This is something I've been thinking about for a good while; and, even though I know of positively no one who reads this (perhaps *because* I know of no one who reads this) I wanted to set it down. It's self-indulgently long though, so I shall place it behind a spoiler.
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
I have been a console gamer geek for as much of my life as I can recall.
I can distinctly remember playing my first video game at the age of four or five (I can't remember the exact date, but I can't have been older than five, because it was before my parents split up). The game was Gunslinger; and, despite it's stick-figure graphics and horribly clunky controls, I played it with an eagerness that bordered on obsession.
From there I have owned one or more game consoles from every generation right up to the present (currently a 360, a Wii, and my third or fourth PS2 are scattered around my living room television, flanked by their assorted controllers).
I moved, over time, into the further niche of console RPGs. The root of this more specialized obsession was, in fairness, one of the best games ever made:
By the time the SNES came out though, Squaresoft owned me.
In the heyday of the PS1, this became even more pronounced.
There were two or three years when this was my homepage.
As I got older and my financial situation improved, I bought and beat dozens (it may even be over 100) games, investing thousands of hours. I eventually was able to buy a decent PC (thought not until well after my most obsessive years; accordingly my computer geek pimp hand is shamefully weak) and became deeply attached to Blizzard and almost all of their games.
My continuing attachment to Squaresoft RPGs led me to FF XI without my really being conscious of the MMORPG format or phenomenon. I loved that game. I know a *lot* of people have disparaged both its mechanics and its aesthetics (particularly in the necessarily less graphically intense version I played on the PS2), but the quality of the community when I was playing (fostered by Square's policy of making it virtually impossible to progress past level 10 or so without a full party) was a refutation of this theory, which is so commonly demonstrated in every MMORPG (indeed, every online game) that I have played since.
With such a positive FFXI experience, though, and my deep affinity for Blizzard, I was ripe for the picking.
WoW was an exclamation point on my fetish for gaming. I can't calculate the amount of time I consumed playing, discussing, researching, and just plain thinking about that game. I would not be surprised, when it was all added up, if the total came to something like a full year, round-the-clock.
I broke away from the juggernaut to expend hundreds more hours on console games here and there when the servers were down or my guild was spread thin.
After a little over two and a half years, a combination of financial pressures and work obligations persuaded me to finally cancel my subscription. I found several new toys, though, to consume such time and money as I still had to spare.
That brought me up to this past year. To fill in some gaps, I should say that, during the few hours that I wasn't gaming over the years, I did a few other things: learned to talk to women, took a B.A. in English Literature, got engaged, got a good-paying job at a regional insurer, quit said job after almost three years in disgust at the avarice of my employer and the tedium of the cubicle life, and began the motions of putting in an application to graduate school.
That brings me up to just about now, and now is what is so strangely different from all that has come before.
It started with my having a lot of free time on my hands. Most grad. schools only accept new applicants once a year, and you have to fulfill a lot of requirements to be ready when the annual application deadline comes around. This leads to a long build-up in which (if you're lucky like me, and have a supportive significant other willing to pick up the bills while you work toward your educational goals) you read, research, polish a scholarly paper or two, write to old academic contacts for recommendation letters, and study for the required standardized tests. That might sound like a decent bit to manage, but honestly (for me at least) it mostly boils down to islands of feverish productivity awash in a sea of sitting-around time.
So, I used that down time as I have in the past. I played and replayed half a dozen quite long games, and supplemented them with television when my eyes or thumbs were too weary to go on to the next save point.
Things proceeded this way for four or five months. Somewhere in there I realized that I was increasingly miserable. The activities I had pursued with consummate enjoyment in the majority of my leisure hours for most of my life now seemed intensely hollow. I could remember distinctly the feeling of delight at collapsing in front of the television after a twelve-hour day or putting in fifty or sixty hours on a new RPG over a holiday weekend. Now, though, without the counterbalance of meaningful (or at least engrossing) labor, there seemed to be no substance behind these things.
Still, I was compulsive. I logged six to eight hours on a near daily basis in the game of the moment, and I became unable to eat without the television on (literally, I would have plates of food go cold on me as I searched through the channels for a suitable program to watch). Nevertheless, I had come to loathe what I would once have referred to as pleasures. It is hard to express how passing strange this was and is. My conception of myself seesawed violently in my head, some of the fondest memories of my childhood at war with the plain and bitter facts of immediate experience.
Gaming and the culture of geekery that surrounds it was more than something I looked to in my off time; it was a large element of my personality. That sounds a bit strange to say, but I would wager that a sizable portion of individuals of my generation would avow similar feelings without a second thought. The peculiarity of my new feelings was highlighted whenever I gathered with my friends. I have known most of them for more than a decade, and we are all of similar age and life experience. For them, though, every conversation still revolved around (in approximate order of frequency and sanctity of discussion) video games, comics, sci-fi tv series, and fantasy novels. None of them even remotely shared my experience, and I certainly didn't draw attention to it. No one wants to be a patronizing ass.
What do you say to one of your oldest friends in such a situation? "Oh, by the way, you know all that shit you're always on about, yeah, I'm not really into that anymore. On reflection, I feel it mostly made me more stupid and lazy as well as less focused and motivated."
I don't want to be an asshole, and I don't want to be condescending, and I certainly don't want to be self-righteous. I don't think there is any evil in someone settling in on their couch to watch a seven-hour marathon of _I Love the 90s_ if it makes them happy.
For me personally though, most of the pursuits of most of my life seem like dust and ashes. I find myself almost entirely replacing this, this, and this with this, this, this, and this (among other things).
Looking back, I'm pained by the time and money I have expended on something that I feel now more as an emptiness than a presence. It's like looking back at a many years long relationship irrevocably ended, thinking of all the emotions, the professions, and protestations -- all shored against the ruin of something permanently lost. Any connection felt strongly and for a long time must come to seem fundamentally unreal if it proves to have an end.
As I said, it seems passing strange.
I have been a console gamer geek for as much of my life as I can recall.
I can distinctly remember playing my first video game at the age of four or five (I can't remember the exact date, but I can't have been older than five, because it was before my parents split up). The game was Gunslinger; and, despite it's stick-figure graphics and horribly clunky controls, I played it with an eagerness that bordered on obsession.
From there I have owned one or more game consoles from every generation right up to the present (currently a 360, a Wii, and my third or fourth PS2 are scattered around my living room television, flanked by their assorted controllers).
I moved, over time, into the further niche of console RPGs. The root of this more specialized obsession was, in fairness, one of the best games ever made:
By the time the SNES came out though, Squaresoft owned me.
In the heyday of the PS1, this became even more pronounced.
There were two or three years when this was my homepage.
As I got older and my financial situation improved, I bought and beat dozens (it may even be over 100) games, investing thousands of hours. I eventually was able to buy a decent PC (thought not until well after my most obsessive years; accordingly my computer geek pimp hand is shamefully weak) and became deeply attached to Blizzard and almost all of their games.
My continuing attachment to Squaresoft RPGs led me to FF XI without my really being conscious of the MMORPG format or phenomenon. I loved that game. I know a *lot* of people have disparaged both its mechanics and its aesthetics (particularly in the necessarily less graphically intense version I played on the PS2), but the quality of the community when I was playing (fostered by Square's policy of making it virtually impossible to progress past level 10 or so without a full party) was a refutation of this theory, which is so commonly demonstrated in every MMORPG (indeed, every online game) that I have played since.
With such a positive FFXI experience, though, and my deep affinity for Blizzard, I was ripe for the picking.
WoW was an exclamation point on my fetish for gaming. I can't calculate the amount of time I consumed playing, discussing, researching, and just plain thinking about that game. I would not be surprised, when it was all added up, if the total came to something like a full year, round-the-clock.
I broke away from the juggernaut to expend hundreds more hours on console games here and there when the servers were down or my guild was spread thin.
After a little over two and a half years, a combination of financial pressures and work obligations persuaded me to finally cancel my subscription. I found several new toys, though, to consume such time and money as I still had to spare.
That brought me up to this past year. To fill in some gaps, I should say that, during the few hours that I wasn't gaming over the years, I did a few other things: learned to talk to women, took a B.A. in English Literature, got engaged, got a good-paying job at a regional insurer, quit said job after almost three years in disgust at the avarice of my employer and the tedium of the cubicle life, and began the motions of putting in an application to graduate school.
That brings me up to just about now, and now is what is so strangely different from all that has come before.
It started with my having a lot of free time on my hands. Most grad. schools only accept new applicants once a year, and you have to fulfill a lot of requirements to be ready when the annual application deadline comes around. This leads to a long build-up in which (if you're lucky like me, and have a supportive significant other willing to pick up the bills while you work toward your educational goals) you read, research, polish a scholarly paper or two, write to old academic contacts for recommendation letters, and study for the required standardized tests. That might sound like a decent bit to manage, but honestly (for me at least) it mostly boils down to islands of feverish productivity awash in a sea of sitting-around time.
So, I used that down time as I have in the past. I played and replayed half a dozen quite long games, and supplemented them with television when my eyes or thumbs were too weary to go on to the next save point.
Things proceeded this way for four or five months. Somewhere in there I realized that I was increasingly miserable. The activities I had pursued with consummate enjoyment in the majority of my leisure hours for most of my life now seemed intensely hollow. I could remember distinctly the feeling of delight at collapsing in front of the television after a twelve-hour day or putting in fifty or sixty hours on a new RPG over a holiday weekend. Now, though, without the counterbalance of meaningful (or at least engrossing) labor, there seemed to be no substance behind these things.
Still, I was compulsive. I logged six to eight hours on a near daily basis in the game of the moment, and I became unable to eat without the television on (literally, I would have plates of food go cold on me as I searched through the channels for a suitable program to watch). Nevertheless, I had come to loathe what I would once have referred to as pleasures. It is hard to express how passing strange this was and is. My conception of myself seesawed violently in my head, some of the fondest memories of my childhood at war with the plain and bitter facts of immediate experience.
Gaming and the culture of geekery that surrounds it was more than something I looked to in my off time; it was a large element of my personality. That sounds a bit strange to say, but I would wager that a sizable portion of individuals of my generation would avow similar feelings without a second thought. The peculiarity of my new feelings was highlighted whenever I gathered with my friends. I have known most of them for more than a decade, and we are all of similar age and life experience. For them, though, every conversation still revolved around (in approximate order of frequency and sanctity of discussion) video games, comics, sci-fi tv series, and fantasy novels. None of them even remotely shared my experience, and I certainly didn't draw attention to it. No one wants to be a patronizing ass.
What do you say to one of your oldest friends in such a situation? "Oh, by the way, you know all that shit you're always on about, yeah, I'm not really into that anymore. On reflection, I feel it mostly made me more stupid and lazy as well as less focused and motivated."
I don't want to be an asshole, and I don't want to be condescending, and I certainly don't want to be self-righteous. I don't think there is any evil in someone settling in on their couch to watch a seven-hour marathon of _I Love the 90s_ if it makes them happy.
For me personally though, most of the pursuits of most of my life seem like dust and ashes. I find myself almost entirely replacing this, this, and this with this, this, this, and this (among other things).
Looking back, I'm pained by the time and money I have expended on something that I feel now more as an emptiness than a presence. It's like looking back at a many years long relationship irrevocably ended, thinking of all the emotions, the professions, and protestations -- all shored against the ruin of something permanently lost. Any connection felt strongly and for a long time must come to seem fundamentally unreal if it proves to have an end.
As I said, it seems passing strange.