[transmission from... Tyler Sonnichsen]

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I have to make a confession. No, it’s not that I’ve been hiding a deep, dark secret about my past, and its not that I treasure that moment rubbing myself against any given attractive girl as I get up from my seat on the Metro, and it’s not that there’s a sad, sad, element of truth to that last statement. It has to do with video games. As far as many people within my age and demographic go, I’m fairly ambivalent towards them. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I do enjoy and admire them. Being a blood relative of TDC co-founder Alex Kain, it is a shocking anomaly that I have not pursued a life mission that is directly correlated to video games. He is a whiz when it comes to computer games, both the creative end and the consumer end. I was the kid who always came in fourth and got ranked “most cowardly” playing GoldenEye.

Fast forward eight years. We’ve got X-Box 360 and PSPs and all that, and I’m still aching for my Game Boy. I’ve always been a fan of the Sierra games, particularly King’s Quest VI and Quest for Glory IV (Alex having introduced me to the latter). But role-playing games, especially the Final Fantasy franchise, have never been my cup of tea. Obviously, music is my resident obsession, though I have been through plenty of kicks with certain games, including Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Now, Tony Hawk’s video game franchise is a good example of the link between video games and music. I enjoyed the selections by the likes of Goldfinger and Adolescents that permeated the virtual skate-parks. I remember in the later versions of the game (I never made it up to any of those), you could even program your own music to skate along with. This was great for the skater kids who couldn’t get enough of their NOFX and Bad Religion, and the hipsters who liked putting stuff like Chicago on there to experience the irony behind doing a Benihana-360 reverse to “You’re My Inspiration” got what they wanted, too.

Now, another thing that video games have in common with mainstream music is the experience of having been scapegoats for stupid shit that messed up kids pull. I’m sure most of you remember Columbine. Instead of taking a long look at the environment that bred those two killers, everyone on the news and somewhere in congress pointed fingers at the likes of Marilyn Manson (who, in reality, Harris and Klebold thought “kind of sucked,” according to a Time article) and violent video games that taught kids how to fire guns. As Alex put it in a beautifully written piece back in the fall, “they also teach kids how to drive on sidewalks, fly helicopters into power lines, and buy drugs! Just press the ‘X’ button for the first one, ‘L2’ for the second one, and ‘Circle’ for the third one! Of course, all of these in-game vehicles and objects will be color-coded for your convenience.”

Here’s where the funny part kicks in. (See, loyal readers? I’m keeping my promise from last week). I came home tonight and my roommate Tom was spending some quality time with Vice City on his rare night off. Alex Kain got me hooked on the original Grand Theft Auto when all you had was the bird’s eye view and crude maps of the city. I think that was around 1997 if I’m not mistaken. I’ll never forget sitting there enjoying it with him, and occasionally cracking up after virtually running down a line of Hare Krishnas. “This game puts you in such a good mood,” he said.

Nowadays, Alex is perfectly well adjusted and doing great out in Ohio. (Well, well-adjusted being a relative term, in the case of basically all of the TDC crew and most of our friends…we’ve got our quirks but are pretty put together up there). In that sense, I’d like to think I am, too, as is Tom. Now, Tom made a valid point about the fascination with immoraliciously destructive games like Grand Theft Auto. The people who play it are usually the ones who’ve got a grip on reality and know full well that if they ever tried to really jack a car, drive it through successions of alleyways, down steps, and shoot helicopters out of the sky on a whim, they’d get wasted before even getting into the thing. The people with problems are usually the ones who are watching it, and enjoying it a little too much.

Everyone has been in a situation like that. The person playing GTA is minding their own business, trying to figure out where the hell the virtual money is or something, and one of their friends walks in, followed by another, then another. These friends gradually get more sucked into the game, and before long, somebody kills the fun.

“Run the lady over! Just, fucking, run her over!!”

Okay, I ran her over. What did that accomplish? The cops are already after me. You wonder why your overzealous friend was really that passionate about you crushing the random woman on the sidewalk. Time passes, and the next thing you hear someone yell is along the lines of:

“Yeah, kill that cop! Shoot the motherfucking cop!”

The frightening thing is that the tone of his voice indicates that he’s not saying that in a recreational Snoop Dogg “1-8-7 on a motherfuckin’ cop” way. He really wants that cop in the game dead. You want to ask if your friend if that suspicious way his voice kind of cracked had any correlation with a pot bust or jail stay, however brief, but you’re in the zone right now, and just may complete your mission in time to get bonus points. But within a few minutes, you hear the third friend kill all of the fun:

“Shoot that guy. He looks like my dad! Show him for making me an alcoholic! Yeah!! How you like that!? You’re why I can’t fall asleep without a shot of Jack! WHY!?”

The guy who is no longer your friend then runs out of the room. I think we can learn a lot about each other and ourselves by sitting down around someone’s PS2 and taking an active part in the observation of a fantastically violent video game. All of this guy’s insecurities came pouring out, and he wasn’t even playing it. You then think about what your first friend said. Did that old woman on the sidewalk remind him of his grandmother- the one who gave him the least money every Christmas? Perhaps you’ll never know. Perhaps you don’t want to know. You really wanted Madden ’06 anyway. You always had a goal to see the virtual Cincinnati Bengals run a passing play to the tune of “Girl You Know It’s True.”