Staying alive in a broken reality

Trigger warning for rape, disordered eating, and attempted suicide

Something that is weird about having 1,000+ people visit your blog every day is how self-conscious you (or really, I) become. But whatever, hi, I’m sleep deprived and thinking about big stuff and the only way to get my head around it fully is to write it down…and if I let the risk of looking stupid in public stop me from doing something, then I’ll never do anything ever again.

I’ve managed to pin down something related to Jane McGonigal and her message of gamefulness, but it’s not really…fully baked. A criticism I hear (and sometimes think) about McGonigal’s take on games, gamers, and reality is that it’s too “Pollyanna”-ish…too optimistic, unrealistic, ignoring a lot of motivators and components of human behavior.

Part of me agrees with the criticism, just based on my own life. When McGonigal talked today at GDC about how extrinsic motivation loses over intrinsic motivation and how people innately want all sorts of good things for themselves…that has not always been true, for me. The opposite has been true. It’s my 30th birthday in two days, which means I’m a couple weeks away from the 10th anniversary of my suicide attempt. Crawling away from the person that I was has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. The list of things that kept me from trying to kill myself again, especially that first year or two, are tangible, external things, not an internal drive to benefit myself. Episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A particular track on an NSync album. There was some internal motivation, but in the form of negative emotions like guilt and shame and fear of failing people I love *even more than I’d already failed them*. That is what got me out of bed, that is what got me to go to my therapy appointments to start untangling the fucked up knots of logic and self-perception. That is what got me to take medication, which hands-down made it possible for me to keep fighting myself and try to save my own life one day at a time. There was no internal desire for good in my life – I didn’t think I deserved anything good at all, not even being alive. I understand that games could function as positive distractions in situations like mine, but they are still external distractions that pull attention from the internal poison. Without a more specific or tighter context around her message, McGonigal’s sweeping vision sometimes comes across to me as impossibly unaware of the divergent experiences of others – even though I know that’s not actually true.

But then, on the other hand, part of me really likes McGonigal’s message *because* of its focused optimism on the biggest possible picture. Given the size of the current and possible future gamer community, I find the task of characterizing that population beyond, “they play games,” to be impossible. So if we’re going to talk about gamers en masse, why *not* talk about the good? Why *not* feed into a public discussion of gamers as positive people who are engaged in changing the world? If that’s true, even in a limited population, why shout that message down with examples of the worst gamer behavior? Why insist that you cannot shine the spotlight on the good until there is no more bad to look at? Why do we have to keep acting like the people who threatened me and verbally abused me are representative of the gamer community while all us gamers who don’t do that or think that’s okay are the fringe population? I’d much rather ignore, negate, and illegitimize the experiences and feelings of the fuckjobs who called my local police department and demanded details of my rape than continue to ignore and erase the existence of gamers who have diverse identities, game play styles, goals, and passions. I’d rather draw *more* attention to the kinds of play and motivations that McGonigal talks about than insist that she shouldn’t be talking about them in the first place, especially if it means letting the current expectations of gamer culture lie undistrubed.

Which isn’t to say that, for all of the theoretical agreement in the paragraph above, that I can ever believe it personally. I like the story of Gamers Gone Good, even while my own track record tells me it’s not true, tells me that it never will be. Someone once told me it takes ten compliments to balance out one criticism. The last month or so has been full of compliments, actually…but not ten times as many compliments as threats to rape and kill me. And even if it was ten times as many, I’m not sure that’d be enough. I’m not sure what could happen at this point that would make me feel through and through, “it’s been worth it.”

In one of those coincidences that make me wonder what shitty Hollywood screenwriter is controlling my life, on February 1, 2011, the following happened: my blog traffic continued its terrifying jumps related to Penny Arcade/PAX/Dickwolves/etc, going from 5,000+ daily pageviews to 11,000+, with the expected jump in trolling and threats (it’d peak at 19,000+ a couple days later); the organizers of PAX East announced Jane McGonigal – champion of positive gamer behavior and attitudes – would be keynoting this year; I realized the same Jane McGonigal was in my town and speaking that night at a local book store.

So for the first time in days, I took a shower. I whined about this a little on twitter while it was happening, but yeah – I stopped bathing for a while. I also stopped eating for two weeks. Maybe a piece of cheese. Maybe a hot dog. Maybe a popsicle. That’s not one meal, that’s three days’ worth of food intake. I lost over 10 pounds in less than a week. I felt like I was going to throw up and/or pass out all the time. I stopped sleeping. We’d turn out the bedroom light, I’d stare out the window, I’d start shaking so hard it’d wake my partner up sometimes. Eventually the sun came back up. I didn’t cry. I said surely it would stop any day now and my blog would go back to getting 7 hits a day. I told everyone I was handling it.

But yeah, anyway, I left my house for the first time in days, wearing actual clothes and not just a bathrobe and slippers. I didn’t mention where I was going on Twitter, because this was the peak of 4Chan’s multiple rage threads organizing ways to find out where I lived. I saw McGonigal speak (something I highly recommend doing, if you ever have the chance). I waited around afterward to say hi. I don’t really know what I expected, but when she realized who I was, she tilted her head and say, “Oh, you’re dealing with a lot right now, aren’t you?” And I don’t know why the hell that did it, but that’s when I finally started crying about the whole mess, into the hair of one of the smartest, most important people in the game industry, while she gave me a hug.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I already know gamers can hurt themselves and each other. McGonigal’s vision of a gameful reality doesn’t seem to spend any time acknowledging that, which makes it hard sometimes to see how her vision connects to real life. But I’m enough of an optimist to say that her vision is appealing, because even if I can’t personally see the path to get there, I want gamers to be able to heal themselves and each other, too.