The Philosophy of a Romanian Gamer Part V: Emigrants and Cheaters

[Adrian is a Romanian writer currently living in Galati. In this series of articles he'll be giving us an insight into just how different gaming is in Romania. A country that didn't see any form of video game until after their 1989 revolution against the ruling Communist regime. Part I, II, III, IV]

They could, and Bogdan did utter them and seemed very determined never to play again. This was largely because he was emigrating in Canada with his family, and he wouldn’t have enough time to play as he had to learn French, get a job and continue his studies. Something similar was going to happen to me too in a couple of years.

When I finished high school, in 2005, I bought another computer. An AMD Athlon with 1.49 GHz and 250 GB hard drive. It was a very good computer compared to the previous one. It so happened that I failed my college admission exam and so I got a job in Galati, where I stayed for a whole year working as a PC operator. This meant that I had enough time to play computer games during my spare time. Andrei, another one of my friends (Bogdan was in Canada, Sorin and I weren’t friends anymore) who lived very near me, was also an avid gamer and we spent most of our time playing the same games.

It was a very fun thing to do. If he was playing Diablo II, then I would be playing it too. When he was visiting me, I would show him my Paladin character, and when I would return his visit, he would show me his Barbarian character. If he was playing GTA III, I was playing it too. He would show me what he discovered, I would show him what he missed, and so on. When we were both playing Gothic 1, I noticed something strange. Usually, it would take us almost the same amount of time to progress through the game, but Andrei was making so much progress lately that I knew something was rotten in Denmark. I told him once: “Andrei, how come you knew how to transform into a bug?” Andrei was a lousy liar, I didn’t even have to hear his answer to know that he was lying. I found out that he was using a walkthrough, but he explained that he only did that because he got stuck and he wanted to see how the game develops. It was the first time he was cheating, so something had to be done to ensure that this wouldn’t happen again. I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about it.

I had to rethink my strategy, to update my philosophy. What kind of analogy can someone make between cheating at a computer game and real life? Let’s say that cheating is the same thing with having someone help you in real life, although you do not deserve it. Cheating is like being born rich: Richie Rich was a cheater, but Larry Flynt wasn’t. I had to tell this to Andrei. When I went to him to do so, he was playing Gothic. I watched him play: he was finishing the last mission! I couldn’t stop him, I had to see how it all ends. When he finished, I stared at the monitor and finally I said: “Give me the walkthrough!”

There were games that Andrei would like and I wouldn’t, and vice versa. He would play Alien vs. Predator, Max Pain, Hitman, whereas I would play Football Manager or StarCraft (I was still playing it). This didn’t affect our friendship however. The fact that I fell in love did, but it didn’t affect just our friendship, it affected everything else too. That’s, however, another story.

There came the day when I had to say to Andrei what Bogdan told me. I couldn’t be a gamer anymore: I was going to study literature in Bucharest. I had to find another job there so I couldn’t afford to play videogames anymore.

Andrei didn’t mind very much, he was emigrating in Italy with his loved one, so he couldn’t care less about computer games at the time.