My Game Boy Is Becoming the Solution to My Burnout
Like everyone, my phone gives me anxiety. I have “downtime” hours set and limits on how much time I can spend on Twitter and Slack. I have turned off all notifications. And yet, it’s just always there, buzzing or just waiting while I’m trying to do literally anything else. I needed a distraction from my distraction, and one that asked nothing of me. So I bought a Game Boy Color off eBay.
There are so many options when it comes to how to spend our free time, provided we have any. And almost all of them involve some deeper signaling of cultural values. Choosing a show to watch means choosing for, or against, any number of prestige shows I should be watching. Drinking or eating out costs money. A lot of millennials have taken up a hobby like knitting or embroidery, a craft that makes work for idle hands, but now you have a bunch of mediocre hats to contend with. The paradox of choice is real.
Video games may have seemed like an obvious solution to my conundrum, but I haven’t been a gamer since 3D movement became an option, and navigating a virtual world became just as disorienting as the real one. When I watch my partner play Zelda games, I’m enthralled by the beautiful graphics, but also anxious about just how many things there are to do. Because while there is an objective to the game, you can also spend all your time wandering the woods and catching horses and cooking. With most games, I wouldn’t even get out of the character design mode, there being too many options that would get me trapped in my own Monster Factory.
The Game Boy is freeing in its limitations. Right now, I’m playing Pokémon Red. There is only one person to be, and all you have to choose is a name. I can move in four directions, technically in “color” but really in black, white, and a grayish-red that’s quickly fading on this 20-year-old console. And everything is centered around catching Pokémon and leveling them up. There are no woods to explore unless it’s to catch Pokémon in them, and the only people you talk to either give you one-sentence quips or want to fight you. I can’t connect anything to the Internet. Everything is there to push you toward fighting the Elite Four and becoming a Pokémon master, after which you can presumably continue to try to catch ‘em all, but at which point I usually restart the game.
While BuzzFeed's recent viral piece on millennial burnout missed some crucial race and class distinctions, it did get at the drive toward productivity that American society has been launching itself toward since its creation. And though it’s always been there, modern technologies have made it even easier to do things all the time, and thus made it easier to feel like one needs to be doing things all the time. A hundred years ago I couldn’t check work correspondence at home, but now I have email and Slack and texts, and not looking at them is a different, and loaded, choice. “Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young,” wrote Anne Helen Petersen.
So in a warped way, it’s now freeing to do something that is not there to optimize me. Evolving my Wartortle into a Blastoise means nothing to anyone outside of 12-year-olds in 1998. I can’t screenshot my progress and I don’t walk away from the experience with extra knowledge about the world. I can’t turn any of this skill, if you can call it that, into a side-business on Etsy. The only thing the game lets me do is play the game. That shouldn't be so novel.
