Digital Cream

Posted by Matthew on September 17th, 2007

On Friday night my son Dylan took my place playing BioShock on the 360. I’d had my couple hours and couple beers, and was starting to make dumb mistakes as he watched with gentle sniggers of amusement. I know he’s a far better player than me, so I was expecting to be pretty impressed when he took the controls. What I was not expecting was the realization that my son is a species entirely different from, and superior to, my own.

The forward edge of this realization came last year when I watched him play Battlefield 2 on the 360 (which, I know, to many is like painting with a bar of soap, but it was fun for a while). I noted that he could do a couple things I had not mastered, such as to run backwards with a zoomed-in sniper scope headshotting the hapless guy trying to nail him with an SMG. I consoled myself that I’d not had as much practice, and anyway, Dylan is smaller than me; his nerve pathways are probably 25% shorter.

But watching him take over BioShock led me to inescapably conclude that while his arms and nerves have gotten longer, they must have dropped in temperature to become some kind of supercooled nanoconduits autoconnecting to a hyperbrain the size of a planet. So I really should not feel bad about the pwnage; it is simply a cross-species competition, like a jaguar racing a mollusk.

I did not consider myself a slouch at BioShock, as I had on Battlefield 2. I know I am a deliberate player (a polite word for slow) who explores and savors the tactical choices I have, the game action frozen as I sweatily hold down the plasmid chooser button. But I like to think that a faster, more impulsive player like my son would trade quick against smart, and I could sip a whisky while watching Dylan play, swelling with the generous sense that he and I are different but equal.

It didn’t quite work out that way. I asked Dylan (who was in his own game at the end of the Arcadia level I had just begun that night) to go load up one of my old savegames, so that I would not have any surprises ruined, and so I could see how he could go through the same level differently (but equally). This he did. My first inkling that my son has transformed into a superior cyber-human species was the greater speed at which he made decisions in the weapon and plasmid menus. Maybe I could chalk it up to the late hour, but I did not exactly see the menu appear, switch to a different selection, and disappear again. It exhibited instead some kind of quantum state leap in which the new selection merely came into being, perhaps even before he selected it, in the reverse causation one expects when using tachyons instead of chemical neurotransmitters.

These choices were made at what I’d have calmly called, sitting in a Microsoft game usability lab chair, ”a more rapid pace than the previous subject”, in the same way that an Uzi fires bullets at a more rapid pace than a Civil War musket. When Dylan encountered a baddie, he would do the following actions in about the same amount of time it took me to switch to my ideal weapon and fire a shot: he would shock the guy, set him on fire, take a picture (lots of points for that combo), hit him in the head with a couple shotgun blasts before the guy ran, switch to a pistol, put a couple into the back of the head as the target ran weaving through the hallways, start a shotgun reload, and finish it just as the guy extinguished his flaming ass in the water, whereupon Dylan zapped him and finished him off with the wrench (having decided he did not want to waste any ammo).

“Wait a tick,” you might say suspiciously. “That’s a lot of shots. Surely Matthew is exaggerating.” I neglected to mention that I had cajoled Dylan into switching to Hard difficulty, to make sure things stayed interesting.

So, okay, I thought, my son is a superior cyberspecies, but I can handle that. So he literally is ten times faster and more accurate than his Dad in a shootout. Well, that’s fine. That’s his genre, trained on the hard Dust-y streets of Counter-Strike. But now that he is starting to hack a safe, at a pretty hard difficulty, I’ll see more parity. After all, I am a pretty good hacker and he has expressed polite admiration at my deft shuffling of those tiles. He may have inhuman reflexes but ahh, my age and experience have given me a seasoned brain, rich in pattern recognition and the wisdom to plan ahead. So I prepared to give him fatherly consolation as he was defeated by the kind of tile-puzzle challenge that I myself would struggle to complete in time.

It didn’t quite work out that way…

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