The Secret History of Me and My Video Games: You're Not From Around Here

Video games have always been a part of my life. When I look back, they were present at many seminal moments in my life. This is one of them.

In Grade 11, I had a short career as a Mathlete.

I have always been a wayward student, and completely uninterested in my studies at every single level. I used to think that I was some sort of unappreciated genius to whom school was an exercise in futility. In later years, I would discover that I wasn’t interested in school because I am very lazy, and I possess only an average intelligence.

There was plenty of evidence against my secret identity as an unrecognized genius. Exhibit A: a 52 mark by midterms in Grade 11 Advanced Mathematics. About the time I totally tanked my fractions test, the entire grade completed the University of Waterloo Fermat Mathematics test, a standardized test of sorts up here in Canada. It was quite a shock to everyone in the school that I placed in the top 2% of Canada. Being the little shit that I was, I knew I had it in me.

I was immediately invited to a provincial mathematics event for high school students at Newfoundland’s only university. There, I spent a weekend with the best students in my school and a dozen others in the province. It was filled with math and was supposed to be fun. It wasn’t.

The attendees of this seminar were from a wide range of backgrounds. There were the big-city kids who confirmed every single thing I thought about them at the time. Cases in point: the condescending jazz fan who didn’t like popular music because it was too repetitive and the prissy girl with the coiffed bob who made faces at me when I would duck out for a cigarette. Then there were the kids from the backwaters of Newfoundland.

At this point, I need to tell you a little bit about my province. It is twice the size of the United Kingdom, with only 500,000 residents. There are three cities, which hold about a third of the population. The rest live in small, isolated communities of 10,000 or less -- often much less.

One particular student came from a small island off the south coast of Newfoundland, a place that had two cars and was accessible only by boat -- not that there was a scheduled ferry service or anything. I can’t remember his name, but he was about as much of a hick as you’d like to find. He was a foot taller than everyone, about 300 pounds, cock-eyed, and had a manner of speaking which led the listener believe that he did not have full control of his brain, let alone the fine motor controls that govern speech.

That’s fine, but I will point out that he was one of the top 2% of math students in Canada, so he wasn’t an idiot. Appearances are deceiving.

He also had absolutely zero social skills, which isn’t noteworthy at a weekend retreat for math, but it certainly didn’t help his cause. We had all of one conversation.

He introduced himself and then asked, “Do you like computers?”

“Yes,” I said, a little awkwardly.

“Do you like computer games?”

“Yes, quite a bit actually.”

“Have you ever played Dooooooom?” he asked, with such an emphasis on “Doom,” that it revealed that this was some secret that we shouldn’t be caught talking about.

Also, I’m going to take this moment in the story to tell you that it was 1998. (Also, this was before the events that ended a previous memory that ruined the Doom series for me.)

“Yeah, that’s a good one. I like Doom 2 a lot too.”

“There’s a Doooom 2?!?!”

That’s pretty much where it ended. Later, I would recount this tale to my fellow classmates, who laughed and laughed. I laughed too. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Here we had a nerd, a social reject, a total yokel that could be beneath even us small-town kids.

Of course, immediately afterwards, I felt like a piece of junk. It’s not his fault that he lived on a small island which had limited access to computers. It isn’t his fault if his entire island probably thought computer games were the devil, let alone one in which you fight the legions of Hell. He was just a guy who was making the best of it -- he would reveal that he was extraordinarily smart over the course of the weekend, so he was doing a pretty good job -- and that he was just trying to be friendly.

And I had to go make fun of him behind his back because he liked an old computer game.