If you want this shirt, you need help.
No matter how you slice it, gaming is huge business. Over $10 billion annually in sales, and the vast majority of American households play video games. (For a bunch of interesting stats, check out this handy infographic from the ESRB.) An ever-increasing number of us could probably be considered gamers, whether it’s as simple as our Angry Birds addiction or the Wii Tennis Parties we have when there’s a family get-together, or a more serious habit like that fostered by the MMORPG fanboys (and girls). Even the music industry is getting in on the action. If you haven’t heard it before, good luck getting this song out of your head:
http://youtu.be/HO1OV5B_JDw
Gaming was a staple of my life as far back as I can remember. I don’t know if the memory is accurate, but I distinctly remember riding on my dad’s shoulders out of the mall at about age 3 while he carried a shopping bag with our brand new wood-veneered Atari 2600. I remember nights spent playing Stampede! and Air Sea Battle and Chopper Command and, of course, Pac Man. When I made it into school, we had educational games in the classroom. I was a huge fan of games like The Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego. When we got our first home PC (An 8086 with 640K RAM, CGA graphics, two 5.25″ floppies and no hard drive) the Christmas after I turned 10 years old, I started hunting for games everywhere I could find them. Shareware bins, friends houses, and the growing software section in retail stores. By the time I was 17, I had bought a much nicer computer, a Sega Genesis and Sega CD, and was reading gaming magazines looking for the newest and best. I had also by this time routinely begun to play games for 6-10 hours at a clip, immersing myself in the experience and tuning out the world. By college, I knew how to build and fix computers, run them faster, make them play better. During my senior thesis (which I did during Spring Break, because I was lame) I took a break and bought myself a Sega Dreamcast, and we had alcohol-fueled Soul Calibur tournaments into the wee hours of pretty much every night thereafter.
I didn’t know it, but I had a serious problem. My wife figured it out after I was let go from my job upon returning from our Honeymoon, only for me to lay around on the floor of our unfurnished condo playing Unreal Tournament all day while she supported us. Oh, I looked for jobs, too, but it was a half-assed attempt. I was much more interested in improving my Capture the Flag rankings. Games had been such a part of my life for so long, such a consolation from the disappointments of the world and my own inadequacies as a clumsy, non-athletic nerd, that I had come to depend on them as a coping mechanism without knowing that this is what I was doing. I was simply hot for the chase, the thrill of solving the next puzzle, shooting the bad guys, driving at breakneck speeds to outrun the cops, and in general just living out the exciting life and sense of purpose that I was ultimately lacking in the real world.
In “meatspace,” I was a loser. In games, I was a badass. It couldn’t be simpler. And so, during the times of my life when I was at my lowest, when I needed to be out busting butt and clawing my way forward to provide for my family, I would instead devote my considerable intellectual capabilities toward planning effective airstrikes in Command & Conquer: Generals.
This is the insidious thing about video games. They allow every washed-up, lazy, ambitionless slacker to feel the euphoria of accomplishment without ever doing anything in real life. This pushes an endorphin button in your brain so hard that you come back again, and again, and again. And if you were destined to really become someone and share your talents with the world, but you used video games to salve the sullen times when you were busy schlepping burgers so you could pay your dues, you may have in fact doomed yourself to become the washed-up, lazy, ambitionless slacker you were never meant to be. Because the allure of the game will always call you back. Just one more level. Just one more mission. Just one more…
I pretty much quit video games cold turkey a couple years ago. I started finding real, actual things to do that felt productive and pushed some of those same endorphin buttons in my brain. So I began replacing video games with these activities, and I hardly experienced any withdrawal. I’d plop down for the occasional tryst with Fallout 3 or Portal 2, or every now and then fire up my copy of The UrQuan Masters (which you can get for free and relive one of the best sci-fi action RPGs ever, and which really helped define the genre) for a bit of interstellar fisticuffs, but nothing that rose to the same level as before. I was free!
Then came this past weekend. I had come down with some kind of nasty, ache all over and feel completely exhausted cold that makes you just want to do nothing. With plenty of rain in the forecast and not much that needed doing, I gave in to the temptation and cracked open a copy of Mass Effect 3.
A word about Mass Effect – it’s just about the most well developed and interesting popular science fiction universe since Star Wars, and the whole series is a work of artistic and gameplay genius. Someone gave me a copy of Mass Effect, and I liked it so much I actually showed up at Target the morning Mass Effect 2 came out and plunked down whatever they were asking so I didn’t have to wait. I had more restraint with the third installment in the trilogy, but I knew I couldn’t resist forever.
So there I was, just giving it a little spin to see how it felt. I’d play for a little bit then take a nap. Maybe get some reading in or a movie with the boys. I would just get warmed up, catch up on the story, get a couple missions under my belt, etc. 10 hours later, I wondered why my body hurt so much, and why it was so dark in the house. And I did the same thing again on Sunday. I racked up at least 16 hours of gameplay in two days. I Could. Not. Stop. At one point last night, I actually heard myself saying to my wife, “I’m just going to finish this mission, and then we can do whatever you’d like.”
I’m just going to finish this mission? SERIOUSLY?!? AM I FIFTEEN YEARS OLD AGAIN?!?!?
I suddenly remembered why I had lost so much of my life to these games. They just take you away to another place, where you can have adventure safely, meet new and interesting people, and shoot them in the face with cryo-bullets that freeze their bodies and make them shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. Unless you’re Richard Branson, chances are very good that video games are a lot more interesting and exciting than your life is. And that’s why they will completely replace it if you let them.
I wonder how many amazing writers, composers, filmmakers, and artists we’ll never know about because their parents bought them an XBOX as a seemingly harmless Christmas present. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. I can only imagine how much more I would have accomplished if I had pursued my fiction writing instead of immersing myself in the fiction of others. I’d probably have finished several novels by now. Maybe even gotten one of them published. When cyberpunk novelist and legend William Gibson was asked how he has been able to write so many books, he responded, “I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”
What he says about TV goes doubly for games. They take longer to consume, and they lure you so much deeper in.
So, will I finish Mass Effect 3? Yes. I’m fairly confident that I will, because I want to know the rest of the story. And because it’s fun.
Will I pick up another video game soon? Probably not. It’s just not worth getting addicted. I’ve got some real-life leveling up to do, and I’d rather not let anything so purposeless get in the way.
Truth. Unadulterated truth. It’s why I don’t have a modern system (last one is a Gamecube), and though my PC is more than capable of gaming, it’s running Linux exclusively. I love video games, and a huge part of me is still really connected to the (now fairly mainstream) game culture. But… between my demanding job and my family, I just can’t make the time commitment to play the games that I’d absolutely love to the most (Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Skyrim, etc. come to mind). So instead, my gaming is pretty limited to playing old emulated NES titles on occasion (just started playing through the original Zelda again — so good!) and online chess with a few friends (Chess.com is buggy as hell, but it works on both iOS and Android).
I’ve always known that adults playing video games is a bad thing. I would never dream of marrying a man who plays games. Games are for children, and I need a grown-up for a husband. It’ something that has powerfully disturbed me about modern men for some time, this bizarre spectacle of grown men playing games, reading escapist sci-fi and fantasy, and doing the same things that amused and distracted them when they were fifteen.
Same thing goes for someone who is deeply involved in any fantasy-based thing, like the SCA or even sports. I’ve written about this for some years now, only the Real counts, and we harm our selves morally, emotionally and intellectually by any attempt to shy away from that Real.
Hilary,
I disagree that adults playing video games, in general, is a bad thing. It depends on the person. I recognize that I can get completely sucked in to many kinds of games, and I avoid those games. I probably spend an average of 6 hours a month playing games, and at least 5 of those hours are online chess.
I have associates and co-workers that play WoW for 40+ hours a week. That’s absolutely freaking crazy. I also know people who watch that much TV — equally nuts. It really all comes down to degrees. I’d say that during college, I spent about 30-40 hours a week split between video games, reading fiction, and tabletop RPG’s. I credit my tabletop gaming for teaching me social skills and keeping me from being a sociopath. I credit my early love of video games for getting me into computer science, which is my career that I use to support myself and my family. I credit all three for getting me interested in higher art and music, and fantasy novels for opening me to the idea of monarchy. Your ideas put you at odds with Tolkien and many others with regards to fantasy.
I see video games as a medium rather than anything else — there’s room for real art, as well as room for total crap. I don’t see a significant difference between painting, writing, sculpture, photography, film making, and creating games (which I don’t do because I suck at 3D vector transforms and the like — I learned by trying hard and failing).
I just sold a bunch of expensive XBOX 360 games and got 32 dollars back from Game Spot. That’s $32 I didn’t have, plus the ability to keep hundreds of hours of life that I’ll get to live with my family, and not pixels. Games are great, life is better. Games ought to be a part of life, not draining oneself of life.
Plus, my video games of choice- First Person Shooters- has a big learning curve that my wife is not willing to learn. Thus, it is basically isolating me from her. It is not something we can share together.
Listen to the last episode of Hypercritical on the 5by5.tv podcast network. It was mostly about playing video games.
…I kept MW3…
I doubt I’ll ever remove video games completely from my life, though I have a hard time imagining myself sitting down to an FPS as my hair grays and the wrinkles spread. It’s an odd picture. (It’s a picture that a lot of people will be seeing as gamers grow old, though, I think.)
A well-made video game has everything going for it that a good movie or book does, put together. That’s what makes them so addictive. Done well, a game can be a completely immersive work of fiction.
Immersion makes moderation tough. I have the same problem with a good novel. I want to spend all my time with the book. But it’s easier to pull myself away when all my senses (or most of them, anyway) aren’t engaged.
I’ve done the same thing with novels occasionally. There was a Catholic writer, Michael O’Brien, who wrote an interesting novel about the end of the world, and it got passed around my friends in Halifax. I heard that everyone did the same thing, reading the whole 500 or so page novel in about two days, pausing only to sleep.
But I still maintain there is something deeply disturbing about the idea of grown men spending so much time playing games. I think it’s a big sign of cultural malaise.
Only the Real counts.
I actually agree about it being a sign of cultural malaise. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that men do these things because they can’t find the Real. They’ve been emasculated, their work is trivial and mundane, their food is pre-packaged, their land is naught but a postage stamp, and so on.
So they go looking for adventure, accomplishment, and a sense of purpose in the only place they can find it: a simulation.
It’s a lot harder these days to find something meaningful to do in real life. It’s abnormal, even.
Yes, I think that’s exactly it. We have made our society so “safe” physically and so insanely dangerous morally, I suppose it must be for men that they feel un-needed.
But I disagree that the false and silly world of video games is the “only” place that many challenges can be found. I think it is more that the games provide the illusion of manly purpose and challenge, while being utterly safe. It’s why I object to them on moral grounds. They are inherently deceptive, a cheat, that feeds the most self-serving impulses in a man using the aspects of male character that ought to be the very things that help him grow up.
The accusation of Fantasy I level at such things as video games is not aimed at the material in them, whether it is sword and sorcery small-f fantasy or whatever. It’s that they create a psychological fantasy, in which a man can be a hero with absolutely no real effort, with no threat to him and at no personal cost. It provides a counterfeit of the things he needs in real life, giving him a bogus emotional thrill to which he becomes addicted and lcoking him in a state of quite unmanly dependence, a condition I find morally repellant.
But real life actually does exist, with genuine challenges. Not many, admittedly, involve pitting one’s wits and strength against grizly bears, but the moral challenge of modern life is huge, and not for the kind of men who have been trained to feed their indulgences. You have certainly found this out, and it’s been a great privilege to have watched this develop over the last few years. I have an inkling of how difficult it has been, given that we seem to share many of the same character flaws.
Just getting on as a moral person in this horrible society, and more than that, working to overcome personal faults in order to become a better father is a challenge that takes more fortitude and moral brawn than most people are capable of.
I stand corrected – I shouldn’t have said “only.” I should have said that they believe it’s the only place to find these challenges. It’s certainly (in most cases) the only way to find much adventure on a grand scale.
I’d also agree that the ability to “be a hero with absolutely no real effort” is a huge problem. It is a counterfeit, and it supplants (or can supplant) those instincts in real life. Although I do wonder – is it possible that it trains heroic instincts in people who, if put into circumstances where real heroism is required, would actually act on them? I have some limited personal experience with this – I once avoided getting into a serious accident using reflexes and driving techniques I developed playing racing games. And the U.S. Army developed a first-person shooter that helped them identify prospective soldiers with certain levels of skill in tactics and combat. Simulations play a real role in training specialized tasks. Could they also instill a sense of heroism? I don’t know.
In any event, this is abstract theorizing and not the practical experience most people will have, barring a zombie uprising. And that dependence and addiction you mention is something I’ve seen first-hand, and it’s deeply troubling.
I see gaming as a sort of vice that can be indulged in critically and in moderation. I used to drink alcohol every night. It was a coping mechanism. Now that I’ve quit, I have no desire to go back to that behavior, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have a few drinks on the weekend. I see gaming in much the same way – I used to hide from life in my games, replacing the accomplishment I was too afraid to pursue with the cheap thrill of the game. Now that I’ve come to realize I can do more and have real successes, the allure of the game has faded.
But on certain occasions, when I’m tired, and my creativity is spent, and I just want to escape for a little while, a game can be an enjoyable experience. I suppose there’s always the risk of slipping back into that world forever, but for me at least, I think it would ring hollow. I’d get bored, fast. The experience can only last so long before the desire to go make something, build something, tackle a real challenge takes over. Gaming is now an occasional diversion for me, rather than a principle means of dealing with life.
And thank you, by the way, for your kind words. I wish I felt as though I had any of the moral bravery you describe. I have a very long way to go.