My brother and I were never the closest growing up, with multiple factors stacked against us: our seven-year age gap, our subsequent lack of common interests, and the slight bumps in communication due to our uneven bilingualisms, and my brother’s hearing disability. The few times I did feel close to him, however, were when we played video games.
Truthfully, I didn’t love playing them. For the most part, I was too young to understand what was going on and didn’t have the coordination to press the right buttons to perform the right “combo,” whatever that was. So, I wasn’t very good at them either. Yet I liked being able to bond with my brother over something that set aside our differences.
This past January, I followed him on his trip to Los Angeles to support him at the Annie Awards, considered to be the world’s highest accolade for animation. The film he made in the third year of his animation program was nominated for, and eventually won, the award for Best Student Film. On our way back to Toronto, I watched as my brother browsed through the animation category of the in-flight film selection and began to watch, before realizing that it did not have closed captioning.
Although to me, the lack of captions is an inconvenience, because they assure me that I haven’t missed anything important, I realized that to my brother, they’re an assurance that he hasn’t missed anything at all. Because most in-flight media requires the use of earphones, which my brother cannot use, he could not watch one of the animated films that was just honoured at the same ceremony as his own film.
He told me that he finds video games to be a more accessible form of media, because most of them provide subtitles by default. They allow him to engage in the story without getting caught up in trying to make sure he’s understanding everything. When watching television and film with closed captioning was more difficult, before streaming services were available, my brother didn’t express much interest in watching movies at all. Playing games with rich storylines like The Last of Us, Catherine, and Telltale’s The Walking Dead series made him develop an interest in visually driven stories.
When we played video games together as kids, I’m sure I wasn’t the most helpful teammate or challenging opponent, but my brother still had the courtesy to plug in a second controller for me. He made an exception for one mission in Call of Duty in which I was being so obstructive that he opted to operate both controllers at once. He did so successfully.
Throughout our childhoods, we went through the consoles of a PlayStation 2, a Nintendo DS Lite with a broken hinge, an xBOX360, a PSP, a PlayStation 3, and a Nintendo 3DS. All of them now collect dust in the cabinet of my brother’s former room in our family home, along with all of the games we grew up playing. Some of my earliest and fondest memories of elementary
school can be triggered by the theme songs to Sonic Heroes, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2, and Metal Slug.
Besides first-person shooters and fighting games, my brother and I were also avid fans of some games exclusive to the Nintendo DS. However, having only one DS, only one of us could play at a time. There were instances when I tried to get through entire chapters of games while my brother slept and took caution not to accidentally overwrite his save file, lest I incur his wrath. Considering my brother has seven whole years and a head of height on me, he used to be the scariest person in the world.
Still, playing these games meant we had something to talk about. Despite the similarities in our upbringings, I often felt a disconnect with my only sibling because our experiences were so different. We never went to the same schools, we were never in the same phases of life at the same time, and we hardly had any overlapping interests.
In retrospect, I think one of the reasons my brother was able to enjoy video games so much was because of these games’ commitment to providing closed captioning. He’s congenitally deaf and has been wearing a cochlear implant on his right ear for about fifteen years, before which he used less serviceable hearing aids. (Bilateral cochlear implant is currently under review for public funding after Health Quality Ontario’s 2018 report and recommendation.) Because of this, my brother is someone who greatly benefits from closed captioning, although he has more often had to get by without accommodation.
Before all of this, though, when my brother and I were kids with no idea of where we would end up as adults, I still valued what video games meant to my relationship with my brother. Even if we didn’t speak much while we played games, or while I watched him play from the opposite side of the couch, it was still something for the both of us to do together.
On our frequent long road trips with our parents, after the battery of my iPod Nano waned on me in the eighth hour of countless rounds of Breakout Vortex and Parachute, I would glance over to my brother with our Nintendo DS in his hands, his index finger resting just behind the top screen to support the broken hinge. When he realized that I was trying to get a look at the device to follow along with the story of the Ace Attorney game he was playing, he shifted in his seat to let me see better.
Illustration by Yoon-Ji Kweon
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