press b.

I grew up as part of the video game generation. The original Nintendo came out when I was six. I never had one, but I used to beg my friend Brandi to let me play Duck Hunt. I'd sit really close to the screen to make up for the fact that I was a terrible hunter. She'd long since gotten sick of her video games, but it was like an amusement park for me.

Later, I would play Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat on a Sega system in the basement of a neighbor's basement. Along with Pepsi vs. Coke and NC State vs. Carolina, Nintendo vs. Sega seemed to be an important question of who your friends were in the second grade. I didn't really pick a side. Sega seemed edgier, but Nintendo seemed to have a sort of classic appeal. I guess we know who won.

In college, my roommate brought in her old Super Nintendo, and I finally was given enough time to play as many video games as I wanted. This culminated in an eight hour Saturday session of Super Mario Brothers, after which I never picked it up again.

I was at a friend of Josh's with a bunch of other semi-strangers shortly after Guitar Hero came out. We sat around and watched two guys play. Then all of the guys went outside to smoke cigarettes, leaving me and another girl there. We both looked around furtively before agreeing to try the game. We played a few songs on the Easy level before deciding we'd done enough.

Video games are fun, but I always feel sort of empty after playing. Yes, that was fun, and I improved as I went along, but at the end, I don't feel like I've done anything valuable. None of these new skills seem to translate to my life. I like watching people who are good at video games, both for the action and for the often surreal world on the screen. It's easier to appreciate all the little touches of video games when you don't have to worry about being shot. I can't handle high-stress games. I can't handle anything where you can be attacked from behind, because panic prevents me from being able to turn around effectively, and so by the time I finally do see what's draining my life force, I'm pretty much dead.

I'm always self-conscious about playing video games in front of other people, since everyone else seems to be much more experienced at them. The controllers feel very alien in my hand. People might be shouting "Press B! Press B!" until I cry out "WHICH BUTTON IS B?" but by then I'm already dead. I know that the reason that the others are so good and I'm so bad is because they've been pushing B for years, but I still feel a little stupid. So I don't really play, and I don't really feel like I'm missing much.

My boss bought the office a Wii last year. People played Guitar Hero (or was it Rock Band?) and the Wii Sports games that came with the system. Everyone designed a little Mii character, even people who weren't really gamers. And then someone brought in Mario Kart, and all the other games started gathering dust.

I like race games okay. They're not like shoot-em-ups, where you can die if you can't find B in time. They've got the action and adventure in them, without the stress of imminent death. I mean, you can still come in last, but that's not so bad.

So I played sometimes with the other guys. At the beginning, we were all sort of on the same level, because the Wii controller is so different from previous controls. You just hold the thing in mid-air and turn it like a steering wheel, as opposed to using a thumb pad or arrow keys. I still wasn't good; I had a tendency to oversteer and would end up driving wildly back and forth across the road and frequently off the track completely.

After a while, the other players started leaving me in the dust. Aside from more general gaming experience, they had Wiis at home and played there, too. They started making the game more difficult by increasing the speed of the cars and the aggressiveness of the computer players. It stopped being fun, and so I stopped playing. There was a core group of people who played in the late afternoon who were just fantastic. They soon started coming up with ways to challenge themselves. They picked vehicles which were clunky and hard to steer. They gave the computer players a full lap head start. Even though they've pretty much "beat" the game, they still play to beat each other and post new top scores. For some reason, Mario Kart is a game which does not get boring.

We used to play board games at lunch, but then the people who owned all the board games left the company. So we started playing Mario Kart at lunch. A couple of the guys who play with us are pretty good, though not in the same class as the afternoon crowd. But then there is me and another guy, two people who have never owned a video game system in their lives. We were bad compared to the people we play with, and just plain terrible compared to the other guys. We drove off-road, fell off bridges, got turned around and drove the wrong way for a while. Fifth place was a strong finish.

Lately, though, something odd has been happening: I've been getting better. I've been finishing in the top three after a series of eight or ten races. We're not using the easy settings, either. Is this what it's like to be good at a video game?

Even though I'm not decent at exactly one video game, I still don't see how it has translated to my life at all. I'd like to throw turtle shells at other commuters on the interstate, but I'd probably be arrested. Still, I think it would be nice to be at a party sometime, where everyone was playing Mario Kart on the Wii, and I could show them up. Hey, I don't suck! It would almost be an inspirational story if it wasn't about a stupid video game.