I’ve talked about my love/hate relationship with video games before. I tend to get addicted and slip into a self-destructive cycle where I put off important responsibilities and make excuses just to play some more. I did that quite a bit during my freshman year of college with Duke Nuke ‘Em 3D. I played so much that while walking down the hallway at school I’d look for sniper positions and think about kicking in a vent and crawling through the passage. Similar things would happen when we played GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64.
I’ve mostly left video games behind to avoid this addictive behavior, but every now and then I give in and have a little fun. Like last month when I went back to my childhood game of Pirates!
It all started, oddly enough, with the Earthquake in Haiti. As I was looking at a map of Haiti, I suddenly remembered the exact coastline of the country thanks to hours spent playing the Commodore 64 strategy classic, Pirates! You played the role of a pirate in the game (duh) commanding your ship as you sailed across the Caribbean. Much of the Caribbean became familiar to me, including the coastline of Haiti and that rare enclave of French colonies (including Leogane, which is a little odd because that’s where my church’s sister parish is based).