As a kid, I learned piano from a young university student named Andrew, who lived across the road. He was cool and I wasn’t. I was a nine-year-old who was bullied at school. He had a gleaming grand piano in a downstairs room, and he smoked. He was incredibly kind to me, and one afternoon, he invited me around to check out his PlayStation. It was meant to be a short visit, but I remember staying for ages, entirely consumed by the original Crash Bandicoot, while Andrew and his girlfriend got bored and smoked out the open window.
That Christmas, we ended up with a PlayStation. The original line-up of child-friendly, cringe 90’s titles was Crash Bandicoot, Disney’s Hercules and the Spice Girl’s Spice World game. My brothers and I arrived at console gaming just in time for 1997, the peak of 90’s gaming, and Abe’s Oddysee, Metal Gear Solid, Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy VII soon followed.
Reader, my family was poor all on the edge of nervous breakdowns. At school, I was bullied daily and couldn’t sleep. But coming home to a PlayStation?
WHAT. A. TIME. TO. BE. ALIVE.
What began as a standard pre-teen infatuation with gaming turned into something more profound for my Autistic brothers. For them, gaming has never been a hobby but a religious lifestyle. Once I was grown and out of the house, I rarely had the disposable income to spend on a game. I inherited their old Xbox 360 and purchased the first Red Dead Redemption in 2010. It was the first game I remember completely immersing me as an adult. It was also the first game that I adored, and my brothers couldn’t stand it. The rich open world was a turn-off for their single-player, narrative-driven love.
Reader, I was poor, recently broken up, and living alone, but coming home (my own home!) to play RDR?
WHAT. A. TIME. TO. BE. ALIVE.
Eventually, my girlfriend moved in with me, and I became self-conscious about playing games under her gaze. She took a mild interest, but I could tell it never really hooked her in the same way as it had for me. One day, I stormed through RDR for six hours. It was raining outside, and my girlfriend pottered around the house. Over dinner that night, she said:
‘I didn’t mind it. I was just surprised. Every time I came out, I was like, oh, he’s still playing.’
Embarrassed, I vowed never to play for more than ninety minutes at a time. More than reading or watching films, playing video games (particularly as a young man) is perceived as indulgent, vaguely masturbatory, and unattractive.
Despite gaming being one of the most popular and lucrative art forms, a stigma persists. There is zero evidence that gaming is linked with more aggression. There are links between gaming and community-building, and creative problem solving.
My girlfriend became my wife. Gaming continued to inspire and delight me. After my experience with RDR, I attached myself to open-worlds. This was convenient because the 2010s became the golden age of open-world games. Assassin’s Creed, Arkham City and the Far Cry series occupied my time.
I want to emphasize my wife didn’t shame my gaming or push it to the side. My embarrassment was all self-constructed. It was some complex reaction to wanting to be different from my brothers and unlike the cultural stereotype of young male gamers. Quite the opposite is true of most men I know who game. Some of the happiest evenings I’ve spent with my wife were playing puzzle games like The Witness and Portal 2. When the Nintendo Switch came out, we played Super Mario Odyssey together, and it felt like I’d reached some marriage/in-your-20s Nirvana—having a wine and playing Nintendo with your beloved?
WHAT. A. TIME. TO. BE. ALIVE.
Assured we couldn’t ascend any higher as a couple, we gave ourselves a new challenge.
Children.
Gaming didn’t disappear immediately. I wanted to keep playing games, and I did. But as I became a different person, my hobbies changed, too. There’s been times I’ve thought of putting the consoles away for good. Selling them and moving on - after all, they barely get used anymore. But I still listen to a video game podcast every week. And often, there’ll be a new release, and I’ll sacrifice sleep and work to enjoy it (like the summer I played the sequel to RDR). But when I do game now, it’s completely different.
It has to wait until the kids are in bed for most games I want to play. I’ve tried getting my daughters interested in a few children’s titles, but they grow bored quicker than I do with them and then I’m just some loser playing the Peppa Pig video game by himself.
That leaves night time - when I’m exhausted and usually in bed by nine (it’s what happens when you have to wake before five most mornings). The huge open-world expanses that used to tempt me now exhaust me. I don’t need more of a to-do list at the end of the day. So I find the best hit of dopamine from a genre I’d managed to avoid pre-children: multi-player online shooters. The original Overwatch took hundreds of hours from me. Connecting with some mates over Fortnite was surprisingly intimate and hilarious.
I have a disposable income these days (sometimes), and I bought Diablo IV, Final Fantasy XVI and Baulder’s Gate 3 this year. I enjoyed all of them, but I lost interest in them about a third of the way through. Games of that size and scale require consistent commitment and momentum to become fully immersive. A week away from one, and I’d find it difficult to go back.
The Switch, because of its mobility, has been a life-line that has kept the hobby alive. I’ve managed to get through the latest Zelda (almost), and like the true hipster/oldie gamer I am, I’ve fallen for short-form indie titles like Slay the Spire, Hades and The Cult of the Lamb.
But it’s a dice roll with any new game. How much time do I need to invest? It doesn’t exactly feel like the spontaneous, easy hobby it once did.
Worse, games now make me feel old. New systems? New characters I need to care about? World lore I need to catch up on? Ugh. Who can be bothered?
Fuck. Am I out-growing games?
In a desperate attempt to re-salvage my love, I created a Facebook Messenger group with a bunch of other thirty-somethings. I’ve gamed with them all sporadically at different times.
Let’s commit to a weekly time! I say. Let’s find a game to co-op together!
Brilliant idea! Yes absolutely! I need this for my mental health!
It never happens. I am the only parent in our group, but work schedules and exhaustion get in the way. There is one woman in the group, and God Bless her. She is the only one with enough social intelligence and care to turn up at the prescribed time or message the stream once every couple of weeks to say she’s hopping online for a few hours if we are around. None of the men reply. That’s not because we don’t like our female friend; we adore her. Hell, we all adore each other…we also never reply to each other.
Men suck.
I fantasise about about a magic future. I am healthy and happy in retirement age. The kids are grown. And I spend my twilight years catching up on Zelda. I dream of nursing homes that host Call of Duty tournaments. But I don’t know if I’ll get there. I’m in my mid-thirties now and tend to care too much about my lawn and interest rates to care about DPS and frame rates. Is the rest of my generation the same? Are we all ultimately destined to give up social media and video games and wind up reading the Murdoch press and developing a love for dickheads like Andre Rieu?
(He seems like a perfectly nice guy.)
Almost all of nerd culture is nostalgia, anyway. Gaming will never feel as pure as that first hit of RDR or rolling credits on Metal Gear Solid for the first time. Even returning to those games now feels lop-sided. I’m not so much playing those games as in a constant dialogue with my own memory of them. Each scene or gameplay beat reminds me of the time I played it for the first time.
The dim living room. The controller in my sweaty palm. The flicking glow from the CRTV. The plastic snap of opening a case, popping a disc from it for the first time. Hearing the buzz as it spins. An exhalation as I settle into the couch. What a time to be alive.