PLAYER 1
My father bought me my first computer when I was nine years old. It was a win-win situation: he wanted to make up for leaving us and I’d decided to watch a screen until my family went back to normal.

My very own Commodore 64 played off-key music, eight bar headaches. My mother fragmented; my brother keyed cars and my sister shouted four letter words. I’d play video games until her words were bleeps, sound files that echoed off the walls and out into the garden.

Mum was lagging. Did she need a reboot? Scheduled system maintenance? Was she simply too far gone?

PLAYER 2
I met Mike that year. For twelve months we played cricket, football and video games on a TV the size of a building block. I had a friend and brother in Mike. He wasn’t sad or drunk or stoned. He liked football, cricket and being my friend.

We talked about books and movies. We ate our way through vacuum packs of ham and sliced wedges of cheese off the family block; we kicked and threw and caught and dived, and when Mum came home she’d drink wine in her living room as we played Green Beret in ours.

I decided Mike was my best friend in the world. I know, kind of weird, but sometimes people like you, and sometimes people are like you. We’d talk, laugh, and sometimes sit in silence. We seemed to know some things were better switched off or saved in the memory.

On the day I got my first computer we played and played until it was time for him go home. I saw him in the screen’s reflection, walking out the back door, and he was gone, just like that.

Consoles came along when I was twelve years old. The games were better, the colours, brighter, and you didn’t have to press play and wait as the computer squeaked and squealed.

The games worked for the most part, only occasionally they skipped, froze, or shuddered. Sometimes they’d celebrate my achievements. They’d congratulate me, saying, ‘You’re a winner,’ and for once I felt like one. In real life, success was a mistake; with every ‘A’ I got, I’d be told not to trumpet, as if being successful were some sort of character flaw.

Cords coiled around my wrists. Mum squeezed out the last drops of Banrock Station, my sister disappearing for hours at a time. Whenever I got a high score I wrote my name on the screen. Soon all the scores were mine. I was king, a three-initialed king with a sandwich and a bunk bed.

PLAYERS 3 AND 4
At fifteen, a boy called Luke made my sister do a thing she didn’t want to do. She came home different that night, as if she’d been hacked. She’d close her bedroom door but if I leaned in close I could hear her crying.

She drank and drank, more than Mum most nights. It didn’t matter what, she just needed to be drunk. Sometimes she’d want to hug me but her breath smelled like tequila. Mum said she couldn’t get through to her, not anymore. I said she needed a strategy. ‘If you want to win,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to have a strategy.’

The police would knock on the front door and ask Mum if she had seen her son. He’d been breaking into homes, they said. He never took anything; he just wanted somewhere quiet to sleep.

I played my games day and night, Sonic The Hedgehog and Splatterhouse 3. I watched the sprites jump and kill and win and win. I played the same game over again, and everything was fine so long as Sonic jumped over the hole and got to the next level.

I started smoking pot. It made the pixels brighter, my family quieter, and everything else was funny. Mum searched day and night for my father’s replacement. I watched loud, ludicrous men in 1970’s sports cars and paint-spattered shorts act half their age, their ice coffee cartons and cassettes scattered around the stereo.

At fifteen years of age, I stuck a cricket stump in the groove behind the door. I was sick of everyone getting in the way of the TV.

KILL SCREEN
I was nineteen when Mike died. That year they released a game called Redneck Rampage. Brothers Leonard and Bubba had to rescue their prize pig from an alien invasion. This meant shooting aliens, but they looked like people, and if you weren’t killing them you were killing pigs, cows, or chickens.

Mike was gone. We wandered into Karakatta, left him there to be cremated. My friends blamed each other, but Mike was responsible for Mike, and the thing is, we didn’t know; we didn’t know that every day in 1997 took us one level closer to his death. Had we known we might have put the bong down, killed the volume or asked if he was okay.

If I could play Mike’s life over I’d keep going until the kill screen, switch it off, and start again. I would prove that death is just a break between games.

I stopped smoking pot a week after the funeral. One day Dad found me in his living room watching pixels, tears streamed down my face, and the curtains drawn. He took me by the arm and held me tight, as if squeezing out the sadness.

GAME OVER
My life is just characters. Some live, some die, some help, some hinder.

Nowhere in the rules did it say I had to stay until the end of the game.

It’s cold here without him. It’s hard to believe in my future when his never happened. It’s hard to find games that change what he means to me. I shoot and jump, log on and off, breathe in and out, but he’s not here. He was supposed to be here.

I chose to leave.

There are shops full of games. Other places, new characters. Where do you want to go?

Anywhere but here.

I’ve got money. We can be knights, or soldiers, or wizards, or —

Anyone. Let’s be someone else.

You’ll come back?

Was I ever here?

I don’t know. I know that the game starts when I plug in the cartridge. I know that when you finish it you get the kill screen. It means you’ve won, but it also means you’ve lost, and the game is stuck, like I am stuck.

Can we just keep playing?

I know he’s still alive to me. I know his brow furrows when he’s upset. I know he can run crazy fast. That if you put us together on a football field, and I tap the ball at the height of my jump, he’ll run past and get it every time. And we’ll win. And win.

Let’s keep playing.

I know that I am angry; that if I stop playing games he’ll be gone, and I can’t bear the thought of that. I know that some nights Mum finds me out the back crying, and she doesn’t know what to do. They don’t tell you what to do.

Everybody has a choice.

Then he’s gone, and it’s dark, and I’m staring at a blank TV screen, thinking how empty it looks without his reflection in the glass.

CONTROL ALT DELETE
I talk to Mike sometimes. I tell him I’m lonely and for a second, I hear him. Maybe I just feel him, the space he’s supposed to fill.

Games are getting better. Faces have texture. Worlds are real, and interactive: games are safer than trains, broken glass, and the guy at the station with eyes ablaze.

The Continue function was introduced into games in the 1980s so that arcade owners could earn more money from kids who wanted to keep playing. They kept it in home-based systems. It doesn’t cost anything to keep going. It just reminds you that whatever happens, you can have another try.

I scored a bonus life. But maybe I don’t want to play anymore.