In the wake of a punishing weekend of multiplayer grinding,
wherein I spent something close to twenty hours over three days dropping on
behalf of Clan Wolf in MWO, I find
myself precariously located between games; I've got a wealth of titles that are
clamoring for my attention, from the terribly grindy Heroes of the Swarm to the
elementally sublime Pillars of Eternity,
but the time required to play each of these titles is truncated, at least in
part because of the attention they demand of me, but also because of the raw
amount of work I have stacked up from other parts of life. These are good games (though I'll be writing
more in the future on how "good," in the case of HotS, does not translate to "a solid competitive MOBA"
some time soon), and they're just the tip of the iceberg: Broken Age's second act finally dropped, I have a backlog of
Telltale adventure games to play, and then there's the bank of indie games that
I'm still procrastinating about.
I'm effectively paralyzed, not by choice, but by the balance
of choice and other commitments, the knowledge that, even if I do choose to
play one of these games, I won't have time enough to play it
"properly." Trine 2's puzzles, simple as they are,
will still take time that the pile of student work needs, time that, frankly, I
need to write to write missives like this, wherein I talk about the time that
missives like this require which forestalls me from writing about games further.
And thus the cycle presents itself.
I have a wealth of games that I want to play, games that
require my attention for long, involved stretches of time, and promise to talk
me on an emotional journey I won't soon forget, but those very games, so
luridly drawn and involved, eliminate all other possible tasks. What's more, every possible task, every
unread essay or unresolved task or unfinished book, annihilates my capacity to
pay full attention to these objects that demand my involvement: if I sit down
to play The Wolf Among Us, I'm doing
both the game and myself a disservice if I'm even somewhat distracted. That's a game about feeling, about reacting,
and about understanding things based on a particular situation. It simultaneously spikes my anxiety,
presenting me with a plethora of real, meaningful choices, and makes it vanish
completely in the moments that follow making those choices. After all, at that point there's nothing left
for me to do but deal with the consequences of the choice I've made. And The
Wolf Among Us is but one example.
There's a fucking pile of games that promise to devastate me
emotionally, games I want to be ruined by, games that will no doubt turn my
summer into an emotional minefield of sorts, but the attention they demand of
me is so great, and the attention I want to give them necessarily undivided when
it does present itself, that I can't pursue them with anything else on my
plate, even a small thing, like a transcription of a notebook or a single late
piece of student work.
The end result of all this is that I'm not playing the games
I really want to play, at least not anymore.
I spent quite a bit of time playing through Pillars of Eternity before finals arrived and ruined my life, but
over the last two weeks I'd be shocked if I'd spent five hours total playing
it. In a game that can easily take over
one hundred hours for a single playthrough, that's not a lot of time to put in,
barely enough to set up quests, maybe upgrade some equipment, and finish
leveling up your characters. Even though
I want to do more, to explore the fantastic spaces, filled with rich, textured
cultures and nuanced political intrigue, eking out the time to do so has been
strange, not because the time doesn't exist, but because the time doesn't exist
in the proper configuration.
See, some games are ideal for bite-sized chunking,
functioning as the interactive media equivalent to a cigarette break. HotS
and MWO are great examples: a round of each of these
games terminates in less than 20 minutes, on average, gives players iterative
rewards (sometimes major rewards) and, post-resolution, doesn't really have any
kind of lingering impact on me as a player.
I can pull a drop in MWO and
come away, win or lose, feeling sated by the experience, but not involved with
it in a larger sense: even if I pulled out all the stops and dropped half an
enemy company, I'm going to, at most, feel a little fuzzy. I'm not going to feel high on my
victory. An exceptionally rough defeat
will likely prompt me to minimize MWO's
program window and watch Youtube videos for a while. These "zero-sum" multiplayer
experiences that present solid feedback loops without requiring much emotional
engagement, have been important to me for a while now, filling in the brief
gaps I can eke out in my schedule, sometimes filling in larger gaps without
necessarily dragging me into emotional rabbit holes that preclude my ability to
disengage from the game structure to deal with other, more pressing tasks. They're almost expertly crafted in this
regard: they are, as I play them, absolute in their insistence upon my focus,
and yet once each round resolves they're sub-peripheral in my life. I spend no time thinking about the next round
of HotS, but I'm still paralyzed by
the choices that The Wolf Among Us is going to ask me to make, and I haven't
played it at all since last summer.
Thusly I arrive at this strange moment, in both this post,
and in my year: I've been relying on these game structures for so long, without
really investing in more involved experiences for a while. It's a pattern echoed in my reading as well:
short, uninvolved books, or uninteresting books, have been taking the place of
great books that I know will disrupt or upset my emotional balance. Didion, Poe, and conceptual poetry have taken
the place of Bolano, Knausgaard , and Atwood.
I know that the moment I crack The
Year of the Flood, I'll be emotionally leveled, and until I can set time
aside to deal with that, I will continue to divorce myself from such
experiences. The end result is a strange
kind of depression, clinging to the rim of an emotional state without
collapsing in, maintaining altitude, treading water, a fourth metaphor, keeping
me functional until I can eke out enough time again to be emotionally
vulnerable, to let potentially disruptive experiences into my life, where they
can keep me up for days or, if I'm lucky, weeks.
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