Beyond Tired
On November 1st, I took part in a community event with my beloved co-editors and a few other coworkers that was called Extra-Life.
For those who are unaware of it, Extra-Life is a long running (since 2008) yearly charity event taking place in November where people streams themselves playing video games for 24 hours straight.
It was the first time I took part in such event, and part of why it happened this year is because I am now working in a company where I can do this and people will 1) know what I am talking about and 2) be supportive of the overall concept. On top of that, I actually managed to find co-workers willing to try doing this with me, see it organized and make sure we could stream for 24 hours non-stop.
Over said 24 hours we raised around 1,000 Canadian Dollars which is not very cost effective (especially if you consider that most of us took a day off for this) but it was about making a precedent… And besides, playing video games is mostly funnier than working, even when your work involves making video games.
However, the reason why I am writing this is because I came wholly unprepared to this event. It was a lot of fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. But in retrospect, it played out a lot differently than what I had expected…
My first and most important mistake was to think the whole thing was about not sleeping. It might be if you do this alone in front of your computer. But for me, the lack of sleep was never my first concern. Or rather… the lack of sleep wasn’t the main reason why I felt tired.
I actually started to feel tired after something like 10 or 11 hours. I usually get tired after being awake for 10 hours when I have really eventful day. When, for instance, I spend a lot of time in meetings. As I was noticing that, I realized something very obvious that I totally missed. This whole endeavor was more akin to a 24 hours long meeting more than a 24 hours game session. Look at it this way. I was in a room that wasn’t my home or didn’t feel familiar, with co-workers that I might not feel super close to and mostly speaking in a foreign language. This is not at all like chilling on my computer during the evening.
The second thing I underestimated badly was the lack of diversity. I never counted how many places I visit during a day, or how many people I interact with. Mostly because there are too many to count unless I go out of my way to remember them all. Here it was very simple. One room. Seven people. And that’s it. In many regards, this was turning more into a human/social experiment than a gaming one. And I have to admit sometimes going to make yourself a tea is as much about keeping yourself awake than getting to change room and having a bit of time out of the group.
The third thing I learned that day is that tiredness is a spectrum and people will act very differently depending on where there are on this spectrum. For instance, I started the day pretty excited and happy. I had goals for that day, wanted to make things happen and had some very specific ideas on how things should play out. For the first few hours, I retained that cheerful attitude and tried to push for what I wanted, see if it could happen. Four to five hour in is when I start to get angry-tired. I am over trying to do stuff, especially if I can’t have what I want. Everything slowly become either awesome because it’s how I want it to be or incredibly lame. This is the part where I usually just sit there and wait for things to happen. If you work with me on a regular basis… chances are you already saw me like that. I just… wait for the day to be over. Thing is, usually the day does end eventually, I get to go back home where I can rest and start over. Not here though.
Comes the third phase that I rarely get to experience unless I am really messing with my sleep schedule (e.g. parties mostly). The phase where I no longer care about how things will play out, I just want my fun right now. Depending on how it goes, that can be very annoying or very fun. Fun because if I can get entertained I am just happy and having a good time. Annoying because I will disregard pretty much any sense of social etiquette or future planning if I find something fun to do. Overall, this time it played out well… Having a video game to keep me occupied did help. Though I can also think of a few times where I was annoying because of that. This is also what some people refers as “Tired-Drunk”, which is a rather accurate description of how you feel.
The last phase is basically a descent into being more and more focused on the “now”. You stop thinking to what you will do in one hour… then you stop thinking about what you will do in thirty minutes… then you only think about what happens now. Are you having fun ? If yes, that’s the best thing ever. If not, you fall asleep. This eventually lead to a state where I was “just functioning”. A low energy state where I could only manage a single, simple objective, and I was doing it. Going forward. Killing that Boss. Anything more complicated was completely beyond my grasp. For the anecdote, we played an horror game around the 18 hours mark where at some point we had to figure out how to open a door. I believe we spent one hour trying to solve the simplest of puzzle just because we couldn’t get a global picture of the level. It was one painfully hour running in circle, not being able to see the links between three buttons across a level. Also, playing an horror game in that state is a lot of fun, albeit not a very pleasant experience on the moment. You are incapable of anticipating anything, so you act kind of reckless, while at the same time being unable to rationalize anything and thus being super receptive to anything scary or stress-inducing. It kind of evens itself out I suppose. It just makes for a very different experience than when you play in a normal state.
The last thing I didn’t expect was the “magic moments”. What I mean by that is those times when everything is in sync for something that would otherwise never happen. We had a few of those and that’s what make this entire experience wonderful. Whether it was playing Getting Over It for 2 hours non stop without anyone getting bored, having fun on Octodad with everyone playing their limb to the best of their capacity, or having someone going out to the grocery store and cooking breakfast for everyone after not sleeping for 18 hours. Those moments would never happen in our everyday life because we are too reasonable to commit to them. Because the payoff for doing those is usually not worth the effort, or it feel like unfair. But as you slide across the spectrum of tiredness, two things happen. First, you get unable to anticipate anything, which means that anything however so slightly unexpected become the most mind blowing thing on earth. Second, peoples start doing really dumb thing that have obviously bad payoff just to fulfill their immediate desire. And sometimes, someone, or the group in its entirety, does something that could have been foreseen but feel completely unexpected at the time and thanks to the lack of sleep and common sense, it feels like a miracle just happened.
We had a lot of fun during those 24 hours. So much that we decided to do it again next year. We also decided to stream a few hours every two months or so. That’s a testimony to how much everybody enjoyed the experience.
Nonetheless, I will definitely do things differently next year. At the very least I will have more realistic expectation about what will happen. But one sure is sure though, I already look forward to all those future “magic moments” to come.
