1. Computer Space

When I was in second grade, my teacher sent a note home to my mother. I had recently been skipped ahead from first grade to second grade and the new teacher was worried about me. I was keeping up with the class fine, I was having no problem with that, she said in the note, but she was worried about me because all I would ever write or talk or draw about in class or in my journal or for homework were video games. They seemed to be the only thing that I thought about. She wondered whether maybe there might be something wrong with me for me to be so obsessed with games.

In the opening scene of the film, a boy is wandering along an empty stretch of highway, the frame filled with waves of desert heat. His face is blank and he carries a metal lunchbox in one hand, swinging it back and forth as he goes. He is no older than six or seven. The batteries of the sun are slowly dying; heat waves play with the orange light, bending it into shimmers. As the last credits fade into the skyline, a policeman in an SUV pulls up alongside the boy and asks him where he thinks he's going. "California," the boy says. His face is blank, his eyes ciphers. The policeman keeps talking to him, but all the boy will say in response is "California."

"When [he] was born, in 1971, his steel blue eyes seemed crossed in an unusual way, drawing immediate concern from his parents. A local pediatrician…dismissed [their] worries, ensuring them that the boy had a lazy left eye that would improve with time…. Finally, an ophthalmologist diagnosed retinoblastoma, a dangerous cancer that strikes one in twenty thousand children.... Doctors removed the boy's left eye, to prevent the tumor from spreading.... Before he turned two, [he] was fitted with a glass prosthesis. It was an approximation of his natural eye, the best they could produce at the time, but it had no movement, making it quite obvious."

I was born with a bad left eye. The eye was called "lazy," as if it were a sign of poor moral character instead of a glitch in the coordination of one or more of the half-dozen muscles of each eye. My lazy eye limited my depth perception and made things hard for me during PE class and at recess. At softball, I always struck out, no matter how I swung: on the basketball court, chest-passed balls hit me full in the face and this was sometimes because of my poor vision and sometimes because they had been intended by others to hit me full in the face. Every day after school, I sat on the carpet in our living rooms and played video games on our Genesis. When I played video games, my lazy eye didn't matter anymore because the screen I was playing the games on had no depth; it was flat. I could move through this sixteen-bit pixel world as well as someone with perfect vision. Maybe even better.

The next scene takes place in a psychiatric clinic, where the boy sits quietly playing with plastic blocks on the floor as his mother and stepfather talk with his psychiatrist about the boy running away, which we find out is a thing he does often. The boy arranges the colored blocks in interlocking patterns on the carpet; from them, he builds towers that rise up above his knees, as high as his chest, but he refuses to speak. He will not say anything to anyone, not a word, except "California." His stepfather reminds the psychiatrist that it has been this way for two years, since the death of the boy's twin sister in an accident, that in two years there has been no change.

"His depth perception was poor. Intense pain in the socket often forced him to leave the class to visit the school nurse. One day in second grade, older children gathered around, cheering him to 'take it out, take it out.' Reluctantly, he complied, drawing even more unwanted attention….'I never had more than one or two friends, if that,' [he] recalls. 'I was always a bit of an outsider.'"

When she read the note, my mother wasn't too worried. She didn't think the video game thing was a problem because boys will be boys and she had two of them to deal with, after all, but she told me that maybe for a while I should try writing and drawing and talking about some different things at school, because then my teacher would be less concerned and also because, of course, there were other things in the world besides video games. I nodded my way through her speech and said "yes" and "okay" and "I understand" and when she was finished I went back to the living room, where the game I had been playing was paused, waiting for me.

"Though [he] is a heavily traumatized boy, he has a certain fixation with building, stacking things," the psychiatrist says. The camera cuts away to the boy, building the tower from blocks on the carpet. It rises skyward, one block on top of the other; the boy seems completely focused on the activity, oblivious to the fact that people are talking about him. "These little monuments he makes," she says, her voice breaking, "I like to think that they mean something."

The world's first commercial electronic video game, Computer Space, was released in 1971. The world's first electronic stock market, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), opened in 1971. The world's first scholarly journal devoted to the study of autism and autism spectrum disorders in children, The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, published its first issue in 1971.

The boy's stepfather wears a black suit and has a black briefcase which he fingers as he talks to the psychiatrist. He drinks coffee and paces around the conference room; this is a waste of his time, he needs to get back to the office. He tells the psychiatrist that it's been two years with no change and that they've decided it's time to move the boy into an institution. In the next scene, which takes place in a dingy working class kitchen, we find out that the boy's birth father thinks that this is wrong, that the boy should be at home with his family, but that he can't really do anything about it because he can't afford another mouth to feed or a custody battle to fight, because he's just a blue collar guy dressed in a stained polo shirt, powerless against the power suit.

"[He] quickly became enamored with making money. Sometimes he'd wash dollar bills, drying them off with a towel and placing them between the pages of thick books on his shelf to make them look crisp and new. Working odd jobs on Sundays and holidays, including an $11-an-hour stint at a local IBM research lab, he built a small savings account that he began to invest in mutual funds."

My favorite game when I was in second grade was called Kid Chameleon, which was a game in which your character, traveling through a dangerous virtual world, could take on different identities by collecting masks. The masks changed your character; they changed you and allowed you to do different things, to be different than the person you were normally. I wrote about the game and talked about it and drew about it every day at school because I thought it was important, more important than anything else in the world. You put on the masks and you were made different; you were yourself but you were also something else, someone else, different. I couldn't understand why everyone else couldn't see how important it was.

If you're like me, sometimes you're on a subway or plane ride thinking to yourself, "Oh man, I wish I could play a portable video game that has 3D effects not unlike the experience I had in the theater when I watched Avatar!" or, "Oh man, I could really go for a turkey sandwich from Torrisi right now!" Well, good news: the Nintendo 3DS now resolves at least one of those desires. READ MORE

Things are finally looking up for Saigon. A few years ago, the hard-knock NYC rapper looked like he was about to become a big star. After a string of very strong mixtapes, he signed with Atlantic Records through producer Just Blaze's Fort Knocks Entertainment, and, in 2005, landed a recurring role on HBO's "Entourage," while readying his first album, The Greatest Story Never Told. READ MORE

Self-professed recovering video-game addict the RZA (a.k.a. Prince Rakeem, The Abbot, Bobby Digital, Bobby Steels, the RZArector, Ruler Zig-zag-zig Allah, etc.) tells his sons, "If it was up to me... You wanna make me happy? Four hours of video games a day is enough."

To the frontiers of technology: "You might not be surprised to hear that the demographics of video-game characters don't quite match up with those of real populations. But the first 'virtual census' of the human characters that inhabit US video games exposes just how much they diverge from reality. The survey reveals that males, adults and white people are over-represented in games. Females, black people, children and the elderly are correspondingly under-represented." What the fuck is up with that? I want to be able to blow away a bunch of mutant toddlers, damn it.

You and I, we aren't from here. I know I am not anyway and if this whole universe including me turns out to be a harsh game, well, consider my imagined heart crushed and my fictional breath taken totally away. What a beautifully cruel thing of unimaginable definition and color this place is. What incredible aberrations; what perfect anomalies. I sure as hell don't know what the fuck I am doing here and I am quite certain that you don't either. In fact, I can't recall the nothing I was before. I wonder what the nothing will feel like later. That's how I can do whatever it is that I do and not give a rat's ass, not really, what someone else thinks. That said, I was wrong about Galaxian. I managed to find the handheld of Galaxian (2) and well, it is kind of great in all its simplicity. Like the color blue. Like pizza. Like laughing. READ MORE

I remember the light of the sun shining straight lines of rays through the hollowed-out space above the street-and the dark shadow in the bulky concrete shafts of bleh that rose to the side. I also remember pain. Total pain in my fucking heart and mind. Total static.... It was the end. Manhattan was meant to go cheesecloth and me butter-like the oil of eternity through the laugh track of a commercial in outer space where a mop dances with Fred Astaire and he accidentally drops a sardine off his cracker and says, "Oh dear, summer plums, I have spilled my hors d'oeuvres." Then a bunch of spiders crawl from the subway and he blasts them with his donut lazer. Ah shit. READ MORE

It really feels like the end of the world. In science magazines there are articles about colonizing space and other planets but we won't ever do that. We're stuck on the hot rock full of water waiting for the inevitable asteroid. All you have to do is look at the moon-that fucking thing is covered in cosmic ACNE and those craters are made by things flying at 13 miles a second. Somebody get Bruce Willis on the phone. He can handle anything. READ MORE