In the Aftermath newsletter last week, I wrote about the tragic end of a recent run I was on in The Long Dark, my favorite survival game. I almost immediately started a new run, determined to do everything better–no, perfectly–this time. Stop me if you’ve learned this life lesson already, but trying to do everything perfectly isn’t much fun at all.
In the survival sandbox of The Long Dark, you’re given a huge, snowy world to survive in as long as possible, and how you go about doing that is up to you. As I’ve written before, despite hundreds of hours in the game, my runs have never lasted very long. My last run was only about 35 in-game days, but it was solid: I had good gear, had crafted a bow and a ton of arrows, and was well on my way to getting to check out the recently-added safehouse customization when I lost it all due to bad luck and panic. Lessons learned, I thought, promptly starting again.
I hit the wrong button when starting my new run, because I spawned in the game’s remote DLC maps instead of the main map that I intended to. It wasn’t my ideal place to start a run, but it did mean I was well set up to check out the narrative that the DLC added, which I’ve never pursued in earnest. I decided to embrace my mistake and make that my plan, focusing on trekking across the game’s world repairing the required transmitters and finding their related bunkers.
I’m ashamed to admit I almost immediately took to (let’s call it what it is) cheating by looking up guides to the locations. When I learned that one might take me back into the path of the cougar that ended my previous run, I became fixated on the idea of completing that part of the story before the cougar spawned. This wasn’t hard–in the difficulty I’m playing on, I had plenty of time–but it stressed me out a lot. I beelined across the game’s world, grabbing what I could get on my way. This single-minded focus led to a couple mistakes, wearing way too heavy clothes and missing places where I could have grabbed some good loot, including some of the items needed to repair the transmitters. This latter mistake slowed me down once I realized it, but once I repaired the necessary transmitter, I raced toward the bunker. I panicked when I got lost in a transition mine, and I fell through thin ice several times as I split my attention between the radio required to locate the bunker and glancing around wildly for extra-dangerous aurora predators.
Right now, my character is in that bunker, well before the cougar has spawned. I know where the other transmitters and their bunkers are because I’ve watched unnecessary hours of YouTube videos and pored over player-made maps. I keep running over my plan in my head: I’ll drop my collected gear at my favorite base, hit the next transmitter early in the morning so I can be right where the next bunker is when the aurora starts, then hit the last transmitter and bunker on my way to another good looting spot. Closing out this part of the DLC will require going back to an area I don’t terribly want to trek to, and I’m torn between locking in the ending so I can pursue the next part of the DLC on a different save if I die, and trusting myself to survive long enough to let it happen naturally.
Logging out for the night with my character safely ensconced in the bunker, I realized I was feeling distinctly stressed out and weird about the run, and about a game that I really love. In many ways, The Long Dark is a game about fucking up, about embracing impermanence and coming to peace with seeing your hard work vanish in an instant. For the decade I’ve been playing the game, I’ve never been too attached to a run, but now that I’m trying to play it “right,” I find myself feeling like I’m not playing it right at all. I’m afraid to take risks or encounter wildlife, feel like exploring is just wasted time, and trying to optimize every choice and path in ways that seem to come naturally to players far more skilled than me, but which loses the feeling of free-flowing adventure that I like best about the game, even when it leads to disaster.
It has of course occurred to me that I got really into this game again around the recent election and its subsequent horrors. The Long Dark is a wilderness full of unpredictable dangers, which certainly fits the current vibe, and an empty world far away from people, which certainly fits with my desire to fade away into the woods when things in my life get tough. I’m sure a therapist would point out that my fixation on getting everything in a video game to go exactly my way stands in contrast to the helplessness of the current administration’s attacks on trans people like me. This is all one big exercise in sublimation and avoidance, though at least it’s one aimed at a video game I really like instead of the more destructive directions I used to favor.
But I feel like I’m ruining my favorite game for myself by playing it this way; my approach feels like it’s against both the spirit of the game and the way I most like to play it. I’m making myself a little crazy in a way that I at least had the self-awareness to realize is not entirely about a video game, and I have enough stress in my life to not need to make myself stressed about a video game, of all things, too.
While I don’t tend to go in on the idea of video games as escapism, I want to hold that it’s OK for me to distract myself from the ongoing onslaught of horrors. But if I’m going to use a game in that way, I want to make sure I’m not just making myself feel worse. I want games to feel fun and joyous, or at least the good kind of stressful. I don’t want my run to be about control and perfection; I want to explore more of The Long Dark’s maps and mess around with mechanics I haven’t engaged with much, to see what happens when I play around in one of my favorite video game worlds. And games need to be just one way I find an outlet for my feelings, instead of hanging them all on the perfect run.
