A few weeks ago, during some idle procrastination, I browsed through my Steam library and opened up a game that I’d actually purchased like a year ago but never got around to trying out.
I’m not much of a gamer at all, although I played them when I was a kid. My favorite games were the Sonic the Hedgehog series, which I followed loyally from the character’s 16-Bit Genesis era until he joined the world of 3D platformers in the 128-Bit era.
By the way, can you believe that was only seven years? At the speed we perceive time in our youth, my Sonic fandom felt like it encompassed 20 years of my life, when in reality the golden age of Sonic the Hedgehog lasted fewer years than Clinton was president, which he was for almost the entirety of it.
I never thought about that because I didn’t really know or care who the American president was. One of my clear early childhood memories was playing Sonic and asking my mother who the President of the United States was, and she had to think about it for a moment before saying “I think it’s George Bush.” That was 1991 or 92, and I was 7 or 8, and the only reason I know that is because those were the only years when Bush the Senior overlapped with the existence of Sonic the Hedgehog.
Sonic games, weirdly, are too hard for me now. I don’t know how I clocked them when I was a kid. The games I enjoy now are not platformers but things like management sims and what are called automation games. The game I picked up a few weeks ago is called Satisfactory. Basically, you land on an alien planet and start mining resources until you can build yourself a factory that manufactures doodads. You deliver them to your base and are rewarded with recipes for more complex doodads, which you make by building up your factory. That’s it, that’s the game.
But it’s become a bit of a problem, you see. At some point I kind of designated Saturday my “do nothing productive” day. My secular Sabbath. Apart from my capital-J Job, I spend most of my off time writing or working on my Three Minute Philosophy animation series. I publish my weekly newsletter on Friday, very late at night sometimes, and then Saturday I just kind of scroll the internet or play a videogame, mostly.
After I got the hang of Satisfactory I didn’t put it down on Sunday and get right back to work. Satisfactory ate Sunday as well, and then on Monday when I clocked into my day job, I started thinking about my factory. When I got home I checked on my factory and did a little work on it and before I knew it, my factory had eaten Monday. That sorta went on.
So I’ve been temporarily distracted by things before, I kind of have that sort of personality, but this is something new, it’s a five- or six-week distraction that doesn’t seem to be getting off my back, and in case you’re wondering, yes, I am thinking about my factory right now.
While I want to reassure subscribers that I haven’t done no work, on either my book or my newsletter projects, over the past month, the work has hit a speedbump. This chapter of my book is kicking my ass. The philosophy video I’m working on is kicking my ass (coming this weekend, hopefully, I’m doing my damndest). I haven’t missed a deadline for Plato Was a Dick, but it’s also kicking my ass. None of this is any more difficult than it was before, but my wife and I went away on vacation in September and in my head I never really came back from it, not fully.
In my effort to reckon with this I think I now understand what’s happened, and I understand why, specifically, this game has broken my brain.
While our plane was in descent toward our holiday destination, someone shot Charlie Kirk in the neck and killed him. I’d just switched off the movie I was watching, on impulse, to check the news. (I don’t believe in psychic woo but it’s interesting to note that a very similar thing happened to me during the 9/11 attacks in 2001. I turned off a movie I was watching to check the news, which is something no 17-year-old does ever, but the first plane had just hit. Look, I’m still a skeptic but it does spike your imagination a little bit, doesn’t it?)
This was it, I figured. This was the Reichstag fire of American fascism. Trump was going to do something drastic like invoke the Insurrection Act or even outlaw the Democratic Party. That was all a bit hysterical, it turns out, but it didn’t ruin my holiday, and in fact I didn’t wind up thinking about it much at all.
Coming back home and reattaching my hose to the news spigot revives a dormant but constant flow of low and deep dread. I don’t want any of those drastic and horrible things to happen, but the alternative is what we have now—a tension that just keeps getting more tense, in defiance, it seems, of some natural law.
I never wanted to write about Donald Trump or even American politics. When I worked as an editor for Cracked back in its golden age, before they fired everyone and turned it into a Reddit thread aggregator, assignments came down to me from higher up, and from 2017 onward most of them were Trump. Rating Trump’s movie cameos, the six weirdest things about the Trump-Russia probe, Trump’s craziest tweets. Gone were the days of the “ten weirdest languages” or “eight weirdest celebrity backstories” or “six astonishing ways to beat popular board games,” the stuff I enjoyed writing for years.
Trump just suddenly swallowed the world.
For the first full year and a half of writing this newsletter column I only wrote about Trump once and it was about how relieved I was that I could avoid Trump news, mostly. This was of course, during the middle of the Biden administration and before primaries had started up again. How naïve I was, like a sweet little baby. I had a hate-on for Elon Musk but I failed to see that he was the Silver Surfer to Trump’s Galactus.
Most people would probably be surprised that I used to write comedy. Even that piece I just linked is funny! I’m not funny anymore. I’m just documenting the center of the Western cultural empire lurch slowly into white supremacy and drag other Western countries in with it like moons trapped in its gravity. Just reporting on it in a way that feels increasingly helpless and useless.
What does this have to do with Satisfactory? Yeah I kind of trailed off there, didn’t I?
I don’t really consider playing a videogame to be “wasted time,” any more than I think reading a book or watching a movie is wasted time. But playing a videogame without a storyline that mostly involves building conveyor belts does feel like it comes close to wasted time.
But it’s not that I’m just escaping from the world. Although it is very welcome to do something that involves no contact with the news, there are a lot of things I could do to achieve that, like streaming TV or reading anything else. Nor does it really feel like a procrastination thing to avoid writing, because I love writing! The idea that I would seek something to avoid it is paradoxical.
What it feels like it comes down to more than anything is that when I’m playing this game, I’m building something.
Not really, though! When I eventually turn this game off my factory is going to vanish because it only exists in my imagination guided by an illusion my computer monitor is projecting, but the brain stimulus is the same. The itch that this scratches. I’m solving problems and being constructive in a way that I feel like I fail to do in other areas of my life and work.
Writing, of course, isn’t really about solving problems, but it can be used to work through a problem, like I’m doing now. It can be helpful and constructive. It wouldn’t really matter if my writing wasn’t constructive if not for the fact that I work a day job that largely involves, basically, moving PDF files from one folder to another.
It occurs to me that helping you, or even just myself, to understand something or learn something or even just escape a little bit is constructive in a way that I don’t always feel that my work really is. At some point I lost sight of that and my problem-solving brain fell into the wrong mission objective. I started trying, I think, to solve white supremacy, or to figure out how to stop fascism, or something. These are impossible goals! Building a cartoon factory inside my computer isn’t impossible. It’s solving tangible problems to a foreseeable end and it’s fun.
It’s not fun in every way. By two biggest phobias in life are heights and spiders, and not only is Satisfactory a realistically rendered world that heavily involves climbing to very high places, it’s also full of giant spiders that launch themselves right at my fucking face. I should actually hate this game, come to think of it.
It’s not exactly solving world hunger, but it is… well, it’s satisfactory.
What I need to do now is find a new mindset and realize that my writing will never solve the problems that my satisfaction-starved brain wants it to solve. That maybe I can step back from looking too closely at the American politics garbage fire and find a more productive, more helpful, more satisfactory voice. Maybe I’ll even start being funny again.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn this into a cooking blog. I’ll still be talking about the same topics you subscribed to read about. But there’s other stuff to talk about as well, and hell, don’t be surprised if sometimes I talk about movies as well. There’s so much much in the world, and letting Donald Trump swallow it all seems like it kind of helps him, more than anything.
Be well, and now if you’ll excuse me, I just about had my oil refinery set up before you so rudely interrupted me with a deadline.
I’m writing a book about how toxic cultures on the early internet created the political madness of today’s world in just a single generation. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
I so appreciate this piece. My day job is in healthcare (well...it's actually a night job, but whatever.) My hobby is music - playing in a band, and, more recently, piecing together guitars and bass guitars. The latter is largely for the same reason you play that video game - I'm building *something*. There is a deep satisfaction that comes from figuring out how best to piece together the instrument such that it's functional, aesthetically pleasing, and (hopefully) a bit different from the others out there.
The ersatz job-satisfaction that the automation game genre provides is certainly its main appeal. I know the OG of the genre, Factorio (the calculus to Satisfactory's algebra), appeals to many engineers and programmers because it scratches the itch they don't get at their day job.
Not everyone has the wisdom or the discipline to pull themselves away from video games, or even to dispassionately observe the libidinal purpose they serve, as you can with your writing.
I'm beginning to doubt the customary caveats: "There is nothing wrong with watching TV or reading a novel or playing a game per se..."
They sound a bit like the classic disavowal of the patient on the analysts couch: "I had a really happy childhood, a perfect childhood, really..."
Neil Postman gives the same caveat in his fiery critique of public discourse in TV-pilled 80s. Well, it's been forty years, and television has been supplanted by even more fragmentary, silly media (TikTok). Perhaps we need to start re-examining the assumption that 'everyone needs to unwind, from time to time'. Yet we cannot return to the Victiorian era of literally whipping yourself to atone for hedonism.