A Gaming Life
My life and video games, their experiences and my experiences while playing them.
Everywhere you look now, video games play a prominent part in modern life and regardless of whether it’s from a gamer’s point of view, from a journalist’s or a teacher’s, video games invoke a very real opinion. These can range from video games being a good thing, a bad thing or even an evil thing.
Ever since receiving a Master System and being brought up with a Spectrum ZX 128k+, video games have played a major part in my life, both the good and the bad. Coming from a rather under-privileged background — in comparison to most, but better than some — video games provided me with an escape that books and films offer to other people. Becoming engrossed in games I was bought for Christmas or birthdays, or ones I had saved up myself for, become a trip to the unknown for me, a chance to explore worlds that were beyond my reckoning and a chance to leave my humdrum life behind. This, though, came at a cost and a very real one at that.
To make sense of where I’m going with this, some backstory is probably appropriate.
I was raised by a largely single, jobless mother whilst living on a council estate in a tiny council house, in the roughest part of the Wirral. Despite her best efforts, I grew up to become quite the little shit despite my intellect and chose to rebel against almost everything on my life — except my mother. Freud would have a field day with me.
In between the events of my child and adult life, my father was in and out of that life. Playing the strict, “I’m looking out for you” role in between bouts of complete drunken annihilation, abusing my mother, and cheating with whomever came across his path, my father chose to show his feelings by either complete neglect, stern upbringing or bouts of abuse, often ending in tears of regret and labelling them as “your own fault, son.”
From a young age, I displayed varying levels of anger due to my predicament. These ranged from hurting myself, to becoming obsessed with fire, to hurting those around me and becoming a compulsive liar. Many events occurred as a result of my anger, many which I will not speak of, and some of which have had a permanent effect on myself, on those whom I love and on those whom I have now parted ways.
Right, that’s the backstory.
All throughout this time, I played video games to escape the monotony and the strife I was forced to face in my younger life. I also read books and drew a lot, but the core thing to lose myself was video games.
As a result of my anger problems as described above, I constantly diced with losing the control on my anger on difficult video games, or when my concentration dipped. Mostly, the only victim was myself when I realised I couldn’t play my games anymore down to having a smashed up controller or a broken console, or I had the system confiscated from me until I calmed down.
There were times, though, when my anger became apparent in front of other people, and they, both in a physical and mental way, became my victims too. Treating my brother like shit and blaming him for my fucking up in a game became par for the course, and he soon learned to duck ahead of my explosions. Looking back on that now, I feel like such a fucking cunt. However, I carried on playing games.
Later on in my life, video games were still my best friend, my crutch. Not learning my lessons, I still got angry, only now, as I got bigger, so did my explosions. Controllers were thrown with such force, that not only did they break, but they often broke the very thing they were thrown at — TVs, consoles, walls.
As consoles developed, so did the experiences and other features. The biggest change in my experience playing games with anger problem was the advent of online play.
Normally, where a difficult game or section that required the upmost concentration presented itself, it would be down to my own inadequacy or lack of concentration to blame for the outburst. With the unpredictability of online play, my outbursts became almost as unpredictable. Where I would be leading in a race on Burnout Paradise, only for lag to make me crash into an invisible car, or being shot by unbeknownst snipers in Call of Duty, online play was an immediate trigger for an already short fuse while gaming.
At this point, I was now in a relationship where my actions with gaming and anger were very real, and very scarring. My partner — now wife — constantly teetered around on eggshells whenever I played games, knowing an outburst or a flying controller could be anywhere around the corner. With a newborn child on the scene also, things were escalating to an almost life-threatening level.
Simply put, an anger problem and video gaming do not go together. Period.
Recognising that my anger problem wasn’t just affecting me, but also those around me and endangering my chances of ever having a ‘normal’ relationship, I sought help in the most basic way at first — counselling. I simply thought that a few words with an understanding counsellor would correct my outbursts, give me an ear to chew on for an hour and it would alleviate my anger. How fucking wrong was I?
I don’t mean that as a slight against anyone who uses a counsellor or sees a counselling team regularly, though. I just meant that it wasn’t for me given the depths of my anger problem.
I didn’t see this at first. I just thought I could sugar-coat it and hope for the best. I knew deep-down that counselling wasn’t working for me, but felt as though I should be going as I’m doing something. I didn’t care what, but I was doing something and was more concerned with the fact that other people thought I was getting the help I needed. Still, in all of this, video games were my escape and sought their warm embrace even deeper.
Alongside another thing that happened that almost cost me my own and another person’s life, the time came where drastic action needed to be taken before something drastic happened.
After this event, I sought more professional help past a counsellor. I went to my GP asking to be referred for more serious help —in other words, psychiatric help.
Now, obviously, video games weren’t the only problem in my life, so I’ll just stick to the game related sections of the help I needed and received, but you get the gist that I wasn’t a very well person and video games weren’t helping with the problems I had.
The first and most immediate conclusion to one of the areas of my anger was video games, and the first suggestion by my psychiatrist was to stop playing games. This was welcomed, of course, with complete rejection and a “fuck you” stance, not seeing the point trying to be made. I attempted to propose that I wouldn’t play online games — something I had consciously identified as a serious trigger — but insisted that I continue playing video games as my escape. Therein lied a problem about my problem. Denial.
Despite admitting I had an anger problem, and despite admitting that games made me angry, I refused to admit to, and denied that, video games alongside my anger issues were catalysts for extreme angry reactions and explosions. I just thought I could solider on, and keep playing video games. Truth is, I was scared that by not playing video games, I’d have to actually face up to my problems in life and I wouldn’t have that escape.
In the end, it took a desperate step from my future wife to make me realise the damage and the pain and suffering I was causing. Selling my PlayStation 3 with games behind my back felt, at the time, like an ultimate betrayal, and like a stab in the back. The rod, a beacon of hope, the crutch I had used for years, was gone.
And I only had myself to blame.
Continuing on with my treatment after the loss of my gaming life, I realised that despite the assurances to myself that gaming was helping me deal with life, in fact, it was the complete opposite. I was using games as a shield to protect me from life and its obstacles and, all the while, they were dragging me deeper and deeper into potential danger.
My treatment allowed me to explore different channels to funnel my anger and to use my anger in a productive way or, at least, a less destructive way. I found myself allowing myself time to think through decisions, and to think about the potential consequences of anger explosions, and the effect it would have on others. As a result, I calmed down a lot, find out more about myself and learned not to hide behind things like games or excuses to hide away from the world.
Skip forward a few years, and after mellowing out a lot and having less explosions, we were bought a Wii ‘Mario Kart’ pack for Christmas. And queue the strike of fear into my family’s hearts.
However, as a matter of trust and respect, we kept the console and played the games like we should. The first moment something happened — ironically enough, being twatted with a blue shell six feet from the finishing line, ample reason to scream out loud — I didn’t react. I didn’t throw anything. I didn’t scream and turn Super Saiyan. I shrugged and got on with it. Shit happens.
Although greeted with much trepidation for a while, expecting an outburst at any moment, my future wife realised that the help that I had sought had worked. Sure, I still had moments. I still have moments — who doesn’t? — but none that were game related. She could now stand to sit in the same room as me while playing games, could bear to talk to me while playing… could bear to live with me, even.
Simply put, I realised there were more important things than getting angry at a game, or at other people through games. I realised that there’s a world out there already full of anger, and who am I to wreck a family’s life for the sake of being angry at the sake of a few games?
Games are still important in my life and they always will be. Games have showed me many worlds and stories that I simply would not have experienced had I not played them. They gave me a hobby when everyone else and everything else denied me the happiness I sought.
I still use them as an escape, but I use them now as a fun escape. I use them as a break from designing, or to relax and chill and to find new worlds. I can now play them with my family, regularly getting my arse kicked by my wife and kids, and having fun along the way. When I die in a game repeatedly, or come across a cheating bastard in an online game, I switch it off. I shut it down and go back to it later.
I no longer use games to hide away from life’s barriers or an escape to pretend that things around me weren’t happening. I no longer think that games are the only way in life.
I’m largely writing this as a reaction to the many skeptics and media outlets who think that video games on their own are a bad influence.
At least weekly it seems, video games are blamed for all manner of violence across the Western world, from the shootings in the Washington Naval Yard, to the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012 and linked to the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik.
Like music and movies before them, video games are an easy target to blame for massacres. Whether this is down to people’s interpretations that gaming is anti-social, or that it stirs feeling up in people that would otherwise stay suppressed, I don’t know.
What I do know, is that video games can provide a very real catalyst for an already existing condition.Whether that be a mental issue, or an anger problem, games can exacerbate an underlying problem, however, so can films, music and other mediums where people with an issue can fall into that trap. Films like The Matrix and Scream have been blamed for murders where the murderers have been obsessed with the films and brought the film’s story and setting into real life. In music, metal bands such as Slipknot, Metallica, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein have often been the target of the media for influencing murderers into committing their crimes.
While movies, music and games can be catalyst to a problem, I believe that it would only be a matter of time before that very same person started showing traits of this behaviour in other areas, letting the anger in their life build up to breaking point. These mediums only serve to allow the release of emotion and anger at an earlier point than would normally would. I think, to an unstable person, playing games all day or watching a movie repeatedly, serves to act as an ongoing catalyst equal to, say, instances where people have “saw red” when they’ve found out their partner has been cheating on them.
What the media often fails to think of in their haste to find a scapegoat is that these people, murderers and psychopaths are clearly already under some kind of derangement and some suffering from mental issues apparent even before video games were on the scene. As mentioned at the start of this, video games are everywhere in today’s times, so they are an easy target for the media and politicians to jump on. Before that, movies were more prominent. Before that, music. Before that, comic books.
The fault and the blame lies alone with the perpetrator himself. He alone is to blame for committing actions that lead to the loss of lives, regardless of what has happened previously in his life that has led to it. Sure, being abused, feeling angry at the world, left alone to be become socially inadequate are all very real reasons why people have issues, but that person alone is to blame for the refusal to believe that real life exists outside of his chosen medium. Taking to heart the lyrics of Marilyn Manson, choosing to believe that The Matrix is real or believing that Call of Duty is a training sim for real life shootings is the fault of the person who believes this, not the medium.
The (civilised) media cries foul when people take the Bible, Qur’an or Tanakh seriously and commit crimes based off passages of the these books, but the very same media will jump at the chance to blame a certain media for the very same thing.
The media like to make out that they are printing the truth, when all it comes down to is lazy journalism and, in part, scaremongering. Having generated more than $67 billion in 2012, there is no bigger market currently than video games and, as such, no bigger target.
In finishing, I will admit that video games can be a bad influence on people, but only on those people who already have physical, mental, social or emotional issues, otherwise even the mildest of people who play games would be turning Hulk at the slightest hint of trouble.
Video games, like films and music, can be a trigger to an already underlining, inherent problem that serve to feed off the sufferer’s feeling of ineptitude. Much how alcoholics explain their addiction by finding solace in bottom of a vodka bottle, gamers find their comfort in the shape of a controller and TV screen, not realising that the deeper and longer they play games that feed off their problems, the worse they are making it for themselves.
When played for fun, for entertainment, for pleasure, video games can provide hours of entertainment for children and adults alike. It’s about time that the media, politicians and scaremongering folk started to realise that video games are here to stay, despite their ‘warnings’, and that the few do not equal the majority.
Blame the person, not the medium.
