Mysterious Ramblings: Emotional attachment

October 25th of this year marked a special anniversary for me: It was 10 years ago on that day that my father was shot and killed.

In 1968, my parents were wed in a ceremony spurned by my grandfather, who couldn't stand the idea that my mother might give birth to me out of wedlock. I was born 7 months later, and my brother was born 3 years after that. Ten years nearly to the day after they were married they were divorced in a court in Florida.

My brother and I spent the next few years being shuffled between houses. My dad had us for 6 weeks straight in the summer and on alternating holidays. It was just enough to keep him relevant in our lives.

My dad and I never had the kind of relationship you'd see on television or in the movies. We never spoke about real things, and even when we did, it was fallout from a heated argument or a family tragedy.

Our lack of intimacy didn't factor in to how I felt on the day he was killed: I still felt the loss; I still feel it today. No matter what kind of relationship we had on a day to day basis, I had a life's worth of emotions tied up into his presence in the world.

How does this relate to games, actually?

This is a gaming column, so I should probably rein this in a little.

People often comment on the effect that games have on people. Oprah's doing a special on game addiction. We've all heard the stories of people committing suicide after something bad happens in the game they were playing.

I could continue, but the basic point is that people have emotional attachments to what they've created in a game. Even if these things that they've created are as ephemeral as the top score on an arcade's Asteroids machine circa 1983, people can get just as serious I did about my father, above.

Emotions can't be trivialized. You can't point to someone's obsession with Everquest and belittle his attachment to his characters simply because of context. Or at least you can't do it without expecting an appropriate emotional reaction.

Why do people get so attached to things that hold no other substance than the 1s and 0s held on some company's machine halfway around the world? Can anything be done to reduce their association with such trivial things?

No Answer, but maybe a position

I don't think that we can answer a question about the fascination with games and get away with it. The question, at that level, is such a shallow representation of the human psyche that any attempt to answer it is an insulting exercise in ignorance.

If you want to entertain thoughts of getting the general populace to disengage emotions from otherwise trivial matters, you have to objectively look at what makes those things so trivial. There are people in the world that would look at the relationship that I had with my father and wonder why I didn't cut him loose from my heart years before then. How are they the ones to judge what is truly meaningful in this world?

There are those that would argue that under any subjective lens, games are trivial enterprises. These are the same people that fail to realize that games are typically microcosms for real life, games serve as an emotional pressure valve and games have a utilitarian function in society for our armed forces and future generals. The worth assigned games by those that would argue their triviality is nothing more than an arbitrary value that holds only the context of their personal morals.

Maybe, next time

It's still worthwhile to discuss the degree of emotional attachment. If it weren't, the entire psychoanalytic profession would be destitute. If you personally experience an emotional attachment that's unhealthy to your continued existence, no matter the subject, then you need to seek help.

Characterizing a person's feelings for anything as trivial is characterizing that person as trivial. When the next "fanboi" struts in front of you and calls you a "n00b" for playing anything other than his favorite online game, maybe you'll cut him some slack. He's obviously invested some time and thought into his position. Obviously, he's invested emotion.

Me, I'm going to look at some old photos of my father and wonder what may have been had he gotten the chance to meet his grandchildren. I can't stop the emotions, and I don't think I should have to.