Something that gaming has taught me about revenge.

Me and my girlfriend were doing the weekly grocery shop at Tesco. She was pushing the trolley, and just as we came to the end of the cereal aisle, some bastard child who was running with a trolley crashed into the side of ours, which kind of pushed it into one of those cardboard display cases they sometimes set up at the end of aisles, completely totalling it and knocking these brunch bar things all over the place.

The kid, who looked about 14, doesn’t stop to help clean it up or say sorry, he just f*cks off towards the fruit and vegetable section.

Some of the people that worked there came along and fixed the display and we continued doing the shopping, when ten minutes or so later, we get to the electronics section and see the child begging and pleading with his mother. He wanted her to buy him Mass Effect 3, but she was examining the back of the case and said “look, it says it that it has strong language and violence”.

Some kids are able to kind of bully their parents into getting their own way, and that seemed to be happening here. So i sidled up beside her and casually picked up a copy of the Silent Hill HD collection.

“You know, the swearing really is very infrequent in Mass Effect 3. Just a few four letter F words. I can count the instances on one of my hands. And the violence isn’t graphic at all.”

The woman thanked me for my input, and explained that she doesn’t know very much about computer games so it was nice to get some help. She then turned to her son and said “are you sure this is the one you want?”.

“Oh, but it does deal with some quite mature themes… such as inter-species sex.”

Her face was a picture. “No way, you can put that one back Oliver. Look, how about The Sims Pets”. He looked like he was going to cry. I put Silent Hill back and turn to leave, and she thanks me once again for my help.

I was initially quite proud of myself for pushing a little kid to the brink of tears in defence of my girlfriend's honour, but later that day when i logged into the BioWare network something dawned on me.

You might be aware of the controversy surrounding the game's ending. A lot of players were angry and vowed to do anything they could to make BioWare fix the ending or hurt the company. I had spent many weeks educating the uneducated as to why the ending wasn't that bad and got into some heated arguments with the "retake mass effect 3-ers". I grew to dislike the people immensely... but by costing BioWare a sale, i actually ended up aiding their cause.

The path of revenge leads to some weird places, so it really is best to just chill out and let things go sometimes. This is just one example of how gaming has made me a better person.