On being outside, but inside (so, not outside at all.)
In which Hari discusses illness, digital life, and probably unnerves someone
Image: A farm in Stardew Valley (Credit: Concerned Ape)
I think I may have mentioned to you before, readers, that I am nothing short of a sickly Victorian orphan. I regularly am so ill that getting out of bed feels like trying to cross the arctic tundra, and my muscles frequently feel like I am a little kitten being asked to bench an Olympic weightlifter. It has been this way for over a decade, maybe more. It means, to no one’s surprise, that often I simply don’t want to go outside.
Now, I could, if I were a better person, a more well-developed and functional person, wax lyrical on how I should – and you should – push through the discomfort and sit outside because that is part of our natural state. I could, if I were a better person, tell you that the cool breeze and the damp grass will ground you in something bigger than yourself, and you will feel better for it, even if your illness doesn’t go away. I could say any of those things, but I will not, because you should not tell others to live in ways that you do not live yourself. When I feel shit, I feel shit, and I want to curl up and listen to men with glasses on YouTube tell me the unemployment rates of fictional places and eat Rich Tea biscuits until the world doesn’t feel like quite such an awful place anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t forget about the outside world when I’m ill, I just prefer to engage in the Black Mirror version of it.
Before I continue, friends, I am well aware of the fact that the majority of my core readership (hello, core readership, thank you for being here) are retired or late-career. You are, I am sorry to say, a bit old in comparison to me (who in turn is a bit old in comparison to the first years I will be teaching next week – but that is another story for another time). I hope you will bear with me, then, when I discuss all the things I am about to discuss – you, like my mother, were raised in a time where people ‘went out and did things’ and didn’t ‘look at screens all day’; I am afraid that this essay may seem incredibly off-putting, but I must speak my truth and I hope you will stick around to hear it. New readership (hello, new readership, thank you for being here), I haven’t worked out your demographics yet, so I am also earnestly concerned for your reading enjoyment, but not in a way I can directly address. All I can say is that I hope you enjoy the article.
Anyway, yes, Black Mirror and such like. The inevitable decline of the human experience. Yes, when I am poorly, and when I am tired, and when the world just seems a little too much, I spend my time in outside spaces in video games.
I am what some may term a ‘cozy gamer’. I like games with cartoonish graphics, cats, and mischief. I like farming simulators, narrative adventures with no sense of threat, and puzzle games as long as the puzzles have almost no challenge to them whatsoever. I grew up playing the Sims 1 and 2, and I still have a copy of the Sims 2 Super Collection on my Mac that I boot up whenever times are hard. I hate video game music and almost always play with the sound turned off unless I’m reviewing a game. I basically don’t play games for the story, I play games for the pleasure of pretty views and easy wins.
One of my favourite games for a long time was Stardew Valley, a farm-life simulation game where you play as a city slicker who gives up their busy 9-5 to work on a run-down farm left to them by their deceased uncle. You go to live in a village and get to know the locals, plant crops that you can go on to sell or gift and try to stop a local corporation from destroying the rustic aesthetic of the town. It’s a bit like yuppie retirement in a video game – very NIMBY, very demure. I am not ashamed to say that the reason I got into allotmenting and growing my own stuff is because of this game – I wanted the feeling of satisfaction I got from affecting my surroundings to be real, I wanted to change the world around me in the same way I changed the world of the game. Now I allotment regularly, I very rarely play it, but it does have a special place in my heart for that reason. The game I am playing currently (because, as you may have already guessed, I am currently ill) is Hogwart’s Legacy. It’s not a particularly good game – I would resent the money spent on it had it not been a £15 sale purchase – but it is mindless and the forests are pretty and I enjoy ‘saving’ all the magical animals by shoving them in a bag and putting them in an artificially generated field in the back of a cupboard that only I can access (yes, that is part of the game).
Image: Using your bag to 'help’ magical animals (Credit: Warner Bros. Games / IGN)
Why am I telling you this? Well because I think, as I have mentioned before, that we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and each other to be ‘good’ at this nature thing, and I’m just not – I don’t think you should have to be either. Sometimes the real thing isn’t accessible, sometimes we can access it in other ways and that is ok and probably actually good. My love of nature in games has given me – a neurodiverse little gremlin who, for most of her life, has been overwhelmed and afraid of everything – an ‘in’ to a world that seemed icky and overstimulating and for people who had better cardio than me. When I was a child, unfit little nerds didn’t have ‘forest schools’, we had ‘hockey’ and other kids saying ‘you run like a chicken’ – I didn’t feel like falling over in the mud, I didn’t like running field, I didn’t like that the only thing that happened when I went outside was that I was called weird. I had games. Games that showed me ways to enjoy the natural world that the real world around me didn’t offer me. And now, when I’m not well and my body says it can’t cope with the chill and the walking and the being-with-other-people (have I ever mentioned that I miss having a car of my own?), I still have games, and they remind me what I have to look forward to.
For most of us, it is good to replace the screen with the real thing. Some of us are so poorly that we can’t do that – for you, I hope you find countless hours of beauty in your Nintendo Switch. It’s important to remember, at the end of it all, that judgement achieves very little, and we are able to experience the world in many beautiful and complicated ways. I hope you do a nostalgia playthrough of Skyrim and it inspires you to try blacksmithing. I hope playing the Legend of Zelda inspires you to take up hiking. I hope that your relationship with technology offers you a fruitful relationship with the wider world around you – lots of people are making art that want exactly that for you.
In the short period since I published the article, one of my favourite gaming YouTubers put out this wonderful video. I hope watching it gives you an understanding of what games can do for the people who play them.
Thank you Hari, I feel seen. Although my distractions are not video games, they aren't far off. My experience of 'Outside' were extremely similar to yours as are my physical limitations due to chronic illness. So one again, thank you🥰
I found so much of this relatable that I struggle to distill it into a comment-length comment instead of a lengthy ramble. Gym class (falling down and being called weird), being kept from the outdoors by chronic illness, and something about screens and nature and neurodivergence. My calming video game is Yoshi's Island, a 90's Super Nintendo game. On the Switch you can rewind a few seconds if you make a mistake - easy wins! Also, the way it takes up so much focus is kind of a relief for my neurodivergent brain. For once, instead of attention being sent out in multiple directions, I am concentrating on just ONE THING.