Once you accept Hamlet as the archetypal modern hero (or anti-hero), you begin seeing him everywhere. Case in point, my wife and I were watching "Phantom of the Opera" the other night. There's a line toward the end of the movie where the Phantom sings: "Down once more to the dungeon of my dark despair; down once more to the prison of my mind." All I could think of was Hamlet's line to Guildenstern and Rosencranz: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I had bad dreams." Here, once more, was the star-crossed prince, slighted and overlooked, falling back within his own mind to recreate the world as a play, with himself as the main character, and wreck his revenge. Of course Christine is no Ophelia, and that alters the whole course of the story.
I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old. That's a couple years after it first came out. The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer. I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit. It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows. With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play. What was that first game? It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past . Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge. It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing? There were stretches when I didn't. Many times, I've just been too busy. There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
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