Adventures In Middle-Aged Gaming: Diddy Kong Racing And Midnight Mass Do Not Mix

As many of you may be aware, I regularly struggle with the demands of parenthood as they annoyingly tend to interfere with my considerable addiction to videogames.  Luckily, my eldest is of an age where he can share in this addiction and I now have an ally in the ongoing struggle in my home for access to the ‘œgood’ TV for said video games.  Now, as if the demands of house and home weren’t enough to piss me off on a regular basis, with the festive season upon us I have had to deal with an entirely different set of distractions with regards to the balance of gaming, child-rearing, and paying some occasional attention to my long-suffering wife.

I was raised Catholic.  That is to say that I was forced to attend weekly mind control group sessions led by virginal androgynous foreigners as no one from North America enters the priesthood anymore.  I was also bound to regularly report my considerable offences against the higher power.  Once, when I was seven I ate red meat…on a Friday!  Let’s be honest, like any healthy child I broke stuff, called my sister a bitch, and horked snotballs on the door handles of various cars after school.  I confessed these sins, did my penance and resented having to do so.  When I became old enough, I started refusing to go to church on Sundays.  However, when I became a parent I started to feel the pull of all the Sundays I had endured as a child. My eternal soul was flicking me in the ear, and I responded.  Nowadays, I sometimes take the kids to church.  My Unitarian feminist wife has no interest in Mass and so enjoys sleeping in on Sundays.

Growing up I always dreamt of finding new ways to make the time pass more quickly while in church.  Though I had suffered interminable boredom in my youth, I had no intention of forcing my son to endure similar hardships.  So we started sneaking the DS into church.  With Christmas upon us I decided to take my eldest to Midnight Mass and frankly, I didn’t really think anything was likely to go wrong.  Little did I know that the boy had packed Diddy Kong Racing into the slot of his DS.

So, we made it through the first reading without incident.  I had us scuttled away in a corner and the boy had remembered to turn the sound down.  The problem arose though when he decided to try one of the time trials in Diddy.  Now, anyone who has played Diddy Kong Racing on the DS knows that it is essentially a buggy piece of shit.  The controls are imprecise, which yes, isn’t exactly new to the DS, but it also happens to be unreasonably difficult on the time trials where you have to fly through rings in the sky.  Fuzzy controls and challenging courses may have contributed to my probable excommunication.

As the boy got increasingly frustrated with the stupid level, he became louder.  Clearly, I probably should have just told him to turn the damn thing off, but hindsight is 20/20.  You see, with games that are unfair, or unreasonably or inconsistently difficult, rather than give up it makes me want to beat them regardless.  So I reached over and took the game out of my son’s hands.  While the congregation sang Hallelujah, I embarked on a fruitless endeavour against a fucking monkey that is no more than a second banana to an afterthought from another franchise.  And on this went through the reading of The Gospel, and into the Homily.  Still I couldn’t beat the fucking level, to his credit my six year old muttered supportively: ‘œDaaaad, I got further than that,’ or ‘œDaaad c’mon…give it back!’  My personal favourite was ‘œyou suck.’

Some of you may agree that when you’re in the zone, when you’re in the heat of battle with a piece of shoddily developed software, you lose yourself.  And lose myself I did.  Time and time again I tried to fly Diddy through the rings in the sky, and time and time again I failed.  I forgot where I was, who I was with, what was going on, and eventually I grunted loudly, ‘œFUCK!’  and all sound went away.  I looked up, to my right was a family of short hairy people hiding their children’s faces from me, in front of me was an elderly couple staring disapprovingly over their shoulders at me, and in the aisle to me left was the usher with the offertory basket for the weekly tithing.  They all just looked at me with a combination of shock and judgement.  In my panic I looked for a friendly face, my son’s innocent face.  Looking up at me from the pew beside me he stared wide eyed. After what seemed like minutes, he opened his mouth, and in his high pitched six year old voice he said: ‘œFUCK!…Fuck fuck fuck fuck.  You said fuck Daddy’  and he turned to the elderly couple, ‘œDaddy said fuck.’  to the family beside us , ‘œUnhuh, yeah he did.’  to the the usher ‘œdo you know what fuck means?  I do, Shane at school told me that it means when a man puts…’ and I covered my son’s mouth with my hand.  To my credit, I genuflected on the way out dragging my son behind me.  We may start attending Unitarian services in the new year.  I don’t know yet.

Image: flikr / Tony the Misfit