The Truth About Gaming: How It Changed My Life

So apparently there’s some bogus study that came out—I guess this was back in August, I’m just seeing it now—that basically says you’re a loser and totally unattractive to women if you play videogames. In fact it puts videogames at the top of a list for the least attractive hobby a man can have—right up there with collecting figurines and magic tricks. They put “online trolling” as the fourth most unattractive thing, which is funny because I have a sneaking suspicion this list is actually online trolling. But it doesn’t matter, because a lot of women jumped on the so-called study and said right on sister!

In my freshman year at uni I knew a guy who skipped the first month of classes when WarCraft came out. Just locked himself in his room and that’s all he did. I know people who have spent tens of thousands of hours, not joking, playing this game in particular, to the exclusion of everything else—friends, family, a love life. None of it mattered. One guy I knew didn’t wash his bed sheets in over two years. I dunno if that’s related to his WarCraft addiction, but it seems relevant.

And if you’re a girl—I can understand why that’s a turn off. But that entirely misses the point, because that behavior is not a problem with videogames, it’s a problem with that person: they have an addictive personality and can’t control themselves, or they’re depressed, or they have some other issue. Because I’ve met plenty of other people with other hobbies who were just as annoying or unhealthy. I used to go bouldering and man you meet some weirdos in there. Same with skiing. In fact, I went to school in Boulder and… you know what maybe that was just a weird town.

But I digress. The fact is, I love videogames. I love them. I think they are a fantastic form of storytelling, one of the best we have as a species—they’re a form of art, I’m not joking. And I think demonizing them because a few people can’t control themselves is the same argument anti-gun people make about guns. I’ve always been a computer gamer, I never got into consoles—I don’t like the controllers, I can’t hit crap with a controller.

But I’ve been playing computer games since I was… two?? I used to sit on my dad’s lap and he’d fire up “Their Finest Hour” and he’d hop into a spitfire and let me push the spacebar to shoot down the Me109s over the Cliffs of Dover. And I loved it, that’s one of my favorite memories. Then I vividly remember playing a game where you paint dinosaurs, and another game where you play Mickey Mouse and solve puzzles. Mickey told a bunch of jokes, and I still remember some of them. How do you catch a squirrel? Climb a tree and act like a nut! That was high-brow comedy to a five-year-old.

There was another game, Ultima Underworld Stygian abyss… isn’t that an incredible name? So much better than what we get now, “Unknown 9: Awakening,” meaningless slop. Anyway, in Ultima you run around a dungeon and fight spiders and drinking potions, and to this day I clearly remember playing with my dad and being super excited to fight the spiders. And then of course the original Doom came out—but my dad wisely wouldn’t let me play that. A little too satanic for a 7-year-old.

And how about kid pix! Do you remember that one? I had so much fun with Kid Pix—it was such a great tool to give kids to let them be creative and explore their artistic skills. I’ve even let my 2-year-old play with it, but I think coordinating the mouse and keyboard with actions on the screen is still a little over her head. And Wing Commander 2, where you fight these giant alien cats in a starfighter with live action video featuring Mark Hamill before he went crazy. And just a slew of World War 2 flight sims, like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe—which taught me so much about airplanes and history and the time period. I clearly recall spending hours on a mission flying a B17 over Germany, waiting to arrive at the target, and listening to the tinny, comforting drone of the engines.

There was another game, and I’ll be eternally grateful to anyone in the comments who can help me figure out what it is, where you had these blank scenes and you basically put in all the elements you wanted—trees, rocks, animals, and then you could animate it and add music. It was phenomenal, I created so many cool stories with that game.

And that’s the point! Games are wonderful learning tools, and for kids, they can let you express yourself in ways you can’t do anywhere else. I used to play a lot more games than I do now. I’ve got two kids, and hopefully more someday soon, God willing, so I’m lucky if I get an hour or two a week to play. And I’ve never been a big multiplayer, I love single player games with great stories.

Games you can immerse yourself in, with beautiful art and worlds you can explore and get lost in. I specifically remember playing Batman: Arkham City—a terrific game, by the way—and wandering into a random bathroom in some old warehouse and just marveling at the level of detail. There were boxes and magazines and pictures on the wall, broken tiles and spiderwebs and dirt on the floor and mops and buckets and all these thousand little details that made the room absolutely real—and it hit me as I was taking in all these little mundane details, that someone put them all in there.

An artist drew all these things, designed them in the game, and hand-placed each and every one of them into this tiny, random bathroom, that probably no one would ever see, and this artist put them in there for me to look at, to give the game more realism, to make it feel more believable. But the point was an artist, a real person, had created all these things and put them inside the game, and that really hit home for me. This wasn’t just a game, it was art.

Another great example is the game Assassin’s Creed Origins. You play in ancient Egypt, which right off the bat is one of my favorite periods in history. And you start out in this temple that’s been buried under the sand. And you walk into this huge open chamber that’s just breathtakingly beautiful. You can see all these fallen statues, and pillars, and this massive vaulted ceiling with these intricate little gold stars painted on this brilliant blue sky… and it’s completely enthralling. When I found this room I just sat back in my chair and stared at the screen for a good ten minutes, just soaking in the atmosphere. It was so lifelike and real, it transports you to another place in history, it lets you go somewhere you could never go in real life, somewhere you’ve only ever read about in books. But I got to go there, in a videogame.

That’s one of my favorite games of all time, and I spent countless hours wandering around Egypt exploring these tombs and imagining what it would have been like to really be there. And the developers are aware of this—they actually have a game mode where there are no enemies or combat, you just walk around all these real life, historical locations—that the developers visited themselves and photographed and scanned and mapped to make them as realistic as possible—and the game teaches you about their history and what happened there, so you can explore them for yourself and learn about one of the most incredible civilizations on earth.

How can that be a waste of time, or “unattractive?” In Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, you go to ancient Greece, and it’s so realistic that a university actually uses the game to teach their students about Greek history!

Something else I think is important to mention—videogames have actually changed my life. Significantly. Some of the most important interests I have, the things I’m most passionate about in my whole life, I discovered through videogames. Let’s start with Vikings.

It’s safe to say that I am a Viking fanatic, I have somewhere around 45 books on Vikings, not joking, books on Nordic culture and history and Norse mythology, and I’ve read them all. In fact I’m currently reading another book, right now, at this very moment, called “Norse Mythology” by Scott Lewis. I’ve personally travelled all over Scandinavia just to visit famous Viking historical sites—Viking settlements  in Iceland, Ireland, England, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland—I even went to Istanbul in Turkey to see the Hagia Sofia where Viking members of the Varangian guard carved their names into the stone balustrade overlooking the central hall.

I’ve taken half a dozen university courses on Vikings, including a course from Oxford University last summer, just for fun. And all of that, that massive chunk of my life devoted to studying and literally traveling the world to explore Viking history and culture, all of it, is because of one videogame I played back in high school called “Age of Mythology.”

My friend casually gave me a copy because he wasn’t interested in it, little knowing he was handing me the keys to a lifelong obsession. I was enthralled at the stories of Norse Mythology in the game, something I’d somehow never heard of before. I got totally lost in the world of Vikings and their seafaring adventures, and bought countless books that I couldn’t stop reading. I remember being a teenager, working in the kitchen of a restaurant washing dishes, and on my break I would flip over a wash bucket and sit in the corner behind the freezer and read about Thor and Freya and Odin and all the rest. Opening up all these wonderful new worlds in my mind, and all because of a single videogame that apparently some women who’ve never played a game in their life, think is a waste of time.

I’m not mad, that would be silly, but I think they’re holding extremely ignorant opinions.

It’s the same thing with Chernobyl. Back in 2002 I discovered this game called “Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl.” It’s basically an alternate-history horror story about a mercenary who gets sucked into a life-and-death struggle to uncover the mystery of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I was hooked from day one. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on about Chernobyl, and I even went as far as writing a massive short story about Chernobyl and some monsters that lived there.

Years later, when I found out they were going to tear down part of the power plant in real life, I booked a ticket and flew to Ukraine to see Chernobyl for myself. I got permission from the government to explore the power plant and Pripyat, and I wandered through all the old abandoned streets and apartment buildings with a sense of disbelief that this was actually real and that after all these years, I was really there.

I can’t quite say what fascinates me about Chernobyl, but it tickles every single part of my brain you can think of. The desolation, the mystery, the abandoned buildings, the Soviet art and architecture. It’s lonely, haunting, other worldly, like it shouldn’t exist—but it does! The tragedy of the story is horrifically sad, all the lives needlessly lost because of the hubris of communist tyrants.

Since then I’ve started work on a documentary about Chernobyl and my time there, and I’m also writing a novel that ties into Chernobyl, kind of a sci-fi horror story—and again, all of this… was inspired by a videogame I played when I was a kid. How is any of this bad? How is any of it a waste of time?

The simple fact is that it’s not. These are rewarding pursuits, and I regret none of them. My fascination with Tibet and Tibetan history and mythology can be traced back to the 2014 game Far Cry 4. My fascination with the military and what motivated me to apply for the Marine Corps, was the 1998 videogame Half Life. It’s probably for the best that I have asthma and they wouldn’t accept me, I absolutely hate being told what to do and I don’t think that would’ve gone over well with my CO’s. But for a thirteen-year-old, becoming a Marine Force Recon sounded like the stuff dreams are made of.

My love of World War 2 history probably owes a good deal to the 2001 game Return to Castle Wolfenstein. That’s also what jumpstarted my fascination with medieval German history and actually prompted me to take four years of German language courses when I started university.

Do you see my point? I can’t speak to mindlessly losing yourself to an addiction and escaping the problems in your life with an unhealthy gaming problem… but clearly, you can get a lot more out of gaming than what some people think. And getting immersed in good stories, and maybe even learning some life skills, is just part of it, because despite the anti-social stigma, gaming can be an incredible bonding experience.

My dad played computer games back in the day, and he made friends all over the country—and some of those people became my friends too. There was a guy named Matt who I used to play Star Trek games with, he was pretty nerdy, and we got along really well. We had some deep discussions that meant a lot to me at the time. Matt was pretty unhealthy, and actually had a heart attack and died when he was in his 40s. His death hit me pretty hard, to say the least. But that was because he was a friend, someone I cared about—and someone I met and bonded with because of video games. Tell me, how is that a bad thing?

Here’s another example: my best friend lives in Colorado, halfway across the country, and we’ve only gotten to see each other in person about five times in the last 15 years, which is really sad, honestly. Perils of having jobs and families. But, every Saturday night, we log on and play a game together for an hour or two, and I get to hang out with my best friend. We catch up on each other’s lives and spend some time together having fun shooting some zombies or whatever. So instead of just sitting on the phone for an hour—which I don’t know many guys who just call each other up to talk on a regular basis—we get to do something together, spend some quality time together, and it just happens to be through gaming.

So I’d ask all the women out there who hate gaming, is that wrong? Should my friend and I not do that? Should I not play an hour or two of videogames a couple times a month, because some femsplaining women think it’s dorky? Well that don’t bother me none.

And this doesn’t even cover the topic of computer building! That’s an entire hobby unto itself, which is incredibly fun and rewarding. I built my last two computers, and I’ve built computers for my father, and for friends, and it’s a ton of fun picking out parts and sitting there figuring out how they all go together, testing the system, seeing how it works and playing with the settings, tinkering with the different parts until that glorious moment when you push the power button for the first time and it boots up. It’s a ton of fun, and with all due respect, I think the people who make fun of us gamers for enjoying our hobby are simply just ignorant and uninformed.

But that’s my take, what do I know! Thanks for making it through this tangential rabbit hole about my odyssey with videogames. It ain’t much, but it’s honest, and I felt like sharing.

What do you think, do you like to game? Can you keep the addiction in check, or are you LFM Kara PST? I wanna hear from the ladies too, what’s your opinion of guys who game? And has this changed your mind at all? Lemme know in the comments below.

And don’t forget to tell your kids that Communism has failed every time it was tried.