Not A Typical Post ~ Jason Takes Comedy Seriously

Hey fans,

I'm going to be taking a break over the holidays, so unless I feel the urge there won't be much content on here until some time in January.

For one of my final assignments, I had to write a personal essay. I'm going to post it here because, frankly, I'm proud of it and I hope it's at least a little bit funny.

Enjoy!

Life is a Roll of Quarters

Have you ever seen a Nintendo 64 controller? More importantly, have you ever held one? The Nintendo 64 was a video game console that came out in 1996. It sold over 33 million units worldwide and has what many consider to be the worst controller in modern gaming history. It’s shaped like a letter “M” – with three prongs touting the various buttons required to play the game.

I was five years old and sitting in the back seat of my parents’ forest green Ford Explorer holding onto the large box on my lap. I remember its bright yellow and red colour scheme, and I remember reading every word on the box over and over for the entire hour-long drive home. My dad set it up on the small TV in the basement once we got home and I played my very first video game. Endorphins and dopamine flooded my central nervous system as the motion and colour overloaded my impressionable senses. Mario Kart 64 was my first taste of this new high – the one the dealer gives you for free. The only problem was the controller. My tiny hands couldn’t support the controller the way it was meant to be held, so I placed it on the ground and gripped the joystick with a clawed hand, the way my Pac-Man-playing proto-nerd ancestors had before me. I was adapting. Jurassic Park had been out for three years, and though I didn’t know it, life was finding a way.

We drove to B.C. for a family trip when I was six. As we neared the majestic Rockies, my dad would periodically make a comment like, “Look out the window, Jas. Quite something, huh?” I would reply by peeling my attention off my Game Boy’s screen for as little time as my young brain would allow before returning to Ash’s adventures in Pokémon Blue. Here was Ash, a 10-year-old boy who decided he was going to be the very best, the best there ever was. He caught and trained the best Pokémon. He always defeated his snobby rival, Gary. He even brought down a national crime syndicate. When I was 10, what sort of globetrotting adventure would I set out on? I had four whole years to plan and decide what I would be the world champion at.

Junior high was not a fun time in my life. I was a late bloomer and no kid who’s five feet tall with the voice of an Italian soprano is king of the school. My parents were very supportive and didn’t resort to helicopter parenting, but they gave me the advice to try to find common ground with the lead bully, a Biff Tannen-type named B.J. I don’t even remember how it came up but B.J. and I shared an affinity for a relatively obscure Xbox game called Ninja Gaiden. It’s not like the clouds parted, inspirational music kicked on, and we strolled off into best-friendship, but knowing about a video game had saved me from relentless bullying.

I’d started identifying myself as a gamer since middle school. Video games still carry a stigma of being a thing that only losers do. But video games have given me more powerful emotional reactions than any other medium. I laughed out loud when the alien doctor Mordin Solus revealed he had played the lead in an interspecies production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” in Mass Effect. I sat awestruck when Andrew Ryan told me “a man chooses; a slave obeys” in BioShock. And I choked back tears when John Marston took a final stand against the evil that had ruined his life in Red Dead Redemption. I’ve sat by myself in front of the TV for an entire weekend, drawn into some grand adventure. I’ve sat with 11 of my friends; bathed in the glow of 12 TVs, drenched in the sweat of an unventilated basement, rank with the fumes of Monster energy drinks.

I spent a free period in high school playing Tetris on my Nintendo DS, as was my custom, when the thought struck me. When I do things right, they blink and disappear but when I make a mistake and don’t act to rectify it quickly, it leads to a chain reaction of more and more problems. People, like Tetris are messy and sometimes your mistakes lead to unwinnable situations.

I don’t experience empathy very easily. Feeling what other people feel does not come naturally to me. I’ve read books, watched movies, and lived my life with an understanding that people are capable of experiencing a spectrum of emotions that I could observe, but not necessarily share in. There’s this thing I do when I meet someone new. In many video games, characters’ abilities are determined by their attributes – things like strength, intelligence, charisma, and wisdom are assigned a numerical value. These values allow you to compare what different characters are capable of accomplishing. When I meet someone for the first time, I break them down in terms of these attributes in my head. Some people score very high in intelligence, but low in charisma. Others start with a high score in strength but get low points in wisdom. When I work out, study, or practice something, I visualize the experience points I would be gaining to a particular stat. This has become so habitual that I don’t notice it anymore unless I stop to think about it.

My mom has told me she always thought video games were just part of a phase I was going through. She never thought that her decision to buy Mario Kart 64 all those years ago would become such a fundamental part of my worldview. Some people read great authors and the great questions they pose. Others watch great cinema and try to understand the world through a camera’s lens. Everyone wants to understand how the world works, what the rules are. I’m content to keep dropping quarters into my life to see what’s next.