I ascended the mountain of microchips and ancient cases (branded Gateway, Tandy, IBM) to reach the great guru. He sat cross-legged inside a sacred circle of flat-screen monitors. A few were blank. Some showed message boards. Others, LOLcats.
The guru opened his eyes and looked down at me from atop his holy black t-shirt.
“What is it you seek?” he asked.
“It’s this game,” I said. “Bioshock 2 — it’s crashing my computer when I try to play it. I get like, ten minutes in, and then — boom! — it takes the whole computer down. I think it’s got something to do with Games for Windows Live.”
The guru blinked slowly. “When the time of crashing comes, are your eyes filled with screen of blue death?”
“Nope. Nothing. No error messages, no blue screen, nothing. It just shuts the computer all the way down.”
“Ah.”
“What do you mean, ‘ah’? Can you help me?”
“Perhaps. But one cannot address a hardware problem if one believes it is a software problem.”
“What hardware?” I asked. “It’s within the system specs listed on the game.”
The guru shrugged slightly, as if to say that system specs are mere bullet points, designed by marketers and not engineers.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But the eye that is blinded with sweat cannot see.”
“Okay. Sure. No. Wait. What are you saying?”
“When the man is hot, he sweats, and that sweat blinds the eye.”
“Sorry, still not following.”
“Especially if that eye is inside a really hot computer case and covered with dust.”
“Oh…” I said. “You mean the graphics card, don’t you?”
“Words have many meanings,” said the guru, but I knew I was right. And he was right too. The graphics card was probably overheating — and shutting down the computer — and needed a good cleaning.
“Awesome,” I said. “Thanks!” I turned to go.
“One more thing,” said the guru. “You are right to beware the foul beast that lurks at the heart of this game.”
“Ken Levine?”
“Games for Windows Live. For truly, it is the devil.”
Thanks for the help, Colby!
