I Don’t Get Attached to any Game That I am not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat

I wish it were that simple. The rest of my life has been easy to explain away in such colloquialisms. Pockets of it have been. And even my primary life motif. Relationships. No woman can wake up in this apartment after sunrise. Fear of commitment has been a staple. And while I am a materialistic SOB, nothing that I own has any real emotional attachment to it. I can drop a car or a bike or a house and feel not one ounce of remorse. They were all things earned. They can be earned again. And if not? I can’t take any of it with me anyway. It’s no wonder that I am a digital guy when it comes to games. Versus physical. But that’s a conversation for another day.

Experiences. Now that’s a thing. People make much ado about the differences between spending money on durable goods versus experiences. I have not one ounce of hesitation in telling you that I would much quicker drop a few G’s on a spec’d out PC that I am going to play games on for 2 or more years than a vacation to some place that is likely a pain in my keeshter to get to and that I won’t be able to wait until I get back from. But what about the games themselves? How do we establish value over those experiences in a discussion about  entirely non-durable, almost ephemeral, goods? This is the struggle with self that I have been going through for the past two years.

It started in December of 2019. No. Let me wind the clock back even further. In January of 2019, after an episode of Enough 2 Keep Going, in the post show discussion while everyone was waiting on the Discord phone call to have me validate that we had captured a good recording and the stream had held integrity….this was when the first die of doubt was cast. It was not really intended as such. It was more a journalistic entreat. After ragging, once again, on Star Citizen, I mentioned that if we were going to continue to throw pot-shots at that property (we had been for some time), then one of us, as a matter of journalistic integrity and credibility, was going to need to go deep undercover and become a member of that community and play that game. Participate with the denizens and find out if they were all gas-lighting themselves, or if there was some Illuminati at the center that held the conspiracy together, kept people believing that a real game was actually eventually coming.

I took the assignment myself. I had already gone undercover once as a member of the streaming community. I figured this could be no less dangerous. My co-hosts were always there to pull me out if I got in too deep. But then they weren’t. I became a hard core member of the SC community. I played the game despite it’s game-stopping bugs. I paid in to an extent that approached my normal annual spend as a variety gamer. I believed in the dream and that was what I held on to. The concept. The ideal. To hope. But that, too, is a tale for another day.

The crux of all of this is that after I took a desk job after coming back as a UC, everyone thought everything was ok. I showed up for the podcasts like usual, it appeared that the usual games were coming back on the menu. But my time on the inside left me bereft of the ability to feel anything when playing any game that did not have a persistent progression model. Any notion that I was shoveling time into a time-monster that was going to end in 40 hours just left me disinterested. I wanted something that gave me a tingle that I’d felt while on the Star Citizen op. That feeling that the time I was putting in was leaving bread crumbs of progression that I would still feel represented itself with tangible evidence a year form now. Or two. 

So. In search of that same high, I went seeking that blow. MMOs. Season passes. Battle passes. Microtransactions. I don’t regret any of it. In that migratory onboarding, I signed on to Dual Universe, Warframe, Fortnite, World of Warships and Tanks. I went back to Destiny 2. I finally invested in EVE OnLine. Before I knew it, subscription gaming had become my all. And I could little be bothered to lift my head up and notice anything else. Many of these titles were things I was aware of as a gaming commentator, but had never dared step my toe in. I had always known that with my addictive personality, that once I went into that pool, it’d be hella-difficult to ever come out. I lapped all of these up, and then when Call of Duty: Black OPS – Cold War dropped last year, I went into an eternal abyss from which there appeared to be no return.

But as is the case with many things, the way out was to go through. As I relaxed and stopped fighting the sub-conscious urge to resist, stopped telling myself that I was doing something wrong, and just let myself enjoy the ecstasy…eventually I came to feel that I had drank my fill and that I was ready to go back. In some ways, that sabbatical may have even allowed me to gain some new freedoms that I had previously not been afforded. I now do not feel as repulsed by the idea of spending time in a JRPG. I am no longer rigid in my thought that time in a puzzle game is a waste. Or that a point-and-click adventure is beneath me. No longer do I equate gaming to something that needs to drive me to the nerve-firing ends of adrenaline and lived at no less than 120mph. There’s more room in my gaming appetite for a slow night here and there and some consideration for slower movements and a sonata every now and then.

I have not closed my accounts. I am totes ready to slap on the FPS gloves and sit in front of one of my 240Hz displays with the GPU on fire. But I am also not displeased for that world to no longer occupy my  frontal lobe, with all of my planning constricted around the metric of what my revisit time is on a particular game and account and platform. I’m less cognitively loaded by having to plan and project out my gaming plan and schedule weeks into the future. I can afford an interrupt here and there to go and dip into something I’ve been wanting to check out on Game Pass or to hit one of my Pro Games on Stadia, which is the freedom I should have allowed myself to feel before. This allows me to do things  like check out a Final Fantasy game, which I thought I would never do. Or play some DLC….yet another thing that I did not let come across my windshield before my subscription addiction. It’s a good time, with eyes perhaps a bit wider open. Let’s see how long this tune is held before I need another beat drop and some change-up in the syncopation. Despite my seeming joy at this change, I thoroughly loved my time in MMOs and subscription games and games-as-a-service. And I enjoy my time now. A lot of this essay is a bit of was joking and satire. It all goes to the proof of the philosophy of play what you want and bollocks all to any who tell you to think , speak, and play different than you are. But also don’t follow the crowd. Your gaming self will figure itself out if you let loose the reigns for it to meander and seek out what it ascribes to. Don’t force it and it will all work itself out in time. Maybe four or five times in a very long life as a gamer in different ways. Having lived that experience and now into yet another decade of the life, I’m here to tell you….that’s ok , too.