Esoteric Gaming’s Role in Helping Us Come to Grips with Our Trauma in a post-COVID world
We all grow up with parents we didn’t choose, in a part of the world we didn’t choose, and live in a moment in history we didn’t choose. As we grow, we have to come to grips with that context, and often we make a choice in how we will live in it. Taking the word “grips” literally, we have to understand and engage in combat with that context less it beat us down to sarcastic, depressed, and burnt out husks. I think about this a lot as I teach students how to make games because games are canned portions of context, made within a time period, to technology of that period, by designers who reflect the same process that children are raised in. And to that end, Phillip Larkin, in “This be the verse,” notes that, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They don’t mean to but they do.” This is what we come to grips with because, “…they were fucked up in their turn.”
And yet, Games, canned play or canned culture, allow us to explore the portions of what fucks us up AND battle it, literally coming to grips with those things we can’t. There are things we can’t name, esoterica only those few well-adjusted or well-trained folks can see. While I take a very personal route to get there, I want to ask,
“Can esoteric gaming be the remainder of what was fucking us up in the first place? Can it provide a guide toward that place so few of us can get to? Can esoteric gaming help us push back against the monsters we’re seeing in the mirror?”
I struggle with the term esoteric gaming, and while I might head into whimsy about the juicy bits in each virtual or tabletop world I enter, there’s a fundamentally different thing that sits as the basis of what I would see as esoterica in gaming. We grow up surrounded by it, and all those competing forces help us identify what we do and do not like, who we are and are not like. We might refer to database animals in this way, but it is something more primal, more akin to humanity fighting against and for itself simultaneously. For example, me. I hear the voices of my parents in my head all the time. I fight them constantly and they come up after every sentence, after every paragraph. If I stop writing, there they are.
“Don’t be a bitch, you fucking fairy.”
I began therapy in 2020 in the midst of COVID after sitting in the corner crying for a couple of days that I really needed to. The act of coming to grips with years of complex personal trauma was suddenly front and center in a world where it might not be possible to go outside anymore. It was as if Ragnaros himself had become a virus trying to set fire to the tree we called society.
“No son of mine is going to be a fucking nerd.”
But I wasn’t really coming to grips with needing to talk to a therapist or needing to talk to the suicide hotline…again, I was coming to grips with who I was versus what those voices in my head, the voice of my parents were constantly telling me I was. As a child of the 1980s, almost all of my childhood toys of obsession were suddenly front and center again. There was a new He-Man Cartoon, Transformers and TMNT were Michael Bay franchises, Voltron was redone, She-ra was redone, even MadBallz had somehow become a thing again. Was that a Furby? Did I mention Critters? Dark Tower? Fireball Island? Heroquest? The retro craze that was about to descend on the world as we all cowered inside we were not prepared for.
“I guess being a fag means you can’t get anyone pregnant.”
As a kid, I was constantly told what to do. I was signed up for baseball, basketball, football, soccer, track, bowling, and my uncle owned a golf course. I was never bad at sports, but I was constantly forced into those things when all I really wanted was a good book filled with Dragonlances or Forgotten Realms. I wasn’t allowed to come home during the weekend until it was dark outside but had to remain at a park playing. I wasn’t able to spend the night at a friend’s house (because I wasn’t worth the effort to bring me there), and no one could spend the night at our house. But I had no frame of reference that this was weird until I suddenly felt myself trying to come to grips with a childhood that was vastly different than the ones I saw in the movies I cherished the most from my childhood like Flight of the Navigator, Cloak and Dagger, or The Goonies.
“You ate all my chips, you fucking fatass?”
Looking back, I avoided coming to grips with anything. Instead, I fled in secret to fantasy worlds where characters like Raistlin Maejer spent decades enacting revenge on the people who wronged him (even though it was mostly he who created the problem). I loved GI Joe because I could be a specialist; I could play with those characters who were able to pursue the things that they identified with the most. I loved Conan the Adventurer because he could wander around helping people and took on bullies, warlords, and evil people who stopped the dreams of others. I cried at every commercial that involved parents getting their kid something they loved, at movies like Flight of the Navigator where a kid could suddenly meet parents who had matured while he remained a child. Looking back, I couldn’t come to grips; I could only avoid, escape.
“You’re not worth loving. I’m ashamed of you.”
In junior high and high school (for a time), I found a group of people who would play things like Dungeons and Dragons on the way to football games or soccer games. When I visited their homes, we played CDi, Genesis, and master system games. I found people during lunch that I could play Magic the Gathering with or other CCGs at the time. But after that, I had to go home and work. I still couldn’t stay overnight at anyone’s house. Instead, I worked on a farm, I sold coupon books for D.A.R.E. At all times, my parents endeavored to fill my time with things related to who they wanted me to be. I have often wondered if it was an attempt to keep me from thinking about the fact that I was not trying to figure out who I was.
“You have until tomorrow to find somewhere else to live. Our obligation to care about you is over, you’re 18.”
I enrolled in college in 1996 and failed out because I had no idea how college worked and had no support, no friends, no family who could help me. When I tried to go to community college, my parents refused to fill out the FAFSA for me to declare I was not part of their taxes anymore, that I was financially independent. “That information is private.” As a result, I had to wander around until I was 25 when I no longer needed to show their tax info. Between failing out and leaving Ohio, I got engaged, but we split up because I was angry, so angry. I didn’t know why, either. It was here that the inkling of needing to come to grips began. But I needed to survive each day, and as a result, I avoided needing to come to grips for almost 20 years. Let’s fast forward a bit.
“I don’t care if you’re homeless. You decided to leave Ohio, and we don’t have to care about you anymore.”
After a period of extreme stress where I didn’t really know where I was going to sleep most nights, I met the person who would become my partner in life; my wife, and I began to get myself a stable life, graduated from University in 2008, and got my masters in 2012 from the same place. It was here that I enrolled in 2013 to get my PhD. I was still on the avoidance train of coming to grips with myself in PhD School, but the overwhelming amount of work helped. It helped because I could avoid thinking about anything but what I was doing. I worked as a professor the entire time I was a PhD student and don’t really remember much of that time.
“I want you to be my best man and come to Germany and help me get married.”
In truth, I enrolled in grad school because I wanted a PhD as a way to prove to my parents that I wasn’t worthless. The quotes between paragraphs were my parents misunderstanding me and really not having the maturity at the time for a kid like me. But even within that realization was the need to show that I was worth something! And I’d prove it to them. Once I did, I’d kill myself, and they’d know that it was their fault someone so worthwhile was someone they gave birth to and screwed up. I got my PhD in 2018. I began to enact my plans. It was here that a friend completely changed my life.
I got the above message via Skype on the day I had begun to enact my plan. At that moment, my friend changed my life. We had run a podcast together devoted to Monster Hunter and had remained fast friends over the course of my PhD School. Hearing from him, while I filled up the bathtub to do what I had planned to do for over a decade, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t let him down. I cried, I cried hard. And in doing so, my wife came home, and I talked about what I had wanted to do. She was angry, very angry. It was here that I began to really think about how to come to grips.
But before that, the thing I really needed to come to grips with was my career, who I was as a person, as an academic, and as a so-called learned person. Coming to grips was still far off, I was honestly still in survival mode. In that mode, I fought to get a tenure-track position. Surprisingly, I found that there were people I had met who were willing to write letters of recommendation for me. That era from 2013 to 2019 is a void with brief flashes of memory. Why these people wrote me letters is frankly beyond me; but still, it happened, and I found myself with a tenure-track position. Call it white male privilege…I still do.
This was in 2019, and by the start of 2020, COVID descended on us. It was here that I began therapy. I found myself crying in the corner of my office because COVID forced me to slow down, stop, and turn around and look at all of the things I avoided talking about, thinking about, and overworking to avoid. I can remember that first session, the second session. I can remember suddenly being very tired. I had a warm feeling in my chest. I actually slept for once. For the first time since Krystian, the voice that punctuates silence started to change.
“That’s the feeling of not being in fight or flight. That’s how you feel when you’re simply being a person.”
I left my first tenure-track position for a new one in a games program. It was here, I thought, that I’d really find myself as a scholar and start a lab, endeavor to write meaningful papers, and really establish myself. This was me coming to grips! It was exciting! But instead, what I found was that I didn’t really like academia anymore. I didn’t like the mindless churn of papers no one would read. The work I had begun during COVID was interesting and meaningful, I could think about lives saved and processes changed to save more lives. I could think about trying to manifest a new technology industry while teaching classes on game design. But, no matter how much I tried, I found that I just…didn’t actually enjoy it. I had no joy as my h-index went up, as I got closer and closer to 1000 cites. I had the success I should but it wasn’t true. I was growing in the wrong direction.
“You are too diffuse, concentrate on just one thing. Get more grants.”
It was here that I began to realize that in coming to grips with myself as a fan of games, of play of all kinds, that I didn’t really like the place I entered to prove to my parents that I was worth the life I was going to voluntarily end. If I wanted to really come to grips, I would have to start doing the thing I wasn’t able to do as a kid: come to grips with that life. In coming to grips, in fighting that upbringing, I could find what brings me joy.
“You should be what your department expects.”
The biggest issue for me is if the PhD was a tragic mistake. I find that it was not a mistake. The skills that I had developed, the intense amount of reading across discipline, and the methods of analysis I could perform are perfect vehicles for me to build a career around that doesn’t require me to churn papers, proposals, and deal with folks who simply didn’t have the ability to come to grips (yet). It was here that I began to realize that if I wanted to come to grips with who I am, I probably need to leave academia and find something to do. And to that end, the most frustrating aspect of my coming to grips is that I replaced the abuses of my parents with the abuses of academia. It was a powerful moment of self-reflection to really push me to start to advocate for myself and learn what I like, what I enjoy, and who I really am.
And I find now that I am in mourning at times. I mourn for that scared little fat kid whose parents felt that he was gay. If I had come to grips with my nerdy, play-loving self earlier, maybe I could’ve fought back against the parents who spent their time taking their weaknesses out on their oldest kid, a kid far too energetic and observant that they could only see their failures in my wonder. But that feels like i’d have been burnt out sooner before experiencing enough of the world to wander freely.
I was stamped out because I loved to play and explore. Coming to grips with that means re-igniting that little kid. I need to play more games, make more games, and think about how games can help others come to grips with their weaknesses, their shadows, and their doubts; doubts probably hoisted on them by others.
So what I have come to grips with is that games have helped me escape; however, in that escape, I can also say that games helped me prepare. I learned the tools and techniques I needed to heal when the time was right. And in that healing, I get to wander around trying to find what I like and why I like it. In that process, I am becoming a person who can stand using the grips I finally found. I realize now that it’s probably time to leave academia, as it’s time to really engage with the world around me as a person who is no longer hiding from it.
We arrive at a conclusion having travelled through a darkness of spirit.
Esoteric games is a concept that lets us highlight those invisible things that we don’t have conscious access to as people living our lives. We all live our lives within and among types that force us in one direction or another. And yet, as I think about it, what I actually came to grips with was that I was stuck. I was stuck between being forced to be a jock by my parents because they were worried I was a nerd, a gay nerd. In academia, I have been stuck being forced to be an HCI person focused on disaster and workforce development by those who sign the papers stating I’m worth employing.
My coming to grips was simply learning to focus on who I was outside of the trauma of being forced to live within the expectations of others. Games help us understand those things. They also show us what humanity is and can be, who we are.
We come back to the questions that started this essay:
“Can esoteric gaming be the remainder of what was fucking us up in the first place? Can it provide a guide toward that place so few of us can get to? Can esoteric gaming help us push back against the monsters we’re seeing in the mirror?”
And across this piece, the thing that has been pointed out to me by games, especially those aspects of games that we can’t really voice, is an entire answer, a whole topic we can devote to this project.
The esoterica of games are those facets of being human we haven’t named yet, those strategies that can help us come to grips with whatever we need to overcome in the world we find ourselves in, wherever or whenever that is, regardless of how our parents shape us to be.