As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, I’m obsessed with something new. It’s a game called Star Wars: Battlefront, the point of which is to dress up like a stormtrooper or a rebel or a droid and shoot everything else you see. This is not the game I thought it was going to be; I thought it was going to be a space game, but instead, it’s a running around and shooting people game.

I have never played a first-person shooter before, or even wanted to. Guns are bad. I am more the strategic type. There is a game I like to play that is like chess except with tanks and airplanes, and that’s fun, but it stopped working on my computer, so I got this new one.

The great thing about Star Wars: Battlefront is when you get to be a stromtrooper. Every time you get killed, you get to come back from the dead in your choice of new outfits, as if you are Wonder Woman spinning around extra times for an appropriate ensemble. There are regular stormtroopers and stormtroopers with black and blue and yellow stripes. I think that the point of all this is that each outfit gets its own kind of gun, but that’s hard to tell because I keep getting entranced by the green stormtroper’s Sunday best.

The graphics in this game are extremely realistic, which is good and bad. It’s good because playing it is a vivid experience. It’s bad because even if you only play the game for a little while, its realism tends to superimpose itself over your own experience.

Last night, Rob and I went to the Hampden neighborhood for dinner. Walking up the Avenue to the restaurant, I kept getting the idea that stormtroopers and rebels were around every corner. What was really around every corner were bands of belligerent, drunken children, knocking things over, punching cars, and screaming at the top of their lungs. “Are you guys drunk like I am?” one boy kept yelling at us between banging on shop windows and howling at the moon. He was one nasty-looking thirteen year old. I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him and ask him what he thought he was going to get out of life with that sort of attitude. He was angry, and I don’t blame him. The neighborhood he grew up in is being bought out from under families like his by yuppie gentrifiers, and the politicians his family sees as leaders and heroes are actually lying monsters who are selling their futures for a few extra bucks they don’t even need. How do you tell someone like this that his only chance of escaping the ice floe of misery that’s carrying him toward his certain doom is to defy the low expectations of the world around him and use his anger as a motivating force to improve himself?

Well, you don’t.

What you do is to hope to god he’s not going to kill you for no reason as you walk past, then go home and shoot a few extra stormtroopers in his honor.