Member-only story
Game Over
I used to play video games to escape from monotony. Then 2016 happened.
I purchased a Playstation 4 gaming console shortly after it was released, in late 2013. At the time, Barack Obama was still president, and I worked a newly appointed desk job that was mundane and repetitive but not without its joys. The console purchase had been like many of my other adult purchases: a desire to fulfill that which I didn’t have access to as a child. My family acquired gaming consoles as they went out of style and were replaced by newer models, and so my relationship with video games was always a generation behind that of my peers. With a “real” job and the means to spend money on unnecessary flourishes, I talked myself into getting in line with the current generation of gaming, once and for all.
The main function of the system was to provide a small respite from the monotony of working a nine-to-five job—at the time, something I felt like I was destined to do forever. It seems foolish in retrospect, but my comfort with my station in life told me I would need the brief and thrilling escape that entering a world of video games could provide, the way it did when I would spend boring summer days biking over to the house of whichever friend had the newest game or the newest console and leaving the world behind for a couple hours.
