notes on video games and my relationship with them

Sometimes I use Twitter. I'm not sure why.

The other day, I tweeted:

how would I explain to my 17-year-old self that in twenty years, he'd mostly be listening to ragas? https://t.co/VmmmGVlyV7

— Patrick R (@sunspeakgreen) July 6, 2021

At age seventeen, I was still listening to Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails on a regular basis. I was just getting into Skinny Puppy, and was dabbling in Leæther Strip, the Electric Hellfire Club, Birmingham 6, and Wumpscut. All of it loud, abrasive, clanging, screeching, thumping music with an antiheroic (if not outright villainous) lyrical charisma, embracing the tacit philosophy that music ought to be a contact event. I suppose I understood then that a lot would necessarily change in two decades—but the insinuation that I'd somehow get to a point where most of the music I chose to listen to would be recordings of people from India playing the sitar and occasionally singing in a language I didn't understand might have been a bridge too far.

A longtime internet acquaintance pointed something else out:

I just realized I could make you feel really old and tell you that *my* 17 year old self would be confused if I told him Pitchfork doesn't play video games anymore

— Raijin Klaid (@thegreatklaid) July 7, 2021

 
Yes, well. Let's see here. When I was in my twenties I made a (relatively) long-running webcomic from ripped NES sprites and wrote (and rewrote) a series of essays about Final Fantasy. I haunted gaming message boards and IRC channels. I racked up hundreds of hours in Disgaea and Makai Kingdom, and probably even more playing online matches of Street Fighter III: Third Strike. I routinely drove forty-five minutes to play King of Fighters XI at an arcade in Wayne, New Jersey. I bought and played through seven—SEVEN!—.hack games, despite knowing in my heart that they were trash. I'm not certain if I ever self-identified as a gamer, but video games were more than just a hobby. They were my touchstone.

But I never stopped playing them! Why, just a few months ago, I wrote about the Valiant megaWAD. Last year I ploughed through Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 (and had nothing but good things to say about it), finally played and finished Cuphead, and fondly revisited Einhänder. Early into the lockdown, I kept the anxiety at bay with Lumines. And right now I'm feeling like it's finally time to try out Black Mesa, which Shirley's PC can apparently run (though my laptop falls far short of even the minimum requirements)—but I'm going to wait until the fall or winter.

Right now, if I've got time during the day where I don't intend to do anything constructive, I feel like I ought to at least go on a bike ride to the river (if I don't sneak out of the city to visit the Pine Barrens) or sit outside one of the reopened coffee shops and either read a few chapters of a novel or write postcards before Philadelphia cycles back into the six-month period when the doesn't come out and the temperature ranges from frigid to just unpleasant enough to be distracting. I've started bouldering again, too—though I don't make it out to the rock gym as often as I'd like.

I played more video games last summer than usual, true, but it wasn't like I had to budget my time during the lockdown. Now that I've reentered the workforce, the hours that I'm not doing what I must to earn a wage have become more precious. But when it's dark and drizzly again, I'm sure there will be days and evenings when I don't feel like doing much, even when there's opportunity—and that will be when I make Shirley regret she ever offered to let me use her desktop PC for video games.

I miss video games—which is a strange thing to say after admitting I never quit them. But part of me hates that I'm not playing fighting games online every night, and that I'll never experience Final Fantasy XIV. I'm trying to enjoy a healthier relationship with games than I once did—which is very much like saying that I love cigarettes but don't want my smoking them to become driven by compulsion.

If gaming is a lifestyle choice, then it's one of those choices that has a funny way of making itself. If you're old enough to remember being a child at the mall arcade, or at the local restaurant that had the latest Street Fighter knockoff or Konami beat 'em up in the vestibule, and can remember the anguish of running out of quarters and being refused more by your parents, you have some insight into how the smoker feels when his pack goes missing and all the convenience stores are closed for the evening.

Talking about video game addiction in particular seems a little beside the point in the age of Netflix and social media. Over the last decade or so, "bingeworthiness" has become the metric by which the quality of a new serial is assessed; in 2019 (before the pandemic), the average American was spending two and a half hours on social media per day. In 1990, the average America household watched seven hours of television per day; in 2017, that number had dropped to nearly eight hours, after peaking at about nine hours in 2009. (These numbers come from Nielsen and did not take streaming services into account.) It seems silly to believe that there's no correlation whatsoever between our media habits and our not going outside, not doing volunteer work, not participating in social clubs or civic groups, and our not having sex.

None of us want to think of ourselves as zombies, moved to and fro by the operation of attractors, repulsers, and our own biological exigencies. We want to believe we do what we do, whatever we do, with reason and intentionality. I say that I open Instagram when I think "gosh, I wonder what my friends are up to?" and check Twitter because it occurs to me that there's so much happening in the world and I ought to bring myself up to date.

"I have weighed the alternatives, and I believe the situation calls for me putting off going to bed one more hour to watch another episode of Jupiter's Legacy."

"It is Saturday, and I feel powerfully that of all the activities to which I can possible commit my finite leisure time of my fleeting existence on this planet, playing PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is, by any conceivable metric, and for the fiftieth consecutive week, the most reasonable choice."

"This enriches and gratifies me," I grit through my teeth at 2:30 AM, starting another ranked match in BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger after losing thirteen in a row. "I am asserting my will as a rational, self-determining agent!"

BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (2008). I mained Rachel, and ArcSys probably did
me a big favor in the long run by nerfing her in Continuum Shift.

The ingenuity, artistry, and passion writ large in good video games is undeniable. But trust a current nicotine addict who once had an unhealthy relationship with ranked matches in 2D fighters: the raison d'etre of video games to make a lifetime customer out of you.

When I do play video games, I try to bear in mind that they're also playing me. I like to think of them a as a friend whose company I really enjoy—he's brilliantly intelligent, funny, eloquent, imaginative, and makes me feel like I'm at the center of the universe when he engages me in conversation. But he's also a bit of a sociopath whom I can't completely trust, and to whom I shouldn't allow myself to get too close.¹ Letting myself get drawn too deeply into his world, permitting his fancies, biases, grudges, and idées fixes become my own would be—well, you can read as many internet testimonials as you'd like about the experience of getting stuck in the orbit of a dark triad personality.

To the video game industry (and to the entertainment industrial complex as whole), we are mere instruments. No matter how wonderfully video games stimulate, delight, or inspire us they are also using us. I don't doubt for a second that the creatives who work so hard to design games earnestly wish to delight, stimulate, and inspire—just like the guy who invented Lunchables wanted to help out time-pressed parents who had to pack their children's school lunches, and make brown-bagging it a bit more exciting for the kids. But they're operating within an industry whose business model consists of selling people a habit and devising new ways of privately profiting from it.²

Sure, yes, with the way things are organized, we're making some horrible exploitative asshole somewhere richer no matter what we do. I'm convinced that for every book I sell, Jeff Bezos is able to buy 0.005 USD worth of rocket fuel. All I'm saying is that I'm trying to be more deliberate in choosing whom I hand over the keys to my mind, and setting limits on how long I allow them to rent the space. The vector through which the worms of heteronomy get into our brains isn't media content, but media formats.³

I have a lot of fun playing video games, and nothing but admiration for artists and auteurs who achieve excellence in the medium. I still enjoy writing about games from time to time. But it makes sense to me to limit the extent to which I give myself over to them. I don't like who I am when I'm so emotionally invested in a game that I get angry at it, when I'm so engrossed in a game that I put off sleeping, bathing, and/or eating, or when games make me avoidant of the people in my life and indifferent to actual events on my part of actual Earth.

It makes sense to me. But you should do what makes sense to you—naturally.

1. Yes, I've actually had friends like this. They're all very fun and charming.

2. The tobacco industry understands that it needn't fret when a smoker isn't buying cigarettes on a regular basis. What matters is that the pack is in his drawer or coat pocket, and sometimes he reaches for it. As long as he's using the product, the tobacconists can reliably expect he'll be back to buy more. Incidentally, I believe the happiest day in the the lives of the people who sold discs, cartridges, and consoles was when they understood that the kids and adolescents to whom they marketed their products in the 1980s and 90s weren't "aging out" of video games as they did conventional toys. 

3. Obviously Marshall McLuhan build an illustrious career exploring "the electric dilation of our various senses" by twentieth-century media forms. From The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962):

This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the "noosphere" or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending toward a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.

Big Brother needn't necessarily refer the government. Facebook and Twitter getting into people's heads made the QAnon cult possible. As a collective, journalists are in the advanced stages of Twitterbrain, and our politics are all the worse for it.