It’s 11:39 on a Saturday night. I’m just off of work and my brain is completely burned out. I like to Relax with some videogames.

It’s one of those nights where staring at a list of games on some online marketplace might make me disassociate. I look for the comfort of the new in one of those places you put all of your old garbage: the on sale, the summer sale, sale sale sale. Videogames prices as low as 1.49 a piee. How about that?

Whole digital library at my fingertips and I’m scrolling through it with the kind of attitude that keeps people constantly updating a twitter or facebook feed. I have been doing this with my shelves since I was a little kid. Something worth the alone time, an experience. Not comfort, maybe, something else.

Aragami boots up. It is familiar in every way because I have played a dozen billed stealth-action games like it before. Stay out of line of sight. Enemies can’t see you in shadows. It takes the texture of hiding and turns it into a puzzle. Navigate the little diorama terrariums it gives you with tree leaves glittering under perfectly circular full moon.

I have done Aragami before but back then it was called Tenchu: something of Shadows and it was much the same. It has been done from that all hallowed of side-scrolling viewpoints in the Penny-Arcade drawn Ninja game. Remember when those guys leveraged an audience of thousands to buy average playing videogames: remember that the end of their career was bookmarked by a multiple thousand word long post saying they didn’t know shit about making videogames.

I digress.

Aragami doesn’t hold sway over me. The storybook Japanese-Fantasy or anime inspired whatever you want to call it. I reflexively look up Aragami 2 on the Steam store and add it to my wishlist just to make sure I don’t miss out on the next hot piece of indie software.

The game makes me burn out. A little cartoon squiggle above my head that grows and grows until it fills the room. I close the app.

Currently, my night stand that balanced a precariously placed flat-screen TV is about a foot away from my computer. I slide the desk chair over uneven tile and metal coping with a click clack. Playstation 4 boot noise. I know where I’m going. Ozzy Osbourne’s “momma I’m coming home” plays in the background.

I’m back in Afghanistan. The sun hangs warily over a desert that rolls off in every direction. I take to my feet and follow a convoy of soldiers back to base, because nobody in this game ever seems to drive faster than 15 miles an hour unless they’ve got someone to be.

No mission. Nothing. I want to be somewhere.

I’m 13 years old and sitting in the passenger seat of an older friend’s car. He’s several years my senior, but one of the only people I have to hang out with at school who wants to do shit like talk about videogames. We’re cruising through one of those little rural freeway towns. He’s from the city, not that I remember which one. Somewhere in the midwest.

The conversation drifts to someone he knows in this little town and how much pot he’s heard they have on them. We cruise slowly by the house. Nobody is home.

It’s a little duplex with a golf course behind it that hasn’t been used for anything other than teenagers dicking around since about ten years before I had ever seen it. We cruise down the block.
I remember when Ryan asked me if I wanted to help. I am more prepared than I realize.

I remember saying something stupid like do we need lockpicks – because the only things I have done in life that don’t happen in my yard or someone else’s yard is talk shit with boys my age about the things we know we’re capable of. Some of them go on to do those things, some of them already have.

One night a friend breaks into the place I’m crashing at and pretends to try and kill me. As a joke, you know. Last I heard he was living in the upper mid-west, Hatchet Man stickers still proudly displayed on the back of his vehicle.

Ryan tells me that we’re just going to see if a door is open, and then, the window. It’s the first time I’ve ever broken into a place that wasn’t just a house under construction, or one of the old abandoned places down by the river. Old abandoned places down by the river give rural kids so much time to practice. When I drive passed a house with a kicked in door and boarded up windows, I now assume it was bored teenagers or police looking for bored teenagers.

It works. Not the window or the side entrance, but the front door is open. We both step inside and Ryan tells me to wait by the door. There really is no one home – all of the lights are off. He’s tearing through a bedroom while I bury this palpable feeling that we aren’t supposed to be here. Pictures on the wall of families I don’t recognize.

Ryan has me see if anything in the fridge looks good. I take two cans of Dr. Pepper, creating a fraught with symbolism relationship with Dr. Pepper that has lasted my entire life. I think now, god, twenty years later that it was some kind of weird brotherly move to not make me actively involved in stealing shit from someone.

We don’t find the weed, but we do find about 20 bucks in a nightstand, two cans of Dr. Pepper and a copy of that years Madden that Ryan throws in the back seat. We don’t skip out of the back of the house, we just walk out of the front door.

There’s a silence in the car ride but something has latched onto me in that moment. No lockpicks or guards.

In Afghanistan, much of Venom Snake’s tools of survival hinge on creating, exploiting, and defusing situations. There’s about a dozen ways to play, my favorite doesn’t hinge on D-Dog doing the heavy lifting. I like being in a place and learning about it on the fly.

My favorite area is the huge, abandoned and shelled out mansion that’s the focus of the mission Back Up, Back Down and a few others. It’s my favorite spot in the game to drop nearby and try and steal my way to the top, destroying power and radio like I’ve done a dozen times before. I’ve done it enough I know where most of the guards spawn, but I like to keep myself surprised.

The next time it happens is of my own volition. I create a situation when I’m fifteen years old hanging out with the kind of idiots I was at the time. Lovely idiots that were willing to do the shit bored teenagers with no gas money and a frightful need to be out of the house do.

I bet you anything that place is unlocked. We’re in a nice neighborhood around sundown. Two towns over, nobody believes me. I say it as an empty statement and one kid, maybe smarter than I was, tells me he’ll help me prove it. A year or so before, I learned how to spot one of those big front windows with the “Secured by _____ home security” that just rich enough but too cheap to pay for home security put on their windows.

We pull a little down the road, me, him, and one other. Around the back of the house there’s one of those ineffectual neighborhood walls that will keep the neighbors from seeing the wife’s boyfriend but has enough of a groove for a foothold and isn’t so high a teenager can’t vault over. There’s no dog either.

The sliding glass door is unlocked. This time there’s the fear.

I don’t take anything but we wander through. I think he does – and my deep seated white kid paranoia that I might be breaking the law but I’m not a criminal sits uncomfortably in me in a way I won’t recognize for years.

We make it back to the car unscathed and full of a kind of nervous laughter. We don’t get stopped.

Venom Snake’s arsenal has everything you could ever want. If things get out of hand – go in shoulder strapped and shooting from the hip. Play it coy and leave doppleganger distractions out in the rows and rows of corn. Mark your targets and pay attention as you crawl through. Too many night time missions make you switch it up and infiltrate during the day because guards start wearing infra-red goggles.

The house is dark and I’m walking through a neighborhood for no good reason. One of those places that’s permanently under construction. The roads are always a little torn up, the finished apartments are next to the old ones with that outer-layer of stucco over the bricks and grouting.

Another little low wall. I come up to the door.
An old man yells. I still to this day don’t know if he had a gun or not, but I panic and throw myself back at the wall almost tripping over a little kiddie pool. I don’t know why I don’t get shot or at the very least the extremely bored and violent local police crawling through the neighborhood. My heart is jack hammering out of my chest.

I wish I could say that dissuaded me, but who am I kidding. A few years later at 19 I’d hear a story from an older co-worker about the time their dad told them that any building big enough has to have one door open somewhere. I know it’s stupid, but god damn do I have to try.

It really is true by the way. Pick a building if you want, late enough at night. Hospital cafeterias and Museum back doors. Concert venues when you find the right door just after the ex-cops that work the door take a smoke break. Nobody ever tells me why it’s so easy, but I start to get the sense that rules and laws are meant to apply to people who don’t look like me.

The overwhelming green palette of Africa reminds me of the way Outer Heaven looks in the NES Metal Gear, where all of this great bitter fascination started. Africa is Emerald Green and Tan with splashes of bright blue filament for the rivers and lakes that flow through it. Here I am again: another Oil Tanker but this one a refinery situated on dry land. It is by far the biggest structure we’ll be taking Venom Snake through that’s not an FOB ran by another player.

It’s got its own challenges, but the rules still apply. Create situations. Take advantage of them. Defuse them.

I remember being 21 and finally having someone make sense of it all. I was back in Martial Arts, but this was different. It wasn’t self defense – our teacher was a guy in his 60’s who was the first person to tell me you actually can’t trust cops even if you train with them because they have a way of thinking that only benefits cops.

He tells me about rules and laws and what they mean. You can go somewhere and if you look the right way, people wont care. I learn about Privilege and Bodily Harm all at once. We learn to dislocate a shoulder, to take some time sitting on the bench at the park and pay attention to the way people walk. See if you can spot a healed but formerly broken knee. Stiff shoulders and bad posture.

I’m frustrated and standing over a hot bar asking the person next to me if they know where the Mocha is. I’m wearing a green apron, but I haven’t worked there in years. In fact, this particular kiosk is about 100 miles from where I currently live and I’ve never worked there. The younger guy working there asks me how I feel about the city. I tell him I’m happy to be working there, I just need some caffeine before my shift.

I’m still frustrated because I don’t remember how to make the god damned drink. I tell him I’ll see him soon, but I never do. My green apron goes right back into the cubby in the car I was driving at the time, where it’d been since I quit the job three years earlier.

I choke another guard out. It’s a sign of failure if I get spotted, to me. It means somewhere I didn’t take my time and evaluate the situation properly – it has caused more than a few missions to get restarted in the late quarter half when you’ve neatly ticked off all of the side objectives in step with the main objective.

Sometimes I tell myself “weapons and equipment OSP” and remove everything from my inventory.

I know where I’m supposed to be and where I’m not supposed to be. I know when they’re looking for people that look like me and aren’t. I know what a cracked door and a smoke break invites, if I’m curious enough. I bury the urge. Just because you see the rules doesn’t mean you’re not a law abiding citizen.