We walked, rather than dashing wildly through communal hallways. When we opened drawers or lockers, we closed them after. We repeated if for hours, through obtuse puzzles and frantic micro-management of the things in Hui-min’s pockets as we made our way through this spooky school. It became a tight sequence of gestures: flip switch, step through, turn around, and close the door. Only turned on lights when we actually needed too, and made sure to turn them off immediately after. Hui-min was a good, conscientious boy (even if he was still weirding out over this girl he didn’t know). Starting over, I took a different approach: Make the janitors’ lives as easy as possible. I think a lot about games outside of them, but it’s been a while since a game has made me stop and consider what I’m doing in my own life and then alter what I would normally do. My mother could only deal with me bringing home a bent ski pole or questionable toaster from an alleyway so many times. After all, you never know when a scrap of copper wire, a gummy eraser, or discarded cassette tape might come in handy. I stuffed my pockets with anything vaguely attention-getting.
When I was five or six, I took the message of Sierra graphic adventures into my heart: Pick up everything that isn’t nailed down. Has a game ever shifted how you act outside of it?
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Has a game ever changed your behavior? I don’t mean in the way that Dark Souls teaches you how to play it, learning patterns, correct combinations of button presses in Tekken, or the precise moment when to tap A in Ninja Gaiden to account for NES-era platforming clumsiness, internalizing a game into the motor neurons of your fingers perfectly. The goal in the end is to say “I lived, motherfucker.” Survival requires persistence, the continuation of the self. Turns out, that’s not a habit that’s helpful in survival horror games either, which is a weird revelation to have. Mostly I just like the reminder that someone was here, that I exist, and have an impact on the space around me. I always try to do better-I understand their frustrations, I apologize-but change has been slow. Usually for other people-my partners, parents, the people who are left to contend with the consequences of my leaving the spaces I inhabit constantly looking like they’ve been rummaged through. Whatever the process behind it, I just don’t close things fully, if at all. A lot of doors stay open because I’m never sure if I’m finished with whatever’s beyond them. I’ll keep the fridge open while cooking until the beeping prompts someone to tell me to close the damn thing. Sometimes I underestimate how much force the smooth-glide hinges on a cabinet require to shut, or don’t want to make noise by overestimating how little force is required to shut something properly. See, I have a problem: I never close doors.
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