Relaxing to the point of distraction.

This will probably make me sound curmudgeonly, but I miss when it was just me and a game. Of course I can recreate that whenever I want by turning off Steam’s overlay, but there’s something to be said for the ubiquity of in-game overlays. Not to mention the utility of the overlays. They allow you to access the web, chat with friends while you play, and check achievement counts. But at the same time, they increase the artifice of the experience. Yes, there’s always Alt + Tab to launch yourself out of a Windows game, or the PS button on a PlayStation controller since the PS3 days to fling yourself to the menu screen, but there’s something about how these overlays are integrated these days. I think, and this may sound stupid, but they gamify gaming. At least in regard to achievements. I have my own complicated history with achievements, but I think that they should only be pursued in a game that you are really enjoying. Otherwise they restrict how you play – much like how generically good or generically evil playthroughs in games restrict how you function. All of a sudden, you are not playing a dynamic experience, but a spreadsheet. You’re looking for the “evil” dialogue option so you can get “evil” points.

In the case of the overlay, it’s a button press away from smashing my immersion away. All of a sudden, if I’m stuck, I can just open a guide or ask a question or just chat to someone. And these aren’t necessarily bad things – they’re useful and social! It’s just I feel like I’m getting a poorer experience. Maybe it’s that I have less self-control than I used to. If I ever had that self-control I idealize in the first place. Maybe if I’d had the opportunity back in my childhood, I’d have searched up guides for anything and everything I got stuck on.

And to be fair, it’s not necessarily the guides I have the most trouble with. I still enjoy a good, earnest challenge, and it’s only when I’m incredibly stuck, or incredibly frustrated, that I’ll look something up. It still feels cheap, but sometimes games are cheap. No, I think what I struggle with the most is just the mere act of being able to see and interact with the overlay. It’s probably a struggle I alone am experiencing, but it’s important to note just how it affects a player of a game. A game’s immersion is a precious, precious thing – but it’s so easily broken.

In the internet age, everything fights for your attention. Much has been written on how exactly our attention has been corroded and how we flit from thing to thing. I’m not a pessimist (most of the time), but sometimes I worry about myself, specifically. The day I can’t get atmospherically involved in a video game because there’s a news article I’m reading or a video I’m watching will be a miserable, miserable day. Sometimes I worry that it creeps ever closer. But I also know that not all technology is bad, and that spending time on it relaxing is not a bad thing. But if my relaxing gives way to deeper relaxing – if I get distracted from my relaxing by something else – then am I actually relaxing? Or is my mind overworking itself, as per usual?

Absorbing games – such as cRPG Planescape: Torment, or dungeon-crawler horror Fear & Hunger – have not encouraged me to open the Steam overlay and have a mess around in it out of boredom. Pathologic only did that once or twice, mainly when replaying sections. But to what do I owe my time? I am probably a bit of a miserable person to be around at times, as I wonder to myself if I’m spending my time right. Is playing a video game better than making a video game? Well, not necessarily – in fact, playing and critiquing video games theoretically makes one a better developer (as well as a better analyst). But there’s also a creative side to feed.

It all comes back to balance. If I spent, say, five hours trying to learn a track in Jak X: Combat Racing and only managed to come second last, is that time well spent? In the moment, it doesn’t feel like it. But when I actually managed to beat somebody, the elation was surprisingly gratifying. The game also managed to hold my attention for that amount of time. I set myself a challenge and I achieved it. But it’s also easy to drift away, particularly the more powerful the system is, and the more it can do. Thinking back to playing the survival horror game Silent Hill on a PS1 system, there was no friends list (unless I decided to call someone) and no quick way to just look up a guide. It was me and my wits. And that will always be more engaging. But if a system is powerful, it encourages you to open more. More tabs, more resources… you can run them all alongside your games! Listen to podcasts, watch videos… but why am I playing games if I’m just running a video over them?

YouTube is a bit of a black hole of time, really. It doesn’t trouble me that I contribute to that black hole, because I believe I’m making content that’s at least thoughtful. And there’s a lot of that out there. That stuff can be an incredible resource. But it’s also so distracting. I’ve found this year that for every video I’ve wanted to write, there’s been someone out there who has probably beaten me to the punch – not in terms of specific angle, but at least game. It’s just not healthy to be able to see all that as a creator. Which is wrong – I should be pleased to be able to connect to so many like-minded folks at a few keystrokes. But when I’m doing that in the middle of a game I should be playing and enjoying, I feel exhausted when I realize I could be doing a thousand other things at once. And this is probably how humans have always felt, to a degree. We have a finite life with countless choices.

I saw this really disingenuous argument online. I can’t remember who it was by – but I think I just happened to be in the room as a sibling was watching it on their phone. They argued that attention spans had always been “bad” – that when we were having a conversation, we were watching birds fly by, watching the waves on the shoreline, and so on. But that’s misrepresentative of the actual power of the internet, and the power that digital convenience has over so many people. When we can overlay a conversation on a video of birds on a video of the shore on a game on a podcast on a web browser, we start to feel something giving that shouldn’t be. Multitasking is a myth, and one that ironically correlates to computers and the digital. We’re very good at doing that, as cognitive science grew up alongside computer science. As Christine Rosen writes, it was “used for decades to describe the parallel processing capabilities of computers” (2008, 105). So is it really fair to use it to refer to ourselves and our own capabilities?

She cites an example of a “study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interrupting among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task” (2008, 106). When it comes to games, can we ever have an “original task” when the entire internet landscape is at our fingertips? How can we ever recover? Someone writes about in response to a study they are participating in, saying that “I multi-task every single second I am online […] At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message”. Language around multitasking is often about “slowing down”.

What we call multitasking is on the rise, even though it’s not really possible – the energy spent multitasking becomes exhausting, and we can only really focus properly on one thing at a time – but surely it’s ridiculous to say that we should “slow down” and focus on our leisure time? On entertainment? But no, of course it’s not. It would be more ridiculous to say, pile on more distractions. Because those distractions dilute experiences; Klaus Manhart writes that “switching tasks comes at a mental cost […] processing of information actually takes place in ‘three-second windows'” (2004, 65). Crucially, Manhart identifies the problem at the core of the multitasking myth – “what appears to be multitasking is thus more akin to channel surfing among different television stations. A person can concentrate on a conversation for three seconds, then for three seconds on a crying child and three on a computer screen. While one subject at a time occupies the foreground of consciousness, the others stay in the background until they, in turn, are given access to the central processor” (2004, 65). Consciousness, in other words, is an act of focusing on one thing at once. If we are to reduce our brains to the level of computers – only one thing is allowed in the CPU at once.

In the case of video games, we can only focus on one thing properly at a time. Either the game, the chat we’re having with our friend, or the guide we’re looking at. Three seconds, and the spell is broken. Immersion is lost, focus is lost – and why do I play games if not for those magical moments of total immersion?

The overlay is merely a portal to those distracting choices, to the videos I could watch or the essays I could read. It’s a symptom, a scapegoat – a point of interest in the midst of a larger potential problem. As much as I value chatting to people and using the overlay, I know that it’s also a complex construct for me, something representative of my relationship to technology. I’m never sure it’s a good thing. I’m probably a Luddite, which surprises some people when I tell them of my computer background, and obviously my interest in games. I have an understanding and an appreciation for the cutting edge, for new games, and I know my way around. Maybe that’s part of the problem.

But to be able to have a screen within a screen, to be able to have the world at your fingertips when you’re meant to have another world at your fingertips… is that too much power for one person to have? Is it too convenient?

Perhaps for me, it is.