MY LIFE IN HORROR. IF ONLY THERE IS SOMETHING WE COULD HAVE DONE

My Life In Horror
 
Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favor and checking out the original material first anyway.
 
This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.
 
This is my life in horror.
 
If Only There Is Something We Could Have Done
 
It’s 1997. Or 1998. I am 17, or 18, or 19. It doesn’t matter. Nothing much really matters.
 
My life revolves around precious little. In theory, I am at college, but really, I’m just existing; claiming Jobseekers Allowance whilst aggressively not studying or looking for work.
 
I don’t drink. I don’t smoke anything stronger than Boars’ Head rolling tobacco, at least not very often. Can’t afford it, no other reason. I don’t eat well, but I eat often enough, the poverty diet of noodles and chips and Brian Ford’s breaded Beef Cutlets.
 
I am miserable, but there are chinks of light. I have a small but tight-knit social group, and we have a regular roleplaying game. And, of course, there’s the music - music that speaks to me, and later, music that saves me.
 
And there is also addiction.
 
I sometimes think, as I reflect upon my life, that I have in general been very fortunate in the addictions I have been drawn to.  Whilst compulsive behavior is almost by definition not healthy, and while a side effect of my various obsessions has been persistent issues with sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and the occasional psychological issues such tiredness can bring, it’s very rare they’ve been destructive beyond the time sink factor. Poker held me for about 3 years, but while I sunk many hundreds of hours into the game, I was good enough to break even over that period. Ultimately, while I wasn’t quite good enough to make money at it, it at least only cost me time. I know that it cost - and still costs - a lot of other people a lot more.
 
Similarly, my obsessions with various pieces of pop culture seem to have done little harm - in the cases of Doctor Who and horror fiction, they’ve led to some amazing friendships, and of course the enormous privilege of writing a monthly column for the biggest independent horror review site in Europe. In Stephen King’s IT, adult Eddie (always my favorite, bless you Eddie) talks about how the secret of life is to find the little bastard who lives in your head, fucking everything up, and get your hands around the little bastard, and then.... Don’t choke him out, but put the fucker to work. I’m not going to claim to have fully mastered this advice - or, indeed, that I don’t still have the issues that I am working through, and the odd wobble - but I’ve certainly found that turning that compulsion towards getting words on a page has done a pretty spectacular job of replacing a still-entirely-absent work ethic. “I don’t know where you find the time!”, people often remark. I normally make some joke about sleep being for the weak.
 
It’s not really a joke.
 
Anyway.
 
There is one other item that keeps me going during this 1997/98 period. It’s a 384 PC, ancient even then, a hand me down from a University that’s upgraded the student PC lab. It’s a gift from The Ghost. Of course. Austensibly for study, and for writing - even back then, writing feels like something I should be doing, though my output is pitiful in both scale and content, only happening when the mental pressure feels so strong that I literally can’t help but get something down, and I know how that sounds, but I was there and it’s how it was.
 
But really I only cared about it because it could run games. Not many. Not Doom, much less Quake, which was just coming out around then. But it could run Wolfenstein 3D just fine.
 
More importantly - all-consuming important - it could run UFO: Enemy Unknown.
 
UFO - later rebranded XCOM - is, in your humble correspondents' opinion, one of the greatest PC strategy games of all time - maybe the greatest. The premise is simple;  aliens make first contact with Earth, and they are not friendly. The player takes of the role of commander of the hastily assembled XCOM - an international military project established with the explicit goal of combatting and eventually defeating the alien threat.
 
To do this, the player is given a base, some interceptor aircraft for shooting down UFO’s, and a small army of soldiers for assaulting the downed ships and killing any remaining aliens. The player will also end up building laboratories for researching the alien artifacts that are recovered from the crash sites (and hiring the scientists to work in those labs), and workshops and engineers will be employed to manufacture more of these items once they’ve been researched.
 
So it’s a combination of strategic base/resource management (funds are limited, as are alien materials, which cannot be synthesized and must instead be recovered from sites), and a hypertense turn-based combat game, where you sneak your soldiers around a procedurally generated map, with the geography very loosely based on where the UFO crashed on the planet, and try very hard to kill a better armed, tougher opponent.
 
This is, I think, the core of the genius of XCOM. One aspect of game design that I am really coming to appreciate as I get older is that of balance. The deck building game Legendary is a perfect example of this - it’s essentially a cooperative game where you work with the other players to beat a villain and their scheme - and the genius of Legendary is you usually win… and it’s usually really, really close. You normally feel like you just squeaked it, just got it put away in time. Pandemic is another excellent boardgame example of this.
 
And in XCOM, you basically always feel like you’re on the back foot, up against it, struggling to hold ground. Every combat mission feels like it could end in disaster (and it often does), you never have enough money to do all the things you need to do, and if you screw up missions (and you do, frequently), you lose funding from those countries in subsequent months, further putting the squeeze on your options - indeed, one of the main ways you can lose the game is by having enough countries leave the project that you’re no longer funded. Additionally, your soldiers improve with each mission, becoming more effective, but that very effectiveness leads you to end up putting them into more and more dangerous positions.
 
And most of all, there are the aliens.
 
They get smarter, for starters - or, at least, it feels like they do. They certainly get tougher - there’s more of them per spaceship, and there are a lot of species, each with their own weaponry, movement, threat. The first few months are a near constant exercise of perpetual what-the-fuck-now as you round the corner of some farmhouse or gas station and see a reaper or cyberdisk - or one of the aliens starts flying, or one of your troops suddenly falls under enemy control and starts shooting his compatriots.
 
And the game fucks you over in other ways. Example: your scientists inform you that in order for the research to really progress, you’ll need to capture one of the aliens alive. And in order to do that, you’ll need to use a stun prod - which as the name implies has no range at all, meaning that you need to be adjacent to the aliens to use it. So now, you’re taking your most experienced troops (with the most movement and health) and giving them a weapon they can only use at point blank range, and running them up to aliens to zap them, hoping it works.
 
It doesn’t always.
 
It’s an exercise in sadism, is what I’m trying to say. The game delights in finding new ways to punch the player in the face. Oh look, now the aliens are sending huge super-tough forces into cities to murder civilians, and if you don’t try and stop them the country will leave the project, but if you go you can’t use any of your explosive weapons without killing civilians yourself. Oh, look, the alien UFOs are tougher now and can shoot down your interceptors. Oh, look, they’ve figured out where your base is and are attacking it. Oh look, you lost. Again.
It’s punishing even on the lower difficulty settings, and on anything from ‘normal’ up, it’s downright vicious. And holy shit it’s a slog. An average winning game will have engaged in well over 50 combat missions, each taking around an hour to complete. You will have researched huge numbers of items and tech. You will have - somehow - taken out one of the giant UFOs and captured its commander alive - or assaulted an alien base on earth and somehow captured the leader from there, instead. Then you’ll have built a new ship that can take your soldiers to Mars, where you will finally assault the alien base there and - if you’re lucky - destroy the huge beating heart at the center of that base and win the game.
 
I loved it. I loved it because it was so fucking hard. I loved it because it was such a fucking slog. I loved it because it was a series of repetitive tasks with endless slight variation, constantly escalating challenge. I loved it because even when you’d played it through once, it took so fucking long that you’d forgotten the tech tree and had to guess at how best to assign research all over again.
 
Most of all, I loved it because I could become absorbed in it. By it. The world around me, the crowded, dirty bedroom filled with black bin bags and stinking of cigarette ash, and the house outside the room with the dodgy electrics and moldy shared bathroom and filthy kitchen, and the town outside the house that was rapidly becoming the limits of my imagination and understanding, a town full of callous indifference at best and a kind of dull-minded sadism at worse, a town/world that seemed pretty well personally tailored to grind me into a fine powder and scatter me to the wind, never to be seen again… it all went away. And so did I.
 
I’m not saying it wasn’t fun. But my abiding memory isn’t of fun, exactly. It’s more of a   blankness, where all the challenges are abstract; a space where there is still complexity and difficulty and unfairness, but where all that can be overcome by rigorous application of understanding.
 
Addicts talk about this a lot - the blankness that lies at the core of it, at the bottom - doing the thing so hard and so long that everything else vanishes. And I still think there is, or can be, a therapeutic value to that, at least in theory. No-one can spend 24/7 inside their own head, after all. The human mind is kind of the opposite of a safe space.
 
But it was absolutely a compulsion, too. I’d lose days to the game, playing until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, sleeping for 12 hours, waking up, shoving some food down my throat, and then straight back to it. Whilst I was nominally attending college, the need to attend the odd class held it in check a bit, but once I’d given up the pretense of ever passing anything, there was also nothing to keep me from turning on, loading the latest save game, and dropping all the way out.
 
And - newsflash - I’m not cured. Not even close. Because it’s now 2018, and I am 40 years old, and over the last few weeks, I’ve lost hours - hours of sleep, hours of potentially productive writing time, hours I can ill afford - playing the PlayStation 3 iteration of XCOM, in the name of beating the Ironman Classic version of the game - a particularly sadistic setting where the game saves after every decision, overwriting the previous one, so you can’t simply reload if you fuck up. It took me over 30 attempts to finally beat it, and more late nights than I am prepared to admit. All for a couple of PlayStation 3 trophies that mean absolutely nothing to anyone that isn’t me, and the ability to be able to say ‘I beat XCOM on Iron Man mode, classic difficulty’.
 
Quite early on in this writing thing, I remember talking to a mate about how I was struggling with balancing PS3 time and writing time. My rationalization for the time I spent playing was that it was when I was too tired to write.
 
Well, guess what? That was bullshit.
 
Turns out, if I am awake enough to game, I am awake enough to write. Right now, I am fucking exhausted, and half cut on my second beer of the evening, and in less than two hours I’ve gotten over 2000 words out of my recent relapse into XCOM addiction.
 
The truth is, I can always fucking write.  And the next truth is, when I do it, I always end up feeling better  - much better than I end up feeling after a three week XCOM binge. And as a bonus, I have something to show for it at the end; something that might bring other people some kind of pleasure.
 
And yet.
 
I still feel the pull of it. The platinum trophy. The two sequels. XCOM is a near-perfect game, in both the original version and the recent remake, and a part of me wants to shut this down, right now, and just go and fire up the PS3 and play until I can’t see straight.
 
It’s absolutely a compulsion. It’s absolutely an addiction.
 
And as much as my life is, thankfully, transformed from that time in 1997 and 1998, when I was adrift, and essentially alone in my own skull, afraid and terrified and desperate to just disappear, it’s clear to me now that part of me lives there still. And that part of me is still terrified, and adrift, and uncomprehending of the life I’ve built for myself. Still expecting it to all come crashing down, and leave me back in a single room in a deathtrap house, with no money, no hope, and no future.
 
That part of me will always see play, not as a pleasant diversion, but an escape, a lifeline. A welcome isolation, a blessed cell.
 
And I rather suspect that I am no more done with XCom than XCom is done with me.
 
KP
11/9/18