Songs for a secret gaming habit
Guest post alert! My friend Joe lets us into his dank, shameful little world.
[Editor introductory remark: I’m briefly relinquishing some control and handing over to my very dear friend Joe for some fun and gaming. I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time playing games with Joe and it is a truly horrible experience, as will become apparent. He is a good and nice man, but if you don’t like his work I’m happy to pass on his email address for some direct feedback]
Ah, the secret hobby: gaming. Hi, I’m Joe, and throughout most of my life, I’ve felt mortally embarrassed about anyone finding out that I play a lot of games. Boo fucking hoo, I know.
Anyway, I also like music too, so I thought it might be interesting to write about how the two have intersected in my life. Play the… jingle? (Is that what he says?) [Editor note: fuck off Joe]
Horsell Common and The Heat Ray - Jeff Wayne (‘s War of the Worlds)
Alexa, play Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds.
Playing Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and similar tracks on Amazon Music.
Alexa, stop.
Alexa, play Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds on Spotify.
Playing Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds on Spotify. Would you like that on repeat?
Yes.
The year is 2367. My Avian commune society has expanded into the galaxy viciously, defeating the enslaving the nearest molloscoid colony nearby. On Earth, I’m sat in my underpants in the spare bedroom in Hillsborough, Sheffield, and I’m playing Stellaris. In darkness, the screen lighting up my sweaty, desperate face, but in the fictional grand strategy game of Stellaris, we’re a major player in disgusting, addictive, beautiful galactic war.
We began this journey towards the west of the galaxy, and have expanded uncontested outwards to the western edge to lessen the likelihood of being flanked. I’ve met the Machine species occupying my southern border, and for now they seem friendly, if a little standoffish. A mutually beneficial trade deal involving Zro and exotic gases helped progress the relationship, and it’s necessary we keep them on good terms for now - you can’t make enemies of everyone in this universe.
Northwards were the molluscoids, before a disagreement over border settling led to them transmitting some diplomatic insults in a language unknown to my Avian species, which in turn led to me quickly and efficiently mincing them. Nobody much missed them, and their territories (and indeed species) were quickly assimilated into a role of servitude in the empire. “Those minerals won’t mine themselves!”, I whisper to myself as the enslaved molluscoids do their work.
[Editor note: You might be wondering here why I am allowing Joe to continue to talk us through every inch of his pathetic little war against the space monkeys or whatever; but for every paragraph I threatened to cut, he promised to write two more. This is the creative compromise we settled on. Settle in.]
The eastern border remains a concern, as do the unexplored natural wormhole in one of my southwestern systems, the roaming Tiyanki Space Whale currently traveling within my borders and my shortage of volatile motes, which considering my reputation for militarism and increased reliance on kinetic weaponry, need to remain stable. A few clicks, an adjustment here, a change there, and I’ve started the process of building several mote harvesting traps and chemical plants, which should help maintain my stocks of motes and keep my fleet powered. A quick upgrade to the Starbase in the system containing the natural wormhole ensures the system is well-defended in the event of an unexpected invasion. The Tiyanki Space Whale travels on.
On Earth, in the spare bedroom, it’s dark now. The only light in the room emanates from the screen, and time has become more of a fluid construct since the development of the empire, with human requirements such as food, water and sleep seeming to be less important somehow. Neither my partner nor the Galactic Senate seem concerned that the eastern fungoid empire grows ever more powerful, and seem to be amassing forces near the border. The dog watches dolefully on (in fairness, she does that a lot).
Disaster strikes! A misjudgement, a misclick, a small misunderstanding in my sleep-deprived mind and I have somehow pressed the wrong button and accidentally freed all the slaves in my empire, completely crashing my economy and destroying my stock maintenance of raw materials. The figures quickly turn red, my mineral mining ceases, the fleet starts to rebel, my energy stocks deplete and the eastern fungoids, sensing weakness, start engaging my stricken starbases. Slowly but oh so very surely, my heavy head falls into my hands and the scene becomes an accidental renaissance, the screen’s illumination now casting its once hopeful light upon a broken man. How? Why? And having wasted the last 16 hours on expanding the empire only for it to fall desperately and hopelessly after a single misclick, should I restart? Perhaps a lithoid, mineral-reliant trade empire next…?
Alexa, stop playing Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds.
Alexa, what is a Tiyanki Space Whale?
I don't know that.
Great.
Girls - The Prodigy
We were all young once. And we should be allowed to feel cool sometimes.
Imagine: You’re walking down the street, headphones blaring something funky like A Tribe Called Quest or Jamiroquai, strolling in beat, feeling like the coolest cat in town. The world has a positive hue, created in part by the reckless beats being pumped into your ears, and you’re happy, because you feel cool, and that’s lovely.
Everyone (I hope!) has musical moments like this, and it’s the power of music to be able to take you somewhere much, much cooler than you are, when the reality is you’re walking up Middlewood Road partly to get your steps in, but also to go to a different Turkish barbers from your usual Turkish barbers, because the Turkish barbers closest to you have had a change of ownership and the quality isn’t quite what it was, despite the prices being the same, and the new one is slightly less chatty which means you can sit and daydream without being forced to pretend you know what Sheffield Wednesday are doing, or what transfers Manchester United have made, or care about [enter generic headline news article that “we’re all talking about” here]. Life is relentless, relentlessly. Cool music is a blessed relief.
Now picture 12-year-old Joe, sitting at the family Personal Computer (PC) in the ‘middle room’ of our suburban house in Lincoln, gaming headset on, leaning close to the screen. It’s 2004, and Joe isn’t cool or trendy, and is made less so by being addicted to PC gaming. He’s also had another crap haircut (even by 2004 standards), returned from being hospitalised from a brain-threatening case of orbital cellulitis (Google it) and has a giant seeping eye scar to prove it. And instead of pounding the streets listening to Stevie Wonder on his Walkman, he’s sat indoors alone on a summer’s day, when any self-respecting 12-year-old is either outside playing like a child, or lurking on street corners throwing things at buses.
The Prodigy were my teenage touchstone for finding a cool feeling in times when I definitely was not cool. My teenage touchstone for finding a cool feeling in times when I definitely wasn’t cool was The Prodigy. Something about the pounding, heavy-yet-electronic beats smashed into my head and altered it somehow, to a state where played at full volume, I thought Girls was the coolest song in the universe. The soundtrack to my hidden, shameful summer of indoor gaming.
A point of clarification. It was 2004 and PC gaming is NOT cool. And 12-year-old Joe has a crippling fear of how his friends would react if they knew about his hobby, a fear that would continue through teenagerhood, into university and beyond. His gaming mouse (a Razer Diamondback 3G), adorned with its horrible green snakelike logo and its garish lighting, lived firmly in his room at home, hidden from prying eyes.
Ooh, you see those sexy colourful lights? Ooh, is that a sexy matt black finish? Ooh, is that a sexy snakey logo? Now look at it whilst listening to Girls on full volume. Oooh yes, that’s the spot. My working theory is that a lot of gamer-styling exists because, historically, people who play games have been starved of cool feeling. So if your sweaty hand is grasping a mouse coloured and shaped like an alien's chin, that makes it better. Maybe.
And when you’re soaking up so much uncool, hiding indoors playing shooty shooty games on your mum’s PC on sunny afternoons, the right music can make you feel like a baller, even when your haircut is shit and your eye wound is seeping, and that’s magical. Playing Girls at full volume whilst sitting indoors shooting other nerds on the internet feels cool, even though it isn’t, and we should all be allowed to feel cool at times, especially when we’re not.
You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire - Queens of the Stone Age
On the face of it, it might feel slightly odd for a 32-year-old man, with a degree, career, life and fiancé, to choose to be called a “pussy cunt” by European children several times a few times a week. Yet, here I am again, choosing to log on to VALORANT (a “free-to-play first-person tactical hero shooter”, obvs) and queue into a few ranked competitive games. I’ve been relatively successful in this; my most recent act rank is “Ascendant 2”, which puts me in the top 3% worldwide in a game that 18 million people play.
The internet, however, remains a wild west and for the layman, queuing into a ranked game is the equivalent of being locked in a room for an hour with nine mentally unstable, sexually frustrated teenagers, all of whom are desperate to win the game and have no idea how to do it. And I absolutely love it.
Fierce competition is one of the purest things there is, and humanity can't get enough of it. Most seem to find their fix in sport, through playing, watching and supporting whatever sport exists. People bet on chickens fighting, for fucks sake. Humanity is obsessed.
I'm no different, and my main outlet for this was playing football in my younger years, before I was struck down in my prime (16) by an injury sustained whilst training at RAF Waddington for Lowlands A U16 (ironically positioned on the only hill in Lincoln). With my shining future career in Sunday league football extinguished, I patiently waited to get knee surgery on the NHS and turned instead to the digital realm to get my competitive fix. I was heavily into indie music at the time just like everyone else, which tonally tended to suggest I should spend my 6th form years trying to get into clubs underage (“Swap jumpers and make another move”, anyone?). I instead spent my time captaining a competitive Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (a “free-to-play, objective-based multiplayer World War 2 first-person shooter”, obvs) team. In some ways I’m an indoor guy, through and through.
Many of the competitive games I play are fast-paced, which suits fast music. Overwatch (a “team-based multiplayer first-person shooter game”, obvs) is especially frantic; much of the gameplay is focused around shooting, but it also includes characters that flip the playstyle to make it more chaotic, e.g. a giant hamster ball that, alongside shooting, draws enemy attention by grappling around and smacking into people to cause damage and knock them off the map.
I’ve invoked You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire by Queens of the Stone Age partly because early QOTSA gives the rolling, speeding pace perfectly, but also because it is gratuitously and gloriously heavy. This isn’t the part of me I’m proudest of, but when playing games it’s often not detrimental to be a bastard, and QOTSA is music that puts you in the mind of bastard, doing all a bastard does. Queens of the Stone Age give the pace to think and act quickly, and the dark villainy to enable you to be ruthless in competition. The sort of vilainy that fucking loves that I, a 32 year old man, still have the reaction times to put a European teenager in the bin, digitally speaking. “Go fuck your mum cancer nerd”. Love it. Play it louder.
What You Know - Two Door Cinema Club
In 2010, I moved to Sheffield. Upon starting university, like everyone else, I was randomly allocated to some exploitatively expensive student accommodation. It was a building named Lawrencefield, Flat B1, and that is where “I found my people”.
The idea of this being randomly allocated is a strange thing to think about: Imagine if I ended up on the other side of Endcliffe student village? Or in D1? Or didn’t move to Sheffield at all? Would I have found “my people”? The upshot is I gained many of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life, but that isn’t what this blog is about. This blog is now about listening to that same Two Door Cinema Club song I still don’t know the name of every single day and playing Football Manager in our kitchen. Hours and hours and hours. Hours. Probably days. Weeks even. Surely not months…?
It turns out if you just mix onion, chopped tomatoes a Knorr chicken stock cube and some rice/pasta, it’s a meal. Note that that mix of ingredients covers risotto, every curry, every italian meal and basically every other meal under the sun. If you think about it, if you REALLY think about it, every meal is either a generic rice meal or a generic pasta meal. Deep. Sam and I made hundreds of generic rice/pasta meals, all whilst playing Football Manager and listening to Two Door Cinema Club.
Once it was snowing outside, so we pulled up the sofa to face the window so we could watch the snow fall. Another of the flats had built a snowman, and what a lovely snowman it was, beautiful and alone in the middle of the grass outside our building, grinning through the falling snow. That was before a 4x4 skidded around the corner, onto the grass and smashed into it, before reversing away to cause more havoc. We clapped, we cheered, we shouted and we hugged. And we were playing Football Manager and listening to Two Door Cinema Club.
In the summer, we decided it might be nice to pull our uncomfortable fireproof sofas outside to get a little bit of much-needed sunlight on our wan skin. We sat there for a while, and it was nice. And then we thought, actually, if we planned it right electrically, we might also be able to run an extension lead outside so we could plug our laptops in, and maybe a little speaker. So we did that, and sat outside in the sunshine. And we were playing Football Manager and listening to Two Door Cinema Club.
Overall? I strongly feel that Football Manager, Two Door Cinema Club and the weight gain that results from sitting still eating chicken nuggets all day have taken away from my life to some extent. However, they were all necessary to make some of the greatest memories and best friends I’ve had, and still have to this day.
[Editor note: I was there for a lot of this time and I don’t actually remember listening to Two Door Cinema Club. According to my memory we spent most of the time ironically listening to this weird remix of Hard-Fi’s Hard to Beat, but who knows; we were just happy to be there. We were living]