on the champion’s road
Ideas like this make me so very sad.

(Image from this tweet by Chris Kohler, taken at the Oculus press conference on June 11)
I used to be someone who tried to fill holes in my life with games, as if the games themselves could provide the meaning that was missing in my life. But I don’t think it works that way, and now, when I meet people who seem to put games ahead of real life rather than putting them in the context of the lives they are really living, I feel like something has gone horribly wrong.
Games, as sure as any other art form, can help us understand ourselves and our lives and our connections to others. They can give us new ways to think about the challenges we’re facing. But I think of them like the moon reflecting the sun’s light. They can take on meaning and help us see, but they aren’t the source of the light itself. That has to come from our lives.
How do games get inside of us and take on meaning for us? Playing a game with someone isn’t quite the same as watching a movie with someone. Depending on the game, maybe it’s more like visiting a particular place with someone, or dancing with someone to a particular song.
Recently someone said to me that finding the woman who would become his wife was like finding the answer to a question. For many years, I wasn’t even asking myself questions about love and connection and relationships, what my life didn’t mean without love and what it could mean with love. Then things happened that shook me to the core and ever since, I can’t stop asking myself those questions, and searching for answers. Not answers that would close things off but answers that would lead to new, better questions–What are we together that we couldn’t be alone? Who am I with you, because of you?

You may have noticed that when I approach a game, my experience of the game often can’t help but be affected by these questions. Games frame the questions for me in different ways. Dark Souls II’s quest seemed to be all about yearning for connection and the ways in which we can only live when there is love in our lives. Dragon Age: Inquisition became less a story about saving the world from a threat beyond reckoning and more a tale of unrequited love. Alien: Isolation weaponized my own loneliness so viciously that I had to stop playing. Sunset’s empty apartment made it a game about a particular kind of intimacy for me, an intimacy of absence.

But all of these games are (primarily) single-player experiences that, in one way or another, deal with loneliness or connection or love on a textual level. The game from the past few years that says the most to me about these questions doesn’t actually say anything about them at all in its story. It’s a platformer with hardly any story to speak of, and its cheery atmosphere isn’t intended to provoke soul-searching questions about the meaning of our experiences alone or with others on this little planet. But it is a game that you can play alone or play with others, and it speaks to those questions because of my experience with it as a player, and the time I’ve spent playing it alone, and the time I spent playing it with others.
Don’t the ways in which we share games with others (if we’re lucky enough to have people to share them with) always become an integral part of our memories and feelings about those games? Would The Legend of Zelda have been what it was to me if not for the excited schoolyard chats, the whispers of wisdom and secrets? Would I feel the way I do about Final Fantasy VII if it hadn’t been a game some friends and I played collectively in college, staying up late and occasionally skipping class to breed chocobos and hunt down the most powerful summons?
Now aloneness sometimes feels like as much a part of my experience with games as shared experience was then.
I played this particular game once with somebody who made me not so much think as feel these things: This could be someone special. This is someone I want to be around and be close to, someone I want to know more about and reveal myself to, someone I could maybe learn a lot from. This is someone who could maybe break down my isolation. In other words, I thought I might have been falling in love with her.
Being around her was one of a few experiences I had that made me start realizing that there were things about me that I thought were just the way I am that aren’t just the way I am at all, but that were effects of the loneliness I’d been feeling for so long. I realized then that loneliness changes you, that there are things we can’t do and people that we can’t be when we are alone. I realized, too, that I felt I’d been alone long enough, and that I was ready for something in my life to change.
As sometimes happens in these situations, things with this particular person didn’t quite go the way I’d hoped they might, and I stopped spending time with her, and I stopped playing that game, too, for a long time. Was it because it reminded me of her? I think that was part of it. But it was also that it reminded me too sharply that I didn’t want to face the challenges of life alone anymore.
I knew what the time spent playing the game with her meant. It had meaning to me because it was a shared experience with someone I really enjoyed spending time with. Completing levels, collecting things, these weren’t the source of the meaning. It was the fact that we’d done them together. Playing the game alone still meant something but the meaning had shifted. It’s a matter of what matters more, the journey or the destination. I think Bon Jovi was on to something with those lyrics:
It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not
We’ve got each other and that’s a lot
Playing it on my own, what matters more is just getting it done. Not the journey, but the end result. The accomplishment. But I want it to be the journey that matters more.
So now I am searching. Now I can’t stop asking the questions. A few weeks ago in a post on Dave Chapelle and fame, Masha quoted this about Virgos, and it feels so true to me right now:
On the deeper level, Virgo needs something, wants something, is hopeful, expectant, worried, anxious. Beneath her cool exterior, she is on a continuous search. She’s not quite sure what she’s looking for, but she knows she will recognze it when she bumps into it. She is after like minds, kindred souls, those who are going where she is going. She must find them; they are the missing key and she knows it…She makes the best use of her time…The sign Virgo is so very blessed, so very cursed, so very gifted, so very easily misled.
I’ve gotten to this game’s final challenge, and it is one of the greatest challenges I’ve ever faced in a game. It’s called the champion’s road, and at least for now, I’m facing its dangers and pitfalls alone.
I love that it is called the champion’s road, because roads so often figure into our literal and metaphorical searches.
There’s a game called Glitchhikers, about driving down lonely roads late at night. Much of the talk you have with the hitchers you pick up concerns the search for meaning and connection.


And of course there’s Kentucky Route Zero, one of my favorite games of the past few years. which is very much about the search for something, out there somewhere on the road.

In movies, too, roads are where we search for the things that are missing. What is it with Mad Max, also known as “the road warrior,” always heading out again on his own, never sticking around, never staying with people?



These images are from The Road Warrior, released in 1981. At the end of this year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, too, Max leaves. Why? What does he think he’s going to find out there alone? Or is it aloneness itself that he’s looking for?
The search I’m on right now is not, in and of itself, giving me the meaning I’m looking for, but there is still meaning in the search. Until I find an answer, the question is what keeps me company. Absence is a kind of presence.
Games can’t be the answer. But they can help me keep asking the question until I find an answer. They can help me keep searching.
The search for love continues even in the face of great odds.
Notes
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