I Don't Know What The F@ck I'm Doing

Welcome to Episode 3 of I Don’t Know What The F@ck I’m Doing: “A Treatise on Video Games”. (Two weeks in a row with an SAT level word in the title. Is this blog just an opportunity to toot my own horn about vocab? We will go ahead and pretend it’s not.) This week, I am going to break down what I believe to be the good, the bad, and the ugly of a topic near and dear to my heart. Let’s get into it.

It’s Call Of Duty League Championship time. What does that mean for most people? Literally nothing. What does that mean for me? It means hours spent over the next month watching grown men compete for their share of $1,000,000, and inspiration to write this blog! In my opinion, playing for large sums of money is a perfect reason to dedicate large portions of your life to a game. However I, like many probably (not) reading this, am just a gamer. No salary or prize money, no fame, and no trips across the world for tournaments for this guy. Just little ole me sitting in my apartment in a beat up office chair at a desk picked up from Goodwill.

Did you like how I started at the end there? Pretty sure a lot of great writers do that shit. Now, let’s take it back all the way to the beginning. It was ~2003 when my dad brought home my first console, The Nintendo GameCube. Oh, what a beaut she was. The memories I made playing “Star Fox Adventures” and “Mario Party” will stick with me always. Video games, specifically “Call of Duty”, brought me through what I would consider the golden age of my childhood. Maintaining a positive Kill/Death Ratio and grinding to be the first to Prestige were really the only things a young man had to worry about back in those days. Times were much simpler. Little did I know, that was the beginning of the longest running interest of my life. Yet here I am 20 years later writing a blog about it. Even though life has gotten more complex, I still enjoy getting home from work and booting up the console for a few hours of dominating my enemies. On top of the pure enjoyment value that gaming has, it allows me to stay connected with a group of friends that I no longer live around. It’s wonderful to log on and hear the chorus of chaos that makes me feel like I am in the same room with them. Lastly, research supports the idea that gaming has a positive effect on cognitive ability - this is an opinion piece, not a research article, so I won’t be backing that up with any facts. You’ll just have to take my word for it or look it up yourself. Let’s call those items “The Good”.

Unfortunately, most people who play video games will never receive any large monetary or social gains from playing them. Unless you are one of the small percentage of people who support themselves through streaming or playing professionally, the overall life benefits of playing video games level out fairly quickly aside from general enjoyment. Becoming a streamer able to support yourself requires building a viewership base willing to subscribe to your channel or donate to you. To do that you need the time to stream consistently, the personality to entertain your viewers, and a fair bit of luck in many cases. On the other hand, I am pretty sure everyone knows what it takes to be a professional athlete (esports included) but if you don’t, I will sum it up as a lifetime of dedication and a constant honing of your craft. On top of those factors, the difficulty/time requirements of trying to become someone able to support themselves by gaming will almost certainly have a heavy cost to real-world relationships and professional opportunities. The worst part is many people DO give up their jobs and relationships for a chance at that lifestyle. If it pays off then it’s awesome, but if it doesn’t you are in a world of hurt. We will call this previous paragraph “The Bad”.

Now for “The Ugly”. Video games (I believe this applies to lots of media, e.g., TikTok, but my personal experience is as a gamer, so I will address that) have absolutely destroyed my attention span and systems for mental gratification. I also feel like this will become more and more prevalent in our daily lives as time goes on. I really took no notice of those sobering facts until somewhat recently. I guess I started looking at things from the perspective of a Marketer with the goal of gaining and retaining a user base. Which, in extreme cases the ultimate retainage of a user base would be addiction. With this in mind, I’ve noticed the rewards systems in modern video games are designed to produce frequent spikes in your brain’s happy chemicals even though you really didn’t do anything of importance. For example, in Call of Duty, my collection of pixels in the shape of a man onscreen, shoots another players collection of pixels onscreen, resulting in a big, bright +100 to appear. At the end of the game, all of the “XP” or experience points you’ve earned is added to your “rank”, allowing you to level up and unlock guns, attachments, etc. This all creates a feeling of progress and achievement even though everything happening is completely arbitrary with no impact on the real world. The issue arises when your sense of achievement in this digital environment begins to outweigh your sense of achievement in the physical world. This creates an addiction to that digital environment. Why would someone want to deal with difficult life problems when you can feel a “real” sense of gratification within seconds of joining a game? It’s a tough trap, and one that I have recently broken out of. Concerningly, I see this cycle happening all over the digital universe. There are so many stimuli constantly competing for our attention that it feels like we really are in a race towards addiction. “Who can Crush the most Candies? Who can kill the most enemies? Who can get the most likes?”, The gamification of our world has had a terrible impact on our willingness to struggle to achieve something, and on the speed at which we believe it should be achieved. Who knows when or if it will ever stop. Maybe we all just end up like the floating chair people in WALL-E.

Again, I don’t have the answer to this; I just wanted to get my thoughts on the subject out there. Do I love video games? Absolutely. Will I keep playing them? You bet. Do I kind of wish I had never picked up a controller? Maybe a little… SIKE! I wouldn’t trade the memories I’ve made around gaming for the world. But I will be looking to expand my skills and experiences in other areas of life. Maybe touch a little grass every once in a while. That PlayStation 5 isn’t going anywhere.

Hopefully that little spiel got you interested in the awesomeness (or ugliness) that are video games, or in my future attempts to enlighten myself and the world. Anyway, thank you for reading and tune in next week for another episode of I Don’t Know What The F@ck I’m Doing.

Much Love.