Complicated
So yeah, Avril.
Now that the intense regimen of remote learning was over, and there were to be no summer camps, movies or really anything cool at all, I was concerned that my eight-year-old and I were in danger of coming up short on things to do around the house.
The kid is awake for sixteen hours a day, there is only so long you can do workbooks, ride bikes and build Legos. Besides, it’s time he knew — it’s time he knew there is something that is way cooler than anything else — and that something, is video games.
We had begun spending too much time watching TV anyway, and there were only a few seasons left of Full House.
So we got a PlayStation 4.
This is the father/son time I have been waiting for since diapers.
Which brings us to Avril, who once rhymed “skater boy” with “later, boy,” and this was before Hamilton, and who I also believe said, “Jesus-humping-Christ when did everything get so complicated?”
Once we were ready to pull the trigger and make the purchase, I loaded up the virtual cart at Best Buy-dot-com and chose which store to pick it up at — 86th and Lexington Ave. Funny, there are no consoles at that one.
Well, you know, Covid, so.
I tried other stores. Nope. And nope again. I called Best Buy — yeah, the guy said, sometimes we just run out and we don’t know when we are getting new ones in.
Me and my first world problems. My girlfriend looked it up at Target and, voila! (She finds everything at Target, ) they had consoles — but not the games we wanted. So we ordered the console from a Target and the games from a Best Buy that was near each that Target — which is a trick in NYC — and went to both stores to complete our mission.
Oh, did you think that was the complicated part? Shit ain’t even out of the box yet.
Once I opened the box, I got her hooked up to the back of the TV and stuck in one of the games. From the television there came a hum followed by soothing music — the kind they might play in an elevator on a space station that is orbiting a dying planet. Then, a huge array menus of all these things to do and look at appeared as if I’d been waiting for it.
Data Handling Health and Safety
Accessibility
Account management
Parental controls
Login settings
Network
Notifications
Devices
I was still stuck on Data Handling Health and Safety. Um — I just wanted to shoot zombies. Is there going to be a test?
Account management? Was I in trouble?
Network. What network?
Devices? Isn’t this the device?
But where was the game? I began to feel older than this guy I used to work with who used to be a bouncer at Studio 54 and thought not owning a cell phone made him better than everyone who did.
There it was. My game; hit start. Sweet. It said I had to log into the Playstation network. I had to be online to play a game I owned.
This was not how my old Atari Cartridges worked.
I had to go through the menu and set up an account which meant I had to do the thing I hate most in adult life; set up a user name and password.
Using my camouflaged wireless controller, I followed the links and clicked join the freaking network. I had to move the cursor back and forth across the entire alphabet spelling out my email — my password — and making up a username no one in the universe had used.
Ijustwanttoplaymyfuckinggame2020 had been taken.
Once set up, I joined the playstation network.
But now I had to set up the second controller? Did I? I turned it on and, feeling a little lazy, swiped over to player two.
I clicked play — and after a few more minutes it told me I wasn’t in the network.
I checked and somehow I had left the network. I googled it, and it said there was a box to check that said to join the network when starting — who would not want this?
Wait, player two is not — what? It says I have to create an ID for the second player? Does it mean the second remote? Does it know who is holding which controller?
I still can’t get on the network even though I’m signed in which means I can’t even play the games I just bought. I don’t want to play against some kids somewhere — I’ll play single player.
One of the games I bought for my son — where you are a little daisy fighting baby zombies — I had to be getting some kind of up to the minute information off the internet do do that?
Fuck it.
No, dammit. I tried again. I AM on the network. But the game doesn’t think I am.
I check my wifi signal.
It said my signal was weak. I beg your pardon, for a man my age…
My girlfriend (again, so helpful, if you don’t have one, get one,) says that’s the problem. The playstation doesn’t see the signal. I said, Netflix does.
So now the cable guy is on his way to check the signal so my playstation can stay online so I can play a game I already own.
When we were kids, we talked my grandparents into getting a VCR. We went over and told them how to use it and wrote out all the instructions. But my grandfather couldn’t make sense of it after we left and grandma was apparently no help and after several evenings of being shamed for not getting the damn thing to play Dances With Wolves — I remember it was Dances With Wolves — I heard he took the VCR to the town dump and chucked it on a heap of trash.
I always thought that was a bit extreme. Until now. And while I’m not looking for the offramp of the Information Superhighway just yet, one day I may join my grandfather and pitch some piece of plastic that makes me feel like an idiot into the abyss and head home for a simpler life.