People have debated about the effect of video games on people, particularly children, since they were invented in the late 70s.  Having been born in 1971, I was 9 years old when the first Space Invaders machine was installed in a pizza parlor in the small town I grew up in on the outskirts of Detroit.  I wasn’t very good at it, but whenever we went there, I begged for a few quarters to plug into the machine so I could practice.  As more games were invented and they began to appear everywhere from the laundromat to the gas station, the wide variety meant there was greater appeal to a wider audience of people.  This tendency would only explode when video games became available for home use, first through home consoles such as the Atari 2600, and later through home computers, which allowed for the invention of games that could take hundreds of hours to play.  Many of these games were Dungeons & Dragons-based RPGs, which formed a huge niche that may have originated with the game Moria in the 80s, which was nothing more than colored symbols representing monsters moving about on a screen no more complicated than a hand-drawn map to Enchanter.

RPGs and cosplaying have created an incredibly useful and necessary outlet for many people to express parts of themselves that otherwise go unnoticed and unfulfilled.  Recently, video games have even been used by and specifically engineered for people with a variety of mental health issues ranging from depression to anxiety.  While looked upon with disdain by those who think no one over the age of 18 should play a game or dress up, the ability to take on the mantle of another character and their attributes can give a great deal of positive influence to people who may otherwise be shy, lacking confidence, or even trying to figure out who they really are.  Not everyone has a solid notion of who they really are, and sometimes a video game or cosplaying can help them figure that out.

Despite my age and love of all things geeky, I didn’t get the same opportunity to engage with the world of video games and board games that a lot of other people did, for a variety of reasons.  I love D&D, but have only had the opportunity to play a handful of times, often with other players that made the game rather unpleasant.  I also like video games, but found them frustrating to play, even after acquiring a home system to play on, because I lacked the experience of others my age, and because I had a hard time with the learning curve of some games, which can be pretty steep.

In 2011, I was misdiagnosed with a severe mental disorder and put on medication to treat it that had bad side effects.  I dutifully took my meds and visited my psychiatrist, but I wasn’t feeling any better.  In fact, in many ways, I felt worse.  That year, Bethesda Games issued their fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls series of games: Skyrim.  Its release date of 11/11/11 was announced in my hometown of Austin by an 18-wheeler parked on Sixth Street with the imposing numbers emblazoned on the side of the truck on a murky gray background.  Players of the previous Elder Scrolls installments had been anxiously awaiting its release, and it quickly became the best-selling game in history.  My husband is a gamer, and I typically buy him new games for Christmas.  That year I bought him Assassin’s Creed, a driving simulator, and Skyrim.  He looked them over and plugged the Skyrim disk into the PS3, where it would stay for the next year.

I’m a little odd: I like to watch people play video games sometimes, something friends of mine have declared the dullest activity in existence.  Most of those same friends don’t play video games, and it’s a good thing, because if they did, I’d kick their asses, because by watching others play, I learn how to play.  I was curious about this game that had captivated so many of our older friends, who posted frequently on FB about how it was “dragon killing time” when they got off work, so I parked myself next to my husband while the opening sequence played.  Like everyone else who laid eyes on that game, we were astonished at the graphics.  My husband was instantly hooked on the gameplay.  Having only witnessed the playing of a game as complicated as this one from a distance, I was quite interested in the mechanics and asked a lot of annoying questions that probably would have caused a lot of other gaming hubbies to growl.  However, my husband is a man of infinite patience, as he would have to be in order to be married to me, so he happily paused to answer my questions, occasionally interjecting to say that the best way for me to learn would be to play.  I refused at first, but as I watched him play over the next month, my curiosity grew.  I needed a diversion from my mental health issues, and this was increasingly proving itself to be an opportunity to completely detach from the ever-annoying real world.

One day, I screwed up my courage and began to create a character, a process that could take hours if one were finicky enough in a creative environment that allowed you to tweak shit like cheekbone height and eyebrow thickness.  I spent about an hour on mine, generating a thin dark elf with arching eyebrows and large angled eyes that said “don’t fuck with me”: an accurate outer depiction of my inner attitude.  Finally, I said “Okay, show me how this works.”  The controller was foreign to me, and as I played, I realized the up/down controls were counterintuitive, making it extremely difficult to do anything.  My husband looked in the settings and discovered you could flip the Y axis, which made my life much easier.  It quickly became apparent as I played that I was a huge chickenshit.  Combat scared me and I fought my first battles in a frenzied panic of madly waving sword blades.  I thought to myself, “this is a GAME: why is this making me so anxious?”  The main questline of Skyrim involves the slaying of a boss dragon, which itself involves many levels of slaying lesser dragons before you can kill him.  I wondered how I was going to handle killing a dragon when a mere band of bandits made my heart race.

The architecture of Skyrim’s gameplay is clearly based on the archetypal “hero’s journey” motif, but unlike other games such as Tomb Raider, which lock you into a preset sequence of events, a Skyrim player generally gets to choose when, how, or even if they choose to pursue a particular quest, even the main one.  This characteristic alone is what sets the game apart from others for me.  I get to choose the pace of the gameplay, not the computer.  Frequent saving meant if I got stuck somewhere I didn’t like, I could end the game and restart from my last save, a tactic I used frequently when I found myself in an anxiety-producing situation that threatened to scuttle my progress.  Furthermore, the “choose your own adventure and pacing” motif meant that I could enjoy exploring the game without being stressed out by it, like so many other games.

I didn’t realize what an anxious person I was until I played Skyrim.  In fact, there were a lot of things I didn’t realize about myself until I played that game, and a few things I once knew but had forgotten in the haze of my dysfunctional life.  I spent about a year playing Skyrim, and put over a thousand hours into the character I generated.  While my husband played the game over and over again, each time with a different character, I only played the one, using it to explore every aspect of the game possible.  I’ve always been a terrible liar, something I learned as a child, so I don’t do it.  Being asked to lie in Skyrim on occasion generated a lot of anxiety, and I often couldn’t do it, resulting in pissing off a few NPCs.  At first, this bothered me because I feared I’d ruined an aspect of gameplay, but I noticed after a month of “game time”, they didn’t care anymore.  After a while, I noticed that almost everything in Skyrim resets about once a game month, from the treasure to the monsters.

My first couple of months playing the game were very anxious because I was a low-level character, a time when you are notoriously vulnerable.  For a normal person, this phase is fun and involves doing things over and over again until you get them right, giving one a sense of accomplishment and progression, much in the way childhood is supposed to be (but isn’t, for too many).  I often give up on difficult tasks that require repetition, largely due to being a gifted child in school for whom things usually came easily.  I really wanted to play this game, though, so when I got to something that required a bit of diligence, I’d stick to it.  Over time, my confidence gradually built up.  Stressful gameplay no longer resulted in anxiety and a bad mood, but in a sort of pleasurable tension.  The first time a dragon landed in front of me, I nearly had a panic attack.  After a couple of months, no problem.

I still didn’t like combat, though.  Hand-to-hand fighting was my least favorite part of the game, and as such I turned myself into a long-distance fighter, relying on magic and a bow to do as much of my killing as possible.  Lucky for me, combat is only a small part of Skyrim.  I spent almost as many hours at the alchemy table combining plants and at the enchanting table creating new weapons as I did working on my armor and weapons.  What’s really amazing about Skyrim is the ability to explore what they call a “sandbox”, and since the game is self-paced, it’s possible to just go wandering around without any particular aim in mind.  This affords the opportunity to interact with the NPCs and discover new locations not necessarily led to by a quest, both of which can lead to new adventures.  For a person like me that shies away from new things and people, playing the game was actually a good way to practice these things so they became easier in real life.

As I ascended in the levels, I discovered I much preferred a stealth mode of play that involved avoiding as much combat as possible.  Note I didn’t say “killing”: killing is a part of Skyrim.  So I developed a ninja-like assault method of playing that, when done right, allowed me to dispatch the enemy with a minimum of fuss.  I was a little disturbed by this aspect of my personality, but I realized that it was based at heart in a deep-seated desire to avoid all confrontation, as I am essentially a non-violent person.  So I had to ask myself what sort of person I was in the context of a killing game, and saw that I was still dealing with a lot of anxiety regarding any kind of confrontation.  When forced into a confrontational situation, I strike hard and fast.

I also realized something else about myself: I hate losing, though I’m not sure why, given my generally cooperative nature.  I don’t like being competitive, not against anyone but myself anyway.  Despite my advancement through the skillsets and the levels of the game, I still wasn’t progressing the way I wanted to and was nowhere near ready for some of the bigger quests, let alone tackling the boss dragon, which I had seen my husband take the better part of a day to do.  However, the game had a feature (or a bug, depending on who you ask) that allowed for the massive pumping up of weapons, armor, and magical items through the complicated use of what Skyrim players call the “restoration loop”.  Using it, I was, over the course of about 15 levels, able to make myself swift, silent, and deadly to everything in Skyrim except for one thing: ancient dragons, which burn right through my enchanted armor.  By the time I was done, my character looked like this:

glass waterbreathing helmet
glass sword (1000+HP)
glass boots enchanted to carry 3000+ pounds (enchantment breaks when boots removed: restoration loop)
glass shield
glass armor (1000+CP)
glass soul-catching bow (1000+CP)
sneak ring (100%: effectively silent and invisible)
race: Dunmer (dark elf) – 50% resistance to fire negating a vampire’s 50% weakness to fire, native power: Ancestral Flame – 8 points fire damage to anyone, friend or foe, standing too close
primary weapons: bow, sword, destruction spells, shouts, alchemy, enchanting, smithing
gender: female

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I essentially built myself a subconscious persona that would carry me through some severe mental health breaks and rough life episodes that would permanently disable most people, and indeed, I faltered for a while after each one, but as the Buddha says, “fall down 7 times, get up 8”.

As I played Skyrim over the course of a year, I discovered a lot about myself.  I detest confrontation as well as lying, but will engage in both if the outcome is a positive one, especially one that rescues someone else from harm or danger.  I have outstanding aim, perhaps a genetic gift from my father, who was a sniper during the Vietnam War.  I can be very persistent, but once I reach my frustration level (about an hour for any given difficult task), that persistence drops considerably.  I surprised myself with how long I stuck with a game that killed me hundreds of times and made me repeat certain tasks until I got them right.

Alas, the same thing happened to my Skyrim playing that happens to all of my life diversions that run their course: I got bored, and one day I just didn’t want to play anymore.  I tried starting a new character, but that was during my zombie years when I was taking bad medication, so it was a fruitless effort.  It’s been several years since I played Skyrim, and I’m a different person now, so part of me wants to pick it up again.  I’m also interested in the new EA game “Sea of Solitude”, which is a game specifically designed to mimic certain aspects of mental health issues, so I’m eager to see what I’ll learn about myself in that virtual world.  I won’t go into the details in this entry, but playing Skyrim probably helped save my life.