GET HOOKED ON GAMING???
Yeah, instead of apologizing for wasting your time playing games, you ought to cultivate a gaming discipline, for the sake of health and happiness, a discipline in which you dedicate AT LEAST four hours a day to online gaming and the sooner you build it into a CONSCIOUS ADDICTION, the better. Notice that I did not tone it down by saying “Conscious Habit“, but that is of course what I mean — a deeply ingrained and unbreakable habit that one has acquired deliberately and intentionally, and that one has cultivated and deepened over the years.
I feel sort of like I’m standing in a dark alley somewhere, with a ballcap perched sideways or backwards on my aging, balding head, saying something like “Psst! Wanna try this videogame? First Hit is Free!”, but the fact is that INTENTIONALLY ADDICTIVE GAMING of AT LEAST four hours up to eight hours per day at SERIOUS GAMING — not casual gaming or over-addictive gaming — can be very advantageous in several areas, not the least of which is what is now called NEURO-PLASTICITY, but which we back in the old days used to call “Keeping the Mind Alive”, and it comes to the same thing, but there are many more clear and distinct advantages to cultivating a gaming discipline with a SPECIFIC RITUALIZED AND REGULATED GAMING PRACTICE — permit me to list just a few:
- THE DUH FACTOR — What I mean is, there are times, lots of times — and the times grow more and more frequent as the aging process melts away your organic body — when you just can’t do ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING. Nothing seems worth doing, and if it did, you couldn’t mess with it anyway. You can’t even wiggle your little finger. You just sit, staring straight ahead, at nothing, but it’s not any known form of meditation. You’re just plumb out of gas. A gaming discipline doesn’t start from this dead zone, but if it’s already established, there’s a chance you can get through the night by gaming the night away, and if you’re clever enough, you can also work at the same time as you game.
- DEPRESSION BLUES — Depression is Depression, and there is no cure except time, so why not spend your time with other Depressed Persons? On the TF2 Servers you will find Depressed People, lots of them — probably everyone you meet on any gaming server will be suffering from Severe Clinical Depression even as they run with the Intel or blow some smartass scout into smithereens on their front deck.
- LONELINESS — Even God — who is Endless and Eternal but also VERY ALONE UP THERE — gets lonely. Everything is social, even a few memorable microbes I could name. Lonely people tend to get depressed and stay depressed. Sometimes it takes getting out there and milling about and doing something constructive with other folks, things like blowing up a bridge or destroying an enemy sentry gun or knifing an engie in the back and then blowing up his shit and taunting him as you do it. Loneliness didn’t used to have a cure. You had a choice — get up off your couch and go hang on on the street or in a bar or pool hall. Not so anymore. It’s a lot different when you hang out in a game, especially on a protected server — one that’s friendly, where respectful players gather, and there are plenty of them, far more than the other kind.
- DESPAIR — Everyone feels Despair now and then, some more frequently than others. If Despair is your problem, online gaming is your solution. You won’t be able to hang onto personal despair for very long in the heat of battle. If you ask folks on the server if they have a problem with Despair, they’ll all tell you “Yes” and some will elaborate.
- CYNICISM — I can’t even spend the extra second typing a blurb for this heading.
- SQUEAMISHNESS — I’ll give you a hint about squeamishness, but you should know right away, before you hear my opinion, that frankly, squeamish people turn my stomach. Gaming with the “GIBS” button on “FULL GORE” will quickly cure you of that.
- FEAR — Nothing cures fear better than whatever it is you’re afraid of actually happening or seeming to happen, and if you’re afraid of things happening suddenly and unexpectedly, and you’re afraid of something blowing up in your face, or someone jumping at you and attacking you with a bazooka, online gaming is definitely the way to deal with the apprehension of attack, and you might even learn to deal with it in an efficient manner, leaving no mess behind, as does Han Solo in the now-famous bar scene in Star Wars IV, A New Awakening, which, if you’ll recall, was actually Star Wars Number One???
- WEAKNESS — That feeling of being drained, thoroughly washed up, rinsed out and hung to dry, can be overcome by gaming, if you’re able to hold a mouse and hit a few keys on the keyboard. If not, there are still games and controllers you can use.
- INSOMNIA — The only real cure for Insomnia is to have something fun and interesting and compelling to do, and online gaming fits that description perfectly. All-night games are totally normal in TF2, and if you have a few friends with the same problem, don’t fret, just get up and game in Diablo 2, get up a Dungeon Party and go until Dawn Breaketh.
- SUICIDAL THOUGHTS — If you’re feeling suicidal, how about dying a few thousand times a day in TF2??? You can amp the sound on full blast, get a huge immersive screen and FEEL the death exploding in your bones. This might sound crazy, but it’s far better than the actual alternative, which you WILL REGRET if you try it, because it LOCKS YOU INTO AN ETERNAL CYCLE OF RETURN, and I’m sure you don’t want to get locked into this lifetime — that’s the very thing you’re trying to get out of, so take the GAMING WAY OUT and it WILL LEAD YOU OUT. Truly, there is no way out but the way THROUGH, and everyone will tell you that, absolutely everyone. Suicide is NOT a good answer to life. Live Your Time, but you don’t have to suffer — get the gaming habit and you’ll feel somewhat more free, and perhaps a whole lot more so.
- CONFUSION — If Confusion is your problem, you can work out the wrinkles and develop some serious strategic muscles in just about any game, but it’s especially true of TF2 that you will have the best chance of success in building lightning-fast mental resources to handle confusion issues.
- MEMORY PROBLEMS — Without the explosive and demanding environment you get in TF2 and Diablo 2, you’d never be able to expose and work on memory problems that might be developing. There’s no better way to handle atrophy than to exercise the muscle, and the brain is no exception.
- LAPSES OF ATTENTION — You can’t have lapses of attention and survive very long in any online video game, and nothing exposes it better or gives you more opportunity to handle it than online gaming. In this instance, Diablo 2 might be superior to TF2 in addressing this problem, but they both work wonders in my book in this arena.
- PHYSICAL DISCOMFORTS & PAIN — Nothing works better than misdirection, and the very best misdirection is a constant never-ending succession of explosive deaths from which you must revive quickly in order to save your team, your base and your own hide. The very best map for this purpose is DUSTBOWL, where a well-played game will have not a single second without something or someone exploding near you, and it’s very likely that you yourself will blow up momentarily, too.
- BAD THOUGHTS — Drive out bad thoughts with confusion and riotous action, in TF2, again I recommend DUSTBOWL as the map of choice in this case.
- NIGHTMARES — The best cure for a nightmare is to stay up, and the best way to remain up is to ACTIVELY do something interesting that requires continual attention and response, and TF2 or Hardcore Diablo 2 could be your answer.
- LOVE — You will think it’s silly, but a game with a lot of people in it, not casual passers-by, but serious gamers, will have a lot of love and respect in it, in a strange sort of way. I doubt anyone thinks about it, but you get to know people on a server and friendships, even without speaking, develop just because there is contact. If you’re looking for love in the form of sex, I suppose you could find it there, but sex and love are so very different and quite apart, although they are often confused and woven into the same fabric for the sake of marketing and crowd control.
- MINDLESS TEDIUM — Sure, it’s true that no matter what you do, in the end it’s all Mindless Tedium, twiddling your thumbs one way or another, standing, sitting, driving, walking, jumping, running or flying around waiting to die, and if it’s Mindless Tedium you want, how about repetitive stupid pointless game after game where you variously try to grab the other team’s thingy, and they try to grab yours while you valiantly try to defend whatever it is you’re defending? Now, there’s a plot for a movie if ever I heard one. Mindless Tedium if properly applied, works wonders.
- FUTILITY — Futility is where you can’t dispel the thought that everything is shit, that in the end, it all comes to nothing, and that nothing you hear, say, think or do will mean more than a twaddle’s tink, and the fact is, you’re absolutely right. In the end, the universe collapses in on itself and crunches down to a small thing, then explodes big again, and that’s the way the monkey spins, pop goes the weasel. In short, futility IS the correct feeling and thought-form to express the Meaning of Life, at least in the singular sense, thus ignoring the Bee Hive Effect (BHE) that makes human life so interesting to higher forms of intelligence… What I mean is, forms of actual intelligence. Humans function only as a reactive mass, like a hive of bees — an individual’s reactions don’t statistically count for anything, just the highest mass numbers doing what they do — below that, it’s invisible, like yourself.
- CONNECTION — A feeling of being connected, not to anyone or anything in particular, just of being connected.
- CHILLING — I know, you shouldn’t need to chill, but the fact is that everybody does need to chill now and then, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t chill, so go ahead and chill in peace, security, serenity and comfort — or learn to chill in the face of total mayhem.
- DEEP MEDITATION — Laugh if you will, but the fact is that if you can’t KEEP YOUR MEDITATION while being unfairly blown up by a vicious cheater who came onto the server just to grief people, your stupid meditation sucks. Try keeping your center while some asshole wipes you across the map and keeps killing you with a baseball bat.
There are a lot more applications and reasons and rationales, but the bottom line is that when all is said and done, and you have nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, and can find no answer to the long dark hours of the night, you might find some relief in the maws of Conscious Gaming Addiction, a cure for which there is no disease.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby