The game was System Shock 2, and I was really into it during middle and high school. I have never finished System Shock 2; I would play long sessions on weekends until I got stuck, and then I’d take a break for a couple months before restarting with a new, slightly different character. Incidentally, this is also how I played the Dark Souls games, which I also never completed. I learned a basically similar thing from those, but SS2 stands out in my memory for a few reasons.
Before I get to the ‘overcoming anxiety’ part, you should know something of the aesthetic of this game. If you disagree, skip the next six paragraphs. The world of System Shock is high-tech and far-future. Earth is wrapped in a megalopolis filled with things like virtual reality chambers and cyber-space-travel, flying drones and cars, levitation fields as elevator replacements, and sliding automatic doors. Some people live in space, there’s economically viable space-travel. The first System Shock sees you play as a hacker caught by and turned mercenary for some corporation which has a problem: they built a supercomputer AI into a space station, and the AI has gone rogue.
System Shock 2 starts in a slightly more mundane way. You’re an anonymous soldier for a military convoy onboard a space-bound scientific research vessel, and the game opens with you visiting the recruitment center and choosing between training in the Marines, the Navy, and the O.S.A. This is a actually a five minute tutorial section wherein you learn the game’s controls and basic mechanics while picking your initial stat allotment; as a marine you’re good with weapons, in the navy you learn tech skills, and becoming an O.S.A. agent means developing tech-augmented psychic powers which you’ll later use to PSI-blast small monkeys. You take a basic training and a few advanced trainings, which take place over 3 years before you finally enter the military and get assigned to your mission.
The game actually starts with your character being violently woken from cryo-sleep midway through your research vessel’s initial journey—it’s hard to tell what’s going on, but a fire’s raging, ceiling girders are crashing in, and a window in the pod-room has shattered. Over comms some lady’s context-less voice is guiding you, ‘follow me if you want to live’-style. You have about a minute to traverse this brief and deadly gauntlet to reach some temporary safety further into the ship, where you find slaughtered crew and roaming enemies. Something terrible has occurred, and you were asleep for it. Fleshy creatures, exuding or accompanied by thick, arm-length worms, roam the hallways in a shambling distortion of the human creature’s shape and sound. Rogue service-robots and heavy-duty mech suits autonomously seek out signs of life to destroy. Small monkeys are walking around, and they’ll PSI-blast you if you don’t PSI-blast them first.
System Shock 2 doesn’t have safe zones. Your enemies can open doors and roam nearly-freely. You have the finite amount of ammo, food, healing items, and skill-accruing resources that already exists, wherever it is, on the ship. You have no idea what’s going on, only being guided sporadically by the lady-from-comms (apparently a scientist holed up somewhere else in the ship); otherwise you have to piece together your own mission based on information to be found in the environment—ship and crew logs, the placement of the various creatures aboard, occasional transmissions from a fleshy, psychic over-voice (worm hive-mind planet) and a mysterious computer-voice (it’s SHODAN, the supercomputer AI from the first game).
It’s easy to internalize the taunting voice of SHODAN calling you an insect: your character really is akin to a rat, scurrying around for pockets of safety amidst the constant threat of resource-consumption and consumption-by-adversary within the belly of some cloistered, overconstructed environment. The ship hasn’t stopped crumbling, by the way. Structural failure is ongoing.
When I was 13 playing this game, I was really scared. I played in the dark in my basement, always during the day but alone, facing the wall and a disproportionately huge Vizio TV sitting on a speckled-white plastic folding table. The uncarpeted concrete floor was cold and uncomfortable for my feet. I was nearly there in that ship already, and when I scurried it was in full, embodied identification with my character, curled up and hunched over in the dim half-dark with machine sounds and schemes as company. The robots turning the corner would startle me genuinely, and the monkeys’ distant shrieks set off strings of curses coming from a terrified frustration. The crying and moaning of a mutant human in an adjacent hallway filled me, down through my stomach, down to my root, with dread.
I can identify a few things I did over the course of playing, quitting, and restarting this game that transformed my relationship with anxiety related to social-place. Also, I learned how to follow the almost-invisible silver thread of curiosity.
The first was noticing how batshit crazy unnecessary it was that the game would produce reactions in me. Or, in other words, I watched myself ‘play along with’ the game in my dramatic immersion; once I noticed that I was ‘playing along’, I could come out of the immersion and treat the game as a thing I could relate to.
While immersed, relation was impossible because I was essentially always reacting to what the game was doing. In other words, the creators of the game, displaced in time across decades, were more in control of what I was doing than I was—because they had made the game according to their decisions, and the game was doing things that I reacted to in predictable and unconscious ways.
However, even though I was ‘reacting’ rather than ‘responding’, and even though my reactions were unconscious, I was still participating in creating my reactions. I was essentially encouraging my reactions to facilitate immersion in the experience—which is another way of saying I was encouraging immersion to facilitate my reactions.[1]
My reactions felt uncontrolled, even though I was in a position of relative control of them. I noticed this control by noticing that I was ‘playing along’. If I wanted to stop reacting how I was reacting, I just had to stop playing along with the whole ‘scared rat drama’. If I wanted to stop playing along with the scared rat drama, I just had to stop encouraging my reactions. This sounds circular because I’m describing a feedback loop that we can control with our attention. I wasn’t just noticing that I was playing along because noticing that was also noticing that I was encouraging reactions—both of those are aspects of one thing, the situation, and I could control both at once by watching the situation before choosing what to give my attention to.
Basically, when I was scared I was entering a kind of tunnel-vision; for a brief moment, the whole world and all that mattered was the mutant-zombie in front of me and also killing it or getting away. I was immersed in the situation. I was watching one aspect, the scared rat drama, and from that perspective my reactions (flailing aim, wrong key-presses, breaking into sweat and screaming, quietly) seemed uncontrolled and incredibly prohibitive. My reactions made the situation worse, and I had a hard time feeling like I could change them. Once I noticed that, I committed to noticing the relation between the drama and my reactions, meaning I had to ‘defocus my (figurative) vision‘ in order to see both happening at once, and thus I inadvertently noticed that they were the same thing. The ‘drama’ disappeared the more my reactions disappeared, and all that was left was the situation itself.
I could help the drama-reaction-complex to disappear by noticing it, acknowledging and allowing it, and then doing one of two things: I could maintain awareness of it while I let my attention roam to find more a more suitable thing to focus on (like stillness in the body to smooth out my mouse movements, or the game’s soundtrack, or the environment immediately beyond the enemy-encounter)—and I could maintain focus on it while letting my ‘vision’ continue to defocus so new things could enter my awareness.[2]
I effectively carried out this awareness-expansion process to the point of being able to play System Shock 2 in a relatively analytic and dispassionate state, but this led to my ‘second problem’: why play?
I had come, somewhat, out of the anxious haze. I had realized that the attention of my enemies did not warrant a reaction from me, and I could bear changes in environmental state while maintaining a problem-solving state of mind.
There was a new, smaller problem in which I was more effectively avoiding stressors, because I had found out the way to acknowledge them while finding new focuses for the purpose of circumventing problems (and this is a very important strategy for a limited-resource game like System Shock—you could literally run out of everything you needed to progress, thereby ending your run totally without ceremony. I did this once and never forgot) and so whenever I encountered a problem I couldn’t go around, I’d freeze or collapse. However, this smaller problem was itself only a symptom of the larger one.
The near-invisible silver thread of curiosity is important because it is leading somewhere. The thread doesn’t simply stop where the problem is—because it keeps going, I know then that I keep going. I just have to follow the thread, and the thread itself is providing the motivation to do so (if it isn’t, if I haven’t been rewarded by my curiosity, that’s almost always a me-problem—I haven’t followed long enough, or I’ve totally overlooked whatever’s right in front of me that ‘curiosity’ wants me to look at).
By this point in my time with the game, I was optimizing my manner of play and learning where things were—but my 14 year-old self still didn’t really get what I was supposed to be doing on that ship. I didn’t even really get what had been going on. The author of a page-turner knows how to exploit the reader’s curiosity by intentionally placing aesthetically and symbolically compelling ‘hooks’ throughout a story in a rhythmically interesting way; System Shock 2 is not an attempt at a page-turner, and its hooks are placed in strange moments an oblique places that support the overall feel of the game. It’s atmospherically interesting when a psychic contact trance-vision from worm-hivemind-planet interrupts what should be a fairly innocuous delve into the med-bay to lift a keycard from a corpse; this is the first time this is happening after a few similar dives for keycards.
In my anxious haze, it was impossible for me to relate empathetically to the other characters of the ship. Throughout the ship you come across audio logs, scattered among corpses, held by shambling mutants, left in or on desks or in weird and unlikely places (like a chemicals-supply closet). A few of those will have genuine pointers for the way forward, but otherwise most follow the goings-on and small dramas of life on the ship before SHODAN and the worm-hivemind’s incursion. By the time you’re going into the med-bay you know exactly who’s keycard you’re getting, and you know who he was annoyed with at work and what he was looking forward to for after-hours before his untimely and work-related death—or, you do if your eyes aren’t totally skimming over this for the key information you need to progress.
The faster I could progress, the faster I could be out of my anxious haze. The requirement for me to slow down and take in the details of what was happening was to come out of my anxious haze—and it was a genuine requirement, because taking in details was the same process as coming out of the haze, a function of attention and awareness.
Unnecessary excursions throughout the ship would end my journey prematurely—there was just too little resource to afford exploring, so in order to progress I was compelled to follow, with some wiggle room, the general arc of the plot. At the same time, excursions were incredibly valuable: they taught me more about the ship and environment itself, knowledge which I could take with me across playthroughs, and doing the exploring helped to further clear the anxious-survival-haze. It was inevitable that I would play, quit, and restart given this method of progression, but it was also this method which allowed for progression in a manner of increasing ease, interest, and power.
The more I could empathize with the story of the environment, the more compelled I was to follow the plot. The more I followed my curiosity, the more I learned the story. The more I came out of my anxiety-haze by noticing more, the more I could become aware of what at present it was that’s interesting and curiosity-inspiring. The less immersed in the ‘scared rat drama’ I got, the more immersed I became in the human drama of empathy for my fellow victims and survivors of SHODAN and the systems that produced her. Concentric rings of ‘dramas’ abound—after the ‘human drama’ it’s the ‘ideological narratives drama’, and so on.
I never finished System Shock 2. I still experienced depression and anxiety (way more the former than the latter, which makes sense given my problem-avoiding strategy) through high school, but I could always use the same techniques that diminished those malaises in the game of System Shock to overcome the suddenly-cloistering sensations and thoughts involved with something like walking through the hallway in front of a full cafeteria. When I did this, the place became ‘mine’ in a sense; even if there were enemies, constant danger, limited resources, an inability to just fuck off and a basic requirement to ‘stick to the plot’, I could always recover enough wherewithal to come out of the haze and do what kept me going.
Doing what kept me going wasn’t what let me relax and get comfortable amidst the danger—what let me relax and get comfortable was knowing and resting in my power to recover wherewithal.
That is also essentially the basis of all esoteric and occult systems (you can’t do stuff like complex or intense energy work, say, if you’re not relaxed and comfortable and in possession of your wherewithal).
From that ‘(figurative) place’ of knowing and resting in my power, I was capable of noticing what was interesting and curiosity-inspiring, and moreover I was capable of pursuing that. If I was pursuing that fine, shining thread with sufficient love, trust, and commitment to my own ‘curiosity’/’interest’, I could solve any problem which lay beneath that thread. From my place of knowing and resting in power, I could find that thread in any situation.
The only hard part of any of this is letting myself agree with myself that ‘I’m in a drama’, and it’s batshit-crazy-unnecessary that the various dramas produce reactions in me. My control is in my power to stop encouraging reactions and come more deeply into the real situation at hand.
Even though I never properly finished System Shock 2, I hope I’ve conveyed that System Shock 2 was more like a virtual reality training-environment for an overall situation which has continued beyond the game to express in and as the environment of my life. Thus, the skills which System Shock 2 (the basis for which were likely in development long before playing this game specifically—don’t get me started on the hundreds of hours I put into Battlefield 4) are ones which I’ve continued to refine in other arenas outside of video games, a thing which is possible to do because these are the only real skills we possess, and they are universal and universally applicable skills.
Whenever your system is shocked by an enemy encounter, or something, don’t freeze up and don’t panic! Let these things happen while you remember your attention and awareness, look for that silver thread, and see more of the whole situation by ‘defocusing’ your ‘vision’. If you’re ever depressed and asking ‘why play?’, use these skills to learn more about the story around you so that you have a purpose for moving forward and surpassing unsurpassable obstacles; if you’re ever anxious and in a haze, use these skills to come back to the ‘place of power’ where you recover wherewithal, from which place you can use these skills to respond appropriately.
Astral travel is just a metaphor (and the practice of that metaphor) for traversing the concentric rings of dramas and reactions, finding again and having come again from that place of power.
Which includes the sensations and feelings of playing, not just my actions and decisions.↩︎
Attention is like a spotlight in a theater, while awareness is like the theater’s house lights. With this model, the former method of attention-roaming is more like a way to turn up the house lights, while the latter method is more like a way to heighten the resolution of the thing in the spotlight. Also, heightening resolution is, paradoxically, what allowed the drama-reaction-complex to wither away—thus, a combination of the methods should be employed.↩︎
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