He’s been gaming for a while. His childhood filled with Christmas gifts of countless consoles. He made gaming look easy and, in my eyes, really really cool.
Sometimes when he’s feeling nice, he’d give in to my constant pleas of teaching me how to play his favourite games. But, such instances are few and far between as he often grew quickly frustrated at my poor technique. He hated watching me try my hand at Call of Duty: Black Ops III, announcing that my reaction times were much to slow to kill any zombies (even though I swear I got at least one).
Even with slower paced story games, it was very much the same. In keeping with our mutual zombie interest, he let me try The Walking Dead, surely no one could mess up the episodic style? Well, according to him I least, I could. My choices were all wrong he said and, I took too much time trying to decide which one to pick. I had to be content with just watching him play instead, since my own gameplay was wildly frustrating to witness.
All of this is to say that despite my supposed inability to play, I still wanted to be like him. This is where my beloved Friv comes in. Finally, games I could follow with ease, where my slow fingers and indecisiveness wouldn't get me in trouble.
The catalogue of different games kept me entertained for hours and made decision making much less daunting, and given that most games are rather simple, reaction times became a lesser issue too.
My favourites were the baking games, in which I could pretend to be a skilled gamer just by decorating virtual cakes. I also loved the game ‘Adam and Eve’. Each run through follows the exact same story but, somehow, I never tired. The aim is to help a cartoon Adam progress through a historic landscape- moving dinosaurs out of his path and helping him to escape a boiling cauldron, until he reaches Eve to mark the game’s close.
It seems a little silly that such a basic story could keep me repeatedly entertained, especially when next door my little brother was progressing past complex levels of whichever bloody game he had chosen that day but, I think that Friv is very solid proof that gaming doesn’t have to be pretentious or challenging. For me, basic games simply helped to feed the craving of feeling closer with my little brother (I’m still itching for a rematch with those zombies though).