Newsletter from Jay Wilcox - May 2023: On Video Games
Good morning/afternoon/evening!
Back in the day, the best Super Nintendo games my family owned were all single-player. My little sister wanted to play along, so I'd pass her the unplugged second controller and tell her she was "on my team." If I was playing as Yoshi, for example, she could play as the shell on my back. If I was Mario, she could be my hat. I've since conferred with the Council of Older Brothers, and apparently this is a timeless strategy for sibling management.
In all seriousness, I loved sharing that part of my world with her. Sure, it was somewhat duplicitous to have her think she was also playing--but I enjoyed having an audience, someone who could watch me triumph over monsters. I made up stories about the games. I told her secrets about our characters and showed off my cheat codes, hacking the game to give us every advantage.
As I grew up, video games grew up. Graphics became increasingly lifelike, stories evolving Shakespearean characters and arcs. Arguably, gaming has never been this good--yet it's been years since video games occupied any meaningful space in my life. Even if I could add an extra hour to the day, there's always something to be done around the house, some writing project I'm working on.
I'm aware of what I'm missing. Friends describe games to me. I marvel at ads for new releases and see games becoming movies, award-winning TV shows. The Last of Us, anyone?
I'm aware of this artform's power and potential yet still largely view gaming as a waste of time.
It's not that video games are inherently bad or immoral. However, I've heard of young men who prioritize gaming over their families, who blow off birthdays and half-ass anniversaries in favor of virtual worlds, online personas. In a modern culture that caters to perma-adolescence, chronic gaming becomes a way to duck the tide of time. Nonetheless, I've known such men to one day bemoan the time they lost and the real-world skills they never honed, the books they never read, the attention span they just can't summon.
A thing doesn't have to be bad to be addictive.
If an unexamined life is not worth living, perhaps it's important to look long and hard at the things we can't look away from and consider what such distractions cost us. At the same time, are distractions always a bad thing? I've oriented so much of my adulthood around chasing goals, setting schedules and routines and little arbitrary challenges for myself, that sometimes I wonder if this ongoing struggle against distraction isn't itself some meta-distraction from the memories of lost relationships, those bittersweet but bygone life-eras spent being Productive.
Like you, I want to enjoy my life as much as possible.
Maybe the best way for us to do this is to embrace small internal compromises--per the adage of "All things in moderation," to love our dichotomies. A muscle is made strong by its ability to both tense and relax.
After all, what makes a good life? Is it not the relationships we cultivate? Do we not love our beautiful diversions, and is love not why we're here? I truly cherish the memory of every video game I ever played--even the last time I played Call of Duty and got killed, like, forty times in a row, because I was surrounded by friends and we were all cracking up. Isn't that what life is all about?
As always, I hope you've been well. Thank you for reading.
Infinite Regards,
Jay