Overleveled: My Life in Videogames

By Karen Mead

What does it mean to invest thousands upon thousands of hours into videogames?

 

In Overleveled: My Life in Videogames, writer Karen L. Mead (author of the urban fantasy series Demonic Café) looks at her long history of gaming and tries to figure out what's going on. How do the memories of time spent in imaginary worlds interface with our memories of real places? Is it possible for memories of games to be more genuine in some ways than memories of real locations, and if so, why? Mead looks at incredibly popular, era-defining games like Super Mario Brothers, Final Fantasy VII and Starcraft among others to see how these games simultaneously became both an important part of her life and an escape from it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karen Mead
• Release date: Jul 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393445425

Book preview

Some Useful Terms to Know

This book is primarily targeted toward gamers, but I thought it might be helpful to define a few of the terms I use in this book for the non-gamers among us.

Boss: A difficult enemy character that often stands in the way of progression. In many game genres, it is typical to defeat a boss in order to gain access to the next area.

Farming: Trying to gather as many of a certain kind of in-game item as you can, even if it requires staying in the same place and fighting the same enemies for hours on end. Not to be confused with the type of farming done in farm simulation games, in which case farming means...regular farming.

GameFAQs: One of the biggest sites in gaming, GameFAQs contains in-depth guides for a tremendous number of games. If you get stuck in a game and don’t know what you’re supposed to do next, GameFAQs probably has the answer.

Grinding: Often used interchangeably with leveling up, this refers to fighting monsters in a repetitive fashion to either make your characters stronger, make money or collect items. Often used with a negative connotation because many gamers consider grinding to be a boring activity.

JRPG: Japanese Role-Playing Game. JRPGs have their own conventions that set them apart from Western RPGs, and have a very devoted fanbase internationally.

Let’s Play: A playthrough of a game where the player provides information and commentary on the game as they play. While most of these are done in video form, some are presented as text with pictures.

Leveling Up: Repeatedly doing tasks, usually fighting monsters, in order to make your characters stronger. A staple of RPGs.

Memory Card: An external memory device that allows you to save your progress in a game. Earlier incarnations of the Sony Playstation used memory cards, but the more recent models save directly to the hard drive without the need for external memory.

NES: Nintendo Entertainment System.

Nintendo DS: A portable videogame console.

OP: Over-powered.

Overleveled: What happens when you level up too much. Intentionally or not, this means that you’ve made your characters so powerful that the game no longer presents much of a challenge.

Playstation Vita: A portable videogame console, made by Sony.

PSX: Abbreviation for the original Sony Playstation.

RPG: Role-playing game. A direct descendent of the pencil-and-paper character progression systems originally designed for Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games. RPGs can have a wide variety of mechanics, but they are usually more story-driven than other genres and often feature complex character building systems.

Save-scumming: Reloading from a saved game over and over again in order to achieve a desired result. Someone who is save-scumming might fight a boss five times in order to get the specific item drop they want, and only save their progress once they have obtained the item. For some gamers, save-scumming can entail dozens and dozens of reloads.

SNES: Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

SRPG: Strategy role-playing game. A subset of RPGs where the player has to make many tactical decisions in order to win battles. SRPGs often contain large character rosters and extremely complex unit customization.

Underleveled: When characters are weaker than expected because the player has not devoted much time to leveling up. Some players underlevel intentionally in order to increase the difficulty of their games.

Unit: Another way of referring to a character, vehicle or some other entity that is controlled by either the player or the game’s artificial intelligence. Characters in SRPGs are often referred to as units.

Mario and Firetrucks

I remember the charade: trying to sound casual, trying to hide my anticipation. Do you have Nintendo? I would ask the new friend from elementary school. Usually, the answer was yes. This was promising, but only the first step.

What games do you have?

"Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda." It was always Mario and Zelda. Somewhere out there, I was sure there was a kid who owned a Nintendo game that was not Mario or Zelda, but I had no idea where they were. My luck, they probably didn’t even go to my school.

Oh, cool. D’you wanna play Mario? I would persist, trying so hard to sound like I couldn’t care less one way or the other.

The moment of truth: my friend would pick up a cartridge, look at the artwork, considering. However, this was the same NES game they’d gotten for Hanukkah two years ago, and after a brief honeymoon phase of playing it to death, they were done with it. Usually one of these little girls would look at a copy of The Legend of Zelda the way a bitter divorcee might look at a picture of her ex-husband.

Nah, it’s boring, she would say, chucking the game back on the floor, or in the media center, or wherever it lived when I wasn’t around.

Devastated, I would try to remain positive while we played with Barbies, or My Little Ponies. I admit to some enthusiasm for playing with multicolored plastic horses, but always my gaze would drift over to the game console sitting in front of the TV; unplayed. Unloved.

It’s okay. Maybe Katie will let me play next time.

Unlike seemingly everyone else in late-1980s America, I hadn’t gotten an NES for the holidays. When I asked my Mom why I couldn’t play video games, she would invariably snap I don’t believe in it! As an adult, I understand that she was expressing a preference for limiting childhood exposure to electronic media, which can affect a child’s attention span. As a kid though, it sounded ludicrous; it sounded like video games were a faith she didn’t believe in, and she was really inflexible about it because religious console zealots had killed her family. As far as I knew, my Great Grandpa Herbert could have perished in the jungles of the Great Donkey Kong War of ‘82, and she would die before letting a cursed video game console touch the brown shag carpeting in her house. Maybe I didn’t quite think of it in those terms at the time; I just wondered what my Mom’s problem was.

My mom’s problem, as it turned out, was that she wanted me to read, and she thought that if we had a game system in the house, I would read less; she was probably right. However, considering this early exposure to lots of books eventually led to my graduating college with a degree in English, quite possibly the most useless degree there is, it’s debatable how well this plan worked out for her. Maybe if she’d just let me have the damned Nintendo, books would have been less enchanting, I would never have started writing stories in my head, and today I would be the proud owner of a degree in Aerospace Engineering. I would be a woman in STEM, we would all be living in the