Might and Magic VI
“You all have gotten even better!” -Tecmo Cup Soccer
The ball came skidding out to me on the right wing, heralded by an aural avalanche of “Man on!” Opening out my body to caress the ball to a halt on the inside of my right heel, I hesitated for just for a second as the full back, a 19 or 20 year old kid, crept in on me, 
before suddenly I burst past him, moulding my body fluidly around his desperate attempt at obstruction and leaving him struggling in my wake, only my slipstream keeping him within touching distance. On the touchline to my left as I pelted past came a cry from the coach.
“Done him for pace, Thomas!”
I could almost have stopped dead and wept, because it is years since anyone has said that to me and, chances are, I will never hear it said to me again. For I was quick, once. I remember -what do I remember?- demanding justification as to the stange tactical usages of me by my basketball team, and being completely mollified, deeply proud actually, of the shrugged explanation “It’s because you’re faster than us.” But year by year I get slower and slower, my pace retreating deeper and deeper like an aging prizefighter’s punch, my memories of Road Runner-like vapour trails now so dusty that wiping them off for inspection is an episode in snorting and choking. And the only reason I am able to write this is that I don’t really believe it, not really, I can’t imagine ever being 52 and dynamically power-shuffling from one penalty box to the other, I can’t even imagine being 27, to be honest.
It was when I was 18 and had already forgotten everything I’d ever been taught about Maths that I realised Life was not the linear structure of XP Points and levelling up that I had hitherto taken it to be. No, no such steady progress from “Mostly Harmless” to “Elite” for me; instead I was like a polar bear on a disintegrating ice floe, every piece of which floated away, irretrievably lost, as soon as I moved my foot from it. Including my capacity for apt ursine metaphors. And I keep casting around to find out what new abilities have replaced my old lost ones, flicking through status screens and inventories for some scant sign of meaningful improvement, but finding all across the board only red numbers and dropping line graphs and decline, decline, decline.
This is what I didn’t like about Might and Magic, frankly. Zelda and things like that, you 
could just flash about in the sheer joy of exploration, slinking about the ghost-infested graveyards at night and jumping off waterfalls, and nobody said anything. With Might and Magic, though, there was always the implication, the nagging recollection that any time spent simply navigating its beautifully rendered and imagined world was merely money in the bank for Atrophy, the delight of discovery forever marred by the approaching half-coconuts of the apocalyptic Horsemen. Clip clop, clip clop.
Fuck sake! I am getting old enough fast enough as it is, without the help of some withering on-screen avatar, my own personal JPEG of Dorian Gray. Too much realism, that’s what it is, people coming home from the unrewarded grind of work to the unrewarded grind of World of Warcraft. I remember when I first got The Sims 2 and didn’t eat or sleep or go to the bathroom for about two weeks. I can laugh about it now. In thirty years, I’ll probably weep.