My head pops off the pillow at the witching hour. I've no idea what time it is, but the darkness showing through the cracked white paint of my room’s shutters tells me it’s still the middle of the night. Perhaps sometime early in the morning, when the monsters come out. I am a timid child. Going to sleep is hard for me, meaning that going back to sleep after waking up is nigh insurmountable. Yet up to this point in my life, I’ve never gotten out of bed in the middle of the night. Some combination of awe and fear has glued me there, hunkering down until I see the sun and smell my mom’s coffee brewing downstairs in the kitchen.
However, this time I am called. I take a few deep breaths and jump out of bed. I’m wearing patterned pajamas, cranes, dozers, and graders falling from my abdomen. One of my favorite books as a kid was called Dazzling Diggers, and my mom’s favorite quote of mine from that time was: “I love levers.”
The air in my room and the upstairs landing is cold and shimmery, as if the night sky had come inside. My parents like to sleep with white noise, and the whir of their fan is an unadorned roar through what otherwise is silence. I creep down the stairs on tippy-toe. I know if I’m caught, by my parents or – worse – the things that creep around in the darkness while we sleep, that my life could all come crashing down around me, my wants and needs swept up like soft flesh in the claws of supervision.
I make it down okay. Nobody’s in the living room. I’ve never seen it before at this hour. The potted plant on its small wooden stand in the corner by the TV looks more like a prehistoric bird. I hear it say my name in a botched British accent. The corrugated squares on the carpet swallow me, their textures making my feet feel numb and gorgeous. I stare at them, but not for long. Otherwise, I might get lost, and I am so very close now.
Now I open the media cabinet. Now I press that satisfying circular button and feel the warmth of my GameCube’s orange ON light. Now I turn on the TV and fiddle with the remote to shift from the petrifying static of the wrong input to the one that is nothing if not oh so right.
The familiar whirring of the console’s minidisc. That iconic stinger that goes “dooh bah dee bah di bah dooh bah dooh bah dee bah di bah dooh bah dee bah di ba dooh bah...blump.” A few more button presses and the dulcet tones of my favorite game’s introductory harmonica spin up. Mario and Luigi are tossing a baseball, and before I know it, all their friends are getting involved. I’ve snuck down in the middle of the night to play the 2005 classic Mario Superstar Baseball.
Is it actually a classic? I’m not sure. Was it my one true love as a child? Absolutely yes. Did my parents come down three minutes later and put an end to my intrepid mission? Indeed. Indeed, they did.
The point of sharing this memory, however, is to access the fact that such anecdotes are far more common than I once thought. On a recent episode of Triple Click, I heard Kirk Hamilton discuss how he used to wake up before dawn to install and play Doom on his dad’s laptop for a couple hours before deleting it from the hard drive and returning the device to its original spot so that no one would be the wiser. It got me thinking about how exciting games are when we’re young, and how playing games is actually one of the first things we do when we come into the world.
Not video games, per se. But for babies and toddlers, everything has the potential to become gamified. Interactions as simple as peek-a-boo or batting at a mobile to those as complicated and involved as learning to read can be viewed as forms of games. Each one challenges young minds to learn the rules of engagement and explore within their parameters. In many ways, learning anything at all is a kind of game, as existing within a set of ever-evolving norms presents challenge after challenge after challenge to be mastered and, thus, overcome.
This all came rushing back to me while I sat with my mom and grandmother (who we call “Gabba Dot” – “Gabba” because my sister couldn’t pronounce grandma as a child, and “Dot” as a hypocorism of her full name: Dorothy). Gabba was sitting in a hospital bed at her assisted living facility in Falls Church, Virginia. The week prior, she’d gotten up in the middle of the night and taken a fall outside of her bathroom. She broke her jaw and received a large gash to the uppermost limit of her forehead that extended back into her scalp. She spent a few nights in the hospital and was now on the mend back home. My mom and I sat on either side of her. Mom sifted through a deck of cards by Gabba’s bedside, pulled out the jokers, and started shuffling.
Gabba Dot has dementia, and her short-term memory has all but escaped her now. She only recognizes her daughters, and even they’re becoming foggy. Sometimes she’ll introduce my mom to her nurses as her sister or her cousin, though she’ll always remember her name. “This is Beth,” she’ll say. “Come to visit.” Though she doesn’t know me, she’ll often wink at me and comment on my scraggly beard. “He’s got whiskers,” she’ll whisper to my mom, loud enough to be heard in the adjoining room. She’s always been a paragon of positivity, and that hasn’t changed, even after her fall.
Most of this visit, though, she’s been closed off, eyes shut or gazing into the milky distance, keeping to herself. That changes when Mom pulls out the cards. We play a modified version of War – comparing what we draw from our own little decks three ways to see who has the highest card and, thus, who wins the pile. My mom holds Gabba’s card up to her face with each draw, and Gabba reads the number and suit with swift precision. “Jack of Diamonds, Ace of Clubs, Nine of Hearts.” She takes my pile quickly. Now it’s Mom versus Gabba for the game.
Cards are not video games, but their ubiquity speaks to the human instinct and desire to game at its core. They illustrate the point that, at some moment or another in everyone’s life, they’re likely to have played a game. With friends or family, for money, pride, or – hopefully first and foremost – just for fun. Playing War with my mom and Gabba Dot soon dovetailed with my GameCube memory and got me thinking about capital-G Games as a common language and how the art and joy of play are a certainty of human life.
Games help us learn when we are but days old. They captivate us when we’re young, challenge us as we grow, and keep us company as we fade out. They are a language that everyone can speak and can be scaled to all ability levels thanks in large part to the extent to which they are ingrained in the very act of being human. Gabba Dot will always know what an Ace of Spades is just from a symbol on a sheet of stylized cardstock. She’ll understand that it beats all other cards. Why? Because it does. Because those are the rules.
A large part of what we were put to do here together involves games. Which brings me to the following questions. What does it mean that some of the first and last things we do in life are games? Do games enhance the function of our brains or encourage their wanderings? And what does all this say about the time we spend gaming between the ages of five and seventy?
We come into this world gaming, and go out gaming too. That’s because games have rules and rules are concrete boundaries that help us manifest our goals and give structure to our thoughts. We crawl out of nothingness to encounter games because they help us find meaning in a place where there is none. Ever since I visited Albert Camus’ grave in Lourmarin, France, I’ve counted myself among the Absurdists. We believe that life is inherently meaningless, but that every person’s goal should be to imbue their life with meaning, to make their own where there is none, to crackle up a beacon of combusted light where there is only darkness. This philosophy cuts to the heart of why I think and care about Games. Because they are morsels of meaning where otherwise there might be none, concrete experiences to which we can cling even when everything else is enveloped by fog. Instruments that help us welcome nothingness again when our bodies can’t hold us even a moment longer.
Games enhance the function of our brains when we intentionally engage with their systems. They also, likely, have a hand in turning them to mush when Games help us tune out the rhythms of outside life and provide an escape. Video games have made me feel smart and dumb in kind. Finishing Return of the Obra Dinn had me believing I could be a crack detective, solving unfinished cases through the ages with the sharpness of my wit alone. However, crawling away from my computer after playing Baldur’s Gate 3 too late into the evening makes me feel like I’ve devolved into nothing but a hulking mass of loose flesh and regret. Games fall on either side of this spectrum due to the broadness of the category that holds them. However, at the end of the day, it is my contention that Games enrich our lives, regardless of how much they stimulate our minds, and that’s what matters. Gaming in a nursing home will be a surreal experience that I hope I get to have one day.
Lastly, the time we spend gaming when we haven’t just been born or aren’t about to die is time well spent. The art of play helps us better understand ourselves in safe environments that encourage us to experiment and explore when otherwise we might be too timid to do so. Games may serve to close us off from experiences in the “real world” at times – I’ll be the first one to acknowledge that (especially after those late night BG3 sessions that leave me feeling like a zombie the next day). But they also provide us with a common language that is the most joyous avenue to human connection I’ve experienced in my adult life. Talking to a stranger about a game makes all the anxiety of a new encounter melt away. Talking to a friend about a game makes me feel closer to them. It’s because, regardless of all the other elements that make that other person who they are – that pulsating life so full of facets right in front of you – you’ve both put time into learning the exact same set of rules and have played within those rules to make unique memories.
Sharing those memories with one another is sharing a common ground upon which you can visualize and empathize with each other’s experience. This engenders intimacy, and intimacy makes life sweet.