Sometimes I look at the nearly-10,000 hours I’ve poured into this game and feel a hint of the old pre-conditioned guilt set in. Sure, I could have spent that time doing other things. But I wonder: would those things have similarly-empowered me to be a better person?
When I first started playing, in December 2015, I of course was dogshit. But it didn’t matter: this was easily the most fun I’d ever had in a video game and it wasn’t even close. I think what initially drew me in was the immediate sense of depth in a hyper-focused lane, perfect for my AuDHD processing: to succeed, I had to predict a few different variable vectors procedurally bouncing around in a confined geometric space. It was like music; I intuitively understood it; I could excel at this.
Fast forward a couple of years – the monotropism was paying off. I’d practiced endlessly, honed my muscle memory in a multitude of matches, watched hundreds of YouTube videos on advanced gameplay and theory, manically dove into the subreddit for discussions on the finer points of mechanics and the “meta”…before I knew it, I could actually play competitively in an online multiplayer game for the first time in my life. It felt amazing. And for a time, it was glorious.
But, as power corrupts, I started turning ugly. I would quit in the middle of games, send vitriolic messages to complete strangers, and blame my losses and failures on everyone else. I was aware the enjoyment was getting harder and harder to sustain, but like any other addiction I lived for those highs, even as I could feel that the magical moments were becoming fewer and further apart.
Eventually, I realized – I was attached to the wrong feeling: the need to be perceived as better than others. I could no longer enjoy the game for its own sake. Okay, no problem – I just figured it was a signal that I needed more balance. I cut back, played casual mode, spent more time just vibing in free play…but more than ever I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was hollow, that it didn’t really mean anything to me anymore…that it was a waste of energy. Why was I still playing?
Around the same time, I was doing a fair bit of self-discovery, and was researching neurodivergent behavioural tendencies and experiences. One thing in particular stood out in the vein of my Rocket League journey; I’d read a comment by someone (in either an adhd or autism community, I forget which one…) that mentioned this: once they understood or became skilled at anything, they lost interest.
That resonated hard – this was an experience I’d dealt with all my life. Once I “get it” on a certain level, my desire and passion evaporate.
In this context, my feelings suddenly made sense: playing had been relegated to a comfort ritual. Not that I didn’t still enjoy the activity at a passive baseline, but the thrill of exploration, that burning curiosity, the drive to learn…had been overtaken by the desire to feel safe by doing something I was familiar with, something that had become relatively easy, a kind of…stagnation.
Armed with this self-awareness, I needed to find a way to either rediscover the joy of improving myself within the game, or fill that hole with something else that stimulates it. I happened to remember something I’d heard a pro player recommend but I’d never actually done before: watch your game replays from your teammates’ and opponents’ points of view. Sure, I thought, might as well see what it looks like to play with someone as awesome as I am, right?
No more than a couple of minutes into trying this method, I had my answer. With startling relevance it clicked into something I’d been researching: theory of mind. It turns out that my perspective of the gameplay was only one of several, and not taking this into account was immediately and obviously flawed. Over and over I saw myself through others’ eyes, making poor, selfish decisions and remaining blissfully ignorant of their cascading effects.
I may have been mechanically proficient, but higher-order teamwork like collaborative movement, awareness of others’ experience and decision-making as equally complex as my own, the ability to read people and understand them, forging connections of reciprocal behaviour – these potential psychological upgrades had eluded me. The arts of communication and relationship never occurred to me as skills I could improve, but were now opening up before me like ancient tomes of arcane knowledge, buried in traumatized neural pathways. I’d been using the game as an escape, to tune out of reality – but maybe I could use it to tune in.
As I was figuring this out, I couldn’t help but think of another favorite game from days of yore – an MMO named Dark Age of Camelot. I had long since realized the magic of that experience hadn’t been from the gameplay itself, but the friends I made along the way. Could the same be true here?
Toxic habits die hard, but I had a critical anchor – the worldview-shattering betrayal trauma of realizing that I wasn’t the arbiter of truth, an objective observer; I was an equally subjective, and equally accountable, shaper of collective experience. I was now aware of patterns I couldn’t see before, and this changed everything.
I felt like I had unlocked a superpower, that I could see the shape of what I could be – but I still had to train the muscle to respond reflexively. Using a combination of in-game customization and external modifications to reduce distractions, I was able to prioritize one thing only: understanding the connections between myself and others. It didn’t matter whether I won or lost or even played well – I just needed to generate data. I watched every replay immediately after the game, comparing my decisions with the perspective of everyone else in slow-motion scrutiny, noting the shifts in repetitive sequences, the subtle adaptations, the almost chess-like level of anticipation and response…what began to emerge was a unified, communicative rhythm…a language.
That was something I could use.
Hyperlexia presents as having an apparently-advanced expression of reading ability at a young age, but it’s essentially just a cognitively distinct method of learning involving the function of structural mimicry. This comes with pros and cons, but one of the practical advantages is that once I recognize the existence of a structure, my predictive modelling within it gets quite accurate.
So by diving into the substrate of player interaction and seeing it as a system with noticeable patterns in which to slot myself, it was like I could suddenly move fluidly in another dimension – a relational one. My Rocket League flow state was back, stronger and easier to generate than ever – and I realized that deeper connections with other people were the key. I was approaching my gameplay not with a desire to win or dominate, but to deepen my alignment with those I encountered. I now understood that the root cause of any frustration could inevitably be traced back through the chain of events to a misinterpretation on my end. I started asking for and offering feedback. I no longer knew imperfection as a threat or as failure – I knew it as opportunity. As exposed vulnerability I could share and learn from, and weave into deeper structural understanding; not just for myself, but for all. Playing the game was valuable again.
In a nutshell, I became earnestly invested in improving the experience for everyone, not only for me. The most significant grounding mechanism I used to train myself in this way of being was small but effective: start congratulating opponents for their successes. At first this was extremely difficult – in-game chat is notoriously ill-tempered and malicious, and suppressing the more competitive instincts in an anonymous battleground is like pushing a boulder uphill – but almost like a spell being cast, the effect was noticeable. The matches were getting more fun than ever. And the energy was infectious; there was a significant uptick in team-agnostic support from most lobbies I found myself occupying once I began normalizing the behaviour. In casual mode, people would stick around for multiple games – a clear indicator of a welcoming environment.
Soon it became apparent that I wasn’t just learning how to get better at a game – I was learning how to get better at people. The same drive to improve myself as a player was being instilled in a zoomed out sense. In social interactions, I observed an increasing capacity to step outside of my hypervigilance. To pause and think more often, to react less aggressively, to smooth out my nervous system’s excitability before it caused more frustration…and probably most importantly, I seemed to be more capable of understanding in lieu of judgement. I was starting to enjoy connecting and harmonizing with something bigger than myself, noticing the intrinsic value of socialization and community, and developing a growing affinity for other humans, as the internalized misanthropy that was modelled for me was gradually transmuted. I was building a kind of bottom-up structural cognitive empathy, extrapolating from a controlled microcosm to an existential level.
In a reverse-engineering sort of paradigm, I realised that in being able to shape my development at my own pace, I had kind of brute-forced my way into an openness and vulnerability that was entirely new to me. Maybe it had been building for a while – I recall a few other experiences that had seemed to offer me glimpses of this potential. But this was the first time I had intentionally taken the opportunity to gain insight into my foundational link to other people…and it worked on a universal, fractal scale.
Thanks to a longitudinal study of social behaviour through a video game about flying car soccer, I finally had the ability to generate from within myself the motivation to fill the ethical void left by religious indoctrination and deconstruction.
In conclusion, Rocket League helped me experientially verify a core principle of morality I could trust: it’s good to be good.
Mind Stuffing 