wraggster
November 2nd, 2009, 18:56
This morning a videogame literally forced me to say "I love you", enunciating every syllable perfectly, clearly enough for a computer program to register, before it would allow me to progress.
I don't use that word lightly. Maybe that's why I have all this money and no one to use to make it happy. I'm not going to lie: I had to close my eyes in order for the words to come out. It was that creepy. Eyes closed, lips pressed close to the microphone so as to minimize the already-minimal chance that the girl sleeping in the other bedroom sixty feet away wouldn't hear me and think I was talking to her, I said "I love you" to my Nintendo DS. (In Japanese: "a-i-shi-te-ru".) My god; I shuddered. That was the first god damn time I ever said those words to anyone, real or not. The sickening implications of this — the causes, the effects, the explanations — made me suddenly dizzy.
The girl in the DS then said, "Now say it 999,999 more times". The microphone icon displayed again. Was this a bad dream? Well, certainly, in the game I was playing — Konami Digital Entertainment's Love Plus — it was being presented as a bizarre nightmare of the main character's. I had been living out the simulated life of a high school student for 81 days — ten hours or so in the real world — and the game was just starting to recognize that I had preferred this one girl from the start. The thing is, she was finally starting to like me. The main character realized this, in much grimmer terms, minutes after I saw the figures and crunched the numbers from the comfort of my giant oak bed, here on a beautiful, crisp October morning. Hence the nightmare. The master bedroom in my current palace-like apartment doesn't have a lock. If it did, I would have done like the time the "Eyes on Me" scene came up in Final Fantasy VIII. Back then, I was a college student living in a dormitory, and there was a football game on TV. I could have been decapitated.
I told the game "I love you" one more time, finally feeling like I was doing the second worst and terriblest thing I have ever done in my life. The worst was way too terrible. I have occasion to remember it, maybe, once a week. It took maybe three years after doing the worst thing I ever did in my life to even realize how terrible it was to say such a thing to someone, so unthinkingly. With Love Plus, the guilt came immediately. We can get into that part later, if you'd like.
Thankfully, it let me off the hook at the second "I love you".
http://kotaku.com/5395084/can-videogames-be-our-friends
I don't use that word lightly. Maybe that's why I have all this money and no one to use to make it happy. I'm not going to lie: I had to close my eyes in order for the words to come out. It was that creepy. Eyes closed, lips pressed close to the microphone so as to minimize the already-minimal chance that the girl sleeping in the other bedroom sixty feet away wouldn't hear me and think I was talking to her, I said "I love you" to my Nintendo DS. (In Japanese: "a-i-shi-te-ru".) My god; I shuddered. That was the first god damn time I ever said those words to anyone, real or not. The sickening implications of this — the causes, the effects, the explanations — made me suddenly dizzy.
The girl in the DS then said, "Now say it 999,999 more times". The microphone icon displayed again. Was this a bad dream? Well, certainly, in the game I was playing — Konami Digital Entertainment's Love Plus — it was being presented as a bizarre nightmare of the main character's. I had been living out the simulated life of a high school student for 81 days — ten hours or so in the real world — and the game was just starting to recognize that I had preferred this one girl from the start. The thing is, she was finally starting to like me. The main character realized this, in much grimmer terms, minutes after I saw the figures and crunched the numbers from the comfort of my giant oak bed, here on a beautiful, crisp October morning. Hence the nightmare. The master bedroom in my current palace-like apartment doesn't have a lock. If it did, I would have done like the time the "Eyes on Me" scene came up in Final Fantasy VIII. Back then, I was a college student living in a dormitory, and there was a football game on TV. I could have been decapitated.
I told the game "I love you" one more time, finally feeling like I was doing the second worst and terriblest thing I have ever done in my life. The worst was way too terrible. I have occasion to remember it, maybe, once a week. It took maybe three years after doing the worst thing I ever did in my life to even realize how terrible it was to say such a thing to someone, so unthinkingly. With Love Plus, the guilt came immediately. We can get into that part later, if you'd like.
Thankfully, it let me off the hook at the second "I love you".
http://kotaku.com/5395084/can-videogames-be-our-friends