Hello dear,

Thank you again for the Sony! I had a devil of a time getting it working, but Daniel was so helpful and patient putting all the cords and wires in place. I have to say that it took quite a bit of getting used to. The new television is very big and the hi-fi your father put in is very loud. When Daniel showed me how to play a game the entire apartment shook so much that one of my glass rabbits nearly fell off the shelf! Ha ha. Learning how to use the remote has also been a bit of a trial. I told you how Dr. Singh says “it’s incredible that a woman my age has so little arthritis”, but trying to wrap my fingers around all those buttons hasn’t been easy.

I’ve stuck with it, though, and I wanted to write you a little note about the game I’ve been playing so you can see for yourself how much I’ve been enjoying the gift! It’s called Payday 2 and it’s about a group of bank robbers. Bank robbers! It took me a few minutes to wrap my mind around THAT ONE and I’ll admit that I felt a bit uncomfortable pretending to be a criminal at first (even after shutting the blinds). They make it so fun, though! You pretend to be one of these gangsters and you go to banks and malls, and little jewelry shops and you rob them. It’s very much like Ocean’s 11 (except I can’t imagine Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr. using the kind of foul language in this game!) and is an awful lot of fun.

Have you seen what these videogames do with the internet? You play this game with complete strangers that the Sony finds for you. Can you believe I robbed a bank with a young man from Houston today! Ha ha ha! He was very kind, the Texan boy, but I also had a teammate who wouldn’t tell me where he was from and who was very rude. Well, once the Internet gets all of you connected you pick which kind of guns you like most (don’t tell your boys how good grandma is with an automatic shotgun!) and the kind of tools you want to use (I’m very handy with the first aid kits) and then you get to work. Each of the games I played was very different from the other ones. In one of them everybody was very polite and nice after I told them that I was new to this videogame thing, and they kept helping me up after I had been shot by the policemen (I’ll get to THAT later) or telling me where to go when I got stuck. In other ones everyone was extremely selfish and they all ran around on their own and wouldn’t help me at all even when I told them that I was in real trouble!

On the whole I’m not sure how much I like these Internet games compared to the other ones you bought me that I can play by myself, at my own pace. You would think that playing with other people who want to accomplish the very same thing that you do would help you all to stay together and work as a team, but that didn’t always happen. Even worse than not having as good of a time as we could have had — some of these Internet people can say the meanest, most horrible things! I won’t write them out here (GOD FORBID) because I do not want anyone seeing these kind of words in my own hand and thinking that I’ve gone on a terrible rant to you. All I will say is that I would prefer to play Payday 2 only with my friends (you’ll have to buy a few more Sonys for the girls! Ha ha ha!).

The LAST THING (I know this is getting a bit long, but just bear with me) that I wanted to tell you about is how awful this videogame is with the violence! I found the heists very fun for the most part — I did not care very much for the one where you had to make drugs in an old house. What could have been just a nice time figuring out how to crack the lock on a giant safe without letting anyone know you and your thieves were inside kept turning into big shootouts. Now, I know that kids see things differently than old farts like me do, but is it really necessary to have quite so many gun fights in these videogames? I admit that they do help to make everything feel very dangerous and exciting. Couldn’t the police have been replaced with aliens, though? It would probably be very interesting for a videogame to show aliens trying to stop bank robbers rather than other humans. If they did that then maybe the blood could be green and they could have colourful and interesting designs that would look much better than what they have now. Ha ha. Just a thought! Maybe I should become a videogame designer!!!

Love,

Grandma Haddy

September 4th, 2013

P.S. What kind of grades did Daniel get on his last report card? I have put a $20 bill inside a card, but I’m not going to send it to him unless he did very well.

***

Haddy Liu is new to videogames, but finds them quite exciting! She loves tea, her children, her grandchildren, and her friends. Her letters are put on the Internet with help from:

Reid McCarter is a writer, editor and musician living and working in Toronto. He has written for sites and magazines including Kill Screen, The Escapist, and C&G Magazine. He is also editor-in-extremis for videogame site Digital Love Child. His Tweet-fu is strong @reidmccarter.