Video Games can be a Spiritual Experience



A touching story appeared today on Yahoo! that I thought I would share here.

Per Yahoo!:

Losing a parent at just six years of age is unimaginable. You may vaguely remember some of the wonderful memories from that brief time spent together, but the pain surely never goes away. I imagine you cling to those memories dearly, grasping hold of them and praying that over time you won't forget.
For one teenage YouTube commenter (00WARTHERAPY00) that scenario is real. And in thecomments section of a piece about whether video games can be a spiritual experience, he told his touching story:
Well, when i was 4, my dad bought a trusty XBox. you know, the first, ruggedy, blocky one from 2001. we had tons and tons and tons of fun playing all kinds of games together - until he died, when i was just 6.

i couldnt touch that console for 10 years.

but once i did, i noticed something.

we used to play a racing game, Rally Sports Challenge. actually pretty awesome for the time it came.

and once i started meddling around... i found a GHOST.

literaly.

you know, when a time race happens, that the fastest lap so far gets recorded as a ghost driver? yep, you guessed it - his ghost still rolls around the track today.

and so i played and played, and played, untill i was almost able to beat the ghost. until one day i got ahead of it, i surpassed it, and...

i stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure i wouldnt delete it.
Bliss.

I can sort of relate to 00WARTHERAPY00. I havent lost my parents fortunately, but my father in law.

My father in law, Mike, was a bit of a gamer. So one year for Christmas, my wife and I bought him  a XBOX 360. He set up his avatar to look like him and added me as a friend on  his friends list. Talking games and lending games was something we really got to enjoy together. We even got to play CaveMan Games for the NES, one of his favorite drinking games when growing up, together before he passed. At that time he said "I must have really been drunk."

A few months after that he suffered a massive heart attack and passed away unexpectedly.

A year later around christmas time, Microsoft had a little dashboard game on 360, where you throw snowballs at people on your friends list. There I was playing the game, thinking this is cute, then Mikes avatar showed up. Throwing snowballs at each other on a dashboard mini game.

To this day, I still have his Gamer Tag on my friends list, and he still pops up in my games (ones that use the friends list and avatars) from time to time.

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