Chris Ferguson had almost given up on video games when he first visited Skyrim.
‘The power fantasies had worn me out,’ he tells me. ‘Whether it was pretending to be the perfect sportsman or a man changing the world through the power of guns, I was bored of the fantasy. As I began to adjust to the idea of fatherhood, I was more or less ready to leave all that behind.’
Ferguson and his wife, Sarah, had been married for seven years and, during that time, had ‘never not been trying for a baby.’ In that sense, the news that the pair was expecting a baby wasn’t unexpected, but it was still a surprise.
Like many who hear the news for the first time in their lives, the pair began to try on the idea of being parents. They bought a red and blue Babygro that said JUST LIKE DADDY across the chest and a pair of those implausibly tiny infant socks. They celebrated their final Christmas as two.
On New Year’s Day, Sarah was taken to a hospital, where she underwent an operation to remove the ectopic pregnancy that threatened her life. This is caused when a fertilised egg implants itself outside the womb, usually in one of the fallopian tubes. Stuck in this tubular limbo, the egg is unable to grow into a baby. About one in every hundred pregnancies is ectopic. If caught early enough, it’s treatable with few side effects. If left undetected, it can cause the tube to rupture, causing life-threatening internal bleeding and often resulting in the loss of one of the woman’s fallopian tubes. Sarah’s tube had ruptured.
‘It felt like a miracle to get pregnant at all, and then to have that taken away …’ Chris Ferguson says. ‘But it was never a viable pregnancy at all. That’s a funny thing to have to get over. Because in your head it’s been your baby, but in truth it was never something that had a chance to become a baby. You then have to come to terms with the fact that it might have been your only chance to have a baby. The human body does make some allowances for only having one fallopian tube, but it was still devastating.’
After the operation, Ferguson wasn’t allowed into the ward to see Sarah, who needed rest. In the chaos of the emergency, no one had taken a moment to explain to him why, as he puts it, he wasn’t going to be a dad any longer. Instead, they sent him home.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he says. ‘There was no question of me going to sleep. I was dazed. I’m not someone who can sit and watch a film. I have the patience to read a book or refresh Twitter all day, but I can’t watch a film. But video games … I can do that.’
Ferguson had been given a video game for Christmas. He put the disc into the drive and began to play.
Skyrim is the name of a vast region set in the northern part of the fictional land of Tamriel after which the game, launched in 2011, is named. It’s a hardy, unforgiving place, home to the Nords, a people toughened by decades spent battling frost. Lines of coniferous trees, defiant and snow-dusted, surround its ice lakes. Grey mountains rise and fall in the distance, clouds draped around their necks. The wind whips up angrily, lifting with it white, swirling powder.
It is a world shared by beasts both mythical and real. Elk canter. Rabbits bound, then lift quivering noses to sniff for threats before returning to the whisper and scurry of their busy work. Clicking, overgrown crabs patrol the shoreline. Woolly mammoths tread heavily through the snow. At night you’re just as likely to run into a cruel giant as a fox. Freeze the frame and you have a picture postcard: Iceland with the contrast turned up. Dig a little deeper and you find Iceland with a cave-troll infestation. There are friends to be made here, in the nooks and valleys, but generally Skyrim regards you as an unwanted visitor: the land and its people try to expel you.
This place of virtual cold and grim scarcity is not a typical refuge.
In Skyrim, you can choose to bring peace or turmoil to the land. The native Nord race want to free their land from Imperial interference, to become independent. The Imperial Legion, the military of the Empire, seeks instead to reunite and pacify the province. To a certain degree, you are free to choose with whom to side.
One of Ferguson’s frustrations with video games at the time was his own tendency to race towards the goal, rather than take time to explore and enjoy the journey.
‘Something that I’ve learned about myself is that, if a game’s story is based on saving the world, I will concentrate all of my attention on that goal,’ he says. ‘Other characters in the game might implore me to carry out side-quests, helping them with this and that, but I usually never engage in that because … well, because the world needs saving and that seems more important.’
This time, however, was different. Ferguson spent his time roaming Skyrim’s world, wandering and, as he puts it, exploring for exploration’s sake. For Ferguson, this freedom to set his pace and manage his destiny was key to being able to escape the turmoil in his mind and in his home.
‘If it had been a shooter or something, I’m not sure I would have fallen into it in the same way,’ he says. ‘It’s not constantly intense. There’s room to wander. It also gets the power fantasy thing right. You have power to change things while none of the missions you’re given are particularly taxing.’
A few days later Sarah returned home.
‘I remember when I took her back from the hospital, I was scared that I’d never bring her back to life,’ says Ferguson. ‘She was empty and broken. I brought her tea and beans on toast and when she slept I played. Sometimes, when the loading screens went on too long, I’d start crying. She would call to me and I would pause the game and go and sit with her and tell her that the important thing was that she was well and safe and that she would get better.’
Ferguson gathered up the vials of folic acid, the baby books, and the red and blue Babygro, placed the items in a plastic bag, and hid it in a drawer.
‘I didn’t want her to see any of it,’ he says.
Sometimes visitors would visit and Ferguson would make them tea.
‘We’d sit and they would leave their coats on. Everyone had such serious faces.’
Sarah remained in bed for a week. She needed drugs every four hours, which Ferguson administered. He spent the rest of the time cooking, cleaning, or retreating into Skryim.
‘I flitted between these few rooms, these two realities,’ he recalls.
Entertainment, particularly the sort that can be consumed from the comfort of a chair, often has a utilitarian role in our lives. People might chain-watch soap operas as a way to steady their emotions in the wake of a breakup, or revert to cartoons with easily digestible messages and morals when the complexities of life’s decisions weigh too heavily.
With video games, the effect is different. In the modernised Netflix adaptation of the BBC television series House of Cards, Kevin Spacey’s character, a high-flying American politician, is shown playing online competitive video games as a way to unwind and destress from the wrangling and machinations of his political life at the end of each day. Many share Frank Underwood’s habit: video games serve a specific purpose in the day’s schedule, a way to escape from the rigours of the preceding hours in a virtual space or, perhaps, in some way to make sense of them. What makes them unique is that these are places where one’s actions and decisions do not have to be so carefully weighed: outcomes are usually predictable, reliable and, if necessary, easily undone.
If, while playing SimCity, you decide to place a new sewage-treatment works near a residential district and upset the citizens who you, as mayor, are supposed to be looking out for, you can simply turn back the clock to an earlier save to undo their anger. Such mistakes are indelible in real life. In Braid, a game that gives its player control over time itself, every mistimed jump can be unjumped with a squeeze of a button, every action rehearsed and repeated until it is perfected.
Then there are the games that provide a more numbing kind of escapism. Descend into Hyrule, the setting for each of Shigeru Miyamoto’s Zelda games, and there’s no need for the high-stakes precision of a Braid or SimCity. This is, rather, a place to which you acclimatise then wander about in, pursuing goals often of your own choosing, at your own tempo.
This kind of scrappy catharsis is beautifully presented in a different way by Katamari Damacy, a Japanese game in which you must roll an adhesive ball around a series of domestic locations, rolling up household detritus (until the ball grows large enough to be fired into space). There’s something deeply liberating about the act of decluttering the modern world (as the sticky ball grow larger, you’re able to exit into the surrounding Tokyo streets, rolling up cars and bus stops, benches and ice-cream vans), a feeling that reflects the sense of peaceful clarity we can feel after tidying a desk, clearing out a spare room, or otherwise making our lives less complicated.
For Ferguson, bewildered with grief and confusion, Skyrim was a place he was able to visit in order to be anchored. It might seem strange that someone might choose to find their feet in a place that doesn’t exist. But when reality has let you down with an event of colossal indifference and capriciousness, the reliable rules and outcomes of a video game become all the more inviting.
Skyrim may not have been a sacred space for Ferguson, but looking back at that time today, he does believe that the game gave him a specific type of escapism that, in the moment, he needed.
‘It is a game that rewards you for doing the same things over and over again, allowing you to get better at them, refining your skills by constant iteration,’ he says. ‘I was in a cold, mechanical world where I was getting better, getting powerful.’
Perhaps it was the comfort of feeling that he was in control of his own destiny again, after an event that showed with such clarity how there are some things in life that no man can control. But whatever comfort the game gave him, it was complicated by guilt.
‘There was part of me that thought I was doing the wrong thing,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure what else I should have been doing, but I felt guilty about spending all of this time within the game. It was a real opportunity to disappear into another world, and I was never entirely comfortable with how readily I embraced that.’
Eventually, his wife Sarah left her bed. She would watch her husband play for a while. ‘At a certain point there were bigger emotional problems for us to deal with, but for a while, it was enough to sit there together, visiting this cold place.’
While Ferguson appeared quietly resilient to his visitors, his internal feelings were different. ‘We weren’t sad and brave,’ he says. ‘We were angry. But I don’t think that came through in the way that I played the game. I played through in quite a law-abiding way. I chose to be moral. Even in the combat I snuck around. If my character had reflected the way that I was I would have bought a giant broadsword and attacked everything in sight.’
Then one day, a few weeks after he started his journey in Skyrim, Ferguson was finished.
‘When Sarah started to recover, that’s when I started to become emotional for the first time,’ he says. ‘I stopped playing the game. I had a realisation that this just wasn’t where I wanted to be any more.’
There was ceremony to the breakup. Ferguson removed the disc from its tray, opened up a menu on the console, and began to delete his save games—those digital files that record a player’s progress in the game—one by one. Skyrim saves a player’s progress in an unusual way, creating a new file every few minutes, a breadcrumb trail of historical record. By the end of an adventure that can last for scores of hours, there are often hundreds of files.
‘Looking at all those saves was upsetting to me,’ he says. ‘There’s a part of your brain that believes playing a game in tragic circumstances is stolen time, that should have been spent doing something else. To see hundreds of those saves laid out confronted me. I remember I was telling myself that I needed space on my hard drive. But I never download anything, so I absolutely didn’t need to do it for that reason. I had done everything I could do in the game, or at least everything that I was interested in doing. So I guess there was a sense of closure there. The save files were a record that I was embarrassed about. It was time that I’d put into a virtual life, rather than a real one. There was guilt. Eradicating the saves was perhaps a way to get rid of that feeling. Or maybe just a way of saying goodbye to that time altogether.’
A few weeks later, Ferguson was able to say goodbye to the time spent in the game in a more definitive way when a friend visited.
‘He mentioned that he wanted to play Skyrim but couldn’t afford a copy,’ he recalls. ‘So I gave him mine. It felt good to have something to give that someone wanted. But there was something else, I guess. A sense of closure.’
It’s clear to me why Ferguson found solace in a video game at that time: it gave him something to do, a series of easily digestible tasks which he could complete without needing to leave his wife’s side and, as a result, a sense of progress and movement when the rest of his life’s plans had been obliterated. I remember when, as a teenager, my parents first separated. I too found routine and direction in a video game (mine was Final Fantasy VII) when the framework of my life seemed to be collapsing.
Literature is able to remove us from our own lives and focus on the hopes, dreams, and conflicts of another. But only a video game gives us the sense of being in control, of being the author of our destiny.
Strangely, it’s for this precise reason that Ferguson, who now works for Edinburgh University and has a young son, is reluctant to recommend video games as a salve for the wounded soul.
‘It can be a problem to get lost in fiction—and I include films and children’s literature in this—that’s centred around manifest destiny and the idea that everyone is a good guy or a bad guy. These kinds of stories are useful for certain stages in a human being’s development, but it’s not how the world works. It’s simplistic, and sometimes we can cling on to these stories that were supposed to be for childhood into adulthood. In games it seems unhealthy to me that you usually play as the hero who can overcome all odds, and who must destroy anyone who stands in opposition or disagreement.’
Despite the reservations, Ferguson recognises the role that Skyrim played, if not in his healing, then in his survival at the time. ‘If you play games because you just need a break from the real world then, with that caveat, I do believe that it can be helpful. Games can provide respites from the storms of the real world. People do that with all kinds of fiction. For Sarah, it was watching hundreds of episodes of Gilmore Girls. It’s the consumption of something that is reassuring, something that displays shades of the real world, but that is also a simplified, comforting version, which has aspects that you can control in some way. It makes sense that this would be something people retreat into when life feels out of control.’
A few months after I first heard Ferguson’s story, I visited Tale of Tales, a two-person independent game developer based in Ghent, Belgium. The pair, a husband-and-wife team, make art games that bear little resemblance to Skyrim or the other blockbuster titles that reach the billboards and advertising hoardings.
After I arrived they took me into the city, where the spires of St Bavo’s Cathedral prod at the Belgian sky, which was, on this particular day, a uniform September grey. Inside the building a Gothic warren of chambers and alcoves was warm with bodies and candlelight, a refuge from the post-summer downer that is September outside.
‘The problem with God being dead is that nobody builds cathedrals any more,’ Auriea Harvey said. ‘And humans need cathedrals. Or, at very least, they need somewhere to go for refuge, reflection, sanctuary, and rest.’
While Harvey and her husband, Michaël Samyn, are not religious in any formal sense, they come here often, she told me. Sometimes they visit in order to revisit the dominant aesthetic of Samyn’s adolescence—he attended Catholic school, with all of its attendant ritual, art, and arcana. Sometimes they come to be inspired, not by the aesthetic but by the utility.
‘I think that, at their best, video games are able to perform something of the cathedral’s function in the modern world,’ she says. ‘At least, that’s my hope for the games that we make, that they might be sacred spaces in some way.’
This has been my own experience of the pair’s work, their numerous ‘cathedrals of fire,’ which bear almost no similarities with the violence and noise of the mainstream video-game industry’s more familiar and routine output. In 2005’s The Endless Forest, for example, an online game commissioned by the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, you play as a rangy deer that interacts with other players, each of whom also plays as a deer, through sound and movement. Some of the attributes of the vast online game worlds such as World of Warcraft are seen here, such as the ability to customise characters’ appearance with new antlers, pelts, and adorning flowers in order to personalise the game and show off to others. But there are no enemies to vanquish, and, in most cases, you are only able to change the appearance of other deer. If you want to change your own appearance, you must find a way to enlist another player’s help, convincing them to cast a spell on you that, for example, grants you red antlers, or pink eyes. You can hop, trot, make sounds, and even dance with other deer, but there is no chat-box to allow for open communication. In this way, The Endless Forest is an ephemeral tribute to primal communication that demonstrates the value of the unspoken in online games. More broadly, it’s an ode to the mystic gloom found beneath a canopy of trees and, per Harvey’s hope, a virtual place to revitalise the soul.
The Graveyard, another of Tale of Tales’ works that was nominated for the Innovation Award in the Independent Games Festival in 2009, is more peaceful still. In this game—or rather place—you’re cast as an elderly woman with a walking stick who trudges between phalanxes of gravestones en route to a bench. Presented in noirish black and white and soundtracked by yapping crows, distant sirens, and the crunch of the gravel underfoot, it’s a quietly subversive work. The understated experience lasts for just ten minutes, unusual in a medium that prizes length and expanse. Tale of Tales made the game free, but for five dollars players can purchase a premium version that adds just one feature: the possibility that the woman will die during the sequence. It’s a quiet reflection on age, death, and remembrance.
These games have been created specifically to perform a utilitarian function in the player’s life, be that as a space to interact with others without troublesome social mores, or the pressure of having to create scintillating conversation, or as a space to find peace, and to reflect on our own histories.
But in some parts of the world, video games are not only psychological or spiritual places of refuge. In certain contexts, the hiding place isn’t metaphorical.
Yousif Mohammed is only nineteen, but he is one of the world’s top players in the online video game Battlefield 3. A realistic military first-person shooter that sold more than eight million copies in the months following its release in 2011, it no doubt feels closer to home for Mohammed than for the Western players it was primarily designed for—one of its missions, dubbed Operation Swordbreaker, is set within Mohammed’s adopted home city of Sulaymaniyah.
During the past two decades, life for many Iraqis has been turbulent and perilous. In 2006, while Baghdad was still experiencing the war’s aftermath, ten-year-old Mohammed was playing in a park in the city with a friend when he saw a man in a parked car lean out of the window and stare at them through a camcorder’s viewfinder. Believing that he would appear on television that night, Mohammed hurried home to tell his parents what he’d seen. His mother, Amna Mohammed, an engineer in the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources, didn’t believe her son until, later that evening, she received a phone call from the mother of Mohammed’s friend, confirming what had happened.
‘At that time, there was a gang operating in the area that kidnapped kids and demanded money for their release—around fifty thousand dollars,’ she told me.
The gang operated in the Mansour district, a relatively wealthy neighbourhood in western Baghdad, where the family lived. Typically, the gang released the children after receiving the ransom money, but in one notorious incident, they killed the hostage even after receiving payment.
Amna knew that boys like Mohammed were prime targets, so she sent him and his grandmother away from Baghdad later that night. The pair took a six-hour taxi ride to Kurdistan before heading into the northern city of Sulaymaniyah.
‘Any mother, believing that their child was in grave danger, would have done what I did,’ she told me. Amna stayed behind with her husband to settle the family’s affairs before joining her son. The escape had a profound effect on Mohammed: he left in such haste that he didn’t pack any of his toys, including, most distressingly, his video-game console. Alone in a new city, with no friends, the boy felt grimly isolated.
‘Gaming had been a big part of my daily activities, so when I fled to this city, I was at a loss,’ he said. ‘After a few months, I bought a computer again and, through that, met other players and began to feel settled.’
Today, Mohammed is an aspiring doctor, as well as one of the country’s top video-game players. After his family resettled, he threw himself into gaming, both as a means of escape and to make new friends. He excels at the latest blockbuster American titles, particularly first-person shooters like Battlefield 3, a game that he has spent seven hundred and twenty-one hours playing. He is currently ranked in the top 2 percent of players in the world.
His parents’ generation views his hobby with some distrust: like many Western parents, they worry about shooting games and the possibility that they could encourage violence. But, for the most part, Mohammed’s parents supported the hobby, because it kept him inside and safe. For the same reason, many Iraqi children are encouraged to play as much as they like, because the country remains volatile. Video games have become a way to keep a generation away from the capricious bombings that have made the streets some of the most perilous in the world. They are a physical refuge, as well as a psychological one.
‘Video games are the only viable entertainment we have here,’ says Mohannad Abdulla, a twenty-five-year-old network administrator for Baghdad’s main Internet service provider. He’s been playing games since he was a teenager; a poster of Captain Price, a fictional British Army officer from the video game Call of Duty, hangs on his wall. ‘Other hobbies are just too dangerous because of terrorism. We don’t have clubs, so games are the only way to have some fun with friends and stay safe at home, where there is no risk of being killed by a suicide bomber. For many of us, video games are our only escape from these miseries.’ During Saddam Hussein’s rule, it was difficult to buy them, and only relatively well-off, professional-class families like Mohammed’s could afford to import titles from Europe. Until the advent of disc-based video games in the mid-nineties, it was too difficult to pirate game cartridges.
‘The industry is still in its infancy in Iraq,’ says Omar M. Alanseri, the owner of the Iraqi Games Centre, one of only a small number of dedicated video-game retailers in Baghdad, which had opened sixteen months earlier. ‘But each year, more people get involved. I’ve seen the audience vastly increase, especially among teenagers.’
Some of the most popular video games in Iraq, as in America, are military-themed shooters, in which the player assumes the role of a soldier and blasts through waves of virtual enemies.
‘Almost all of my friends play video games like World of Tanks [and] Battlefield 3,’ says Abdulla. ‘In fact, we have some of the top-ranked players in the world here.’
This interest in military games stems from the local environment as much as, in the case of many Western players, male vanity.
‘Growing up, my life was completely military-focused,’ Abdulla says. ‘It is the way we are raised. For example, I was taught how to use an AK-47 when I was in elementary school. Younger players who are not so affected by Saddam’s agendas play other game types more easily than we do, like Minecraft and other nonmilitary games.’
Many of these first-person shooters, often created with input from U.S. military advisers—a handful of Navy SEALs were punished for consulting on the 2012 video game Medal of Honor: Warfighter—are set against the backdrop of fictionalised real-world conflicts, often within Middle Eastern countries.
Some have entire sections set within Iraq, like the Battlefield series.
For Abdulla, playing these games in their real-world settings isn’t problematic.
‘Any video game that’s set within Iraq and involves killing terrorists becomes instantly famous here,’ he says. ‘Everyone wants to play it. We have been through so much because of terror. Shooting terrorists in a game is cathartic. We can have our revenge in some small way.’ Alanseri agrees: ‘Any game that has a level set in Iraq is popular. They always sell more copies than other games because they are related in some way to our lives.’ The games have even established a kind of empathy for foreign gaming partners that Alanseri said he would not otherwise have. ‘I have learned a lot of things, like Western-world values, culture, lifestyle, and even the way that they think, through video games.’
Mohammed believes that the friendships he has formed through online gaming have had a transformative effect on the way in which some people view his country.
‘Some people told me they were scared of Iraqis,’ he says, ‘thinking that they are all terrorists. But in reality, we are victims. When they got to know me, they saw the truth and changed their minds about Iraqis. It removed the fear.’
A twenty-two-year-old Norwegian, Michael Moe, is now one of Mohammed’s closest friends. The young men met online while playing Battlefield 3, and now speak on the phone or over Skype every few days.
‘I become worried about Mohammed if I do not hear from him for any more than two days,’ says Moe. ‘I always check up on him when that happens.’
Abdulla almost seems to prefer friends he has made playing online video games.
‘Here in our home country, most of us have lost some, if not most, of our friends,’ he says. ‘They were either killed or fled Iraq. And you can’t just trust anyone any more. So a friend across seas who you can trust is better than a friend here who might stab your back any minute.’
Video games will not solve Iraq’s ongoing challenges. But for some young Iraqis, they do provide more than a mere distraction from the terrors of life in the country. The social connections that they encourage, both within Iraq and beyond, have built empathy in ways that may have a profound effect on the way some young people view their place in the world.
For Amna, Mohammed’s mother, the effect has been less grand and more localised.
‘I used to object about video games,’ she says. ‘I wanted Mohammed to spend more time studying. But I’ve come to see the strange benefits. Video games have broadened his relationships outside of our borders, and formed new bonds. He loves his gaming friends and, from what I can tell, they love him, too.’
Battlefield’s Swedish creators could never have known that their game, based on contemporary urban warfare, would play an active role in keeping one young player away from the risks of genuine urban warfare. There are other pastimes, of course, that could have provided the same function (fifty years ago, Mohammed might have had his nose buried in a comic book). But as we’ve seen, the video game passes the time more efficiently and in a more prolonged manner than most. Battlefield in particular offers Mohammed a way to feel in control of his circumstances, just as Skyrim offered Ferguson a way to take control of a reality, when the world outside of the game was turbulent and untethered.
In different ways but for similar reasons, Mohammed and Ferguson’s stories illustrate something crucial about the role that video games (all games, arguably) fulfil for human beings: a way to step outside reality for a fleeting moment in order to better understand ourselves and the world in which we live when, at last, we’re ready to return.