DIGITAL REMOVAL: Purging Video Games From My Life - Day 1
Day 1
See this? Pretty mundane, isn't it? This is what computers used to look like back in the Reagan era, and in 1985, when I was but two years old, my father purchased this innocuous bulky block of plastic and circuits and introduced it not only into our home, and into my life.
I vividly remember the first time I watched my dad playing a game on it. Ostensibly purchased for work purposes, the inclusion of a rudimentary, single-button joystick with the package signaled that at least a secondary - if not hidden primary - function of the device was to be a source of digital entertainment.
The video game industry was still in its infancy, and as for myself, I was barely out of mine. Seeing those bright colors, that scratchy digitized sound, and the catchy MIDI soundtrack of Spy Hunter, I was intensely eager to have the opportunity to play it for myself. After a few minutes of play, my dad handed me the joystick, and I was immediately enthralled by it.
Being 2, I barely had any idea what I was doing, and beyond the sensory stimulus and feeling of excitement I experienced at the time, there isn't much else to the memory. That first experience, though, was the first step on a long journey. Unfortunately, that wasn't a journey that was to take me much of anywhere at all.
After the Commodore, I had an NES. After the NES, a Sega Genesis; then an N64; then a PS2. I had a PC all throughout as well, though, and while I found base amusement in the consoles, it was the personal computer that was most dear to me. Maybe it was the fact that my gaming habit started with the Commodore 64 instead of an Atari, which forced me to learn rudimentary computer commands and a basic understanding of how things such as command lines and various bits of hardware worked together. No doubt the utility of a PC made it preferable to me over a console, as I had always been somewhat ambitious, and there isn't a version of Photoshop or Microsoft Word available for the XBox quite yet.
That ambition, though, has consistently been stymied by the fact that, while PCs do possess more utility than gaming consoles, utility means nothing unless it is utilized. Far too often, I find myself in the midst of long gaming sessions, when I suddenly feel this pang of emotional dread: what happened, I ask myself? Why am I still doing this? What could I have achieved in the time that I have dedicated to hitting the next level? Could I have reached higher levels of my own personal, adult potential?
Well, duh. Of course I could have. It's the kind of question I always realize I shouldn't have to ask myself, since the answer is quite obvious: time gaming is time not being productive.
There will always be another dopamine hit ready to be delivered by some kind of in-game achievement, but how pathetic is it, really, that these entirely meaningless milestones are referred to as "achievements" to begin with? What, really, is being achieved? Am I creating value for the world? Am I creating value in my own life? Nope. Not even close.
Today, listening to a podcast, the idea came to me. I have a Steam library full of all manner of varied titles and genres. If I don't feel like playing a shooter, I can play an RPG. If I'm not in an RPG mood, I can play a strategy game. If it's not a good time for strategy, I can race cars, or fly planes, or build cities, or do parkour in historical settings, or any number of unproductive activities that exist solely to draw my attention and my brain into a dopamine coma which only further stymies my forward progress as an actual adult human being.
When I get home tonight, the first thing I am doing is wiping my Steam collection clean. Those titles will always be there for me to come back to, some time in the far future, when I have achieved some of my personal goals and have earned the privilege of playing them again. Until that time, though, those bits and bytes will be wiped clean, and so will uPlay, and GOG Galaxy, and on and on, until the only software remaining on my computer is explicitly there for the purpose of productive, value-creating activity.
Will it be like this forever? No, probably not. It is possible, however, that upon receiving the dopamine rush of actual success in life, I may not have the urge to revisit games in the future. In fact, a part of me hopes that to be the case - that my break from digital pleasures inspires me to lose a taste for them altogether in favor of finding pleasure in life on its own. That may or may not happen, but there's really no downside for me to try and reach for it.
I will be revisiting this topic in the future with follow-up articles. In the meantime, I'm writing an eBook, and I have things to sell on eBay, and then there are all the other things I need to do that don't start with a lower-case "e" followed by an upper-case "B". I'd also like to think that, if I can get some of those things done, I can share them with you all here, and inspire others who have been a little too caught up in pixelated pleasures to consider shedding them.