Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (20 page)

‘If it had been a shooter or something, I’m not sure I would have fallen into it in the same way,’ he says. ‘It’s not constantly intense. There’s room to wander. It also gets the power fantasy thing right. You have power to change things while none of the missions you’re given are particularly taxing.’

A few days later Sarah returned home.

‘I remember when I took her back from the hospital, I was scared that I’d never bring her back to life,’ says Ferguson. ‘She was empty and broken. I brought her tea and beans on toast and when she slept I played. Sometimes, when the loading screens went on too long, I’d start crying. She would call to me and I would pause the game and go and sit with her and tell her that the important thing was that she was well and safe and that she would get better.’

Ferguson gathered up the vials of folic acid, the baby books, and the red and blue Babygro, placed the items in a plastic bag, and hid it in a drawer.

‘I didn’t want her to see any of it,’ he says.

Sometimes visitors would visit and Ferguson would make them tea.

‘We’d sit and they would leave their coats on. Everyone had such serious faces.’

Sarah remained in bed for a week. She needed drugs every four hours, which Ferguson administered. He spent the rest of the time cooking, cleaning, or retreating into
Skryim
.

‘I flitted between these few rooms, these two realities,’ he recalls.

Entertainment, particularly the sort that can be consumed from the comfort of a chair, often has a utilitarian role in our lives. People
might chain-watch soap operas as a way to steady their emotions in the wake of a breakup, or revert to cartoons with easily digestible messages and morals when the complexities of life’s decisions weigh too heavily.

With video games, the effect is different. In the modernised Netflix adaptation of the BBC television series
House of Cards
, Kevin Spacey’s character, a high-flying American politician, is shown playing online competitive video games as a way to unwind and destress from the wrangling and machinations of his political life at the end of each day. Many share Frank Underwood’s habit: video games serve a specific purpose in the day’s schedule, a way to escape from the rigours of the preceding hours in a virtual space or, perhaps, in some way to make sense of them. What makes them unique is that these are places where one’s actions and decisions do not have to be so carefully weighed: outcomes are usually predictable, reliable and, if necessary, easily undone.

If, while playing
SimCity
, you decide to place a new sewage-treatment works near a residential district and upset the citizens who you, as mayor, are supposed to be looking out for, you can simply turn back the clock to an earlier save to undo their anger. Such mistakes are indelible in real life. In
Braid
, a game that gives its player control over time itself, every mistimed jump can be unjumped with a squeeze of a button, every action rehearsed and repeated until it is perfected.

Then there are the games that provide a more numbing kind of escapism. Descend into Hyrule, the setting for each of Shigeru Miyamoto’s Zelda games, and there’s no need for the high-stakes precision of a
Braid
or
SimCity
. This is, rather, a place to which you acclimatise then wander about in, pursuing goals often of your own choosing, at your own tempo.

This kind of scrappy catharsis is beautifully presented in a
different way by
Katamari Damacy
, a Japanese game in which you must roll an adhesive ball around a series of domestic locations, rolling up household detritus (until the ball grows large enough to be fired into space). There’s something deeply liberating about the act of decluttering the modern world (as the sticky ball grow larger, you’re able to exit into the surrounding Tokyo streets, rolling up cars and bus stops, benches and ice-cream vans), a feeling that reflects the sense of peaceful clarity we can feel after tidying a desk, clearing out a spare room, or otherwise making our lives less complicated.

For Ferguson, bewildered with grief and confusion,
Skyrim
was a place he was able to visit in order to be anchored. It might seem strange that someone might choose to find their feet in a place that doesn’t exist. But when reality has let you down with an event of colossal indifference and capriciousness, the reliable rules and outcomes of a video game become all the more inviting.

Skyrim
may not have been a sacred space for Ferguson, but looking back at that time today, he does believe that the game gave him a specific type of escapism that, in the moment, he needed.

‘It is a game that rewards you for doing the same things over and over again, allowing you to get better at them, refining your skills by constant iteration,’ he says. ‘I was in a cold, mechanical world where I was getting better, getting powerful.’

Perhaps it was the comfort of feeling that he was in control of his own destiny again, after an event that showed with such clarity how there are some things in life that no man can control. But whatever comfort the game gave him, it was complicated by guilt.

‘There was part of me that thought I was doing the wrong thing,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure what else I should have been doing, but
I felt guilty about spending all of this time within the game. It was a real opportunity to disappear into another world, and I was never entirely comfortable with how readily I embraced that.’

Eventually, his wife Sarah left her bed. She would watch her husband play for a while. ‘At a certain point there were bigger emotional problems for us to deal with, but for a while, it was enough to sit there together, visiting this cold place.’

While Ferguson appeared quietly resilient to his visitors, his internal feelings were different. ‘We weren’t sad and brave,’ he says. ‘We were angry. But I don’t think that came through in the way that I played the game. I played through in quite a law-abiding way. I chose to be moral. Even in the combat I snuck around. If my character had reflected the way that I was I would have bought a giant broadsword and attacked everything in sight.’

Then one day, a few weeks after he started his journey in
Skyrim
, Ferguson was finished.

‘When Sarah started to recover, that’s when I started to become emotional for the first time,’ he says. ‘I stopped playing the game. I had a realisation that this just wasn’t where I wanted to be any more.’

There was ceremony to the breakup. Ferguson removed the disc from its tray, opened up a menu on the console, and began to delete his save games—those digital files that record a player’s progress in the game—one by one.
Skyrim
saves a player’s progress in an unusual way, creating a new file every few minutes, a breadcrumb trail of historical record. By the end of an adventure that can last for scores of hours, there are often hundreds of files.

‘Looking at all those saves was upsetting to me,’ he says. ‘There’s a part of your brain that believes playing a game in tragic circumstances is stolen time, that should have been spent doing something else. To see hundreds of those saves laid out confronted me. I remember I was telling myself that I needed space on my hard drive. But I never download anything, so I absolutely didn’t need to do it for that reason. I had done everything I could do in the game, or at least everything that I was interested in doing. So I guess there was a sense of closure there. The save files were a record that I was embarrassed about. It was time that I’d put into a virtual life, rather than a real one. There was guilt. Eradicating the saves was perhaps a way to get rid of that feeling. Or maybe just a way of saying goodbye to that time altogether.’

A few weeks later, Ferguson was able to say goodbye to the time spent in the game in a more definitive way when a friend visited.

‘He mentioned that he wanted to play
Skyrim
but couldn’t afford a copy,’ he recalls. ‘So I gave him mine. It felt good to have something to give that someone wanted. But there was something else, I guess. A sense of closure.’

It’s clear to me why Ferguson found solace in a video game at that time: it gave him something to do, a series of easily digestible tasks which he could complete without needing to leave his wife’s side and, as a result, a sense of progress and movement when the rest of his life’s plans had been obliterated. I remember when, as a teenager, my parents first separated. I too found routine and direction in a video game (mine was
Final Fantasy VII
) when the framework of my life seemed to be collapsing.

Literature is able to remove us from our own lives and focus on the hopes, dreams, and conflicts of another. But only a video
game gives us the sense of being in control, of being the author of our destiny.

Strangely, it’s for this precise reason that Ferguson, who now works for Edinburgh University and has a young son, is reluctant to recommend video games as a salve for the wounded soul.

‘It can be a problem to get lost in fiction—and I include films and children’s literature in this—that’s centred around manifest destiny and the idea that everyone is a good guy or a bad guy. These kinds of stories are useful for certain stages in a human being’s development, but it’s not how the world works. It’s simplistic, and sometimes we can cling on to these stories that were supposed to be for childhood into adulthood. In games it seems unhealthy to me that you usually play as the hero who can overcome all odds, and who must destroy anyone who stands in opposition or disagreement.’

Despite the reservations, Ferguson recognises the role that
Skyrim
played, if not in his healing, then in his survival at the time. ‘If you play games because you just need a break from the real world then, with that caveat, I do believe that it can be helpful. Games can provide respites from the storms of the real world. People do that with all kinds of fiction. For Sarah, it was watching hundreds of episodes of
Gilmore Girls
. It’s the consumption of something that is reassuring, something that displays shades of the real world, but that is also a simplified, comforting version, which has aspects that you can control in some way. It makes sense that this would be something people retreat into when life feels out of control.’

A few months after I first heard Ferguson’s story, I visited Tale of Tales, a two-person independent game developer based in Ghent,
Belgium. The pair, a husband-and-wife team, make art games that bear little resemblance to
Skyrim
or the other blockbuster titles that reach the billboards and advertising hoardings.

After I arrived they took me into the city, where the spires of St Bavo’s Cathedral prod at the Belgian sky, which was, on this particular day, a uniform September grey. Inside the building a Gothic warren of chambers and alcoves was warm with bodies and candlelight, a refuge from the post-summer downer that is September outside.

‘The problem with God being dead is that nobody builds cathedrals any more,’ Auriea Harvey said. ‘And humans
need
cathedrals. Or, at very least, they need somewhere to go for refuge, reflection, sanctuary, and rest.’

While Harvey and her husband, Michaël Samyn, are not religious in any formal sense, they come here often, she told me. Sometimes they visit in order to revisit the dominant aesthetic of Samyn’s adolescence—he attended Catholic school, with all of its attendant ritual, art, and arcana. Sometimes they come to be inspired, not by the aesthetic but by the
utility
.

‘I think that, at their best, video games are able to perform something of the cathedral’s function in the modern world,’ she says. ‘At least, that’s my hope for the games that we make, that they might be sacred spaces in some way.’

This has been my own experience of the pair’s work, their numerous ‘cathedrals of fire,’ which bear almost no similarities with the violence and noise of the mainstream video-game industry’s more familiar and routine output. In 2005’s
The Endless Forest
, for example, an online game commissioned by the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, you play as a rangy deer that interacts with other players, each of whom also plays as a deer, through sound and movement. Some of the attributes of the vast
online game worlds such as
World of Warcraft
are seen here, such as the ability to customise characters’ appearance with new antlers, pelts, and adorning flowers in order to personalise the game and show off to others. But there are no enemies to vanquish, and, in most cases, you are only able to change the appearance of other deer. If you want to change your own appearance, you must find a way to enlist another player’s help, convincing them to cast a spell on you that, for example, grants you red antlers, or pink eyes. You can hop, trot, make sounds, and even dance with other deer, but there is no chat-box to allow for open communication. In this way,
The Endless Forest
is an ephemeral tribute to primal communication that demonstrates the value of the unspoken in online games. More broadly, it’s an ode to the mystic gloom found beneath a canopy of trees and, per Harvey’s hope, a virtual place to revitalise the soul.

The Graveyard
, another of Tale of Tales’ works that was nominated for the Innovation Award in the Independent Games Festival in 2009, is more peaceful still. In this game—or rather place—you’re cast as an elderly woman with a walking stick who trudges between phalanxes of gravestones en route to a bench. Presented in noirish black and white and soundtracked by yapping crows, distant sirens, and the crunch of the gravel underfoot, it’s a quietly subversive work. The understated experience lasts for just ten minutes, unusual in a medium that prizes length and expanse. Tale of Tales made the game free, but for five dollars players can purchase a premium version that adds just one feature: the possibility that the woman will die during the sequence. It’s a quiet reflection on age, death, and remembrance.

These games have been created specifically to perform a utilitarian function in the player’s life, be that as a space to interact with others without troublesome social mores, or the pressure of having
to create scintillating conversation, or as a space to find peace, and to reflect on our own histories.