As a professional writer, I read a lot. It’s part of the job.
I read a large number of essays, articles, and books, with a healthy helping of PRDs, SRDs, legalese, and questions please.
To read for either pleasure or self-development on top of that is a bit much. Every year, one of my goals is to “Read 12 books this year” and every time I manage about 3-5. There is a friction there that I’m unable to break through.
The problem, I realize, is that I put reading in my list of goals as a pleasure activity - to offset work activities - but I don’t derive pleasure from it anymore. I treat it as a development task, and my choices of books are as such.
In March 2021, I tried to combat that by reading a book solely for my pleasure, and as a result, I read Neuromancer (William Gibson), which was an incredible experience at the time. I loved that book. However, I was unable to sluice that excitement into any meaningful momentum.
In October 2021, I bought myself a Nintendo Switch - and I played a couple of games and fell back in love with a hobby with which I had slowly lost touch. Through 2022, I played a handful of Nintendo Switch games, and had some incredible experiences with games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and Hollow Knight.
Those games, while different from Neuromancer, gave me the same rush - in discovering a world that is different than my own.
I’ve always been a fantasy nerd - whether that was playing Golden Sun as a child or creating Zemera for tabletop gaming as an adult. I’m a shameless sucker for other worlds, maybe because I’ve always wanted to escape mine.
Gaming allows me to engage in that desire in a much more accessible way than reading does. And while they are very different hobbies - a game does not force the imagination as a book does - they function the same.
Playing a video game allows me to disconnect from my work senses, which reading cannot. For a writer, reading isn’t a pleasurable hobby anymore, it is a masturbatory performance of #Hustle culture.
Last night, I livestreamed on Twitch for the first time, and a few of my friends participated in the chat. I played Elden Ring while my friends gave me tips and guidance, and I tried to commentate over the game and entertain. It was so refreshingly fun that I woke up excited to do it again.
The only reason I write this essay today is because reading is still seen as an intellectual pursuit while gaming is seen as a wasteful one. As a professional writer, I’m telling you that they are both completely alright to add to your life. Reading books won’t make you Bill Gates and playing video games won’t make you a worthless bum living in a basement. Do what you want because you want to do it, not because it will benefit your career in some way.
In 2023, I formally say goodbye to my misguided goal of reading for pleasure, and I fall back in the folds of an uncomfortably tight hug from the gaming community. May it squeeze my everloving life out of me.
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