The Joy of Not Playing Games

By Garrett Martin | October 23, 2023 | 1:55pm

Photo: Mosaic at Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy. Taken by Garrett Martin, who would totally play a game that looks like that.

Video Games Features A Vacation from Games

I left the Switch at home. I usually bring it with me when I travel, especially on long trips, not because I want to play games all the time, or can’t go two weeks without them, but because I generally have to play them as part of my job. It’s hard to write about games if you don’t play them. (Not impossible, though.) Nine trips out of 10 I never even turn that Switch on. It just takes up space in my backpack, alongside the hairbrush I never actually use and whatever book I’m not actually reading that week. Before the Switch this happened with the Vita, the 3DS, the iPad, the PSP: there was always some piece of hardware cluttering up my luggage and hardly ever getting used.

I just got back from a two-week trip to Italy, a country with a solid pinball history but not much of an internationally-recognized videogame scene. (505, the publishers of Control and some other really good games, are based in Milan, but that’s about it.) This trip would have even less downtime than most; it was a cruise, a different Adriatic city almost every day, with just enough time in each port to exhaust ourselves with culture, history, and food before passing out back in our stateroom. I figured that after the mosaics of Ravenna I wouldn’t be in the mood for Elephant Mario, or whatever, and that even if I did have time to kill on the boat, I could easily take care of that with the unfinished books on my phone and at any of the well-stocked and generally free bars found throughout the ship. The Switch stayed home while I drank rum and Diets and finally read David Browne’s Sonic Youth book, and guess what: it felt amazing.

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Do you know how good it feels to not play videogames? To not stare at a screen while fidgeting your thumbs and jumping through digital hoops built by overworked artists getting their souls destroyed in a cubicle somewhere? To not feel the need to go adventuring or save the world or avenge your family or play a game you loved 30 years ago because you feel every bit as old as you actually are? To take a break from the pressure of always playing something to write about, keeping up with the latest games to stay up on the discourse, digging into whatever old game was just remastered or remade or rediscovered so you can stay relevant with the latest social media churn? To just sit silently in a room half-filled with strangers while a man named Jafar plays ‘70s and ‘80s hits on the piano and a Russian bartender keeps refilling your glass with Diet Coke and the well rum without you even having to ask? It feels good, reader. It feels good.

Videogames can be fantastic. At their best they’re one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Anybody who writes about games for a living has to believe that at some level; no matter how critical, cynical, or grumpy they might seem, they wouldn’t have gotten into this racket if they didn’t think it was important to some degree. Now, I’m not talking about bloated story-heavy games with realistic graphics that are so desperate to be from another medium that Hollywood can basically just drop them on TV or in a theater with little change to great acclaim. I mean games that can only be games—that use the language and possibilities of game design and theory to create something that isn’t possible in any other artform. You know, what you call “the good games.” There are a lot of them, and they’re good no matter where you play them—in an arcade, in your house, in a car, on a boat drifting from one ancient city to another. But I don’t always have to play them. I don’t watch a movie every day, or read a book, watch a TV show, or even always listen to music. There’s a time and place to play games, and a time and place to strike up a conversation with a group of drunken mid-period Boomers you’ve never met before who are loudly talking about the brilliant drummer Ginger Baker. If I had stayed in my room playing the Switch at night during that cruise, I wouldn’t have met a dude who was actually at The Last Waltz, and I’d be a poorer person for it.

Next time you’re preparing for a trip, consider leaving the Switch at home. It depends on context, of course—if you know you’ll be in limbo for a long period of time, in the back of a car or on a Greyhound, with almost no other way to entertain yourself, then sure, bring the game. Be the Elephant Mario. But if you’re going to an unknown city where you can explore new places and meet new people, maybe give that a shot instead of tapping those buttons your fingers already know so well. And when you do get home, and pick up the controller or the Switch for the first time in days or weeks, it’ll actually mean something this time.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.