I’m going to share a little secret with you all — I would absolutely love to be a video game character, and I wish I were kidding.
I’m not talking about the super villains, and I’m not talking about the sniping soldiers that frequent the many mass-selling war games. I’m talking about the heroes and heroines that save other worlds, show superior skills to anyone in the real world and just look and act pretty darn cool.
You can’t tell me you haven’t thought the same thing once or twice. Even the simplest of tasks would become so much easier. No more walking to class from my Dirty South dorm room, no more eating sub-par dining hall food and no more sitting through a boring lecture. Life would be perfect.
It would also make things a lot more fun — outdoor adventures, specifically.
This weekend, I went to Old Man’s Cave with a few friends. Normally, I would sit in my room with some kind of electronic device on the weekends, but it’s pretty hard to resist the southern Ohio nature on a beautiful Sunday like we just had.
Though I may not be the super outdoorsy type, I do love to do a little bit of hiking here and there. When I do this hiking, I especially like to feel like one of my favorite video game heroines — Lara Croft.
Seriously, that girl can do anything. Leave it up to her to scale mountains, fight off feisty attackers or even just scavenge for what she needs in abandoned campsites. Every time I play Tomb Raider, I find myself wishing I were her.
The hiking we did definitely wasn’t intense and certainly wasn’t close to anything Lara is used to, but we all left feeling refreshed and proud of ourselves. I couldn’t help walking away feeling like Lara.
The world could use a few more Lara Crofts, which might be part of the reason I find myself trying to be like her.
I often find myself looking up toward the popular female stars as sort of role models. This list currently includes Beyoncé, Jenna Marbles and Hermione Granger (yes, she’s real in my eyes).
Maybe it makes me a weirdo to look up and pretend to be a video game character, but maybe I don’t want to be normal. I can pretend to be Beyoncé by dancing alone in my room, Jenna Marbles by sitting home alone and videotaping my dogs and I can be Hermione by... we’ll get back to that on a later note.
I can be Lara, or any other character for that matter, by unleashing my inner badass. Sometimes, that inner video game even comes out on things a little less adventuresome than hiking — like finishing a really long school paper, doing a mountain of laundry or climbing up Morton hill on a hot day (which is the real struggle).
Sometimes it’s just fun to pretend to be like the characters you spend so much time with. It could be worse, right?
Sophie Kruse is a sophomore studying journalism and a columnist for The Post. What video game character do you wish you were? Email her at sk139011@ohiou.edu.
