Gaming and Getting Over It

 

It’s been almost two years, and I still wake up thinking about Afghanistan. The further out I get the more I’ve begun to realize: there is no going back from that phone call and seeing the tiger at the zoo. I thought the anger would die down a bit, that I would be able to return this blog back to its previously scheduled routine. I want to. 

I can’t. 

Every time I close my eyes I see her: an illusory Afghan ripped from her home, her school, to be enslaved to some pig. My mind understands the absurdity of that image, but I don’t have the courage to attempt to debunk it. Sometimes when I close my eyes she’s riddled with shrapnel, blood streaming from her bleeding face. That’s when I force my eyes to stay shut; I can at least keep my mind's eye on something I don't have the courage to look up in real life. And the rest of America has moved on, much to my chagrin and total lack of surprise. I meant, why would they? Taking responsibility for the aftermath of decisions is so alien to the American mind they lose it when fairy tale endings don’t happen for their pop culture icons, nevermind entire countries condemned to slavery in the face of our own apathy! So what am I supposed to make of American popular culture, where we idolize those who will not kill even if it means others die to maintain whatever moral purity they can fool themselves into having? Where idealism is just fine, even at the cost of lives? Am I supposed to take such obvious hypocrisy seriously, now that I see it for what it is? How am I supposed to think about such an obviously damning idea being celebrated in aesthetics?

I don’t have answers for these questions, for the record, because my issue isn’t a rational one. I was involved in the abandonment of a whole country. I have to grieve that, and my questions are symptomatic of my grief. By now I know they’re not the real problem. Somehow I have to figure out a way to integrate what happened into my life now, and until then these questions will persist. That is not a comfortable answer, but it is the only one I seem to have found. Bide your time and hold onto hope and all that! 

But that sort of decision has consequences, one of them being learning to sit with that kind of awful ambiguity.

And pretending that it's a comfortable thing to sit with is a lie. You have to let go of loving comfort and needing comfort to make you sane. But it's not a question of just diving into horrifying pain all the time, because no one can do that, all the time. Where does gaming and popular culture fit into trying to actually develop yourself and to become more, because you're either striving to live or dying, and no there is no inbetween?

Again, the solution is to sit and wait and watch. So that's what I've been doing.

And then the other day I randomly decided to play Bioshock Remastered on the Switch. I'd not played Bioshock when it first came out, although I was always interested in it. So, now it's on the Switch, so I bought it a few months ago... and then did nothing with it. Until the other day. I was having fun, but not a ton of fun, just getting used to the mechanics and the world and all the things I normally don't give videogames much time to do, but this was enjoyable enough!

And then this happened.

Right before she was picked up I had closed my eyes, and yes there was the Afghan girl was, and yes she was shredded all to hell, and that one time I didn't keep my eyes shut, so I popped them open... and there was this little abomination being restored to a little girl. My hands shook as I watched. I didn't hear anything after that. I couldn't. I just stared as the little girl curtsied, ran off, and climbed into whatever the hell that thing on the wall is. All of a sudden I had a goal: rescue all the freaking little sisters. It just sits in the back of my head: "Have you rescued a little sister today?"

No, I know this isn't me actually doing anything for anyone in Afghanistan, nevermind me actually solving the issue. I still have plenty of work to do on that front, and I know it. 

But if you think for two seconds that this one moment of relief, where someone is healed, isn't itself a moment of mercy I don't know what to tell you. This experience did and continues to do something for me, something I did not anticipate but am eternally grateful for. It's unreality seems to be part of the point: I can make something like this real, somehow.

I'm not sure where to go from there. But it is a direction. And that is more than I had before.