot about who we are. The “high ground” we seek reveals the geography of our values.

Vane, you okay in there?” my mom calls through my door. I jump so hard I crash into my desk and knock off some books and video game cases. If my mom comes in and finds a gorgeous girl in a skimpy dress passed out on my worn gray rug, I’ll be grounded for the rest of eternity. Especially since all I have on at the moment are my Batman boxers. Pretty sure she won’t buy my ghost-guardian angel/freak-of-nature theories either. I stumble toward the door, prepared to barricade it with my dresser if I have to. “I’m fine, Mom,” I say as I grab the first T-shirt I see off my floor and throw it on, along with my gym shorts. “Then what’s all that banging?” Come on, Vane. Think! Inspiration strikes. “I found a date roach in my bed.” “Did you kill it?” My mom sounds farther away, like she jumped back. “I tried to, but now I can’t find it.” I don’t need to worry about my mom offering to help. She’s a big believer in the whole boys should kill all the bugs philosophy. “Well, I won’t distract you, then,” she says, and I can’t help smiling.

He imagined having a home to go to at the end of the day where he could rest. It was like a lump in his throat, the idea of going home. Home. Where his worst worry would be what’s for dinner. Where he’d be able to go to his room and lay on his bed without being afraid of it, where he’d be able to go online or play video games and then do his homework at his own pace, where he’d be safe, where he’d be lov—

Just about every kid in America wished they could be Kyle Keeley. Especially when he zoomed across their TV screens as a flaming squirrel in a holiday commercial for Squirrel Squad Six, the hysterically crazy new Lemoncello video game. Kyle’s friends Akimi Hughes and Sierra Russell were also in that commercial. They thumbed controllers and tried to blast Kyle out of the sky. He dodged every rubber band, coconut custard pie, mud clod, and wadded-up sock ball they flung his way. It was awesome. In the commercial for Mr. Lemoncello’s See Ya, Wouldn’t Want to Be Ya board game, Kyle starred as the yellow pawn. His head became the bubble tip at the top of the playing piece. Kyle’s buddy Miguel Fernandez was the green pawn. Kyle and Miguel slid around the life-size game like hockey pucks. When Miguel landed on the same square as Kyle, that meant Kyle’s pawn had to be bumped back to the starting line. “See ya!” shouted Miguel. “Wouldn’t want to be ya!” Kyle was yanked up off the ground by a hidden cable and hurled backward, soaring above the board. It was also awesome. But Kyle’s absolute favorite starring role was in the commercial for Mr. Lemoncello’s You Seriously Can’t Say That game, where the object was to get your teammates to guess the word on your card without using any of the forbidden words listed on the same card. Akimi, Sierra, Miguel, and the perpetually perky Haley Daley sat on a circular couch and played the guessers. Kyle stood in front of them as the clue giver. “Salsa,” said Kyle. “Nachos!” said Akimi. A buzzer sounded. Akimi’s guess was wrong. Kyle tried again. “Horseradish sauce!” “Something nobody ever eats,” said Haley. Another buzzer. Kyle goofed up and said one of the forbidden words: “Ketchup!

Just about every kid in America wished they could be Kyle Keeley. Especially when he zoomed across their TV screens as a flaming squirrel in a holiday commercial for Squirrel Squad Six, the hysterically crazy new Lemoncello video game. Kyle’s friends Akimi Hughes and Sierra Russell were also in that commercial. They thumbed controllers and tried to blast Kyle out of the sky. He dodged every rubber band, coconut custard pie, mud clod, and wadded-up sock ball they flung his way. It was awesome. In the commercial for Mr. Lemoncello’s See Ya, Wouldn’t Want to Be Ya board game, Kyle starred as the yellow pawn. His head became the bubble tip at the top of the playing piece. Kyle’s buddy Miguel Fernandez was the green pawn. Kyle and Miguel slid around the life-size game like hockey pucks. When Miguel landed on the same square as Kyle, that meant Kyle’s pawn had to be bumped back to the starting line. “See ya!” shouted Miguel. “Wouldn’t want to be ya!” Kyle was yanked up off the ground by a hidden cable and hurled backward, soaring above the board. It was also awesome. But Kyle’s absolute favorite starring role was in the commercial for Mr. Lemoncello’s You Seriously Can’t Say That game, where the object was to get your teammates to guess the word on your card without using any of the forbidden words listed on the same card. Akimi, Sierra, Miguel, and the perpetually perky Haley Daley sat on a circular couch and played the guessers. Kyle stood in front of them as the clue giver. “Salsa,” said Kyle. “Nachos!” said Akimi. A buzzer sounded. Akimi’s guess was wrong. Kyle tried again. “Horseradish sauce!” “Something nobody ever eats,” said Haley. Another buzzer. Kyle goofed up and said one of the forbidden words: “Ketchup!” SPLAT! Fifty gallons of syrupy, goopy tomato sauce slimed him from above. It oozed down his face and dribbled off his ears. Everybody laughed. So Kyle, who loved being the class clown almost as much as he loved playing (and winning) Mr. Lemoncello’s wacky games, went ahead and read the whole list of banned words as quickly as he could. “Mustard-mayonnaise-pickle-relish.” SQUOOSH! He was drenched by buckets of yellow glop, white sludge, and chunky green gunk. The slop slid along his sleeves, trickled into his pants, and puddled on the floor. His four friends busted a gut laughing at Kyle, who was soaked in more “condiments” (the word on his card) than a mile-

There I sat as my dad and the salesperson walked down the aisle. My dad seemed to take some particular interest in the video game that I had just been playing. Maybe interest is too weak of a word, because my dad became engrossed with the demo. I spent the next forty-five minutes crouched behind the boxes across the aisle, waiting for my dad to get bored and to move along. He never moved. Actually, it was pretty impressive how well he did on the game. In that time, he beat three levels and unlocked a few hidden treasures that I never even heard of. I’m starting to wonder if the reason why he’s always telling me to get off the video games is so he can play himself. The salesman urged him a few times to see other set-ups and even try other games, but my dad had none of it. He was like a man possessed on that controller. The whole time, my back was growing sorer from crouching under the shelf and my butt was starting to go numb. Finally, as it came closer to the time he had to leave to pick me up, he graciously thanked the salesman for his time. When they walked away, I burst out from behind the boxes ready to sprint. I needed to beat my dad outside, but the first stride I took sent me collapsing to the ground. Both legs were fully asleep! I shook them like crazy to get the blood flowing back into them. A man walked by with a frightened look on his face, shielding his young son from the sight of me. By the time I got my feet to stop tingling, it was too late. I ran to the front of the store just in time to see my dad get into his car. At that point, I should have cut my losses and admitted to the charade. At least this way, I would have had a ride back. But that’s not how it happened. At that moment, I was sure I could sprint back to the library faster than he could drive there. Three traffic lights stood in between Good Buys and the library. I was counting on a little help from the big Guy upstairs to make those lights red for as long as possible.

I can practically feel my hit points plummeting. The one-heart-remaining video game alarm beeps in my mind. Seconds away from one final “Mamma mia” before Bowser burns the Mushroom Kingdom to the ground.

They said that product management in Silicon Valley was like “flying an F-16 at Mach 2 over a boulder-strewn landscape, two meters off the ground. Plus, if you crash it’s just like a video game at the arcade, and we have lots of quarters.” Cool! The best industries are the ones where you’re flying the F-16, your pocket full of quarters, trying not to crash.

Bill Wilson would never have another drink. For the next thirty-six years, until he died of emphysema in 1971, he would devote himself to founding, building, and spreading Alcoholics Anonymous, until it became the largest, most well-known and successful habit-changing organization in the world. An estimated 2.1 million people seek help from AA each year, and as many as 10 million alcoholics may have achieved sobriety through the group.3.12,3.13 AA doesn’t work for everyone—success rates are difficult to measure, because of participants’ anonymity—but millions credit the program with saving their lives. AA’s foundational credo, the famous twelve steps, have become cultural lodestones incorporated into treatment programs for overeating, gambling, debt, sex, drugs, hoarding, self-mutilation, smoking, video game addictions, emotional dependency, and dozens of other destructive behaviors. The group’s techniques offer, in many respects, one of the most powerful formulas for change. All of which is somewhat unexpected, because AA has almost no grounding in science or most accepted therapeutic methods. Alcoholism, of course, is more than a habit. It’s a physical addiction with psychological and perhaps genetic roots. What’s interesting about AA, however, is that the program doesn’t directly attack many of the psychiatric or biochemical issues that researchers say are often at the core of why alcoholics drink.3.14 In fact, AA’s methods seem to sidestep scientific and medical findings altogether, as well as the types of intervention many psychiatrists say alcoholics really need.1 What AA provides instead is a method for attacking the habits that surround alcohol use.3.15 AA, in essence, is a giant machine for changing habit loops. And though the habits associated with alcoholism are extreme, the lessons AA provides demonstrate how almost any habit—even the most obstinate—can be changed.

A synthesis of metaphysical diference into a “one-all” universality of identical-sameness is epistemologically impossible, because the occurrence of an insurmountable parallax gap makes it such. Tis gap is constituted by “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.”3 Such a one-all synthesis is impossible because what philosophers of epistemology might refer to as the “real world”, as something external to the subject, is always unfnished, unstable, and incomplete. We can only ever obtain a partial knowledge of reality, and therefore no objective truth exists as a fully rendered form. Truth is incomplete and partial, like in an open world video game where a character navigates a world only to discover a doorway to a building that cannot be opened because the programmers did not have the space to create something behind the doors. Some aspect of the Real must remain bracketed.

Once games required an actual place to play them, whether on the chess board or the tennis court. Even wars had battle fields. Now global positioning satellites grid the whole earth and put all of space and time in play. Warfare, they say, now looks like video games. Well don’t kid yourself. War is a video game—for the military entertainment complex. To them it doesn’t matter what happens “on the ground.” The ground—the old-fashioned battlefield itself—is just a necessary externality to the game.

René Magritte, a Belgian surrealist painter, is the author of the popular painting La Trahison des Images (‘The Treachery of Images’), which depicts a pipe. Below the pipe, Magritte wrote the following sentence: ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’). What Magritte seems to be trying to convey is that this in not a pipe, but rather a painting of a pipe; the word ‘pipe’ is not a pipe either. The x on the map does not (usually) refer to a real x on the ground, and even if it does, the x on the map is not the x on the ground. It is a re-presentation. And this re-presentation is not what is re-presented, the signifier is not the signified, and the map is not the territory. …However, if it is possible to affirm within a video game that ‘this is not a video game’, it is because video games are also representations of reality (or experiences of reality as we saw in Chapter 4), and that affirmation allows the game to refer to ‘real life’ as the opposite to a game, a fantasy, or a fiction.

she pointed across the room at the suits hanging a few feet off the ground, “and there are the guards,” she pointed to a squadron of ninja-looking, knife-wielding robots standing in front of the suits.

Finally, after what felt like an hour of flopping and glugging, we jumped our last ramp and tumbled to a stop in another tunnel. I stumbled around on my skis for a couple of seconds until Roger cut them off. “Can we not do the fast way anymore?” I asked before puking all over the ground. Sam and Mark patiently waited for me to empty my stomach of sewer water before pressing forward into the next room. “Whoa,” Mark said as we walked to the middle of the chamber. The walls created a perfect circle around us, and the ceiling was at least 100 feet high. It felt like we were standing inside the world’s biggest Pringles can. Right in front of us was a power-up cube. “Why don’t you take this one, Jesse?” Mark asked. I smiled

the ground, he messed around with electric guitars, video games, propeller-driven airplanes and wooden speedboats. He loved real hardware even more than he loved his computer, and he did love his computer. If he could build it, fix it, refurbish it, or just plain tinker with it, he was happy.