People ask me what wreck diving is like. I have had a lot of time to think about it, mostly while I am wreck diving, and the best description that I can come up with, having been a teen during the advent of first person shooter video games, is that it is like playing Doom. Without the monsters and demons and shotguns and explosives and rocket launcher ammo and whatnot...actually, there are explosives and ammo here, there just aren’t zombies actively trying to use them on me. I’m getting ahead of myself.
For those of you who haven’t wasted inordinate amounts of your life playing video games, here’s the short version. First person shooter games present an explorable environment using the screen to give a first person perspective of what you would see if you were moving through that environment. Turn left and your view changes left, look up and you see what is above you, crouch to examine something on the ground and you zoom in on it as if you were getting closer to it. The themes of different games range from ancient times to the far future, with attendant weapons, foes, puzzles, maps, clues, etc., but certain mechanics of these games are pervasive. The world is broken down into areas. Each area has a layout, a map through which you navigate. The designers insert into the maps hidden areas and navigational puzzles to reward the observant, persistent, thorough player. Careful examination of each area reveals in the nooks and crannies hidden rooms with caches of goodies and passages that allow access to hard to reach areas or shortcuts through the map. Play enough of the games or figure out the designer’s logic, if there is any, and finding the hidden goodies becomes easier.
What the hell does this have to do with wreck diving? Simply this: exploring the wrecks, learning them, mapping them out mentally, poking into every nook, is similar to exploring in a first person shooter. I am looking for the same things: hidden goodies and ways to get to hard to access places. I get the same feeling in a wreck as I do in a game: show me everything, leave nothing unturned or unexplored, poke nose and flashlight everywhere. I enter new areas in wrecks the way I do in games, methodically moving from one side of the space to another, searching high and low. Granted there’re no aliens waiting to jump out and liquefy my face or axe wielding zombies bent on dismembering me when I disturb their lair, but I have found more than one pile of human remains in the wrecks, and that’s something one often encounters in the more macabre games. Ammo too. Much of a shooting game revolves around finding enough ammunition to get the job done, and there’s plenty, plenty of ammunition around here. I’m not going to fall back on that old video games are useful because they improve hand eye coordination saw, but I have solved more than one maze riddle in a wreck superstructure by using the always turn left trick everyone who ever played Castle Wolfenstein learned. Who said video games are a complete waste of time?
