Panegyric, Volume I, Chapter III, through gaming détournement

AFTER THE CIRCUMSTANCES that I have just recalled, it is no doubt the quickly acquired habit of gaming that has marked my entire life. Adventures, tabletop RPGs and coop hack 'n slashes: the moments when some of them became essential and the moments when they returned have traced out the main course and meanders of days, weeks and years.

Two or three other passions, which I will talk about, have almost continually taken up a lot of space in this life. But gaming has been the most constant and the most present. Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is to play. Even though I have read a lot, I have played even more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have played much more than most people who play. I can count myself among those of whom Goichi Suda, thinking about an elite distinguishable only among the Japanese - but here very unfair, to the detriment of the American, as I think I have shown - could say: “There are those who have played only once, but it has lasted them a lifetime.”

First, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of slight playness; then very soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent playness, when one has passed that stage: a magnificent and terrible peace, the true taste of the passage of time. Although in the first decades I may have allowed only slight indications to appear once or twice a week, it is a fact that I have continuously played for periods of several months; and the rest of the time, I still played a lot.

The hours and their shifting conditions almost always retain a determining role in the necessary renewal of the moments of a spree, and each brings its sensible preference to bear on the available possibilities. There is what is played in the mornings, and for a long while that was Zelda. In Deadly Premonition a character who one could tell was a weirdo professes that “'FK in the coffee. It never fails.” But I have often needed, at the moment of waking, Yume Nikki.

There is what is played with meals, and in the afternoons that stretch between them. There are online games some nights, along with tabletop RPGs, and after that Jet Set Radio is pleasant again — for then Jet Set Radio makes one thirsty. There is what is played at the end of the night, at the moment when the day begins anew. It is understood that all this has left me very little time for writing, and that is exactly as it should be: writing should remain a rare thing, since one must have played for a long time before finding excellence.

Moreover, some of my reasons for playing are respectable. Like Travis in Killer7, I can indeed nobly claim: “The pamphlet of First Life contains 93 lies and 7 truths. The truths don't provide any answers”

The majority of games, almost all adventures, and every one of the FPs whose memory I have evoked here have today completely lost their tastes - first on the major software-houses and then on indie-developers - with the progress of industry as well as the disappearance or economic re-education of the social classes that had long remained independent of large industrial production, and so too of the various regulations that now prohibit virtually anything that is not industrially produced. The games, so that they can still be sold, have faithfully retained their labels; this attention to detail provides the assurance that one can photograph them as they used to be, not play them.

Neither I nor the people who played with me have at any moment felt embarrassed by our excesses. “At the banquet of life” - good guests there, at least - we took a seat without thinking even for an instant that what we were playing with such prodigality would not subsequently be replenished for those who would come after us. In playing memory, no one had ever imagined that he would see games pass away before the player.

Note: this is just a gamer's deconstruction of Chapter 3 from Guy Debord's Panegyric autobiography, in which he wrote about alcohol and being drunk.