A medium-size, darkly colored room of an apartment is where I was when I began my start with video games in my life. This was my room as a child, brown walled with little light ever bleeding through the windows, a red and yellow Little TIkes car, a coarse carpeted floor, a desk covered with various knick-knacks, a TV a foot below the ceiling. I had just gotten my first console ever: a PS2. The first game I played, Medal of Honor: Rising Sun. Given the title, anyone would know that it obviously involves fighting the Japanese in some capacity, but as a kid, the cover alone just looked cool enough for me to try it (even though it was a very bland one, to be honest). I load the game up and it has a very rustic looking menu screen. I look through each individual menu on the screen: the audio, the video, the subtitles. It all looks great, with each screen slightly different from the last. After my fiddling with the menus, I start the game and read the text on the bottom of the screen, at this point not knowing what any of it meant, but that it was describing the location as movies did the same thing. The game showed panning shots of a boat (Pearl Harbor specifically) and planes going around. I was captivated by how it looked. Then suddenly an explosion, and a few more followed by alarms. The game cuts to black, then to the character, a nameless soldier. More text comes up trying to detail the time and place that I can half understand. I start going through the boat, still burning from the bombs, and have to read a tooltip (the name for any message directed at you the player rather than the character) for crouching and jumping. After more running, there’s a fire you’re supposed to avoid, but I just ran through it and burned up. The game showed a tooltip to avoid the fire by suggesting I go another way. I get past it and reach the deck, which of course is also on fire. After about 30 minutes, I finally clear the whole mission. Each death brought a new tooltip on how not to die the next time. I was proud that I had learned how to play a video game and succeed! Then I never got past the first five minutes of the next mission and got too scared to continue.