I approach this topic of game play with a sense of trepidation. Not because of the subject matter of some of these—though my wife is now questioning what I my PhD will be in—but because I have never been good at playing games. When my sons were young, I remember playing Tekken—a fighting game– with them on the Play Station. I always chose to be one of the scantily clothed, buxom babe characters in the game; they always beat me.

I first tried Stick Shift. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing—and I drive a stick shift. So, I got wrapped up in the guy’s goofy face and wasn’t paying attention to anything else, at first. Then I noticed that he was dozing off. I figured out how to move the mouse to shift, but the first time I tried I stalled the car. I got it going again and was able to shift. I found moving the mouse in different directions moves the dude’s head back and forth. I found the up and down motion on the stick shift—something I’m not used to doing in my real car. I got it into 5th gear and then the damn police rolled up behind me.

So, I’m sitting there—stopped by the cops. Now, there’s a timer on the screen, and every time I click the mouse my character blows a kiss to the officers—and another 10 minutes gets added to the timer. I exited the game, restarted it and it remembers the place I left off with the timer still counting down.

So, I’m at a point where I just don’t understand. I just don’t get it. Perhaps, this is my issue with playing games is that I either always lose, get killed, can’t get past a certain stage, or can’t figure the damn thing out. Reading Aden’s Post, I’m not sure what to make of the statement that “games prepare us for participation in a capitalist system.” Perhaps, I’m just playing the wrong games.