Transcript
One of the reasons I have felt stymied in my pursuit of this hobby is my measurable decline in imagination. “Declining powers of imagination” … now that’s a phrase fraught with terror for me personally and one I never thought I’d utter, especially relative to myself. In the past decade or two of self-examination, I’ve come to believe that my penchant to get hooked on video games of specific types and titles is the cause of this decline.
Welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we shoot the shit about the rpg and skirmish game hobby stuff. All right, let’s get into it.
Imagination, in my own forever-layman’s opinion, is similar to other physical human attributes, i.e. physical strength, mental prowess, et cetera. It’s a muscle that needs to work out lest it become … flabby or emaciated from disuse.
If you wanna be able to do 50 pushups a day, which is a worthy goal, then you gotta … do … pushups. And it’s not that you gotta do 5 a day for a year and then you’ll be able to do 50, no no no, you gotta do 5 a day this week, then next week you gotta do 7 a day – and so on and so forth. You gotta work them muscles out! You gotta sweat. You gotta put the time in. And if you do, you’re guaranteed results. And there ain’t many guarantees in this life, that’s for sure.
So HOW are video games killing my imagination? Well, let’s illustrate this with a specific example. Let’s use Skyrim, ‘cause we both know we both know that game. So I load up Skyrim, grab my controller – yes I am a console gamer (with one very specific exception, we’ll get to that later) for two reasons: 1) my console is in the living room hooked up to the big tv where I like to chill out and burn precious time watching YouTube or slaying dragons; 2) the games I like are typically shooters and so pulling a physical trigger is something I just really cotton to, so to speak.
So I load up Skyrim, there’s my custom character who I molded the digital flesh of, chose the hair style and color for, picked out some cool tattoos and scars, there she is, my badass wood elf rogue in her badass, intricate leather armor. And now we’re walking through an amazing biome with towering cliffs and glowing fairy trees and now we’re fighting some draugrs with our magic-imbued daggers and throwing fireballs and it’s great fun. The music is epic, the sound design impeccable. We head into Solitude – my aesthetically favorite Skyrim town – and visit the local weapon smith. The architecture is awesome, the interiors highly detailed, moody and strewn with collectibles and valuables and decorative items I can buy or steal and put into my own player-owned house. And on and on and on, right?
And now what is it that I do NOT have to do, at all, to engage with and experience this amazing world and the adventure it holds? That’s right, I don’t have to imagine anything. That part of my brain, that muscle in my brain, gets to be lazy, gets to sit on the proverbial couch and lick Cheeto dust of it’s fat sausage-like fingers. And when do I play Skyrim (let’s say, for the sake of this particular argument, I’m playing right after it was released): I play it for hours and hours every day. For a long time. Cause we both know, one play-through isn’t enough. You gotta make more characters, try out different spells, different weapons, put different classes of armor on that 3d paper doll just to see what looks cool. And all of this feels GOOD! Not only do I not have to get up outta my Lazy Boy to run around in this monster-infested fantasy landscape, but I don’t even have to think to hard. I just get to react and experience.
After years and years of this, though, what I’ve found is that when I try to write something or create, it’s much harder than it used to be. Like, REALLY difficult, in comparison to how I used to feel. I feel tired and at the first sign of having to put in some mental effort, I feel like quitting. I feel like getting up from the desk and returning to that Lazy Boy and hitting that main line of Skyrim on the Xbox.
Fifteen years ago I wrote screenplays for other filmmakers, I produced my own short films, ten years ago I made my own feature film, six years ago I made a fantasy action adventure web series and after that … I haven’t made hardly anything. When I sit down to work on my current projects, things we might talk about in future videos, it feels much more difficult to push through a work session of imagining new, fresh, exciting ideas – versus how I used to be able to work decades ago.
Video games create these low-level virtual realities that are becoming more and more detailed every year. And if you’re experiencing someone else’s creative vision, specifically built so you DON’T have to spend energy imagining things, I can’t see how your imagination’s growth isn’t affected in some way. Unless you work hard at specifically avoiding that.
Now this is all anecdotal to me and my experience. I’m know there are plenty of people out there who are inspired by the games they play, they go on to create like I used to be able to do. I just wanted to discuss this in case anyone else out there was feeling the same way as me. Video games could be a factor.
So I did mention there was one exception to the console gaming and now that I think about, there are actually two exceptions: Minecraft and Tabletop Simulator. Minecraft is similar to our tabletop gaming hobby in a metaphysical way: it has an almost infinite number of ways in which to engage with and enjoy it. Sure, some people play Minecraft strictly as a competitive action video game but many more people, myself included, enjoy it as a creative outlet where you get to build things, all kinds of things, from simple architectural structures to intricate, logic-based mechanical devices to code-based game development to voxel art.
And the PC version – known as Java Edition – is a much better experience on mouse and keyboard than controller or touch-screen, at least for me. Tabletop Simulator on the other hand is simply a way for me to engage in tabletop games with friends and family who are far away. So those two games don’t really seem to hinder my imagination, at least not from my internal viewpoint.
Another reason I think video games, for me, is killing my imagination is they usurp time I used to use for reading. Now, there are a ton of things in this current society that compete for and capture our attention and take up precious time. For me personally, though, as I’m sort of allergic to anything with an infinite scroll, it’s video games that hook me in and keep me playing rather than reading or even watching movies.
Reading is like that pull-up bar you hung in the bedroom doorway for two days and now hides under the winter coats in the closet (what? that’s just a random metaphor, man, c’mon). Anyway, reading is like a pull-up bar for your brain, in particular for your imagination. Because it not only facilitates the usage of your brain but REQUIRES it. And every day, I feel like we all get a little less inclined to read – and when I say “read” here, I’m referring to the consumption of fiction and non-fiction that isn’t “comment-based”. You know, like, “hey, I read Reddit for 17 hours today, I feel great!” Cause, be honest, nobody feels great after reading any comment section for too long. Let’s face it, there’s just a [bleep]load of dopamine dealers in our faces all the time, and they’re all legal and they all feel good in the moment. Even the ones that make you mad. Especially the ones that make you mad, but that’s just emotional provocation for clicks, just somebody hacking your limbic system.
Now I know the bottom line is that I’m responsible for choosing to play video games instead of reading or playing a Warcry match or running a D&D session. I get that, I accept full responsibility. This is in fact one of the reasons I decided to create this channel. For me, Tabletop Alchemy is one way to kind of force myself to operate and engage with a hobby that fosters imagination rather than time sinks like looter shooters. Years ago I broke a two year addiction to World of Warcraft, and I’m happy I did. I don’t have generally addictive personality, but I do have a couple of specific things I get trapped by – one of those is video games.
I’m definitely not trying to say that this is the same issue for everyone. You know me, this channel is – and I would argue MOST YouTube channels are – completely subjective, opinion-based endeavors. If you play video games and you like ‘em, and you’re happy with your life, that’s awesome. Seriously. I just had to take some time for self-examination and I determined that this theory of video games forcibly alleviating the use of my imagination, versus like a novel or piece of art, et cetera, this theory really resonated with me, in my specific case.
I’ve found that tabletop games and producing content for this channel are helping me work out my imagination, simple as that. D&D in particular – though this would be true for any rpg – is really helping kickstart my imagination workouts. The very nature of role playing games are fundamentally imagination-based exercises. If you’re writing or creating your own adventure for your players, that’s just doubling the workout. Even if you’re just running a pre-written adventure module, the act of running a game session REQUIRES heavy lifting from the old noggin. Inventing dialogue, describing scenarios, reacting to player actions, this activity is all mental and imagination-based and I love it. It’s challenging, but it’s challenging in that good way, like a gym membership that actually entices me into returning for more workouts.
All right, that’s it. As always, I love to hear other people’s opinions down in the comments but yeah, get outta here, that’s the end of the video. See ya next time on Tabletop Alchemy.