People do like to spin drama around themselves, don’t they? Drawing castles in the air, except … castles under siege and with buttresses falling off all over the gaff. You know what I mean. Anything but a quiet life. Spare us from a winter of bliss/content (I’ve bounced between Cork, Galway and Carlow in the past four days and I’m bloody knackered, so all twelve of you are just going to have to forgive the horrible slide in blog-related quality).

 

Anyway, the moral of the story is that people need excitement, and the best kind, like underarm hair, is self-fabricated.

 

Like the other day, I was right up shit creek without so much as a soup spoon. My spouse left me. I can really only blame myself. I had seduced a bloke I met in a pub, brought him upstairs, and rogered him most exuberantly whilst various villagers milled about, expressing their undying adoration for my bare arse and generally corrupt carry-on. Then my wife walked in, screamed, and immediately left town with all three of my children, who, in a fit of ghetto-fabulousness that had lasted through all three pregnancies, I’d named Shaniqua, Jamal and Tyrese.

 

Fable II is surprisingly involving. Thank fucking God for that.

 

fablerentboy

 

It’s a good thing to be able to live vicariously through fictional bastards, lest you find yourself sewing the seeds of destruction in your own garden. Outside of writing, which is more terrible slavery than enjoyable hobby to me, I like to faff about with my alter-ego through the medium of video gaming. Fable II is one of the better platforms for such virtual bad behaviour, allowing the player to step into a life of adventure and magic and sex and drink and landlordism and gambling and dog-training and sock-puppetry. See? If I sampled a little from each in real life, I’d be broke, single, and possibly dead.

 

There’s no harm at all in bowing to the dark side for the sake of entertainment, so long as you’re doing it in an imaginary universe. I’d be quite, quite crazy by now if I couldn’t misbehave in pixels.

 

Yet people still insist that gaming is just for kids. Pah and pishaw to that! Grand Theft Auto, Gears of War, Fallout 3 – all games, all high-octane entertainment, all immersive as a bath of Awesome, all created for and pitched at grown-ups – people with mortgages and utility bills and an interest in the IKEA catalogue. Children aren’t the only ones with imaginations, you know, plus they’re more likely to misappropriate theirs by creating monsters that make weird noises and hang out behind curtains at night time, kind of like Louis Walsh at the YMCA.

 

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, released last week, has caused quite a bit of hooha and rira and “Dearie fucking me, have I nothing more prudent to be harping on about” amongst the stupider mothers of Ireland. Apparently it’s terribly violent.  Well holy fucking Cardinal Richelieu! It’s almost as if its over 18s certification and fucking title don’t give a clue at all to the simulated horrors within! It’s almost as if grown men haven’t had a single hankering to be James Bond between the lot of them up to this present fucking epoch. It’s almost as if Tom Clancy had never put pen to bog roll and squeezed, isn’t it?

 

I once wiped out a whole village in Fable II and got rewarded for it with loads of in-game renown and sexual interest from a masked cult member called Lester. In real life, I still haven’t fellated a chicken or joined a coven of shorn lesbians. Sit on that one, Joe Duffy.

 

I wonder how many of those who complain about video games being violent like to curl up of an evening with the latest Karin Slaughter? I wonder how many of those who presume gamers are mutant infants like to lose themselves in Eastenders?

 

I’m not about to claim that no fictional universe has ever adversely effected the impressionable – after all, the Bible’s been a bit of a bugger to quash – but for every adverse effect, there’s a thousand sane people better able to face another day of meetings and school runs and queues. Real life is an absolute bastard, and imagination is the best tool we have for coping with the oppression of order and common sense.

 

So stop fucking fighting it. There’s nothing more terrifying than a drama queen, somebody who’s not happy unless they’re razing all of their relationships to the ground and drenching your shoulder with the needless self-indulgence of it all. Conflict is best wrapped in mystery, gunfights, or Worst Dressed lists – keep it in your heads, people. Think of the world we’d live in if only more of us gamed our egos away!

 

That’s how you really play safe, y’know.

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