The heyday of the literary addiction memoir might have passed. Addiction now plays second fiddle to other topics, like hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild or the relationship between daughter and mother in Domenica Ruta’s With or Without You. Addiction memoirs, the kind seen in Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life or Elizabeth Wurtzel’s More, Now, Again are somewhat absent from today’s memoir shelves.
Instead of dying out, though, I’m hoping that addiction memoirs are just biding their time, waiting for a comeback. What I’m especially excited about is the potential for a wave of literary memoirs about video game addiction. Think about it. The time is now ripe for an author to tell their story of how an MMORPG destroyed their marriage, how they skipped meals to repair their Xbox, or how they were unable to hold down a job due to their intense Quake tournament schedule. To simulate what these video game addiction memoirs might look like, I’ve taken excerpts from my favorite addiction memoir — Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story — and replaced references to alcohol with references to video games. I think you’ll agree with me — the future of addiction memoir looks exciting.
Page 3:
I played video games.
I played web-based games at work, and I played cheesy touch-screen trivia and memory games at a dingy pizza place across the street from my office, and I played at home. For a long time I played first-person shooter games, and I learned to appreciate the subtle differences between Call of Duty and Battlefield and Counterstrike, but I never really cared about those nuances because, honestly, they were beside the point. Toward the end I kept two televisions in my house: the minimalist, modest one for show, which I kept in the living room, and the real TV, which I kept in the guest bedroom with the headsets and controllers. The peripherals plugged up to the show TV were expected, a DVD player and a cheap sound system. The real TV had wires everywhere, each connecting to consoles and a computer. I was living alone at the time, when I did this, but I did it anyway and it didn’t occur to me not to: it was always important to maintain appearances.
I played when I was happy and I played when I was anxious and I played when I was bored and I played when I was depressed, which was often. I started to raid my childhood room’s closet in my parents’ home the year my father was dying. He’d be in the back of their house in Cambridge, lying in the hospital bed in their bedroom, and I’d steal into the tiny closet and pull out a Gameboy that I’d hidden under a stuffed animal. It ran so slow–the thing must’ve been fifteen years old–but my father was dying, dying very slowly and gradually from a brain tumor, so I played it anyway and it helped.
Page 71:
Bits and pieces come back to you. You remember the early part of the evening clearly, the first few games, the way you started to get into a groove. Perhaps you remember being on a kill streak, or playing co-op with someone you met somewhere–a chat room, a website, an instant message. Then things start to get a little blurred. You remember yelling: you were yelling at him, or he was yelling at you. You felt strong and focused and you had a sense of purpose, as though some secret part of you were rising up, a part you rarely have access to when you’re not playing. This felt like a kind of liberation: real life is slow and meaningless; the game is a rush and intensity and satisfaction.
There are more games; things get blurrier. At some point there was commitment: he sent you a friend request or you asked him for his gamer tag. You moved alongside each other, dominating, and you felt unstoppable, and that feeling gave you a sense of power and possibility.
Now your eyes throb; you lie still in bed. The clear memories stop there and all you have is snippets. You were accomplishing things with him: things that felt important, difficult things. What were they? Something about a boss fight. Some elaborate strategy for an ambush you invented one day on the bus. Some . . . some tournament, some LAN party. You strain to remember and lying there in bed this makes you cringe, this wondering what you did, how noobie it might have been.
Page 117:
Most competitive gamers (not all) sooner or later have to grapple with the idea that they have a disease. Some people play in wildly addictive ways the first time they ever turn on a console: they go days without sleep, call in sick to work, and gamers like that may have an easier time than some of us understanding that certain powerful psychological forces are at work, that their brains respond to games very differently from those of other gamers. But those of us who’ve experienced more gradual and insidious descents into video game addiction have to turn the disease concept over and over in our minds, to learn over long periods of time to believe and accept it.
Back in those years of playing World of Warcraft–and for more than a decade after that–I was nowhere near believing I had an illness, nowhere near even considering it. The body, after all, colludes with the mind, and I was still profoundly affected by the simple manner of physiology, by the simple truth that playing video games made me feel better.
Plus, until I quit, gaming seemed more to me like a social issue than a psychological one. This is one of our culture’s most basic assumptions about the hobby, and one of its most destructive: we figure that gaming too much is a sign of social ineptitude and a lack of a structured childhood; that it’s “nerdy”; that it can be overcome by will.
Page 162:
As a rule, active gamers are powerless people, or at least a lot of us tend to feel that way in our hearts. That’s something you usually can’t tell from looking, especially when it comes to the high-functioning brand of gamers, people who manage to hold on to all the trappings of personal power, like jobs and families and intact savings accounts. But you have to step back and look beneath the facades. In fact, very few people who game competitively can learn to feel like powerful players in their own lives; all the strength comes from a screen.
Page 185:
My father got sick about a year after the carpal tunnel surgery and I started spending more nights at Michael’s apartment, partly because he lived near my parents and partly because he was a comfort I needed. Gradually, I took to hiding games. I’d stop at a Blockbuster on my way over to pick up a movie for after dinner and I’d see those new release on the rack by the cash register. I’d feel exhausted and depressed, these stressed weighing on me like stone, and I’d think: Insurance. Just in case I feel I need it. New releases in the purse, new releases in the drawer at Michael’s where I kept my stuff, new releases transferred surreptitiously to my toiletry bag so I could play an hour or two before I went to bed, to help me sleep.
At some point–I don’t remember when–it got too embarrassing to stand there in the Blockbuster every other day and ask for two or three games, so I bought twenty or so online and stashed them in Michael’s unfinished basement, behind an old refrigerator. I’d steal out of the bedroom at night and marathon game my way through them. “I’m going to smoke a cigarette,” I’d say, and then I’d slip down the back stairs and into the basement. It was nasty down there–cold in the winter, dusty, cluttered with old furniture and paint cans–but I’d slide the Xbox out of its hiding place and sit there on a small wooden chair, playing and smoking, and I’d feel relief.
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