The first thing someone says in Edith Wharton’s 1924 novella “New Year” is “she was bad…always.” Although nothing I do will fascinate me quite like Lizzie Hazeldean, who horrified Wharton’s fictional New York high society with her affair of “running out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel on New Year’s Day with all these women dressed up,” I took it easy that first horrified statement to heart – I always think of myself as bad, so I usually avoid making New Year’s resolutions.
But, you know, video games don’t make me feel nearly as existential, so I’ll make an exception.
In general, I set a changing standard for myself on my tortuous path to emotional growth and accept that I will always fall short of my highest expectations, as humans do. New Year’s resolutions – making big life changes, mainly because it’s January – usually feels like living on a whim, it can be unstable and soon become listless. I don’t like being crammed into a new, rigorous exercise regimen or an unreasonable plan to completely invert my personality just because, in another freezing winter, I’ve realized that we’re all dying.
Yes. I get grumpy over the winter because I am a Slav. But video games, which give us infinite lives and worlds to inhabit, help me take resolutions less seriously. And my main solution for video games is to use them to help me take myself less seriously.
Defying all logic, common sense, and the will of God, I’ll probably choose to play more online multiplayer games with random people…via voice chat.
I know. But random people create my gaming Achilles heel. I am in love Dead by daylight and fighting games like Guilty Gear struts, but I rarely play them because I’m terrified of other people. Even without using any chat functions, I have crippling gamer stage fright – teabagging clips on YouTube not help. Not even with a very high pitch girl voicewhich, in online gamingcan frustratingly lead to gender-based harassment.
But lately I’ve been wondering why I care. Would a 15 year old war zone Player giggling at me about “sandwiches” and “the kitchen” is really shaking and crushing my core like a coke can? No I do not think so.
I no longer want to let momentary discomfort keep me from playing games I enjoy, so in 2023 I’ll try to scale the wall I’ve built around multiplayer. I’ll make an effort to talk and play with weirdos online, and accept the possibility that I’ll get nervous, make a mistake, or have to block someone.
my city Staff writer Zack Zwiezen told me his New Year’s resolution is gaming the perennial“Stop buying games you don’t finish.” Staff writer Levi Winslow echoed this, adding something I’d like to steal too – “play more indie games.” Famous fashion cop and my city Editor-in-Chief Alyssa Mercante has also sympathetically vowed to play war zone with me and “terrorize the boys”.
More than I think of the first line of “New Year’s Day”, the last lines of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” come to mind – “for here is no place / that does not see you. You have to change your life.” It’s so sudden and shocking, the immediacy of these lines. I thought we were talking about a statue, Rilke, and now you’re telling me to change my life?
My yearning for statuesque uniformity often clashes with my yearly urge to start fresh. It feels like we’ve been banging on stone our entire lives, waiting for the day when its form will make sense to us. It might never come – all we have is this immovable rock. But we can’t ignore the tools in our hands either, can we?
So tell me, do you like making New Year’s resolutions? What are some of your video game resolutions? Do you also feel existential at this time of year? Let me know and have a happy new year.
