A few days before my dad died in August, I got the call Iād been dreading from my mother. She told me it was time to come home for my dadās last days. I live in California, and they live in Alabama. I packed up my PS4, super slim PS3 and PS Vitaāalas, my desktop PC was too bigāand made the journey.
Iād never experienced a death this close to me before, and I had no idea how to handle it. But it was a safe bet that āhandling itā was going to involve playing some games, and so I was going to make sure I had as many as possible at my disposal.
Thereās no right or wrong way to grieve, people say. āEveryone has to grieve in their own way!ā they yell into our abyss of sadness. Most of the people who tried to impart that bit of popular wisdom didnāt know how I was planning to grieve.
Contrary to what I was told, there absolutely is a wrong way to grieve. I could have disappeared down some bottles of liquor. My dadās mother took her grief out on my mom; Iām pretty sure that counts as a āwrong way to grieve,ā considering it made everybody else somehow feel even shittier than we already did.
My official grieving process began before my dad died. I spent three-and-a-half days in the hospice before he passed, but after he stopped being coherent. We sat with him, held his hand, talked to him, but he seemed more like a broken automaton than a human being most of the time.
There isnāt much to do in a hospice, of course, and we happened to be at a hospice in a small town in rural Alabama. There werenāt many places nearby, like a movie theater, that might have given me a reason to leave that death hospital for a brief respite. Instead, I sipped on whiskey āenough to untangle my nerves a bit but not enough to get smashedāwrapped myself in a blanket in a pretty OK recliner, and played
Danganronpa 2 on my Vita.
Danganronpa 2 is a visual novel. It doesnāt require a ton of overt energy to play, which was ideal. Its story and themes were strangely appropriate for what was happening in my life. Itās a game about death and despair, as a bunch of high school kids are trapped on a tropical island, and if any of them wants to leave they must kill one of their friends and then pin it on another student.
Danganronpa 2ās subtitle is āGoodbye Despair.ā Itās story is about holding onto hope through dark times. Our hero character is struggling to have faith that he and his friends will be able to persevere and survive through it all, as they fall one by one around himāthis was obviously something I could relate to and draw strength from as I, severely depressed as I am on a good day, sat in that chair waiting for my dad to die.
Iām fortunate enough to have had a dad that I liked. I donāt think he ever fully understood me, but he triedāand he inadvertently led me to this career I have writing about games. More recently we bonded over other types of entertainment, like action movies and football, and heās been fully supportive during some of my drier months working as a freelancer. Itās safe to say I wouldnāt still be around had he not stepped in at some key moments in my life.
A lot of other people liked my dad, too. An āadvantageā of dying at 49 years old is that most of the people he knew and whose lives heād affected were still around, and many of them visited him in the hospice.
For whatever reason, small talk with these folks in the hospice seemed to be largely the same as it would have been had I come into town for some other reason. The biggest difference is in the amount of itāit felt as if there was small talk aimed at me during every waking hour. That small talk usually consisted of explaining my peculiar career as a freelance journalist who covers video games, a job that many of the parents in the crowd would say their children would enjoy. Thanks for telling me about that over and over and over, middle-aged Alabama moms and dads. I should go.
Unfortunately, you donāt get much alone time during situations like these. Spending a weekend in a hospice room that you know your father will never leave is distressing enough, and while I canāt speak for anyone else, the parade of well-wishers trying to hold casual conversations in that room certainly didnāt make me feel any better.
So playing
Danganronpa 2 on my Vita was more than just therapeutic; it provided an escape when entertaining visitors became too much. I could sit back in the recliner with my headphones on and get some distance from what was right in front of me.
My dad passed on August 26, in the early afternoon. I was in the room when it happened, even though I didnāt want to be. Watching somebody you care about die fucking sucks. Seeing their dead body lying there afterward sucks even more.
We all cried for a while, and then I went outside to smoke and cry some more by myself and listen to some comfort music. Eventually my siblings and I went back to my parentsā house, where to my chagrin some friends of the family were waiting. Theyād brought pizza, which was nice I guess, but we didnāt leave the tangle of mourners at the hospice because we wanted to hang out. So to head off the small talk, I plugged in my PS3 and started playing
Uncharted
The first two
Uncharted games are among a handful of comfort games I have, games I always know I can enjoy when Iām down. It had been a while since I played them, so they werenāt fresh in my memory. I started them up just hours after my dadās death.
They were an extra comfort, because theyāre breezy for me. Iāve played them many times. Also,
Uncharted is a game about family, about protagonists who care more about each other than they do about whatever else is at stake. When conflicts arise between them itās nearly always because somebody is about to do something boneheaded and the others are trying to talk him or her out of it. You only ever play as Drake, but his friends pull your ass out of the fire more than you do theirs.
I spent the next several days playing all three console
Uncharteds back to back. I donāt particularly like the third one, but I hadnāt even tried to play it since it had launched in 2011. It felt like time.
Iāve discovered that grief isnāt really that different than the angst I normally suffer. The grief Iāve experienced in the past few months has most often taken the form of a nebulous sense of paranoia, that something just feels wrong and I donāt know what it is. Even when my dad isnāt at the front of my mind, itās as if the fabric of existence has changed just enough that everything around me seems off, like when you come home and arenāt sure if everything is where you left it.
Thereās no āgetting pastā the death of a loved one, Iāve been told over and over, but the hope is that you can return to a semblance of normalcy, or at least find a new normal.
Thatās why I played
Uncharted 3 as well. I donāt game purely as a diversion. It is an intellectual pursuit for me. I was going to need to revisit Uncharted 3 someday, and I hoped playing it back to back with the previous two would give me some perspective on why I donāt like it.
I ended up being rightāplaying
Uncharted 3 in close proximity to the others made it much easier for me to articulate why I find it frustrating. That little critical exercise also served another purpose: it made me feel normal, at least for a little bit. I wasnāt playing the Uncharteds for work, and I didnāt have any deadlines to try to meet, but it felt like I was doing what I should be doing, and what I like doing. Playing games and discussing them critically is my normal, and it felt right.
I play games for two main reasons: to clear my head, and to engage fully in something. One aspect of depression that people donāt talk about much is a short attention span. Plus, Iām a millennial with many devices, so itās even worse. Because games require my direct and constant involvement, theyāre more likely to be able to dominate my attention than other forms of entertainment I have at home; itās the same reason I prefer to see movies in a theater over watching them on my TV.
When I achieve that engagement, it removes me from myself as well. That doesnāt mean games become a method of escapism in the traditional sense, but rather they put me in a safe place to experience my feelings.
Danganronpa 2 is an ideal example of thisāitās symbolically similar to what Iāve been experiencing in my life, but when I think about recent events through the prism of a game or movie or other media it lessens the blow and provides some perspective just by virtue of having that divider between me and the immediacy of real life.
Not every game is going to be like that, obviously, and I donāt need or want every bit of entertainment I consume to primarily be a mechanism by which I reflect on my own life. At the minimum, I want the games I play to give me some substance to chew on. I want to feel something when I play.
I stayed in Alabama for about four weeks, and I treated it like a vacation in that I gave myself the freedom to do what I wanted. And I wanted to play games. So after my
Uncharted marathon, I took some shots at my PlayStation Plus back catalog. I downloaded some games to my momās MacBook from Steam and tried to teach her to play them. And I got Destiny and played that far too much.
Destiny was strange. It certainly cleared my head, but it didnāt really give me anything new to put in there. I didnāt think. I just reacted as I wandered through it. I played 20-something hours in four days, and I felt groggy and cranky when I stopped, as if Iād just woken up. After I returned home to Los Angeles the next week, I started a round of Civilization V. In normal Civ fashion, I ended up playing for a dozen hours with few breaks, and when I snapped out of it I had that same groggy feeling that Destiny had given me. And I was in a solidly terrible mood.
This is the flip side of what I felt playing
Uncharted and Danganronpa. Those games made me feel something, and for me, Destiny and Civ were merely activities, devoid of real meaning or purpose. Those activities can have a place in my gaming rotation, but only in shorter bursts. When I play too long I come out the other side worse off than I came in.
My particular brand of crazy grants me some rather outlandish emotional responsesāwhen I feel something, I feel it
very stronglyāand my dad dying sent my brain chemistry into more of a tumble than usual. After years and years of dealing with suicidal urges, my mind has become somewhat predictable in how it tries to fuck with me. But my grief changed that. Mood swings became harder to see coming.
So when I spent a day playing
Civ and then got upset about the lost time, I wasnāt Regular Upset. I was distraught. I probably had enjoyed myself, but it wasnāt constructive fun, or so I was telling myself. It was merely a Thing To Do, and not very stimulating. This is something that gets to me a lot, because I work from home and my life is unstructured most of the time. I only get paid for actually completing work. Wasted time is wasted money, and I donāt have a lot of money to waste.
But thatās just the spark. On a normal day, any small irritation has the potential to tank the rest of my waking hours, and knowing when and how Iām vulnerable is key to managing my mental health. After my dad died, everything ramped up to 11, and it became impossible to predict shifts in my moods.
These are the sorts of times when compulsive gaming becomes an issue for me. I chatted with some psychological researchers about that sort of pathology in 2013. Iāve also written about my deep involvement with a particular
Star Wars MMO after I lost my job, and so losing myself inside endlessly repetitive gaming activities in times of emotional torment isnāt exactly a new topic for me.
There was something different this time: I played a bunch of different games instead of just one for several weeks. Some of them had a negative effect, and others had a positive one. Those that actually aided in my grieving process gave my brain something intellectually-stimulating to chew on. They made me feel something, instead of keeping my head empty for long stretches.
Months later, I still donāt feel quite right. Weāre in the middle of college football season, and on a normal Saturday this time of year Iād be texting and talking with my dad on the phone about every game we watched, 2000 miles apart. He died two days before the first game of the season, and every time I watch a football game Iām overtly reminded that heās gone. It might have been slightly easier to handle had he died some other time of year. Maybe.
Whatās been keeping my feet on the ground the last two months is the games Iāve played, both the good and the bad. So while itās a little worse for me that he died in the fall, the glut of new games Iāve had to play has kept me occupied. Iāve even mixed in some oldies, thanks to the GOG.com re-release of
X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Those are games my dad bought for me when I was a child. Theyāre wonderful.
Phil Owen is a freelance games critic and journalist. Follow him on Twitter at @philrowen, and send hate mail to [emailĀ protected].
Image by Sam Woolley
