[Nostalgia/Grief]

Thanks, Tess.

A few things fell into place, last night, regarding my motivations for playing games. I'll write more about this in my journal, but the gist of it is that I played to avoid dealing with a lot of personal upheaval in my home life, in my extended family, and even in the wider world. Games offered consistency; things there would always be the same, time after time.

Meanwhile, out here in the world, real nostalgia involves longing to return to places that have changed, often beyond recognition. Even my own household isn't what it was five years ago, and never will be again.

And that's okay. That's as it should be.

And no good can come from chasing after changelessness. Sure, in-game places will always be the same, but only because they are hollow simulations filled with cardboard cutouts of people who always say the same danged inane things (i.e., "an arrow to the knee".)

[What is the last book you read?]

I just finished Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies and started in on John Rawls' Political Liberalism, which doesn't mean what you probably think it does!

Evening reading became my routine during my one-week "game fast", and I tried to hold onto it when I returned to gaming for a few days. Now that I've quit again, I'm hoping to get through the backlog of books I've been meaning to read. After Rawls I'll probably go back and finish Roger Scruton's Conservatism, and maybe finally go back and read Edmund Burke.

[Nostalgia/Grief]

How do you all deal with nostalgia for games?

I'm three days in to my prolonged (maybe indefinite) "detox", and find I'm struggling most with the thought that I may never see certain (artificial) places or encounter certain (fictional) characters again, or even just bask in the immersive experience of an open-world exploration game in VR.

I won't name any of them, so I don't trigger someone else's nostalgia.

It feels like a variety of grief, complicated by the knowledge that I could go back at any time. I keep slipping in and out of the "bargaining phase" of grief: "I'll be good this time! I promise! Don't make me pull the plug!" . . . except that I'm also the one pulling the plug.

I wouldn't call this an emergency, yet, and I have so far managed to bring myself back around to thinking of all the things I'll have time for in the real world without gaming.

But, still . . .

(Fun fact: 'nostalgia' means something lie 'return-pain', which can mean either 'a painful longing to return' or 'the pain of returning' - or both at once!)

[We Now Rejoin Real Life, Already in Progress]

A quick bit of math. There are 720 hours in a 30-day month. That means I spent a total of 4.8 months playing one particular open-world sandbox/exploration game over the past 5 years. And that's only one of the games into which I've sunk my time.

I shouldn't go throwing away months like that. Someday, they may be scarce!

(I'm currently 52. If I live to be 92, I have about 480 months left in my life.)

[Tired?]

8 hours ago, Theresa said:

@Zeno of Eleathanks for the advice. Sleeping regularly is life-changing. I used to only get a couple of hours when gaming and that was pretty  bad....I’m picking up exercising and reading. The former helps with fatigue a lot.

Diet may also be a factor. I've seen people on this site advising others to be sure to drink plenty of water, and I can't disagree with that. I've also found that reducing or eliminating refined sugar in my diet keeps my energy from peaking and crashing through the day.

[We Now Rejoin Real Life, Already in Progress]

This is day 3.

I keep finding myself switching back and forth between two ways of thinking about gaming. The switch is abrupt, like a sudden transition from one world to its dark twin; I imagine it accompanied by a flicker of light, or a video glitch, or something. You know, like in that one game . . .

Okay, as I was saying, I switch abruptly back and forth between imagining my life without games, full of possibilities and future accomplishments, and imagining my life still visiting and trying to dwell in artificial worlds toward which I already feel the pull of nostalgia.

There are game worlds and game experiences I'm going to miss. I was really into single-player open-world exploration games, in both "sandbox" and RPG versions, and sometimes in VR. I would sometimes be in awe of game designers for bringing together the elements to create such interesting, often gorgeous, and sometimes nearly sublime settings. There are also particular places that had become familiar, almost like an alternate home town.

(I won't mention any of them here, so as not to set off other people's nostalgia.)

And I think: Just one more visit. Just stop in once in a while. Don't give it all up, that would be silly.

But then I just remember how hollow and unsatisfying the actual gameplay was becoming, how I would grind pointlessly for hours, often restarting games again and again, to recapture some of the magic and the novelty of the first play-through, trying to recapture the sense of accomplishment of becoming established in the game world from a shaky beginning.

And I also think of how the game worlds are at best cheap imitations of the real world, which is full of wonders and terrors enough. Not to mention that the real world is already rendered in 3D with astonishing visual fidelity and total sensory immersion! And the ray tracing! O, ye gods, the ray tracing!

I also remember my life before gaming, even before my marriage, when my sole ambition was to be a scholar and a teacher, when I would read voraciously and sometimes just think for hours, trying to untangle some philosophical knot or other. I would think best when walking out in the wide world, or sitting quietly in the woods, or even just in the back yard.

I can have all that again.

And that's what pulls me forward, out of the mirror-universe and back into real life.

Right now, I'm thinking I'll just take the plunge, downgrade my desktop computer now and sell off my graphics card - at the current hyper-inflated price! I imagine my hand will shake as I place it in the box for shipping, and all the game-worlds I have loved will call out to me . . .

I may not be ready for that, yet. Maybe at the 90-day mark.

[We Now Rejoin Real Life, Already in Progress]

The benefits of having a comfortable chair and a good light for reading in the evening got me thinking about the setup of my household and what I'll call the infrastructure of gaming.

Part of the difficulty I've had during the pandemic is that my home office is also my entertainment/hangout room for off-hours. The rest of my house has been a bit of a shambles since the divorce, a year and a half ago - my ex has yet to retrieve the last of her stuff - and my two young-adult kids have been sheltering here with me for the duration, so this really was the best place to be.

So, I've spent spent much of the last year sitting right here looking at this (very nice) monitor, which is connected to a very nice desktop PC. I recently rebuilt the thing, with a new motherboard, best-of-the-last-generation tech (2080Ti) a slick case with tasteful RGB lighting.

So, what do I do with the thing? It's completely overpowered for the work I do, even when I do a little bit of video rendering for online teaching.

I guess I'll know I'm all-in with quitting when I break the thing up, sell off the gear, and build myself a small, energy-efficient PC for work, maybe with an older, low-end graphics card in case I do need to do something with videos. I'm not sure I'm there yet, but the part of me that has enjoyed tinkering with gear is starting to think about taking up energy efficiency as a challenge . . .

[Tired?]

When I'm not gaming, I generally get more and better sleep. My rule now is to have all screens off by 9pm, at the latest, so I can sit and read for a while before going to bed around 11pm.

That may be the one thing, above all, that convinces me to stick to the one-year detox I've just started: regular, good sleep feels like a kind of miracle.

Maybe it's a matter of finding things to engage your attention, real-world accomplishments that will get that dopamine to kick in for you. Have you taken up any new activities? set any new goals?

Be well,

Bob

[We Now Rejoin Real Life, Already in Progress]

Luna says: This is my chair. Don't you have a game to be playing, or something?

[We Now Rejoin Real Life, Already in Progress]

(The first post to this journal is actually in the Introduction forum, under the same title.)

So, I took a week off from gaming, ending last Wednesday, and seemed to find a little balance in my approach to electronic entertainment thereafter. That balance proved temporary, if not simply illusory, but I still think I learned something from it.

It's not just the games themselves that keep pulling me back, but all the various expressions and apparatuses of game culture. I'm not on any kind of social media, except that I do have an account on YouTube that generates recommendations based on what I've watched before . . . and my homepage there was generally always full of gaming-related videos: gaming news, tech news, endless (and pointless) lists, angry rants against developers, serious gameplay videos, goofy gameplay videos, and on and on.

Even during my short break, I realized that I would have to get rid of it all. The secret is to click the three-dot symbol next to the name of a video and select "do not recommend channel" from the drop-down menu. I've done that again and again: Goodbye WhatCulture Gaming! Goodbye Gameranx! Goodbye Let's Game It Out!

I thought of it then as a kind of electronic hygiene, clearing away everything that might draw my attention back to gaming so that, even if I were to start playing again, I could compartmentalize it more effectively. I thought I might be able to manage to play games without being so sucked in to the world of gaming.

Well, that didn't work very well, and I just had another lost weekend.

Now that I'm attempting to quit for a longer period of time - at least a year - I already have that hygiene protocol in place, which is to my advantage.

It also helps that I've already set up a more comfortable place to sit and read a book . . . though I have to vie with my cat for dibs on the best chair.

[We Now Rejoin Real Life, Already in Progress]

Hey, everyone.

Some call me Bob.

My history with gaming is somewhat peculiar. I knew I had obsessive/addictive tendencies way back when I was a teenager in the 1980s, even with those 8- and 16-bit wonders on the personal computers of the time. (TRS-80 CoCo, anyone?)

Once in a while, as an adult, I would have access to a game and fall into it. Eventually, as I became more established with a family and a mortgage, I started dabbling in the newer generation of PC games . . . and got on the treadmill of upgrading my PC to keep up.

I wouldn't say gaming destroyed my marriage, exactly. That was probably set to self-destruct before I really started gaming in earnest, about 6 or 7 years ago, for reasons I don't really want to go into. I do know that, had I not been gaming, I would have filed for divorce several years earlier, and spared my kids a lot of unnecessary stress and upheaval.

Well, now I'm trying to make a new life for myself, and I'm trying to get my professional life back on track, even in the face of the pandemic. But still, I keep getting drawn back into gaming, just out of habit.

So, I took a week off, during which I spent more time playing fiddle, reading interesting non-fiction, and starting to organize my post-divorce household. When the week was up, it seemed I could find some kind of balance: play a few hours after dinner, then settle down to read.

Then the weekend came, and I played for hours and hours on end.

So, last night, I decided to take another break. At first I thought, how about two weeks, this time?

No, not enough.

A month?

No, not enough.

How about a year?

So that's what I'm trying: no electronic games of any kind between now and April 1, 2022.

(In the back of my mind I'm thinking that, by that point, I'll be so far out of the gaming frame of reference that I wouldn't mind going gameless for another year, and another, and another.)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to finish that book . . .