The Mammon Philosophy

So today, I almost decided not to play any video games for a week. Allow me to explain: the latest Brandon Crisp story at GamePolitics invited the attention of “Yawheh,” the wife of one of the professional search-and-rescue workers who was in the Barrie area. She issued this peculiar query:

Tell me something! what do you folks get out of gaming.

Well, let me tell you a little something about a title by the name of EarthBound. It came out in June of 1995, when I was a mere ten years old. I’d already had plenty of experience with gaming (I played the Tron light-cycle game on an Intellivision when I was 3 and never looked back) but EarthBound was something else: a twisted and hilarious take on the old Dragon Warrior formula, set in the present day and filled with incredible characters and strange plots. (There’s a more detailed outline here.) 1995 was also the year I got my first taste of the Internet, and a few years after that I was looking up old games on Yahoo’s directory and found my way to EarthBound.Net, later renamed to Starmen.Net.

In the ten years since then, I’ve improved my writing ability and my people skills through participation in SMNet’s community. I’ve made lasting connections with other gaming fans all around the world, and am even part of a major online business venture which will be paying my rent by this time next year. All of this is thanks to EarthBound in particular, but even more so to video games in general.

Ask tens of thousands of other gamers, and they’ll have a story that’s similar to mine. People meet and socialize through gaming, and it inspires us to greater skills and higher knowledge. This is why I defend gaming when it’s brought out as an excuse for behaviour: because I know that it is not, nor was it ever intended to be, the addictive life-destroying substance that its occasional proximity to tragedy might seem to mark it as. It’s no more (and, to be fair, no less) influential than movies, television, books, theatre, paintings, or any other medium you could care to name. And when you weigh the unquestionable amount of good that gaming has done for so many of us against the few times when gaming could be linked, sometimes spuriously, to something bad, it becomes clear what its true value is.

But I do go on. Further in Yawheh’s post, she challenges us to quit gaming for a week, or even a month. “Bet you wouldn’t last a day,” she taunts us. And it got me thinking: could I quit gaming for that long? In the much-parodied words of so many who have come before me, I can quit any time I want to. I don’t really have an option, anyway; gotta get to work during the day, gotta go to the dentist tonight, gotta write my novel. If I was addicted (and it would have to be an emotional addiction; as all-around good guy EZK points out, gaming doesn’t create a chemical dependency in the body the way drugs or alcohol do) then I wouldn’t have time for any of these things. And if, in my spare time, the power went out or I was otherwise rendered unable to game, would it drive me crazy? A little bit, sure; it’d be annoying. But I have other hobbies to occupy my time. Heck, if I really caught myself jonesing for interactive entertainment, I’ve got plenty of board games and decks of cards. I guess I’d start to withdraw if I was completely cut off from doing anything, but what does that make me? Addicted to pastimes? A normal human being, maybe?

Truth is, I’ve had my systems shut down for me on many an occasion. Vacations and road trips spring to mind; so does a time when my parents pulled the ol’ “take the games away for his own good” move, which motivated me in a far more positive way than the Crisps’ supposedly addicted son. At the end of the day, gaming on its own merits is not an addiction. It is a choice. And if someone chooses to game in lieu of a more important element of their life, such as social development or healthy activity, then that isn’t the game’s fault; that lies deeper within the person themselves, with the game acting as a symptom rather than a catalyst.

So I was all worked up, all set to denounce my gaming for a week (but not a month, as Chrono Trigger DS drops on the 26th and I’d like to see its new features sooner rather than later) when it occurred to me that it would be a fruitless gesture; I have nothing to prove, and it would prove nothing. So rather than give in to my addiction to controversy (which is actually just a manifestation of my natural counterculture spirit, so I should really just leave controversy out of the discussion to begin with) I decided I would settle for carrying on with my day: going to the dentist, writing my novel, and perhaps taking in a movie. I hear some producers were influenced by the Max Payne games to make a movie starring Mark Wahlberg. I hope it doesn’t influence me to do backflips while firing a shotgun over my head! I’d probably just sprain something if I tried that.

Tags: Brandon Crisp, games are good

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 1630:35 and is filed under Industrial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.