Preemptive Retaliation

I was never really into playing online multiplayers. I dabbled. Back in 2010 I spent some time playing Black Ops online with my friends. Before that I maybe dipped into Halo 3, but nothing too serious. I always into communal games, where you’re sitting beside your allies and enemies, not separated by the online expanse. For a while growing up, every month my brother and I would attend a Halo LAN party, zipping from CRT to CRT in a mouldy conference suite. Before that it was hosting Smash Bros and Mario Kart tournaments on my purple GameCube, and before that it was Perfect Dark scenarios on the N64, and before that even still it was elbow to elbow with my brother again, in the kitchen playing Donkey Kong Country in tandem. These days the physicality has turned digital, but I still like hopping online and playing a game with friends. I don’t know. Call it the camaraderie of it.

But anyway, the last online competitive multiplayer I played was Rocket League, because it was a fun game that I got into early so I felt like I had discovered it (and so had an intimate connection with it). I liked the game. I wasn’t very good at it, but I liked it. And then one night, at maybe 1am, I played a very close match online with a stranger. We were both not at a great level but were still giving it our all. The game only lasted a few minutes, but those minutes were both fast as anything and stretched out over an unfathomable time. We matched a goal a piece and then spent our time ricocheting the ball by each other in similarly terrible shots. Evenly matched, so to speak.

I’m describing this with a level of calm that is only possible due to the length of time it has been since this night. There’s probably a day in your past that was, likely, the worst day of your life at that point. Everything went wrong. Nothing went as planned. You’re at the end of your tether. And then some guy comes along and gives a desperate smile and says, “You know, we’ll all be laughing about this one day.” And it takes all your effort not to tear him limb from limb, not only because he’s wrong but also because he is so entirely correct, and that in a months time you’ll be regaling this story with a smile and genuine laughter at the absurdity of it all. At this point in time I can reflect on this Rocket League game in the safety of the future. At the time of playing I was so stressed out that I’m lucky I didn’t have a stroke.

So we were evenly matched, going at each other as if everything was on the line, trying out trick shots and feints in a desperate attempt to get one, just one, point ahead. The clock ticked down and the match came to a close, and I kept pushing, pushing, pushing to score. To have that victory.

And then, with only seconds on the clock, my opponent snuck the ball by me and scored. The screen exploded in colour and glory. The game had been won.

If my opponents reaction was directly inverse to my reaction, they would be fucking singing. They would be experiencing the greatest high of their life, pumping the air with righteous celebration of their well earned victory.

What made it worse was that in the post game misery, my opponent typed “gg” into the chat. For those not in the know, “gg” is shorthand for “good game”, a casual signoff for online matches. A superlative in all its meaning, I could see it both as an agreement of a victory hard earned and also as a mocking jibe of inadequacy. Good game? Yeah it was a fucking good game for one of us, you moronic, self-congratulating, cheating little cu-

That night I didn’t sleep. And it wasn’t due to racing thoughts or retreading the analytics of the match, it was pure chemistry. My body was vibrating with an adrenaline hangover, my fight-or-flight system fighting to keep me alive from an invisible, fictional, digital threat. I wanted to sleep. I was desperate for it. But my heart, for six hours straight, exploded with the same energy as that final goal.

I quit playing after that. Not out of pride. Seriously, not out of pride, but due to my health. I couldn’t hack it. I couldn’t keep up that kind of stress in my life. My blood pressure would be through the roof and, since I do most of my gaming in the evenings, I would be up half the night as my body dealt with the aftermath of it all. And the kicker is that I wasn’t even enjoying the game! There was something good about it at one point, but maybe the skill ceiling was too high and the constant need for competition and battling against human opponents was so completely draining that I wasn’t even liking the moment to moment play.

Where’s this going? Well, last week I came down with food poisoning. Blame it on a late night chicken pakora or a dubiously heated airport sausage roll, either way I had four days of exhaustion, lethargy, brain fog, and general inability to think. I still had childcare, I still had household responsibilities, but for the most part I was in bed early and dragging myself through the day.

And so, after one hundred and fifty one days straight, I didn’t write for four days.

Of course I’m disappointed. It’s an all time high score for me. I was on a family holiday in May, and at some point each morning I tucked myself into a corner to batter out a few hundred words. I’m redrafting my novel right now (it’s sitting beside me, crinkled and annotated, with a bright red stain of possibly poisonous pakora sauce in the corner) and I am working my way through the rewrites. I am rediscovering what I wrote and, pearls clutched, even enjoying it. Every day I have been redrafting it. Every day I have been chipping away at it. Working on it. Grafting it. Completing it.

Was I enjoying the process? No! Of course not! Do you expect people to enjoy the act of writing?

More often that not, when I think about my writing I’m gripped by a creeping, anxious dread. This book, especially, feels like a line in a conversation that is slowly slipping away from me. I have a perfect joke for the topic, the situation, the moment – but with every moment that passes the chatter is moving on and my joke becomes less and less relevant, and soon enough I’ll splutter it out to people who had moved on a lifetime ago.

If I don’t finish this book now, when will I finish it? Later? That’s unacceptable!

So for much of my time I’ve found myself facing off against this manuscript. Instead of it being online it’s much more physical. There’s a slab of paper on my desk. If I rap against it with my knuckles it responds with a solid, knowledgeable echo. But I still struggle against it. I fight with it, every night, to eke out one more paragraph. To score one more goal.

For a hundred and fifty one days I’ve waged this war. I’ve fought this battle. And now I’ve been defeated. I have lost my streak.

And that’s not a terrible thing. I enjoyed the streak. I loved the streak. The streak, at times, was the only thing keeping me writing.

But was it fun? Was it productive and worthwhile?

I don’t know the answer to that. What I do know is videogames, and I know that I love a high score. And, you know, that’s the beauty of a high score. It ended. To get a high score you will have to, at some point, fail. Otherwise the high score wouldn’t exist.

I know that I’m missing the meaning of this message. I’ve been writing this for a few days now and I do like it, more than my other stuff, but it’s time to come to a conclusion. And this conclusion is;

I struggle with writing. I struggle because I have an expectation of it, and I want that expectation to be met, and that expectation can sometimes be too high. For the past hundred and fifty so days I have been writing every day, which hasn’t made me feel more like a writer, but it has tickled that part of me that likes building a high score.

So my high score is one hundred and fifty one days.

My current score is four.

Onwards and upwards. Keep going Joe. You’ll win the match next time, I promise.