“Elf needs food badly.”
That was my cue to do something. Someone was in need, I had to respond or he would die.
When my boyfriend first moved here, we played a lot of video games. Well, we still do. But it was our earlier days of game playing that taught us a thing or two about how our relationship was going to unfold. We’d been long distance for a year and now here he was, in New York. Not for a visit, but for a stay. It’s hard to predict how something like this will work out. But we knew we were good because of the way we played Gauntlet.
This is the thing about Gauntlet. It’s a cooperative game. You play with someone else and you depend on that person you are playing with to help you through the levels. Cooperation. Working together to meet common goals. Helping then find ways to escape. If the person you are playing with doesn’t have your back, you die. It’s as simple as that. So you work together, looking at what your individual strengths are and figuring out how to best use each other’s skills to stay alive and move on to the next level. You don’t give up on each other. You don’t bail. Because you depend on each other.
I used to play Street Fighter with someone else. There, you size up your opponent and take advantage of their weaknesses. You learn how to hurt with the most impact, how to cause the most…
