[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]
The answer was simple, as was the computer that we could afford to buy. A Pentium I, with 16 MB of RAM and 1,7 GB hard disk space. All of the cards were incorporated in the motherboard, which meant that I couldn’t upgrade it, and it was even bought on second hand. I am not trying to stress the fact that my family was poor, on the contrary. Few of my friends had a personal computer when we bought it. But to me it was one of the best things that ever happened. I immediately installed some of the games that even to this day remain my favorites: StarCraft, Civilizations 2, Diablo, Fallout, Age of Empires and Heroes 2.
I was in my first year of high school, and these games had a large contribution to my poor situation at school. But seriously, who would pay attention to the geopolitical factors that lead to World War Two, when at home I was already involved in the Fourth War? Who would be interested in mathematics, when my Roman Empire had already discovered Future Technology 12? Who would give a damn about a Grammy (as Eminem wondered), when those minions kept increasing their numbers and powers and something had to be done to stop them?
All these game had a really terrific impact on me. I was far from considering them just ways of spending free time or having fun, it was much more serious than that. I would like to say that I was considering those games extraordinary due to the philosophical interpretations that I was giving them, but it wasn’t like that. It was a rather psychological matter. Each time I like something that I know is bad for me, I immediately build a philosophy to support my vice. And that is a puerile thing, I admit it. The fact is that it works every time. I actually believe that, for example, I am playing computer games because they explore metaphysical possibilities. But that is in fact just another fancy way of saying that they are fun.
I don’t know if spending so much time as I did playing computer games was a bad thing or not, but I do know that they enlarged my imagination. I wasn’t a fan of cool graphics, I liked a game that could suggest rather than show how things are. It is just like the difference between showing and telling in literature, as Wayne C. Booth discusses it in The Rhetoric of Fiction. I still believe that much more could have been achieved in the computer industry if the emphasis would have been put on the storyline and not the graphics.
I was very sad to find out that many of the great games I would have wanted to play were not compatible with my computer. I felt retarded. I also felt retarded when my computer was using Windows 95, when everyone else used the 98 version – which was soon going to be obsolete too. When I read the minimum system requirements for some of the games I was curious about, I could almost feel like I am the problem, not the computer. I could use an upgrade or two just like in those cyberpunk science fiction novels.
I remember that one time I asked a friend if he could recommend an upgrade for my computer. He asked me what system I had, when I told him, he replied. “Yeah, the best upgrade I recommend is buying another computer”.
In two years time all my friends started to make fun of my computer. I was embarrassed to say that I own one, but I kept on playing. Until one day, when Bogdan came to me and said, “I am no longer a gamer”. I didn’t even know those words could be uttered.
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