Uncool Addiction

          I always had a healthy relationship with video games growing up. Like most kids, I enjoyed them, and spent a fair amount of time in the arcade at Straw Hat Pizza playing my favorites Gauntlet and Spy Hunter in the 1980’s. In the 1990’s, my girlfriend and I had an obsession with Galaga – which was by then an old game – and would play every time her mom took us to Ted’s restaurant in San Anselmo, which was often. In the 2000’s, while living in the Ingleside neighborhood of San Francisco, the homies and I would stay up until 4:00 am on a nightly basis getting high and playing NBA Jams, NHL 97 and Sled Storm on the Play Station, our eyes glazed over with weed and strain from looking at the television too long.  It was tough to wake up on time many mornings after these marathon sessions.

            After my tenure at the Ingleside house however, I gave up on video games. They seemed to be a thing of my youth and a wasteful pastime. They also seemed singularly uncool and certainly not a hobby I would find in people I admire. I’m pretty sure Charles Bukowski. Pete Dexter and Cormac McCarthy weren’t big video game players.

            And then, about four years ago I discovered Sim City for my Iphone. Sim City is what it sounds like: a city building game that continues the tradition of the old “Sims” series, which I never actually played. To keep it short: essentially, the player has a bunch of tasks they have to complete so that they can earn money and other game currencies and build up their city, thereby increasing the population which creates more taxes and makes it possible to build more buildings, sporting arenas, casinos, beach boardwalks and so on. The goal of the game? Basically it is to build a cool, well functioning city with a lot of people in it.

            Here’s the rub. The game moves at a painfully slow pace, especially when you make more progress. Tasks get exponentially harder as the game goes on and your city becomes bigger. Why, you ask? Simple: so that the game creators can get you to pay actual, real-world money in exchange for Sim Cash, the most difficult currency to acquire in the game, and the key to shortcutting all the painstaking work of building.

            So I’m ethically opposed to paying my hard earned money for game currency. That just seems ridiculous. In addition, it feels like the minute you do that you have ruined the challenge. I mean, anybody can buy their way to success, right? So I set out years ago to play the game the right way, without paying a dime. My goal: to build a city with one million inhabitants.

            I’ve probably put on average an hour a day into this motherfucker. And it’s been almost four years now. So lets call it 1200-1400 hours just to be reasonable. I think about that and it makes my heart sink. I could have written two novels in that amount of time. I could have put those hours into my work, and who knows what kind of payoff I might have seen. But no, instead I put my life’s effort into this meaningless game. Why? It doesn’t get me high; it offers nothing but frustration and, ultimately, existential dread in miniature.

            As it stands today I have 985,855 Sims living in my city. What will I do when I hit a million? I’d like to believe I’ll just put it down.