When you play a video game, you become a new person. You become an inch high, pixelated being running around in a two-dimensional world.

When I was a child playing Nintendo for the first time, it was a milestone achievement in hand-eye coordination to know where the buttons were without looking. And more importantly to understand the effect each button had on the character.

Push A to Jump. Hold B to run. Right, left, up, down.

This is power. This is control. Kids have bad handwriting because their still undeveloped brains have not yet mastered fine motor control. To push a digital button and get an exact response: This is power. This is control.

Video games have a number of subliminal messages built into them.

In life, one wins or one dies. Unfortunately, in real life you only get one shot at winning. So unless I save the princess this time around, she'll die.

The world is laid out in a straightforward manner, going in order of increasing complexity. Squash all your enemies in elementary school and you'll advance to the middle school world.

If something odd happens, it will be important later. If you get a chicken from a wizard, you'll need that chicken to fly across a chasm later.

Have you ever played a two-player game and not realized that you were looking at the wrong screen until the game had been underway for a while? Have you ever seen kids at an arcade futilely jiggle the controls of a game that say "Insert Coin" at the top? Have you ever felt like your life was the demo loop that results when no one presses start?