Video Game Paralysis: Loving Games with BPD
Video games are challenging for me. On one side there are the straight-forward kinds of challenges, those familiar characteristics of video games like improving skill level, the game’s difficulty settings, or utilizing strategic thinking. While these aspects present a kind of cumulative stress during an otherwise leisure time, the more personal challenge is related to how my own Borderline Personality Disorder-related anxiety interacts with my consumer based personality. Neither of these problems exist in a vacuum, and they frequently compound each other.
The experience of playing video games with borderline personality disorder is, for me, a constant game of redefining myself based on my perceived categorization of video games design, cliques, and criticism. I call this kind of self image a “consumer-based personality” because I frame products and art as my sole means of self-worth and identity. For example, I might try to wholly define myself based on the first person shooter genre; suddenly shooters occupy my fullest love and attention. I’ll hyper-focus my research of the genre’s history to suite whichever niche I choose to define myself with and even emphasize my own history with this niche to incorporate it more “authentically” into my identity. After a “personality renaissance” defined by, say, games I’ll vaguely categorize as “surreal Americana”(think Fallout, Deadly Premonition, Bioshock), I’ll rediscover an intense passion for Japanese role-playing games. Exhaustively, I’ll then bolster that love with my own extensive personal history with it, ignoring any outlying interest that complicates the euphoria of single minded devotion.
The root of this turmoil is in large part what’s called a “chronic feeling of emptiness” by just about every source I’ve read on BPD. I have little to no sense of self on my own — a void sophist woman (trying to even figure that out now?) produced a hot cocktail of genetic predisposition and childhood trauma. The crux of this feeling is that I need external stimuli to validate my sense of self. Codependency would be in the same ballpark to what I feel, but a key difference is that the feelings I have for something (or someone) are required to be all or nothing. All of my pursuits, worldview, and impressions of others are coloured in stark monochrome.
While there are other behaviors and symptoms associated with BPD, including intense emotional dysregulation, heightened sensitivity, and extreme self criticism, my need to make video games a mirror to search for an identity makes the whole process unduly draining. When one interest begins to naturally shift into another, my sense of self begins to crumble. The problem is that, as artificial as that identity obviously is, I can convince myself that it’s my authentic center. BPD makes it challenging to allow multiple characteristics to settle into a complex whole. My world has to be singularly defined, or I lose myself. The resulting mental fatigue that comes from playing games makes the habit both richly rewarding and completely untenable. On one hand I love the feeling that comes from pouring myself into, say, the history of first person shooters, but on the other hand my emotions are completely disproportionate to the leisure fun-time I should be having. It’s important to remember that the fulfilling sense of identity that comes from a passing FPS obsession can come from something as innocuous as finding the original Doom fun.
As opposed to most leisure activities, playing video games require a seemingly inordinate amount of energy for me. First there’s the combination of “cumulative” stress produced by gameplay challenges and my overall energy output while playing. This mostly affects my depression. There’s simply a considerable effort involved in mustering the energy to even hook up the damn console. Yet exacerbating even that is my unwillingness to play anything that doesn’t satisfying whatever craving my mind needs to feel complete. These obsessions create a stress barrier that has me completely transfixed by the mental forces that compel me one way or another.
As navel gazing as it is to write about playing video games and my own mental health is, it helps identify a rift that I feel between the idea of leisure activities and their actuality. The images of leisure that we collectively envision (and impart) are produced by the ableist lens of society after all. It’s easy to forgot that stress is relative to each individual person’s mental health, and that a person’s experience and relationship with leisure is individual. I often feel ashamed for “not even being able to play games” when I have time. “How broken must I be if I can’t do even do that.” It’s much easier for me to fixate on listening to new music for example, due to the relatively low maintenance prep work that it entails. It’s comparatively stress-free, is all. Some of the shame I feel from this kind of stress-induced paralyses comes from me of course. Yet the social framing of video games as this facile, effortless activity does have an impact on my mental health, and it’s important to be aware of how these trends impact people living with personality disorders and mental health problems.
