I

used to believe that video games, in general, were a waste of time. And I felt sorry for gamers who weren’t able to pry themselves away from their poison of choice. I mean, don’t they have better things to do?

I didn’t know just how addictive video games could be until I visited my son, Dai, in the United States, where he was studying. He had a roommate, Qin, whose sole preoccupation during the school semester seemed to revolve around such games. At some point, Dai managed to talk some sense into his roommate, who had just sold a fancy desktop, which gave him access to very advanced games.

They were three weeks into the new semester at the University of Pittsburgh, and they had work to do after classes.

“OK. It’s 10 p.m. I’ll play for a few more minutes,” Qin announced one evening.

He was playing Fruit Ninja on his mobile phone. His fingers were busy going all over the screen with a force that could easily destroy the phone. His lips were twisting left and right, then they were pressing hard against each other. He also had his legs raised high in the air, which he abruptly lowered as he folded himself forward to get closer to the mobile phone. I shot an amused look at my son and whispered: “His mother knows nothing about this?”

“No, she thinks he’s studying hard.”

“This is so worrying. Can’t you stop him?”

“I’ve tried a million times. This is nothing compared to last semester. But he’ll get down to work eventually,” Dai said reassuringly, as if I were his roommate’s mother.

Six months later, Dai returned to Guangzhou during a summer break and spent some time playing the game Qin had been so obsessed with at home. I noticed his physical movements: his legs went up and down in response to the rhythm of the game. And upon a closer look at the phone screen: fruits were tumbling up from the bottom of the screen before being maliciously sliced into pieces by his unforgiving finger-blade.

You see, I like fruits of all kinds, and Fruit Ninja has a good collection of them: bananas, peaches, kiwis, watermelons, passion fruits, mangoes, strawberries, etc. At this point, I was staring at my son’s gameplay. The background music, coupled with an encouraging comment when one does well, excited me.

“You want to give it a go?” asked Dai.

“Well, why not?” I said.

It was an interesting sensation, especially when my finger went through a specific fruit that triggered a 10-point reward. Something clicked physically and you knew you had scored well. Then I accidentally sliced through three fruits at once.

“Like a Ninja!” a strange voice complimented me from inside the handheld device. Thirty extra points!

But that wasn’t enough. My overall score was 157, whereas Dai’s was 385. He said he could easily reach a score of 1,000+ if he had taken the game a bit more seriously.

That hurt. So I gave myself another go, this time more mindful of the bombs that dashed into the screen randomly along with the fruits. Slice the bomb by accident and a life would be lost (one gameplay grants the player three lives).

My next score was 135. That was intolerable! Before I knew it, my entire evening was spent trying to catch up to what my son would like to call his “casual play score”. I was still busy slicing the fruits at bedtime — and I played the game in the dark, with all the lights turned off. I had to do better in the next round, I thought. Yet my highest score was 322 and I couldn’t seem to go any higher, much less 1,000+.

I was challenged.

I was defeated.

So I kept playing. By the time I looked up from the phone in my hands, it was already seven in the morning.

***

DAI WAS AMAZED, or more accurately, shocked by my resilience and final score. He decided to give himself another go at the game and began to play in a very light-hearted manner. The score? 539!

My husband, Jigang, took it much more positively: “At least you still have the energy and passion to sit up all night. I can’t do it anymore!”

Good point.

Later, when I complained to my son about the time it took for the game to load, Dai told me the game also comes with a brief, one-minute gameplay. Perfect. That would give me a necessary timeline and the required discipline.

This was when I discovered what addiction feels like. One minute grew into a whole set of other minutes. I couldn’t stop. I was ashamed. Didn’t I once despise the very notion of gamers being addicted to games?

However, the feeling did little to discourage me. I made up excuses to continue playing the game, and the best one had to do with mental health, in which I justified the need to leave the last round of the game with a higher score than the score of the previous round. That means I’d have a few more rounds to play before it happened. When that excuse became old, I would check the last digit of my final score. If it ended with the number 4, I would play again, because in Cantonese the number “4” has a similar pronunciation as the word “death”.

Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t superstitious, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t spend one short minute to avoid a bad omen.

The thing is, playing Fruit Ninja helps me understand several things about life. Sometimes the game would go so well you might score over 1,000 points; however, your points might drop to a mere 300 in the next round for no good reason. You do what you can under such random circumstances based on algorithms set up by the game designers. It is as if they’re trying to say, “Here’s an important life lesson: Even though you work hard at something, there is no guarantee you will achieve the desired goal.”

This realization helped me come to terms with my own performance, the low and high scores. All of a sudden, I was able to take Fruit Ninja as nothing more than what it has always been: a game — one in which I can let go of myself for both entertainment and pleasure; and in which I may choose to exit at any time. Above all, it is wonderful to witness the phenomenon of video games imitating reality, while still able to treat them as games. Besides, how many things are there in life that could turn into manageable addictions?