Playing With Yourself: Pretendo Entertainment System

[Editor’s note: Community member Daxelman wrote an excellent Monthly Musing on how he applies his imagination to his games when playing alone, which is an eerily similar theme to this one I had been planning to do! Nevertheless, I still want to share my own story, because the ways in which we used our imaginations turned out to be quite different. Read on to see how. — Ashley D.]

As my interest in videogames budded throughout my youth, my desire to share my love with others grew as well. I desperately wanted friends to discuss games and play them with. Unfortunately, I was growing up in the wrong time and place to find any potential second players. The love of videogames did not seem to spread among my peers. Even my two siblings, who were both exposed to gaming as I was, could not care less about them most of the time. The other children’s general opinion on games was that they were for nerds, and therefore uncool.

Unlike many gamers who started young, I did not have the luxury of a group of like minded people who I could share my enthusiasm with. All I had were a bunch of snobby kids who would rather look cool than have fun. Wanting desperately to fit in, especially after being placed in a new school during the third grade, I did my best to hide my interest when not at home. But the more I stayed quiet about them, the more that the games I loved began to take over my thoughts.

No one can be your player two when you start to play the games inside your mind.

It all started innocently enough as a recess game of pretend, not unlike the ones that most normal children play. Each person in my small group of acquaintances were the outcasts of my class. We all had very little in common, besides the fact that we had no real friends, so we eventually agreed to play neutral games in which we could choose our own characters to pretend to be. The roster was always the same: a few Power Rangers, a mother, a kangaroo, and a guy who was always a tyrannosaurus rex, a role that did not end once recess was over.

Meanwhile, I would rotate through Sonic characters. When I was Sonic, I would run circles around everyone the whole time. When I was Tails, I would jump off the top of the playground equipment repeatedly, insisting I was flying. While pretending to be Knuckles, I would climb things and never stop clenching my fists. None of my friends ever knew exactly who I was emulating, but our mismatched teams would always win against the bad guy or make a really strange game of house. For me, this was the next best thing to having a friend to play actual games with. But even though I played these games with others, they did not imagine things the same way as I did. Everyone was pixelized, and beeps and boops filled the air.

The rest of the school day eventually fell victim to my videogame-related daydreams. Scribbled hedgehogs would progressively make their way across math worksheets, ducking under word problems and falling into the bottomless pit on the other side of the paper. My drawings became somewhat popular amongst my schoolmates, but they ultimately had a hand in my falling behind in the studies of the multiplication tables. But I didn’t care too much. As I sat in the hallway studying the table of nines while the rest of the class got a movie, I continued to smile and imagine that my videogame friends were there to comfort me.

My obsession then began to manifest itself in other places. The passing scenery outside of the back window of my mother’s car became the backdrop of many of my imaginary games. My eyes were used in lieu of a controller – looking back and forth would move the character similarly, and a quick look up would make him jump. As I made my character leap over other cars or mailboxes, which depended on whether we were on the highway or a country road, I would count the score on my hands. My imagination dotted the scenery with coins or rings to collect. Each successful jump and item collected counted for one point.

Some people are single players by choice. Whether they are shy about playing games around other people or just enjoy the experience of playing games alone, the single player is a breed that has continued to thrive even as multiplayer experiences seem to reign supreme. Meanwhile, there are others who are single players due to certain circumstances that would shape their preferences. I would fall under this camp, but the ways in which I dealt with the fact that I had no player two make me feel as if it was no big loss. I had entirely too much fun playing all of my favorite games in my head.

While most of my childhood imaginary gaming has long since faded, there are some aspects of it that are still with me. For example, if you see me gazing out of the window of a moving vehicle, you can almost certainly bet that I am seeing some sort of pixelized hero dashing alongside us.