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Chasing Amy
by Tom Chick
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April 13, 2001
I'm on the phone with my girlfriend Lisa.
"Trevor has a date coming over to Shoot Club tonight. We need
to know what kind of games a girl would want to play."
"Well, how would I know? I don't play those things."
"I know, but I've showed you some of them. If you were coming
over to play a computer game, which one would it be?"
She thinks for a moment. "What about the one where you pick
up stuff and dress up?"
"You dress up?"
"Yeah. That one."
I don't know why girls can't remember the names of games like boys
do. Now I have to play twenty questions with Lisa to figure out
which game she means.
"The Sims?"
"I don't know. You kill little monsters and get gold and hats
and stuff."
"Oh, you mean Diablo."
"I don't know. You can wear a sash and boots and gloves. I
think you also get swords. You made me be the amazon."
"That's Diablo. What other games would you play?"
"What about the one where you chase the chicken?"
"Chase the chicken? Which one is that?"
"You know, where you're the little kid and you chase chickens.
You're running around in a room full of chickens and the feathers
go flying."
"What on earth are you talking about? There is no such game."
"Yes there is," she insists. I've learned that most of
the time men think women are wrong because the man has long since
forgotten whatever it is the woman is talking about. Women remember
everything. Lisa can repeat, verbatim, the exact things I said in
a fight we had last year. Any fight. Every fight. So I'm sure there
must be some chicken chasing game that we could play with Trevor's
date. Now if only I can get Lisa to help me remember what it is.
"You're a little boy in a green outfit and there's a tinkerbell
fairy that follows you around. We played it on TV."
"Zelda? Zelda on the N64?" I can't believe a thirty hour
game that spans a generation over several decades and an entire
continent, Miyamoto's greatest accomplishment, is remembered by
Lisa as the game where you chase the chicken.
"I don't know what it's called. But the man throws the chicken
in a whole flock of them and you have to get the right one in a
certain amount of time. It's right before you get the horse."
"You're talking about Zelda. That's an N64 game. We can't
play that at Shoot Club. It doesn't even have any multiplayer."
"But you and I played it."
"That's different. We played it together."
"Well how is that different from what you do at Shoot Club?"
There are some things you shouldn't even try to explain to a woman,
so I decide I'm just going to move on.
"Okay, so there's the chicken game. But what else? What games
on the computer that you've seen would a girl like?"
"The city game."
"SimCity? Where you set zones? You hated that game."
"No, the one where you can name your cities."
I eventually figure out that she means Civilization. She liked
it because she could give the cities any name she wanted. She had
no desire to build military units, research technology, or manage
her economy. She just wanted to give names to cities. She named
them after the pets she'd had as a child. She named them after her
girlfriends at work. She named them after characters on Ally McBeal.
She even named one city after Robert, her ex-boyfriend, just to
annoy me. I have it in a saved game on my laptop. Every now and
then I boot it up just to let Robertville starve itself off the
map.
"Look, maybe you can you come by tonight. Just for a while."
"No way. You guys fart on each other."
"No we don't."
"Yes you do. Eric told me."
Eric told her? That rat.
"Well, we won't do it this time, because Trevor has a girl
coming over."
"What difference does it make if I'm there."
"Come on, Lisa. Just for a little bit. Trevor's really nervous.
It'll make it easier if there's another girl there."
"I already have plans to see Someone Like You with Molly.
If I don't go tonight, you and I are going to have to see it this
weekend instead of going to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again."
The things I do for Trevor. "Okay, fine," I say, figuring
I can talk her out of it later in the week.
Cont'd
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