You Don’t Have To Be Like Elon Musk, Embrace Sucking At Games

I swear to god I wanted to write about the Star Trek Deep Space 9 episode “The Visitor” but when gaming news breaks containment so much my dad texts me about it, I take it as a sign that it’s worth covering.

Elon Musk, former richest man in the world and current most divorced man alive, has been accused by Path of Exile 2 players of having his account boosted.

(For my dad, who reads this newsletter: yes it’s a thing in games for people to grind an account to a high level and then sell access to the account online. It’s cheating but it’s not something Musk invented.)

Assuming Musk did, in fact, pay someone else to play games for him so he could brag to people on Twitter about being the best gamer ever, he probably did it because -- for large portions of the gaming community -- being a “gamer” isn’t just being someone who enjoys games, it’s someone who’s good at them.

People pride themselves on being able to throw themselves at challenges and overcome them and will often brag about how many hours they put into memorizing a boss’s attack pattern.

And I just want to say:

Don’t think not being able to do that means you’re a fake gamer. You don’t have to do that to yourself. Games are expensive, and they take a lot of time, and it’s not worth wasting what precious time you have on this Earth getting a number to go up.

I’ve played Overwatch 2 exactly once because a friend asked if I wanted to play, so I sped through the tutorial and then proceeded to be probably the worst healer on any team that day.

And you know what it was fun! I got to chat with my friends on Discord. I got good enough at Lucio to figure out when to have the healing field up.

Never let sucking get in the way of enjoying yourself.

I think people who can beat Soulslikes are really impressive. They demonstrate an amount of patience that I do not possess for combat and good for them.

But don’t let assholes convince you that’s the only thing that matters for being a gamer. You can put 500 hours into Animal Crossing and be just as messed up as the rest of us.

If you’re getting frustrated playing a game because you’ve been fighting the same boss for an hour and instead of feeling invigorated to solve this puzzle, you want to break something in half, take a step back look in the mirror, and then lower the difficulty.

Or play a new game. Come on, be honest, how long is your backlog? Do you want to prove your gaming cred to an imaginary audience of people on the internet, or do you want to do something that you find fun and engaging? 

The two games I’m most excited for (assuming they come out this year) are Pokemon Legends: Z-A, the latest game in a franchise for literal children that hasn’t changed its core formula in almost 30 years, and Fantasy Life i, the sequel to a game where my brother and I cleared a high-level dungeon with the best pro-gamer strats our 11- and 13-year-old brains could think of:  “run away and avoid any monsters we can and then abuse potions and healing spells against the ones we have to fight.”

We need to bring back playing games to have fun instead of playing them to “git gud.” We need to bring back sucking at games and not having that be disqualifying. We need to make the point of games actually playing them and having fun, and respecting when what sparks joy is different for other people.

This goes for reviewers too. I don’t think reviewers should have to play through an entire 100+ hour game for their opinions to be valid.

(I mean I think, like any other academic work, if you’re offering an in-depth critique of something you should actually play it, but if it’s a “should you buy this game” type of deal, that’s not much more complex than “did I enjoy it,” so it’s not that big of deal.)

There are a lot of games out there man. We literally do not have to do this.

If someone says they spent tons of hours in a game, let’s just say “oh cool, sounds like you had fun,” and leave it at that. It doesn’t make them any better or worse than someone who played a 12-hour game and moved on.

And if we can’t do this for the sake of making a healthy gaming ecosystem, can we at least do it so we don’t have to deal with Elon Musk allegedly trying to prove he’s one of the cool kids every couple of months by showing off his builds?

Can we all agree on that?