i don’t like video games as much these days.
no, not like that.
i don’t play video games anymore.
no, not like that.
i have never played a video game. i will never play a video game. despite evidence to the contrary, i did not produce art or content centered around a game. i did not play them, i did not assimilate them, and i did not adore them.
a bridge for you: being and play are mutually exclusive.
i can do one. i can do zero. i can not do two. slot conflict. burning lake.
engaging in an elaborate, self-organizing story is having that story become you. no one’s at the wheel. there is no player. there is no judge. there’s only the game.
it is, therefore, the perfectly efficient form of dissociation. i do not experience the game, or the world outside it, because i do not exist. an emulated subject writhes in my stead, playing out a shadow of an expected experience. it is wholly defined by the ludic context. as soon as the context is dead, it is deallocated, and i reconstitute. the “experience” is hastily backported onto the memory. it’s basically a dream.
this is a strange, baffling thing to come to after basically forever of considering myself… not a “gamer”, but still someone defined in context of augmented play, someone with extensive vocabulary for handlng it, someone who can’t see anything else in the waters over her shoulder. but here we are.
it perfectly answers the dissonance between discourse and subject matter that always ate at me. for years i’d weave around the answer, wondered why the intensity of my records was fleeting compared to what others taked of. i’d push past the mismatch, recalibrate my sentences before sending, tell myself it’s anhedonia. well, it was, but also it wasn’t. i can not, i could not ever possibly match their experience, because i don’t have any at all. not even once before now did i query, “maybe games aren’t for you”.
the answer is probably “yeah, they aren’t”. there are exceptions, but they are at the medium’s edges. low-mechanical IF and virtual hangouts. basically-books and borderline-meatspace. straftat, for a month in 2024, as a lever for sadism. statistically insignificant.
well, shit. now i have to hot-swap the wheels on a running truck. at least it’s a truck i can afford to lose.