When you decide to give up games, you need some affirmative advice to help you through the bad times. The first thing self-help books tell you is that computer games can’t offer anything that real life doesn’t.

This is so fucking true.

If you make an effort, you can fill real life with all the things you used to love doing in computer games, and you’ll feel a genuine sense of achievement too! So why not put on your Reality Pants and fire up a session of Real Life: The Ultimate Adventure Game.

Remember, this is a feel-good exercise, intended to show you that there’s always a positive way you can look at any situation. So read on, and get ready to smile!

The ability to fly

When I was a gamer, my favourite game was, of course, Microsoft Gannet Simulator. I loved the freedom it gave my imagination as I soared majestically over cliffs and skerries, seas and estuaries, my craw writhing with whitebait that I would later regurgitate into the screeching throats of my young. That was what gaming was all about.

I used to believe that I would never be able to fly in the real world, due to my poor vision and air-rage restraining order. However, I was wrong. Real Life can take you anywhere in the universe, thanks to a little “game” all of us play every night. It’s called dreaming, it doesn’t cost a penny, and we all have them every night.

And every morning, when we wake up into the yawning horror of our wasted lives, we just need to remember that new dreams wait for us, a mere 15 soul-crushing hours away.

Dreams.

Reloading

In games, if you make a mistake, you die in a cloud of flying giblets and are forced to reload. Real Life is kind of like this, but instead of dying, you disappoint your family and irreparably damage your chances of career advancement. You can always reload, though! All it takes is a slide into drug and alcohol abuse, followed by an epiphanic rebirth one drizzly Thursday evening at the Scarborough Evangelist Society. As you sit on the hard wooden schoolchair, sipping your tea and nibbling on your custard cream, Donald (his cardigan grey as the overcast sky) will explain that God has been trying to talk to you all these years; you just didn’t hear him because there were too many laser explosions happening.

You will walk out a changed man, bathed in fuzzy euphoria. You need no longer be afraid. From now on, your life will be filled with an overriding sense of purpose, and you will almost completely convince yourself that there isn’t still a huge, howling hole in the world that can never be filled. So, don’t despair. You can reload.

Fall under a bus and you’re fucked, though.

Teabagging your enemies

The funniest part of online shooters wasn’t the shooting, maiming and slaughtering, although they were pretty darned spiffing. No, it was the humiliation you could bestow upon your enemies after defeating them. This, when you get right down to it, is the sole reason for a man’s existence. In games such as Halo, you could do a crude approximation of a Tea Bag by squatting your character over the corpse of your enemy and allowing your imagination to fill in the gonad-shaped blanks. It didn’t matter that you had no balls; the enemy still knew that he was beaten. He had been teabagged by a metaphor.

The seeming irony of Real Life is that you have balls but no way of using them offensively. Taking them out in public is seen as a crime, and even if you could use them without getting arrested, your years of cloistered game slavery have made you look like an emaciated grasshopper who’s been tortured on a rack. You will never be able to teabag a real person because you are a total, unmitigated loser.

But this is where magazines can help. They are filled to the brim with handsome icons of success: those shining beacons of fucking bastardry who make you feel like an awful failure whenever you look at their beautiful faces. They have achieved so much, and you have achieved so little. But now the tables will turn, because only one of you will end up with your balls on his face. And it’s not you.

Go on, rest those bad boys on George Clooney. Makes you feel an awful lot better, doesn’t it. What computer game lets you achieve actual ball-to-celebrity contact? Why not take it a step further and take clandestine photos of your boss, or the last girl who turned you down with a vague shiver of disgust, and then relax upon them? The great thing about teabagging their photos is that they won’t even know of their own defeat. But you will know.

Thank you, Real Life, for providing a healthy and exciting way to aerate one’s crotch.

Levelling up

Games offer a satisfying sense of progression. The more experience you get, the higher your level becomes, until you are the supremely capable master of your world. But Real Life offers this feature too! You’ll level up every single year - it’s called Getting Older! When you reach the higher levels, you gain access to certain special powers, also known as Responsibilities, and this is where the real depth and complexity of Real Life shows itself. You’ll learn to hone your micro-management skills as you try to balance a mortgage with a fuel-guzzling car, food-guzzling kids and the cash-guzzling prostitute whom you only sleep with because you feel scared and lonely, and you forgot how to talk to your wife years ago.

You’ll also get the chance of promotion, though a well-balanced game knows not to give you too much reward or you’ll grow bored. This why Real Life will usually keep promotions just out of reach, in order to give you something to hope for while you shiver listlessly in your battery cage, your optimism burned to a stub by the corporate machine. Remember to take a break every once in a while! Get up and walk around, stretch those legs.

Upgrading

For many, the real thrill of gaming isn’t even playing the games: it’s lusting perennially after the latest and greatest piece of hardware. Does your PC gradually become outdated, meaning that you can’t run the latest games because it’s too slow? Well, Real Life does the same thing! The older you get, the more of your basic bodily functions will start shutting down, until you become a curiously shrunken sultana of a man, spending your last days pushing a zimmer frame down the street in a perpetual losing race against death!

Death waits to claim his prize. “OLD PEOPLE SMELL LIKE VINEGAR”, he muses.

“Great! But how can I upgrade myself?”, you’re probably asking. Well, the trick is to have kids. After you grow withered and useless and are picked off by one of Real Life’s countless viruses, they will be the Next Gen, ensuring that a tiny part of you is passed down into immortality. Call it a God Mode, if you like.

Except that within two generations, no one alive will ever have heard the sound of your voice.

Also your great-great-grandkids are dicks.

Well, for all those people who feeling down about quitting, unsure as to whether real life offers the same thrill-a-minute excitement as Halo, I hope this has cheered you up and given you the confidence you need to quit gaming for good. Who needs games when you’ve got Real Life!

Meeeeeeee.

Filed under: Addiction