Dying Flesh, Thriving Pixels
By: P Henry
Tags: Culture, Gaming, Purpose, Joy, Art

Quotes from “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus

Mystics… Find freedom in giving themselves. By losing themselves in their god, by accepting his rules, they become secretly free.

Against my better judgment, I have caved to temptation. An extended imposition towards self-isolation has caused me to turn to one of my oldest vices. At four it was the Gameboy, at six it was the Gameboy, at ten the Wii, at eleven the DS, and now I have purchased a Nintendo Switch. For about two weeks, I allowed my usual disciplined attitude towards spending to go untethered and purchased games with abandon. After the frenzy, I pulled my head out of this black hole of spending, and I stared in horror at the infinite mountain of interactive media I had collected. When all the games I purchased are transmuted to hours, there are well over 800 for me to indulge in. In my twenty-two years of life, I am dangerously close to mastering the art of staring at a screen and pressing buttons to complete an arbitrary goal, but I don’t know if I regret buying the very chains I now feel bound to until I complete this multi-year sentence of gamer-girl transformation. My bloodshot eyes scream that they do, but my uncalloused hands and electrifying synapse throughout the different lumps of my melted smooth-brain would tell a different story.

[The Gods] had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

To write down my three pillars of youthful addiction as sugar, television, and weed feels like a cliche. The same friend who gave me my first taste of weed when we were high school freshmen was also the first person to show me the original Halo on Xbox when we were both in kindergarten. I still remember laying on his bedside by side, shooting each other in the game just to test out the weight of the mechanics that were so new to me. For a six-year-old, it was more control than I had ever experienced before. I have a vague memory of one Christmas (perhaps that year, perhaps a year before) where my parents presented me with a turquoise GameBoy Color that came preloaded with Pokemon Crystal. These two memories are two sides of the same coin but still contain a wide barrier in the ways that they ignited different passions within me. On the one hand, the GameBoy ignited already established pleasure centers. The device fit into my small hands, and I can still remember the textures of hard plastic on a bed of tissue paper, a red light signaled the device had been turned on, and the pixel art of Suicune ran onto the title screen which showered my vision with a torrent of instant serotonin. The other experience was completely foreign to me. Laying on a bed in a new friends house, someone who I felt understood me in a way no one else I really knew up to that point did, thrusting a bulky controller into my hands that I had to struggle to grip, but feeling a weight of victory when I felt it become a part of my essence. I transported into a world of three-dimensional polygons to shoot a gun and watch blood spurt out of my opponent. This would be sacrilege if it occurred at my own house, but here I was in an isolated environment of my new friend's design. This was not the pleasure of the mind. it was something more taboo I wouldn’t understand until years later: the pleasure of the body.

When he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness.

Fast forward countless experiences and advancements in virtual technology, the last modern game I committed myself to in an isolated, individual setting was 2017s Prey for the Xbox One. I was a parks employee during the week; at night I would unwind with a joint, lay on a black leather couch, and sweat out of anxiety and dread as I transported myself to a space-station hellscape until my eyes dried out and I had to lay in bed and hydrate. There was something too advanced about this generation of consoles that caused me to stop. It was breaking down my body more than it was providing pleasure; I was no longer transported into a different space but absorbed into a sinister corporate hub of multimedia temptations and advertisements promising a whole new experience the instant I maxed out all activities the game provided. I was giving myself over to the virtual world and dove backward into bulk orders of weed and a new affinity for thrifting books the moment I returned to Boston at the end of the summer.

This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.

Now that I have firmly planted myself again in the culture of games, albeit in a way removed from the new current generation of the Xbox series X and Playstation 5, I have rediscovered a fear of the virtual world that threatens to trap me within it while my physical body rots away. While not nearly as intense since I cut weed out of my life since the beginning of autumn, I find that similar restrictions are necessary in order for me to retain a healthy relationship with this vice. On the nights that I do choose to indulge myself, it feels like I’m searching for something. It could be the pleasures of the body or a return to the sharpened reciprocals of pleasure that have been dulled with time and substances. While I’d like to see myself as Orpheus looking for Eurydice in the digital underworld, I can only look at myself as Sisyphus, pushing the same boulder up the same hill day and night to no end, carving a smooth path that will not make the pain more enjoyable, but only easier to enact.