My journey of recovery.

Six months ago, while sitting at my computer and preparing to log on to work for the day, I noticed I was no longer able to type. The words appeared in my brain, but my hands were no longer able to express them. I tried to walk to another room to get my wife’s attention, but found myself tripping up the stairs. It was, for lack of a less dramatic term, a nightmare scenario for any usually able-bodied person. I spent the next month inside a hospital after being told I suffered a neurological stroke that robbed me of the use of my left arm and leg. Sitting in my uncomfortable inclining bed in the dark, I cried uncontrollably while attempting to play Mario & Luigi: Brothership because I couldn’t move precisely. I might have been the first person to ever cry while playing a Mario & Luigi game.

The following weeks were a storm of people telling me exactly what to do regarding important questions that I did not have the wherewithal to ask. The implication, whether accurate or not, was that landing here was a natural consequence of choices I made, and the only way to dig myself out was with choices of greater force and effort. The doctors wanted to make sure I understood I almost died; I wanted to know if I could ever write or play video games again. They seemed less concerned about that, but the idea of abandoning a thing I have dedicated no small part of my life to due to essentially losing the genetic lottery felt like a punch in the gut on par with any pesky questions about mortality. What is the point of getting better if survival couldn’t accompany any of the joys I had before? A growing frustration that no one really understood festered as a pit in my stomach, something I now recognize was likely depression, but would have been easily understood by anyone else as generalized anger at the world given the context.

After returning home, I picked up my Xbox controller and held it in my hands. I was not capable of walking downstairs unaided, I could not prepare my own food without needing to take frequent breaks, but maybe I could play Indiana Jones. Maybe this piece of my life that I had based a career and hobby on, the proverbial basket in which I’d placed all my eggs, was not totally lost to me. After the fifteenth time my lack of finer motor skills dragged me off the edge into oblivion, I gave up and loaded YouTube, if only to save myself from another stroke.

The YouTube algorithm is a carnival game on a foundational level. It’s a scammy barker trying to get you to notice the various goods and prizes you could win if you just clicked on this gasping thumbnail instead of the one with text saying “THIS DIDN’T WORK” superimposed over a picture of Steve Carell. After endless scrolling, I ended up clicking on a video of Kaizo Mario, ultra-hard Super Mario World romhacks, and was immediately enthralled. If nothing else, this would be something I could think about in order not to think about more difficult things.

For a few weeks, I watched various YouTubers playing dozens of different kinds of Kaizo Mario hacks. My own physical therapy was proving to be a daily grind, the hardest thing I have ever had to do, but I could shut my brain off and watch people bash their heads — literally — against impossible level design and feel a little bit better for a brief moment. In one video, an edited stream from Kaizo Mario player GrandPooBear, the streamer mentioned as he effortlessly cruised through the level that he has likely put a thousand hours into getting good at this. I am not sure whythat moment crystallized Kaizo Mario as something I wanted to try, because the phrasing could not be interpreted as anything but a warning. Still, I muddled my way down to my office, holding on to the surrounding walls to keep myself from falling, and gave Kaizo Mario a go.

I am not sure I could ever have been naturally good at Kaizo Mario at the top of my physical abilities. A decade ago, I could have been passable. I might have been able to cut the number of deaths down by a thousand or so. But now I was not at my best and it really did not matter, since failure was not only inevitable, it was assumed from the outset. Frequent, immediate, consistent deaths were priced in to the experience, whether I was suffering from a fracture of my nervous system or not. In that sense, Kaizo Mario became the perfect video game for my disabled body to play — I could not win, so there was nothing to lose.

Every day after work, I would load up different Kaizo Mario games and attempt to make it inches further than my previous best. Success was not measured in new stages, but in desperate dives to see a few more pixels than I previously had. In order to get better, in order to make progress, my hands had to get better at the precise fine motor control that left me months prior. Moreover, it represented something more than just forward momentum in a game. If I could do this, what was stopping me from walking unaided? What was preventing me from making dinner? Why, in my head, was I still sitting in that hospital bed, mourning what I had lost, when that loss could be as much of a choice as anything else?

It was never really that simple, but it sometimes helped to think of it that way. My helplessness could be as passable as a Chargin’ Chuck blocking a hallway, I only had to figure out how to get around it.

Over the months that followed, I did not put one thousand hours into Kaizo Mario, but I slowly got better bit by bit. I began to understand the language the game spoke, bellicose though it may be. In doing so, I also understood level design in a way I never truly grasped before this: it is, at its core, a conversation between the player and the game. And we were both just kind of trauma dumping on each other.

With every new bit of frustration, I experienced an equal amount of resolve to overcome. With every obstacle, I pushed myself a bit more. And rather than feeling like an antagonist in my narrative, the game’s difficulty was daring me to continue. I genuinely do not know if I could be as recovered as I am if not for video games. I parry in Clair Obscur without clumsiness, I jump in Super Mario Odyssey with confidence. Most importantly, I walk. A once-necessary cane has become a sometimes-useful accessory, more akin to a Scrooge McDuck fashion statement than a precondition for movement.

There is a world in which I gave up and did not make the progress I needed to, but thankfully, that is not the world I live in. Perhaps it is all a little bit too corny; maybe I am ascribing a natural process to something that could have been anything else. Not sure, don’t care. Whatever got me here worked. Wherever I go next is my decision.

Feature image credit: TheBourgeyman