The Gamer Who Doesn’t Play Games 1

A cou­ple a weeks ago, I resolved that my next arti­cle would be about a spe­cif­ic inter­pre­ta­tion of Portal, to which I allud­ed in my last piece. I decid­ed that it wouldn’t be fair, to the read­er­ship or to me, if I delved into such with­out first con­sum­ing Portal 2 in its entire­ty. I haven’t yet done so, not nec­es­sar­i­ly for lack of time to do such (my Facebook friends can attest to the fact that I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time with New Vegas’ DLC). Nor has it been a prob­lem of access: with just a lit­tle bit of plan­ning and fore­thought, I could have had my Portal 2 expe­ri­ence all set up and ready to go on the PS3 a full month ago, and like­ly would have been fin­ished by now.

But, I didn’t. Why? Am I retir­ing from gam­ing? Has it all been too stress­ful? Am I burnt out? Have the long nights and sleepy days final­ly caught up with me?

No, my prob­lem is a frus­trat­ing one; but one com­mon to church­go­ers, polit­i­cal activists, and stu­dents of all stripes. I would ven­ture a guess that pret­ty much every­one who’s ever been regard­ed as an offi­cial part of a com­mu­ni­ty has encoun­tered this dilem­ma at one point or anoth­er. Here I’m speak­ing of a defined iden­ti­ty (in this case, that of a “gamer”), and the resis­tance to such which is nat­u­ral­ly implic­it in the psy­cholo­gies which are cen­tral to con­scious crea­tures such as our­selves.

I’d like to refer again, as I have before, to Becker and Terror Management Theory. In his trea­tise on death-denial, he asserts that one of the strate­gies we humans use to come to terms with the con­scious inevitabil­i­ty of death is to allow our­selves to become absorbed under the ban­ner of a sym­bol. These sym­bols can be large (cul­ture, reli­gion), or small (local church, book club, vol­un­teer group, swinger’s meet­up, what­ev­er). In attach­ing our­selves to these sym­bols, we are com­pelled to believe that the gestalt of the group, the larg­er idea, will (in at least a metaphor­i­cal sense) grant us immor­tal­i­ty by virtue of our asso­ci­a­tion with it and due con­tri­bu­tion to such.

There’s a catch in this, though. In this age of near-universal con­nect­ed­ness, the seams of this method of anx­i­ety cov­er­age have start­ed to show. We can look to other cul­tures, study them, can see how they oper­ate. We now view cul­tures through a sci­en­tif­ic lens and there­by (whether con­scious­ly or sub­con­scious­ly) see the same uni­ver­sal mech­a­nisms at play in our own. The catch of this all this is, not only is infor­ma­tion more and more read­i­ly avail­able to us, no mat­ter the qual­i­ty, as a species we’re get­ting smarter, and more able to accu­mu­late and process such a bar­rage.

The issue is that, as we are able to con­nect to infor­ma­tion, we’re able to see more and more of the Grand Scheme of Things; the bio­chem­i­cal rules by which human ani­mals oper­ate. And it ain’t pret­ty.

According to the pre­em­i­nent the­o­ry of human behav­ior, (TMT) we spend our entire lives try­ing to make sense of the fact that one day, those lives will end inevitably. By asso­ci­at­ing our­selves with our cul­tur­al sym­bols, we can mit­i­gate that fear; by sub­sum­ing our indi­vid­u­al­i­ties into con­struct which are like­ly to last longer than the human lifes­pan, we can extend our inten­tion­al behav­iors and affect future gen­er­a­tions. In short, by invest­ing in a group, we make that group our real­i­ty, and con­nect our iden­ti­ties to it, know­ing that it will be able (at least in a metaphor­i­cal sense) to grant us power beyond death.

Power over mor­tal­i­ty; we all strive for that.

Well, there’s a lot to be gleaned here, and no sur­prise. TMT has no end of per­son­al reflec­tions in store. I could talk about how games make us face the inevitabil­i­ty and hope­less­ness of fini­tude, how they help us escape our “heart-pumping, breath-gasping” bod­ies, as Becker puts it. But the Ontological Geek does a fine job at get­ting at the heart of this new emer­gent medi­um, and why we engage with it so total­ly.

The ques­tion I’m ask­ing is: why am I resis­tant to that?

For the answer, I turn to Rank, who defined “artist” as one who rejects the assumed cul­tur­al lie, whose untrust­wor­thi­ness is con­firmed by Becker, Rank, Kierkegaard, Luther, and Epicurus before him, ad infini­tum. Some of us just are not able to believe whol­ly in a cul­ture, and so must cre­ate our own. We do this by paint­ing, writ­ing, act­ing, design­ing, and through counter-cultural activ­i­ties like play­ing (and being pas­sion­ate about) videogames).

But, as games enter the main­stream cul­tur­al envi­ron­ment more and more, and as my own role as a games colum­nist becomes more evi­dent, I become aware of my nec­es­sary sub­servience to my emo­tion­al and envi­ron­men­tal milieu, and there­fore less inclined to cre­ate works in ser­vice to such.

In a grasp­ing attempt at self-sufficiency in the face of total, nec­es­sary, inevitable, inim­itable, immutable anni­hi­la­tion, I join com­mu­ni­ties, then, just as quick­ly, break quar­ter with them in order to make it abun­dant­ly clear that I am an INDIVIDUAL (stress that ety­mol­o­gy there; I mean every minute of it), capa­ble of main­tain­ing my own self-efficacy in the face of death.

I know my own ten­den­cies. I don’t have the slight­est clue how to change them. I apol­o­gize to my read­ers, past, present, and future, and to my edi­tor (who deals with my hereto­fore unex­plained resis­tances so patient­ly).

Does all of this make sense to the lay­man? No, prob­a­bly not at all. And I am will­ing and ready to admit to the fact that I have a pletho­ra of undi­ag­nosed and hereto­fore unre­solved men­tal dis­tur­bances. I don’t know what to do about that. Don’t have the fog­gi­est clue.

But, I know this: gam­ing has in some way helped me over­come, and deal with, the over­whelm­ing, empir­i­cal (I might say numi­nal) facts of life. I have been whol­ly ded­i­cat­ed to the process of gam­ing as an escapist mech­a­nism, a psy­cho­log­i­cal bul­wark, and a con­stant friend and ally. For these rea­sons, I hate it, and love it at the same time, and feel guilty for hat­ing it. I feel as though it con­nects me to oth­ers, though for some unseen rea­son, can’t bring it into total rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with such. I want to be rid of it entire­ly, yet at the same time I feel as though it brings me clos­er to some resid­ual under­stand­ing of how oth­ers, and humans, and I oper­ate.

This may sound like grand­stand­ing and excuse-making, and per­haps it is. But, it’s how I feel. Sometimes, I just don’t play games, even though I’m a gamer. No, that’s not quite right. Sometimes I avoid videogames because I’m a gamer.

Make sense?

And, cer­tain other times, a well-crafted rec­om­men­da­tion from a dear friend can turn the whole thing on its head, and get me total­ly rein­vest­ed in the process of play­ing and think­ing about games. And writ­ing about them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go fin­ish Dishonored.