The Loneliness Of The Online Gamer
Hello again and welcome back. It’s been seven months since the last update; all I can say is that some shits just can’t be rushed.
Today I want to talk to you about being alone. Really, truly alone. So put on some My Chemical Romance and get comfortable.
In terms of fatness, though, these markers are reversed.
Loneliness. Online gaming can give you a peculiar appreciation for it. You cower in your curtained grotto, a hermit wizened before your time, tapping and clicking while your family laugh and bond in some other room. The people you talk to online aren’t people, really, just blue sentences scrolling up the screen, friends so fickle that they disappear every time you reach the score limit. For social awkwards such as ourselves, there’s something comforting about this cosy loneliness, something we grow to depend on.
But this is nothing. Do you really want to be alone? Try creating a multiplayer game where you’re the only player; where you can be the only player. How? By making a peer-to-peer game, and telling no one of the I.P. address required to join. This is worse than just logging onto an empty server. Even if the server is password-protected, you’re still aware that other people are lurking just outside the boundaries, curious about what’s going on. But when you create a private peer-to-peer session, there is no one. No one at all, except for you. Your game world is a tiny ephemeral bubble in the ether, a place that exists only while you exist in it, and from which there is no escape.
A long time ago, in a bedroom far, far from clean…
Back in the really early days, I was addicted to Jedi Knight. I remember the first time I tried to start a multiplayer deathmatch game; unaware of how everything worked, I just assumed that people would find the game and join in. So I loaded up a map and started walking around. Fittingly, the map was Bespin, a city suspended in the clouds; a speck in a vast pink limbo. Minutes passed. After I’d paced every inch of the map and gone from expectation through confusion to annoyance, my footsteps slowed to a stop, and I listened. Where the hell was everybody?
Vague tendrils of unease coiled around the corridors and gantries. The place was so quiet. Quieter than an empty crèche. Nothing moved, except for the scattered weapon pickups, dismally rotating as they waited for a battle that would evidently never come. I walked again, aimless. My invisible feet took me outside, to the frail gangways suspended in mid-air, infinity above and infinity below. With an ominous weight upon me, I wandered to the edge of one and stared down at the endless clouds. What would happen if I jumped off, I pondered.
Bespin. Majestic, gravity-defying and utterly implausible; much like your butt.
But this was getting retarded. Something had to be done; anything to relieve the oppressive tedium. I resolved to pick up every last piece of weaponry and armour just in case someone joined the game. This kept me busy for a few minutes. But the silence was getting to me. I started firing at walls, senselessly unloading my lasers at those maddeningly impervious barriers that absorbed every hit without a scratch. Out onto the gantries again. There was a wind sample that was cutting into my bones. All ammo exhausted now, I walked up to the precipice and stared. Why not jump? What difference would it make? What else, when you got right fucking down to it, was there to do? I glanced behind me, and saw that all the weapons and armour had respawned, just where they had been before. That did it, really.
So I hopped off. I fell a thousand feet, screaming and flailing. The screen went red. There was a little click, and I reappeared with a shimmer in one of the map’s many strategically placed spawn points. The scorecard registered that I had killed myself, and was now on a score of -1. In a game with no other players, I was contriving to lose. And there was nothing else I could do; nothing but die again and again, until the act lost all meaning. I was stuck in a digital version of Groundhog Day in which there was no happy ending, no groundhog, and no ground.
Jedi Knight: Enter the world of STUNNING REALISM
Feeling slightly sick, I hit escape and destroyed the sad little universe I had created, resolving never to go there alone again. Over the next few months I discovered how to make real online games, and I even found a few ludicrously-named friends to game with. But here’s the thing: something kept drawing me back. I was like Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. I’d stared Oblivion in the face, and now I saw his curiously hairy cheeks every time I closed my eyes. So I went back. I spent longer and longer periods of time skulking around empty maps, ostensibly so that I could learn their secrets in order to get an edge over Wolfspite, who was a cunt, but in reality because I couldn’t keep away from the emptiness.
I recall this one particular place. It was a swamp on Dagobah, dark and moist and tangled with vines. I never played that map with another person, and yet I found myself returning there again and again. There was something else in that swamp: a little screechy maggot-like creature called a Ysalamir, placed there purely for decoration. But it was something. Another creature in the tiny empty universe I had created. Thus, I decided that the Ysalamir would be my Groundhog. Our conversations were not profound; I lectured it on its own futility, being a computer-generated collection of pointless polygons, a window-dressing in a mall where everybody was dead. It replied by flapping its tail and emitting a continuous grating screech. We had good times. There were no infinite chasms here, so eventually I would conclude the conversation by shooting rockets at the nearest wall until the backblast blew me to pieces. Then I ended the level. In my quiet moments, I wondered if the Ysalamir missed me while he was busy not existing.
“So… I see you have constructed a new Ysalamir. Indeed you are retarded, as the Emperor has forseen.”
If I can digress for a moment: there’s a short story by D.H. Lawrence called The Man Who Loved Islands, the sadness of which has always stayed with me. The protagonist is a man who loves pornography. And also islands, which is ultimately his destruction. When we begin the tale, he has just acquired a manor house on a large island, and thinks himself happy; but his thirst for isolation leads him to sell the place, get rid of his servants and retreat to a small cottage on a nearby islet. Eventually, even this is too much for him, and he ends the story (and his life) shivering and insane, hunched on a tiny rock skerry with only bird droppings and a huge collection of tentacle hentai to keep him company.
Lawrence’s face: merely the arena for a titanic battle ‘twixt Beard and Quiff.
I mention this story because the analogy applies to any type of desire. Lust is infinitely reducible. Sate it today, and it will return tomorrow with more stringent demands. In my little digital bubble, even though I was totally alone, I had to be even more totally alone. I started using mods so dreadful that no one else would dream of joining a game running them, even if they randomly hit upon the right IP address. But it wasn’t enough. Later I retreated from the net entirely; I made LAN games on a non-existent network with the name “FUCK OFF” and the password “d578chd£@~Ukf4dsfjgl5jgSS£L$Jf<YAAAA”, but satisfaction yet eluded me. I caroomed drunkenly around desolate levels dressed as a woman, howling poorly sampled Chewbacca noises at the empty corners, but still I did not feel the solitude I craved.
Then one day, as I stood in the Dagobah swamp, nude, viciously punching Alan the Ysalamir while screeching an effeminate descant harmony, the reason came to me. This world of mine would never be truly empty, because one person would always be in it.
Me.
Briefly I considered creating a game with no players whatsoever, but no. That would have been silly.
Filed under: Addiction
[...] The Loneliness Of The Online Gamer [...]
I would make Quake games filled with nothing but Bots. Then watch them kill each other for…for quite a while.
Also, I’ve been sitting on a couple different posts me self but eehhhhhhh.
Ehhh.
Watching A.I. bad guys fight each other is curiously enjoyable. I’m sure most Doom lovers remember the first time they caused a crossfire between two bad guys, then watched dumbfounded as they forgot you entirely and proceeded to wail the shit out of each other.
I ended up getting killed countless times while attempting to cause demon bitch fights. I still have a special love for games that allow you to turn the enemies on each other. Bioshock is especially great for this. There’s nothing more satisfying than walking round with a possee of reprogrammed security bots, gunning people down in cold blood and stealing their hats.
I discovered your site in that seven month absence and have looked at that sad, little, lonely RSS feed every day.
UNTIL TODAY!!!!!!
Today, It was glorious.
Welcome back!
Thank you Razberry, it is nice to see you here. Before my break, I had finally built up enough dedicated fans to make a suitable sacrifice to The Blood God Th’Raganosh, and now that the echoes of carnage and screaming and horror have finally died away, I have to start the whole smegging process all over again. So it’s great to see you.
You’re type O, right?
Type O and full of bloody goodness.
Not bloody like I’m English, bloody like hemoglobin.
Excellent.
Eeeeeexcellent.
First Mr. Gale and now you start updating again. Engeland could be on fire and londen would be burning down down down if you could get your hats together. Good post.
To be honest, I only posted again because I hate the thought of Gale doing anything special or worthy of comment.
Oh, Gale’s posted again, has he? Well, so has this other guy, and he is considerably less homosexual by default, so I think I’ll read his blog instead.
That’s how it’ll play out when Gale’s mother logs on this evening.
Funnily enough, I used to do the same in Jedi Knight, and later on in the even more excellent Jedi Outcast.
When I was younger, about 16 or so, I’d create maps for Duke Nukem 3D – using the Build engine – and wander around, admiring the scenery. Nowadays I do the same in Second Life, which is mostly empty anyway – so much to explore and be curious about. I wish I had more time for that.
I tried to like Jedi Outcast. I really did. But Raven seem to have a genius for making every game mediocre. JK2 committed too many sins: the levels were small and required constant backtracking, but were so samey that you got lost in corridors you’d already navigated twice. The in-engine cutscenes were a good idea, but the technology wasn’t ready, and the characters were hilariously wooden. You were no longer able to choose your own force powers, nor gain extra strength in the force by finding all the secrets; the result was a depressingly linear game with none of the magic of the original.
The glowing sabre was pretty, though. I’ll give them that. I never actually played it online, so I probably missed out on the best part of the game.
Hey. you are back… How is the addiction going?
Hey Mikle, nice to have you back too. The addiction comes in waves, and is maddeningly hard to control. Right now, I’m playing about half an hour a night, which seems to be the minimum for me to keep my sanity. I gave up completely for months and months, but I found myself getting ever more depressed through lack of stimulation. Eventually I couldn’t even write anymore.
In a moment of weakness, I downloaded some old Amiga games, thinking they would remind me why I had given up gaming in the first place. Not so. After a while I started playing Far Cry 2, then X3. There was no excuse for it, and I wasn’t achieving anything at all.
Now that spring is here and there are nauseating amounts of vitamin D floating around, I’m going to try again. This time I won’t go total cold turkey, since it didn’t seem to work last time. Fingers crossed.
I’m pretending that Diablo 3 doesn’t exist, by the way.
Multiplayer-Games are confusing first.
I remeber the first time I went online was with Diablo 2.
All the poeple were Level 99 and the were shiny, shiny lights around them. I went out of the camp and got killed. Every time. I screamed “leave me alone” but they wouldn’t.
Later i traded my 3-Emerald-socked magic crystal sword, wich took forever to get agains a cheated charm wich gave me incredible powers.
Just to recognize it would crash the game everytime I played with this charm.
Never played online again, never will.
Now I know how a little girl raped in Tokyo must feel.
PS:
Nice your back… to remind me of all things fucked up in my life because of pc-games.
I’ve just checked my search results, and someone found this article by typing “the loneliness is getting to me” into Google. Whoever you are, if you’re reading this, please say hello, and I will say hello too, and then there will be less loneliness in the world. How does that sound.
If you like isolation so much why do you even publish these things?
Wait, are you telling me you’re not a figment of my imagination?
Jesus, now I’m terrified to leave the house!
Camheril, you flaky and irresponsible ruffian! If this article hadn’t been so damn funny I would harbor a grudge for being forced to wait for seven months.
Great job!
Oh man, now I have an image of you sitting in your bedroom, patiently clicking “refresh” every thirty seconds for month after month, while your family goes from confusion through intense anger to cold, shrugging apathy, and then finally leaves you; soon after, your body withers away and perishes due to malnutrition, but you linger as a restless shade, your mission on this Earth not yet complete.
By the third month, you are sitting inside your own mouldering body, still clicking “refresh” with the tiny amount of poltergeistial potency available to you, silently moaning, moaning, moaning. Eventually, the neighbours report the smell, and the council kick the door in to find a scene of horriffic tragedy. The floor is strewn with poop, and worse, and the only thing moving is the computer screen, seemingly refreshing itself.
All the contents of the house are sold. The computer is bought at auction by a fat, sinister pervert who cannot understand why he suddenly feels so cold all the time, nor why his webpage keeps defaulting from http://www.preteensecrets.org to http://www.thesillyaddiction.com. Unable to tell anyone of the problem, he eventually hides the computer in his basement, where the starving Filipino boy he keeps as his slave languishes in misery.
Little Bayani hatches up on a plan to escape. The pervert does not suspect that he can operate a computer, but he has fatally underestimated his captive. There is one power socket in the basement, which powers the freezer. That night, when the man is sleeping, Bayani unplugs it and uses it to power up the computer. He thinks quickly. With the smatterings of broken English available to him, he must contact the police somehow, and inform them of his location. But what is this?! Every time he tries to access Google, the website defaults to The Silly Addiction! After hours of fruitless trying, Bayani gives up for the night. He curls up on his flea-ridden mattress and tries not to cry.
In the morning, he wakes shivering. It takes him a second to realise why, and then the horror creeps over him. Last night, in his haste, he forgot to plug the freezer back in! The cellar is flooded. The game is surely up. Before he can gather his thoughts, the door slams open, and the pervert descends. He sees the pool of water, and his ponderous yet cunning brain instantly divines what has happened. Not knowing that Bayani has failed, he believes himself a fugitive now. It can only be a matter of time until the police arrive. What now? To escape, or to make a stand here?
No, all is lost, and he might as well dispose of the miserable wretch before turning the knife upon himself. He rushes for Bayani, but slips on the sodden floor, landing badly. Bayani sees his chance. The freezer comes crashing down upon the pervert’s head. His body coursing with adrenaline, Bayani lifts it up and brings it down again, and again, until all struggling has stopped. The plucky kid flees, taking enough money from the pervert’s wallet to hail a cab and make it to the Filipino embassy. Two months later, he has a tearful reunion with his mother, who had long ago given him up for dead.
Once again, you find yourself alone with a corpse, endlessly clicking refresh, while the rats and maggots give their host a purity and a use denied to him in life. Will the torture never end? Will there never be a response?
In the sixth month, the computer is wiped and given to an old-people’s home. Already terribly frail, the poor geriatrics cannot stand the strain of your ghostly chill upon their bodies, and the effort of constantly navigating away from http://www.thesillyaddiction.com leaves them exhausted and confused. After a fortnight, you have been responsible for the deaths of nine people. The computer is clearly cursed, the survivors say. We should destroy it before it claims any more of us. You shudder with terror, your clicks rising to a fervent pace. What would happen to you, if the means of your salvation were taken away? You would surely linger on earth, in an endless limbo, never to be set free.
It is decided. The moment of doom has arrived. The old people approach, rude weapons of destruction in their wizened hands. Frantically you try to push them back, but you are not powerful enough. One blow lands upon the tower; another falls upon the keyboard, irreparably smashing the keys. The staff look the other way; let the old people have their fun. You are screaming, screaming, but no sound comes out.
Blow after blow descends as the ravening, red-eyed horde champ at their gums and howl animal taunts. The screen is flickering now, coughing and spluttering its last. But as it dies, and your hope dies with it, the unimaginable happens. Just for one brief moment, you see something new! A post with today’s date!
He has done it.
He has updated.
A tremendous rush of beatific euphoria overcomes you, and time slows down to nothing. The inhalers and the walking sticks are frozen in mid-descent. The new post is laid out before you, and with each word you read, a tiny part of you evaporates and disappears, until by the last sentence there is only a whisper; a vague notion of you left, floating up to endless rest. After all your hardship and torment, it is over. You are free.
Also, the post totally made you LOL.
Comments aren’t supposed to be that long and / or scary
I’m actually contemplating going to blizzcon, although I live on the other side of the world.
Anyways – thanks for remembering me
Heh. I got totally carried away on that comment. It was only supposed to be a flippant throwaway thing, but as soon as I started writing about Bayani, I got ridiculously invested in the story. I actually thought at one point “I won’t be able to sleep until I find out what happens to him”. Hence why I’m communicating entirely in groans today.
If you go to Blizzcon, you should totally dress up as an Amazon. It is the only time in your life when you will have justification for dressing as a woman.
Oh thank GOD. I honestly thought I killed you!
I found your site, read all the posts while on the clock and then… nothing.
You seemed to have disappeared the same day I found this site. Do you have any idea how many sleepness, tormented nights I have spent thinking I somehow internet-slayed you simply by reading all your posts in a single work shift?!
I think an apology is in order.
I’ll apologise when I know for certain that you weren’t somehow responsible.
Oh, believe me, you may have hidden the evidence well, but I have the nose of a sniffer dog. And when I’ve managed to get rid of it without alerting the RSPCA, I’ll be coming after you.
Just amazing – the story of the haunted PC as much as the article.
I have floated out into space in Startopia, aware that my thriving space station is still behind me, and sought out the quiet places in Grand Theft Auto games, but this is on a far higher level.
I’m really glad it’s not just me who gets a little scared by games sometimes. Jedi Knight is particularly eerie because the levels are so well-designed. You really do feel as if they could be the places they claim to be, which makes your guts churn when you stare down – DOWN – at the clouds, and then accidentally tap the “W” key and plummet to your death.
sina blog…
..[Rollercoaster Rush online game]…..