The compshop generation

I’m sorry, I can’t make it today,” he said into his phone, feigning coughing. I looked at him, my eyebrows raised. He looked at me and put a finger to his lips.

“Yes, I’m in bed right now; no, I can take care of myself.” He ended the call, put down his phone, and turned back to his monitor. Not really caring, I turned to mine.

He was neither sick nor in bed. He was in a compshop. All around us were chairs and monitors, teenagers playing Overwatch and League of Legends, the chatter of mice and the clacking of keyboards. Inoffensive pop music poured from speakers and filled the room. This was the world we occupied. Where I and countless others like me had spent hundreds of hours and thousands of pesos. Where we would immerse ourselves in virtual worlds for four to five hours a day. Where we would make our friends, fight our battles, triumph together.

This is home.

But why is this home? Why do these teenagers come here,
instead of the school or the library, or even the neighborhood bar? Who are these people who frequent this place, and
what makes them different?

For those who have never been to these places, or have only had passing glimpses of them, these questions seem unanswerable. Those who frequent compshops are often seen as addicts and losers, wasting their lives in worlds that don’t exist. They are unable to talk back, because no one understands them, and no one bothers to.

We need to have a meaningful discussion from which we can all learn about each other. For the children are the future, whether we like it or not.

When people are sad, depressed, or feel as if the world has become too much for them to handle, they turn inward, and escape into their own worlds. The alcoholic reaches for his bottle, the smoker grabs his cigarette, the gamer turns to his computer. When people can’t live in the real world, they create a new one they can live in instead.

And that’s why we turn to video games, because in life, there are no rules, only convention. There is no straightforward path to success, no goal we all strive for, there is nothing to give meaning to our existence. For most of us, there is no grand drive, no overarching vision telling us what to do and when to do it. When we wake up in the morning and go to school, it is not because we are making a conscious decision to go one step further in improving our lives; it is simply because it requires less thought, it is easier to let life carry you than to
swim against its flow.

So we escape. We create walled gardens; we populate them with people and AI, we give them rules and logic. Most importantly, we make sure that here, there is meaning. If you ask a gamer what he wants to do with his life, he will probably give a very vague and general answer, without any concrete and time-bound goals. But if you ask him what rank he wants to end at this season, he will give you a realistic, straightforward vision of what he plans his performance this season to be.

Because when he turns on his PC, he does it with a vision: This is what I want to achieve today, here is where I want to be next week. He pours himself into the game, because it is what he loves doing. He swims upstream, against the mediocrity of his teammates, against the sluggishness of his internet connection, striving to be more than what he is. Because here, he knows he can make a difference.

This is why he escapes, because the world isn’t designed to be fun, it isn’t designed to be engaging; it doesn’t come naturally, and you have to force yourself to love it. It is true that the time we spend playing computer games is time wasted. But we are not aimless and we do not direct all of our ambition into cyberspace. We all know that we cannot spend our lives playing computer games. We know that only the most ambitious and skilled of us rise above the millions of other gamers, and manage to make a living off playing computer games. We know that we will never reach those heights, that we can never rise above the throng, that the real world, no matter how harsh, is where our destinies lie.

But those who are forced to live in the real world are neither helpless nor hopeless. Because stereotypes are wrong. There are gamers who are honor students, gamers who are artists, gamers who are writers. Even those that do nothing but play video games all day have other talents and other skills. Because you never know someone until you’ve fought on the same team; and when you fight alongside gamers, you will see that like all humans, they are stronger than you could have imagined.

I believe that the time we spent playing video games was not wasted. We made friends, we fought battles, and we triumphed. Ask a gamer if he has any friends outside the country, and he will give 30 names. Ask a gamer what he did to get out of Gold, and you will see the fire in his eyes and the vitriol upon his lips as he tells a tale of triumph and woe. Ask a gamer what it means to win and he will not give an answer. For he knows that there is no such thing as permanent victory, only continued struggle, and that the more you win, the more ambitious you become.

The previous generation of gamers was not a generation of failures and addicts. They were a generation of pioneers. Using their skills and talents, they made more than just walled gardens and places to escape; they made works of art. Some of the best games ever made are the products of this generation. Bioshock, Half-Life, Portal, Skyrim — the list goes on and on; every single one of these games was made by a gamer. Every single one of them is a timeless masterpiece.

I believe that this generation will be no different. I believe that with our skills and talents, we, too, will change the world. For we are more than just gamers: We are the fire of a generation.

* * *

Juan Antonio Batnag, 17, studies at the Jose Abad Santos Memorial School in Quezon City.