The Gaming Implosion

After literally 4 years of Minecraft mania, it has been shelved for something better.

Terraria. 

Terraria swords. Terraria books. Terraria YouTubes. Terraria gaming. Multiplayer.

I can happily ignore all of this as long as it fits in the limited time box she's allotted each day, but then her eyes turned towards Mommy.

Mommy, you should really learn how to play Terraria so we can do multiplayer.

For the longest time, I presumed her approach was simply to ensure that I would become addicted and she'd get more play time. After all, it worked so well for Daddy except for the fact he's not home a lot.

I finally became convinced that she really simply wanted me involved her Terraria life, which is when I panicked.

I despise crafting, mining, and questless games. My gaming niche is strictly quest driven third person shooter. Which is odd because my favourite P&P RPG games are story driven nearly diceless experiences like White Wolfe versus the destructive insanity of Hackmaster. Anyway, there will always be a soft spot for 2D side scrolling games from my Mario childhood (who doesn't have that soft spot!), but that's about all Terraria could offer. Everything else in that game sucks for me.

Finally, I promised her that I'd let her put together a set of lessons to teach me Terraria when we were in Australia. She was ecstatic! Days of planning. Days of prepping a world for me. Days of re-planning. Tonnes of negotiations for how long we'd "practice" each day.

Today was the first day. And the last.

"I don't get this. What am I supposed to do?"

"I know you don't like crafting or mining; I'll do all of that and you kill things."

"OK"

*died*

"This game really sucks."

"MOMMY! Please be patient. [insert 15 minutes of instructions]

30 excruciating moments later, Ellie had to really come to grips with the fact that I was motivated very differently than her in gaming. 

She wept. 

I was hollow with sadness.

An agreement was struck that she would still give me daily lessons on how Terraria worked so that I would understand what she was referring to when she talked about her accomplishments, and that I'd keep the game on my Surface so that she could keep my character up in case my interest increased.

So the remaining 30 minutes of this horrendous hour was her putting our computers side by side to build up my character, bouncing back to her computer to have her character protect us if extra bad guys came.

I went into the bathroom and hid with a glass of wine and my Kindle.

No Going Back ....

When 9/11 changed the lives of Americans, I admit that I felt enraged with the attack, had a profound respect for our firefighters and police force, and shed tears of the images that flooded us. However, there was a limitation to what I could feel.

Sitting cross legged on my bed in the hotel only minutes away from the first attack in Paris, I stuck headphones one Ellie and told her to watch all the shows she wanted as I listened to the sirens wail for hours. I felt so angry ... and so utterly helpless.

Witness to violence was not a particularly new experience for me, but being present for this scale of violence felt overwhelming. As we've watched Syria disintegrate before our eyes over these past years, it seemed likely for it to spill over the borders. We've seen it in Africa, and now, we see more and more terrorism in Europe, even Australia.

People were anxious for Ellie and I to get out safely, which is understandable, but part of me could not completely understand the point of leaving. After that night, with the military descending on Paris en masse for the remainder of our visit, cancelled events, closed attractions .... inability to get our train tickets to Germany ... I could almost watch Ellie and me in slow motion ... realising that it didn't matter where we went.  We didn't feel any "safer" on the train or in Munich. Or on the plane back to the States. I doubt we will feel safer in Australia next week.

We couldn't ever go back to the sense of security that we had before .... that night and day changed us at the core. What newspapers, blogs, and tweets couldn't do for me across 5 years happened in a 24 hour period of being there. It's a different war. Extremism with the battleground being us ... with the chief weapon being fear.

Many years ago a rather young and angry Arabrian horse had flipped me for a rather painful landing at her feet as she reared up over me, truly terrifying me. Rolling to the side, I got to my feet, shaking. I heard my indomitable equesterian trainer tell me, "ok, go get back on now ... don't let her win, or you'll never get back on a horse."

I got back on, crying, but winning.

I was 13 then, and get to have that lesson again at 36. Only this time there is a lot more at stake; in this case my daughter's life. I paced for quite a while thinking about cancelling our Saturday night event. Despite the fact that the caberet had cancelled it for us, I was happy that we got dressed up, and went out with the intention of "getting back on the horse."

I'm not suggesting we be stupid. In fact, I recommend caution and observation. When the jittery fellow on the train was pacing between cars, you can imagine how he had my attention. When he pulled his headgear into place where it looked like a mask, I had stuffed Ellie in a corner and eased the table back for easy movement. I looked around me and noticed nobody had seen any of this. While he was in an altercation between two conductors and ended up getting off, everybody was blissfully unaware.

Let's wake up. Pay attention. Think ahead.

We can't get sidetracked with the pretend agendas of these extremists. Remember it was a Muslim who insisted on patting down the stadium bomber. And it was that Muslim who died for it, saving so many lives.

We can't let the fear, rumours, and propaganda rule us.