2269: Video Games (Might Have) Saved My Life

I thought about writing about this yesterday, but didn’t; I was feeling rather emotional about it and thus figured it probably wasn’t the best idea to spew out an ill-considered rant on such a sensitive subject. It’s still a delicate subject, of course, but I feel a bit more mentally prepared to tackle it and attempt to do it justice today.

This will doubtless be difficult to write, so bear with me while I inevitably ramble around the point. It will probably also be quite difficult to read, particularly if you know me quite well… but, again, bear with me — hopefully you’ll come away with a better understanding of some of the things I feel.

All right, preamble over: let’s begin.

Yesterday, when I first thought about writing this piece, I was angry. I got suddenly very angry about something I’ve been angry about before, and have been doing my best to not be as bothered by: the ongoing “culture war” that has all but destroyed rational, reasonable discussion of popular media — particularly gaming — through public social channels such as Twitter, as well as all but destroying any credibility, inclusiveness and, in many cases, entertainment value the mainstream video games press had.

It wasn’t really a specific event that made me feel angry; it was more a buildup of tension that just needed to be released. Recent controversies over the new Baldur’s Gate expansion, the press and “social justice” types outright lying about why people didn’t like it, needless outrage over Tracer’s butt in Blizzard’s Overwatch, the ever-present undercurrent of the morally superior looking down on people who are into video games and branding them misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, cis white heterosexual male scum… all of it was getting on top of me, even though a lot of it didn’t even directly concern me and the games I’m into. But the controversies still resonated with me, since I’ve also seen very similar nonsense aimed at the games I am into.

When I get angry about something, after the fact I often like to take a moment to reflect on exactly why I got so angry — why is that thing in particular so important to me that it had such a powerful emotional effect on me? Video games are dumb timewasters, aren’t they? Why should I care so much what some people I’d never want to hang out with at parties (not that I want to hang out with anyone at parties save for people who want to join me in another room and play computer games all night) think of the things I enjoy? Why do I feel compelled to continually defend my hobby and this medium from people who desire nothing more than to tear it down and remake it in the way they think it should be — because make no mistake, the loudest critics like this aren’t after true “diversity” or “inclusion” since they, in many cases, simply cannot accept the existence of material they deem “problematic”, nor can they understand that some people enjoy said “problematic” material and don’t want to be called sex pests/paedophiles/misogynists/assholes simply for the things they happen to be into. Why?

Well, “video games are important to me” is the simple answer. And I could leave it at that. But I’m not going to: I’m going to explain exactly why video games are important to me.

Growing up, I was a bit of an outcast. I was shy, I lacked confidence, I didn’t know how to talk to people. I remember on my first day at secondary school I turned to Matthew, one of my few friends from primary school and, with genuine fear in my eyes, whispered to him that I “couldn’t remember how to make friends”, which was putting me at something of a conversational impasse with Murray, the boy I had been sat next to in our tutor room. (Murray turned out to be a massive bullying twat, whom I finally punched in the face just as the headmaster was walking around the corner one memorable lunchtime; I escaped truly serious punishment on the grounds that he most certainly had had it coming for a very long time indeed.)

Growing up, I wasn’t into sports. I was into stuff that other people weren’t into. I played the piano. I played computer games. I wrote stories. (All of these are things I still do.) These were things that I learned I enjoyed at a very young age, so I have clung onto them with all my might for my whole life — and I’ve always known when someone would turn out to be a true friend, because they’d be into at least one of those things, and preferably more than one of them. Indeed, when I did eventually successfully remember how to make friends at secondary school, the group of friends I surrounded myself with were all a little like me to varying degrees — I was by far the most awkward and nerdy of them, but we all had our shared interest in video games which we felt like other people didn’t really get the appeal of.

When the time came for me to go to university, I was terrified at the prospect of having to deal with new people and even live with them. Fortunately, I found myself living with a flat full of thoroughly decent people who tended to be remarkably understanding of my quirks. There were still occasions when what I now recognise as social anxiety would get the better of me, and I’d want nothing more than to lock myself away and escape into the wonderful worlds and stories gaming let me explore and be a part of.

I continued my love of video games throughout my adult life. They always served as something comforting to me: after a challenging day at university, games were there to help me relax. After a difficult day working in teaching, games were there to help me vent my stress. After a day of chaotic retail, games were there to help me chill out and forget about the previous eight hours. And after a day where everything felt like it had gone wrong, games were there to save me.

Those who have been reading this blog for a while will know that I’ve been through a few difficult periods over the last six years in particular. The most notable of these was in 2010, when my first wife and I parted ways and I was left unemployed, with no money and facing the prospect of having to move back home — something which I found mortifyingly embarrassing for a man of my age who had qualifications (and a failed/abandoned career based on those qualifications).

As time passed, I sank deeper and deeper into a very dark depression indeed. There were days when I was completely unable to function normally. I had a long period where I didn’t — couldn’t — get up until about 5 in the afternoon, which would always make me feel terrible when I’d stagger, unkempt, to the shop across the road from my flat and the guy with the smelly armpits behind the counter would ask “how my day had been”.

Everything felt like it had gone wrong; I felt like I had completely failed at life. I felt like I had made all the wrong choices, and that there was no way out of the situation in which I found myself. And so my thoughts turned, as do those of many people in a similar situation, I’m sure, to whether or not this world really needed me in it any more.

Once that initial floodgate bursts and you start wondering such things, all manner of unwelcome thoughts start coming to the fore. Would it hurt? What’s it like to die? If I did die, who would find me? Would anyone find me? Should I tell someone I’m feeling this way? Should I tell someone I’m going to kill myself? If I do, do I actually want them to stop me?

More often than not, these strings of thoughts would cause my brain to get into a bit of a feedback loop and I’d end up eventually just passing out from exhaustion, often after having had a spectacularly undignified cry and/or rage about the whole thing. But so long as the situation remained, the thoughts wouldn’t go away entirely. I’d picture different ways of how I might do it, and what would happen once the deed had been done and someone found me — or what would happen if no-one found me.

To cut a long story short, I pushed through all that — more on how in a moment — and, for a while, things started to look up, and I started to think that I might have finally gotten myself into a situation where I could be happy and content, looking forward to the future rather than dreading it.

That didn’t happen. The unceremonious loss of my job at USgamer for vague (and, frankly, probably spurious) reasons, followed by the horrendous way in which subsequent employer energy company SSE (or, more specifically, my immediate managers) treated me while I worked for them — yes, I am naming and shaming here, because it fucked me right up, and I am still bitter about it to such a degree that I often have flashbacks to my particularly horrible last day — caused me to once more sink into an awful pit of depression, and it wasn’t any easier this time around, either.

Those thoughts of not being sure if I wanted to be part of this world any more started to come back. Familiar images of me holding a gun to my head came around; questions over what would happen if I followed through on these thoughts started to rise up once more.

And yet, even though I wouldn’t describe myself as being out of the worst of it even now, I never once harmed myself, let alone made an attempt on my own life. Even in my darkest moments, I was always pulled back from the edge of that particular precipice.

Why? Two reasons, the first of which is the one I imagine most people in a similar situation quote: awareness of the few people in the world who do care about you, and what it would do to them if you were to do something as drastic as killing yourself.

The second is video games.

I’m not joking. A big part of why I am still on this planet is because of video games. And it’s hard to explain exactly why, because there are a myriad of reasons I feel this way, but it is absolutely true, as ridiculous as it might sound.

Games have always been important to me. But over the last few years in particular — since about 2010 or so — I feel like I’ve really found the niche of games that interest and excite me, along with a group of publishers and developers who consistently and regularly put out things that keep me enthralled for hours on end. These games engage my emotions and draw me in with their stories and characterisation; these games make me feel like I can be someone that I’m not; these games put me in a situation where, while there might be problems and strife, there’s always a way to deal with it, however challenging.

As I became more and more conscious of how I felt about these games, I started “stockpiling” — picking up games that I had no real intention of playing immediately, but which I wanted to add to my collection while they were still reasonably readily available. I also started re-acquiring games that I had previously owned that had made me feel the same way. And, one by one, I’d work my way through them, constantly finding new and enjoyable experiences to discover — even where, in many cases, said experiences weren’t received particularly well by critics.

And here’s how games saved me: the knowledge that in every DVD case on my bookshelf there is a new experience to be had; a new world to explore; new characters to fall in love with — that’s the one thing that, every time, pulls me back from the brink of doing something drastic, however dark the situation in which I find myself might be, and however persistent those horrible thoughts in my head might be. I have literally had the thought “I can’t die until I’ve played all the Neptunia games”. I have literally had the thought “I’m not going anywhere until I’ve played all the Ateliers“. And so on and so on; so much do I value these experiences — and the ability to talk and enthuse about them with those people I know who do respect my interests, even if they don’t share them — that I can’t bring myself to even hurt myself, let alone make an attempt on my own life.

You may think this is a dumb reason to keep living. You may think that this is unhealthy. You may think that there are more deep-seated problems here (and you’d be right). But trust me when I say: when even a tiny part of your brain starts considering whether or not you’re really needed in this plane of existence any more, the part of you that is still concerned with self-preservation will cling on to any thing — however dumb it might be — that will help you survive.

For me, that thing is video games, and to my reckoning they’ve saved me from three particularly bad periods in my life: the nervous breakdown that convinced me once and for all that no, classroom teaching was not the career for me; my first wife and I parting ways; and my recent employment woes.

Hopefully it is now clear to you, dear reader, how important video games are to me. And, bearing in mind how important they are to me, can you perhaps understand how frustrating and upsetting it is to me when a needless, pointless cultural war comes stomping all over them — with the games that resonate with me the most inevitably being the ones that come under the heaviest fire from some of the most obnoxious people on the Internet?

Video games — as they are today, regardless of how “problematic” or whatever other bullshit adjectives you want to apply to them — saved my life. So you damn well better believe I will fight back with all my might against anyone who wants to change them and the culture surrounding them for the worse.

Video games saved my life. Thank you, video games — and everyone who makes them.

(Here’s the source for the awesome image the header pic is based on, if you were curious.)

2089: Connect the Dots

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Connect the Dots.”

“Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.”

When looking for “entirely uninteresting stories”, your first port of call should almost certainly be your local newspaper. Sure enough, the Daily Echo didn’t disappoint with this marvel:

BREAKING: City bridge closed due to ‘police incident’

A SOUTHAMPTON bridge was closed this evening due to a ‘police incident’.

The Itchen Bridge was shut at around 6.30pm but the exact nature of the incident is unknown.

And the bridge was quickly reopened at 6.40pm.

This is currently the top story on the Daily Echo website, which probably gives you an idea of the sorts of things that get posted on there. But let’s ponder the actual question from the daily post: how this connects to my life in some way.

Well, okay. This is actually quite an easy one in many ways. The most obvious connection, of course, is that I live in Southampton, and consequently I know where the Itchen Bridge is. But the connection actually runs a little deeper than that: about five or six years ago, I used to live very near the Itchen Bridge in the town centre. The bridge itself was within walking distance, only about five minutes or so away. This didn’t really have much of an impact on my life for the most part, as I tended to find other ways to cross the river owing to the toll gates at the other side of the Itchen Bridge. But during my oft-mentioned “difficult period” in my life — the time my first wife left and my life pretty much fell apart — the bridge became somewhere that I liked to occasionally head towards in order to just stand and reflect.

I don’t think I ever seriously considered jumping off the bridge, though with my mental state at the time I won’t lie to you: I certainly thought about it more than once or twice. Ultimately I knew that I’d never actually have the courage to do it, though, for all manner of reasons: firstly, part of me, despite being deeper in a pit of misery than I’d ever been in my whole life, I didn’t really want to die; secondly, even contemplating that sort of thing made me feel guilty about the people I’d leave behind; thirdly, the idea of jumping off a bridge into horrible dirty water sounded both terrifying and unpleasant. And, I mean, I know killing yourself (or the contemplation thereof) isn’t particularly pleasant anyway, but I kind of figured there were easier, less painful ways to do it.

That didn’t stop me regularly going out to that bridge, though, noticing the Samaritans stickers on the railings every time I walked up to its highest point to look out over the water. I never called them — as I say, I knew that I didn’t really want to jump — but they always gave me pause when I saw them. Perhaps they did help, in their own way.

Eventually I settled for getting these musings out of my system with a piece of creative writing. In the short first-person narrative — which was left a little open-ended in case I wanted to expand it into a full-on story at some point — the protagonist, who was very obviously me, walked out to a bridge that was very obviously the Itchen Bridge, tormented by his own despair, and jumped. At the last moment, he was saved from his seemingly inevitable demise by a character I’d created and had my own story in mind for; this particular little narrative was set after that other story, even though, to date, I still haven’t written all of it. In other words, the character who saved me was the character as she was at what I had planned to be the conclusion of her original tale; as it happened, she fit nicely into this little fantasy scenario, though.

But I digress. How does this news story connect to my life? Well, my first thought upon reading the headline of the story on the Daily Echo website was “someone’s probably jumped”. Given that the bridge was re-opened after just ten minutes, though, I wonder whether that was really the case or not; at the moment, it looks pretty much like a non-story, despite its prominent billing on the Daily Echo website. I guess my thought process ran something along the lines of “I wonder if there would have been a story like that on the Daily Echo website if I’d actually given in to my despair and jumped back in those dark days?”

Bleak? Oh, absolutely and definitely. But, well, there you go. That’s me.

1806: Resolute

My friend Dan (aka “utterbiblio”) wrote a heartfelt and eye-opening post earlier. And I related to it one hell of a lot.

Dan has been through a lot over the last few years, most notably a horrendous family tragedy that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. This, thankfully, isn’t something I can directly relate to — though I can at least empathise and sympathise with him — but the other things he talks about in that post, some of which stem directly from that awful happening and others of which have always been present in his life, are the parts where I felt like I could have written that very post.

Depression is, as I’ve commented on here on numerous occasions, a terrible thing. It destroys lives — quite literally, in all too many cases. And for those who hang on in there trying to survive day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, little by little, it can feel like a pointless journey with no end in sight. Or, perhaps more accurately, it can feel like a journey with two possible destinations: the one that’s worth getting to, the one that’s hard work and far away, feels like it’s way beyond the horizon and perpetually moving away from your current position, while the other destination is just a short hop off the cliff that is forever to one side of you. Just jump, and you’re there; the end, that’s it, nothing more to worry about.

Dan describes in his post how he has contemplated taking his own life. On a number of occasions throughout my time on this earth, similar thoughts have entered my mind. They’ve never stuck around long enough for me to seriously feel like I’d ever act on them, but they’ve been there nonetheless, offering me that easy-to-get-to destination during the darkest periods of my journey. I’ve wondered what it might be like; I’ve even written a private piece of creative writing contemplating what it might be like to go through with ending one’s own life, but even then my own mind stopped me from truly going through with it: the character in the short tale (who might as well have been me) was saved at the last second by a fictional character of my own creation who has always brought me great comfort ever since I first dreamed her up back in high school. Even in fiction, it was clear I didn’t want to go through with it.

My life’s not in a terrible place. I can’t complain too much. But still the darkness comes from time to time; feelings of bleakness and hopelessness — and no-one around to go and hunt Odin with (there’s a reference only FFXIV players will get) — that eventually dissipate into the wind, but which occasionally, from time to time, drift back, sometimes as the result of a careless word, sometimes due to something silly happening, sometimes just… because.

It’s an unfortunate reality of life. And it’s one that, over the years, I’ve come to know a significant proportion of people carry the burden of — even those who may seem bright, chipper and upbeat when you see them face-to-face. That public face isn’t always the true face; inside, there might be unrest, pain, suffering, even the desire to end it all. You can never really know what someone is feeling unless they’re feeling strong and safe enough to spell it out for you, like Dan did with the post I linked to above, and like I’ve done a few times here on this blog.

2014 has been a year of ups and downs for many of us. Here’s hoping that 2015, which is just around the corner, errs on the side of “up” rather than “down”.

1667: Depression’s a Bitch

I’m conscious of adding to the noise surrounding this topic at the moment, but given, well, the nature of the topic, I felt it important to speak about it.

On the off-chance you’ve missed the news, it seems that beloved comedy actor Robin Williams was found dead recently in what appeared to be a suicide. The star had been struggling with depression for some time, and the conclusion to his life story is an all too common tale for those who suffer under the weight of the Black Dog’s attention.

I have written about depression numerous times on this blog, but at times like this it pays to re-explain some things to those who have never encountered it or do not know what it is like to be plunged into that particular world of darkness. I have no shame in saying that I have suffered because of it, and it has helped define the person I am today, both for better and for worse.

Depression is something that is difficult to define, because it changes its own manifestation so frequently, and seemingly at random. On some days, it can make you want to not get up, not get dressed, not leave the house. On others, it can make you want to go and look at things that make you sad, pondering what might have been. On others still, it can make you have strongly emotional reactions to the slightest stimulus. It beats and pounds on your brain; it makes you think you’re stupid, worthless, ugly, fat, disgusting, useless, incapable of doing anything worthwhile, doomed to failure; it makes you think nobody loves you, nobody cares about you, nobody would even notice if you were just to die here and now; it makes you wonder if life is even worth persevering with if all each new day brings is more pain.

It doesn’t strike every day, either. A depressed person is not perpetually down or sad. On some days, they can go about their business perfectly normally, as if nothing is wrong. Sometimes, a poorly timed comment or a badly phrased joke can bring the Black Dog back at a second’s notice; others, it is banished to a cage in a far-off corner of the mind. But it always breaks out again eventually.

There is no “cure”. There is no magic bullet. You can learn to cope with it, but it never truly goes away. And on days when just everything seems to be getting worse and worse, the temptation can be to want to escape from it through the only means seemingly available: to escape this world altogether, in the hope that the next, whatever that might be, is more hospitable. I’ve only come close to contemplating this during one period in my life — the time when my marriage fell apart is when I felt lower than I’ve ever felt in my life, and on more than one occasion I wondered if it would really matter, if anyone would really care if I were to just end it all and leave the world behind me. Obviously I didn’t do that, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this now, and I’m glad I didn’t; while I wouldn’t say my life is perfect just yet, it’s certainly been making slow but steady progress back into a territory I would describe as “on track”.

And yet here’s the thing: I still get depressed. I live in a house that I own along with a wonderful partner whom I love very much. I’m soon to start a new job that should be a good fit for my skills and experience. I’ve bought a new car that I like a lot. I’m in a position where I don’t have to panic too much about money. I have most of the things I want in life, and the means to acquire those that I don’t. And I still have my health, all my limbs and my mental faculties. I count these blessings — and plenty of others besides — every day, and yet still there are some days where the darkness is inescapable; some days that just lay you low, unable to do anything, unable to define exactly “what’s wrong”.

That’s what depression is. It can strike anyone, anywhere, any time. It doesn’t make any distinctions based on any of the labels we humans like to ascribe to one another. At best, it’s an inconvenience. At worst, it’s a killer.

Should any of the above seem familiar to you, I’d encourage you to talk about it when you can. Don’t be afraid of judgement or negativity; reach out to those you know and trust — or a professional trained in such things if there is no-one in your personal life that you trust enough with this — and speak up. Don’t suffer in silence. You matter, even if there may be days when it doesn’t feel like it. The world would be a worse place without you in it.

Most of all: good luck. The battle against depression is a tough, never-ending fight that can never truly be won, but, as we so regrettably saw with Williams, it sure can be lost. Hold your head high, stand up to that Black Dog and tell it to fuck off. You’ll be surprised how many other voices you’ll hear; you are not alone.