It was early on a Tuesday during my rainy commute to the office. Apparently rain makes the world come to a halt on 95 South, so I was stuck, in traffic, with a bunch of other people who were angrily drinking coffee and running a few minutes later than they were hoping. After picking the right sitting-in-horrible-traffic-for-no-reason-on-a-Tuesday-morning music, everyone started driving at a semi-normal pace, and I felt like I was now able to take on the world, (or at least the rest of 95 South) until I looked ahead to my right and saw…
a banana peel;
Now, I know to a “normal person” this isn’t a big deal… at all; it’s just debris in the road, a snack for the deer; whatever, it’s just a banana peel! But when you’ve spent hours, days, and years playing multiple versions of Mario Kart, you can’t help but cringe at the site of a banana peel sitting exactly as it sits on Rainbow Road, (but) in the middle of the actual, “real-life” highway. I literally thought to myself “I can’t run over this banana peel or I will spin out!”
and there it was;
my “I did not just say that!” moment.
I chuckled a little bit (okay okay, I chuckled a lot, actually) and wanted to hit myself, but instead I avoided the peel like the plague and continued down the highway.
It’s funny how this happens; we spend most of our lives playing games and immersing ourselves in these worlds where literally anything is possible, and we end up taking the virtual situations we’ve put ourselves into, and applying them to everyday life, may it be a conscious or subconscious application. Sometimes these virtual situations haunt us, help us, or just make us want to smack ourselves in the face “irl.” For example, seeing abandoned hospitals or creepy places in general, we instantly think “oh, this would be the perfect place for a zombie game!” or spotting a tall building and believing that Nathan Drake could scale the side of it without breaking a sweat; and the funny thing is, we say these things with so much excitement because we believe they’re possible; but I guess that’s what makes us passionate, and I guess that’s what makes us gamers, and I guess that’s part of what makes us “nerds” to other people, but whoever said having an imagination was a bad thing in the first place?
