S1E17: Mary, Abi, and Zoe

I grew up in the pixelated TV light of the 1980s, when Nintendo and Sega didn’t just entertain. They baptized us into something new. I was nine years old when I first played Super Mario Bros. for the first time at my cousin Darrin’s house, and I remember that moment the way some people remember their first kiss. It was instant. It was electric. The 8bit music was like neon-pink candy in my ears. The colors of the scenes tickled my eyes. The hard plastic of the controller pressed itself against my thumb, branding me with the Nintendo arrow. And I was hooked. I played so much that I started inventing challenges for myself: playing upside down, playing backwards, testing the limits of what a controller and a kid’s imagination could do. I still get the sweats about nigh-unbeatable games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I still remember waking from a dream in fifth grade, stuck somewhere deep inside Bowser’s castle, my brain insisting on figuring out the solution to this level.

But even then, before I had the conceptual language for it, I knew this wasn’t just a toy. It wasn’t just sound and light and dopamine.

It was story. It was stakes. It was agency.

In today’s episode, Mary, Zoe, and Abi try to unravel that same mystery: why video games matter, why they aren’t just distractions, and how they might belong in a high school Honors English class. They wander sometimes. They gush over FNAF and Undertale and other favorites. But they also get somewhere honest. They reflect on empathy, on the upheaval of their childhood homes, on narrative choice, on the ways videogames let us step into a world and test ourselves, make mistakes, grow. Because being in the story changes the story. The videogame gives us a chance to claim power over a destiny that, in the real world, we are often denied.

Books take us on a path someone else has paved. Games let us choose. Fail. Reload. Respawn. Try again. A novel’s ending is already printed on the page, no matter what you do, inevitable. But in a videogame, the ending is yours to shape, or to sabotage, or to chase down again and again until you get it right. That’s more than entertainment. That’s training for life.

And for a lot of us (players, readers, thinkers), that’s a pretty good metaphor for growing up.

These three girls are too young to have played the games I grew up with. They’ve never blown the dust out of an NES cartridge or played upside down on a beanbag chair until way past bedtime. But they know. They know what it feels like to lose yourself in a world, to learn something from it, to come out changed. And as we draw toward wrapping up this school year (and this season of our podcast), I think it’s fitting to place this episode here. With stories that move, that shift, that let us try again. With students who see art where others might only see screens.

Give it a listen. And if you still think video games have no value to the developing human mind, you might just be playing the wrong ones.

You can find With Honors

on Spotify:

on Apple Podcasts:

and on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCweufFHJbylu4tR598SDj5w

Also, throw some love at our brotherly podcast with Coach Haston, A Deadman's Books. He's online at

This episode features excerpts from W.G. Snuffy Walden's "Project Blue" from The Stand, retro arcade music, and inspiring piano music by BlackTrendMusic, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

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