Previously, I tried to distinguish between fantastical escapism and engaging escapism. The more I reflected on that post, the more I wondered if, when saying engaging escapism, I was just gussying up distraction.

The latter doesn’t seem to do what gaming did for Daniel justice. Nonetheless, is it accurate semantically? Was gaming simply a distraction for Daniel, albeit an active one? But there’s the rub; I don’t think distraction can be active. Surely something distracts us, and that’s passive. Contrastingly, Daniel talked about solving problems and taking on challenges when gaming through his grief, and that is clearly active. Therein lies the further rub; play by definition is active. Gaming is an interactive medium. I realize I’m stating the obvious a bit here, but it’s worth underlining, as I believe it was the engagement with gaming that was key to Daniel’s escapism. When we’re in despair, feeling like we’ve been robbed of all influence, gaming can be very empowering.

According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ well-subscribed DABDA model for coping with death, it takes passage through four painful stages in Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Depression before one can finally reach Acceptance i.e. closure. Of course, acceptance is the ideal final stage for the grief process, but that doesn’t make it any less disempowering, especially considering what one goes through before it. Psychologists believe that the DABDA model can be applied to other personal tragedies besides death, and that it doesn’t just apply to adults. I suppose I would agree, given how I went through all five stages during my parents’ divorce.

I was ten years old when I first realized that things weren’t right; changes like odd silences at dinner, or playing tennis with my dad, my mum’s absence from the park bench conspicuous. One night, dinner at a dimly-lit Indian restaurant ended in scorns barely whispered across the Primera’s gearstick. Slowly, the whispers grew into shouting, stomping and slammed doors.

Then one day the shouting and stomping became smashed plates, screaming, and seemingly endless crying. I won’t go into specifics for my parents privacy, but suffice it to say that day was one of the worst of my life. I can remember sitting in my room, trying determinedly to play Cloud Kingdoms while ceramic crashing against wood saturated the house. No matter how loud I made the TV it couldn’t block out what was happening below. Then, when it finally stopped, I was left crying onto my keyboard. As I wept, the Amiga’s tumultuous bleeping and whirring felt like mocking laughter.

Divorce is commonplace in society now, you may say, but no-one could make my ten-year-old self care about that. In my defence, it was a particularly messy divorce – although the concept of a clean divorce is ridiculous. More pertinently, the timing was about as bad as possible. When it finally went through I had finished primary school and was just about to start my secondary education somewhere that would prove far more hostile and merciless than before. Sure enough, I didn’t make friends quickly and started to flunk exams, feeling lost both at home and away from it. This was all on the back of my going through the motions of the DABDA model. I denied the divorce was happening, got angry at my parents for letting it happen, pleaded with them to get back together, and then finally accepted that there was nothing I could do. The one stage that cruelly lingered on was Depression. Accepting that there was nothing I could do about the divorce depressed me. I kept thinking I was to blame for it.

On reflection, there were two ways I could have gone with gaming. I had found it impossible to switch on my Amiga in the more immediate aftermath of that terrible night, the bleeping and whirring still vivid in my mind. But, like Daniel – and once again, please excuse how incomparable my parallel is – I eventually found something I wanted to do: gaming. I threw myself into it, more than I had ever before. I excelled at Super Mario Kart, driving down my time trial scores on Mario Circuit 1 close to world record level. I completed the notoriously difficult Rainbow Islands, plowed through the expansive A Link to the Past, and pushed through the grind of Mystic Quest. I played games like Smash TV, Mega Lo Mania and New Zealand Story until I knew them inside out. Eventually, the pain I associated with the bleeping and whirring faded.

I’m not going to say that I knowingly felt this sense of accomplishment from or engagement with gaming at that time, or even that I realized that gaming was what helped me get through the divorce. I was too young to really be sure of what was going on in my head. All I know is that eventually I really did accept my parents’ divorce. Life went on, but it went on with gaming a much bigger part of it than before the divorce. So, I did make friends at that scary new school and get back on track with my studies, and I like to think I’ve become a fairly well-rounded individual – easy now, tiger.

But I don’t want to paint gaming as a sole hero for the emotionally wounded, or as a security blanket that kept me upright through life. Nor am I trying to assert any real theory here on escapism. While the DABDA model is widely accepted in psychology, my comments on what Daniel went through, or indeed what I went through are largely speculative. Truthfully, all I wanted to do with this piece was to share the memories that flooded back when I read about gaming challenging Daniel during his grief. Now that I have, my final act is to suggest that it wasn’t that gaming challenged him or myself. Rather that, in Daniel’s words, we “picked up the controller” and “found something to strive for”.

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