The Great Escape

MY NAME IS JENNIFER
There are times in life, as already expressed, where we aren’t escaping from a bad day at work or a surprise boiler replacement bill for several hundred pounds. There are times when we need to lower our heads and hide from grief, allow time to drift past us and put our minds to things other than grieving for those we have lost. Freelance journalist Jennifer Allen talks about how an almost nondescript arcade game on XBLA helped her through the hardest time of her life.

“Sometimes it’s actually the most mindless of games that can help us through a tough time. In my case it was the XBLA game Boogie Bunnies. On the surface, it was absolutely nothing special. Your typical match-three puzzler, with its ‘unique’ twist being that you had to match dancing rabbits together. I’d bought it Easter in 2008, a spontaneous purchase as I was bored that day and had some points spare. I played it for about 30 minutes before putting it aside and doing something else. I figured I might return to it at some point with my mother, as she was a big fan of puzzlers, and it was bound to be a bit of entertainment for both of us. At the time I had no idea just how pivotal it would be for our sanity in the coming weeks. Three weeks later my Dad was dead.

Witnessing the sudden death of a loved one is unbelievably traumatic, of course. It also sets your brain racing, yet makes you entirely numb, all at the same time. This is where the ability to escape from the awfulness of your situation becomes so incredibly crucial.

It might sound strange, but two days after his death I went out and bought a Wii. To me, it made perfect sense at the time – I hoped I could lose myself in it and hide. It didn’t really work. Wii Sports just felt too new and different – it felt wrong to play something that felt foreign to me. I needed the comfort of something that I’d played previously. Having said that, it couldn’t be anything that gave me too many fond memories, as I just couldn’t face my past. It needed to be something disposable, something mindless. There was also the issue that I wanted something that my mother and I could play together. Something in which we could escape.

Boogie Bunnies filled the gap perfectly. It was an intense enough game that it held our attention throughout as the action got more and more frantic the further we progressed. For the two weeks between my Dad’s death and the funeral, it was all we did in the evenings. Watching TV didn’t have the right effect – it allowed our brains to wander too much – and after full days of dealing with relatives, coroners and funeral directors, all we wanted to do was hide. Working our way through the levels of Boogie Bunnies meant that we were in control again. We weren’t spectators to the mess that our lives had become; we could change what happened in the game. Most crucially, it kept our brains in a numb state, while also passing time quickly.

Boogie Bunnies may have just been a form of denial to our situation but it was just what we needed to survive such a period of our lives. A period where time had simply stopped as we waited for the funeral. Unsurprisingly, I’ve never returned to the game since the funeral. It did its job admirably but I have no interest in ever going back to it: too many bad memories are tied to it now. I’ll never forget the impact that such a seemingly innocuous game about crazy rabbits dancing could have on my life, though.”

MORE PERSPECTIVES
PlayStation 3 Magazine’s features editor Andy Kelly thinks games work so well as an antidote to grief thanks to the power and control they give you over an imagined world.

“When something bad happens to you, it’s because you’ve lost control. After all, nobody willfully makes their own life a misery. And that’s why videogames are the perfect anathema to a cruel and senseless world. When you’re in a game, you’re in charge. You can become the most powerful element in that universe by learning and exploiting its clearly defined set of rules – while in reality you’re a slave to chance and circumstance. So that’s why videogames are so effective as a means of escape. Not only are you drawn in by the visuals, sound and storyline, but it’s a place where you set the rules.”

[Continues...]

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5