I play Turrican II every day, and for a few hours I’m capable and in control of my situation. I get harassed for how I look and sound by other school kids and my own family, but right now I’m in charge of saving the universe. I don’t have the words to explain how terrible I feel all the time.
My starter in Pokémon Blue is a Bulbasaur I love dearly. We do everything together. I spend a long time drawing the adventures I’d have as a Trainer, since I really don’t want to battle. I play to try and avoid fighting. The Game Boy Colour means I can play with headphones for the first time. It helps.
I play the opening act of Final Fantasy VII over and over again. I don’t need to see the rest of the world, or to save it from my extremely attractive antagonist. I don’t even need to see everything it has to offer. I just need to know what it’s like to escape a space that could collapse on you without warning. Standing on an unfinished highway, looking out on night sky and mountains with Midgar ready to be put behind me is the calmest I feel for a long time.
“It is said that you cannot leave the island unless you wake the Wind Fish.." the Owl had said. I spend hours wandering the beaches of Link’s Awakening just listening to the water. I don’t want to leave, not yet. I’m not ready to go. I have friends, here. I keep finding myself in the Photographer’s shop, looking back over fond memories and smiling.
Final Fantasy VIII means a lot to me for a lot of reasons. Squall is the first time I find a character I identify with. It makes a difference to me, to see someone else’s fear of isolation stop them connecting with others. It’s enticing to keep others at a distance, rather than risk losing them or being hurt by them.
I watch the opening cinematic of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver over and over again. Watching Raziel writhe and burn in The Lake of the Dead is almost as good as hurting myself some days. I don’t cry anymore. Or rather, I can’t cry by now, even if I want to. Tears mean getting hit harder or screamed at louder. I’m silent when my father finds fault in something and beats my legs. He’s careful to pick somewhere others won’t see, but I don’t feel much at this point.
Tekken 2 is a game full of firsts. My intro to couch co-op. The first time I remember other people asking to spend time with me. My first fighting game. The first time someone tries to force themselves on me. It took me longer than I’d like to work out if it was better than being alone again.
I play Phantasy Star Online like a single-player RPG long before I ever have access to an internet connection. Every day I come home from school my mother asks me if I’m a faggot. Sometimes my father wants to know why I don’t have a girlfriend — “Are you gay or just a fat bastard?” — while my mother asks if a classmate’s pubic hair matches their haircut, or which of my classmates I want to fuck. Hours later, I’m always told “That never happened, you’re fucking crazy” and I lose myself in the forests of Ragol for weeks.
I love Final Fantasy IX. I love Vivi. I understand Vivi’s shyness — their fear and hesitation. I fall in love with the places in that world. The winding streets and crooked buildings of Alexandria. The shining lights over the waters of Treno. More than anything, I fall in love with the endless rain of Burmecia (…I had an extremely strong crush on Kuja, too) and save a checkpoint there so I can stand and listen to Kingdom of Burmecia and the rain.
The sun is setting in Wind Waker, so we stop at an island to look at the stars. We listen to the grass rustling and the burbling waves and I breathe calmly. I talk to the King of Red Lions about their favourite constellations, and tell them about the names we gave them when we were growing up on Outset.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is my first Bethesda game. I join the Thieves Guild as soon I escape jail. This game makes me feel like spending my life trying to be invisible could be useful. Like I could be useful. My mother asks me to do things around the house, then screams at me for doing things she explicitly told me not to hours later. It makes me feel useless and hopeless and detached from reality until I learn this is a common tactic for abusers.
I’m homeless and staying with a friend. My parents finally turned on each other and I’m just now starting to understand my experiences are atypical — that my family relationships are built on manipulation and abuse. I spend my time between high school exams dismantling pencil sharpeners and disposable razors to hurt myself in increasingly severe ways. I play Shadow of the Colossus in a single sitting and fall for it’s melancholy. I don’t want the Colossi to die. I realise I don’t want to die, either. After years, I stop cutting.
I come back to Mirror’s Edge every year or two. The fluidity and freedom are unlike anything I’d seen before, and I’ll run hours over the target on Time Trial missions wandering around rooftops and practising flowing sequences. Each time after the first, it’s like sitting down with an old friend. I think about trying to flow through spaces while working in nights in a club. Between the long nights, the fighting and getting groped I end up drinking a lot, on and off work. I turn up to work drunk and stoned a lot. Nobody notices because everyone who works here has similarly awful ways of coping with it.
I’m playing Grand Theft Auto IV, and I spend a lot of my time sat in a parked car. I pull up in Port Tudor and watch the grey waters heaving. I listen to Jazz Nation Radio and the rain on the roof. I wait at traffic lights and stay within the speed limit when I’m driving. There’s something soothing about playing this game wrong. I meet my father after a doctor’s appointment and tell him I have severe depression. He says “Everyone gets sad, you just get on with it.” and I wonder why I bothered trying to explain that it’s an illness, not a mood.
Cass and I have an understanding. We leave New Vegas’ strip before the sun rises and hole up in an outcrop somewhere near a caravan route. She’ll work her way through a bottle of something and tell stories about the places she’s seen while I drop Legionnaires with my rifle. She’ll offer me the bottle, but I’ll tell her I don’t drink anymore — bad experiences. She has something to say about everywhere we visit, and I think it makes us both feel better. It’s easier to get attached to places than people. They crumble a little less often.
Sometimes I take days to raid an old tomb, or to clear a Dwemer ruin, or just to ride from one city to another to look for work. I’m not a Stormcloak, but I’ll waste every Imperial patrol I cross paths with. I’m a sellsword, and business is booming in Skyrim. Living a different life is an attractive prospect.
Journey is a transformative experience. I’m sat in front of a waterfall of sand — mesmerised — when a stranger squeaks and sits down next to me. We sit together for a while, and we leave together. We surf downhill, chiming support and weaving between pillars on waves of golden sand. We creep through darkened ruins, a comforting presence as huge, dangerous shapes glide around in the shadows. We chirp in encouragement, freezing winds tearing at our robes as we struggle to climb a mountain. We fall in the snow, side-by-side, and reborn in light I’m alone again. It’s heartbreaking. Music swells joyously, but there’s nothing joyful about this. A huge carved gate sits in front of me. I see rippling fabric. It’s a scarf. They waited. We ascend, together.
BioShock Infinite is my first BioShock game. I come home from work and find out that doing hideous things to people with a hydraulic hook makes some days feel less exhausting. In the weeks that follow, I begin to read more and understand how media can be a platform for educating folks — about how fiction affects real people, about how damaging it can be for an author to skip making a point in favour of letting players determine what’s good and what’s bad, and about how misguided and harmful Infinite is in it’s efforts to remain impartial, especially. It took time for me to look beyond my own problems, but I leave the floating city of Columbia more empathetic than when I arrived.
In State of Decay, zombies place unrelenting pressure on folks trying to maintain healthy relationships. They’re a constant strain on folks trying to build a community. It’s the first time I’ve seen a post-apocalyptic story focus on wellbeing, and I spend time getting to know each of my community members. We head out on supply runs in pairs, and come home telling stories about narrow escapes and stashed hope and triumph.
I still see stories regularly about how Destiny was someone’s perfect podcast game. It makes me think a lot about Csikszentmihalyi’s work on cognitive flow, how it relates to game design, and how the balance of skill and difficulty makes Destiny feel like meditation for me. I don’t listen to podcasts while I’m playing, but I’ll pleasantly disassociate for hours at a time. It helps me manage the periods of intense anxiety more effectively.
I have a fondness for Hyper Light Drifter that I don’t think I’ll ever lose. It gives me room to wander, and challenges me to overcome it. I delight in having a map that shows a broken world, ripe for exploration, instead of telling me exactly where to go. It’s the game that I loved enough to finally try and overcome my anxiety about recording a Let’s Play. It started me on a path I’m almost a year into now; I’m streaming regularly over on Twitch, and working at creating room for a supportive, inclusive community that cares about good stories and tries to make room to talk critically about games. I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done, and constantly so grateful and overwhelmed folks show up, and keep showing up. It’s such hard work, but it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. I’m bisexual and non-binary and visible and sincere in a way I’ve never had the opportunity— or safety — to be previously.
I spend two days with my first game of Stellaris. Our civilisation of egalitarian, pacifist fennec foxfolk take to the stars and begin to gently explore the surrounding systems. We make contact with humans, overwhelmed with intrigue at our “exotic visages”. We make contact with chittering bugfolk who tell us our frail bodies would make for weak labourers. Centuries pass, and we keep them at bay. We build monuments to our key leaders. We terraform barren planets and name them after our explorers. We protect indigenous civilisations from those who’d do them harm. Decades pass in moments, and each step makes our corner of the galaxy a little safer. A little more supportive. A little more welcoming.
Between jobs, I stop and talk to my crew in Shadowrun: Hong Kong. I’m interested to get to know everyone better, but Is0bel and Gobbet capture my heart. Gobbet is a Shaman of the Rat totem, and most of the time I visit she’s eating steaming, oily soup and cooing to the rats that nest in her hair and sleeves. She’s dangerously carefree, and I get it. Is0bel is a Decker, and my visits usually interrupt her jaunts through cyberspace. I find myself talking to her avatar a lot — an electronic visualisation of her Matrix. She’s more comfortable there than in meatspace, and I get it. Our adventure brings us all closer together. We’re a family now. We take care of each other. I get it.
The console of my ship rattles in Elite: Dangerous as we orbit this system’s star. A light flickers and turns green to confirm our fuel stores are replenished from orbiting this system’s star. I wrestle with the ship for a moment to get us pointed at the nearby station we’re due to deliver these medical supplies to and kick On Starlit Wings into Supercruise. A timer ticks up on my monitor: 7 minutes to destination. I tilt my chair back, lift my feet onto the console and let out a sigh. Sometimes these little tasks make a whole world of difference.
I don’t have an affirming conclusion to this story about how I got through it and how things were alright in the end. This part isn’t a video game, sadly. I started this piece because I wanted to look at the way games have — and continue to be — a coping mechanism for me. They might be a coping mechanism for you, too. I’ve distanced myself from the toxic people and places that drain my mental health and trigger my trauma, but I’ll carry my past with me wherever I go and I’m learning to live with that.
My mental health has deteriorated so severely I’ve been unable to work properly for almost a year. I haven’t slept properly in weeks (I’m taking sleeping pills right now to try and manage that) and every day for the last week I’ve thought about not being alive and found it comforting. As I mentioned in this piece: I can’t cry, so the pressure just builds up until something internal shuts off.
I avoided confronting any of these problems for so long because I was determined to try and be how society expects people like me to be: manageable, minimal and invisible. The desire to not draw attention to myself or risk being pushed further out kept me from acknowledging my sexuality, my gender identity and my own basic needs for comfort, care and survival.
I’ll get through this because I’ve gotten through so much already. I’m getting medical support I was too disenfranchised to fight for previously, and even that’s an uphill struggle every step of the way. I’m determined to get better for myself, for the people I love and for the people who love me. Illness and abuse sometimes make reality a shifting nightmare, but writing this means I can trace an unshakeable arc of things improving, however slowly.
Sometimes your brain makes an enemy of you. Sometimes seeing facts helps.
Nat is a non-binary queer streaming part-time on Twitch, usually talking emphatically or critically about good scenery, lovely robots and storytelling.
Find them at twitch.tv/NatelliteDish or support them at ko-fi.com/NatelliteDish!
