BROKERBELLE'S GREAT SECRET

BROKERBELLE’S GREAT SECRET

Now Brokerbelle has a secret. I first discovered it in the early 1980’s. Brokerbelle and I left the kids at home and went for a few days up to the University of Missouri where HarleyDad was doing some legal recruiting.

After a hard day of recruiting law students, HarleyDad returned to the motel that night and caught Brokerbelle in the midst of her addiction. She was standing at a video arcade game with a stack of quarters on the side of the machine about 8 inches high. HarleyDad was a amazed because he had no idea that Brokerbelle loved video games and that stack of quarters looked pretty high especially at the end of the day. I wondered whether it was the third or fourth stack she had gone through.

Could it be that I had married a serious video game addict. The game was “Space Invaders” and pretty soon I learned that I was going to pay for a lot of those little invaders to bite the dust.

But HarleyDad had a plan for stopping the outflow of quarters. Why not buy a game and quickly save the money squandered in Arcade Land. Oh, foolish man! I fed the addiction and it began to grow. There was Atari and all the Atari games. And the kids soon got involved with their mother in the games.

Little did I know that I had propelled the family into a technological arms race. Those little games like Space Invaders (1978) and Pacman (1980) all had to have machines to run them. And so we began with a modest investment in Atari 400 in 1979 to play Asteroids. Oh, if it had only ended there.

Then the race was on. Next we needed in 1982 the Atari 5200. Then it was Sega Genesis and NIntendo Gameboy in 1991; Super Nintendo in 1991; Gameboy Color in 1998; Play Station 2 in 2000; X-Box in 2001; PSP in 2005 and all the Nintendogs in 2006.

The main gaming stations were connected to the TV, often with a maze of cables figured out by my wife , probably after consulting with a mad MIT electrical engineer ( or perhaps she did it even by herself, who knows.)

And so the inheritance we were going to leave to the grandkids slowly dissipated one shekel at a time for an assortment of video came consoles and video games. However, Brokerbelle has pointed out to me that these video consoles and games have increased in value like a great Harley Motorcycle and now are worth more than she paid for them. I pointed out however, that Brokerbelle had not time valued her investments and without including interest on the funds , her electronic and vintage investments in ancient technology may not have appreciated as much as she thought.

It was 1986 when the next event occurred in this electronic tragedy. In 1986 a role playing game called “The Legend of Zelda” was released. After all, Brokerbelle should have known better. She had heard many sermons in church on the evils of “Dungeons and Dragons” and how role playing could lead to moral degeneracy and even death. But “NO!” did Brokerbelle listen. She did not. She immediately assumed an identity and that was the last that we heard of her in 1986 and 1987.

One day when I got home from work I came in early and saw that Brokerbelle had well over 100 hours on the game or was it 1000 hours, I now forget. At any rate, the Zelda game had developed from a game into a passion and from a passion into an avocation. There were other tell tale signs. We started getting phone calls from kids, and they wanted to talk to Brokerbelle instead of our children. Soon Brokerbelle was the neighborhood consultant on Zelda. Kids dropping by for helps and “cheats” on video games. And then there were the complaints from Brokerbelle. She had no adult friends. However, she stood high in the estimation of her own children who also played games but because of their need for schooling could not match their mother’s video game prowess. But they were proud anyway and all the kids in the neighbor respected our children-because they the children of “Brokerbelle.”

It was in those years that HarleyDad drifted into the background toiling at legal salt mines during the day, traveling a lot and doing churchwork. Meanwhile Brokerbelle went to baseball games, became a boy scout leader, taught the children to fish and gave Godly advice and motherly advice especially on video games.

Pretty soon there was another woman involved in our marriage. It was Zelda. The Legend of Zelda grew. And then there was another man in our life—“Link.” In 1988 came Zelda II-The Adventure of Link. It was about that time that Harley Dad got confused and thought that he and Brokerbelle had five children, Josh, Julie, Stephen, Zelda and Link.

Many years later Addi was added to the family but HarleyDad got confused again and concluded that Addi was only a video-game character until she was about 3 years old. About that time Addi bit HarleyDad and from time on he could look at the scar and recall that she was a real little girl. And belonged to him and Brokerbelle.

Link grew. In 1991 the Zelda games added “A Link to the Past.” In 1993,” Link’s Awakening", in 1998 “Ocarina of Time”; in 2000 “Majora’s Mask”; in 2001 “Oracle of Ages”; in “Oracle of Seasons”; in 2002 “Master Ques”t and “Wind Waker”; and in 2004 “Four Swords”. All to be purchased and played to the bitter end and then replayed over and over until every secret is discovered and every permutation of characters to be investigated.

Brokerbelle and her children began to introduce certain myths into the family. Myth number one was that video games were good for education. If the kids did not make high grades and do their homework you could take the games away. Video games helped hand-eye coordination. Next video games were found to assist in the treatment of Attention Deficiency Syndrome. Intelligent people like Hilary Clinton loved video games. Video games helped young men and young women to have they hand eye coordination that would help them to be good fighter pilots and could help them defend their nation. (Sure enough one of our children does now use some of this coordination to defend this nation, and makes his own video arcade games to boot.)

HarleyDad did not buy all of these myths. He noted that not many of our children had become Rhodes scholars despite their video game proclivity. But those who excelled in the video games did seem also to excel in other areas.

Finally HarleyDad noted that everyone in the family could beat him in video games. And so in a spite, he turned away from video games forever and went to blogging. Meanwhile the rest of the family just laughed and went back to the video games.

Brokerbelle as she nears the Social Security years just laughs at time. In fact she races against it. Not in life but in video games. Brokerbelle has a PSP now and her children and grandchildren do not (“If they want ‘em, let them buy “em, “ says Brokerbelle). That PSP was the best gift I ever bought her.

She begins her day by warming her fingers on the computer keyboard and playing computer video games like Cubis Gold, Trijnx, Zuma Delux and Jewel Quest. Zuma is kind of like a fancy Tetris.

So this morning I got up and said: “How are you doing?” Brokerbelle says “Pretty good. Yesterday I was the second high scorer on the internet rankings on Zuma. I said “How many were playing yesterday?” “Oh, about 370 people” , says Brokerbelle. “My score went up but some of the better players may have had to return to school.”

Well that is it. Brokerbelle is a video games playing fiend. Hilary Clinton better watch out or Brokerbelle will beat her socks off at the arcade. And HarleyDad, he never saved one red cent.

(This blog is dedicated to Brokerbelle, to Billy Mitchell who scored 3,333,360 in Pac-Man being the highest score a player can get, and to Shigeeru Miyamoto, the genius creator of the Zelda series and who is the father of Mario and Donkey Kong.)