Two-Player Mode: Me, My Brother, and Our Gaming History

“Help, it’s the boss!”

Aneil comes over to the foot of his bed where I’m hunched towards the small screen of his tube television. Hands gripping the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) controller, I panic as I make little Mario jump and dodge attacks, having already lost his size and firepower to a failed altercation with a Goomba.

“You can beat him,” he says.

“No, you do it!” I push the controller into Aneil’s hands. He dispatches Bowser with ease.

“You keep playing,” I say, scootching back so that he can take my place. I settle onto a pillow, content to watch as Aneil takes Mario into the next world.

*

During our youth in the early 1990s, that was what gaming was for me: sometimes playing, but mostly observing my brother Aneil on our original Nintendo. Five years older than me and born a paraplegic, Aneil faced challenges I understood only in the small ways a child could. I knew he needed a wheelchair and that there were certain activities he couldn’t participate in because of it, like most organized sports. But the world of video games was a level and equitable playing field. And he played well.

We had stacks of game cartridges, but our well-worn favorites included the Super Mario Bros. series, the Mega Man games, and, strangely, Track and Field II. Our sister Anissa also played with us from time to time, but her interests mostly lay elsewhere. The two-player mode in Battletoads was the first opportunity for us to play simultaneously. I was terrible at it, regardless of who I played with, often damaging my fellow player with mistimed kicks and punches.

Our parents nurtured my brother’s love for gaming. During a trip to the U.S., they even bought the original Nintendo Chair Controller (which wasn’t available for purchase in Canada), which Aneil could sit in to enhance the physical experience of playing piloting and car games. While I never got the hang of sitting in the deep bucket seat, my little legs too short to reach the foot bars, my brother loved it.

“The thing about that chair,” Aneil told me during a recent video call about our gaming lives, “was that it became the directional arrow, so using it made me feel more connected to driving and flying without being able actually do those things in real life.”

Today, the Chair Controller is a rare and coveted collectors’ item. Unfortunately, the fate of Aneil’s Chair is unknown as we lost track of it, and our NES system, in the mid ’90s.

The Nintendo dominated our gaming lives until late 1991, when our dad brought home a secondhand PC. A work colleague’s son was experimenting with computer technology and had graciously given us his old system, an overclocked 486 PC that had a functioning Turbo button. “That meant our used computer was actually faster than most Pentiums on the market at the time,” Aneil explained. “Better memory. Better graphics. Plus, it came loaded with games.”

Aneil immediately immersed himself in the world of PCs. Meanwhile, I was unable to wrap my mind around the finer mechanics of playing more advanced games, like Civilizations. Each time I tried, I’d wander my 8-bit avatar aimlessly until it encountered an enemy or obstacle that quickly killed it. Aneil tried on several occasions to teach me on the PC, but I wasn’t ready or willing to learn. When Aneil received a collection of the original LucasArts games, his love for Star Wars and gaming came together in an incredibly meaningful way: “I logged probably 300-400 hours in Tie Fighter and X-Wing. That was one of the first times I gamed for the lore or story.”

*

Having only one PC in the house meant using a schedule board for allotting computer time, each of us getting a couple of hours in the evenings. In my preteen years, I used my PC time to do schoolwork and browse the internet, discovering chat rooms and the marvels of ICQ and MSN Messenger. Meanwhile, Aneil and his high school friends were all becoming heavily invested in the culture and innovations of computers. At sixteen, Aneil built his first self-customized computer system. Over twenty-five years later, he can still recall the system specs in an instant: “It was a Pentium II 350, G-Force EDR-1.”

That same year, he attended his first local area network (LAN) party, lugging the PC to a friend’s house to spend the weekend playing Counter-Strike. I had no interest in first-person shooters. I still vividly recall hard-resetting the computer out of sheer fright while playing the original Doom when a snarling monster suddenly appeared and turned the screen red with its flurry of attacks. That’s a series I still don’t have the nerve to play today.

Eventually, each of us got our own PCs, and with them came greater freedom and privacy. Although we no longer fought for computer time, I was too entrenched in high school life to game thoughtfully. When Aneil’s friends came over to have LANs, I’d peek downstairs to see what they were doing. I harbored crushes on a couple of his friends, and it served my young heart to mill about when his buddies were around. But my genuine interest in gaming was always there.

*

Aneil, through his extensive research on the latest in tech, began telling me about games he thought I might like. If my interest was piqued, he would install it on my PC. As such, I invested hours in the Black & White and the Fable series from Lionhead Studios. While I enjoyed the puzzle-based gameplay of B&W, the diversity of interactions with Fable’s environment and characters kept me enthralled with its world. I didn’t have to just follow the plot of the game. I could explore and make choices that would affect how “good” or “evil” my character was. I always endeavored to be a glowing positive presence, a true Hero of Oakvale. Still, the demands of high school—both scholarly and social—as well as the challenge of getting accepted into a local university kept my gaming at a casual level. I would go weeks without playing, often restarting the games each time rather than returning to a saved play.

When Aneil graduated from university and started working, he began upgrading his PC regularly. I would relish the days I saw him come home with shopping bags full of components and a new housing case. That meant two things: one, he was building himself a completely new computer system, and two, I was about to get his hand-me-down system.

While he spent most of his time in games like Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and Defense of the Ancients, I enjoyed being leisurely and completist in offerings such as the Harry Potter games. I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had found all the side quests and hidden collectibles.

Aneil started playing World of Warcraft (WoW) around early 2005. I was in my third year of a four-year undergrad program. I took summer classes rather than breaks, which meant endless coursework all year round. I had a vague desire to work in the literary world, but I was still very uncertain about my career and life after school. I was an introvert, but unaware of the fact—I just felt sullen, antisocial, and constantly on edge about my choices.

One evening, I was lured into Aneil’s room by the amazingly rich graphics on his PC monitor. As I watched him play, I was awed by the staggering vastness of WoW, but I wasn’t a fan of the player versus player (PVP) dynamics, which felt too hostile. When Aneil informed me that I could play on a player versus environment (PVE) server, where other players wouldn’t be about to mess with me, I was persuaded to try. When we picked a race and class for my character, I half-jokingly typed my brother’s name in to see if anyone else on the server had it. No one did. My first and eventually highest levelled WoW character was “Aneil” the undead mage. With WoW, I found an escape from the pressures and disappointments of my life. I logged into its world as often as I could.

“Aneil” walked around leisurely, exploring various terrains for hours at a time. He’d wave at and dance with anyone he came across. Crafting and herbalism were his professions, which ate up both time and resources. A loner, “Aneil” hardly ever joined parties. Shortly after he got his riding mount, a skeletal horse that made land travel quicker, he hit the levelling wall: he’d have to join raids and enter instances if I wanted to continue to advance him.

Meanwhile, real-life Aneil was intense with his WoW play from the very beginning. It was how his friends played, many of whom had level-sixty characters before Aneil joined. To catch up, he spent six laborious months leveling up so that he could participate in raids and guilds with them.

On the days I didn’t log on, I would still indulge by lying on Aneil’s bed while he played. There were more than a few occasions when I’d fall asleep, only to wake from my nap to see Aneil still playing. We spent hours, whole evenings, whole weekends, absorbed in WoW. Eventually, levelling up became too difficult for me. But I’d gotten so accustomed to the time-eating distraction, and I felt a need to play without the pressures of higher-level obligations. I created a new character: an elf hunter with an auto-generated name. Half-hearted play with this new character still felt like a better use of my time than facing my anxieties about what I was going to do when I graduated. Without realizing it, I was allowing my introversion to evolve into isolation.

Aneil’s reasons for stopping were similar. “Playing WoW began to feel like a second job,” Aneil explained when I asked him. “You had to commit to times to play when you’re in raids and guilds. You couldn’t do much else.” Things took a turn one day when, while at work, Aneil was researching WoW. “My boss walked by and said, ‘Aneil, can I see you in my office?’ He then asked me, ‘What is that you’re looking at while at your desk?’ I had to tell him it was something for a game I was playing. He wasn’t impressed. He says, ‘You’re at work and I don’t want to see that again, or you and I are going to have a much harsher conversation.’ And that was the realization for me that this was becoming a problem.”

What made things most frustrating was no one could seem to find time outside of their gaming to meet up in real life. It was then that Aneil knew it was time to pull away from the grips of the game.

My awakening from the haze of WoW occurred around the same time. One Friday afternoon after class, I came home intending to play for an hour or so before getting dinner. Time got away from me. When I looked up from my screen to see the light of dawn through my window, I realized that I had missed dinner, hadn’t had anything to drink, and had not spoken to anyone in the house. Gaming to destress from my studies and thinking about my future had turned into an unhealthy compulsion. It wasn’t long before both Aneil and I had uninstalled the game from our PCs.

*

Aneil still had his LAN parties occasionally, but recalled that paring down gaming time had a lot to do with his work culture and social circle: “A couple of my buddies were working for companies that built video cards, so gaming was their job and they didn’t want to do that in their free time. The rest of us were in IT, so we were staring at screens all day, too.”

Spending time away from the safe, imaginary realms in my PC forced me to confront the terror of finding my place in the real world. It took me an entire year after I finished university, but I eventually landed part-time work as an editor and started to figure out my career path. I still gamed, slowly playing through all eight of the movie tie-in Harry Potter games and the first two Dragon Age installments, but I never allowed it to dominate my downtime again.

The last time Aneil and I played a game together, before he moved out of our parents’ home, was in 2011. The game was Portal 2. In a rare role-reversal, I handled the controls while Aneil sat either in his wheelchair next to me or behind me on my bed. It’s one of my fondest memories of our relationship before I, too, eventually left home.

I was starting to write creatively and eventually applied to go back to school and obtain an MFA. In 2012, I was accepted to the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. Before I left home that summer, I researched getting my first laptop. My only stipulation was that it shouldn’t have the capacity to game. I worried that gaming would become, once again, an obsessive distraction. I decided to quit, cold turkey.

2022 will mark the ten-year anniversary of my decision to leave Ontario for the shores of B.C. In the years that passed since I left home, Aneil and I rarely talked about gaming. Other things became more significant: Aneil began dating his partner Humaira. It wasn’t long before they were living together. In the three years it took me to finish graduate school, I learned how to balance my life as an introvert, parcelling alone time and putting myself out there to participate properly in school, my career, and my personal life. I fell love with B.C. and decided to stay in Vancouver indefinitely. I fell in love again when I met my partner Brodie.

Through Brodie, gaming re-entered my life. He played on PC and owned a PlayStation 4. I hadn’t played for a while but hearing him talk about it was enticing. When we moved in together, Brodie made a point of installing Dragon Age: Inquisition for me. It was the first time I’d gamed in over six years. I fumbled at first as I slowly got accustomed to the PS4 controller, a far cry from the early days of up, down, left, right, A and B. As I played, those familiar feelings returned: the joy of immersing myself in role-playing, a buildable character in a lush and well-storied setting, the melting away of tensions from the workweek, the sense of sheer enjoyment. After a couple hours of play, I saved, logged out and thought to myself: “This is good for me. Why did I stop for so long?”

*

These days, Aneil’s LANs have given way to remote, online gaming with his buddies. Various commitments make leisure time scarce so, via private rooms, friends can step in or step out to as needed. Discord chats and Skype help emulate the “around the table” experience.

I use a ThinkPad with relatively low gaming capability, but I play games on the PS4 and an MSI gaming laptop. I’m more aware now than ever of my needs as an introvert, in which I maintain a shifting equilibrium of everything that make my life feels enriched. These days, that includes various forms of gaming. Brodie and I socialize with a few close friends by playing table-top Dungeons & Dragons, and Pathfinder. I am slowly playing through The Witcher: Wild Hunt and have been enjoying the repeat-playability of the survival game Don’t Starve. Solo gaming, for me, lasts for a couple of hours at a time about once a week. Just long enough for me to get immersed, make some progress, and feel the endorphins do their good work.

At the height of the pandemic, Brodie and I started playing online with Aneil as one way to cope with not being able to visit him. We played various games on the few occasions we were able to coordinate an hour or two of leisure time, talking all the while via Steam chat. The conversation was often peppered with moments of nostalgia about the games of our youth, as well as the new games we’re eagerly anticipating. During one session, we wracked our brains trying to remember the name of a helicopter rescue game on our old 486. For the most part, though, it’s a way to keep each other updated on the goings-on of family, life, and work. Neither of us game as much as we did a decade ago, but we’re both content with maintaining a balance of commitments—to our lives, our partners, and ourselves. After a couple of hours, we say our goodbyes and log off. The time never feels long enough.

There are moments in gaming that stay with you. Sometimes it’s the awe of a great bit of storytelling, or a particularly satisfying accomplishment. At other times it’s about being bested by a challenge multiple times, or even just a silly glitch of wonky in-game physics. It’s during these moments that I often think, instinctually, “I should tell Aneil about this.” That thought makes me hope some things will never change.

One afternoon, Aneil randomly sent a message to our group chat: Guys, “Armor Alley”! The aha moment took me back thirty years. I’m crashing the little helicopter over and over again, and ready to give up when eleven-year-old Aneil comes over and plays the first level through, trying to teach the fundamentals of the controls to a frustrated six-year-old. He’s ever patient with me, eager to demonstrate those first steps toward figuring it out and realizing just how much fun this could be.

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