Giving Up Gaming 4 – Pleasure Center

Merry Holiday of your choice, nondescript and easily offended gray blobs of the internet. Here’s hoping it gave you joy in a way that brought no pain to others. Except for the jerks who DDoS’d PSN and XBL. You guys just made everyone’s lives a little more miserable. Why?

In the past few weeks I’ve done a few things, one of them has been continuing to read. In my long sojourn with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I came across something that stood out to me in a big way. It was part of a chapter which discussed what people center their life around and the strengths and weaknesses of some of those centers. The particular paragraph was focused on Pleasure Centeredness. Rather than try to synopsize I am going to quote the passage.

Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of “fun,” constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger ”high.” A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now.

-Steven R Covey “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”
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Video. Games.

Mr. Covey says in one paragraph what many within games media have spent thousands of words on. When you base your identity around being a gamer, someone whose main interaction with the world and themselves is to consume game media, you are focusing on the pleasure center. By and large a videogame creates no lasting change or impression upon a person. You’re not a better person because you play games. You’re not smarter just because you play games. In fact, if you only identify as a gamer and little more, then what good are you to anyone, including yourself?

Don’t feel too bad; this is a question I’ve had to ask myself as well. It’s part of the reason I’ve cut games to once a day and considered cutting them altogether.

The term narcissistic in that quote I feel is of specific importance. I’ve met many gamers who perceive themselves as better than the plebs who simply watch television. The sports fans, specifically. However, I caught something on TV the other day that has been on my mind for quite some time. A woman in the crowd of a football game was cheering, literally screaming, with everything she had for her team. She was experiencing such elation that I actively envied her. I’ve hated sports for a long time, and still dislike them, but this woman was receiving something from that game which my videogames had never given me. I’ve cried, I’ve shouted, I’ve laughed, I almost broke a PSP because Tekken has a cheating AI that can rot in the cold void of space. But never in my life had I cared about anything in my life as much as that woman cared about that football. It wasn’t about her, it was about everyone around her, the team, the other fans; she was deriving her joy from supporting others. I still envy her but I think I’m starting to understand her.

That brings me back around to narcissism. The reason (I feel) that things like death threats, Gamergate, and general vitriol happen within games is because when people base their life around consuming games, they have nothing. When the game ends you are left with nothing but a memory and not even a memory of yourself being courageous or exceptional in any way, but the memory of a false “you” doing these things. You literally have nothing to show for your time. The fun has passed and it’s on to the next distraction. You will not find lasting happiness within games, ever.

I was and am just a guilty of this as any gamer. Bullied in school for being “weird” I sank into games as an escape. They held for me something this world held above my reach. A place where I fit in, where I was the hero, and it pleased me greatly. It took many many years for me to see the cage I had built for myself.

Being a “gamer” something that had once given me a sense of belonging, was now a weight that held me away from reaching any goals. My depression, a symptom of my pleasure sickness, was overwhelming. I had everything I wanted and still felt very empty. I’d like to wrap up by saying that everything is better now but it’s a slow process. I have come a long way in many years and it seems as though filling my life with fulfillment has involved draining it of games.

Need an example? Well, the real final straw was catching every Pokemon. A complete Dex. Literally one of every single Pokemon rests in the Pokebank right now. The last one was Slyveon. Upon completion I felt nothing.

To be fair centering your life around immediate pleasure is a huge problem within our society today but games are especially guilty.

And that’s really all I have to say about that.

I’ve been going to Taekwondo with my wife a few times now. I’ve got a uniform and everything. Can I kick butt? No. I’m lucky to kick above the knees.

My first night there one of the instructors grabbed a large padding shield and told me to hit him. I did. Again. I did. This went on for about ten minutes and by the end I was using all my force (admittedly not much) on this bag. I was panting and heaving. Every throw was everything I had. As a child I had fought, but this was different. I’ve always been very afraid to let myself really go. I don’t like hurting others, even in self defense. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I’ll be interested to see what happens when we finally start sparring.

I also played some more Infamous Second Son. Last post I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Last This Game is Broken I slammed it. Now I’m not so sure I was right. The problems I have with it still exist but it still is a fun game. Barry Villatoro (Owner LevelSave.com) wanted me to write about why it was bad in a way that mirrored this article, but I just don’t have the passion for it. Batman Arkham City was a bad game, Second Son is just mediocre.

I’ll talk more about Christmas and such in my next post. I didn’t mean for this post to turn into what it did but this is what happens when I let my mind freely run upon the keyboard. I would love to talk to you about your thoughts on it. Positive or negative. You can leave a comment here, shoot me an email to [email protected] or his my twitter, @Snickelsox.

P.S. I’d like you to take a second to think about your life today. Is it what you want? How can you change it for the better?