" Which was half true." Which was half true. "I get paid to look like him." Which was also, in an way, half true. "Uh-huh," the waitress said. I gave her a wave and left her a healthy tip before we headed out the door and up the road. We spent the next two hours wandering around somewhat aimlessly; by the time noon had rolled around, though, the strip that was alight with video games had become a noisy, rollicking center of youthful attention. That was when K'meh found her niche in the world of Clarkesburg, NH: a projection-based VR game called F-25 Space Interceptor. There were already a dozen kids gathered around the thing. I gave her a handful of tokens and told her to go have fun. She walked right up to the crowd and said "Is there a line?" "Yeah, sure," one of the boys said before turning to look at her. "Holy shi... Hey, Dickie! Turn around." K'meh instantly went from trying to get to the center of attention to being the center of attention. I laughed to myself as she waited her turn in line (they all wanted to watch her first anyway, but she insisted they go), finally got in and adjusted everything the way she liked it. "So, what's the purpose of this game?" "You have to kill the bad guys?" "That's it? How's it fly?" Four young men, ages eleven to fifteen, started tripping over themselves to explain it to her. Finally she nodded, dropped in a few tokens and took off. Not surprisingly, she did badly. On her first game. By her third game she was getting the hang of it. By her sixth game, she was placing eighth in the top ten of the day. |