mognet#3 | re: Psycho Wand, My Beloved or: mmos, addiction, writing
Yo,
Just a heads up that, while typing this email, I was (am) listening to the track titled “Elwynn Forest (Ambient)” from the official World of Warcraft Soundtrack—which was ripped by some person named “Homer” (per the attached metadata)—which I had illegally pirated some time ago (along with nearly a terabyte of other video game music, all of which I had listened to while playing the actual games in question at some point in my life [meaning I did not just download this stuff to have it for no reason—each soundtrack holds some sort of special meaning for me]), all of which I have had stored on my second hard drive for many revolutions (the drive is named “X-Drive,” and yes, this predates Elon’s co-opting of the letter X, which is also a good reminder that I need to get a new drive for storage sometime soon). And I was (am) listening to this track on repeat, of course. And if for whatever reason you don’t believe me, and you think I’m just trying to be cute or clever or funny or whatever, I have attached a screenshot of my desktop with both X-Drive and the Rhythmbox media player pictured as proof of these claims (see attachment titled “proof.png”).
Anyway…
Before I get into writing about “Psycho Wand, My Beloved” (which I’m very happy that you actually read and provided feedback on!), I wanted to briefly cover my own experience with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (what a mouthful), as I think it colors what I’ll be getting into with the rest of this email.
My own experience with MMOs is vast, spanning my entire post-pre-teen life (starting 2003) until about two years ago (2022), when I swore off MMOs as if they were as harmful as smoking cigarettes (which, coincidentally, I also swore off that same year). As mentioned in a few of my other stories/essays, I was on Adderall from a young age, which I abused to facilitate this feeling of getting-totally-lost in a video game’s world. This getting-lost feeling was especially potent with MMOs, as the worlds of these games are huge and full of real people, and, therefore, there is near-endless possibility for unique experiences. I played my first MMO at 12 years old. It was Ragnarok Online (Korean MMO, released in 2003), a beautiful isometric sprite-based MMO all about building cool-looking anime characters with perfect stats and grinding for items with terrible drop rates (a time-sink measure commonly implemented in MMOs to artificially increase playtime and thus subscription revenue [as covered in the PWMB footnotes]). My second MMO was Final Fantasy XI (released by Square in 2002), which I started playing at the age of 13 (prime time for forming potent nostalgic connections that literally never fade), and this game pretty much consumed my life. The zones of Final Fantasy XI are as nostalgic for me as the old pond at my grandma’s house, where I stayed every summer—that’s how ingrained Final Fantasy XI is in my memory. I played Final Fantasy XI well into adulthood and ruined at least one relationship playing it—which inspired Blair and David’s relationship dynamic in PWMB. And, like you, I’ve also played World of Warcraft on and off; but when it first came out, I wasn’t immediately drawn to it because I didn’t care for the western cartoony art style and lack of pretty characters. I only tried it—at a school friend’s insistence—after Burning Crusade came out, because I liked Blood Elves aesthetically. And since then, I’ve put about a year’s worth of play total into WoW, much of that driven by my current partner’s love of the game, as I played along with her until the release of Battle for Azeroth in 2018, at which time I somehow got sucked back into Final Fantasy XI for several years. Eventually, I got into Final Fantasy XIV (the successor to Final Fantasy XI), which is an incredibly shallow action game that’s more of a fashion simulator than anything else; yet somehow, despite my dislike for that game, I ended up maxing out every class around the time of Endwalker’s release in 2021 (Final Fantasy XIV’s fourth expansion).
So, what I’m trying to say is, I have a lot of experience ignoring reality by playing MMOs.
Also, you might notice that, within that whole run-on paragraph about MMOs up there, I didn’t mention Phantasy Star Online, not even one time; that’s because I never truly got lost in that game world. So, the question you’re probably asking now is, “Why did you use that MMO as the backdrop for the story, then?” and that’s a fair question. Let’s delve into that. You see, at the time, I was publishing this faux-historical magazine titled On Computer Games Monthly, and the first issue of that magazine was faux-released in November 2000. And since I wanted this magazine to be a sort of faux-historical document, I wanted the next issue to cover December 2000, and, as such, I needed a keynote game for that issue that I was also interested in playing and writing about. It just so happens that Phantasy Star Online was released in December 2000, and, having played that game once or twice before (but never seriously engaging with it), I decided it would be the perfect candidate for my next writing project.
Thus, “Psycho Wand, My Beloved” was born. And, thus thus, On Computer Games Monthly #2: Delving Digital Voids.
When I sat down to write “Psycho Wand, My Beloved,” I wanted to do this whole dark-comedy David Foster Wallace-inspired kinda thing (even the main character of the story is named “David”), as I was reading The Pale King at the time but didn’t actually finish that novel until, well, just a few days before writing this email to you (as I picked the novel up and put it down many times—considering it’s a massive tome—and finally got through it after realizing that highlighting passages as I read is a brain hack that keeps me super engaged in the reading process, always on the lookout for new passages to gush over and absorb; so, as such, I have this copy of The Pale King which is just chock-full of highlighted stuff; and now that I’m finished with the novel, I plan on writing a small piece inspired by it and, thus, I highly recommend the novel for anyone into meticulous and/or humorous and/or existential fiction, even with the novel being incomplete due to its tragic interruption, that being David Foster Wallace’s suicide on September 12, 2008—truly, one of the greatest writers of our modern age was lost that day). There’s also a tinge of psychedelia and absurdism mixed into “Psycho Wand, My Beloved,” and the footnotes (also inspired by Wallace) are quite gratuitous indeed (and I also noticed that you didn’t comment on the footnotes in your email, probably because you read the piece on howdoyouspell.cool instead of its original place of publishing, which was oncomputer.games, where footnotes are much easier to navigate to and fro; meanwhile, howdoyouspell.cool [or, rather: the WriteFreely platform it’s built upon] has no official footnote support, and thus, I am made to do some gimmicky workaround with superscript and hashtags, which—as you might imagine—is actually very very very annoying to work with and—as I can imagine—just a complete nightmare for readers, so much so that most readers probably just don’t bother with the footnotes at all [but, for the record, I tried really hard on those damn footnotes, so if you didn’t read them, you should; and—post-hoc footnote justification incoming—I used the footnotes as a way to insert my own personal experiences/thoughts into the story and provide review-like commentary on the game without hindering the flow of the main story]).
But what I’m really trying to say is that I am constantly surprised that I—or my writing (which sometimes feels like it came out of another person entirely, especially when I revisit my work after a long period of time)—can compel anyone to sit down and focus on something for any length of time whatsoever; and even after having had it (people reading my stuff and providing feedback) happen a few times, it still surprises me, and I can barely even believe it; I assure you that my middle school and high school teachers would certainly not believe it, either: “I figured he’d be dead in an alley somewhere by now.”
So what I’m really trying to say is that I really really appreciate you reading the story and doubly appreciate you providing feedback.
It’s funny that you mention that some readers might interpret David as “too much like a strawman of a modern game addict,” because, when writing the character, I feared that he might come off that way—a caricature or a parody in the worst way possible—but David is actually some fictional exaggerated version of myself. I have been addicted to many things, including video games on and off. And, as you probably already surmised, I have an “addictive personality” (if we’re using psych terms, which I don’t prefer to use, but they serve the purpose of easily getting across my point here); that is, if I like something, I do that something at every possible chance until I wear it out and become bored, at which point I move on to something else that catches my interest and wear that thing out until I become bored, at which point I move on to something else, and so on and so forth. This whole addiction loop is like a compulsion and continues to happen even though I’m aware of it. Contrary to what some might think, this behavior is not always a detriment, as it helps with writing, personal projects (actually completing them), reading, and, in the case of single-player video games with clear endings, it facilitates my completion of those games and then my moving-on to something else once those games are completed; but, for stuff that is designed to be as addictive as possible and/or basically endless—such as all MMOs or hard drugs (which are basically the same things, as far as I’m concerned)—my addictive personality becomes my proverbial Achilles’ heel, and you can kiss any semblance of a quote-unquote life I had before starting said addictive, predatory things goodbye. For real for real.
Here are a few examples of how David is inspired by me: the whole sneaking-into-the-bedroom-early-in-the-morning-as-to-not-wake-his-partner thing, the whole ignoring-his-partner thing (this one is actually not exaggerated at all), the whole getting-jealous-over-William-spending-time-with-Mark thing, the whole copious drinking thing, the whole work thing (I wasn’t a debt collector, but I was a call center agent that made outbound calls for a time [also note that, somehow, Merenie—David’s manager in the story—ended up being my favorite character after the whole thing was written]), the whole Pavlov response thing (the lighting in David’s room and the urge to have a certain television show playing in the background while playing Phantasy Star Online; i.e., the whole associating-one-thing-with-another-thing-thus-both-things-reminding-you-of-the-other-thing thing), the whole hyper-obsessed-with-his-goals thing, the whole ignoring-his-family thing, &c. &c.
Of course, nearly all of David’s issues are exaggerated for both comedic effect and to kinda get a “point” across. The point being: if you give yourself up completely to these urges and/or bad habits without reflection, you will ruin your life completely—it’s that simple. The secondary “point” of the story is that David spent so much time in this MMO, ruined his life playing it, but, by the end of it all, he had nothing to show for it: his beloved Psycho Wand drops, and the next day or so the official servers are shut down; I wanted to use this as a way to show how ephemeral MMO achievements actually are; I wanted to get across that MMOs—and, by extension, even gaming as a whole—is not worth sacrificing other more tangible aspects of your life for (such as friends and family and general survival). In fact, this “secondary point” is actually the most important point I wanted to get across with the story, as I feel like it’s something we as a species—especially my generation—need to hear; we need it jammed into our heads every day all the time: VIDEO GAMES ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR REAL LIFE. (Some people might have a problem with that last statement, considering it’s kind of broad and “real life” is a nebulous concept, but I would simply point those naysayers to my entire body of work as a counter, as I’ve written about this very sentiment in much greater detail elsewhere [most recently: “Destination Ivalice”].) I look around and see people vegged out in front of screens both large and small all the time everywhere: in the car, at the dinner table, when their kids are playing on the playground shouting “daddy, daddy, look at what I can do!” and they (the parents) are just sitting there on the bench looking at their weird glowy cube. And it’s not just video games, it’s entertainment as a whole—the instant accessibility of it, the faux self-gratifying nature of it, everything; it’s gone too far. And I wanted to use David to illustrate this.
I wanted David to be a cautionary tale.
Anyway. I probably need to calm down. Sometimes, I feel like I am developing harmful writing habits that actually make writing harder for me than it has to be. I could just do the whole everything-is-a-standard-sentence-with-no-weird-stuff-between-the-first-capital-letter-of-the-sentence-and-the-hard-period-at-the-end-of-the-sentence thing, but for some reason I am magnetically drawn to just doing the opposite of that with every fiber of my being. I have always been kind of a contrarian (I say “kind of”). The parenthetical stuff in my non-fiction writing kinda mirrors how my non-sequiturous brain works, I guess. Anyway, I know that if Cormac McCarthy were alive today and reading this, he would probably try to find me and then kill me Judge Holden-style for all the quote-unquote weird little marks (McCarthy’s words) that I use. With that in mind, I am consciously making an effort to use fewer commas in my writing, as they both look ugly and are just not necessary for understanding the text in many cases—ultimately disrupting pacing and readability, I think. I get separating independent clauses and dependent clauses and appositives and long lists with commas—that makes sense to me; that both looks and feels right to me—but using commas between certain adjectives and for weird pauses and for setting apart small lists can lend itself to overuse and start to make the text look pretty gross, but that’s just, like, my opinion (you see, in that last aside, the comma before and after the filler word “like” seems to suggest pauses, but is it really so different if I just used “but that’s just like my opinion” instead? Oh, the joys of being a wannabe writer).
I could probably go on and on about any of the subjects brought up in this email, so I’ll just cut it short here. Again, I appreciate you taking the time to read my stuff. If you want to read something similar to PWMB, I suggest both “My Time in Arcadia” and “Dionysus: Death,” as they’re both more story-like than essay-like and they’re both very personal.
And, yes, I am posting this as a Mognet,
Forrest
(oh yeah, here's the screenshot:)
