Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Today, I sit and think about grief.

It’s been just over three years since my grandfather died, and posts like this one really do make you think about why, exactly, you’re so deep into electronic escapism until you find someone who can support you. Think of this post as a rite of passage for me, and a response to something Sinan wrote on his blog that touched me deeply. In eight days time I’ll be standing on a stage, receiving my diploma, in a kilt. This was something I promised my grandfather, silently, the day after he died.

The night he passed away was during my going away party. I had around twenty friends round, and we were all laughing and celebrating my last night in north London before I moved to Greenwich for university. I remember they were all gawping as I’d recently shaved my head after letting my hair grow for a good couple of years. It was a nice night, and when my mother took me aside and told me he’d finally moved on to pastures anew, I didn’t really respond at first. I simply walked out of the garden, and down my driveway. At the end of my driveway stands a pair of pillars; flat at the top, and wide enough to sit on. I’d spent a lot of my childhood sitting on those pillars, and now I returned, years later, to sit on my favourite, the one on the right.

I sighed, and wondered what everyone was doing inside the house. We’d known it was coming for some time; I’d visited him in the summer, travelling up to Glasgow to visit a man who spent an hour talking to me before I realised he thought I was my father in the ’70s. I went back inside, and came face to face with twenty of my dearest companions in the process of cleaning up the house, in preparation to leave. I stopped them from leaving, and we finished the evening, for the sake of my mental health.

When I moved into university, I had nothing. A tiny box room and an iMac, with no allowances on the uni internet service save for World of Warcraft. I had been playing on and off for a year at that point, but it was then I became deeply engrossed. I did it to escape, to move away from an environment that to me, was a stark reminder of loss, and of pain. New friends, places and experiences helped me to settle into a world away from home, only finally leaving it when I met someone who was capable of supporting me emotionally to the point where I didn’t need to raid four nights a week just to forget all the bullshit that occurred in my life outside the screen.

The thing with games and using them to escape from grief or hardship is, fundamentally, that it doesn’t work. As Sinan said, eventually, instead of moving you away from the memories that cause you so much pain, they start to remind you of it. My three years at university constantly reminded me of my grandfather. I’ve not even passed the denial stage with that, yet, and that’s something that I’ll deal with in time. But videogames are an odd beast; there for you when needed, but never quite strong enough to blot out the thing that’s really digging deep into your chest.

A lot of people will claim their guildmates were a great source of compassion and understanding, and I’d be the first to agree with them. But the loophole here is that you’re never playing games when you’re talking to the people you met whilst playing a Tauren warrior; you’re talking to them in real life. These are real people, with real problems and feelings, and you’re subverting the idea of the MMO, turning the endless grind-raid-repeat into something deeper, something more real.

When you shed tears at Dom’s wife passing on, or Aeris being fatally impaled by Sephiroth’s blade, are you grieving for the character, or what the character represents? Fundamentally, everything reminds us of something, and death reminds us of the worst kinds of pain. When we’re playing games, we never take a moment for those who pass away in front of our endless spray of bullets, but we take a moment to consider grief in substance when the protagonist, ergo the player, loses a close friend, love interest, or relative. We spend hours identifying with our avatars when they kill, maul, maim and feel joy at victory, so why not when they feel loss, or sorrow?

To lose someone is to take stock of what you do have, and focus on it relentlessly, lest you lose yourself to grief that becomes overwhelming so quickly you fear you’ll suffocate. When faced with grief, people tend to enter denial in different ways. Some get drunk, some break things, and some insist they’ll deal with the funeral details after this next Halo match. Games are a valuable source of escapism, but they are still games, and meant for enjoyment. Enjoy them, really enjoy them, and if what you need to get through the next twenty-four hours is to spend eighteen of them grinding elemental Earth in Outland, and we’ve all been there give or take the game in question, then do so. But eventually, we’ve got to turn it off and face up to reality, and that’s where your peers come in, be they on Ventrilo, a forum or IRC. But they’re there, and they don’t cost forty pounds.