#non rt

Still, I'll never forget the one time he sat down to play a video game with me. I was downstairs in the basement, 12 years old. As usual, I was loading up Call of Duty: Black Ops. I remember needing to beg my Mom to buy it for me. All the kids at school were playing it and I needed to see what all the hype was about. She got it for me after a while of childish persistence. I sucked at it, but man was it fun. Anyways, I hadn't really loaded into the game quite yet, so I was sitting on the multiplayer menu screen when my dad walked in. I'm going to paraphrase here, surely this isn't what was actually said.

"So what's all the excitement about this game anyways?" Dad asked. I was fully expecting him to shit on it, like he usually shits on video games. I'm not even quite sure why he bought the PlayStation 3 in the first place. I don't think he expected me to latch on to it quite as hard as I did, and I'm pretty sure he regretted buying it.

"It's just an arcadey shooter game," I said, trying to downplay it in an effort to keep him from going on some spiel about me being too young for the violence it featured. "No big deal."

"Well, how do you play it?"

I was confused. I'm not sure what was hard to understand about the fact it was a shooter game, so I told him you had to eliminate your enemies to win.

"I know that, you dork. I meant how can I play it with you? Is it two player?"

I was kind of stunned, but immediately a huge grin crept across my face. I handed him our second controller, usually piloted by my brother. I loaded up Nuketown, where else would we go? Just a regular old Team Deathmatch game.

That's when my dad reminded me he had no idea how to play video games, it was actually pretty funny. You know how old people are when they try video games, especially an FPS. Newcomers have a really hard time wrapping their head around how to walk and look at the same time. I couldn't understand why it was so difficult for him then, but it makes sense to me now.

So I had to quit the match. It was too difficult. I didn't expect him to be so bad at it. This time I loaded it up just with him and I. One Versus One.

We just met in the middle of the map, near the school bus. I was trying to help him get the hang of walking around. Eventually he kind of got it a little bit, not really, but enough to progress on to something else. I put down my tactical respawn thingy, and started making janky movements so he could to practice shooting. He mostly missed, but would kill me every once in awhile. It was fun.

Big Brain: Nomad is a girl

Got a cool pin. Gonna show it off in class tonight.