I still feel the hunger after all these years. The pangs spark at the strangest times—as attention wanes at co-worker’s oft-told story; ascent 302 of the thousand times I climb my apartment staircase, moments of confusion amidst a girl’s mixed signals. I want to go back to that safe, warm, strong place of my childhood. I want to play video games again.
I know cravings. I gave four years of my life to heroin and learned to get over. But this craving is something different. Hard drugs claw at the mind like a long-gone abusive ex’s abrupt reconnect. The call of gaming is less demonic than those harsh whispers. Instead, it’s a half-remembered piper’s song calling me back to halcyon days when I could rest, when I could dream. No remembered crumbling of my adolescent life warns against diving back in.
My last paid vacation (elusive things in the service sector’s bottom rungs) was concretely an imaginative failure: day 3 I went out and bought an Xbox. I sold myself in practical terms—it offered all the streaming services we depend on in our collective cord-cutting. But if Peak TV offered an “adult” excuse, another crack at gaming was the libidinal core. I bought the latest iteration of a beloved role-playing game from my youth and found myself quickly… bored.
Where once the generic fantasy settings provided just enough depth for callow imagination to flourish, it now fell flat. After a decade of the author-reader relationship to texts—whether they be music, films, or books—an interactive, virtual world felt both overwhelming and redundant. I had two simultaneous, conflicted cravings. I wanted the interactivity to stop—to enjoy humane character studies and alt world-lores cultivated by often ingenious game developers. Yet I also wanted to just get the twitchy, adrenaline-fueled high of shooting things. Forgive the analogy, but I was reminded of weird, green nights where a speedball of uppers and downers worked against each other towards an almost cosmic discontent. Where once the highs smoothed into a holistic whole, furthered time and frazzled nerves impede that complete oblivion. I justified my failure in “flow” at first with the self-congratulation that maybe I’m too grown for games. But my half-hearted hope I now belonged to the elect didn’t reach the pain’s core. After all, my own diversion deficit is what brought me back to the screen.
I’m not alone in this. A friend of mine has played Minecraft religiously going on ten years now. (My daughter and I’s roofs turned out great, thanks Nick!) He mentioned that where once he settled into a game easily and for hours, nowadays he lurches from disk to disk (or download to download with services like Steam). It’s like flicking though postcards of places you can’t go back to; some nights he just quits.
Gaming YouTuber Nakey Jakey touches on that exit-from-Eden quality of adult gaming with more optimism than most.[I] He can’t square the 60+ hour commitment to a game anymore with the frenetic pace of being grown. He caps his tale of disenchanted maturation with a timely panacea—video streaming services like Twitch. There, millions flock to watch what basically amounts to extended live reaction videos. Watching others play gives the high of the game without the burden to grind. I’ll admit my brain staggers before this digital ecosystem. I can relate in a desperate way with fans of “e-girls”. Lonely young men pay to orbit pretty young women playing games, among other activities. The dynamic of this symbiosis is patently false, mutually exploitative, and has led to at least one horrendous act of aggrieved violence. That evil, though, is at least relatable as a human horror. Twitch, on the other hands, seems completely alien. It’s like some artificial intelligence remaking human desire in its own lifeless form—a psychic bootcamp for the Singularity.
Jakey’s video handily introduces us to the mindset of the (mostly) young men flocking to such voyeurism. He’s thinking hard—but it doesn’t feel like his toes reach the bottom. As he aims for a wider audience, he clings to old models of media consumption cause-and-effect. I think of an old friend who used to bring his kid to the office when the babysitter bailed. Deprived of Fortnite for an afternoon, the kid watched his fave charismatic streamers mow down opponents and scream obscenities into the mic. I recognized the expression inside the kid’s glazed eyes. It was like that of a dreamer, strategizing amidst the flashing images, searching hypnotized for dangers in the emerging digital jungle.
The landscape of possibilities—both economic and spiritual—is in play. Video games are becoming ground zero—where one goes and what one does when there’s nothing left to do. I know men my age whose lifestyle is without much variation; constant gaming punctuated by eight-hour shifts of survival-mandated work. Their oases amidst the wasteland aren’t purely solitary affairs. Beyond communal streaming, I’ve seen memes purporting that friends “I’d die for” may be made through controller mics and complementary toggle-stick movements. I wonder, though, how deep this amity goes. Amidst rising rates of anxiety/depression, digital “communities” might not provide nearly the same protective factor as friend groups founded on unscreened interactions. I’m also aware a social problem without victims is just a moral judgement. I’ll cop that video games leave no body bags and few broken families. Yet I worry about what it means to outsource the aimless futures of young people to profit-driven dream factories. Should the “best years” of one’s life to be spent in front of a monitor? Escapism’s nothing new. But it seems we’re veering towards total, futureless escape on one hand vs. totally unbearable reality on the other.
Debate on games is stuck on an intermittent swirl around acts of violence. Bad-faith conservatives blame virtual violence while discounting the role of actual guns. Gamers strike back at scapegoat status—and research backs them up. Multiple studies find little ground for connecting participatory digital violence with an increase in its real-world occurrence. But recent memes savage that proposition out of all proportion to its weight in the cultural conversation.
Consider what happened when Walmart, in the wake of El Paso, raised the possibility of removing violent video game displays from view. Vitriolic reactions from gamers and pandering politicians were remarkably tone-deaf. Walmart’s quick (and admittedly superficial) fix in the face of terror infringed on our right to screen death. The blood-rage of the permanently disinhibited insists on the complete externalization of the violence’s cause. That avoidance, though, suggests at some repressed level a basic discomfort with games and our relation to them.
Games don’t cause violence. But they’re often an ominous star in a constellation of compulsions that define fruitless lives of too many young American men. We concede the discussion to industry press and insider minutia at our peril. The country-at-risk we ignore is our own. Clarity about the need for gun control should not come with an aversion to asking if habitual, participatory exposure to digital violence is, you know, good for people. I was particularly put out by liberal politicians seizing on Walmart’s quandaries to score quick political points. God bless her, but Hillary tweeted “Video games don’t kill people. Guns kill people.” (An unconscious aping of the conservative evasion, replacing “Guns” and “People” respectively.) The language has the same pandering feel of a tech company CEO raving about the next invasive technology he wouldn’t let his own kids touch with a ten-yard stick.
Recently a father came into my workplace along with his young daughter to return a not-cheap Xbox controller. I appreciated the contrast between the burly, probably blue-collar, dad and his wispy second grader so we made small talk. I asked if there were new games he’d enjoyed and that sparked him. He proceeded to go into minutia of recent releases and genre developments. The daughter seemed confused, or bored, as two men discussed what for her probably seemed serious adult matters. I was taken aback a bit. I signaled I vibed to his culture, but was unprepared to reply meaningfully to such an insider dump. He sensed my mixed response, I think, and his tone shifted from manic excitement to apologetic defense. He said “I work hard five days a week. When I come home I deserve to kick back and just relax.” I didn’t know what to say except “Yeah, man,” but as the moment stretched out, sympathy won out. Our eye contact settled into something like “I understand your pain.” Three seconds later, as I glanced down at the now impatient girl, I averred: “Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to save the industry next April.” “Hell yeah it is,” he said, and they left.
The workday was almost over, and most would soon return to their homes. We’d indulge in whatever meager pleasures kept us going another night, morning, and promise of another night. Empty 40s and egghead speculations are the nightlights I flicker across my little cocoon. Perhaps those dingy flames aren’t all that different from gamer-dad’s blue screen glow. Both stall for time as we stare into the face of a heavy unknown. Games, both the beautiful lights and our chrysalis shell, keep us warm, safe, and not completely forgetful of power. They’ll have to do in their faulty form until we feel it’s safe to go outside again; until this unnamed storm begins to pass; until we’re ready to be born.
NOTE
I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0ftgpVgzu8