Single Player

A few weeks ago at work I had a guy in his late 30s, maybe, come through my register with a Christmas tree and some various other Christmas items and family trailing behind him. It seemed like any other transaction, changed only by the fact I was being polite to people because of the disturbing sense of Christmas cheer that had worked its way throughout my nervous system over the previous week. I began the slow dragging of items across the laser beams shooting skyward from my checkout counter and made polite hollow conversation with the man who had the tree. I tend to look at every customers shirt because you get to see a lot of shirts during the day and some of them are entertaining, they also don’t require eye contact, it’s just a shirt. This is where the alarm in my small reptilian brain went off, causing an explosion of excitement.

It had just become clear to me that I was standing face to face with another gamer, there was a 15 year age difference, easily, but we were both gamers. The shirt this customer had on under his bulky jacket was a Cavedog Entertainment shirt, who I’m sure most of you will know and for those who don’t a quick Google search will reveal. I told him “Cool shirt, man”, and he looked at me as if I had just said I had a fine selection of rare salami hidden away deep within my ass. He continued to look off guard and finally asked me, “You know what this is?”, I replied, “Yeah, Total Annihilation, I spent a large part of my childhood destroying my friends robot armies.” This made him laugh and we spent a few minutes talking about how we were both just playing WoW these days, like everyone else (I quit again, again again, again shortly after this) and how funny he thought it was this was the first time someone recognized his shirt.

This whole event just made me realize how few times there has been where I’ve actually met real gamers in the real world. Sure, there’s tons of guys I talk to online who are just as or even more hardcore than I am, many of which I consider some of my best friends. There’s whole communities of us on the internet but really, we’re spread pretty thin. Even among the friends I’ve had at various stages in life, many of whom have played games, but not been gamers, it’s not something that was up there with eating and sleeping to them. Looking back it was a really pleasant little surprise to each of us I think, just nice knowing that we weren’t the only ones of our kind. Two pasty, poor complexion sporting mythical beasts running into each other in the wild.