The Gospel According to Xbox Pt. 1
Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
His mic just cut out. Right as he finished telling me he wanted to end his life.
We were playing Gears of War. For non gamers, imagine 90s action flicks meet 80s survival horror movies. We were just playing online versus other people. On the same team, thank Jesus. Because Marvin was WAY better than me.
He was an S tier varsity player and I just recently got asked into the JV team. But we were in a private chat.
Normally boisterous, loud, abrasive, joyful, hilarious, and always high, St@rvinM@rvin was eerily quiet. I plucked up the courage to ask, ironic due to my own mostly mute nature.
I was 16 years old. He was 19. I was in Oregon, he was in Washington. States apart, wildly different upbringings, stark contrast in personality, ego-checking skill gap between us.
Yet he told me he wanted to end it all. And I understood. But I also understood that he shouldn’t end it all because underneath the raunchy jokes, the fierce trash talk, and the laundry list of drugs actively in his system all the time, he was just a scared boy.
Just like I was. And still am now sometimes, even at a ripe 29.
But before we finish this story, I want to share others, Gospel accounts, according to an Xbox user named ObiwanCalobi182. Formerly known as killerkeller23.
killerkeller23 was a far different animal than ObiwanCalobi182. Introverted with introverted tendencies, freshly christened with an Xbox as opposed to his home PlayStation, and equally laced with angst, sadness, and confusion. What the dictionary calls melancholy. Anyway, this keller fellow wanted the sniper.
For non gaming types, I’ll make what’s normally gibberish and use layman’s terms. The sniper is what cool kids want. It’s the gun that gets you cool highlights. It’s the status that either makes you or breaks you in the gaming world. You’re either the dopest player online or the chump who’s making everyone else lose.
In other words, killerkeller23 didn’t want to be like the real life guy that was shy, unliked, unpopular, and insanely insecure. He wanted to be the dope cool kid. The popular kid. The one everybody liked.
If in the digital world.
But so did Lacrossekid187. The punk stole my sniper! On the second occasion I had the audacity to speak when I usually didn’t, I was further audacious by calling out the stinker on Gears of War.
“Bro, I want the sniper. You’re getting it every round. Stop hogging it.”
“If you want it so bad, go get it first.”
This really grinded my gears, pun intended. But dammit, I did get it the second time.
Yet now the pressure was on. Lacrossekid187 was decent. Heck, he got three headshots the past two rounds when most dudes got zero.
I was sweating internally and externally. Profusely. But throwing caution to the wind, I aimed.
And then I fired.
I got three headshots that round. I felt ten feet tall. Eleven when Lacrossekid187 said “good shots, man.”
I could’ve rubbed it in. I really wanted to rub it in. But I really wanted a friend more than that. Even if it was just over a headset.
“Thanks, man. You can have it next round,” I said it with equal parts kindness and swag.
“Really? Thanks bro. That’s super nice. You’re really good, man. Let’s add each other at the end of this game.”
Screw it, I was twelve feet tall. Thus began several years of digital best friendship, including but not limited to: freaking girls, frustrating parents, frank discussions about God, and filled with a hell of a lot more understanding than any of the other kids I knew at my school.
See Xbox was a leveling playground. No cliques, no sports, no classes, and, as far as I could tell, no girls. Let me explain. Girls are a big source of anxiety for me. They are now, they were then. When a cute lady is present, from age 12 to my present 29, sweating, stuttering, stammering, staring, and/or suffering commences. A hopeless romantic or romantically hopeless, I know not which I am now but I know what I was especially then. Regardless, when I turned on that Xbox, it was just killerkeller23 and Lacrossekid187, chatting about video games and life and girls but usually all three.
God was always on the table too. No sermons of course, probably some f bombs along with a lot of other cheap swear jar words, but real talk about real struggles. Wondering about why things were they were, teenage angst style over a controller and a mic.
This continued on for many years and although we haven’t been in touch lately, honestly it could just be a matter of scrolling through my friends list, finding his, sending that party invite, and then we will be off to the races “doing life” together as the cheesy saying goes, if doing it digitally.
It will never be a replacement for real friendship, this Xbox thing, but it is a better substitute for loneliness than the mild vices, like Netflix, Youtube, and social media, better then meso vices like porn and alcohol, and far, far healthier than the heavy stuff like cocaine, cutting, and other paths of destruction. In fact, it often can be what saves someone from going from rock bottom to the well far underneath that.
It was over. Two and a half years. Often shouting, sometimes shoving, always manipulating, hardly loving, and hardly ever a solid fix for that bastard they call loneliness. But a relationship I spent the tender and naive side of my 20s fostering, corrupting, and salvaging, usually all at once, was capoot.
Few months after the fact and the weeks of crying myself to the point of not sleeping were gone, traded for a haze of a weighty emotional fog bolstered by nonstop buzz drinking of the cheapest IPAs I could find. Saying I began “binging” on gaming was an understatement. And while these months were marked by other addictive habits I need not describe in the same detail, those others just made me feel worse. All they ever did was make the bad feeling normal. Things started to shift, though, when I met VinnyDoCuzHeDUZ. For the third or fourth time at a dingy bar in SE Portland off of Hawthorne.
See I knew Vince far before we become virtual BFFs. The guy was a brother of another good buddy of mine, named Bowen IRL. I knew Bowen because he was cool and tattooed and drove an old blue Buick and for some reason thought I was really funny, but his brother, Vince, kept things close to the chest. And by close, I mean I wasn’t sure what was underneath his Bane from Batman style massive torso.
He was quiet. Too quiet, if you know what I mean. The drinks started flying, which I was relieved would mean that my average state of melancholy would be returning after a brief sojourn into sheer sorrow. The speaker overhead started playing Iron Maiden. Bowen and I started joking about something, but I noted the change in music from what was some weird indie music you hear at parties filled with annoying people to the now excellent 80s heavy metal. But for some reason, because someone in the bar wasn’t Portlandy and didn’t believe in being “weird” and totally threw off my raging vibes, T-Swift came on.
The fumes were coming off of me but also the other guy. Interesting. The dude said not a word, but the grievance of mine was totally felt by him as well by his shifty eyes and clenched fists. Exiting the bar fifteen minutes later, somehow, someway, Bowen made mention of Halo. He knew I was a partaker of the Masterchiefing since the glory days of ‘07 and Halo 3. And I think he also knew I’d be interested to know that his brother was too.
Now, to pinpoint the exact moment from then to Vince being absolutely one of the nearest and dearest brothers I’ve ever had is hard to articulate. See, vibing with someone via gaming is a weird science, not an art. Not only does your personality have to mesh (more the art portion of the gaming tandem thing), you need to like the same stuff. You need to want to play the same sorts of games. You need to coordinate to get the same kind of games.Meanwhile, you also need to have complimentary styles of play. You can’t have two mages or two warriors or two archers. You need to mix it up. But there’s no need to be the hero. It’s less Batman and Robin, less MJ and Pippen, it’s more Legolas and Gimli, it’s more Kobe and Shaq. First among equals sort of thing.
Taking after my brother, ZaKdAdDy71907, I am a go getter. Passive and conservative I am not. Give me the shotgun, give me the speed, give me the fix for my undiagnosed ADHD. I want the action and I want it right now. Life moves too slow for gaming to not be fast.
Vince, on the other hand, is Ender from Ender’s Game. Think visually of Harry Potter if Harry Potter wasn’t short, was fairly burly, and was actually smart, more like Hermione, and that’s what my xbox brother in arms is like. Slow to game and slower to speak, Vince maps out all of the things while you are still stuck thinking about the one thing while picking your nose. Strategy games are annoying as f&%# to play against him because he always wins and I hate it. But we work well together in cooperative games. I’m the yang to his ying.
The game we first discovered our “yang yinginess” was the original Borderlands. The game had come out back when he and I were still playing Halo, were insecure teenagers, and when Twitch wasn’t consumed by twelve year olds. It’s simple enough; you and your friends wander around a cell-shaded world with a story style of Firefly mixed with the world-building of Mad Max. You get guns, you gain levels, you kill shit. We played this sort of thing a dozen times separately before and a dozen times after together.
But coincidentally enough, the context for us playing this wanderlust, aimless sort of game was at a perfect crossroads for both of us in our individual journeys. See while me and the misses had just split in spectacular fashion, through Vince and I partaking in hours of sniping, slightly more expensive IPAs, and a whole hell of a lot of Bridge City Pizza, Vince had opened up about his own split. He and a gal had lived together, and she was great. Ridiculously pretty in fact. Anyway, their relationship had also imploded right near when mine had. As we both navigated what it looked like to pick up the pieces of fractured masculinity, unmet expectations, and angry fist-pumping at God, we had a buddy doing it with us along the way.
Maybe Xbox and gaming in general really is just a glorified escape from life, a fantasy away from the daunting of reality of life and adulthood and bills, I see that maybe it is a refuge for broken people. Maybe it’s a way for those who isolate in their rooms to be involved with a larger group of people in the world they wouldn’t otherwise be apart of. Maybe while it can be addicting, can prevent others from going outside, and can hinder people from achieving dreams, maybe it’s also a place for those heartbroken dreamers to connect with other hopeless optimists. With a controller in tow and a mic overhead, lonely hearts unite and let’s blow up some crap.
I still play with this guy weekly. This has gone on for well over six years. If I were to calculate the amount of hours he and I have logged together, it would demolish the Gilmore Girls repeat binges of any set of the closest lady friends (truth be told, it’s a good show and guys watch it too). With these hours, these years, these breakups, these nights of drinking early, drinking often, drinking less, and all the things in between wherein two men somehow connect on a level that won’t be critiqued for being homosexual or incessantly nagged at for being a “waste of time,” hearts begin to beat again. Being honest with yourself becomes so much easier because you’re already honest with the other guy holding the controller on the other mic a state away (sometimes a continent). Getting deep becomes less scary. Becoming close is as easy as coordinating weekends, downloading that campaign, and laughing and crying and swearing our way through hours worth of content. Together.
And that’s what Xbox has become for me. A way to be together with another kind of community. A community which, honestly, I care about as much as any other community I am apart of IRL.
But it wasn’t always this way.
killerkeller23 was a far lonelier and sadder gamer than ObiwanCalobi182.
killerkeller23 was a lot like St@rvinM@rvin.
To be continued…