BGII

I used to know this guy named John who would play Baldur's Gate II with me via the Internet. He was three years older than I and we lived across the street from each other, but after we were sick of hanging out with each other in real life (snowball fights, snow forts, exploring the woodland near the neighborhood), we started playing computer games online together--BGII, Quake, Half Life, Myth, Heroes of Might and Magic. The funniest part about it was that often we would be on the phone while playing. It was a very special bonding experience. Granted, I wasn't on the phone with him as much as some of my other early "best friends," or even girlfriends, but it was enough to remember it.

I remember he was a ranger throughout BGII. He loved using a bow and arrow. It fit his personality outside of the game perfectly. He also liked to set traps. I think his subclass was Bounty Hunter, which is a type of character that indeed specializes in traps. Well, anyway, I was always a fighter and always got impatient with him setting his damn traps but our personalities in reality generally coincided. He was the cold reason and I was the passionate emotive type. His emotions were usually in brute force, mine softer, passive. Strange how the roles both stayed the same and reversed at the same time via Baldur's Gate II.

What makes me think of that game? Well, I've been playing through it again on my mini-laptop, and it's great. It's definitely a lot easier than I ever remember it being, and the concepts are fresh but come much quicker to me, meaning I understand the game and the game isn't nearly as overwhelming (or, unfortunately, as vivid) as it was when I first got it in high school. I remember that the day the game shipped to me, it was one of the first games I ever pre-ordered, and it happened to arrive on a night that my family had a babysitter. I think my sister Katie was still too young and my little brother was probably born and young and very present at that point so me being the irresponsible little twit I was did not have the capacity to watch myself and two other people. Anyway, the babysitter watched me playing the damn game for a while. I was mesmerized. The improvement over the first game was, and still is, phenomenal, but it's much more subtle than, say, comparing BGII to one of the current Wii or 360 games that features stunning graphics.

I've been playing through BGII and I am on my way to beating it very shortly and I should be reading literature I haven't read, but there's a anti-social-though-still-social aspect to a computer role-playing game, much like a blog which is basically a community in itself and a way to feel okay being alone, because of the lightning-quick reflexes of the internet, and . . . well, anyway, BGII is straight-up fun. There are so many references I didn't get when I was younger, such as the Temple District being composed of every major spirituality that exists in our world today, including the strange grotesque cultist type worship that is absolutely irrational (in the game it's called the Unseeing Eye, and is a Beholder Cult that causes sacrificial patrons to gouge out their eyes in service to their lord).

When I finish the game, if I don't go through with the expansion pack, though I probably will end up doing just that, because in this maximist culture, is there any other way?, I hope that I don't choose to go play Oblivion. I recently discovered all of the graphics modification for the game that can be gotten, that would make the game run on my since-converted Linux computer (the behemoth laptop) quite well. I'm just worried about time, particularly because no one knows how long they're going to be on the earth, and to play a game, be in a virtual reality . . . these things shouldn't be strange to me but they are. I feel like I am the last generation of youth that will have this conflict. All kids younger than me will be born into technology of the computer and Internet age and will only know it. Though the relativity is comforting. Technology will still improve and they'll still have more to learn. But they won't know a time where they didn't have a computer, except when comparing blocks of time in their own, individual lives, when they had yet to learn this 21st century language from scratch, for the first time.