She never liked Solitaire. Or Minesweeper. SkiFree. Remember SkiFree? A few pixels of a downhill skier, dodging trees, jumping rocks. You are racing ahead with not a care in a world until BAM the Abominable Snowman catches you. Eats you. The End. You never stood a chance. Not kidding. The End was hard-coded into the game before you even started playing. The game designers knew something about life that she didn’t, back then.
When she was little, her parents had a Nintendo. She thinks it was mostly her dad who played but what she remembers best is Mom. The two of them, they were a pair of homebodies then. A domestic duo with time/Marios to kill.
She remembers Mom sitting down. Firing it up. Her mom on her knees in front of the TV, controller cord tethering her to a virtual world. Mom’s hands and Mario’s feet, one and the same. And Mom’s Mario? Constantly dying. Game over. Game over. Mario never winning, and Mom always laughing. Mom knew something about life that she didn’t. Each time Mario fell into a pit (Game Over!) her mom would lean back, smile hard, roar: ‘Watch out for that pit!’ Tiny her would clap and laugh and beg for more.
The End was inevitable. But not hard-coded.
These days, she must play solo. Farming sims and island design games. In a room awash in colorful lights. Now pink now blue now green, depending on her mood. She has a streaming channel. She is a Cozy Gamer. She tells herself she is not alone and several dozen people tune in regularly to prove it. They are Cozy Gamers, too. They all play together, in separate rooms, with separate systems. Homebodies. They make digital friends. They plant virtual trees.
She turns on her live stream. She imagines Mom out there somewhere, tuning in. Smiling hard. Heart still beating. But her end was inevitable. In her place, the live stream. And she loves the live-stream strangers. They love her back. They love their Cozy Games. Why not? These games are open-ended. No pits, no Abominable Snowman. The End never comes uninvited.
The live stream replaces the grief, the news, the doom scroll. She stares at her phone sometimes. Full of everything terrible in the world, everything terrible in the past. Served up with news alerts and ‘This Day Last Year’ memories. She thinks, watch out for that pit.
She walks past an empty virtual house on her curated island. She removes the weeds in front of the empty house. Mom won’t be back to do it.
She harvests virtual fruit from virtual trees alongside virtual strangers. They know something about life that we don’t. Before The End, Game Over, they laugh. Clap. Beg for more.