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You have seen them, in channels like Summoning Salt or conventions like Awesome Games Done Quick. They have been in a growth spur the last five or so years. Maybe you have a friend you don't see that much anymore, and definitely it's not because he has a girlfriend. Ah, yes. Gamers. The G word. We are familiar with them, what else is new. But these are not your regular gamers. These ones are their own kind. Well, maybe they all are of this kind, and it's just a matter of intensity. They occupy streaming platforms, they play for hours, hijack and destroy your favorite games. Remember that iconic title you invested a couple of months and a hundred hours completing, event you consider one of your hallmarks as a gamer, if not as a human being? Here is a guy in youtube that does it in an hour and a half. How is that even possible, could you ask. Hours, lots of hours. Planning, skill. At its core, it represents a relentless pursuit: the quest to complete a game in the shortest possible time. Sounds simple enough. Pushing the boundaries of human skill, chance, and unwavering determination, learning to program in order to reverse engineer archaic computer code and delve into RNG manipulation, engaging in deep philosophical discussions extra dimensions and what exactly means to click a button, perfecting single frame movements that would leave a trained neurosurgeon to the dust. Doesn't sound so simple now, does it. Sounds absurd, of course. Intimidatingly meaningless. But not simple.
I imagined myself interviewing some speedrunner for this essay, make this whole thing dynamic, a real piece of documentary art, defying the limits of storytelling (instead of a text mostly written by ChatGPT). One of my friends engages in even a more obscure version of the whole ordeal, called "no-hit" speedrunning, which consists in completing a game without getting hit by your parents for not getting out of the house. Also you can't get hit in the game itself, as in taking damage and that sort of stuff. He declined to be interviewed for this film, like the politicians mentioned in "Inside Job". Which was a struck of luck, actually. Not because that reinforces them as guilty (that too) but because it didn't matter what I envisioned; each question I could possibly imagine about this subject was just another way to ask the only question there is to actually ask.
"Why."
Albert Camus, that luminary of existential thought, talked about the enigma of absurdism in his magnum opus, "The Myth of Sisyphus." Within its pages, he painted a portrait of Sisyphus, the archetypal absurd hero, condemned by the gods to eternally roll a boulder uphill, only to witness its inexorable descent. Such destiny was originally meant as a punishment in the myth, but Camus turned the concept, stating that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy". What was was intended as an ironic punishment for his crimes, was in fact the essence of life itself, and the hero is happy in the simplicity of having his life reduced to the completion of his endless and meaningless task. Essentially, his thesis means that life is intrinsically absurd and thus you can chase whatever makes you happy without having to feel any kind of existential dread or doubt about the whole thing. May I add, as a counterpoint, that such happiness is maybe only such for as long as the hero believes he must roll the boulder and that something will happen when he reaches the hill; if that illusion or intrinsic promise were to be broken, the result would be meaningless despair (and it would be cosmically funny if he only had to push it through the slope of the mountain as long as he believes he has to, making the curse a self-imposed one). Anyway, in a parallel as eerie as it is poetic, individuals embark on a daring odyssey to perfect an act that appears, on the surface, devoid of earthly significance—a pursuit that beckons only personal gratification and the acclaim of an esoteric gaming community. Speedrunning. I seriously doubt Camus was thinking about gamers when writing his thesis on the meaning of life (probably because he was thinking about banging as many woman as possible, and because he was born in the wrong century) but what are you gonna do about it. To game, to play, after all, is central to human experience. To mammal experience. It's just that games were originally instrumentally enjoyable acts that were meant to train you for real experience (and signifiers of capacity) but as the centuries passed, the line between the two has blurred until almost disappear. Now more than ever, with the real transformed into the hyperreal. The game has become transcendental for the obsessive performer, and entertainment and symbolic narrative for the audience, making it sometimes full circle into something valuable per se.
Which is jargon for "I once watched a grown man cry after being hit once by a banana in Mario Kart 64".
Streamers and elite athletes aside, your usual gamer this endeavor becomes a pure (both useless and symbolic) act of rebellion, a challenge to the cosmic indifference, an audacious declaration that even when confronted with the void, individuals can forge their own meaning through self-imposed trials. Where you see a nerd, I see a Greek hero. One does not play because of the economically negligible possibility of actual reward (which is often a will'o'wisp, a temporal distraction towards embracing the situation). The core of absurdism hinges on the recognition of life's inherent absurdity—a dissonance born from the vast chasm between humanity's insatiable quest for meaning and the cosmos' stoic indifference. It is not nihilism, though. Their quest to shatter records and breach the boundaries of possibility becomes a testament to Camus' clarion call to embrace the absurdity of existence unflinchingly by taking it to the extreme. They want it to be absurd, they revel on it. But do they even like doing it? Do they enjoy the particular game they run so much that this is the reason they play it over and over, and running it is just an excuse to enjoy the scenery and know more about it? In my particular experience, no. Some like that stuff, but that's not the reason. Why, then? Why this particular endeavor? Why do this instead of literally anything else? I get it, they are absurdists. They don't care. But is pushing digital boulders enough a prize to leave everything else behind?
Do you know how it feels, after years of dragging your feet around, when you wake up in the morning and there is something hard you actually want to invest yourself into? How intoxicating that feels? How not despite the absurdity it "makes sense"?
Have you ever wanted something?
Within the labyrinthine world of this pursuit, games are subjected to meticulous dissection and reassembly. Crafted with intricate strategies, they exploit glitches, deconstruct narratives, and navigate levels with a supernatural grace. Countless hours are invested in deciphering the arcane mechanics of chosen titles—a relentless pursuit of perfection that might appear trivial to the uninitiated eye. The fact that games can be good for building intuition or sports for maintaining good health, are both completely irrelevant and fundamental. Irrelevant because a list of rationally good reasons to do something doesn't glue you to a screen min-maxing digital farming of cabbages and carrots. Fundamental because one of the reasons we find games compelling (and that's even better than funny) is because our evolutionary born brain interprets those sets of experiences as valuable; so they are not so fundamentally disconnected of what our ghost in the machine thinks we should do, or think. In a sense, gamers are not addicted, but following their gut. Their meaning seeking instinct. The same way that social media is not an extraneous artifact to be addicted or not to, and instead is a redirection of social instinct, competitive games (in any way shape or form) seduces our primal system of competitive behavior. Fun is an instinct towards learning. They are not addicted to something in order to not feel anything. On the contrary. Sometimes for the first time, they are alive.
Gaming narrows experience, concentrating it's essence in a single achievable point.
For example, lately I've been into a couple of new things. Indoor bouldering and playing competitive generation three Pokemon. Here is my team. Both are absurd enough. But doing them, I have this strange feeling. It's not just "fun". I want to invest effort into it. My hands hurt, my body is tired, I feel frustrated, I bleed from time to time. I train for them. It's not meaningless pleasure. Because, why do these things? Shouldn't a proper absurdist, in the task of pushing boulders, just select ones that are tied to some sort of short-term hedonism? Because that would be a simulacrum for the body, while we yearn for a simulacrum for the soul. In that regard, is more akin to a hand-job than it is to sex, but hey, its still better than nothing. We know its not real, we know its not sex, but we still can trick our body. We train for it, we keep ourselves fit and eat better so we can climb better those virtual stairs in the morning; our systems ready if we ever have to do the real thing, and that feels good by itself, even if that moment never comes. Its like doing volunteering in a third world country, we go and do our good deeds and go back home feeling better about ourselves, and in our backs nothing really changes. We know its meaningless, but we choose to not acknowledge it; doing feels better this way, better than thinking. In fact, it only feels good this way. It's an intricate balance of knowing-notknowing that Orwell talked a lot about and world governments try very hard to replicate. But the simple truth is, it comes very natural to us, almost as we are already designed this way, lost between realities. Between fictional instruments of realities and reality itself. How far can we push the fiction, how much can we surround them with perfect executions of community and internet points? The answer is, probably, a fuckton. More than we can image. More than the lot of it we already do. And we will. Why, when free to make our own choices about what matters and doesn't matter, we drift naturally towards suffering? Maybe it's the Christ in us, seeking in it forgiveness; or some kind of self-inflicted schadenfreude. Masochism is probably too strong a word, but not misguided in direction. But when doing those things, when gaming, I don't think about the cross (and don't think anybody does). I don't think about any philosopher or martyr. And that's the goal, isn't it? To live a live where those things don't matter and everything is self-explanatory by virtue of just doing it. Free of existential derivatives, of french philosophers. It's a shame that the gift of intelligence, the capacity to understand, improve and do things in complex systems that others can't (or have more trouble learning to) must be pigeon-holed into the particular things we do; we are cursed when we try to apply it to the more general conception of what does that archive or why we do them. Something that, sadly, it's impossible for me not to do. Maybe it is also for you. So we hit play. Again and again.
And it's not because it allows me not to think. On the contrary. It's because it demands me to think AND that thinking actually has an impact on the world, ideas open new paradigms and uncharted territories of possibilities within the game; something increasingly scarce in our already-built real world.
I want to share with you this thread in a Pokemon forum I have been visiting lately. Not just random mainstream Pokemon, but a very niche community inside the also niche community of showdown competitive formats. In it, people from all over the world discuss not even general strategy, but specifically the tier list placements of virtual monsters in the metagame of an specific generation that came out about twenty years ago. The conversation has been active from March 25 of 2014, and it's still going. I have seen more structured though and careful analysis about a complex topic in this post (and others like it) that I have seen during the last five years in all mainstream media put together. Why? Why? Because even when complex, the self-contained world of an stable game is comfortable to us, and that drives people to explore the systems of hidden patterns within. The world is way too big to do so. Way too interconnected. Way too lovecraftian. So there we are inclined towards simplification, and in the small world, we can explore freely the complexity of nature without feeling overwhelmed by it.
Amid this intoxicating pursuit, individuals stumble upon a unique form of meaning that they feel their own, yes. But this is a form that is not just the product of isolated individual experience. We don't do it alone. Meaning is, most of the time, socially constructed or at least, socially curated. Camus posited that by confronting life's absurdity and embracing it, individuals could unearth a profound sense of liberation. In this world, this liberation manifests as the pursuit of self-imposed objectives, the ecstasy of mastery, and the camaraderie of a community that intimately comprehends the absurdity of their shared mission. But that's not what actually happens, is it. We work better against others, we work better against ourselves when others set the trials of our worthiness. Their own self-defined path of absurdity is hardly ever self-defined, as much as we would want it to be. Players rally around sets of predefined rules to compete "fairly" between them, we are drawn towards comparatives with others and accepted metrics of success to establish positions in meaningless hierarchies we don't need; it is who we are, it is what "makes sense". And we rally like odorous flies around what intuitively "makes sense", no matter how much we drink of the elixir of surrealness to cure our poison instinct, quench our thirst for meaning or wash away our sins. However, it is crucial to recognize that this phenomenon extends beyond the confines of the pursuit; it permeates every corner of the gaming (and not gaming) multiverse. Compulsive MMO players, meticulous farmers, and non-professional obsessives in both the realms of sports and games—all partake in this surreal dance, illuminating the broader scope of humanity's inherent need to weave communal narratives from the tapestry of absurdity. In this kaleidoscope, the absurdity of their pursuit isn't just embraced; it is molded, shaped, and collectively defined —a testament to the idea that meaning emerges from the crucible of collective interpretation, even when fervently pursued and executed by individual will. In other words, just another prison. Of their chosing, but a prison nonetheless. The runs themselves are a collective construction, recollections of dozens if not hundreds of individuals fulfilling different roles in the creation of more perfect paths to a never definitive success. Metagames are also constructed through play. It doesn't matter how smart or knowledgeable about a game a player is, he can't figure a game alone, because it's complexity is emergent from the rules, and sometimes cyclical. The whole process reminds me more of the legion of scientists and engineers behind the Apollo mission than to the strange individuals scattered around the globe and closed in their mothers basement that they are. In case you haven't noticed by now, this essay is not about speedrunning or speedrunners (at least, not only). They just happen to be the embodiment of a much bigger cultural trend, and they pose as martyrs because their activities make absurdity absurdly apparent. They embrace it directly. They have to, they must. No sane person can successfully rationalize spending so much effort and years of his life perfecting how to play a game that launched twenty years ago and nobody but themselves are about without abandoning the alluring illusion of meaningful self-realization that other activities placebo us into someplace along the way.
Most of the times I talk about the subject with an MMO player friend, the same reflection is mentioned: "playing feels like a second job". It's not that they have fun playing regardless of the effort and dedication it demands, they have fun because of the effort and dedication. Because there, their personality, play-styles, decisions, investments actually have an effect on the outcomes of their objectives and how are perceived by their peers; unlike in their real life. Agency, symbolism, rites of passage, measurable progress, skill-expression, objective ability, storytelling, competition. These things matter to people. I talk about it using easy big words like meaning and purpose, but they are blanket terms, configured of lots of ingredients we have been skimping from the recipe one by one. It's not only him, I know legions (well, maybe half a dozen) of similar players, an entire generation that has assumed without reserves that their job and function in society is a mere utilitarian choice and that self-realization belongs to the realm of fantasy. Which is not "bad", but it still frightens me the naturality with which they have assumed that ontological choice. And it's not that they work in your usual meaningless job either, the one I'm talking in particular is a data scientist working in fucking healthcare. He could care about what he does and how that affect people and the world, but he doesn't, he just jumps from job to job to the highest bidder. Years and years of academic studies, titles and formation years in a foreign country have been just treads towards a cozy place to do whatever while they dream of farming crops in a videogame —not much different to writing endless essays in a website that nobody ever reads. And they seem happy about it (well, at least not unhappy) but the whole situation makes me remember of an Adam Curtis documentary, where a young lady in a former soviet country talked about her future. "Don't talk me about it." —she lamented— "No, I don't have plans. I used to make plans but now I don't anymore." These people went about their lives more or less just fine, but they don't seem to have any dreams. At most, domestic ambitions.
And what I am trying to argue in this film is not that in any way that we are like the Soviet Union (we are a very different society) but what we do share with that time is a sense that things are a bit odd and unreal, and sometimes fake. (...) But, at the same time, we are so much a part of that system, that we don't have a vision of an alternative.
Adam Curtis
In our modern societies, we find ourselves amidst a peculiar paradox—a world where the authenticity of genuine human experience is both sought after and, slipping from our grasp. As we navigate this intricate labyrinth of constructed realities, the allure of hyperreality becomes ever more seductive, beckoning us away from the unfiltered challenges of life. We begin to construct artificial and symbolic experiences, substituting them for the raw, unvarnished struggles of existence.
We tell kids that they should do what they love. To follow their dreams. But teach them nothing on how to actually cultivate these things, or how to even find them. We can kind of "convince" them that something will be eventually important because of their education or something (and even that only works if they believe it) but if something doesn't "click" the right way in some part of their brain, they will get bored with it. They will be bored before they even start. That's the death of passion. Because that's not the way you actually learn things, you learn things as valuable information that helps you win games and surpass obstacles. How to maintain interest, how to embrace curiosity, how to challenge yourself, how to actually try and fail at things and decide from there if the interest is still intact or it was a fade; we are illiterate in that sense. We play because in games, those things are already built in, and we run because we like being subtly directed towards them but not like following dotted lines (like we do in school with learning). We somehow assume that's a natural process that magically happens to people, not knowing that not only the individual pursuit of something meaningful for yourself is hard, and ignoring the part that it is driven by things like role models and broad cultural influences. Paradoxically (in the surface) it's structures that are by definition driven towards success and achievement, like basketball franchises, high end tech companies or e-sports communities, the ones that are more concerned about things like "team culture" and vague spiritual motivations; because they live or die by success, innovation and creativity, so they are forced to know that those are necessary ingredients of the mix. We have a pathological lack of structural incentives towards actually enriching modes of spiritual growth that aren't about crosses, yoga pants or in general performative pieces of virtue-signaling. It's often not the "harsh reality" of the job market what disillusions people, but their own lack of otherwise assumed internal drive. We go to great lengths to simulate it, convince ourselves and others that we have it: motivational talks, self-improvement tech gurus, micromanagment of expectations, productivity apps, convincing personal narratives. And sometimes we succeed in faithfully recreate it. For a while, until it comes crashes down. It was never even fully there.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
Jean Baudrillard
It's in games where we found our redemption. It's in games where things actually click. Learning the table of type weaknesses of Pokemon never ever felt like studying, just as something I needed to do to accomplish a goal. It came naturally, it didn't feel like tyrannizing myself into trying to memorize the periodic table or a bunch and rivers and mountains. It's in games where after (or even during) the first play-through we began to experiment with it, to make unusual choices, to self-impose handicaps, to create invented storylines, to keep ourselves invested in our own way. That's not void of symbolic meaning. Individuals boldly challenge the predefined rules and narratives set by the industry, and they do it almost as a second nature. In doing so, they embark on a quest to recapture a sense of authenticity, a feeling that the real world often struggles to provide. It's a declaration of intentions more than just an alternative way to enjoy a game. This pursuit stands as a testament to the human desire for genuine experiences of struggle and achievement in a world where constructed, hyperreal experiences increasingly dominate. So we search for them at the heart of the most synthetic of them all, because reality itself is too boring (and feels too inauthentic, believe it or not) and normal gameplay is too defined. The only way to ensure that they are authentic is that they are absurd. The only way for those activities to have even the potential for meaning is to ensure they evidently have not. That they evidently have no functional use. Meaninglessness is not a bug, it's a feature. A selling point. A guarantee that you aren't in some kind of re-branded heroism indirectly serving someone else's idea of what you should do with your life. Because how could something so niche, so obscure, so uncommercializable, so fucking useless be anything but my own. Some part of that struggle, and the mesurability of it, caters to male psychology and the followers of the heroic myth in a profound way. Why this phenomenon is largely located in the young male (proto-depressive) demographic is beyond the scope of this article, but probably not unrelated to it's ideas. And by the way, that resonance with the male psyche is probably the explanation of why there's a gender disproportion of high achievers in areas that require this type of obsession and expertise that comes with it, and not biological differences or the presence of systematic bias or systematic oppression.
So why have we reached this peculiar juncture where we yearn for what I call "synthetic experiences of hardship" in the first place? Don't we have those at home? The answer lies in the complexities of our manufactured, culturally fine-tuned society—a realm where every facet of life has been meticulously crafted and polished. Here, the raw and unadulterated pain-reward systems of reality no longer hold the same allure when juxtaposed against the seductive gloss of hyperreality. As the boundary between the real and fiction blurs, genuine struggles and achievements appear imperfect in their construction. The only thing holding us back from falling into pure delusion is a vague desire for authenticity. But authenticity is a commodity in high demand, its scarcity making it all the more valuable. It becomes one more thing to simulate. It's not anti-simulation, it just demands an even higher form of it. Still much much cheaper than "going back to the fundamental" of any kind. Commodification swallows the whole concept and spills it back. Even if we look for authentic authenticity, that will also become something to simulate, in layers and layers of symbols and performative acts that relate to each other ad infinitum.
Because of that, curated artificial experiences of authenticity have risen ever more sophisticated to try to fill the commercial gap. Hell, we have transformed farming for subsistence into a very expensive hobby, and then made video-games out of it. The clarity, simplicity and honesty after a day (or a life) of hard work is now lived through Stardew Valley, or Animal Crossing. That is the power of capital, the ability to adopt their own counter-narratives. The hope maybe being, that lacking a proper meaningful one, we will be able to recreate life in the aggregate. Taking all the individual facets that should configure it and were naturally designed into psychological reinforcement systems and consuming them separately in their perfect denaturalized form. Like we do with vitamins. After we substituted our original diet with alimentary paste, we take what we lack prepackaged because it is more efficient from an economic standpoint than actually having it in the actual food. Or even worse, we put it back in after having taken it off in the first place, transforming the simulacrum into the real in the most fucking contrived way. Does it make a difference? It's food that contains roughly what it should, after all. It may not matter from a functional standpoint, but it sure makes perceptive people feel alienated and confused about it; no wonder they sometimes call bullshit and go to the gym to lift weights or climb the Kilimanjaro to feel that something is actually real and to don't go insane.
Once you have been in the psychiatric ward of an hospital, or been observed while sleeping by someone because they were in suicide-watch, you become unprecedentedly willing to explore some others ways of how to live.
Marshall in the role of David Foster Wallace.
And while I don't share those exact mentioned experiences, that quote echoes with my life.
I have a friend that lives in a mountain. Another has been for almost half a year a recluse in his house. A couple of them can actually relate to the quote. Not a lot of people from my circle seem to be very happy. I talk with them, and they say then want this or the other stuff. But they don't really. They have everything, we have everything. Highly educated people, talented in art, smart and perceptive. Some of them (not a lot) even have interesting jobs, but are somewhat miserable anyway. They look weird at me when I tell them we should have a purpose, an untangible dream. They look at me like if I suddenly had decided to tell them to accept Jesus in their heart. The only people that seem to thrive long-term are the ones that picked an obsession and went with it or those... that shake off profundity with naturality, like if it was a distraction, even when they are entirely capable of it.
Both synthetic and genuine experiences of hardship have morphed into commodities, available for purchase to those willing to pay the price. And we are more than willing. And the market will expand to fill the void of all kinds and brands of meaningful experience. Some even come in pills. We mimic an actual existence. Their presence and perfection will only increase from now on. This phenomenon extends beyond mere "adventure tourism" or going to an African village during summer vacation to do voluntary work like building a tent between twelve horny students and posting photos of yourself with black children in instagram to show how empathetic you are. It encapsulates a broader range of experiences, from virtual expeditions in video games to the meticulously curated challenges of seemingly inane activities like hiking, sports, nuzlockers and any brand of obsessive competitive gamers besides speedrunners. Metaphorical representations of the whole process of existentialism. But even in those small closed worlds, accessible to most, inside rules and social hierarchies rise nonetheless, no matter how abstract self-defined goals are or how metaphorical the result of success. They are born and quickly infiltrate every aspect of the community, infusing it with vigor and intoxicating it with social relevance. It becomes a different kind of race. Not even about being faster, but being more pure, more authentic, more genuine. An exercise that fold into itself when it gets clear that the best way to signal that is through careful disguised deliberative performance (that then others see and reproduce). Even communities that pride in the apparent subversion of those rules, engage in systematic and paradoxical authenticity as the objective metric to chase instead of results; and as often happens, this is better accessed through commodities in the form of seemingly genuine experiences.
Although not directly related, roles like coaches, analysts and wannabe CEOs pop up in e-sports even when totally unnecessary, almost as a parody of the outside world, legions of people playing pretend corporation. Pretending function. Role-playing. Just they don't even know they are pretending, they fill everything with dubious titles and official meetings of staff and meaningless unnecessary bureaucracy to hide and convince themselves they don't and justify their job. Which is what corporations actually are. It all becomes about vanity. Suddenly, is not enough to climb, now it's about going to an exotic place to do so. Suddenly, it's about running barefoot (I am inventing those) or running a certain race, or running a certain way, or about wearing a certain brand, or not wearing a certain brand, or not caring about the whole thing, or not caring about having to not care therefore caring about the whole thing. Those who can afford commodified expression that captures the current social trends inside the bubble community (and that pay close attention to those) often find more meaning in them precisely because they have been designed to offer a semblance of authenticity within a controlled framework —and seen as others as being at the cutting edge of authenticity, despite it being paradoxically carefully constructed. Probably the most direct example of accomplishment commodification are mobile RPG, where bonuses and equipment can be bought directly from the shop in exchange for real money; the people that do buy it (and they do) are not just buying an enhanced gaming experience, they are acquiring the means of status within the game itself and it's community. You could even say the whole game exists for that purpose, the bulk of their playerbase (to whom the base game is offered for free) is allured by the game-play experience and are served as cannon-fodder of a lower social class to those that actually pay can and will feel superior to. People pay money to have others actually play for them. Then, in a package, they offer you rationalizations so you can feel good and realized about the whole thing, as if you have actually accomplished something meaningful. It's not just about false bragging rights, you actually believe you have paid the price (and in a sense, you did, just not the one indented) despite not actually accomplishing anything. And when that's revealed to the players, they feel robbed because of it, their self-worth put in question, the intrinsic promise of fairness violated, despite it being all almost explicitly meaningless. They should put it in the box of the game or the console, like with a sticker or something as they do in the packs of cigarettes: "Warning: Life is meaningless." But this is only the least subtle of examples, where you can bypass the hardships with capital, just an example of the perversion of crowdfunded meaning and consequently constructed social structures. Overall, gaming is a world where the pursuit of authenticity becomes akin to chasing a mirage, a constantly receding horizon. The world of speedrunning mirrors our quest for authenticity, it tries to get away from all of that. It symbolizes our willingness to challenge constructed narratives and seek genuine experiences of achievement, even if we must fabricate them ourselves. In a world where the synthetic increasingly overshadows the genuine we find ourselves navigating a surreal landscape, yearning for meaning and authenticity in the face of constructed realities that beckon us away from the raw, unvarnished truths of existence. But it falls prey to the same problems.
Despite what runners themselves would like to believe (and like to tell) running is not just a pure individual journey of self-improvement, but it's deeply rooted in social mechanisms of meaning that were developed with utilitarian purposes.
Those who remain outside the embrace of these synthetic adventures find themselves ensnared in unfulfilling cycles of genuine hardship. These struggles, though real, often fail to deliver the same sense of fulfillment and meaning as their synthetic counterparts, because they were not specifically made to do so. They were just... experiences. They were never "meaningful" to begin with, meaning is just a system we have invented to entice ourselves to do stuff. But we have cracked the code through the mastery of superstimulus and created insane expectations towards life because we are swimming in a world of fictional narrative, and then we act surprised when the world doesn't feel the same. Such experiences lack the curated structure and symbolic value that makes the manufactured ones so appealing. Speedrunning is so synthetic, so artificial, that almost feels natural. It almost runs from itself. The artificial core is not negated or wasted in a dichotomy between "genuine" and "synthetic", but instead is the substrate of a new conception of naturality that emerges from it. It preserves part of that unpredictability and chaos we are unable to provide in increasingly uniform fiction, while at the same time retains the comfy structure and mechanics of the synthetic. Nobody put it there. Even when someone put it there, it feels discovered rather than invented. When someone discovers a shortcut, when someone makes a world in Minecraft or whatever, when somebody creates an obscure mod for a forgotten game: it feels like when you find a really good song from an artist nobody listens to. He made it, but you found it and that's the important part, nothing and nobody directed you to it through deception and mass consumer culture, it is not bound by the imperative of having to appeal to a major audience (be it because it isn't or because it can't). Even if it's bad, that's almost an asset. It feels real because it is unlikely. It feels good because it's familiar. It feels significant because it's yours.
Here is perhaps when absurdism as a philosophy diverges from "regular" existentialism; it never ponders about the significance of it's own process. It doesn't need to. It doesn't care. It doesn't lose itself into an endless array of questions and self-reference, it recognizes itself and absurdism as also absurd (it's like the concept of doublethink, it requires the use of doublethink to understand itself). It just goes forward. Movement itself becomes the only imperative. Action the only thing that demands truth. Either your ideas make you fall, or they don't. Nations awake from their slumber during war, others reveal the smoke they were made of. People regain their self-respect in dim lit gymnasiums. They take pride in what they do. Yes, my job could be done by an automaton or a couple of lines of code, yes I have no real control in what goes on in the world or my life; but I can still learn, I can still progress, I can get stronger at this absurd task. Convince them that what they do is worth something and they will change allegiances to Atlas and lift the entire world. The lines converge. They purificate themselves. They purge their soul in the spiritual version of a ketogenic diet. They run.
Having talked about the why, let's talk about the who.
Individuals who immerse themselves in activities like speedrunning or gaming aren't mere escapists evading reality; they are disillusioned go-getters. They are individuals who recognize the limitations of a world that often provides prepackaged struggles and achievements, and they actively choose to carve out their own. These are not losers; these are creators of their own destinies, architects of meaning in a world where meaning is increasingly elusive. Consider the demographic of individuals who gravitate toward competitive games—not the professionals, but the passionate enthusiasts. They are young men, with an internalized sense of progress through struggle, innovative and perfectionists who didn't found an appropriate canvas for their talents; no place in the usual social hierarchies of success, much less a clear path in the too formal or too strict ecosystem of academic achievement. They crave structure but reject the principles (mainly of authority) behind it, and often fantasize from the comfort of their comfort about radical and seemingly opposite lifestyles, like being a farmer, joining the army, becoming a firefighter, studying philosophy. I have seen more people quoting Marcus Aurelius in gaming twitter than anywhere else. In my years of online gaming, most people I have found weren't trying to disconnect from the hardships of their life in the casual cyberspace, but people seeking exactly the opposite: to connect with something. Desperately trying to find something they could connect with and pour their lives into. Desperate to find something to will. Instead of finishing their studies, chasing girls or doing drugs (which they sometimes find dissociative) they rally around ladders in their virtual arenas, ladders that seem, from an outsider's perspective, inconsequential in the grand scheme of life. And, when they found that correct environment that clicks, they do the work. These ladders, these points, these virtual ranks, become intrinsically linked to their individual identity and self-esteem; their integrity is sacrosanct. Because a new hierarchy emerges from them, and with it their position within. Not necessarily a tangible one, in the sense that it doesn't grant actual power, but a social hierarchy nonetheless; with it's own rules and customs that feels as real to our brains as anything else and carry an almost a spiritual dimension. It happens even when the whole thing is initially supposed to be more akin to personal spiritual journey than to a competition, and it transforms the arena into a virtual paideia. It's virtue through trial, a new form of arete measurable with matchmaking ELO points. The Homeric heroic society rising from the ashes of history directly into Battlenet.
Important of these was the Greek words, aien aristeioi, "Always Be The Best". The best doesn't mean morally the best in anything like our sense. It means the greatest, the strongest, the ablest, the most admired. That is what you want to be. Well, you can only do that if you are in a contest. You can only be the best if somebody is not as good, and the Greek word for that kind of a contest is agon. I think it's very necessary to think about the Greeks as having a particular agonal society, a society filled with competition, in which if not everybody, lots and lots of people are constantly striving to be the very best, whatever the definition of best is in the context that's relevant.
Donald Kagan
Competition is key. Is the way, almost the only way in which we can actually test the world of ideas against their actual impact on ourselves and others, instead of losing ourselves in sophisticated and contrived representations of the world that hold no real value. Lots of times, I am doing some pseudo-intellectual task, and feel how that doesn't quite squeeze my intellect, and I stop and go to some online platform or game to get my "fix". Where every ounce of attention and decision making matters. To test it against something.
The emergent complexity of these competitive systems always feels more natural than designed, even when the core is artificial. Beautiful, even. Natural, sometimes. Like in chess. It feels like you are "descovering" them. In the world of gaming, the game feels more real than real life, feels like life should be. And reality is what you choose it to be, so they choose their definition of life. They choose what area their worthiness will be put against, so they choose one that's hard but that also doesn't have much competition. There is competition still, of course, but it's a reduced form, a manageable one that can force history to such a narrow pathway in which an individual like you can still have an impact. The fact that we chase "world records" is not casual, we do because it feels as if that "has" to mean something —I mean it's a world record, that sound nice. At one point I was the best Maokai support in the world, also one of the only ones, but it feels like something when I say it out loud. Then an outside force like Summoning Salt comes, gives it the form of a narrative struggle, and it becomes meaningful. Like in TV. An absurd task. The more absurd, the better. Recognition and social acceptance of the particular struggles and victories of any given gamer are at the same time their dream and worst nightmare. On one hand, it reivindicates what they as something legitimate (and someone to share the experience with), on the other it risks stopping being absurd. It risks being one more part of the usual social dance, something popular in which they can fail or have the suspicion they only care about it because others care about it (when in fact they allow themselves to care about it because others don't). They risk seeing themselves doing it for an actual reason. They risk being caught caring too much.
But again, why? Why? If we could harness that power, that will, all that effort; into actually useful things. Into saving lives, solving world hunger, stopping wars. If we can choose, why not choose these things? I mean this is fine, people do what they want with their time but. It's only a game. It's only a game after all.
It is, it is only a game. What isn't. Even life itself, can be though of as one. A game. A game of games.
Games have transcended the instrumentality I talked about at the beginning of this article. Instead of keeping it compartamentalized, games work so well that we have made all aspects of life into a game. We have gameified life. What does matter which particular game we chose, then?
How different is a videogame from a social one derived from the genetic imperative we are born into? From the relentless and permanent popularity contest we have made society be? This subversion from the usual narratives of success isn't merely a diversion; it is another form of self-imposed imprisonment. A perfection that can only be archived by refusing to touch grass. These individuals have chosen a different path, one that aligns more closely with their own values and aspirations, but it's not fundamentally different than the one we have chosen most of us, both in the good (selfdefined) and the bad (structured). After all, the reason d'etre of our most sacred inner instincts is to win a race towards conservation of genetic material. How is that not absurd. If else, collecting virtual points seem like a refreshing sane alternative.
Everything is a game. Dating is a game (for a reason I call it "The Game" when I still had strength to write about it) status is a game, geopolitics is a game, language is a game. What happens is we are made to solve games (more like, find stable solutions ans jump small gradients) more or less closed, not very interconnected. So when that system designed to solve problems thinks of itself as a problem to solve (why does and wants certain things) it destroys itself with existential madness. That's us, by the way. Much prefers to close itself into systems more of its liking, like (what a surprise) games.
That or...
Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps Camus was wrong. Perhaps "real meaning" (whatever that is) still holds a value. Perhaps it is just a really convoluted way to rationalize escapism. I really don't know. I don't think anyone does. Probably the answer to "why don't we use all this will to solve actual problems" es not because they don't matter, but that we just can't. It's not that they are difficult (they are) but that we just can't harness that power. We can't bring ourselves to care about the things we should care, or drive meaning from the things that should be meaningful, even when we decide they should. If we had that capability, this article wouldn't even exist; neither the runners, the writer nor you would be here instead of doing actual stuff. Reading all this one may fall into a overly romanticized view of speedrunners (that was the goal writing it) but I must crash the mirrors of my own constructed illusion. Absurdist own created meaning eventually falls to the same pitfalls regular culturally sanctioned meaning does. It can trap you the same way, instrumentalize you, institutionalize you. Spend long enough pushing the same boulder, and it will be the only thing that "makes sense" to you. Arms get used to the work, after all. But sometimes it feels so... detached. You are left chasing the high of the exciting adventure of the first time, but it's never the same, you fight for scraps. The unique self-defined path to meaning isn't so unique nor self-defined. Most players just copy the last trend without even thinking about it, without knowing why they do what they do, like stochastic parrots; not even copying to build up improvements for the collective goal of progress, just motivated by egotistical needs or petty conflicts. Gaming is full of cheaters, smurfs, virtue-signaling idiots. They are no hero, they exhibit the same flaws that anyone else outside the ecosystem does, even magnified by the intensity of the experience. They sometimes seem as liberated as the chained hero seemed to the Greeks, and they push the boulder —they do, they actually fucking do I swear to god don't you dare suggest otherwise—, but rare is the occasion I see them smile. They mostly complain, cope, and fall into mild forms of delusion to explain their shortcomings. I have a ten page rant about my struggles to reach Master somewhere here in my blog, which is my own way of being petty and feeling impotent. A minority of them actually archive something worth of notice before giving up. You watch those videos, the world records, and after a brief moment of shock and happiness after months or years of hardships, follows a somber emptiness in their eyes. When the camera is off and the lights are on, they cry black tears of a liberty given and negated by their non-existent God. They take some time off. Get their life in order. Then realize (or remember) it sucks. Then they come back, or don't. But the myth has been broken. At the end of the day, the rock rolls back to the start. Sisyphus has discovered the lie, and he still pushes the boulder, trying to convince himself that the realization didn't broke his heart.
And yes, yes. It's great for your health, your decision making abilities, you belong in a community, you learn stuff. But that's not why you push the boulder. You push the boulder because it's the entirety of your life, your frustrations and failures in a symbolic simulacrum of struggle you can actually push. What are you going to tell the beautiful young lady that has just graduated in journalism when she asks you why do you do your "hobbie"? You are going to lie. And rightfully so. Because you want to protect you, and you want to protect her. You are not going to tell her that life is hard, that you don't have the guts to confront your boss, the courage to leave town, the security to find love, so you push a boulder up a hill seven days a week. You will tell her that is good for your back because some doctor said so and that it's a great way to do exercise outdoors and enjoy the scenery. For a moment, you will even believe it too. During the whole day, if you are smart enough to be dumb. Grateful, even. The boulder is back where it started so I can push it tomorrow again. Lucky me. I can't wait to wake up early tomorrow so I can do some pushing before dawn. I've had this sensation, sometimes. When spiritually submerged into league, you ease the pain of defeat with the eternal promise of another game. There's always another game to be played, there will always be, so where's the harm of losing? I have always been a "quit while ahead" guy. Perhaps more unusual is my tendency to keep going when I lose (as long as I see possibility of progress). One time, when I was a child we had this sleepover at a friends house. We started playing some soccer game he had that I was terrible at. I lost about nine out of ten games we played against each other. But we played the whole night, because I didn't want to stop. It wasn't even that I needed to win, or tried to prove something, or was vindictive in any way. I just enjoyed it. I wanted another chance, to play again and again, a lifetime of chances without consequences. Each day, the promise of a new game. Essentially the same, essentially different. In that regard, not that different from a regular salary life; except on all the things that matter. It was the first night of my life I didn't sleep. In retrospective, maybe that was the start of a lifetime filled with them; I never wanted to go to bed, as is something more was waiting at the other side of the night, maybe I am forever chasing that high of the first time (and so are speedrunners) in which we felt like we succeed in absurdism, the moment we "go it", in which we felt for a single moment liberated by our chosen life instead of condemned by it.
Aren't we tired of the denaturalization? Aren't we tired of losing? Of getting hit, of not getting the best time, of it all amounting to nothing. No, dad. I am not winning. I haven't been winning in a long time. Deep down, sometimes it feels low-key humiliating. Shouldn't we be, instead of gaming and partaking in glorified children's games (I am also looking at you, sports) and watching anime focusing on actually tackling our own problems in very real situations that mark our real life? To step down from the symbolic simulacrum into the real world.
The answer is no.
Yes, maybe it is actually escapism. But, loosely quoting Tolkien: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?”. Not a right, a duty. You have a duty towards yourself and others to keep trying to best your record at minesweeper. Now that's a though. Maybe we didn't live the horrors of WWI trenches, so we can't quite put face on what the enemy is or isn't (yet, incoming my article about the Lemurian Time Wars) or don't feel with the legitimacy to talk about life being "terrible". But feeling trapped is something I think most of us can feel related to, one way or another.
There are lives to be lived out there. Have you guys talked with people, specially with some old people lately? Some of them have wild stories about their life. But when they explain them, they don't even feel "cinematographic" or special, even when they are outlandish. They feel slightly unhinged. As if the world used to have a more loose feeling to it —an improvisational tone. Nowadays it feels like the world is already built, and you have to cheat your way into a club you don't want to go, and doesn't want you in, but where all the fine looking ladies are. "I have worked in this small town flower shop for the last sixty years. I once saw a bear." Alright, I guess. "My father was a clock-maker and we had this client that stole a bathtub so I had to marry his daughter and went to the war. There I knew this man who manufactured jeans and we made a trip to India, bought a steamship full of cotton and sold them to the United States, and there it was where I made a small fortune. I lost most of it at the casino but still bough a couple dozens houses in London. Now I am a professional painter, next week I have an exposition in South Korea. We come to the Mediterranean every summer because my wife likes it very much. No, not that one, the first two died of tuberculosis. We were married for fifty years and had seven kids. Four died. Also we are racist for some reason."
And I'm like. What the fuck was that. No, seriously. What the fuck are you talking about. Is that... is that a life? That's what a life sounds like? Is that even legal? No wonder absurd stuff like speedrunning feels like home (both the cozy synthetic stable feeling and the nonsense) if the "meaning" mechanism in our brain has to be flexible enough to adjust with the shitshow that is actual life on planet Earth. To cover the vast extension that is actually the range of actual ways to organize people and live your life that we modernly tag as anti-social if not directly insane.
This is a terrible essay. It goes nowhere. Feels familiar.
Maybe at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how hard we try, we can't completely abandon ourselves into self-defined pseudohedonistic-heroic orderly pursuits. Even if we rationally decide they are how we're going to live our lives. We know the alternative is bullshit, we know society is bullshit, we know all the god talk is bullshit, but we can't seem to completely break free from it. After months of playing games, climbing stupid walls or writing stupid books, it comes a moment where I yearn for the mirage of authenticity and meaning once more. I stop watching Pokemon gameplays and convince myself once again I should do something tangible with my life. I can't invest three days of my life into a Civilization game without feeling eventually guilty, even if I had decided in an absurdist-existentialist way that's what matters to me now (even when adopting absurdism at first feels like a liberation) because what feels as "something" is not just an unilateral decision I can take, but that feeling is a made from a constellation of things no individual can hope to fully control by himself. As if my very soul was born with that idea of "something tangible" hardcoded in it and no amount of subversion can fix it. I feel phantom limb syndrome: something should be there, yet isn't. And I can only fool it for so long before it comes back for payday. Either one has the luck that whatever absurdist endeavor makes their brain secrete the correct mix of neurotransmitters also for some reason gives them some semblance of socioeconomic value in the real world and can parrot the "follow your dreams" trope to future generations, or you have to do meaningless stuff for the rest of your life you don't want to do and know it's meaningless but have to believe it's not in order to survive.
There are two options to tackle such contrived paradigm: cognitive dissonance or absurdism.
In contemplating the implications of this choice, one wonders if it even makes a difference. After all, you still have to do the things you have to do. More than a choice between philosophies that led to different lifestyles, it's a choice between different brands of coping mechanisms. Does it matter that they have chosen their own path, even if it leads them to a virtual realm of synthetic struggles and victories? I don't want to negate the existence of an objective reality, but to present you with a multiplicity of interpretations and representations of it, where what constitutes what we usually think of as "social reality" doesn't have a very special place within it. Perhaps the difference lies not in the destination but in the journey itself—the act of boldly asserting one's agency in a world that too often hands out prepackaged narratives. Maybe they are just kids playing videogames, and there's no difference at all. Probably it's as much as a mistake to see them as heroes as it is to try to pathologize the phenomenon as some kind of addiction. In the end, the pursuit of meaning and fulfillment remains a deeply human endeavor (and by human I mean "largely incomprehensible but in a particular peculiar way") whether it unfolds in the tangible world or within the pixelated confines of a screen.
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