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How a Stolen PlayStation and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins Taught Me that Gamers Don’t Want Realism
In high school, sometime during the year I finally admitted my distaste for the Beastie Boys, I arrived home one afternoon from school to find the front door of our family’s rented duplex open. The gap was wide enough to register from across the street, wide enough to skew the house’s facade. Like skipping frames. Like a network lag.
I didn’t realize it until that moment, but in every memory of every house I’d ever lived in, the front door is closed. The house we rented on 4th street—we moved because its owner sold it—that house’s front door is sealed. The white house on Ellinwood—we left when the owners increased the monthly rent by a week’s worth of groceries—its door is closed. The apartments in Dogwood, too. And the country house. All of these homes, though temporary they were amid a childhood of raised rents and self-interested landlords, were safe. Doors closed.
The open door that afternoon infected my memory. The open door was a crooked picture frame. It was a hallway rug left dogeared upon itself. The open door was a glitch in the Matrix.
Nobody was supposed to be home that day. It didn’t make sense. (more…)
