Midnight Subculture

Other than brides-to-be who used to invade the old Filene’s Basement the one day every year designer wedding gowns went on deep discount, I can’t recall any demographic group more specific than what I witnessed in Dewitt at midnight last night.

My three sons are gamers.  Two of them spend most of their discretionary money and free time in front of a screen with a controller in their hand and violence before their eyes.  The third is devoted to golf but dapples in video games as well. Once I got used to the idea they weren’t going to read Shakespeare or volunteer at the soup kitchen, I accepted that video games are their hobby and they could probably do worse.

To begin with, if they’re playing video games they’re not driving drunk or speeding with new licenses.  They’re not getting anyone pregnant.  They’re not dealing or buying drugs at the corner, they’re not breaking into cars.  They’re also not creating poetry or spending nights and weekends at the library, but for a glass-half-full kind of girl like I, they might as well be astronauts as do any of that other stuff.

My 16 year old boasts there is no one in school more tapped into the next big video game and where you can obtain it first as he.  I’m not sure this is exactly a compliment, but I run with it.  I tell him its great he’s first at something.  He requested that I drive him to Game Stop in Dewitt last night for the midnight release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I know, I know.  It pushes the boundaries of good taste just like the first Call of Duty and all the others in the series and every other violent video game which is the point of video games.   They’re bloody and disturbing and exactly what boys demand; as ridiculous as Hollywood Slasher Films, another genre produced for the lucrative teen market.

Young people love this stuff.  They haven’t lived long enough to know the effects of real life violence and real life terrorism and real life warfare and real life death.  To a teenager and 20 something who hasn’t enlisted in the military for real, this stuff is pure fantasy, as close to reality as flying pigs and kitchen cabinets that spill gold coins.  It’s outside the imagination but not so far you can’t get it back in.  Video games are the 21st century Frankenstein and King Kong and The Exorcist.  Every generation is born to shock.

Christian and I arrived at the parking lot in Marshall’s Plaza at 11:30 pm.   Mother of the Year didn’t want to do this on a school night but my earlier articles about the youngest making demands that are cute and don’t do any harm proved true once again.  The only place I’d go at midnight on a school night for my oldest child would have been an SAT prep course .  Here I was contributing to the delinquency of a minor and I did it for a reason.  Christian usually has more cash than I do.  If I stay on his good side with favors like this I can hit him up for a loan when I need it.

By 11:50 there were more than 100 old boys and young men lined up on the sidewalk waiting for the midnight release.    I’ve never been anywhere where there wasn’t a female within sight.  I did see two girls drop off their boyfriends to wait in line but the girls waited in the car in the parking lot as I did.  The lineup was pure male.

One by one they arrived to take their place in the line that stretched the length of six stores.  Some came with buddies, most came alone.  It’s different than what girls do at that age.  They come in packs wearing the same clothes and hair style and they huddle in circles to kill the time and the confidence of other huddles of girls.  The boys were chill; patient, well-mannered, occasionally starting quiet conversation about gaming with the guy behind them.

When the doors opened at midnight the queue stood at attention and faced the direction of the store.  It was peaceful and orderly.  The first customers charged out of the store with the box high above their head as if they were taking a victory lap at the Olympics.  Everyone chuckled, even I, sitting in the car trying to stay awake so late.  These peaceful pilgrims seemed content to wait in the dark and cold for a game of extreme violence.

Christian got in about ten minutes later and thanked me profusely for taking the time to get him there when I could have been comfortable in my bed.  Unaffected by bloody warfare on the screen, he does sense the reality of good fortune that he was child number 4 and not child number 1 who would have been stuck in a midnight class for the SATs.

Tagged as: Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2. video games, Parenting, teenagers, violence