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.

]]> http://thesillyaddiction.com/2009/05/the-loneliness-of-the-online-gamer/feed/ 26 http://thesillyaddiction.com/2008/08/real-life-the-ultimate-adventure-game/ http://thesillyaddiction.com/2008/08/real-life-the-ultimate-adventure-game/#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:56:53 +0000 The Silly Addiction http://thesillyaddiction.com/?p=239 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.

And also you’ll be really bored.

Hello, and welcome to the July progress report.

It’s been two months since I started the blog, and three since I gave up games. It’s been suspiciously easy so far, other than a few days when I was quivering with desire to play Diablo 2 again, and this was my own stupid fault for writing two articles about it, back-to-back. However, now that I have a little perspective, I’m realising that quitting games removed one symptom of a deeper problem. And that problem is that I’m a lazy, bone-idle little cockbadger.

Faced with the terrifying prospect of Applying Myself, I’m feeling a strong desire to get addicted to something, anything, and it’s almost irrelevant what it is. Addiction for me is an easy escape from the dull attrition of everyday life, which is why I need to resist it at all costs, and why there’s a perverse sense of pleasure in being bored. It feels like a healthy boredom, if there is such a thing.

Probably not. The longer you stay bored, the less you want to do anything at all, until you start to depress yourself with your own lethargy. Last week, bereft of stimulation, I latched onto Futurama, and I have now watched the whole of series 1 and 5. In an effort to do anything whatsoever, I made it my project to learn how to mimic the voices of every character. So far I have managed two syllables, but what a pair of fucking syllables. If you meet me drunk in a bar and have the misfortune to mention Futurama to me, I will shout the words “….my whaaaa?” loudly in your ear for the next four hours. And you will be quietly impressed.

In order to do the impression correctly, I do of course have to be naked. Even in bars. Especially in bars.

I’m scared of what will happen when the Futurama runs out. Will the boredom overwhelm me? To avoid this terrifying eventuality, I’m preparing a list of alternative time-wasting pastimes so that I don’t find myself at a loose end. Christ forbid I might actually spend my time doing work. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

• Enjoy the crisp, refreshing taste of heroin
• Indulge in restrained pyromania
• Come crawling back to Galaga, despite the way that slut treated me
• Masturbate until a man could toast a marshmallow on my penis

Needs tweaking, admittedly. Your suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If none of those anti-boredom methods work, my game plan for next month is to hang surreptitiously around Diablo news websites while publicly proclaiming the fact that I’ve given up games for good. I am confident that if I say it loud enough, I will start believing it myself. My girlfriend Betty has been awesome throughout my cold turkey, offering constant support and good humour, so I plan on abusing this by placing all of the responsibility for my mental health on her shoulders and then blaming her if I fall off the wagon. This is an awesome technique which really endears me to people, and I’m sure it will bring us closer as a couple. I’ll let you know how it goes. I may include a handy Dumped-O-Meter to keep you apprised of exactly how dumped I am.

I’m praying I’ll have found a solution to the boredom problem by the time Diablo Fucking Three arrives next year. My attitude towards this game is scaring me a little, because I’m not even seriously considering the chance that I won’t play it. I really don’t know what I should do in the face of DF III, but the sensible answer seems to be to burn my computer and become a Hebridean hermit.

Whore

I don’t get much of a chance to whore out other people’s sites on this blog, so I’m going to take that opportunity now. If you haven’t checked out Fag To Go, Melancholic Goat’s blog, you really should, because it won’t be around for much longer. It’s a scary and hilarious account of his time as a pizza delivery monkey, and the weirdos he encounters are very memorable. He recently quit his job, so there won’t be many more updates. Check it out now before it’s gone.

Also, if you’ve ever been hooked on Oblivion, you will love Living In Oblivion. It’s a blog by the guy who made the excellent Half Life comic Concerned; this time, he’s playing through Oblivion as an NPC, which means no saving, terrible clothes and a diet consisting of carrots and horse plops. The blog is frequently hilarious, especially when he goes to ridiculous lengths to avoid the heroism and excitement that the game tries to force upon him.

I did it. I actually did it. I would like to thank my friend and workmate Dave for helping me beat this thing. When he loses his job because of Diablo II, I’m sure he will thank me in return.

Later, finally free of the clutches of addiction, I took my first steps as a free man. And those steps were to watch the entire third season of Futurama in one weekend and accomplish absolutely nothing.

Thank god I’m clear.

This game is some kind of PixelChrist. During recent hands-on demonstrations, crippled children found they could suddenly play advanced contact sports, and men who tried the game became instantly more attractive; even those who smelled of week-old crab.

The designers claim that the entire Earth has been faithfully recreated in-game, from complex transatlantic weather systems all the way down to the faint look of irritation on your cat’s face when you stroke it the wrong way. You have complete freedom to destroy or have sex with anything you want – even time itself.

Of course, all this awesome has a downside. When the game is released, it will require a PC more expensive than the average contract killing. I will buy it anyway, of course, and like everyone else, I’ll be forced to play it with the graphics turned down a few notches. It’ll still look pretty awesome.

This is how the game looks to a casual gamer.

After a while, though, the itch will get unbearable. After all the casual players have completed the game and moved on, I’ll keep returning to it even though every session leaves me feeling unsatisfied. Don’t get me wrong: the breasts do bounce, but they don’t have the exquisite buoyancy that people with ultra-bastard computers are probably enjoying. I’m able to destroy Bristol with a single heft of my penis, but the buildings don’t cascade to the ground with quite the hellish force that they should. My cat is too nice.

Giving in to the lust

Eventually, when desire has gnawed at me for long enough, I will spend approximately six hundred stupids upgrading my computer with the latest hardware. My processor will be replaced by an Intel TitanBalls X950, scientifically proven to be better at Scrabble than Jesus. A new processor will of course require a new motherboard, which will in turn entail new memory. Finally, there’s no point having all this fast hardware if my graphics card is bottlenecking it all, so I’ll buy a new one. There will be a tacky CGI woman on the box giving me a look that could either be lust or constipation, and there will be spaceships swooping through explosions behind her. I will feel vaguely disgusted with myself, not least because the graphics card cost approximately the same as El Salvador.

This is how the game looks to a graphics junky.

The first thing I’ll do when I get home is install all the new hardware. And then I’ll uninstall it all again, because I didn’t remove the old device drivers. Then I’ll discover that re-installing the old hardware did not return things to normal, so I will punch various objects that are unable to punch me back, and then I will format the whole fucking lot and start from scratch.

Forty-seven hours later, I’ll finally get to play TTE on “Very High” settings. It will, of course, look fantastic, although to a non-gamer, the changes will be almost imperceptible. I’ll coast through most of the game with the contempt borne of familiarity, just pausing to look at the way the upgraded tears of newly orphaned children glisten in the glow from my flamethrower. Then I’ll think “I wonder what it looks like at a higher resolution!” and I’ll swiftly discover that it makes my new rig wheeze and shudder just like it did before.

Endlessly deferred anti-climax

I’ve completed this lightweight title twice already. I should be bored of the game by now. I actually am bored of it, but I don’t realise this, because I’ve developed some bizarre obsession with making the game look better and better, as if it’ll eventually become indistinguishable from reality, allowing me to switch off the world and just continue inside the game. I am not actually addicted to the game; I’m addicted to thinking about the game. To wanting it. No amount of upgrading will ever quench this thirst. When I finally get a PC that will play Turbo Titblast Excitegasm on maximum settings, I’ll grow swiftly sick of it and drop it like a maggoty sandwich. There’ll be newer games out, games which promise an equally long and fulfilling period of not being able to play them properly.

This man is more well-adjusted than you are.

This is something that a lot of people don’t realise about addiction: much of an addict’s dopamine response is triggered simply by contemplating the object of their desire. Actually attaining it usually ends up in disappointment. If you’ve ever ventured into the exciting world of drugs, you’ll be familiar with “chasing the dragon”; no matter how wrecked you get, you can never recapture the feeling of the first time. But you keep getting wrecked anyway, until your main pleasure is spending your whole week looking forward to the next time.

It’s the same with Turbo Titblast Excitegasm. I’m going to buy this game in order to chase a graphical fidelity that is impossible to attain, then I’ll drop it when I can no longer sustain the belief that I’m only one upgrade away from nirvana.

Unless the multiplayer 0wnz, of course, in which case disregard everything I just said.

I’m interested in hearing your stories about this. Did you ever get unhealthily obsessed with a game because of its graphics? Ever spend way more than you should have spent on hardware you didn’t need? And if you have a console, do you feel the same kind of addiction? Enquiring minds want to know.

Here are a few thoughts purely from my personal experience. I’d love to hear some of yours.

1. Dance moves

There is a primeval pleasure in learning the moves of the dance, and dancing well. Play an arcade game for long enough, and you’ll learn where to step, when to shoot, and when to dodge away; if you can keep up, eventually you’ll fall into a hypnotic waltz fuelled by constant low-level injections of reward adrenaline. This is how you can lose eight hours of your life without realising it, and why to a gaming addict, losing those hours does not feel like a waste, because somewhere in the future lies the promise of nirvana.

I am some way from achieving this state with Galaga, because Galaga is a fucking arsebastard.

2. Steady advancement; just rewards

Games are what life would be like if it wasn’t so cripplingly unfair. In most games you can guarantee that if you jump through exactly the right number of hoops while barking merrily, you’ll advance to the next stage. The desire for betterment is hardwired into everyone, and games provide a clear, logical way of doing so, with each reward spaced out so as not to make you wait too long or to overfeed you. You know you’re playing a great game when you’ve completed it twice but keep coming back because the task / reward system is so gratifying.

In real life, a logical and worthwhile task / reward system is the basis for a truly good job. And is therefore as rare as rocking horse shit.

3. Escapism

Some game worlds are so pretty that you find yourself returning to them just because they’re a nicer place to live in than the real world. I remember the first time I stepped out onto the beach in Far Cry and saw the palm trees nodding in the breeze… at that moment, Far Cry could have been a geriatric dog-sex simulator and I’d still have called up all my friends to tell them it was my new favourite game.

There is also the dubious topic of moral escapism. Crysis allows you to do things to poultry that would have you lynched and set alight in real life, but it’s fine because it’s a game. No one will ever know about the chicken corpse mountain you constructed and then blew up, watching the beautiful pullet cloud spread across the sky.

Well, except for the ten thousand people who watched the video you uploaded to Youtube after adding a soundtrack by My Chemical Romance.

4. Violence violence RAAAAAARGH

Come on, admit it. You wouldn’t play games if you didn’t get a tumescent killboner every time you made someone’s viscera fly out of their torso like spaghetti in a hurricane. FPS games only get boring when the killing gets boring. This is why Soldier Of Fortune was so popular even though it was an utterly dull game. It was popular because you could shoot someone’s fingers off, then their right knee, then literally pop a cap in their ass. Personally I don’t recall a single memorable level to this game, but I remember the first time I blew a dude’s head off with a single shot from my Deagle, because I finally felt like a MAN that day.

So, in conclusion, if you want to put together the most addictive game in the world, you should make it a samba simulator set in Honolulu, and give all the dancers machine guns.

I would buy the shit out of that game.

How about you? What is it about your favourite game that makes it so addictive? Do you resent its hold on you?

OK. Let’s do this. If I’m going to quit gaming forever, I need a plan of attack. There are two classic ways of quitting any addiction: gradually cutting down, or going cold turkey. When I gave up smoking, I chose the former, and it seemed to work ok; I started on 20 Marlboro a day, then went to 10 Marlboro Lights, then 5 Silk Cut, and eventually I was able to say goodbye to cigarettes altogether.

Well, kind of.

I still feel a slight pang of desire whenever I see someone light up. It’s totally manageable, but it will never go away. The trouble is that games have a much stronger hold on me than cigarettes ever did, and if they remain on my PC to tempt me, I know that I’ll end up falling right back into the old ways. For me, therefore, the only solution is cold turkey.

So. For this to work, I have to remove all trace of games from my computer. This proves easier than I thought… and more terrifying than I could have imagined.

The first thing I delete is Doom III, a game to which I’ve returned time and again, even though nowadays it pretty much bores the dicks out of me every time I play it. Whoosh, it’s gone. I feel a slight sense of nausea, but nothing that can’t be allayed by a spot of conciliatory masturbation. What next! How about Sid Meier’s Pirates! The old Amiga classic is one of my favourite games ever, and was my companion during all those long, lonely adolescent nights, before I knew the touch of a woman, when the best drugs I could get my hands on were nutmeg and banana skins. Whooosh. Au revoir, mon ami. This is a piece of piss!

The horror… the HORROR

At this point, a giddy elation grips me. With every act of erasure I feel physically lighter. As I watch Prey and Unreal Tournament disappear without a scream, I’m seized by a drunken homicidal rush. I want to delete everything, everything, until my computer is totally pure, and I’m so light that I will rocket from my swivel chair and twat my head right through the ceiling. I suddenly understand how it is that killcrazy rampages can start from a simple fatal misstep; how even the most well-adjusted person can trip and slide into an ever-accelerating helter-skelter of depravity once the first bridge has been burned and they learn how easy it is to destroy.

I’m going to finish them all off. I’m going to torch the whole fucking village. The lights go red, horrific shadows skitter at the edges of the room, and the halls shiver at the sound of my maniacal half-laugh, half-scream as I frantically stab “uninstall” again and again. I am Hell’s hammer, and the Control Panel is my anvil.

At around the time when I’m expunging every last one of my emulated Aliens games, this frenzy becomes tinged with desperation, because at some point soon there will be nothing left to delete, and I must shudder to a stop and survey the yawning emptiness that I have created. And there will be no going back, because This File Is Too Big For My Recycle Bin, and I know it.

My “Games” folder is empty.

Oh god. What have I done.

Not… the younglings!

At least I still have my saved games, I tell myself. Those tiny children, nestled safely in My Documents, oblivious to the hell I have wrought. But a voice whispers dark thoughts. Better to put them out of their misery too, the poor orphans, lest they grow up, and one day seek their revenge by addicting you once again. Can you finish what you started? Are you, when all is said and done, a man?

I know what I have to do. There is no choice, really. A few cold motions of the mouse, and those tiny seeds of life have been crushed forever. My PC is suddenly as empty as a virgin’s nethers, the echoes of my keypresses resounding through its empty folders. I am bloodstained, beatific. But now I pause. Was this all for nothing? When the embers of adrenaline have grown cold and grey, will I crave games once again? Or will I slip their hold, now that they no longer lurk behind every spreadsheet and webpage, torturing me with their presence?

Only time will tell, I suppose. In the meantime, I need to cleanse myself of the horror. Perhaps I’ll go and wash my hands until they bleed. Or masturbate. Probably I’ll masturbate.

]]> http://thesillyaddiction.com/2008/05/how-to-give-up-gaming-part-1-cold-turkey-genocide/feed/ 19 http://thesillyaddiction.com/2008/05/galaga-part-1/ http://thesillyaddiction.com/2008/05/galaga-part-1/#comments Mon, 19 May 2008 20:41:16 +0000 Tim Cameron http://thesillyaddiction.wordpress.com/?p=5 I spent the last three weeks in New York with Betty, away from the temptations of solitude that haunt me when I’m at home in Salford. One day we went to Crif Dogs on the Lower East Side for some of their stupidly awesome hot dogs (the one wrapped in bacon with avocado and sour cream fits snugly into the Holy Shit category), and guess what. They had Galaga.

Betty plays Galaga. I do not recall if she beat my score, nor would I provide such information were it in fact to hand.

Now, I was too young to get hooked on Galaga the first time round. It came out in 1981 when I was three years old, and by the time I came of gaming age, Galaga was shunned in the arcades in favour of Bad Dudes, Pit Fighter, and my personal favourite: Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. Fuck you. I learned of Galaga by watching Matthew Broderick wailing on it in War Games, but I didn’t actually play the game until that first fateful visit to Crif Dogs. It was a sit-down cabinet, and each game was a quarter. This is a really clever price point in America, because there’s basically nothing else to spend your quarters on. Anything worth buying costs a paper dollar, and if you attempt to tip using quarters, waiters will remember your face and, if you return, will make a point of urinating on it.

Several hundred quarters later, Betty and I discovered that Galaga is an insidiously addictive game. Its power comes from pattern recognition: the aliens swoop at you in formations which can be learned and anticipated, and every time you play, you learn a little more. For the first 12 stages or so, there’s very little need for skilful aiming or evasion, provided you’re in the right place when the next bunch of bad guys appear. You’re steadily improving at the game each time you play, and you keep coming back because there’s a high frustration threshhold. Even the failures are instructive ones. Subconsciously, you’re imagining the Neo-like mastery of the game that will surely follow if you just practice enough. People will crowd round you in the arcade as you defeat the game using one hand while masturbating with the other. Get good enough at Galaga, you tell yourself, and you will be the serene puppet master tugging the strings of the universe. Fuck Yes.

Galaga, with recommended government warning.

Betty enjoyed the game too, which was the nail in the coffin, really; for the gaming addict, any hint of endorsement from one’s partner is interpreted as an admission that it is perfectly fine to play games until your skin sloughs off your body and you starve to death in a pool of your own effluence.

So, yeah. After we had our hot dogs, we went back to Betty’s apartment, and I googled for a free version of Galaga. And found it. For the rest of the holiday, I would sneak plays on it whenever I thought I could get away with it. Betty’s showers were the most opportune times, though I did get an extended play when she went to check out a new apartment; she had asked me if I wanted to go, and I had declined. I’m not saying I intended to spend the next three hours playing Galaga, but that is because I am a liar.

You know you’re addicted when you start concealing your addiction. I would have got away with my concealment, were it not for the fact that Betty had played Galaga too, and recognised the sudden leap in my skill level from Pissawful to Semi-Mediocre. At this point, I concluded that I was in New Fucking York seeing the Love Of My Fucking Life for a painfully brief amount of time, and this behaviour was simply not acceptable. So I stopped playing Galaga.

Mostly.

I’m back home in Salford now. I’m also up to stage 14, and I’m thinking of putting in a little more practice this weekend.

I’m Tim Cameron, a struggling musician and freelance writer for www.cracked.com.

A couple of months ago, I decided to quit gaming forever. The epiphany came some weeks after I went to New York on a romantic mission to meet a girl whom I had only ever spoken to online. She turned out to be the sweetest, most wonderful person I have ever met. I came home full of optimism for the future. Now that I had found The One, I thought, I would have a new enthusiasm for life. Creating stuff would be easy! Thanks to Betty, I would finally start writing the songs that would make me famous. It was an awesome feeling, and to celebrate, I bought some beers and played Crysis for six hours straight.

I did the same thing the next night.

And the night after that.

At this point, I realised that certain things would have to change. I turned 30 in April, and I am still working a crummy job during the day, and spending my evenings playing PC games and fearing Friends Reunited. I know I am better than this. My band has got great reviews, and I know I can make something of it if I could only commit myself enough. The solution is to give up games. Trouble is, they’ve been my constant companion for as far back as I can remember.

One of my earliest memories is playing Pong on an ancient analogue console with two dials for controllers and a sound scheme that made your standard Bontempi keyboard sound like the New York Philharmonic. In primary school, I had an Atari 65XE. Secondary school, a Commodore Amiga. In 6th form college, it was a 486 PC. University: Playstation. When I failed to graduate (thanks, Wipeout) I bought a Pentium, and it’s been a long slow slough of beautiful misery ever since. I literally can’t remember a time when games weren’t my faithful companions.

And now I’m giving them up. Only, it’s not that easy. Tell your friends or family that you’re trying to give up alcohol, and they’ll give you sympathy and try to help. However, a grown man cannot tell his family that he is hopelessly hooked on Oblivion and expect anything other than glazed looks of vague disgust. So, I’m making this blog in the hope that I’m not the only person struggling with such a silly addiction. If you are in the same predicament, let me know. We’ll work through this together.