When my mother first started dating my stepfather, I wound up being at his house quite often. Because he knew I liked computer games, he often allowed me to play on his old Macintosh while they went out, and one of the games I played regularly was the Thinkin' Things series of games, but most generally the second installment.

The irony of playing a game titled Thinkin' Things when I am bad at thinking is not lost on me, I assure you. Like many computer games geared towards kids in this period of time, it was considered fairly educational, featuring mostly variations on memory matching gametypes, and was hosted by a group of cartoonish generally anthropomorphic animal characters, each one attached to a different minigame.

Much like what occurred in my Math Munchers post, I looked to video games to further my scholastic abilities simply because school itself had failed me so heavily. Alas, no games ever really did much to actually "teach" me anything, besides perhaps that I'd rather be spending my time gaming than studying.

My stepfathers computer was set up in his home office, on a desk right beside an enormous bay window that overlooked our front yard. Because I had a Windows in my bedroom and he had the Mac, I could only play Thinkin' Things on his computer, and I would. For hours. Every day. The thing is, I simultaneously have excellent and awful memory. Allow me to explain. A lot of the times I cannot remember what year it is. A lot of the times I think it's still 2004. A lot of the times I often don't remember what it was I did yesterday, or even the day I did something. And yet, a lot of the times, I also can remember every single room I've ever been in - no matter where it was; a friends house, a hotel, or a tent in the middle of the woods - with such clarity that it can almost seem as if I'd just been there.

And perhaps that's what I got out of Thinkin' Things more than anything else. I am very poor on every other conceivable level mentally, but as I said earlier, the one thing the game is really in tune with is the idea of memory matching. A lot of kids games actually, be they computer or board game style, deal with this very concept. I think part of that is because kids have poor memory up until a certain age and memory matching games help that along, but in my particular situation, while I couldn't be taught to do anything remotely mathematical or scientific for the life of me, I could have an excellent memory.

Some of my memory issues are thanks to numerous things: depression can greatly affect your memory and it likely has considering I've suffered from crippling depression literally the entire time I've been alive, but there's other reasons as well, such as the brain damage and the ADHD and the Autism and you name it.

Which is what makes the times I have excellent memory often make me feel like a fraud. As if I'm faking everything that's wrong with me. I know I'm not. But it sure makes me feel like I am. I like to think it was games like Thinkin' Things that helped me get good at memorizing every song I ever hear no matter how little I listen to it because so many of the minigames were music based, and helped me be capable of memorizing entire film scripts verbatim or, as I said before, being able to recall with such detail every single room I've ever been in. If there was anything to be gained from playing an "educational" title like Thinkin' Things, I think it was that it helped my memory processes.

See, no matter how much I played a game like Math Munchers, I was never going to learn math, simply because in the end I suffered from severe Dyscalculia, as I stated in that piece I linked earlier. But the only thing keep me from remembering things, a lot of the times, is myself. I've blocked out a lot of memories so I could survive, because they were simply too traumatic, and so while I have a hard time remembering the most awful things that have ever happened to me or the most important moments in my life, the stuff I can remember is the mundane. The inane. The absolutely nonsensical unimportant garbled everyday stuff that most people would forget over the course of their adolescence.

And I think it's cause of Thinkin' Things that I got to be really good at remembering things like that. When almost your entire game is memory based, it's kind of hard not to come away with better memory, I'd wager.

And the one thing I really remember? Playing Thinkin' Things.

How's that for irony?

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like my newest novel here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.