Games Journalism Or Bust!

Games for Lent: The Aftermath

As anyone that follows my Twitter feed will know, I successfully completed my ‘Games for Lent’ challenge. I survived 47 days without playing any video games (with the exception of the occasional stint on Chess With Friends and Words With Friends, as I stipulated at the beginning).

And yes, I said 47. Not 40, as the Christians would have you believe. There are only 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday if you don’t count Sundays. Whether or not that means you can indulge on Sundays, I don’t know – I was that determined to prove I could make it all the way through.

In a cruelly ironic twist, I was away for Holy Saturday and couldn’t take any games (console, handheld or otherwise) with me, so I ended up having to last a few days longer. I was tempted to stretch it out for the full 50 days but by that stage, I figured I’d made my point and had no need to deprive myself any longer.

Throughout the experience, my colleagues often went out of their way to ridicule, question and otherwise belittle what I was doing – not out of spite, but simply because they couldn’t understand what the point was. In fact, that was the perhaps the most prominent question they hurled at me: “What will this actually accomplish?”

Having finished last Monday and given myself a week to get back into gaming, not only to satisfy my hunger but also to take a long, hard look at what I’d been missing, it’s time I ask myself the same question.

Oddly the most surprising discovery is also the least surprising: that gaming is integral to my life. That may seem like an extreme statement and, on the face of it, seems to be stating the obvious: I’m a games journalist – of course games will be important to my daily life. But I never realised how deeply rooted gaming has become in my world. They are my primary form of entertainment, a common subject of conversation (both in the office and among friends), the most effective way to relieve stress and a key source of inspiration for my writing.

As sad as it may sound, I even began to dream of games. Not those childhood dreams of being your favourite digital protagonist and shooting aliens or raiding tombs. No, I dreamt of accepting friends’ invitations to join them for multiplayer sessions, picking up the controller – and then throwing it down, determined to finish the full period of Lent. And this occurred a number of times. It’s something I am truly embarrassed about, but I take solace in that these dreams served to reassure myself about my own willpower.

Even in the real world, I was challenged by temptations. Constantly being aware of games through work was bad enough, but going to press events where there was pre-release code to be played was tough to turn down – particularly preview versions of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid: Other M.

At this stage I should say, it wasn’t as difficult as I first thought it would be. Games can be addictive – of this, I am now convinced – but even now I don’t regret passing up the opportunity to play Galaxy 2. Instead, I have learned that while games are important to me, I’m not dependent on them.

Indeed, I don’t think my withdrawal from games and the appetite that grew from this is necessarily a sign of addiction. It is the nature of how we interact with our media, and how we react with that media. Beyond that, it is part of human nature. Take any regular element from a person’s life and they start to focus on what they don’t have. Most people watch TV for hours and hours every day – if they had to give up TV for lent, they would seek other forms of entertainment, but their thoughts would still linger on the shows they were missing.

Granted, it helps that my life wasn’t entirely without games. I wrote about them every day, discussed them with colleagues and friends, and was still able to watch trailers or my housemate as he started Just Cause 2 and Borderlands (again). But as much as gaming is accessible to spectators, simply watching is not the same as experiencing these moments.

Gamers are just too used to having control over the actions on screen, too used to getting involved with what is happening. Telling my housemate to basejump off Panau’s Mile High Club doesn’t provide the same thrill of doing it yourself, even though it looks much the same on screen. Holding the controller and pushing the buttons is a physical link to the game world, and when that link is severed, it takes away one of the key elements of the gaming medium.

And try as I might, I couldn’t quite find anything that could replace games. DVDs that would once entertain me for hours were only passing distractions. I started reading a lot more – something I now recognise I need to find more time for – but even that couldn’t keep me focused for more than an hour or so.

The basic truth is that games are the most engaging form of entertainment. Time flies much quicker when playing, you feel more involved than you do when watching TV. Unlike books or film, where some unseen author or director is telling you a story, games create an experience where a story is happening to you. And once you’ve become accustomed to the level of interaction, anything else seems to be lacking.

Throughout lent, I thought going back to games would be simply a case of picking up where you left off. But games are too fast a medium for that – they leave you behind. In February, I was approaching the end of Mass Effect 2. In April, the world has already chewed up Mass Effect 2, BioShock 2, Final Fantasy XIII, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and God Of War III and spat them out – and it’s almost done with a helping of Just Cause 2.

You can’t afford to lose two months. My already extensive backlog is now behind schedule and I’m going to have to get some serious marathons in if I want to be caught up in time for Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Dead Redemption. So as much as I feel like I could give up games for lent again, I wouldn’t want to.

So what did I accomplish? For one thing, I have a greater understanding of what games mean to me and how they fit into my life. For another, I proved a point to others. My family, my girlfriend, my colleagues – anyone that thought I couldn’t give up games. And while I recognise that by the end they didn’t care if I succeeded or failed, I also proved to myself that I could do it. I knew I could from the beginning, but we all love to prove ourselves right.

I’ll finish off by stating that this post was not meant to make me a martyr or boast about how hard it was and how I pulled through it. But I leave you with this thought: could you give up games? Could you hold off from enjoying the most interactive form of entertainment known to man for the best part of two months?