Mud Room

In both my aunt and uncle’s home and my grandparents’ home, videogames became a sort of extra-domestic space—a crack in a wall that could be passed through to a variable architecture that was connected to and dependent on the ‘real’ house. In both homes there were good reasons to keep children inhabiting their own separate space. My uncle, who struggled with alcoholism, later took his own life. When I was eight years old, my grandfather Bob shot himself in the room where the Atari was kept. After being diagnosed with bone cancer, his employer had terminated his health insurance coverage. That room was called the “mud room” in my family. It was a transitional space between indoors and outdoors—a place where muddy boots were quarantined, paperwork was done (in a locked roll-top desk) and where children played. It was also a transitional space from the home into the places accessed via the game console. It was also a transitional space from life to the hidden space of death.

Shortly after my grandfather’s death I remember one day of being back in the (now cleaned and emptied) mud room playing another Atari game, Sneak n’ Peek (1982). In my mind it was another dungeon, mapped on the iconography of a family home. The videogame is a version of Hide and Seek, where hiding places (invisible, enterable pockets of space) riddle a house. The visible topology of the environment must be tested (by slowly moving the stick-figure-like player character into each pixel) in order to find the location of hiding places. Two children could take turns hiding and testing the skein of the house for invisible folds. One child playing alone could only search for a computer player over and over. As a child playing alone, it was never your turn to hide. I imagined that this was because the computer already knew where everything was hidden. Just as the house in Sneak n’ Peek had permeable walls, the Atari was a portal to other spaces in my grandparents’ home. Somewhere beyond the closed door of the mud room, adults were planning my grandfather’s funeral.
“Thank God for Pac-Man,” I remember my grandmother saying through a closed door.