Zombies of Spain: Back in 2005 when I was a bartender, the company I now work for, Village Voice Media, advertised their opening for a video game columnist. Not only am I an avid gamer, I am THE BEST at writing, according to my stepmom, Linda, who has known me since I was five and is therefore in a position to judge. I wanted to be the Jorge Luis Borges of video game writing, because you know what the world needs? A Jorge Luis Borges of video game writing. So I wrote up the two sample columns the ad requested and sent them in. Several weeks later, I got a very polite rejection letter, and I continued with my bartending/temping/videogaming lifestyle. Now that I work at The Pitch, it gives me trememdous pleasure to publish on their Website a piece of writing specifically rejected by corporate, after the jump. Click here, or here:
Dear Human Resources:
Whatever you may or may not have read on my résumé, I never actually finished college. Consider it a typo. For years, I've attributed my truncated education to the high cost of tuition and also the 1997 release of Half-Life.
As it turns out, I may actually qualify for a degree based on many hundreds of hours of Half-Life-experience, because according to Wired magazine -- which is like Cat Fancy for old ladies who like photos of Linux blade servers instead of kittens in a basket -- video games make you smarter.
Oh, there's a lot of science and statistical analysis involved, but the upshot is that over the last 30 years, kids have scored increasingly high numbers on a problem-solving test called the Ravens Progressive Matrices and to make a long and carefully-reasoned article into something sub-literate, it's because of video games. Or as I now like to call them, "cognitively challenging leisure activities."
Validating my hobby with a lot of pedagogical jargon and stats-geekery simultaneously validates my decision to quit school. In turn, this endears me to the study's authors, the universities that engorge those authors with tenure, and the sexy graduate assistants who drop by the office after class to "discuss dynamic intelligence assessment strategies."
During my European-style three-day weekend, I was sitting on the couch doing some "thinking" with the Nintendo "thinking box." What I was thinking about were parasite-infected zombies who come running at you with chainsaws, which is a logic puzzle posed by a measure of general intelligence called Resident Evil 4. Further ambiguating the scenario, this zombie wore a burlap sack over his head. I had to solve for X, where X = "burlap-sack-wearing chainsaw zombie." In a display of adaptive cognitive response, I disambiguated the problem and solved for X with a shotgun.
This represents anecdotal evidence that games also increase "street-smarts," which are the kind of non-degreed "smarts" cited by people without "secondary education." For instance: I'm not saying I'm any kind of unstoppable kill-bot. I'm not saying that in a survival situation -- a zombie holocaust, for example -- that I'd even know how to fire a gun.
What I am saying is that, thanks to my many years of simulated life-experience, I know exactly when to use the handgun, the rifle, or the shotgun. The fact that I don't know how to use them notwithstanding, this is a vital piece of knowledge that you just can't pick up from "books" or "studying." I'm completely revising my résumé to reflect not just my familiarity with Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook, but also my years of squad-based combat, vehicular commandeering and zombie population control, with an eye toward adding some credits to my record.
Also, thanks for staying on top of the latest updates to my W-4.
Sincerely,
Chris Packham
So, that was back in 2005. All of which is my roundabout way of saying how extreme my love is for Resident Evil 4. Set in what appears to be rural Spain, the first third of the game involves terrifying encounters with the undead in the forest surrounding a Spanish village. I've been waiting for the last 4 years for Resident Evil 5, and wondering what the setting would be -- would zombies take over a scenic, populous landscape like Colonial Williamsburg? Watching las plagas explode out of the head of a Benjamin Franklin impersonator would be both historically educational and terrifying. Or maybe zombies could attack non-Colonial, hipster Williamsburg. I don't think I've seen kefiyah-wearing zombies with ironic T-shirts and child molester glasses anywhere before. I am obviously a GENIUS at video games, clearly I missed my true calling.
Well, as it turns out, Capcom, the company that produces the Resident Evil series, must have heard that there was a lot of starvation, civil strife and general human privation on the continent of Africa -- or maybe they just watched Black Hawk Down -- because they decided in their crazy non-wisdom that the planet's biggest site of desperation and misery would be an awesome setting for a video game, as evidenced by the trailer from the 2008 E3 expo. In this clip, the game's main character, whitey Chris Redfield, walks around a village blowing away a bunch of native Africans with a gun:
I loved Resident Evil 4, and this whole thing breaks my heart, because after waiting for so many years, I will have absolutely nothing to do with this game, you guys. Fucking racist piece of shit. What unbelievably bad judgement. Fuck you, Capcom.
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