Top 5 Games to Play Behind the Teacher’s Back

By Brian S.

Wasting your time is harder than you think, but I can teach you to become a master at it with the path of a gamer. I can teach you to fall in love with video games.  

 

Extensions 

The first step: Google extensions. These downloadable ‘browser-enhancing’ apps made for chrome are the lifeblood of any bored student – a computer turned away from the teacher has a pretty good chance of being on Snake or Tetrys, trying to rack up a new high score. These are the simplest video games: Easy to boot up, easy to hide, and what they do is crucial – they begin to scratch for you, an itch you never knew you had. That itch is for simplicity, a simplicity that life lacks. There’s something comforting about binary achievements, about a puzzle for the sake of a puzzle, no consequences and no strings attached, that which is at the core of every video game no matter the scale. If the simplest games can hook you, then I welcome you to the path. 

 

Browser games

The dark side beckons. You may or may not be familiar with the .io website suffix, but don’t worry– you’ll be well-acquainted by the end of this step, as websites like Krunker.io, Foes.io, and Moomoo.io have somehow lived through generations of students at AISG, even after being banned for a time. Do not overlook them– Browser games are highly-addictive because they target every niche of gamer from the casual to the professional, which is why they’re the perfect gateways into more complex video games. Browser games can give you a surprising amount of nuance and strategy without trading off playability– the bar for entry is the bar of your   and the ceiling for achievement is near limitless in a 90-minute window of class.

 

 

RPGs

Role-playing-games. While most video games have little to nothing to say, an RPG can touch your soul. These games live and breathe through their worlds and characters. There is a reason why we must fear the fandoms of weebs and dweebs and nerds and bookworms: They are possessed. That is what story does. It possesses. Undertale, God of War, Zelda, Skyrim, Halo, Psychonauts– these titles you’ve heard before have reverberated out into the media of non-gamers too, because RPGs aren’t just video games. They are myths. They are modern epics. Down the road of becoming a gamer which is often poisoned with stigma, these ones make the journey worthwhile

 

Co-op

Any game, technically, can be made to be multiplayer, but only a few can elicit true dopaminergic reactions– the frustration, the satisfaction, the laughter, the despair- what distinguishes a multiplayer game is its length of playtime, because true multiplayer is the endless creativity of Minecraft, the game sense required for Multiplayer-Online-Battle-Arenas, the reaction speed of a veteran First-Person-Shooter player. These are games built on rock-solid communities that, over years and years, can make extraordinary craftsmen out of below-average students. On this step, Video games become a labor of languor and anguish. But don’t take it to be pointless and stupid. It’s love.

 

Roguelikes

Welcome to the end of the path and the bottom of the iceberg. Few gamers survive down here because the games here are endless–literally. A roguelike is a dungeon-crawl, a path that doesn’t end.   This esoteric numbers game called Microsoft Teams Assignments. In this roguelike, you have to submit lengthy 500-word responses to adventure campaigns, you have to solve for these pages of cryptic runes, you have to pass these time trial chambers every 6 months, you have to build your points into technical knowledge, critical thinking, communication, and even cite your sources, and there isn’t even a proper wiki for the game! All that, just to die to a rubric score of 3 or under on the final level of world 2 of IBDP… Wait a second…

At the path’s end is the beginning of another one. The reason we disengage, the reason we’ve learned to disassociate with everything outside the game is because we think the game is finite, in its binary glory. We think the game can end. But it doesn’t end. On the other side of the same coin, life doesn’t either. It doesn’t wait– it crawls on, in the background. The work leads to work leads to work, and the days begin to bleed, and your eyes begin to bleed, and what’s more painful than finally feeling like you’ve got it all figured out, before they rip it right out of your hands, before the rules go and change on you? The path that once seemed walkable now seems insurmountable. Your swollen, leaden feet drag at you, and your body protests, even as your mind insists. The clarity of your pain brings clarity to your brain: You can choose to keep going, but maybe you should choose to play a different kind of game instead.