Playing God

My digital prowess peaked around age 12 when I ruled over Roller Coaster Tycoon.  This was in the late nineties when tech-savvy meant popping a cd-rom into your basement PC and crossing your toes it worked.  We tucked our prized games into CD pouches and meticulously cared for them.  A scratch meant malfunction, and who had $29.99 to buy a new copy? No one cared if you could master Excel or if your Outlook calendar was color-coded, but the creation of the perfect digital amusement park carried major cache—at least among my friends whose cool factor was as debatable as my own.  Having unwittingly burgeoned into a tech-misfit, I miss the days of Roller Coaster Tycoon when I hubristically called myself an expert.

Roller Coaster Tycoon hit the market years after Oregon Trail, the nostalgia-inducing classic that was even more crucial to the coming-of-age experience if you happened to grow up in Oregon. The Oregon Trail is really all we’ve got on which to hang our coonskin caps.  Oregon Trail was simple: ford the river and reach the promise land sans dysentery and with plenty of buffalo jerky. My drug of choice, Roller Coaster Tycoon, was just as retrospectively bizarre as its precursor, but with more nuance and better graphics.

The game occupied hours and hours of my pre-teen agenda.  Before school, after school.  Even during school, the screens and sound effects of Roller Coaster Tycoon spun through my mind like a bad trip as I strategized and awaited the end of the day when I would resume my saved game. When I was supposed to be doing my homework or chanting my Bat Mitzvah Torah portion, I was building digital amusement parks. 

Being two extremely stubborn and bossy children, my brother Josh and I could not play together nicely.  The solution was fifteen-minute shifts with the mouse, regulated by our mother. Angsty cries of “Mooooom, his 15 minutes are uuuuup” reverberated through our creaky home until the offender relinquished control.  As the older sibling, I usually clicked well into minute 17.   

Eventually, Josh got an Xbox, I got blue eye shadow and the days of cd-roms were over.  It was a brief, fruitful period in our lives marked by the ability to play God.  The gaming trend at the time was odd: child creates then rules over some sort of digital world. Parks, cities, homes and amusement parks. The success or failure of the realm is entirely in your hands; we were power-hungry.   Josh had a game called Tropico in which you are the socialist dictator of a Cuba-esque island. He bought all the expansion packs. The premise makes me wonder what agenda these game makers were promoting.   My brother’s obsession with this game makes me wonder about his own political ambitions. That’s mostly beside the point.

The premise of Roller Coaster Tycoon was to create a high-functioning amusement park. I had no predilection for amusement parks, nor did I have more than a fleeing interest in planning or money, yet I was obsessed with every detail of my digi-parks. Or, I was obsessed with playing God during a time in life when most things—like my mutating body—were wildly beyond my control. 

Obviously, there are many details that go into the creation of an amusement park. If there weren’t, I like to think I would have avoided early-onset Carpal-Tunnel.  As park creator, you handle the finances of the park and learn the ins and outs of basic economics. You landscape.  You create roller coasters with steep drop-offs and upside-down loops.  Don’t forget to strategically place funnel cake stands so your lego-like patrons spend extra money at your park.  But with funnel cake and roller coasters come nausea. So, hire enough handymen to mop up the tiny little piles of vomit scattered around your park. This is the real world, man.

Emma and I have been friends since kindergarten. In our formative years, we played—then perverted—many games together.  In our younger days, Ken raped Barbie; years later, our computerized amusement parks became digi-death camps.  Bored with benevolent rule, we opted instead to rule our parks like Soviet Russia.  We experimented with creating no bathrooms and hiring no handymen, wondering just how much vomit could pile up along the paths of our freakshow park.  The answer: a lot.  We created roller coasters with no exits, stranding park-goers atop sky-high rides.  The weird thing is that I think our depraved antics were not entirely uncommon.  Kids are intrigued by the perverse, especially if they can orchestrate it with no real consequences.  Roller Coaster Tycoon—and all its many cousins—gave us the ability to conduct freakish experiments while circumventing the therapist’s office.   If you torture animals, you’re on track to become a psychopath. If you torture little digital people, you’re still mostly normal.

It’s amazing to think  about the hours I spent creating these parks.  Like Facebook in college, Roller Coaster Tycoon wrapped me in its addictive, comfortable arms, allowing me to live in some universe only vaguely related to my own.  Sometimes, this is exactly what we need.