Choosing Which Video Games to Play as You Lay Dying

Whether of high rank or low, whether old or young, people die. If enlightened they die; if unenlightened, they die. Indeed everyone must die….Although everyone knows that they will die, they think they themselves will die only after everyone else has died, and they don’t consider the fact the their death may come at any moment. –Yamamoto Tsunetomo

To say life is limited, to say your days are numbered and you don’t know that number, is cliche. But it is true. Whenever you do anything, it consumes your life and takes from your ability to do anything else during that period of time. Life once passed cannot be revisited. And that life will pass whether you consciously use it or not. Many will understand this as a statement to “be constructive,” to not “waste” your life on amusements like video games and anime. Never sports, of course. Sports are exempt from being a waste of time! Although, they consume life no differently than video games, anime, and work. No use of your life is a waste if you choose how you spend that time. If, however, you coast on habit, without a purpose for your choice, you don’t pass your life well. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you “while away” your time playing a video game or worshiping before the idol of work culture. The moments pass just the same.

Video games provide an interactive way to tell a story. They allow the player to enter into a fictional world similar to how books do. Stories shape how we think about reality and other people. Video games do this just as well as books. We think with the information we put into our minds. While most of us cannot choose the culture we live within (exempting expats and modern-nomads), we can choose our exposure to other cultures and ways of thinking through the media we choose to consume. Think of your mind as a bucket of Lego blocks. You can build serviceable things using a set of basic bricks. But you can build far more interesting creations with pirate, space, town, and other themed bricks. Movies, books, video games, and other message containers provide different shapes and types of bricks for you to build with. A well-rounded mind has a large variety of Lego bricks and the creativity to put them together in ways unique to you.

Okay, as a former librarian and a wannabe philosopher, I will tell you: make books a part of your Lego collection. People who don’t read many books fail to live many lives. As US General Jim Mattis writes:

If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.

Or as Yamaga Soko phrases the idea:

Books record things spanning thousands of years. How could we who are alive in the present day know about events hundreds of years ago, or consider the ways of remote foreign lands, if not for books? There broad study of literature should be used to empower the intelligence.

You won’t have enough mental Lego bricks if you don’t read books.

However, this idea extends to video games. Video games can help your mental depth with their story and messages. If you play the right video games, anyway. I’m not talking about Call of Duty, which is a fine game in the right doses. Rather, I speak of games like Persona 5 Royal, Nier: Automata, and Final Fantasy VI which offer philosophy, social commentary, and deep (for their era) characters. While I can read a book in about 8 hours, depending on the book, it took me 103 hours to clear Persona 5 Royal the first time thanks to its twisty story and interesting characters. I had fun with the game, and it invited me to think, which are the highest praise you can give a video game. It made me think about its themes of growing up, the social responsibilities of adults, and the role of the human heart in shaping reality. In short, its themes and visual style gave me new Lego bricks to play with.

Like the joints in bamboo, amusement, for the most part, should have limits. –Takuan Soho

Let me interject again. As Takuan Soho wrote so many centuries ago, we need to keep our amusements limited. But so too we need to keep our work limited. Worshiping the gods of entertainment and the gods of work ends in the same hell, the hell of uselessness and of a life blinked. Work is as useless as entertainment (or more precisely entertainment is as useless as work) when they aren’t done on your own terms. When they aren’t chosen. While your ability to choose may be limited, there’s always some choice if you look for it. Work choice involves financial responsibility and living below your means. When you live a simple life, you can live on 50% of your income, saving and investing the rest for inevitable trouble and possible retirement. This gives your more flexibility with your work choice and appreciation for the simple things.

My relationship with video games has changed as I realized I’m dying. Not dying, dying, but dying as all healthy people are. Which, when you get down to it, is the same as the terminally-ill die: one moment at a time. Back in high school (which was in the previous century), I was addicted to Diablo 2. I don’t use the word addicted lightly. I played the game with my friends for unmentionable thousands of hours. Fast forward and I played Final Fantasy XVI for nearly a decade. I sank over 7,000 hours into the game (700 hours a year, or about 2 hours a day). Which, for many MMORPG players, is newb status. Not all those hours were chosen. Many were more force of habit, even when I wasn’t enjoying the game anymore. Each of those hours I spent on Diablo 2 or FFXIV were an hour I couldn’t spend on anything else, be it a book, learning something, writing, watch an anime, or playing another video game. Every hour I spent on those games prevented me from playing through a different story.

I’ve concluded that I should play through as many video game stories as I can (when I relax at the end of the day) rather than sink that time into the repetitive loops of FFXIV and similar games. Replaying a video game is like re-reading a favorite book. You will notice different and new things. Returns on your time, however, diminish. I’ve played Final Fantasy VI and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past upside down, sideways, and inside out using randomizers and personal challenges. The comfort these games lend me make them worthy of revisiting, but that comfort comes at the cost of exploring a new story, of adding new bricks to my mental bucket. There are too many games (and too many books) to run the same dungeons or play the same multiplayer maps (if you are into first person shooters). This sort of play, chasing virtual trophies, doesn’t enrich your life with story and characters and different ways of thinking. The hundreds of hours I spent in Diablo 2 to get this or that sword are gone. There’s no story from those hours to remember. I don’t remember much beyond the vague fun my friends and I had together, which is valuable itself. But I remember nothing specific. However, Final Fantasy VI‘s story still remains with me with its exploration of nihilism and madness, of love and hope. Nier: Automata’s exploration of humanity continues to sit within my thoughts and shape my own writings. Grinding dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV for gear that becomes worthless one update later left no memories. The false dopamine high grabs you in the moment, leaving you craving the next. And it comes at the cost of exploring other stories, other games.

Non-gamers do not understand the rush that “false” dopamine high provides. The craving to hit it again drives you to play more, and unlike the resistance drug-addicts gain, video-game dopamine hits just as hard each time. The circumstances for that hit may change. That rush is why, when I played online games, I played as a healer. Few things release as much dopamine as single-handedly saving hours of raid progress. The key to this dopamine sits with the team aspect of the games. You “save” other people. I mean, I once saved a 24-person raid with a clutch party-wide resurrection. The flood of praise in the chat was heady, even though I normally dislike praise. The dopamine chase leads gamers to sink endless hours chasing pixels and the praise of others. But this chase leads prevents many gamers from adding a greater variety of stories to their mental library. Reality offers a far inferior dopamine hit (or at least not as consistent) outside of destructive activities like sleeping around and drug use.

Life is zero sum. Time spent doing anything comes at the cost to something else. You reading this article comes at the cost of reading another article. Either way, that moment of your life belongs to death. Of course, the best way to spend your time is out in the world with other people. The world is the ultimate video game, to cite the anime Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki. For every game you play, every book you read, every movie you see, you won’t play, read, or see another. They come at the cost of spending time with other people and of spending time on your other hobbies too. So choose how you use your time wisely. Think about how you would use your time as you lay dying. It doesn’t matter how young you are. As soon as your are born you begin dying. Death isn’t something far off. You experience death this very moment. Death sits on your shoulder, and you hand your moments to it. You cannot hold onto those moments, but you can choose what you hand to death. Everything you choose to do matters, even if it is just playing a video game or watching an anime. It matters because everything you do, everything you don’t do, is your life.