This is the third part of a series I'll be doing on games played during my childhood.

There's not much in the world that I fear, surprisingly, despite being the damaged and challenged woman that I am. I dislike time, and I certainly am dubious on the concept of death, but things like horror movies don't scare me and the idea of aging in general doesn't really upset me. But there's always been one thing that's definitely gotten my pulse racing, and that thing...is math.

Maybe it's stereotypical to fall into the trope that the dweeby girl who could read at a college level in elementary school couldn't do basic math, but sometimes a trope is a trope because they're the truths that have stuck to the wall. No matter what, no matter how someone tried to teach me, no matter who it was doing the teaching, I simply couldn't progress beyond extremely basic multiplication and division. And while, down the road, it was finally agreed upon that I suffered from severe Dyscalculia, for a good long time math was my biggest enemy outside of my immediate family.

My stepfather was extremely good at math. He knew I didn't like doing it and would often lie about completing my math homework, so he would generally try and do it with me at the table in his home office, only for these outings to always end the same way, day in, day out; me sobbing, my brain on fire from confusion, as he held my wrists to the table and screamed at me that I was lying and did in fact know how to do this. My whole life has been a nonstop barrage of having to prove to people that, no I'm not lying, I really am that challenged.

So, eventually my parents tried another route, and decided that perhaps educational video games were the best way to get through my mental blockage. They knew I liked video games, and Math Munchers Deluxe seemed a good start as any.

Certainly it's for kids. It's cute and whimsical and colorful, it's got a fun soundtrack and lots of puns and jokes kids would like. The characters are all very child friendly, and the whole thing just smacks of "kid friendly parent approved", and I admit, I tried. I really, really did. I loved video games, so even I thought that perhaps they would be the gateway to me finally unlocking and thusly understanding the complex mysteries that math had always been to me. And yet...despite my efforts, despite the game being seemingly easy to understand...I...I still couldn't manage to do it. It's the same as any of the old "Munchers" games in the franchise; eat the bubble with the correct answer on it. Not a new concept. But the problem was I still didn't know anything. Math Munchers Deluxe didn't teach you math, it taught you to be proud of the math you knew.

They have these terms within the game, but they don't really go out of their way to tell you specifically what they are or what they mean, and that isn't the games fault, really. The game is there to be enjoyable and fun and entertaining. School is there to teach you. Try as I might, I simply couldn't get past anything in Math Munchers Deluxe that I couldn't get past in my elementary school math class. What's worse is that it made me not enjoy playing video games to boot, because this thing was supposed to fix me, and it wasn't, which meant that video games aren't the end all be all explanations of life that I'd always assumed them to be. Math Munchers Deluxe didn't fix my arithmetic. It just broke my love for something else entirely.

To this day, I hold a weird feeling towards it because - as a game - it's pretty solid, honestly. It's well made (for what it is and when it was produced anyway) and it's got a great little soundtrack and the visuals are fantastic, and the whole aesthetic of the thing is just excellent. But as a learning tool? No. It doesn't work. And I think that's the thing that bothered me most. My parents finally reached a point where they stopped trying to help me learn and decided to let other mediums step in to do the job for them. I didn't want someone to force me to learn something I was incapable of learning. I wanted my parents to listen and understand why I couldn't do the thing they were trying to teach me to learn in the first place.

In a weird way, Math Munchers Deluxe was both a villain and a hero.

Here was a game that just accepted the amount of mathematical knowledge I knew without making me feel bad for it or questioning it, yet that wasn't what I wanted from a game. I wanted that from my parents. And while I want to bemoan it for not doing the job my parents set out for it to do, it's not the games fault. The blame lies on my parents for trying to make a game do that job in the first place. Math Munchers Deluxe was simply another game, albeit updated visually, in the ongoing Munchers franchise. It's sole job was to be enjoyable. No teacher, no textbook and certainly no video game was ever going to teach me how to do math, because, fact of the matter was, I just can't do math.

It's a great game to watch Lets Plays of on Youtube, which is something I've been doing recently, if only because I still really like the hazy memories it left me with in regards to its overall aesthetic, like I said earlier. The music is a lot of fun and the visuals are cute. Do I understand 95% of it? You better believe I don't. But does that mean I can't enjoy watching other people understand it? Certainly not. I'm all for the belief that just because something exists in the world that I don't understand or enjoy - be it a certain film, book, or video game - doesn't mean it's inherently devalued. As long as it brings others some sense of comfort and joy, then it's worth something. Math doesn't bring me any enjoyment, and math based video games certainly don't bring me any enjoyment.

But in the end, Math Munchers Deluxe never questioned why I knew as little math as I did. It was simply happy that I knew enough to progress as much as I did while playing it.

And that's what I needed at the time.

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like knowing I recently published a graphic novel here, I have a semi autobiographical book here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.