Gaming Is The Mind Killer

On the Tyranny of Small Thoughts

I’m fighting the Draconic Tree Sentinel. He’s guarding the entrance to Leyndell, the Royal Capital and I can’t enter until I take him down. He’s a massive knight on horseback with a heavy club and a nasty serrated shield. The battle always starts the same way: I run toward him and jump attack with my Moonveil katana. 246 damage. Only 8,100 more to go. Two more slashes then his horse rears back for a stomp. Circle around to avoid it and slash two more times. I’m doing damage but more importantly I’m building bleed on him that will take 10% of his HP for free when it triggers. I slash again—greedy. His club gets past my shield. Another hit will kill me. I step back, dodge a fireball from the horse, pull out my healing flask, take a sip, and roll again, forward, back into the fray. We’re in phase two now. His club is electrified and almost any direct hit is an instant kill. He calls lightning down on me. I dodge and—smash. He went right into his underhand polo swing. No way to avoid it, feels very fair and very fun. The red lettering I know all too well flashes on-screen again, “YOU DIED.” I’ve only been beating my head against this brick wall for an hour and a half, what’s one more attempt?

I gotta quit playing video games. I’ve known this for years—if I’m ever going to be the writer I want to be it simply must go. But there’s knowing something abstractly and there’s feeling the acute damage it’s doing in real time. I’m finally playing Elden Ring, something I’ve been desperate to do since it came out two years ago and which has, predictably, smashed my routine worse than a punch from a Storm Giant and incinerated my brain like a gout of flame from an Elder Dragon. 

I’m a late-comer to the works of From Software, having not played any of its games, some of the most interesting of the last fifteen years, until I played Darks Souls 1 on Switch in 2018 or so (it was originally released in 2011). When it came time to replace my laptop, my chief criteria was getting something powerful enough to run Elden Ring. With my trademark attention to detail, I didn’t check its requirements and bought a model without enough RAM. That left me high and dry on their latest release but it did mean I could play Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro, which took some of the sting out of my screw-up. I recently recounted this to a friend who turned out to have two PS4s gathering dust in her house; she gave me one with thanks for taking what was essentially garbage to her off her hands. That was a very nice thing to do. It is also completely ruining my life. 

I’ve never been what you might call a “hard worker,” or “motivated,” or “proactive,” but last month I found myself brimming with enthusiasm and ideas for this newsletter. I had just announced my series on the movies of the Coen Brothers, I had a deep well of interesting books to get to, and I was experimenting with a new productivity schedule (a less deranged version of Kelsey McKinney’s hour and a half chunks detailed here, hold the sour candy). It’s no coincidence that the moment aligned with a lull in my gaming life, a fallow period following my complete exhaustion of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom that left me with little to play except further desultory, doomed runs in Slay the Spire (I’m never going to make it past Ascension 17). 

But now I have a new game! The world is so big! There are so many caves to explore and bosses to fight! I have a magic katana! I am a lowly Tarnished collecting the shards of the Elden Ring in order to become the Elden Lord. My mind is empty. There is only the game, only the relentless slog onwards through the shattered fantasy world of The Lands Between, a march of death in which demigods fall before my pitiless blade and the hours slip away while my child sleeps and my eyes grow bloodshot. 

If my time with Elden Ring were confined to my time playing, well, I would still be spending many hours on it when I could be doing something far more meaningful, but at least it would occupy discrete chunks of my day. Instead it’s become an all-consuming obsession that pushes any and all other topics right out of my mind. Some of the things I should be thinking about: 

• Writing something interesting about The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

• The place of the western in film history and the American imagination 

• The Coens’ use of noir tropes in non-noir stories

• What Dashiell Hammett is doing versus what Raymond Chandler is doing

• Finding a job

• Solid foods for Patrick to try

Here’s what I am thinking about instead: 

• Where did Castellan Edgar go after I retrieved the Grafted Blade Greatsword from the Leonine Misbegotten and he left Castle Morne?

• Could I have beaten Starscourge Radahn without NPC summons with enough practice?

• Why did Queen Marika shatter the Elden Ring?

• Am I ever going to find better armor?

• How do I reach Volcano Manor on Mt. Gelmir? 

• What is the significance of the motif of fingers running throughout the game?

• Should I dump all my level-ups into intelligence or keep putting some into dexterity?

• Is there any way to deal with undead without enough faith to use holy incantations?

• Where do I find higher quality smithing stones? 

• How many points do I have to put into HP before bosses stop one-shotting me?

• If I advance Ranni the Witch’s questline is it going to lock me out of other options?

• And above all: what did I do last and what should I do next?

If all those questions read as gibberish to you, well, that’s kind of my point. What I hate about getting sucked into a game is the way my thoughts become sequestered in a closed system. None of these thoughts are interesting because they have no meaning outside the game. It’s circular nonsense that refers only to itself and has meaning only within the narrow parameters Elden Ring. It’s also not healthy to devote such time and attention to a hobby you fundamentally disdain and feel bad about doing. 

(Here’s where I got stuck and went back to playing Elden Ring for two hours.)

My worst case of video game-brain was when I played Red Dead Redemption 2. Liz had an interview with Rockstar Games (didn’t work out, she was overqualified) and she needed to be able to talk about their products. I helped her push through the early game and a lot of boring fetch quests to get to the meat of the experience. I had more problems with that game than I can list here but I found its plot boring, its gameplay rote, its systems opaque, and its controls finicky. I did not like playing it at all. And yet I still got sucked in! The interview had passed and I was still playing and mentally rehearsing all the little “challenges” the game presents you with, planning how I would complete them. 

I also had to delete Stardew Valley after only a couple days. People describe it as a cute little farming and life sim where you move to the country to fish, grow crops, and woo the village cuties but I found it to be a merciless efficiency puzzle that I was incapable of playing without trying to maximize my profits and use my time as productively as possible. I’m eating dinner with Liz silently while I run grain and ore prices in my head, looking for my next angle. Miserable stuff.  

I wasn’t always like this. I swear I used to be able to play a game, enjoy it, and then go about my day and think about my real life in the real world. I’m not sure when this changed but I blame the pandemic. I’ve written previously about falling into a deep and totalizing Pokemon obsession during lockdown and described a similar version of these mental patterns—taking a walk and going over it again and again, I can get Kyogre from this game, which means I’ll need this game to catch Necrozma. I don’t regret that period of my life but it’s also one I thought I put behind me. But habits, even purely mental ones, don’t leave us that easily. I’m not thinking about Pokemon anymore but it’s harder than I knew to shake the easy numbing pleasure of cataloging and planning the purely imaginary. 

Playing video games is often caricatured as a mindless pursuit. In a way, I agree. But an often-unremarked aspect of gamers is that they *love* to learn. Look up any major game on Youtube and you can find countless hours of video running down the best weapon combos, the most broken stat builds, the most obscure secrets, the remaining mysteries in the game’s lore. To go back to the Draconic Tree Sentinel that I still can’t beat, his page on the Elden Ring wiki contains a comprehensive account of his every resistance and weakness—apparently I could just cheese him with Scarlet Rot if I wanted to. Remember when they made that protein folding game and in three weeks players solved a problem that had stumped researchers for more than a decade?

Any of these people could learn Ancient Greek or work through Newton’s Principia if they wanted to. The thing is, they don’t. Why not? It’s a boring answer but it’s because these things are boring. Where’s the rush, what’s the goal, what’s the reward for studying? Gamers are absolutely addicted to any validation a game throws at them and will grasp desperately at any carrot hung in front of them, something real learning isn’t engineered to provide. Beyond that though, what video games do is induce deep focus. They are attention-capturing machines that concentrate one’s entire mind into the pinpoint of the now of gameplay.

Reading a book, by contrast, opens the mind up, points it outward, encourages expansion. There is a sort of terror in it, an unmooring, an internal agoraphobia of losing one’s grip on the simple and near at hand. To play a game is to retreat back to the shallow waters, to take refuge in uncomplicated immediacy. To stop playing is to feel that pull back toward the unknown, toward the vast and terrible possibility of the self. It’s freedom—but the brightness of the sun becomes intolerable when one has grown so used to the shadows on the wall.