Game Over: Why I Can't Play Video Games Any More

The other day, my 12-year-daughter, Sandy, threw herself off a cliff and broke 206 bones. Or possibly 204 bones. She very likely got a concussion, tore many ligaments, and hemorrhaged in various places. We’re not sure, because the bones were what we focused on: 204–206 is pretty much all the bones in the human body. It was really quite an achievement, an extraordinarily painful perfect score.

You should probably already have guessed that she did this in a video game, because this essay is called “Why I Can’t Play Video Games Any More.”¹ The game is Broken Bones IV, it exists on Roblox, and Sandy and Sasha have been playing it a lot lately, ascending mountains, leaping off precipices, and guiding their rag-doll bodies into rocky outcroppings that send them spinning off in new, deadly directions. Broken Bones IV (and presumably I–III) is beautifully simple, a clever inversion of the usual video-game stakes: Instead of trying not to die, instead of gobbling up health packets or hoarding extra lives, you embrace death in one shot, aiming for the most spectacularly destructive finale the game’s physics will allow. I love it.

I will not, however, play it, because I just can’t play video games any more. To be clear, this is not some high-minded objection. Video games are not too violent, or too morally corrupting of Our Children. The large corporations that produce and sell them are frequently abusive workplaces, but they’re not Amazon or Chick-Fil-A (yet). Video games and their makers are fine as is. It’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me.

And that’s because I’m an addict. I feel a little weird about using such a loaded term here, but it’s the only one that fits. I’ve known I was an addict for 30 years, ever since the release of DOOM, the revolutionary first-person shooter, was released on December 10, 1993. On or about that very date, I downloaded it in my Baltimore dorm room and began to play soon after dinner—let’s say 6:30. A minute or two later, I looked up—and it was 11:30 p.m. Five hours of my life had evaporated, and I’d barely noticed. That very night I swore off video games completely².

This was no small decision. As much as my childhood had been ruled by Star Wars, Lego, and skateboarding, it was also dominated by video games. I remember pouring my life’s savings, quarter by quarter, into the arcades at UMass, then scrounging discarded soda cans to recoup the deposits and drop a few quarters more. I remember visiting the local computer store to play Lode Runner on a Commodore 64, and I remember endless weekend afternoons of Wizardry and Ultima IV, and I remember Uma Thurman’s family denying me a chance to play on their Atari 2600. My grandmother once gave me a Pac-Man watch—THAT YOU COULD ACTUALLY PLAY PAC-MAN ON!—and it broke within a day or two; its replacement was a yellow, Pac–Man™-branded plain-old digital watch, and I invented a game where I had to push the buttons to cycle through the time, date, and seconds fully, to see how fast I could do it. My record, as I recall, was less than a second.

Saturday nights were Domino’s pepperoni pizza, two-liter bottles of Coke, and the Nintendo Entertainment System—Super Mario Bros., Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Double Dragon. Summers were computer camp, where I coded Zork-style text adventures, copied cracked games onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and once got in trouble for watching pixelated Apple II porn. Oh, so that’s what the Fuller Brush salesman was all about!

In general, I liked the weirder titles: At the arcade, Xevious and Crystal Castles were my go-tos, with their challenging gameplay, copious Easter eggs, and standout design. Also, no one else wanted to play them, so I didn’t have to take turns or share space. Unsurprisingly, I shied away from the hypermasculine fighting and racing games: Street Fighter II didn’t do anything for me (although I did love the adrenaline high of speed games like Sonic or Shinobi). Give me instead the bloodless, buoyant world of Super Mario or the pervasive wit of Zork’s fallen Flathead Kingdom³.

The point is, for a highly formative decade-plus of my life video games were an inextricable element. And then, suddenly, they weren’t.

This did not leave a hole in my life. In fact, I made the decision to give up gaming because I felt like games were creating a hole in my life—excavating time I wanted to use for school, for friends, for all the things that my life could be as an almost-adult.

Quitting was, to be honest, easy. I just stopped. I didn’t download new games, I didn’t sneak an hour or two of old ones. I just told myself I was done, and I was done⁴. From that moment on, the hours that would have been spent on DOOM and its sequels went to reading, watching old movies, exploring the industrial underbelly of Baltimore, having a girlfriend, and all the other activities an intrepid, independent young man can find to occupy his spare time.

I was successful enough at going cold turkey that, years later, I allowed myself leeway to reindulge. The release of Katamari Damacy—a Japanese game in which you play the son of the King of the Cosmos, tasked with rebuilding the stars and constellations (which your father has accidentally destroyed) by rolling up everyday objects like pencil sharpeners, onigiri, cows, infants, and windmills into ever larger “clumps”—knocked me off the wagon for a few weeks. During a solo stint in Cambodia, I got into Halo, battling the Flood until my sublet living room was dark and the mosquitoes were poking holes in my legs and neck. That night, as I scratched away the evidence of my relapse, I swore off games anew.

And I have mostly stayed pure. While my daughter Sandy has gotten wound up in Animal Crossing, Zelda, Unravel, and the brilliant Untitled Goose Game, I’ve been content to observe, not participate. She has a much-treasured Nintendo Switch as well as a re-created Nintendo Entertainment System with 32 built-in games. Every once in a while—a very rare once in a while—Sandy will persuade me to join her for Unravel, or I’ll engage her in retro two-player Super Mario Bros., and discover that the controller movements are still built into my hands and my brain: I can cruise through Mario’s worlds as fluidly as I could when I was 12.

But then I have to limit myself: I’m playing to play with Sandy. There is no object for me. I am not trying to defeat Bowser, to learn for the nth time that our princess is in another castle. I’m playing for the ephemeral joy of playing, and I have to leave it at that.

This turns gaming into something special, different. It focuses me in on the moment rather than on the achievement. When I play, I must want nothing but that so-nearly-real feeling of leaping over spinning wheels of fire, or throwing yarn-strings onto hooks and catapulting myself across chasms. The verisimilitude of the simulation must be enough. What’s more, everything I accomplish I have to be willing to give up at a moment’s notice, because we have family dim sum plans, or it’s homework time, or I need to write another newsletter.

Video games have taught me a lot in my life: I learned to program, to explore, to measure progress in a zillion ways. I learned to appreciate the zany creativity and immense volumes of labor that goes into their production, and I learned that a truly unique game can fundamentally alter how I see the physical world around me—as Mario blocks, as fodder for Katamari clumps, as head-spinning, perspective-shifting Monument Valley geometries.

But in giving them up, they’ve also taught me how to let go of the things I love. And not just that I can let things go but that letting go does not diminish the love—I can feel and remember these experiences just as fully from afar. And when, on occasion, that distance closes up, and I find myself in the presence of my beloved—whether it’s a game or something else or someone else—I can know that it is only for these moments, and to appreciate them before they’re gone. Because they will be gone, sooner or later, and must be given up, and this is no defeat. To give something up is not to give up. Our princess may always be in another castle, but we are in this one, so let’s make the most of it.

Notes

1. If you didn’t, we need to talk!

2. It’s also possible I quit a week or two later, after I’d completed the game, but I don’t remember clearly.

3. Another proud accomplishment: Finishing Zork II with 400 points in 399 moves.

4. Maybe this means I was not a true addict, in the clinical sense. Oh well.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt