When I was a child, video games were viewed as a sort of “necessary evil” in my household. Certain games were absolutely off-limits. Exhibit A: Tomorrow Never Dies, a James Bond game from 1999 that my dad was “strongly recommended” to return to the store after Mom saw just how much blood splattered on the screen when your avatar died. Other games, like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, didn’t violate any kind of moral taboos, but they were always deemed second-rate activities to things like Going Outside and Spending Time With Friends.

Now, I don’t have a perfect memory, but I don’t recall wanting to spend too many childhood days glued to the couch playing video games. I’ve always been restless; too many consecutive minutes doing anything is more than I can handle; I’ve spent most of my life, especially recently, bouncing back and forth between the couch, the kitchen table, and the neighborhood sidewalk in order to quiet my frenetic mind. Still, in those moments I choose to spend in front of the television with a controller in my hand, I hear whispers from my childhood: “This is a waste of time. Couldn’t you be doing something more productive? More useful?” After some reflection, I’ve formulated some responses to this self-interrogation. Feel free to use them whenever somebody questions your gaming addiction!

1. Video games give me a rare opportunity to collaborate. In my experience, the older I get, the fewer opportunities I have to work together with others in order to achieve a goal. Marriage is an obvious exception, but it’s not like I’m working on group projects for school on weekends anymore. My life, for the most part, is my own, and I don’t have to depend on anybody else for my own success or failure. In certain video games, like Rocket League, things are quite different. Rocket League, for those in the dark, is a ridiculous concept: your avatar is a car, and your objective is to win a game of soccer. It’s Mario Kart-meets-Mario Strikers: Charged (a criminally underrated soccer game), and it’s a team sport to the highest degree. You can try to work independently of your teammate, but you won’t win many games that way. And while it’s a delight to play with actual, real-life friends (thank you, Kjell, for encouraging me to re-download this game), it’s a unique challenge to play with strangers. Using only a few stock phrases provided by the game (like “I got it!” and “Thanks!”), plus a little bit of intuition, you and your teammate have just five minutes to concoct a winning strategy against other strangers who have likely never met, either. Collaborating in Rocket League is unlike any other life experience I can think of, and it’s a justification in itself for playing.

2. Video games teach anti-fragility. Anti-fragility is one of the most useful concepts I learned about in 2019. According to its developer, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, anti-fragility is the ability for “systems” (or people) to become stronger when they encounter failure and other stressors. It’s like resilience, only stronger. When you’re resilient, you bend but you don’t break. When you’re anti-fragile, you bend and then you actually become stronger from the process of bending. I’d like to write a an entire post about anti-fragility, but to keep it relevant to the topic at hand: I get smarter and better when I fail in video games. My personal profile will reveal that I have failed prolifically at not only Rocket League, but also games like NHL 19 (in which I lose games by an average of 2.5 goals) and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (in which I died 30+ times in boss battles as I learned my opponents’ moves and how to parry them). When I was younger, a lot of things came easily to me. I didn’t have to study much in school, and I found I had a natural talent for a few sports. With that early success, though, came a bitter distaste for failure. Rather than seeing failure as a teacher, I abhorred it. In most video games, hating failure simply isn’t an option. It’s not a question of if I will fail, but when and how. Learning to embrace failure in these games has led me not only to improve my skills, but also to feel the emotional reward of persisting, upgrading, and eventually surmounting previously unsurmountable challenges.

3. Video games provide an escape, and escape is healthy. I’ll begin by acknowledging that escapism is controversial, and that I have absolutely heard the call the asks, “Can’t you do something more important to help solve the problems in the world?” But, recognizing that, I think everybody needs to escape sometimes. The world is ruthless, jobs are demanding, and adulthood not only throws new problems your way but then accelerates those problems at the worst possible times. It’s not helpful to plunge your head in the sand ostrich-style, but it makes as little sense to face down your problems without respite. Even Frodo and Sam made camp on their way to Mordor. In a culture that provides so many avenues of distraction, playing video games seems to me to be one of the healthiest methods available. Whereas social media is a mostly passive experience, video games are active, facilitating a more mindful experience. You’d be hard-pressed to experience “flow” while thumbing through Instagram; alternatively, it’s difficult to succeed in many video games unless you are completely immersed in the task at hand. Escapism in video games works differently depending on the game: there are competitive games, like the games I’ve mentioned, in which complete focus is required to win; on the other hand, there are less taxing games (like Spyro) in which the fun of the game is exploring an open world with no ticking clock. Both types of escapism have served me well in different seasons of my life, and I’d recommend them to anybody looking for a few minutes away from the daily grind.

Honorable mentions:

• Video games feature some of the best music out there (the original Sypro soundtrack; the original score in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order; even soundtracks in sports games like NHL 19).
• Video games facilitate virtual (and real) hangouts with friends (I’ve seen certain friendships, even in my own life, forged and strengthened by games like Rock Band, Overcooked 2, and Rocket League).

I’m sure there’s a lot more I could write about the benefits of video games, but my copy of NHL 20 just finished downloading and I’d really like to go try it out! I’m expecting to lose my fair share of online games, but, with any luck, I’ll be a respectable player by the time NHL 21 hits shelves.

Get your mind out of the gutter!

Where I come from, shagging is not a thing done to Austin Powers by spies. Instead, it is a time-honored hallmark of baseball practice, wherein several players stand in the outfield grass and track down balls hit by their teammates during batting practice. It is also, if you asked me during my high school days, the worst.

Usually, during high school practices, shagging balls was one station in a larger rotation: your group would start at home plate for batting practice, then move to the outfield to hit golf-sized whiffle balls, then spread out to shag. Of all possible rotation stations, shagging balls was without doubt the least challenging, most boring, and always felt like the biggest waste of time. It also seemed unfair: why should I have to stand out here collecting baseballs for 30 minutes when I, personally, only got to hit for five minutes! Viewed through the eyes of a teenager (or worse, a child: shagging baseballs as a practice activity extends into the far reaches of Little League), a half-hour tracking down balls in the outfield felt like unjustified jail time. If you were lucky, you could spend it with friends, but if Coach yelled at you to split up, all of a sudden you were in solitary confinement.

Of course, looking back on this activity (and how I felt about it) reveals my youthful self-centeredness: batting practice is simply not possible without players shagging balls in the outfield. Unless your school can afford an enclosed batting cage (ours couldn’t), there is no option but to spend some of your own precious time wasting away in the outfield. When your team has few material resources, you’re forced to rely on human resources, and to “waste” time doing something for the good of the team. And when you’re in your teen years, doing anything for the good of a larger group seems stupid and wasteful. After all, Call of Duty isn’t going to play itself!

Under most circumstances, I wouldn’t be thinking about shagging balls at this moment in my life. I probably would have forgotten about the activity altogether, at least until I have children of my own and am regrettably forced to send some of them into the outfield during batting practice. But shagging is on my mind because it was the absolute best part of my day yesterday, and I did it on the very same field on which I learned to hate it.

Yesterday, I took part in my alma mater’s first annual alumni baseball game. All in all, the entire day was a treat: I saw some old friends; I met many fellow alumni, most from graduating classes far removed from my own; and, most importantly, I played the sport I obsessed over for the majority of my childhood. Most of my skill has sloughed off over the years, but my love for the game has not faded. I still spend many a summer evening tuning into games on television, marveling at how human beings can track (and hit!) a tiny sphere traveling faster than 90 miles per hour. (To deepen my appreciation for this: in my only at-bat yesterday, I struck out against a high school pitcher. Any delusions I’ve ever had of hitting major-league pitching quickly scurried away.)

But without doubt, the most enjoyable aspect of the alumni game was the hour I spent in the outfield before the first pitch, collecting baseballs while the current varsity baseball team took batting practice. It was truly wonderful: for sixty minutes, I ran freely across the expansive astroturf (it was dead grass when I graduated in 2012), I practiced tracking down fly balls off the bat, and I threw the balls to the open gloves of complete strangers, people with whom I shared nothing in common save for our alma mater and love of baseball. I worked alone, patrolling right-center field, making it my personal mission not to let any balls get past me. It was relaxing, it was liberating, it was everything shagging balls wasn’t when I was a teenager.

What changed? Most obviously, I have a new appreciation for things I took for granted as a kid. Even the most mundane aspect of baseball practice is a treasure to me now, as I no longer take part in baseball practices of any kind, save for occasional trips to the local batting cages. On another level, I wonder if I now have an appreciation for group activities, and for playing roles in those activities that allow the activity to take place at all. Whole-field batting practice is impossible without a small army of outfielders to bring the baseballs in for another round; to be one of those outfielders is to help facilitate something larger than yourself. Baseball is notoriously the least team-oriented team sport, but the act of shagging balls during practice establishes a sense of synergy: by doing it, you’re allowing for an activity that is much more than the sum of its individuals.

I’ll admit, there were times yesterday when I regretted signing up for the game. Striking out has always made me want to crawl into a hole, and swinging and missing several times during batting practice didn’t help matters either. But you’d better believe I’m already counting on signing up for next year’s game, if only because I know I’ll have the opportunity to stand in the outfield for an hour, breathing in the fresh air, stretching my legs as I sprint across the turf, and getting a small taste of the game I miss dearly.

December 22, 2019
Riverside, CA

I’m facing the classic What Do I Do With Myself question that every school break has asked me since the beginning of school breaks. I spent the beginning of today helping my dad paint the new shed in the side yard. I really didn’t want to, but I wanted to be helpful, I wanted to repay my dad for so much that he has done for me (painting a shed doesn’t begin to close the gap of what I owe him), and I thought it would be a good idea to keep myself occupied doing something productive.

That word, though: productive. Now there’s a loaded term. I often think I want to be productive, or that I am doing something productive, but do I have the first idea about what that word means? What am I actually producing. My mind floats back to an episode of Philosophize This! about Hannah Arendt, where the host (the excellent Stephen West) lists Arendt’s three major arenas that comprise a meaningful human life: labor, work, and action. For Arendt, “work” meant producing something that creates shared culture (the “setting” in which our human lives take place), whether that contribution is a poem, a sack of potatoes, or a flashlight. Whatever the contribution is, the key is that it adds to our shared culture; that is, other people necessarily encounter the thing that you have worked on.

When I’m at school, teaching, my work is apparent to me. I am directly impacting the lives of more than 100 students every day, plus my coworkers, plus whichever lives my influence indirectly touches through those direct encounters. While it’s true I’m not constructing any kind of physical product, I can still wrap my mind around what it is I am working on: a kinder, wiser, more thoughtful future composed of those minds and hearts I am trying to shape.

When I’m on vacation, my work is much less obvious. I feel like I am consuming so much more than I produce. So far, on this break alone, I have consumed the work of several musicians, three films, dozens of episodes of television, a handful of video games, and parts of three books. That’s a lot of consumption in a week! I almost feel selfish. Do I not owe it to the world to produce? Am I not pulling my cultural weight? What’s more, I want to contribute to the culture, even in the most microscopic of ways.

Maybe it’s just me, but I sense most people want to contribute to our shared culture; most people want to leave some kind of legacy. Some more than others, probably, but I think we all want to contribute, yet it appears that so few actually do.

Or, maybe, I’m being narrow-minded about this. There are several people who immediately spring to my mind, people who have never published a book, or released a film, or sold a painting, but who have assuredly made the world better in less tangible ways. It’s quite possible that I’m projecting my own fantasies and shortcomings onto others, and in doing so, I’m ignoring the invisible work people engage in every day: the work of uttering kind words, providing financial support, or providing steadfast friendship (just to name a few).

Is that the answer to my What Do I Do With Myself question? In time away from my obvious work, can I continue working in important-yet-quieter ways? I do feel as if, at this point in my life, my influence touches fewer lives than ever before (a paradox for another essay), but shouldn’t that give me an opportunity to put even more of myself toward those few lives to which I have access?

It’s likely that I’ll always be unsatisfied. That’s what it means to be human; in the river of life, if we stop paddling ahead, we’re yanked violently downstream. As soon as I think I’ve found fulfillment in one aspect of my work, I will probably feel pulled toward another aspect I deem lacking. But the important thing is to work toward something, whether or not people can see my contribution to the world with their own two eyes.

December 19, 2019
Riverside, CA

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

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