Over the Christmas holiday, I downloaded and played the game Civilization (Civ for short). It’s a turn-based, strategy video game. You play as the ruler of an empire/civilization. You have to discover technologies like the wheel and iron working and space flight. You found cities and build monuments (Stonehenge, the Oracle, Sydney Opera House). The goal is to become the dominant civilization – either through science, war, diplomacy, culture, or colonizing Mars. It’s loosely based on human history and is surprisingly detailed in its game-play. Certain technologies and advancements lead to different politics, religions, military units, city improvements, and achievements. It’s the ultimate in badging, and with that much detail, it takes a while play.
I don’t play video games often. By often, I mean that aside from one night at a barcade in Kansas City, I don’t think I’ve played a game (any game) in the last two or three years. I don’t own a gaming system and I don’t own a TV. Not that I’m above those things. I gave them up six or seven years ago when I was trying to get out more (hiking, gardening, blues shows, and beaches). I also replaced video game and television screen time with a much more vacuous, and probably damaging, screen addiction: social media.
Two guys I knew, Dan and Dwayne, introduced me to Civ as a freshman in college. Dan and Dwayne were roommates. They lived a few doors down from me in the dorm. Dan was from Brooklyn. He was smart guy and we’d hang out talking Philosophy. Dwayne was from Duncannon, a small town near Harrisburg, PA. Despite the shoulder-length hair and leather jacket, Dwayne was too lanky and goofy to pull off that small town, heavy metal, rebel vibe. He, Dan, and I would stay up late and debate religion. Dan had a Macinstosh Classic (or maybe it was a Mac II). He was one of the few kids I knew who had his own computer. He and Dwayne would play Civ, and one night while hanging out in their room using Dan’s computer, I ended up playing. In the morning, I was still sitting by the blue light of the computer screen at Dan’s Desk when they woke up. As they poked fun at how hooked I was, they shared that they had each had similar all-nighter experiences when they first played.
I didn’t pull any all-nighters this time around, but if Christmas didn’t feel much like Christmas this year, it’s because I spent the bulk of my time in front of my computer playing this damn game. Despite its slowness (it’s much more like a board game than an action-packed game), it’s engrossing. Hours pass. Showers can wait until later.
I used to check-out/zone-out like this every year around Thanksgiving. I’d do the family thing on Thursday, but would spend Wednesday night, some of Thursday, and all of Friday playing (maybe Saturday and Sunday too). Some people had Black Friday shopping. I had Civilization.
For a few different reasons, I got more sucked into playing this time than I used to. For one, I didn’t have anything to pull me out of it. I wasn’t hanging out in someone else’s dorm room; I didn’t have any family events to attend; and there wasn’t anyone here who needed my attention. There wasn’t much else going on. Given this utter lack of resistance (or more attractive options), it became easy to sit, play, and ignore everything else. I still made nice dinners for myself. I still showered. I still did a few things around the apartment. But aside from that…
There was something else different about it this time – mentally different. In between games, I found myself feeling unmotivated, lethargic, and disconnected. My brain felt full and doggy (dull and foggy). It was as if a bomb had gone off and I couldn’t think straight. At times, I was reminded of the novel Infinite Jest in which a film is created that is so engrossing that anyone who watches it forgets to do basic things like eat. They eventually die.
Last night, when I finally hit save and quit, I checked one of the dating apps where someone had liked a reference I had made to Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” (“Everybody knows the captain lied”). I put the song on and folded the laundry. That’s when the lyrics combined with having done nothing but play this game for a few days combined to create a small tsunami of nihilism and ennui.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
I made some tea and tried to write about these seemingly related experiences of getting lost in a game, the subsequent brain fog, and the nihilistic ennui. And as I sat there trying to write, I couldn’t. It was as if the days were already lost – or more accurately, there was nothing to remember from them. Hitting something that hard for a prolonged period of time has to have some effect on our circuitry. But beyond that, I didn’t see the point in it – any of it. “The dice are loaded, the fight is fixed, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich.” I felt small and insignificant. I felt like these past few years of writing in this space, hasn’t been terribly different from having spent a few days lost in a video game. And in both cases, there was an eerie similarity of trying and wanting to emerge anew, yet feeling held back. I wanted to forget about the whole thing – pretend none of it ever happened (the days lost to a game, the years lost in contemplation) – not because they were unpleasant or bad, but because those days and years suddenly felt incredibly irrelevant.
Not being able to write (or think), I did what I usually do. I scrolled the news and read a poem or two on Twitter. I could sense my brain coming back to me – slowly. I felt like I was reconnecting, but that I’d only be able to do so by taking small steps towards normalcy. I went to bed.
Shutting my brain off for a few days was… fun? relaxing? automatic? necessary? I’ve been taking in lots of new experiences since mid-September, and maybe I needed to crash. This morning, my faculties seem to have returned. The brain fog is mostly gone. Where my thinking and language continues to fail is in trying to describe the aftertaste. It’s like waking up with a nagging hangover of shame and wanting to course correct. Shame for what feels like lost time (a few days with the game and maybe a few years here on this blog). It’s a desire to be serious, but not in the way we traditionally think of the word serious. It’s a desire for something with a little bit of heft and meaningfulness to it. It’s a desire to build something beyond a few recollections put to words or a simulated civilization – both of which are so easily wiped away by simply powering down and walking away.