The phone rings.

I’m in about fourth form. I’m on the computer in the lounge, playing one of the games on this fantastic list. This is not an unusual after-school activity for me. You might get the impression I don’t have the most happening social life, and you’d be right. Of course, there’s only so much happening when you’re 14.

I wasn’t really expecting a call. Odds are good that it’s someone calling my parents who, would you believe, are at work at 4:30 in the afternoon! Somehow I never quite managed to carry that sarcasm over the phone line. Or maybe someone’s calling to try to sell us Sky again. Yes, I’d like the cricket and the rugby. No, not at that price. Maybe if you stopped calling people so often you wouldn’t need to charge so much.

I answer it anyway – no one else is home. Turns out it was neither of those. “Hello,” a girl begins, “is Dave there?”

“Yeap,” I respond, already off balance. I can count the number of girls I know well enough to have my number on one hand, and I wouldn’t need all the fingers. It’s interesting, too, how playing computer games puts you into a socially disadvantaged frame of mind. I’m a wing commander over there. All the talking heads, they love me. It’s like real life, except awesome and fake. Reality knocks you back.

“What are you up to?”, she asks. Now, shit. I hate answering questions like this with “playing a computer game.” (Perhaps I should spice it up with “fighting the Kilrathi!”). Not that I feel it’s such a bad thing to be doing. It just sounds so lame. I make some sort of feeble reply. “Oh, just on the computer aye.”

“Oh yeah.” By now, I have gone completely on the defensive. Just absolutely and completely. Self esteem issues, peer pressure, bad time of day, whatever, I’m holding a negative self-image and feeling the spotlight on it.

The conversation only lasts a few minutes, if that. I suppose I was too young to realise it at the time, but man, did I turn Opportunity into a negative experience. It seemed that she got hold of my number via a friend or something and was just trying to make a social connection. Looking back, I feel rather sorry for her. She was just being friendly and got a bitter pill for her efforts. I guess it’s unfortunate that someone would have to suffer because of my insecurity. That’s not fair.

I never found out who it was. She never even said how she got my number. In fact, I don’t think I even got her name. After I hung up, followed by an irritated couple of minutes, the experience was largely forgotten (apart from the minor psychological trauma that follows most teenage experiences). It certainly wasn’t a turning point, as you may have thought this post was building up to.

A couple of years later, though, I almost completely stopped playing computer games. Whether it was a phase I grew out of, or I got busy with other things, or I just played them so much I got sick of them, I don’t really know. And it’s not, of course, it’s not as if whether you play computer games or not determines your life. It was merely a crutch. But for whatever reasons, I just completely lost interest in them. Now, I actually have some quite fond memories of the games themselves. But I can’t help but wonder if it should’ve happened sooner.

The interesting thing is that it wasn’t until a number of years after, when I did have a social life of at least some description, that I was able to realise any of this. It’s so easy to sit at the PC and pilot your Sabre to the glory of the Federation, so much easier than actual life. Life, though, is going on without you. It’s not a good place to be. At the time, I didn’t even realise what I was doing wrong. It’s only looking back that I can be so glad I got out of there.