A lot of people seem to not understand why I spend so much time and money into video games. I don't care about leaderboards, high scores, achievements of any kind, and I generally ignore many mechanical functions of a game that gamers are apparently supposed to instinctively care about. These things aren't what motivates me and causes me to need games in my life.
Even explaining to people what I do play games for seems to fall on deaf ears. It's bewildering, and even a little hurtful, that no one else can fathom, or even wants to try to fathom, what it is about video games that makes them so appealing to someone like me.
I've always felt that people understanding why I play games would be synonymous to understanding why I so adamantly oppose certain genres or types of games. Especially why I would never play them myself.
I've known, to my disappointment and frustration, for a few years that barely any of the general populace, if any at all, understands or cares about the things that make games important to me, but only recently understood the marginal divide between my view and everyone else.
For starters, the utter detachment with which people view games with. This is probably what allows them to play a game like Call of Duty and not feel totally appalled that it's basically simulating war and bloodshed. Or maybe they're just heartless monsters that don't value human life, at least that's what the cynical side of me believes. The optimistic portion, no matter how small it might be, likes to think that it can't be a common demonic lust for killing that drives people to play such games. I certainly don't understand the appeal, I find such games depressing, representing the textbook example of what I wish our society could move away from and leave behind. I find the fact that people take joy in games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto to be a violation of moral ethics to the highest degree. And the only way I can make sense of why any stable and functional human being would enjoy such an opposite of the idyllic is because they are so detached from the games they play that they never even think about it.
Which in and of itself is very depressing to me. Why would anyone not want to be attached to a video game in an emotional and mental link for a few hours?
This is why I play games, why I always have. If I could be so blunt, I hate my life. I hate all life. It's miserable and dull, thinking of the scale of human life in general, what we do, what we achieve, what little impact I will have, the reality of how futile existence on one small planet on a universe deemed mortal itself by science is a depressing and crushing weight on my mind, and it has been for several years. Real life makes me feel an honest and sickening amount of dread, knowing I struggle for a better place only for it to have no meaning some 40-50 years from now, to know that my only true purpose as a gender-designated living organism is to reproduce and ensure the next generation which I assure you has always been the last concern on my list even before I started having such broad thoughts, and to know that my chosen career in art is worthless in every sense of the word. I'm an impractical, unnecessary, useless part of society that takes up resources and space and gives nothing of value back beyond the arbitrary value that my species (and only my species, for I do not think one species in a vast universe is enough to justify my resource-draining practice) places on such things as scribbles on expensive paper with equally expensive materials that other humans toil in mines to dig up and transport for no purpose. And I only continue because it's all I know how to do, it's become both my excuse for getting up in the morning as much as it is my only method of maintaining a contented life, for that's all I can think that anyone can work for and feel like it is theirs and not something wasted on unrealistic ideals like religion that seem so much more appealing than the reality or future advancement in technology for "the next generation" when we are all doomed to extinction no matter which planet we inhabit.
I haven't always thought this way, only once I went through a time in my life where I let go of religion as much as a phase of my growth as a result of considering the chilling concept that there was no god or magic or anything more than what we see. I spent much of my teenage years in contemplation and introspection to find a comforting atheistic alternative to the ultimatum of my life's efforts meaning something on a higher level. I have found none.
And as a child, I needed to believe in something. As I type this I feel a pang of guilt both at the admittance of weakness and the fact that it sounds like an excuse, or a cry for attention, or even discredits anything I think or say. I was born in respiratory distress and needed immediate surgery to be able to intake enough oxygen to sustain life. In the time I spent half-dead, my brain received permanent damage that would stay with me for the rest of my life. Side effects of such a development varied widely from mild emotional instability (not the least of which being anger issues) to vivid and highly inaccurate interpretations of my environment that lasted until I was 11 and finally placed in proper care.
The ideal of magic of some kind helped me to explain, and even in some regards, embrace the culminations of my overactive imagination mixed with my slight deficiency in determining if it was indeed said imagination. I will never say that it was a bad experience. There were times when I would become extremely frightened for no reason and freeze or have a hard time breathing, or become angry, but these weren't frequent enough actions for me to say that I did not, as a child, enjoy the incursion of my imagination into the real world.
In fact, in spite of the fact that my disturbing development in train of thought only came about when I was 16, I've never enjoyed plain, bland reality. Possibly because I've always had something to spice it up. I was a reclusive child that viewed all humankind as dangerous, or untrustworthy, which was a trait inherited by my mother, and I invented a plethora of imaginary friends to surround me and make my world colorful and interesting. As well as the average childlike tenancy to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, I could make myself believe some of it, and even made it my goal to explain every detail that made no sense to make it more real, as much to add stability to what I believed as to solidify it in reality. Such as why no one else could see my "friends", or why I was so reclusive and outcasted, which I was, because of my huge glasses and bad temper alike, and thought there just had to be some justice, some explanation for my existence if I did nothing but make my mother miserable, make my teachers frustrated, and be bullied by everyone else.
I suppose my environment at that age wasn't helping my already abnormal mental development...
Then came video games.
I was an active and energetic kid, I liked going outside and pretending to be on a grand adventure with all of my friends and enemies (most of which were anthro, hinthint) either calling for my draconic sidekick, visiting a hyperintelligent sea monster that did experiments, or taking my chances solving thrilling mysteries of why the shipment of sugarberries didn't come in that morning. This was how I spent my days. I even managed to elaborate a reason for my father's absance in my lif, believing he must have been some great hero or powerful being that had very important business and left me as a safeguard or something. But we lived in a terrible neighborhood and my mother didn't want me outside. I suppose she thought buying me a PlayStation on Christmas (Though of course Santa delivered it with his ability to teleport into apartments with no chimneys because so few houses had them these days and he needed a new sort of magic from extraterrestrial life-forms, strange I still remember telling that to my cousin when we were kids) was the best way to keep a perfectly aged pedophile target in the house and out of trouble with the neighbors. (I will say that I'd probably have been a pedophile's wet dream considering how sexually experimental I was, even going so far as to wonder how famous cartoon characters masturbated or how bizarre or forceful it was or why it felt so amazing to drive the body to a certain limit. Guess what that limit was.)
My first game was Spyro, it's still one of my favorites, and my attraction to it was due to my love of dragons more than anything. To me, controlling a dragon on a TV was just as whimsically idyllic as being one in real life. I loved dragons and obsessed about them constantly, always looking for dragon eggs outside and praying for one at night. Spyro opened a door for me that made dreams come true. The expansive worlds, mixed with my inexhaustible imagination, fueled a fantasy I'd always wished for.
I wasn't completely insane... I should elaborate on the specifics in another blog entry. It's complex and requires reflection to unblur and articulate on expansively. And most of it is beside the point, only used to demonstrate my indifference and cresentment of the life I was given, and the life I had no choice in.
It didn't help, and still is no small damper on my wish to achieve something, that I was born with visual impairment, a trait of both parents and unavoidable. And because of this, I can never be allowed to apply for a pilot's license under federal law. I am thus forbidden to legally fly, which has been my dream since as far back as I could remember. I have always known that I would never be able to have a driver's license, that no one would even let me have significant mobile freedom without relying on someone, never truly being free or of my own volition. Perhaps it is these arbitrary and unjust restrictions put on me that have aided my dislike of modern society and technology as much as a preference for fantasy. I feel so restricted and opposed in modern society, as a kid, I believed that if I lived in a fantasy world full of wonder and adventure, I would be free to do as I pleased.
I found this world in video games. This also fueled my preference; I do not play games in the modern setting, feeling humans are "too limited" to be vehicles for my imagination and voracious desire to explore and roam freely, a need which I believe is analogous to oxygen for me. Thus I have always chosen a preference in animal or anthro characters to play as with a few exceptions (Zelda being the largest with Elder Scrolls in close second), because they had such amazing powers and throughout my life, I have always preferred animals to humans. The whimsicality and mystery surrounding animals for a child, as well as their utter indifference to things I despised, such as "laws" on where they could and couldn't go, and they were indifferent to me, predictable, trusting, honest. They seemed to represent divinity to someone who led a life of having less right to things everyone else was fully capable of, not just in arbitrary laws but in innate abilities. I was always less capable in gym and thus decided to just hate sports and make my spiteful attitude known, and was quickly drawn to instruments which, though I couldn't read music (I couldn't read very well at all at the age we were learning it until my mother requisitioned some large-print books for me), I picked up on quickly because it was something I could do with sound and touch and not my lesser, inferior sight. It is still a preference of mine, from whistling to playing a harmonica or a flute, because it relaxes me and is one of the few things I feel truly confident in and capable of.
Video games are not something I feel confident in or capable of. My cousin is often pointing to things I do not see. It is clearly just another one of those many things that I will always be inferior in compared to someone else. Therefore, I choose not to seek the challenge. In general, I choose to reject the opportunity for challenge at all, whenever possible, because for me, the chance of failure is much higher due to my limitations and I see it as a waste of my effort and a method to frustrate me as opposed to a constructive use of my time. Time I can spend doing something I enjoy, such as escaping from my dreadful circumstances for a while.
When I was 11 and my mother and I struck the final nerve in each other's bones, we were forced into therapy before the results could be more violent and I was given the proper medication I needed to function.
My clarity improved gradually, as well as my mood, and various other points of my life, such as the relationship between my mother and I. It's difficult to imagine the time before that I spent sober of the effects of modern pharmaceuticals but I do remember how strained our relationship was, and it didn't console me at all to know that it was nobody's fault. It was never my fault, I could never control anything, apparently, I had genuine problems and was put on the standard pacifier for "wayward, petulant brats" as everyone else whose kid had outbursts in class or hit people for fun. I'm not saying that some people don't have an honest problem. I'm very aware of the types of legitimate medical diagnoses that warrant the treatment that I and several other people I've met online and off badly needed but the fact that every parent that couldn't administer a justified spanking and just wanted an easy solution has saturated the worth of such treatment and created such skeptics to the type of solutions that people like me actually need is appalling, because I'm also very aware of the type of kid that had no problems other than an idiotic, irresponsible mother that didn't know how to do her job, because I'm related to such a kid, my youngest cousin and his clueless mother. And by the way, he's 14 and she hasn't learned a damned thing. I think her negligence as a parent combined with him being forcefed powerful antipsychotics since he was 2 has actually done severe damage to him to the point where he actually needs the care now. But that's a bit off-topic...
There was a downside to the treatment, one that should be insignificant but which altered my life significantly. My imagination settled, it was no longer vivid, and thus my world was no longer filled, despite the vain grasps at the much-wanted whimsy of it all that absorbed me for a couple of years to come. Video games changed from a medium to a coping mechanism for me, helping me to adapt to what was apparently a "normal way of thinking and understanding" and giving me the attachment to fantasy that kept my spirits up. As I grew in the next few years, I found reality to be depressing and dark. It seams strange and backwards for me to mourn the inhibitions and distortions of the mind when a lot of people with such problems are probably grateful to be able to function in society and live a normal and contented life but I don't think there has ever been anything of the norm about myself.
When I was 13 I decided to "do art", though what I thought that meant, I don't know, I just know that I started drawing more seriously than before. I'd always drawn to express my imagination, to show people the characters I invented and my world I valued, but now I was becoming more serious and devout to improvement and refinement. That carried through to highschool, where I drew like a 10 year old, didn't use shading, made haphazard lines with colored pencil everywhere, and was in the absolute barbaric stage of my evolution. At this point, I was resigned to my life, having left aspects of my childhood behind, and very much depressed by many old haunts as much as by the new ones that crept into every aspect of my day. Video games like Sonic had a lot of influence on my art at this point in time and it looked like it. The anatomy was horrible, I could barely draw hands (If you think they're bad now, at least you can tell what they are). the proportions were atrocious, and the drawings were comparable to the usual tripe found on dA. Maybe this has some influence on my rather low opinion of Sonic art in general. My own experience has led me to associate it with immaturity and unexperience, as well as bad taste in character design and unoriginality.
By my sophmore year, I think I was really discovering my craft of choice. I began an almost recolutionary experimentation with many concepts at once that I'd never grasped before. Partly because I had such an amazing art teacher, my highschool advanced art teacher remains a prominent figure in my esteem, her ghost will forever influence me on proper form and my continued growth as an artist. I should really thank her, she did so much for me despite my limits. She treated me like everyone else, she accepted faults in my art that resulted from my lack of vision capabilities and explained how I could change it, helping me pass barriers instead of accepting them, and pushing me to my absolute end, which was exactly what I needed. I began to understand, and become fascinated with, color, lightsource, how colors effect the mind and the emotions, how the placement of such invokes deep feelings, as well as my constant experiment with hues and what could and couldn't be a shade of another color, such as using purple to shade green on the basis that everything away from the sun has a blue tint here on Earth and everything directly toward it can be white or yellow, and using this basic concept to create worlds filled with vibrant colors. I made my world colorful in a completely new way and I was learning every minute.
I slowed down my 11th and 12th year of school. This was a time when "my entire world expanded all at once", as I like to say. This was the time when I was a frequent internet user and an active person in social areas, and in two short years I learned more about human cruelty than I could have stomached in an entire lifetime. Yet in that time, I also learned many concepts which my small world had never bridged, some of them were actually good. But through it all, it did tell me how few people valued the type of whimsy and wistfulness for a "more colorful" life that I so desired. I'd hoped that the internet, a place full of virtual, simulated space where anything could happen (like a video game) would be filled with people wishing for a common goal which eluded and disinterested "real people" but that was quickly shattered in a very blunt and brutal way with the people I came in contact with.
So by the time I was 17, I feel that much of the magic I retained had drained out of me, perhaps the experience of so many humans and none that could understand or wanted to support my wishes exhausted the last of my zealous ambition to pursue a wonderful world I enjoyed in the form of artificial simulation, or perhaps I was just too cynical at that age to appreciate such things as I used to. This was around the time I felt much discomfort at a half-unwilling but entirely necessary detachment from religion or "unrealistic" concepts, as my mother called them, where I wanted so badly to believe in those things again, to be comforted by their promises of a better place than our reality for me, of a reward for my struggle and misery, but could not bring myself to be convinced, and it hurt, it was probably the most dreadful hurt I've ever experienced, along with the constant apprehension of my death, that I would wither to nothing, be nothing, feel and think nothing, and imagine nothing, such thoughts disturbed me to a point of unimaginable depression. I dealt with it in a few years, striving to control or overcome it. I'm not sure I really did, I do know the certainty that I never have, and never will be the same again, and now, almost 2 years after dealing with the change, I'm not sure I'd want to be any other way.
My need to create declined dramatically after highschool. I spent much of my time sleeping, much of my first year after graduation either trying to get into the workforce with the aide of government-maintained services or taking refresher classes for people seeking college (because I thought there was just nowhere else to go since I had no faith in my art to be sufficient at the time) and much more of my time online, doing nothing but getting into scrapes with others and generally depressing and frustrating myself further over my inability to penetrate through to anyone and have them understand. I'm not entirely sure of that motive, it's just what I remember with the most clarity. A scant two years ago feels like an eternity now, I feel 20 years older than I should at times and seeing the dates at which I posted some of the things I did on different sites and in logs bewilders me now, it's like looking at someone else. I'm barely aware of the logic behind some of my previous actions though I have tried to remember what the motives might have been and failed.
My video gaming habits also declined as I settled into a slower pace of life. At this point a hard reality had hit me; my only goal through highschool was to graduate. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do with my life, which was art, but graduation, and the summer after, felt like the end of the road with nowhere else to go and I wasn't sure how to deal with it at the time. This is partly why I did nothing but sleep. Sleeping, until the past year, has been one of my many coping mechanisms for overwhelming circumstances. And these were very overwhelming. It took me until the beginning of the year to decide on a long-term direction for my life and I'm just now really easing into that direction. My dependance on video games has depleted, probably as a result of, though it saddens me to admit, not needing it anymore, at least not to the extent that I used to.
The current market isn't helping. I still have interest in video games but the lack of a market interested in colorful fantasy worlds and, though it is strange for me to admit, a need to feel more adult, limits my choices to a few and turns me off to mainstream gaming completely. There just aren't enough games that capture the elements of what I truly need anymore; it's a depressing reality, and one I constantly refute for the sake of not losing one of my only coping mechanisms for life, but I feel that coping mechanism dying every day. It confines me just as my world always has.
People do not understand the reasons I care for such supposedly "irrelevant" things as art direction, character strengths and weaknesses as well as appearance, freedom of movement, and various other aspects of games which are paramount to me but apparently irrelevant to everyone else.
And when I try to explain this to some of them, their first reaction is always "See, that's what YOU like about games but not what everyone else likes." As if this is supposed to make me think like them. I'm not sure if they intend the kind of hurt a comment like this causes me, and I'm fairly certain most of them don't care. I'm not even sure what their motive could be beyond pouring salt in the old wound of a perpetual outcast but maybe they just feel that my presence threatens their preference in gaming as much as I feel theirs does to mine, though I will argue that my fears are far more legitimate by virtue of the fact that it's happening to me and not them.
I wish writing this out made some of them understand and sympathize instead of being so dismissive of me and what is important to me. I do not need further reminder of my insignificance in the universe, I'm perfectly aware of it, in fact, it's the cause for my resentment. I wonder how many of them truly believe that I believe I'm the majority, or that I believe that everything I say is right. It should be obvious that I don't, that I feel currently as if I am in an impossible situation and neither diplomacy or force has softened anyone to my case. I feel lost in the flow of a river moving against me, never given purchase on a handhold and never allowed an inch, just driven along against my will.
I never get to choose, do I? I can't even choose the types of games I prefer because they are no longer being made. Just as I had little choice with every event in my life. Can I not at least be granted the sentiment of a compassionate audience that doesn't discard or ignore me for a change?
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