Audio Story - His Room.

I decided to do something with a more narrative focus. Some thoughts about games are still strewn about, but for the most part, this is pure fiction.

A boy sits alone in his room, the events of the day still lingering in his head. At the time, he wasn't too sure of the outcome, but now the outcome seems nothing but absolute.

For the most part, arguments do anything but solve problems. For him, it stopped him from correcting one. This particular argument was about whether or not he could be part of a club at school. Or if the club could exist at all.

He looks around his room, observing and noting all of the things he's accumulated over the years. Where they once bestowed upon him a sense of pride and accomplishment, now they did nothing but depress him further. He see his toys, his cases of things, the objects that have defined him throughout his life, and he sighs.

He had tried on several occasions to get a "Gaming Club" started at his school, but there had not been much progress. His biggest roadblock was that for any club to get started at all, it had to have a teacher sponsoring it. So of course, no one would indulge him. He had tried almost every member of the faculty, and was met with nothing short of complete apathy.

He looks down at the floor, where all of this controllers are. He holds one of them up, looking it over in careful detail. Its every facet is familiar to him; the smooth texture, the flat, squishy buttons. He plays around with the joysticks, their rough textures now soft from his chronic touch. Holding it in his hands as he normally would now, the feel seems perfect. How do they not understand?

What bothered him most wasn't that no one would sponsor his club, it was the fact that most teachers with clubs didn't care about them anyway. While the students built models of planes and cars, the teacher would be grading papers or other teacher work, never getting involved, as if the club was something they had to live with, not something they were a part of. Why could no one just do that for him?

He wanders around his room now, pacing back and forth, looking for something that he knows isn't there. Stopping at the shelves full of hundreds of plastic cases, he begins to think that what he's looking for might actually be hidden among them. As he runs his finger through the plastic blocks, he gives up and sits back down. What can make them understand?

His current issue, though, was proving to be a larger roadblock than the last. After he'd convinced a teacher to have the club take place in her room (on the condition that she was under no circumstances going to have it interrupt her work), the board in charge of clubs and such still wouldn't validate it. What struck him as odd was that the "board" was made up of student council members, which were essentially his peers. This made the fact that they wouldn't just let him have a video game club even more frustrating. Shouldn't they empathize with him?

He continues to stare it his shelves. All of his games, movies, and music lie there, together. The cases all look the same, and from where he's sitting, it's hard to tell them all apart. They all are one thing: entertainment. The cases don't fight each other, they don't look down on one another, because they're all working towards the same goal. Why can't people be more like cases?

The member of the board who most passionately opposed him told him he did so because there was "no point to a game club", and then continued to point out that a club must have some sort of "educational value" to students, and that video games had no potential to have any. The movie club had a "strict regiment" that analyzed and expanded on the roles of the respective films being watched and discussed in class, and often had discussions about a movie's impact on culture. A game club would be "nothing but a bunch idiots drinking Mountain Dew and using the school's televisions to play Halo or something."

He begins to think about what he should've said to him. He sees himself being able to readily argue about the cultural significance of games today, how much more mentally stimulating than movies games can be, and how games can teach while also being fun. He goes on to say how he could design a course that would both chronicle the history of interactive entertainment and show his fellow members how powerful a form of expression video games can be, to creators and players alike. With members that are willing to cooperate and learn from each other, their club would be just as valuable as any other, and if they gave him enough time, he could show them that he wasn't lying, either.

None of this ever really happened, of course. Instead, after the board member mentioned that his club would be a waste of time for everyone involved, the boy proceeded to berate his opponent's club, which inevitably lead to a shouting match. The end result was that the teacher involved revoked her sponsorship of the club, saying that the shouting match proved the board member's point; if the leader of the club was this prone to fits of immaturity, then there was no way the club would work out. Furious, the boy stormed home.

He is now furious with himself. He sits in his room, full of frustration that he had let the board member get to him. It was exactly what he wanted him to do. Now he couldn't get a game club organized, so he would never be able to show everyone the value of his hobby; people would continue to treat his hobby in contempt, dismissing it as the pastime of idiots.

Arguments never solve anything.