Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
"KEVIN. WHY DO YOU EVEN LIKE VIDEO GAMES. YOU ARE SO BAD AT THEM.” That's what a friend asked Kevin Simpson, the author of this piece, as he fumbled through one of that friend's favorite games. It's unclear whether or not Simpson's brain injury was diagnosed before or after this encounter, but he'd been feeling the injury's effects on functions like logic, time and direction for a while -- both in his gaming and his life.
Simpson recently shared his experiences as a gamer with a frontal lobe disorder and, much like the IGN article about gaming while color blind that I shared earlier this month, it's a very interesting read if you're looking for a different perspective on worlds and experiences many of us take for granted. He writes:
So, I’m bad at most video games. How could I not be? I’ve gotten lost in my own neighborhood, three decades into living in it. I still enjoy exploration, I like to feel like I’m making progress, and I may never tire of making things move on a screen by pressing buttons and tilting control sticks. My broken brain literally can’t comprehend the passing of time, so I have infinite patience for something I’m enjoying. But game designers don’t have infinite patience for me. I’ve been told that if I was a Real Gamer, I wouldn’t need a map. Even if I cared about being a Real Gamer, even if given a map, I won’t know what to do with it. There was a brief but glorious trend of control schemes with buttons dedicated to drawing a magical glowing line or arrow on the ground, always pointing the right way. I’d press that button every five seconds. The arrow would often do a U-turn right in front of me. I don’t suffer from motion sickness, but if first-person games took their graphical conceit even slightly more literally, I’d probably barf from my main characters rolling their eyes.
Visit Simpson's blog to read the whole piece for yourself.
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