Conversation 6

Elementary school was an strange time for me. I was deeply involved with athletics but, unlike many of my peers, also had a passion for reading and videogames. I also had quite an eclectic friend group, a couple of the “cool” kids, athletes, some “nerds,” and then there was Ryan. Now Ryan was an amazing kid and he and I hit it off from day one. We quickly became best friends and were practically inseparable. The kid was one of the most accepting people that I have ever known and looking back I think that’s why I naturally wanted to be his friend.

He was a grade older and lived just down the road so we always met up after school to play. Now I say play for the very reason that there is no other way to describe it, and I don’t mean play in the traditional sense. We didn’t play sports or play video games etc., we simply played. Every day we would come up with a new story. One day we were all-star athletes having to deal with the pressure of sports and the media, another day we were acting out our favorite movies and taking them on radically different plot paths, still another we became secret agents that had to balance our life at home with our wives and kids, we were very competitive on which of us got to marry princess Zelda by the way.

This play, which eventually came to be known to us as “the game,” was something that he and I shared and is something that I fondly look back on even today. Never before in my life, or I think ever again, will I be as connected with my imagination as I was way back in the third grade. We could spend hours fighting dragons and going on massive quests of grand adventures, complete with our own level up systems and achievements, or we could manage the daily life of an oppressed villager, these sorts of stories would always end with us rising up as the leaders of the rebellion of course.

What was so amazing about this was that the stories almost never ended with happily ever after. Unlike so many of the stories we had seen and been told about, we saw the story to the end. If we both vanquished the evil king, eventually one of us would succumb to the thirst for power. It was the others job then to stop the once hero, now maniacal wizard, from consuming the world in hellfire. These sorts of stories would often result in tragedies where we were forced to slay one another, but the story would never end there. Instead our character’s children would live on and we would become them in a new storyline.

So what happened if we were tired of being able to use magic? An EMP magic bomb would hit the earth and all magic would die, soon to be replaced with advanced technology. Tired of sci-fi? A cataclysm would hit the planet and modern civilization as we knew it would be destroyed. There were endless possibilities! The worlds we created were always unique with their own set of rules. At times gravity was next to nothing, other times humans were the size of ants. Nothing had to make sense, and yet to us it made perfect sense.

In our own way we had created a never-ending epic filled with adventure and the mundane to form the perfect wonderland. As cheesy as it is, our imaginations opened up a myriad of worlds each more different than the last and yet still connected.

As I have grown older, I’ve taken several looks back on my life and realized that many of my passions today are driven by and are due to my time spent with Ryan creating “the game.” The stories we created together have helped me to become the person I am today. They taught me the value of doing what’s right, the value of doing what’s hard, the value of never giving up, and the importance of loving others.

Stories are humanities way of showing that we are the ideal, the paramount, and the incredible, and stories are also humanities way of showing that we are the broken, the rejected, and the inconceivable; however, the greatest lesson that I learned from “the game” is that no matter where we find ourselves in our real world story, there is always room to grow, achieve, and become more than we are.

Since I was planning on meeting with Cori Jo to have dinner with her conversation partner, I was going to use that meeting as a conversation meeting. Unfortunately those plans fell through due to the inclement weather. In order to compensate I used a replacement prompt.

“A favorite childhood game”