Videogames

A story about wasted potential, sugar friends and escapism (oh, and Pokemon)  

School was over, easy as usual. In primary school, every subject came natural to me. In general, I was relatively fine most of the time, I had good grades, which meant that I was a good child (right?). In fact, I was one of the best kids in my class and loved learning to the extent that I did not have to do it at home in my free time.

Wich I essentially never did. I was relatively well mannered, compared to the folks I grew up with, so here I stood out a bit as well. But in general, I was pretty average. My life was easy and did not challenged me a whole lot. And due to that, I was often times incredibly bored. I had too much energy and time on my hands, yet not a lot of passions or supervisors that would demand me to invest it anyhow anywhere. I drew often, but was not too crazy about it anymore after doing it for some hours.

I played the drums, but had no idea of how awesome it could be if I got any good, neither did I have a drum kit at home. I had and liked books, but did I really want to spent so much time reading? I had some outdoor areas around, but did I really want to move around so much? I had a Piano at home, but did I really want to convince my mother to take all the stuff off the lid so that I could play? I was obsessed with lego technic, but did I want to limit my creativity by the few blocks that I had?

The answer to all of these questions was often times no. So what did I do instead? I called my friends. One of them I spend a lot of time with at a certain point was (let’s call him) Jhon. I knew his number by memory. We had a routine going. When he picked up the phone and said “Hey”, “Hey” is what I responded, “See you soon.” was the next thing he usually answered, when there was nothing stopping me from coming over. It was odd, we reduced our conversations to the bare needed minimum.

Why ask him, how he is doing, or if he’d like to spend some time with me, if both of us knew that the answers would be something like “good and you?” and “sure, come over”? It was not really a big secret, but I still tried lying to my mother here and there about what we were about to do: Play videogames. Relentlessly. Something she hated to a considerable extent and restricted for me and my sister to one hour a day. But at Jhon’s place, there were no restictions. And no parents. Call me Super Mario, or Kirby, or the Name of my current favorite Pokemon, because where I was about to go, the dull life of Siemore did not exist anymore. 

I was certainly hooked.

Strange to me, my mother, knowing well enough what we were about to embark on still gave me permission to go. I could only imagine how much she actually enjoyed time without me. She had quite a stressfull job with my sister and especially me. So frankly, she appreciated every moment of freedom.

So I was out, excitedly skipping along the streets I grew up in. Jhon only lived 5 minutes away from my place, so here I went often. I rang the bell, he opened and I entered his flat. I will never forget the strange but welcoming smell inside. We liked each others company, but Jhon and me were very different. He was emotionally extremely reserved and introverted. I on the other hand was full of energy and very out there.

I loved being here, loved being about to have something in my hands that could control something, that is not me. Because being me, being human, was only considered to be boring from my understanding. That is, what brought us together. Escaping reality. Jhon had his own set of struggles that I tried not to get confronted with all to much.

After all we were sugar friends, about to get lost in our addictions. We did not often try to talk much about real life stuff, I had other friends with whom I did so, but Jhon was really hard to talk to. He was certainly socially awkward and could not (or did not want to) relate, when I started talking about my issues with one of my childhood crushs, or overly agressive mother at home.

Jhon was alone at home on the weekdays until his Mom came home in the evening. His parents were divorced like mine, but different from my circumstance, he still met his dad like once a week (Insert sad cildhood Siemore’s face).

On the weekends, when I used to sleep over, noone was there either. His older brother, who was caught up in his own set of issues, was also gone most of the time and frankly, I feared his presence. There was one incidence, where him and Jhon had an argument. It escalated quickly and the older Brother then threw a soft ball into his face with brute force, leaving Jhons nose bleeding.

I just started to cry and stormed out of the apartment. Talking to Jhon a few years later about this, he looked at me strange and told me this never happened. I got confused, but obviously knew that he either forced him self to forget it, or was trying to bullshit me (which he did often enough to consider). Still, Jhon liked him quite a bit. He was the grown up, more agressive, cooler and rule breaking version of him that he would never turn into. And he got him videogames that had age restriction.

Having all this time, but no real hobbies at his hand, Jhon played a ton of videogames and engaged in other nerdy hobbies like collecting Pokemon or YuGiOh cards. And whatever game we played together, he was better. He had far more time to get good, while I had an hour a day to dedicate when it came to practicing at my place. I was really jeallous, that he could play as often as he wanted, but still, Jhon seemed lazy and content in my eyes.

While he was spoiled with all this time, all those consoles and games, I was a true hustler, that needed to learn how to get by despite my many restrictions. I had an hour a day, which meant that I better spend every moment of that hour deeply focused on the task at hand. I learned to play the games smarter than him, I learned the mechanics behind them, the engines, the architecture and during the time at home that I was not allowed to play, I often times did research on how the games were build up and what glitches and hidden secrets existed. After all, he was still better.

Every time. But I did not care all too much. I knew that I would easily beat him, if I had just a little more time by my self. He only played casually in my eyes, while I was far more obsessed, had the know how and considered my self far more talented then him. Because even if I basically always lost, I was usually very close from not doing so.

You may ask your self sooner or later, why in the world I cared so much about this stuff. Certainly, I am a fairly competitive person at heart, but to my defense, this was my world. It may seem meaningless to you, but to me, it meant everything. But I can relate nowadays. It has always been interesting for example to play games with girls I had over in the later years of being a teenageer. They never cared at all.

They never even tried to care, or understand the dynamics. They had no reason to. They had a life, like, a social life. For them it was just a funny little thing to engage in with their current boy. They moved their hands up and down, pushed the buttons without a pattern that made any kind of sense, made noises while playing and were very emotional… and actually seemed to have a lot of fun. As though they were social with someone.. what they probably thought this was all about. I found it cute, but did not relate a whole lot. I was always locked in, fingers set to Max Precision and never saying a single word, cuz, you know, it does not do anything in the game. After all, you need your whole energy and focus for actually playing it… right?

I liked Jhon.. I guess. And he liked me too… I guess. He was weird in a way, as stated, but so was I. None of us had a better outlet of energy or use of our time. There was noone who supervised us during these times and nobody cared, what we did. We were not doing anything forbidden or wrong in a sense, but wasted our time hijacking our brain’s reward systems with the accomplishment of meaningless goals.

We unlocked characters, figured out new moves, combos or glitches and pushed our limits and the limits of the games as far as we could. We were growing up in a simulated world that we controlled with our fingers and hands. We got adapted to using our eyes in the frame of a digital screen, to not overshoot, but lock onto what it is we need to focus on. We learned to be quick in response to something unexpected happening. We learned not to eat, but to get occasionally fueled by candy and little pizzas.

We learned to be negligent of our bodys, of any other sense that percieves stimuli different from what the eyes could catch and fingers could toggle. We learned to be content with living a poor life, that really had no meaning in a rich world. A world none of us had access to, nor thought of existing beyond the tiny apartment walls we grew up in. It is a shame to me till this day. A sad fact that darkens my memories, when I look back. There was nothing more valuable to us then trading in the wonders of life for a half assed simulation at hand. Where we don’t have to move, don’t have to actually do much to reach a certain goal.

I consider my self to be a very physical person nowerdays, somebody who works out like every day, loves to spend time in nature and lives only fully, when all my senses, all my physical real estate is engaged. There are not a lot of videogames, if any, that I touched in about 10 years, where I did not have the feeling that I miss out on a far greater, far more complex experience of life.

It does not matter how good the graphics are, it does not matter how realistic the handling could be, it just couldn’t get close to this thing called real life that happens all around you. But to be fair, some games were just really, really good. The amount of love that people poured into it seems incredible to me. But the amount of love that I in return put into it also seems incredible to me and it still puzzles my mind.

But there were many revealing moments in my videogame loaded past, where I realized, that I had to break out of this current style of living at some point. On one hand, staying up all night until the sun rose in the morning felt quite freeing, when you are a 10 year old kid who is used to following the stuff that your mother wanted from you. Regardless how loco you feel, a thought starts to emerge after the tenth night of waking up feeling like one of the zombies you tried to kill the night before. After having the nastiest taste of candy leftovers from not brushing your teeth and sleeping with an open mouth all night:

“There has to be something better than this”.

Another moment, where a sense of revelation came to me was after one of my many Internet researches about one my favorite games franchises of all times, Pokemon. You see, Pokemon was perfect. It was all I loved combined in a single game. It was competitive, where you had to train Pokemon up into being vicious animals that knock out others with a single hit.

It was caring in that you had to really give a damn about how you train your “pets” to ensure that they were actually capable, regardless of their level, but due to proper developement of stats. And it was, well, utterly artistic and beautiful. Everything from the sprites, to the stories, to the composed music gave me goosebumps like nothing else. It was full of rich language and stories, emotions and actionable goals ahead. And it was challenging.

Back in the days, you had to basically buy rare and expensive books if you wanted to get deep into the weeds of how a game was actually made up and where all its hidden formulas and cracks in the code lie. Some people might never noticed this, but the whole system in the early days of Pokemon was, at least in my eyes, pretty brilliant.

My way of getting behind some of these mysteries was the Internet. I was early on quite big about computers too, although this is where my Nerd Gene of trying to figure out the system behind everything stopped working properly, so that I only went so far as to expertly use a computer to the extent of not writing my own code. But anyways, back in the days it was hard to even get proper google results on how to bake bread, so the hunt for finding out the secret matrix behind Pokemon was a thrilling endeavour to be dedicated to.

But one day, after one of my countless researches, it seemed that i finally found the last piece of the puzzle. I cracked the code in its entirety. I won’t go into detail here, but I knew everything I had to know about how to breed the perfect Pokemon (Yes you could breed Pokemon). And after that I in theory would become the master of Pokemon genetics. But strangely at this point, my whole world started to crumble. I knew it all. I knew what I had to do and all I had to do now, woud be doing it. But this, I figured, was never, where my true passion was in the first place. I did not care about actually mastering the game, about actually becoming the best… like no one ever was. I loved the grind more than anything else.

I loved the hustle of leveling up pokemon, of building a team with no weaknesses, of burning through the games story in no time, of still always loosing against Jhon. And to just appreciate the artistry of the game. But at this point, I saw my potential future ahead. Hours on end in front of a tiny screen, implementing all I learned to act in favor of the games mechanics. I saw it all, the real life turnaments, the championships. Everything. And I wanted none of it.

I needed the challenge, I needed the grind of figuring out, how in therory, to become the best. Because the execution was far too easy and only took time. A buttload of time. So once this grind stopped, once I figured out how to get to the top, I lost the interest of getting there. For ever. After all, I did not want to become a professional Pokemon Master.

Coming to a halt

At about the same time in my life, I got really annoyed by Jhons non existant social skills. Back then I was not a really social person my self, rather the opposite, but Jhon was something even worse. And it started to get on my nerves. He became too damn weird from not dealing with a healthy amount of healthy people. I also started going to high school around this time, what meant that I was not in the same class, let alone the same school as him anymore. Oh yeah, and I also got extremely bad in school all of a sudden, so my head was quite somewhere else (which was still not school really).

I also first got in touch with one of my biggest loves I ever stumbled upon in life, Skateboarding. I loved it like nothing before. It was Real. Hard, Painfull, and Difficult, had a somewhat amazing community and loads of action to it. A literal grind. On top of this, puberty hit me like a train at the early age of around 13 and all I started caring about from there on was aforementioned Skateboarding, partying and girls. So here I was, hormones buzzing, starting to become a real ADHD kid, who can’t, or rather did not want to sit still anymore. My habits still locked me up in playing video games to some extent, but the damage was done:

I would never ever be able to resume my old ways of going about things.

It was still a gradual process though, and there was still a time where I gamed quite extensively. What I remember fondly is the game Guitar Hero 3. I played it with a usual Xbox controller, instead of this disgrace of a plastic guitar. Let’s be honest, it is a game solely about hand eye coordination, why in the world should I pretend to play guitar? Anyways. I got incredibly good incredibly fast. I played every song on the highest difficulty with an average accuracy of 99%.

I even beat one of the Game Designers in a battle once. But yeah, I surely and gradually left this part of me behind behind as well. I was and still am to some extent a Nerd at heart, but once you started exploring the city with your friends for the best skate spots, landed your first kickflip, or had your first real life experience with a girl, there can only be so much you would miss from a screen. When you start playing your own game, your own life, you think twice about exchanging that for sitting around all day in front of a simulation.

To some honest extent, I heavily regret how many hours I clocked in playing videogames. I spend so much valuable time trying to achieve goals that could not be further away from real life accomplishments, that it is incredibly hard to think fondly of these times. I wasted a lot of my childhood brain plasticity on this stuff and I wish I wouldve been more obsessed about other ventures like learning to play instruments, singing, gymnastics or sports in general.

You know, those things that are far less gratifying in the moment but overproportionally more rewarding in the long run. In addition, things that I were always fairly talented and enthusiastic about. And this makes me reasonably sad. Video games are after all designed to be addictive. They draw you in with a magnitude of reward triggering blips and blops. They are hard, but not too hard. They are pretty, fun and action loaded, you know, like a good life. Although luckily back in the days, games were harder and also more artistic in a healthy way of engaging the player. Also, the graphics were fairly bad.

As another side note on that, this was actually one big factor for me to play games like Pokemon. The graphics of the first few generations were so bad, that the real action could only happen inside of your head. I’ve always been a very imaginative person, so the graphics were the perfect way for me to dive deep into the my own desired world. What I was anticipating looked dull on the outside, but rich without limits on the intside.

I only used it as an anchor point for making up my own movie, like a good book. This realization only came to me after a few years, when the graphics got so good and spect out to the tinies details, that I noticed how I lost interest in the games that were all I could think of before. It became more and more dissonant to my internal world, which looked and felt very different and frankly, far better than what the game could offer.

A good manifestation of this was my relationship with the TV series of Pokemon. A lot of kids I grew up with loved this show, but to me, it was a nightmare. There was this main charakter, Ash Ketchum, this little annoying kid who tried sliming his way to the top of the world of Pokemon, battling here and there with other trainers, while in most episodes legititmately nothing significant happened. His Pokemon of choice by his side was this little freak electro mouse Pikachu which he loved unrelatably much.

Believe me, I love animals and had a few mice as a kid my self (and in theory a few pokemon), but loving such a creature to such an extent that Ash did was just incredibly creepy and dare I say retarded in my eyes. On top of that, Pikachu is just a terribly weak pokemon…

Here is where I tapped out: My world of Pokemon was a reasonably dark place. The original Game was sometimes disturbing and scary, it was difficult, full of legitimately evil people who had nothing but bad intentions and frightening music behind their Charakter. It was often very serious, yes very fun and playfull at times, but nothing like the stuff I saw on TV.

And this is where I felt cheated on. See, while the first few generations of Pokemon were all to some extent made for kids, I never felt treated as such when playing the game. It was always somewhat honoring the player and you always had the impression of doing something that is important. One reason is, that at it’s core, Pokemon was not really designed to be a childrens game, but one for young adults (and man childs that never grow up). Yes, kids could play the game, but you had to invest some good amount of research and dedication into really getting the game (if you wanted to).

But once the games got specifically designed for kids in a Disney Land type of style and language, sprites and animations, I was out. Because I wasn’t a kid anymore. So in some obvious ways, I got bitter about the fact that this game only grew with me to some extent, while at some point, I had to leave it behind in the past.

Aftermath

I am still gratefull to some extent for what I learned during these times, because on one hand I was a really good gamer. Especially from the point on, where my mother did not care anymore about how long I played at home (At this point, I also beat Jhon in Pokemon, which wasn’t a big surprise to me.) I was talented and driven. And even though I am not extensively proud of that anymore, it was one area in my life, where I really put in a lot of effort, wich gave me the chance to be successful in some area that mattered to me and my friends.

And with a little more, certainly unhealthy, obsession, I would have seriously had a career ahead of me, however stupid that may sounds. May it be as a streamer, in a time where streams started to become a thing, or as someone who attended turnaments. I was basically good in every genre, Ego shooter, Fighting games, RPG’s, Jump n’ Run, Racing games, you name it. But at some point, I did not want to be good at it anymore. It was too nerdy, too useless for me and the world around me.

But for the majority of time, I loved the process of getting better and the skills I learned translated somewhat into other ventures of my life. On an abstract level, I learned how it feels to be incredibly dedicated and obsessed, effective and focused. Something that I can always relate back to and orientate on when engaging in something. And because the first game I ever had in my posession was the english version of the Yellow Pokemon Edition, I basically tought my self the language from an early age on, when I yet not had it in school.

Another example is flying a drone, where I was immediately good at, because it legitimately works like a flight simulator. Something more abstact and general is using my hands in coordination with what I see. Being able to be very precise in everything manual was always a great pleasure and valuable asset to me. May it be the use of tools and craftmanship, fixing something, drawing, gardening, operating a computer, or something more unrelated like giving a massage, I am glad to have learned how to use my hands in a variety of ways (wich I do not at all only contribute to having played videogames). At the same time, I trained my eyes to be attentive and observant. And as a videographer, designer, or someone who is highly visul in general, this is something quite usefull.

But let us once again turn dark for a moment. A majority of time spend back there feels wasted to me. I was addicted to easy pleasures. And I do not want to turn it any other way, trying make my self believe something I do not feel is the truth at heart. You see, videogames are a bigger business then even the movie industy nowerdays and people happily give up their lifes for what they can operate on a screen. And talking to someone today who is super into games is a strange situation to be confronted with for me. Seeing their passion, their addicion and obsession reminds me of my self as a kid. And it triggers a somewhat visceral feeling that makes me sad to some extent. But thats my personal perspective…

At this point I am not even talking about videogames anymore, but escapism in general. It does not matter wether you watch Netflix for 3 hours every day or Youtube, wether you scroll Instagram or TikTok. There is a Problem at hand. And your habit of tuning out of your personal experience is the symptom. Why would you even want to do that, if your life is that amazing without it? Exactly, you would not. There are many different ways your life can be something you do not want to miss out on. In my case, I was bored, had nothing to dedicate my self to and a stressfull time at home.

There were very few people that supported or challenged me extensively in a way, that would have benefited my obsessive, talented but undisciplined personality. And what I did with this immense internal drive when noone cared is nothing considered really all too good in my eyes. To wasted it on something immediate and fun. I luckily changed quite a bit in that regard. I am still reasonably driven, but figured out more and more what is worth prioritizing.

I also still have a few habits of giving into lazyness left, of being just undisciplined and sluggish, while in those moments it would be the best to have a system in place that got me out of this state. But in a twisted way, this is something to be proud nowerdays. As a kid I was not often adequately told what to do with my drive nor lazyness, not many cared or knew about it them selfs, so I had to learn it on my own.

And for that fact, I am reasonably happy for where I am today and what sorts of responsibility taking habits I build along the way. I am also not trying to blame anyone and put my self into a victim mentality here, but you learn how to treat your self from how others treat you and them selfs when growing up. It is unavoidable to be shaped by your enviornment.

In some way, Videogames were at some point the closest thing to this much needed caring counterpart that I had. It is simple: You buy a game and in return get a service of being treated a certain way and becoming enabled to interact with your enviornment a certain way. One person may find him self drawn towards Ego Shooter or war games like Call Of Duty (wich I never really liked), because they may want the impression of having a noble goal of defending ones country, or principles.

Or they need an outlet for extrem hatred and anger against an enemy they are not able to face in real life, like a teacher, parent, or bully. I for my part loved Pokemon for some of the reasons I already talked about. It was a really fair system, where you fought in the name of justice with and for all the animals and nature that got exploidet in the story.

Games give you a framework and characters that care. It kickstarts intrinsic drive and without much work, you become the person you dream about being. A very good childhood friend of mine, who also played lots of videogames, has a disability in his hip and leg area, due to the fact that he was born a bit too early. He walked a little funny as a result and had a generally unavaliable lower body half. His upper body and brain though were, as far as my understanding went, fully developed, and may I add, home to a beautiful personality, that I will for ever honor.

Now, I certainly loved this kid, because even though he had this body to deal with, he was a really cool and fair person. But what was the genre of games he chose to engage in the most? You may have guessed it, Sports. He loved sports, and loved wrestling with his at some point much bigger brother. They were both black, so had some wit about it (that I did not at all understand at this time in my life). I was marveling at him for still being so active, even more active then me to some extent, dispite his disability. This friend actually started going to the gym and lifting weights many years before I considered anything close to that.

He was naturally very strong and build muscle like it was nothing (After all he was half black, half slavic, what to you expect?). And he even played Basketball to a very healthy extent with his friends! But over the years, the grip of identifying him self with his disability got tighter and tighter. And he started to disbelieve in him self of being able to do any form of sport that would satisfy him further on.

I met him after many years. He was still a very great person from the depth of his heart, that intrigued me with his presence and emotional developement, but he told me that he was suffering from bad depressions. And the reason seemed to be that he had to live with this body. He was on anti depressents and stopped lifting and doing sports all together, something that would in my oppinion have benefited his mental healt greatly. I actually offered to train and get him into the best shape he could think of.

Because I had the knowledge on how to work out in a healthy and therapeutic way from many years of doing yoga and calisthenics my self at this point. But he could just not motivate him self to do it. And at this point, all he did to satisfy his love for athletics was to play videogames. On one hand it is great, that he found a way to still be part of this world of Sports, though on the other, I always thought it to be very sad that he did not find the strength to actually pursue it in real life.

Look, I know that I am not in the position to judge here, but still, he was one of my best friends ever and it just breaks my heart seing him like this. There are a bunch of people in the world who overcame their disabilities or even made it their signature, because they loved sports so much. Anyways. This is a touchy topic for me, so I better not get into it to far, but you get what I try to say:

We look for substitutes of the things we deeply crave, when we can not seem to find a way to actually live them.

This is where “services” like videogames promise salvation for all the reasons I listed so far. Same with any Netflix show we binge, because our life is otherwise dull and empty. Or porn for the fact that our sex life may be non existent. It is a bad symptom of a bigger problem.

Rat park / Rat prison

Let me tell you the story of Rat park. (It is actually a thing)

Scientists like experiments.. and rats. So they asked them selfs about the addictive potential of certain drugs. They then went on to place a rat in a cage, where they had the opportunity of either drinking a sweet liquid from a dispenser that basically resembled food, while there was a second one which was filled with the addictive substance heroin (or something crazy like that).

Long story short, the rats got fully fucking hooked on the drug and starved them selfs to death, because all they did all day was to fly high as a kite, to never ever come back down to earth. Moral of the story? Don’t do crack kids, eat sugar and you’ll be fine. Right? Not quite, because there is more to the story.

A very smart scientist thought to him self, that there must be more to the experiment. He wondered, why every rat became such a junky. He looked at the cage. It was nothing more then a white plastic box, that was illuminated by an obnoxious flourescent light tube on top that emitted stark white light. There was nothing else inside the cage. Just the two containers of sugary and addictive liquid. Well, “pretty disturbing” is what our young scientist though. So he started thinking, that maybe after all the reason that the rats went fully Kurt Cobain with the drug dispenser was not due to the their lack of willpower, but the obvious fact that they were trapped inside of a white laboratory prison cell… of hell.

So the Scientist adjusted the enviornment. He put a nice cover and bundle of dried grass onto the box’s hard plastic floor, added some funny wooden climbing things as well and some vegetables and delicious worms, and oh, why not extent the area by connecting two more boxes with the same and other nice decorations? And let us this time put some more rats in there together, you know, for making rat friends and having some sexy rat time. Now what would you guess did the rats do all day long this time? Become crack heads like their fallen relatives? Certainly not. They actually took some hits of the drugs from time to time, because, why not? But never at all recessed to abusing it. They were too busy running around, playing, climbing, having sex, and generally enjoying their lifes.

And this is basically, what took me out of my videogame addiction back in the days. I found Skateboarding, friends, adventures, girls and the occasional parties in my version of rat park. I became a teenager that enjoyed a whole bunch of new freedoms I never was able to experience before. And I loved it. Now, I know, I know, Videogames are no Cocain (although they do in fact jack up your dopamine system in a similar fashion), but I hope that you understand my point.

There are simply better things to do in life.