Gaming and Games. Betrayal and Solace.
Sometimes I feel like we’re not living in reality and only a few of us see it. Like, there are only ephemeral states in liminal spaces that we don’t recognize unless there’s a pause or momentary glitch in the system. But it’s not the Matrix, more like a layer of absurdity covering up the real. I feel like this with increasing frequency, and I’ve felt this way for a long time, at least two decades. I think it started with reading Philip K. Dick, but it was heightened with videogames.
I remember walking through the University of Washington campus one crisp, misty morning in the mid-2000s when I was still an optimistic grad student and feeling like I was in Assassin’s Creed. Not the run around jumping from rooftops bit, but the look around and see digital artifacts and glitches in the simulation every once in a while bit.
I think I escape reality through games, but I also think I see reality through games. And while games help me engage with the world, I do sometimes wonder if it’s about escapism for me… from the absurdity of reality.
I rewatched Office Space on a flight to Taipei recently. There’s a disaffection with the capitalist wage slave life that serves as a strong undercurrent of the movie for me. IRL, I see people who seem hyperactive, prolific with their work, seemingly very happy, and I just… Yeah. I just. Can’t.
I’m addicted to games. I like the troubleshooting part of it. I was thinking about my life and the parts of my work that I like, and it’s the same. I like figuring out how best to help people learn, how best to set up a course, or how best to unpack and understand complicated systems so that I can make them better with less friction for more people. I like designing things and finding solutions to user issues. So I guess I’m addicted to problem-solving, and games provide that in a way that is more immediate and agentive than life sometimes.
I like being social, but I guess to me that means collaboratively working on a problem with someone, and sometimes that problem is simply how to have fun with each other. I think I learned a lot from Bernie DeKoven, and I am grateful to have been asked by the American Journal of Play to review his book way back when. It deeply affected how I think about the world.
After graduating and publishing my book on online gaming teamwork, I became a little disenchanted with academia, especially the tenure system. I kept seeing over and over again people I admired become distanced and sometimes downright mean as they tried to secure tenure or go up for full promotion and publish as much as possible, gain recognition with a small circle of jerks, and isolate themselves from everyday reality, and I felt like there was something deeply wrong with academia that turned good people into assholes.
Yet at the same time, in the early years post-graduation, before I decided to focus on teaching, I had feelings of envy and anger, hopelessness and frustration, when it seemed like there wasn’t a TT position for me out there, before I really started seeing my friends transform. But I really loved seeing them succeed, too, and know that my impression of their aloofness isn’t the heart of them; it’s just the system. And of course, I know that this was just a feeling and not the reality of the situation or the whole picture of the struggles my friends went through and the measure of good they bring to the world. I just feel like we’re all good people fighting a losing fight in trying to make the world better. Maybe I had just been too isolated in Seattle.
Games provide more immediate agency for me. I’ve spent my whole academic life trying to figure out how to leverage that to affect everyday life and how to help younger generations actually succeed in making the world better. But maybe like us, they’re doomed to failure, too. All we can do is maintain or draw new lines in the sand, fight when we can, and then just pass the torch onto newer blood who don’t yet see the big, futile picture. The everlasting war that must be fought just to maintain some semblance of sanity. (In fighting the futility boulder, are we happy? lol)
Games betrayed me. 2014. Jesus fuck. This hobby I had spent my whole life indulging in and, fresh-faced, was trying to redirect towards improving social conditions, turned into a massive stinking pile of shit. Elitism and gatekeeping, hatred and harassment, and the whole point of gaming for me as a catalyst for agency was so fucked up by gamergate. I guess that coincided with me tapering my job search for a TT position. I felt hopeless and wasn’t motivated because what the hell was the point of it all?
But then good stuff started to happen. Kishonna, Aaron, Ed, Kat, and everyone else. Analog Game Studies. Inclusive Games. Climate Games SIG. People Make Games. It was all awesome, and I’m glad for it, but I’m just so fucking tired.
I play games. Studying them, designing them, and playing them have helped me be me. They are me. But they failed utterly in providing financial security or a stable career. Yet I decided long ago that the best way I could help the world is by being an educator. I’m good at it, and I can try to affect gaming culture, one student at a time. But it’s so slow. I’m not doing enough. I feel both solace in gaming and also like it’s just not enough, but then I just escape into more games.
The above was written a year ago as a stream-of-consciousness dump, originally intended as the intro for a submission to Drew’s CfP for the Well Played issue special topic, For the Love of Games. (The actual meat of the submission was going to be about how games have affected me my whole life, including a deep dive into cRPGs and modding. And I was going to say something about how modding helped me see how IRL could be modded, too. lol.) Since then, things have gotten much better. I suppose I was depressed last year. Unemployment can do that. I’m now a new professor at Appalachian State University, spearheading a new game studies program! I’ve found strong allies on my own actual campus! I hadn’t realized how isolating UW had been as a games person, which is hella surprising, I know. Anyway, I thought I’d rez this writing for Esoteric Gaming. It was always meant to be a place to just write about whatever on or around games that you think is awesome… or poignant… or I dunno… just some place to stick personal stuff related to gaming that you think should be preserved somehow. Work through the tensions and ambiguity of life with games. Submit to the next issue!
