Blog On The Motorway Swan diving off the tongues of crippled giants

Trainee Level Gamer

I love Gaming. Everything about it appeals. The immersive nature, the potential for huge epic storytelling. The culture surrounding it, it all appeals to me. Everything except playing the bloody things.  Unfortunately the ability to play computer games is something that 'purists' consider to be quite an integral part of the culture.

It's always been the same. When I was a kid my friends and I would got to hang out for hours at the Trocadero in London, and they would endlessly pump money into the machines for hours on end, while I inevitably got bored and hankered for a few hours browsing Tower Records while they totted up kill after kill on Mortal Kombat 2.

When everyone started getting consoles I always seemed to have the wrong one. Everyone else got a Game Boy. I got a Lynx. You couldn't even get games for it after about six months.  Eventually I got a SNES, and there were a few games I actually enjoyed for a while.  But then I grew up a bit, and computer games never managed to hold my attention in the way film and music did.

A few years ago I moved in with one of my best friends, a pretty hardcore gamer who would disappear for days at a time whenever a new Resident Evil or Final Fantasy game came out, and I started to hanker again for the ability to do what he did. It always had a sheen of glamour to me, like a secret club I didn't know the password for.

I got an Xbox, but I ended up using it more as a DVD player, the only game I ever completed was Halo, on Easy setting.  I sold it, and used the money to buy a DVD player, on the logic that it wouldn't make so much noise when I was watching a Buffy DVD marathon.  And so I retired from the world of gaming, and whenever my friends started talking about their latest immersive world I would simply glaze over, or try to change the conversation.  Besides, I was approaching 30, surely the time to abandon such childish pursuits.

Then my girlfriend bought me a shiny Xbox 360 for Christmas last year, and over the last 11 months the guilt has been building up in me again. It looks at me with its unblinking green eye as if to say; 'Why don't you ever use me properly? Yes I may make your DVD's look a bit nicer, but that's not what I'm here for and you damn well know it.'  And every time I turned it on up would come my gamerscore, pitifully low.

The came Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe, and I realised that I must be among the world's best informed non-gamers. He made the world of gaming look like everything I knew deep down that it was.  The recent release of Modern Warfare 2 only compounded my outsider feel, with seemingly all my friends, my work colleagues and my twitter feed speaking of nothing else.

And so it's time to make a change. This next year is going to be all about self improvement for me, and in every way that is going to to take me on a road that makes me more adult, more healthy, a more productive member of society.  But if I am going to do everything in one year, I'm also going to try to do this. Become a gamer. A casual gamer perhaps, but I want in.

To that end I have already made my first tentative steps.  I asked my friends to lend me some games that might suit my novice level, and ease me in slowly.  I have started with The Bourne Conspiracy, based on the films (obviously) and over the past week have found myself getting more and more drawn into its world, and more and more capable of negotiating it.  I am still playing on trainee level for now, but I'm getting there.

The old hang ups are still there, of course. I get ridulously impatient when I can't pass an obstacle, or solve a simple puzzle. Last night I got killed repeatedly by the same end of level baddie (curse his knife wielding skills) but eventually I threw him out of an aeroplane, as you do.  I still feel that the Xbox is mocking me from time to time, but now it's for being shit at playing a game, rather than ignoring its tremendous potential. I may fall at the next hurdle again, and it may become nothing more than a noisy DVD player again, cracked open only for occasional games of Scene It, but for now I can count myself as being that one step closer to the ultimate in geek. The Gamer.