Yo They have a complicated relationship with marijuana. I wish I liked it more. But I’m a control freak, so I relax for about three minutes before giving myself a panic attack because I’ve lost control.
I live in Canada, where it is legal, with government stores filled with extravagant tobacco items of all shapes and sizes. They even have sketchy canned drinks, sort of like an anti-Red Bull. It’s all very tempting. And I’ve never tried drugged video games.
You can see where this is going, right?
I select three games that I have not yet played on three different consoles: Super Mario Odyssey on Switch, Dead Island 2 on Xbox One and Marvel’s Midnight Suns on PS4.
I take my kids’ Switch to my office, where the Xbox One is, because I don’t want them to see me high. Not because I’m worried about setting a bad example: of my three adult children, the oldest doesn’t even drink, my son (like me) is too neurotic for marijuana, and the youngest, aka Trouble, has been a total smoker for years, so the Good Ship Parenting Fail sailed into the sunset some time ago. No, I just know that you’ll find the idea of your rule-obsessed, hyper-efficient, strict Scottish dad using marijuana hilarious. And I promised a long time ago to stop giving them any happiness until they start doing the same for me.
I play all three games sober for about an hour to get a baseline reading, because I’m being so scientific with this study I might as well be wearing a lab coat. Then I take my food and return to Mario.
I wonder why I don’t play Mario games all the time. Odyssey is perfectly designed. The more I play, the more I feel like I want to be a part of this world of primary colors and good deeds, where even the bad guys aren’t so much evil as they are misguided. I wish I could also live in a world where the solution to any obstacle is to jump on a block and get a pleasant surprise: a utopia where hard work pays off and life is fair.
Yes. The edible has taken effect.
The joy-cons in my hands get smaller; my fingers bigger. Dave Gilmour sings words inside my head about having hands like two balloons. In a loop. Then Mario sings them.
My oldest son comes in.
“Are you okay, dad?”
“Yes because?”
“I thought I heard you say ‘it’s so beautiful’ over and over again.”
“Well, it is,” I say, indicating the screen.
“Are you high?”
“Yeah.”
“Hilarious,” he says. And he pulls up a chair.
Then I discover that it’s very difficult to jump between moving platforms when you’re out of your pumpkin. Then I move on to Dead Island 2.
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I loved the original Dead Island and the sequel. no marijuana It was fantastic. Drugged? It’s a nightmare. Zombies scare me. I keep throwing things I don’t mean to, pausing the game to look at the map and can’t find where I am. And all the time my brain is screaming at me: “BUT IT’S NOT ON AN ISLAND. WHY IS IT CALLED DEAD ISLAND 2?
There is simply too much to do. Too many examples of having to pick up X, place it on Y to close Z while the zombies arrive. I still misunderstand the order. All I want to do is… nothing. And I want to do it very slowly. And this game is the opposite of nothing slow. It’s all fast.
“WHY ARE ZOMBIES ALWAYS SO FAST IN GAMES!”
Suddenly, playing with marijuana doesn’t make sense to me anymore. Why take something that is designed to stop you from worrying and stressing, and then play a game where you have to worry about things and get stressed?
“Dad, stop saying it’s not an island,” advises my eldest son. So I left him while he was way behind, on an end-of-level zombie bride boss.
The PS4 is in the living room, so now I have to be a doped dad in public. My youngest daughter joins the audience. She’s being a little judgmental because instead of a party for her 18th birthday she wanted me to smoke a pipe with her, and first I agreed and then decided against it. Apparently this was worse than the time I gave up on getting a dog.
“Oh, great, Dad. You won’t get high on your favorite child’s 18th, but will you for The Guardian? This is political correctness gone mad!”
My son laughs at me too, although I don’t know how, because he is 3,000 miles away. Over time I realize that my girls have it on FaceTime.
Maybe it’s because the game is a turn-based card-based RPG, which means it’s nice and slow, or because the superheroes have silly costumes and powers, but Marvel’s Midnight Suns is really fun. I laugh at the superhero’s social media posts; I applaud the camp performance of whoever plays Tony Stark. The animations are ultra vivid, it’s beautiful to watch villains defeat numbers, and most importantly, the game is ridiculously easy.
Maybe the only way to mix weed and games is to find one that’s silly and simple. BRB, I’m going to play every Kirby game ever made.
