October 2024
Last year, as part of an (ongoing) effort to curb my social media exposure, I cleared out my X account and converted it to a “notifications for CMON1975.COM” tool. That move went a long way: for more than year I haven’t interacted on X, and only saw content from that site when it was cross posted elsewhere.
A few days ago, I was posting one of the Resident Evil reviews and out of morbid curiosity I clicked the X logo. It showed me what the main algorithm-driven feed looked like. I’d expected an endless parade of pathetic e-girls peddling their flesh, yet bizarrely all the posts were World of Warcraft-related. I ended up scrolling for a good ten minutes and that nightmare reinforced two of my strongly held beliefs: both X and World of Warcraft are for losers.
I wrote a review for My Time at Sandrock a couple of months ago and never posted it, because it was so much a confession of an existential crisis. Here’s an excerpt:
This summer has been rough on my psyche. I find myself with no outside-directed tasks, a massive financial burden, and a heavy depression. Sandrock slid right into that hole of not feeling like I was getting anything done. Video games can be both a blessing and a curse in that regard. But here, at the end of a 128-hour playthrough over thirty days, and perhaps due to the literature I’ve been consuming and my advancing age, I feel so strongly that video games are little more than a distractive waste of time with very few (if any) redeeming real-world qualities.
I believe that statement to be an objective truth. Sure, video games can be fun, they improve hand-eye coordination and supply ample mental exercise, but the drawbacks of forcing the player to sit and stare at a screen for hours on end to the exclusion of all other activities is not worth the exchange. There was a time—long, long ago—when you could play a game to completion in a handful of hours. Now it feels like game developers want nothing more than to swallow the player whole with repetitive tasks that take dozens of hours to complete. And they’re designing these tasks to trigger positive psychological responses that compel the player. Video games are so unlike most other activities that I wonder why I’ve spent so much of my life engaged with them. The only analog I’ve found is in addiction to drugs, alcohol, and sex. And none of those have any positive, long-term outcomes.
I picked up woodworking a few weeks ago, and that’s where this thinking is coming from. Woodworking is a genuine hobby that I cannot engage in for longer than a couple of hours. The physical requirements force me to parcel out limited time, but the results are so unlike video gaming that it’s shocking to me that I’ve never done this before. I’ve never had a creative hobby that produced real-world results other than physical exercise. Discounting professional players who have reached the highest tiers of competition, video games produce nothing in the real world. All the results of video gaming are intangible. But I can take a small collection of hand tools and build a real thing. To me, this is a revelation.
I don’t know where I’ll go from here with video gaming. Part of me wants to eliminate the activity altogether. If I imagine my psyche as a balance scale, I need to put more tangible creative work on the other pan—because I’ve overloaded the heavier one with thirty years of sitting and twiddling my thumbs.
Yeah, that was a video game review.
Seeing hundreds of people’s complaints about World of Warcraft scroll by on the X feed brought all that home to me. Just how futile an exercise playing that game is, and how doubly futile whining about it on the Internet. I was once addicted to playing WoW and I hated myself for it. At that time, I felt that certain games needed to have warning labels on them, and that we had to hold the industry accountable for crafting products that could ruin lives. Flicking through those posts on X it was clear to me that the game had ruined more than a few.
I seriously envy the non-gamer. This is something I’ve been wrestling with for a while now. Part of me has worked so hard to recapture my love for gaming, and another has been raging against it as a waste of time. And neither side has, so far, been willing to completely embrace a direction. I’ve absolutely used gaming as a convenient escape from the recent stresses of undergraduate studies. But there’s always the feeling that there must be a better way.
And that’s where I’m at this month. Now, go listen to the new Tyler, the Creator album.
2024.10.28
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