The Tolerance Break

It’s 1994. Pastel colour​​s and awkwardly balanced haircuts run wild. I’m leaving England for the first time and heading to California with my mum to visit my family there. It’s a special trip that I still remember fondly, although I don’t know how much of that is memory of the actual trip and how much is from watching home movies or seeing snapshots in old photo albums. I do certainly remember one thing however: the first time I played a videogame.

My cousins owned a NES, and just as much time spent outside playing in the sun was also spent inside huddled around the TV, whether it was Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3 (we don’t talk about Super Mario Bros. 2), Duck Hunt, or Kirby’s Adventure. I was hooked, completely charmed by every aspect: the music, the colourful characters that filled the screen, the challenging precision that kept most of each game a mystery hidden behind my own capabilities, and even the crude rectangular controllers.

Returning home, I didn’t get as many chances to play videogames, aside from the times when going to friends’ homes or when they’d bring consoles over to mine. It wasn’t until my mum got me the​​ cornerstone of the Argos-Catalogue-Summer-’92-Through-To-Winter-’96™, the TV Boy, that I got to play videogames regularly. Even then, it was a mere clone of an Atari 2600, which, although still plenty of fun, didn’t fulfil me as much as the NES I had fallen in love with, or even hold a candle to the newer generation of consoles that were starting to fill the market. I started to play less and less, eventually stopping altogether.

It’s 1997. “Tubthumping” and “MMMBop” dominate the radio. I’ve got a new love now. For my birthday I receive the Nintendo 64 with Super Mario 64 and I can’t put it down, which is for the best, since it’s the only game I’ll own for the next year. My skills have developed considerably since my earlier outings on the NES, yet certain secrets and Power Stars in Peach’s Castle elude me. Although I defeat Bowser and free the Princess, it would be many years before I reach 120 Stars and get to meet Yoshi on the roof of the castle, a secret I heard many times in the playground. A secret that was diluted among the hordes of fake stories and cheats my friends and I would share with each other. The vastness of the title, the many yarns​​ spun about secret levels that didn’t actually exist, or the fabled and long-winded hypothetical process of unlocking Luigi, lent itself well to the wonder that Super Mario 64 instilled in my generation. I thoroughly believe that the current trend of “personalised copies” of Super Mario 64, as well as the troves of creepypastas and ARGs surrounding the game, were very clearly inspired by all these stories, resurfacing the curiosity for many of us from the depths of our nostalgia.

Videogames remained a strong constant throughout my years growing up and well into my adulthood, with my tastes fluctuating and expanding. Although I spent many hours playing them with friends, it predominantly remained a solitary experience: an escape from day-to-day life into a different world or immersive story. I’ve been a long-standing believer of videogames being an art form, and there’s a wealth of experiences I can name drop here: Ocarina of Time, Max Payne, Psychonauts, What Remains of Edith Finch, Hades. I could continue, but this isn’t a listicle. However, I found that my experience with videogames was slowly becoming more communal and social. Stemming from my early days of online shooters with Counter-Strike, then onto Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield 3, through to the more casual Minecraft or Garry’s Mod servers I frequented, I began to appreciate these spaces as environments where I could laugh along with friends. These games became blank canvases for us to instil our own fun onto, a communal area where we could partake in a group activity yet still have our own jokes and conversations.

It wasn’t until several years ago that I began noticing a turn in the way we played games. Things became more competitive. With the rise of battle royales, coupled with my own foray into MOBAs like League of Legends and “hero shooter” style games like Overwatch and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege, there became an unspoken energy in our groups. Though still rooted in laughter and fun, the need to win became more prevalent. This is not to fault my friends or the people I play games with, not at all. This is much more of an introspective realisation than anything, and although we had several of our friends fracture off into more dedicated groups, as if to find new teammates who were more skillful, I found that competitive edge was taking a forefront within myself.

This became a bit of a running joke among my friends, but I found the sentence “I hate videogames” slip from my mouth regularly when I wasn’t having particularly good games. Although done in a sarcastic and ironic way, I was realising that gaming was slowly losing its charm for me. I was getting frustrated at myself for losing and for letting my team down, even though there were never any stakes on the line to win. I had let competitiveness take over how I approached videogames, a hobby that had both entertained and inspired me my entire life, and turned it into an outlet of disappointment and deflation. I began to notice that my attitude was not only distancing myself from games, but from the friends I was playing with.

Over the past few months I experienced a major change in my life. I relocated to the other end of the British Isles, moving with nothing but some suitcases of clothing. I left behind my gaming computer, opting to have it shipped down once I got properly settled, but settling took longer than I anticipated. Although I had not planned it, I ended up taking about a two-month break from online gaming. In fact, I greatly cut down on gaming in general, almost down to nothing, except a bit of Banjo-Kazooie here and there on my friend's Xbox. I had entered myself into an inadvertent tolerance break, one that I found to be crucial after over 20 years of build up. Not having the videogames on hand that had become part of my weekly patterns allowed me to reassess and reinterpret how I would approach them. Ultimately, this tolerance break was not only to videogames, but to many other aspects of myself, but this is a gaming site (and, forgive me, I’m already running the risk of being far too self-indulgent) so I’ve decided to focus this piece on just that one particular aspect.

I moved into my new flat last week, and now have my computer with me again. Despite the excitement of playing games with my friends, I decided to focus on an experience that would fill me with the wonder and amazement I had felt throughout my youth: Elden Ring. Now, this isn’t meant to be a fluff piece for Elden Ring, despite being my clear Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, and maybe even Game of the Century™, just that it happens to be the title that I’m currently lost in, and the substantial beauty in the game’s world and content fills me with the same sense of innocent “anything is possible” imagination that titles like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time did for me as a child. It was once again a vessel of escape to a fantastical world. I have since played games with my friends, which has also been a welcome return for me, and although I might not have completely shed that self-critical competitiveness that clung to me for so long, I like to think I’m getting better at enjoying the moments shared with my friends, instead of allowing old frustrations to hijack them.