There Is No Peak, So Climb With Care

I'm an occasional stand-up comedian. You won't have heard of me, I don't have a social media following, and I'm largely inactive throughout the year. My day job and my life get in the way of doing regular weeknight slots around town and that's just the way it is. I also play djembe in a band a couple of times a year. I like putting on a good show with my friends! I don't perform all that often, partly because if I do commit to participating in a live show, I want it to be excellent. Everyone has bad gigs, but I don't want my next bad gig to be because either I or my co-performers didn't have the resources to commit to all the required practice time. 

A jerkass truism about putting on a performance for others is that you need to Be Good Or Get Better. It's both very good and useless advice to offer to a performer. The good side first. Your absolute aim should be to give your audience the best show you can in return for their taking a chance on you and your show. They could have just as easily stayed at home with a cup of hot tea. It's tough to beat a cup of tea at home when the alternative involves leaving home and traveling to something which might be a shit time. I don't know about you but I take that kind of responsibility over someone's evening entertainment very seriously. So yeah, if you're not good enough to put on that show, you need to get better before you do, no ifs no buts.

The shitty part of the Be Good or Get Better advice is that it's not very constructive, is it? For one, what is Good Enough? All you can do with Be Good or Get Better is to seek continuous improvement. Perpetually seeking out imperfection and destroying it. Finding great things about what you can already do and push it even further. On the face of it, this isn't a terrible game plan and it is how you improve but the real issue is that there's no tangible end to this climb. There is no hard maximum. There is no peak. Just more slope and sheer cliff face and at some point, you have to abandon or at least temporarily cease the pursuit of ever greater skill. 

You have to stop climbing. If not simply for the practical reason that there's a performance coming. The one you're about to be in. Climbing time is over. You have to be comfortable with the level of performance that you are currently able to give and believe that is good enough, even if just for one show. As a sidebar, if you truly don't believe that what you're doing will be of any value to the audience that you intend to perform to, then you should have a serious conversation with yourself or your team, but that conversation should happen in good time to cancel or postpone the performance. Otherwise, just get out there, put a smile on your face, and have at it. You would be astounded how much your audience will adore your terribly imperfect skills that are secretly very good actually. Once the performance is over... sure, you can look at the data and beat yourself up about it. You can find ways to improve and resume the endless climb again. But that's for later. Enjoy your performance and the after-party, you've earned it!

The performers I've met in my life tend to be lovely, hypercompetitive, and relentlessly self-critical people and I try to say nice things to them. Especially stand-ups. The competition there is especially fierce, and the experience of being a stand-up can be devastatingly lonely at times. Going it alone can be a bad time! More often than not you're only able to compare notes with yourself. Most of your fellow practitioners are also rivals, and you're extremely lucky if you have a congressive, collaborative space within which you and other acts can offer candid and useful advice to each other in an equitable way. In practice, you don't often have a good support network there. Your friends and family can be a great source of emotional support but chances are you don't come from a legacy community of stand-up comics. Even then, the journey of stand-up is a solitary one. It's the best and worst thing about it, complete authorial power with complete responsibility for the performance.

Any work that you intend to submit for subjective criticism is affected by this. Years ago, I submitted my PhD thesis (it's about secret intelligence-gathering operations if you were wondering) and I also know quite a few people who are in the business of writing books. If you've ever tried to write something that breaks the 50K word count, there's a good chance that you're the world expert on whatever you're writing about and it's almost certain that nobody on Earth knows your specialist topic better than you do. This can put the writer at risk of entering a toxic headspace. Even great acts of self-encouragement and forgiveness can ultimately fall on your own deaf ears. It's terribly easy to talk yourself down to the point where you're wishing for an end to the torment of putting the beastly words together. You might even want to quit outright. You will almost certainly have a crisis of confidence about your ability to inform, entertain, and enlighten your prospective audience. Personally, I don't think I could trust a writer who claims that they have always written with an unflinching sense of purpose. I'd simply smell a rat.

So sure, I've so far come to the conclusion that creativity is hard. Big whoop, not much of a takeaway. We're all vulnerable to the mental health pitfalls associated with simply putting ourselves out there. The impulse to pursue that challenge in itself is fine. Better than fine actually. I respect anyone who picks up a paintbrush, a word processor, or whatever with the intent to create and share something. But when the healthy self-criticism tips over into ritualised self-loathing, it becomes unsustainable.

You need to regularly free yourself from the stress of self-criticism if your work is going to have any positive outcome. Choose to believe it for that reason if you don't think preserving your own personal well-being is reason enough. You have to be able to say to yourself  "This is my current level. I know what it's going to take for me to take my performance to the next level, and I know that I can't do that right now". Even reading that thought again to myself I can hear how much that sounds like compromise. It is. It's supposed to be. It has to be. 

You have to care about your performance, but you also have to care about yourself. I know there's a temptation to romanticise a do-or-die mentality. To leave it all out there on the field. To be the most dedicated artist possible. Sure, there are some exceptional artists and art that have been wrung out of that kind of approach but just as many artists have been chewed up and spat out by it too, successful or not. People like that will have not read this far. You are most likely not one of those people who can put everything about the performance ahead of themselves. You, my friend, have things that you care about. And people who care about your wellbeing.

You have to grow where you can and maintain what you need. Performance literally has no skill ceiling, and therefore there is no strict effort ceiling beyond what kills you. There is no peak to that mountain, just endless and ever-steepening slopes. I advise anyone still reading that the mountain has an infinite number of ski lodges for rest and relaxation. It's also perfectly okay to retreat back down the mountain if that's what you need. It's just not worth it otherwise and hey, if you still think rest is for the weak, please climb with care. It's a long way down.

I've Become the Guy Who Plays Games at the Hangout

Console gaming has many flavours

The platonic ideal first. The intense single-player experience is just you, your controller, the screen, and maybe a beer. Very intimate, personal time with four hours of uninterrupted progress. In second place there is multiplayer. You're playing with one or more friends. Snacks are eaten. Swear words are sworn. Smack talk. You know, bonding. Third, we have co-op gaming which is a combination of first and second place. 

Then we get down to playing games for the benefit of an audience. We have small streamers who casually stream for their friends or a small but dedicated fan base. A few streamers even make a tidy buck doing it for a living! Single-player streamers tend to be the norm here. We also have a fair amount of Let's Players and sick clippers doing the rounds but all of this requires an internet connection and for someone to click on a link. But we can go deeper still. 

For me, the ideal streaming experience is entirely offline. One person (usually me) is playing, but one or more people, whether they are paying full attention at any given time or not, can dip in it out of watching me play, chatting to someone, or fixing drinks for everyone. Think less Scorsese film and more like Bake Off in terms of what's on the screen and what purpose it serves for the room. It's one step above watching the music-fueled screensavers from the Windows Media Player days. This is the lane I prefer to swim in.

An example then, my mother-in-law visited over the holidays (see here for another reference to my mother-in-law). For as long as I've known her, One of her favourite things to do in the world is to casually watch me play Super Mario World on the SNES Mini. According to my spouse, she also used to be quite good at playing the game herself but she has since decided to retire from actively playing it herself and now prefers to watch. Um, you know, to the point where she'll have flown all the way across from Madrid just to watch me play Super Mario World again.

Sometimes we will forgo a restaurant date because she prefers to watch me doing this. It's great though. Like, I've played the game to death anyway so it's a nice relaxing time for me. On the one hand, she's transfixed for brief spells but then on the other, she can check her phone, talk to me and my spouse, and generally stop paying attention whenever she wants and it's nobody has to make a big deal out of it. It's Bake Off, but Mario.

But historically she's only been interested in Super Mario World. I can maybe get her to watch some Crash Bandicoot if she's in a spicy mood but that's very rare. This year it was a relief to see that she would accept the entertainment value of Super Mario Wonder because Hey, it meant that I wasn't playing Super Mario World again. You know what else? I was trying to complete my standee collection having finished literally everything in the game at that point. I could cheekily farm for purple coins while entertaining my mother-in-law. By the end of her time with us, I was done!

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Closer to New Year's, we invited our relatively new neighbour over for a smoke and a drink, he vapes outside a lot and I'd said hi to him enough times. This would be the longest time we'd spent with him. Real 'get to know you' territory.

So of course I start playing Thumper on the big TV. I think we were talking about music tastes and the new neighbour used the word 'intense' to describe his music taste and one thing led to another thing led to Thumper on the big TV. It was the tail end of a messy night so that's all the detail I have about how Thumper came to be on the big TV. My spouse casually apologised to the new neighbour for the abstract rhythm horror playing out on the screen but the neighbour was nodding and smiling, stating that 'he was into it'. Our new neighbour is a pretty cool guy it turns out.

I don't have a similarly cool story for how Bomb Chicken, Super Mario Wonder, or Puzzle Lines DX ended up on the big TV. At this point, I was just playing five or so minutes of this game. and then five or ten minutes of another. I was creating colours and shapes on a screen that were compelling enough to create a mild background vibe in the room, but nothing so compelling that casual conversation and general vibery would have to take a back seat to the action on screen. We had achieved a delicate balance and dear reader, it was a really chill time.

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Some games are better than others at achieving this 'Sitcom Effect'. I've had some time to reflect on what makes for a good Sitcom Effect Game (or SEG if you will) and I'll set them out for you now.

You need a very low on-ramp time to get SEG status. The time from booting up the game to actually playing the game should be less than a couple of minutes. If your PS5 game requires a 45-minute patch then that's clearly not a SEG. I'm also not keen on 60-second loading times every time you die so that eliminates most FromSoftware and Bethesda stuff. You don't have any of that nonsense with Bomb Chicken. You can be bomb-shitting kick-chicken in next to no time. Bomb Chicken is a SEG.

Next up is readability. A spectator who is low on both investment and attention, possibly even low game literacy also, must be able to get a good read on what is happening on the screen and why. Unless you're all part of Riot's League of Legends death cult, that game is nigh unreadable for anyone trying to watch it. Before you all rush in to disagree with me you'll have to admit it's no Mario Tennis Aces or Nidhogg. It's certainly no Bomb Chicken. Everyone knows where they stand concerning Bomb Chicken, even if they didn't watch the tutorial levels.

The final gut check for the SEG is admittedly context-sensitive. It's almost redundant to say 'read the room' because that generally applies to all actions where the number of people in the situation is greater than or equal to 2. But vibe check you must. If you're at Jesse Pinkman's house, maybe RAGE is a legitimate SEG, but graphic violence is generally a no-no, except for when it isn't. Doom is either the best SEG for your hangout room or the worst. Use your best judgement, traveller. 

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Practicality aside, there's a deeper sense of relaxation I get from playing games without any particular purpose or goal in mind than mildly entertaining a room of stoners and drunks. I find that all too often that when I'm playing videogames, that I'm doing it with a task-oriented mindset. I often hear people talking about their gaming in the language of productivity and work. People set themselves goals of completing AAA games as if their next performance review depends on it. The 'pile of shame' is partially shameful because it represents a body of unfinished projects and wasted effort. Not to mention of course the culture of achievements and trophies. Sure you played the game, but did you play the game diligently and masterfully? This is all sounding less 'I'm having fun' and more 'I'm doing my job'.

When I become The Guy Who Plays Games at the Hangout, there is an element of a different kind of work being done. Emotional labour, fulfilling a social role, call it what you want. But the work I've done in these contexts is mostly social. It allowed me to enjoy the simple pleasure of playing for its own sake in a way that I typically find it hard to do otherwise. I'm not playing Bomb Chicken to tick Bomb Chicken off my list. I'm playing Bomb Chicken because it's a thing to do.

(And yes, I do realise that the Super Mario Wonder purple coins thing was a bit of a productivity wheeze in its own right. This mindset is a sickness.)

As a neurospicy individual (diagnosis pending) I want to try all the things and do all the things and see all the things and it's exhausting. Whenever I'm playing one game, there is an acute feeling that there's an opportunity cost being realised because I could be doing several other things. It's taking me years of training, therapy, and drugs to condition myself to channel my fizzing mind in such a way that it can perform well in the workplace at all.

That mental training has leaked over into my leisure time. Yes, it's very cool for me that I can marshal the attention span to finish difficult books and finish long video games. But because those skills were learned in my work life, in the world of work, it somewhat poisons the enjoyment somewhat. Why would I even apply the word 'backlog' to a pile of books that I haven't read. It all sounds very Salesforced!

Working against the playful and chaotic nature of my own mind is a small yet constant drain on my mental reserves. There's something refreshing and easy about just bibbling around from one game to the next and just trying things out for a few minutes at a time. It's refreshingly effortless to chase the pure thrill of being constantly stimulated with new and different things in rapid succession with no guilt or shame attached to it. It's the guilty pleasure of short form video content applied to videogames. It's the pleasure of trying the first few levels of 30 different Super Mario World rom hacks in an afternoon. Who cares if it's decadent and wasteful. Downtime doesn't need to be frown time!

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Look, most people reading this will exist at the intersection between living in a neoliberal work-obsessed hellscape and having a lifelong obsession with videogames culture. I just want you to understand that as fun as it can be to treat videogames as work, or apply what you've learned at work to games (and vice-versa) that there should also be a space in your gaming life that's purely about the sensation of interacting with something digital and enjoying the feedback for a short while without the tendrils of the grindsetters burrowing into the experience.

For me, playing games socially like this in offline, non-monetised, low pressure way is the route I've found to achieving this. I hope you can find your own way too.