“Gamer Bros.”
I feel I am a bit of an oddity, not just because I am incredibly handsome (bald is beautiful) but because I seem to do things in anything but a traditional manner. An eye-opening example is my history with and current use of... video games. You thought I was going to say drugs there, didn’t you? Geez people, get your mind out of the gutter!
To provide a little context, I am 40 years old. Yes, video games did exist when I was growing up! My parents purchased a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for my older brother and me when we were little hellraisers—that age gap after the cute toddler years but before the awkward pre-teens. Anyhow, we enjoyed the NES as often as we were allowed to play. Fortunately, or unfortunately, all depending on your perspective, we lived in a time when playing outside was much more exciting than staying inside and playing video games. So, we would only play video games here and there. I remember one of my favorite games was named “Rygar.” It's a quaint little game where a Viking in his underwear throws his magic shield at his opponents. It was brutally difficult and became a cult classic! Anyhow, as I grew older and more video game systems were released, I played them less and less. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I almost never picked up “the sticks”—that’s video game slang for the hand-held controllers to all of you boomers out there.
As I grew older, life became more complicated between my job and my family at home, my gaming days were put on, ahem, pause. As my time on this planet carried on, gaming took a back seat to all the obligations that come with being an adult. I did many different things, but owning video games was never one of them. At times, I would sit and ponder what all the video game fuss was about, since I had lost touch with the gaming world. My daughter never even had an interest in video games, cementing my place as a “non-gamer” parent. We never bought them for her, and she never asked for them. It had seemed as if the video game bug had skipped my wife, daughter, and me altogether.
Both of my brothers, one older and one younger, have always had a deep love and appreciation for video games. They advanced their gaming skills and gaming systems as the years passed. I wondered why I “missed the boat.” Video games had always had a negative connotation in my mind, but why? I decided to give this blossoming idea a little more thought.
I was always under the impression that video games were a waste of time with no benefits. I thought that people just played video games to relax, like bingeing mindless television shows. I admit that I was completely ignorant of the topic, and all my thoughts on video games up to this point were simply assumptions I made from my own biases. I quickly began to realize how foolish my way of thinking was. The more I learned about how gaming has advanced so much in so many ways, the more impressed and enamored I became. They went from up, down, left, right, A, B, to wildly immersive fantasy worlds. They are no longer only an individual experience; games have become a way to interact with my best friends, or a way to begin new relationships with other gamers who may live down the street or, amazingly, thousands of miles away—I don’t even need to leave my couch in Pittsburgh to play virtual table tennis with a competitor in Finland!
One day I was listening to “The Joe Rogan Experience” (Episode #2223). Mr. Rogan and his guest Elon Musk discussed a surprising study: surgeons who play video games make fewer errors and work faster. I dug deeper and found a 2004 NBC news article by Verena Dobnik, “Surgeons show video games help” that really made me scratch that beautiful bald head of mine: Dr. James Rosser stated, “I use the same hand-eye coordination to play video games as I use for surgery.” The article went on to read that laparoscopic surgeons who regularly played video games performed 37% fewer errors in surgery and completed their surgery 27% faster!
Even after I educated myself about the boatload of beneficial aspects of gaming, I still did not seem to care enough to purchase a system. Then, five years ago, I hit a little proverbial bump in the road. Multiple open-heart surgeries and two months in a coma, which left me bedridden for what felt like an eternity. Then a miracle happened: that little angel brother of mine gave me his old Xbox because he bought himself a new PlayStation 5. Regardless, it was the perfect storm in the perfect sequence of events. So, at that time, I was 35 years old and hitting that power button for the first time in ages. What a fool I had been all these years!
Today, it has been five years since I first turned that Xbox on. In the meantime, not only did I beat several mind-bending and insanely fun games, but I also purchased the newest version of the Xbox, Xbox Series S, with extra storage! My brothers and I play together several times a week. It has become the most consistent and fun way we keep in touch. We joke, laugh, and catch up while talking through our headsets, all while living in different cities and states. I’m elated that I fell in love with video games, and things turned out the way they did. Not only did they open a world of wonder, but they also brought me closer to my brothers. WIN-WIN!
By: A.L. Blackheart
