I got my first computer when I was fifteen. It was an Intel 386. I didn’t want a computer back then, I wanted an Atari. You play the hand you’re dealt, so I began to turn my computer into a gaming machine.

Computer games were hard to come by in those days, so my catalogue of games only included space invaders, pong and Wolfenstein 3D. Playing Wolf gave me a headache so I mostly played space invaders and pong.

I got pretty good at both of them after a while.

Over time, I got more games, better hardware and some friends, and I forgot all about pong and space invaders.

Until a few months ago.

I was reading Scott Pilgrim when I remembered how satisfying old DOS games were. A few minutes later, I was online, downloading pong and getting ready to kick ass.

The adrenalin rush lasted all of one minute.

The computer beat me. Over and over again. It humiliated me. I consider switching to easy mode, but dismissed the thought. I didn’t want to risk losing in the easy mode too, my ego wouldn’t be able to take it. So I kept at it until the margin of defeat wasn’t all that bad (compared to what I started off with anyway).

I quit, because I’m a quitter, and I downloaded space invaders. Surely it wouldn’t turn out to be as bad as the pong incident.

I was, of course, wrong.

The bigger, badder, meaner games had made me stupid. Cheat codes had made me stupid. I was good at pointing guns at things and blowing them up. These skill based games were showing me how inept I’d grown up to be.

And I began to wonder what else I’d forgotten to be good at.