My niece is a badass.

Day 09 – Something you’re proud of in the past few days

Street Fighter II took up a lot of my time growing up. I was in the seventh grade when I first dropped a quarter in the arcade cabinet. Spent a lot of my time in liquor stores and NY Pizzeria in the eighth grade, getting hit up by gangsters, seeing fights break out and even a few shootings from someone losing their cool because they got their asses handed to them in a round of Street Fighter. In highschool I scrawled out my own fantasy Street Fighter combos and characters and wished that the gods at Capcom would hear my cries and program my dreams into the ultimate quarter munching tournament of street fighters. Street Fighter II was very much a culture to me during my adolescence.

It didn’t occur to me how long it had been until the pop up had begun to fade. I was awarded an achievement for logging into the World of Warcraft for its seven year anniversary. Between all of the expansions, hanging out in voice chat with friends and slaying multiple dragons, I never bothered to put together the large fragments of time logged into a virtual world.

Video games were a babysitting tool with my niece. She loved watching me play. She’d sit on my lap as I played an interactive adventure before her very eyes. She asked me questions about where I was going and why I was doing it. Gave me suggestions when I was stumped on a puzzle and even reacted to the things that happened on screen as the drama unfolded. And when I’d feel the drool on my hands, I’d pause the game and put her to bed.
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