Here’s the thing with crystal meth-amphetamine: you don’t feel anything when you take it. Unless one is mainlining or taking it in vast quantities, there isn’t a high, there isn’t a rush, there isn’t really any tangible quality to it - except in your perception of the world. The world slows down, allowing you to receive and interpret data received by the senses with a speed that feels positively super-human. Even though it’s always clear that this is just a mere effect of a narcotic, it doesn’t matter, because you feel faster, quicker, and much more nimble than everything around you - it’s like getting a speed powerup in any given videogame. Crystal meth-amphetamine developed the street slang of speed for a reason.
I attribute my ultimate victory over the first Knights of the Old Republic directly to meth. I’d been trying to kill the final boss of the game - Darth Malak - for months, and simply could not do it. As will be further explained at later, I have a tendency to move through some games at a quicker pace than I imagine most other people do, and as a result - especially in roleplaying games - I find that my character(s) are often weaker than they should be and ill-prepared for major, endgame-level encounters. Due to choices made during the development of the primary character, whom is the only character useable in the final encounter, Seris was incredibly weak and almost broken. I had chosen initially the stealthy Scoundrel, and then later, the wizard equivalent of an evil Jedi - paths that, in a Dungeons and Dragons setting, would have brought me success, but did not in KoToR due to the inherent weakness and incompatibility of the two character development paths.
Darth Malak must have killed Seris more than fifty times before the winter of 2004 when I’d moved into a new area and acquired a more refined taste for narcotics. I’d certainly ingested, nasally, a certain volume of the chemical compound before that fateful evening, but I hadn’t done so while playing videogames - and as soon as I tried, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t attempted it earlier.
And then it happened: on a whim, I threw my KoToR disc into my Xbox and booted up my furthest save with my room mate as audience and a near-full pack of Camel’s as food - and proceeded to completely annihilate Darth Malak on my first attempt.
The encounter with Darth Malak revolves around executing his Jedi prisoners before he lifedrains them, which restores his life. I was aware of this in previous encounters, but couldn’t quite perfect a strategy for both damaging him and removing his ability to restore his life while keeping Seris alive. The drug didn’t induce an epiphany, it didn’t bring a golden, brilliant revelation of clarity, and it certainly didn’t, on an intrinsic level, explain to me how to kill Darth Malak. What it did do was make me set aside strategic considerations and focus purely on reacting to what Malak was doing, and this enhanced reaction time allowed me to pre-empt him every time, ultimately destroying him and saving the galaxy.
As I was an evil Jedi, the galaxy was not saved, but rather enslaved under a new tyrant - Darth Seris.
The culmination of the events and chemicals of that evening brought to me an awareness of the power of enhanced and altered gaming, and the lessons learned have stuck with since the passing of five years - and I suspect will never leave me. I’ve moved past meth - recognizing the physical danger posed and addiction possibility it represents - but continue to embrace altered and enhanced gaming, albeit in an (I hope) safer fashion, preferring to avoid illegal substances almost altogether.
Meth-amphetamine usage, in retrospect, seems to be an almost natural progression of habits I’d developed when I was younger. The first game that I ever spent a genuinely enormous amount of time playing was the second American release of a Final Fantasy game - and never was a play session begun until I knew I could count on several cans of Mountain Dew or some other highly caffeinated and sugared beverage. Food was and still is never involved, as sticky controllers and keyboards continue to be a personal bane that must be avoided at all costs. Similar to my experience with the nigh-unkillable Darth Malak, I had bashed my bruised and bloodied skull against the final boss of Final Fantasy II for months without making any real progress.
As I cannot recall this day - more than a decade and a half removed from present - with any clarity and thus cannot directly attribute caffeine to victory, I also cannot ignore the impact that I’m sure that it had. If nothing else, it granted me the chemically-induced focus and level of fanatic fervor for the game that proved necessary for victory. Again similar to my later experience with KoToR, my characters as a whole were underpowered and ill-suited for the final encounter, an alien-wizard thing named Zeromus. This was made painfully clear to me as I struggled to even survive for more than a few moments of the encounter, and indeed, I could only barely manage to get to Zeromus - he was situated about ten minutes away from the final save point at the end of a difficult dungeon, and my party could not effectively kill most of the enemies found within its glassy corridors.
If one has played any of the Final Fantasy games, particularly the second American release, then they are probably aware of the importance of the spell Meteo. The final spell for any black mage, it represents the culmination of arcane mastery and is the single highest-damaging attack in the game. It was received by Rydia - the black mage of the party - when she attains a certain level. My Rydia never attained this level - in fact, at the time, I’d just assumed that Rydia never even learned the spell. This level progression doesn’t merely determine the availability of spells one can cast, but also their strength and ability to withstand punishment - and Rydia’s failure to attain a reasonable level was a systemic problem throughout the party.
And then it happened - I sat down one afternoon after school and utterly annihilated Zeromus on my first attempt. To this day, I am unaware of exactly how this feat was accomplished - I have never met another person that can claim to have beaten Final Fantasy II without having the spell Meteo. I attribute this entirely to the enhanced reaction time created by caffeine and desperation. There were lessons learned from this victory, however, and the primary lesson was even demonstrated in the fight against Darth Malak - the hardest encounters are defeated not through repetition, but rather on the first attempt after an extended pause from the game.
Perhaps fittingly, within seconds of killing Zeromus, my mother insisted I remove myself from the basement to help her with something. By the time I returned, the ending sequence of the game had completed and the cartridge returned itself to the title screen. I have never seen, in person, the ending sequence of Final Fantasy II.
The game that had perhaps the strongest singular impact on me - and ultimately demanded the complete and total refinement of previously-learned lessons - was World of Warcraft. Although some eight million people played the game during its peak, I was something of a minority - I was one of those dorks that were made fun of for spending twelve or more hours each day within the confines of the game. Although I experienced many wonderful and frustrating moments in Azeroth, there is one event that I hold above all others: the tenth time that I killed the Lord of Blackrock, Nefarian.
The nine deaths of Nefarian had been witnessed, from me, during my tenure as a member of an elite raiding guild called Demolition. Demolition was the top guild on my server, and I wound up among its ranks due to cultivating a friendship and having a brother already inside of the guild. By the time I had joined, Demolition had killed every boss in Blackwing Lair - the dungeon that Nefarian ruled - except for the Lord of Blackrock himself. Although a relatively simple encounter when looked at in the context of today’s encounters, it was complex and challenging at the time, and it took Demolition several weeks of attemp ts to defeat him. While there was certainly great rejoicing both inside the guild and among the Horde community as a whole when he was killed - the first time for the Horde on my server - I was not terribly excited or surprised. This is because it seemed that slaying Nefarian was inevitable and required only time to be invested into it, as the nature of top-tier guilds in WoW is to defeat any encounter before them (note that pre-nerf C’thun of Ahn’Quiraj is perhaps one of the major exceptions to this, but obviously not the focus of this narrative).
As a result of changes in lifestyle, I was forced to leave Demolition - I could not meet the time requirements demanded, rightfully, by the guild. I returned instead to a group of players that had recently reformed that I had known since the opening months of Warcraft - a guild now called Order of Discord. When I joined, they were progressing - slowly - through Blackwing Lair. Not having the “hardcore raid” mentality of Demolition, the roster on any given evening was seemingly random. Some nights healers would be in abundance; others saw half the volume of required healers. Of the forty people that can be in the raid group, about 20 of them were present for each raid, myself included. This has the effect of lengthening the time it takes for a guild to defeat any given encounter, due to a disparity of armor/weapon quality and awareness of encounter mechanics. After two months of slogging through Blackwing Lair, Order of Discord finally stepped onto the balcony where Nefarian had built his throne.
It’s an imposing and intimidating place. The rough stone blocks that form the walls, railings and floor panels are a dirty, depressing red, and the sky has the look of a recently-erupted volcano. The balcony is perhaps 150 yards across, and at the opposite end of the balcony from the entrance lies a great throne upon which Lord Victor Nefarius, the Lord of Blackrock, rests in human form. He sits almost lazily, his crown tipped to one side, and laughs as his minions slay your friends. And when you’re stoned, as I usually was when raiding, it’s a pretty scary image.
By the time OoD reached this balcony for the first time, it had a core group of raiders that were excellent at their jobs - but there was also a certain casual element among them, which, frankly, slowed progression greatly. The focus of OoD, however, was not progression - it was to form a cohesive social structure of friends, and in this it succeeded greatly. This is why I was able to be lit when raiding with OoD - while the substance increased my overall damage output (I actually tracked it), I tended to miss critical details and die more often - which, obviously, can be bad. Just the same, I enjoyed playing high - I found it less intensive and myself more detached, able to simply play for fun while kicking ass and taking names.
With, presumably, everyone in the raid sober, it took Demolition a month or two to slay Nefarian, and OoD managed it in a little bit more time than that - but the learning curve was far more brutal and elongated for OoD. Whereas Demolition had 35 raiders at every raid, OoD had, again, about 20 - this forced the guild to teach and gear twice as many people. For the first month, it seemed that OoD would simply never kill Nefarian - we couldn’t even defeat the first of three phases. I suspect that more people in OoD also showed up to raids in altered mental states, and one of the rogues that I mentored - Thuglord - I know for a fact never once logged on sober.
And then it happened. Order of Discord blazed through the second half of Blackwing Lair, killing each boss on the first attempt, and we arrayed our forty members on Nefarian’s balcony and triggered the encounter. For the first time, OoD successfully completed the first phase of the encounter, in which hundreds of monsters, coming from two separate doors, flood the balcony and must be killed - and we did it, inexplicably, without a single casualty. When this was completed, Nefarian turned into a gigantic black dragon and began attacking our tank, Grachuus, who angered the dragon sufficiently and moved him to an ideal position. With rogues flanking and wizards fireballing, Order of Discord threw everything they had at the beast - and killed him. Just as with Final Fantasy II and KoToR, the defeat of a major, endgame-level encounter was achieved on the first attempt of a playsession.
Of course, by the time Order of Discord had slain Nefarian, a new dungeon - and a new endboss, C’thun, whom was actually a god - had been put into the game, and we were thus no longer truly endgame.
I am still unsure if marijuana actually has a positive impact on my level of gaming expertise, even though it remains my favorite mode of playing - in addition to good beer, but that’s a constant that needs no mention. I played a rogue in World of Warcraft and was among the highest of damage-dealers in the guild, with only my jerk friends Bokike - a fireball and pyroclasting mage - and Shuzzi - a troll knifeman - able to compete with me. Pushing to the highest levels of DPS - damage per second, the metric by which damage-dealing classes are measured - required an excellent sense of timing, and to this end marijuana aided me greatly. However, it lowers situational awareness, so I found myself more likely to miss critical details - like needing a healer to remove a nasty spell from me - fairly often. As an aside, I found playing a priest - a healing class - to be impossible while high in a raid environment due to the immense level of situational awareness required and the terrible toll mistakes exact as a healer.
My development as a writer, gamer, and embracer of certain chemicals have all gone hand-in-hand, and I’m not sure that I could successfully remove any of these without directly compromising the other two. Not that I need to be in an altered state to write or to game at this point - these things usually revolve around alcohol and tobacco, making me something of a nerdy cliche - but it certainly elucidates the process and makes it more enjoyable for me. The sweeping bulk of my ideas for poetry and prose come to me while either drinking or dozing off on a couch while high, and most of my favorite gaming experiences have occurred while under one influence or another. In fact, my metric for knowing “how much is too much” is the point at which I can no longer manipulate a mouse and keyboard in the confines of a game successfully - I use this metric even when removed from gaming and at a social event where I won’t even be gaming, simply because it has allowed me to understand my body well enough to know when I’m in a comfortable place.
And then it happened: I realized that, unfortunately, playing videogames while under an influence presents something of a problem for me professionally: I tend to enjoy all media, whether it be in the form of text, film or computing, more when I’ve ingested some chemical or another. This strikes me as a loss of objectivity, and the permitting of external influences to determine my final opinion of a game. As an individual attempting to pursue a career in game criticism and academics, this could be a rather large problem. I’ve begun separating gameplay time into categories - one for pleasure, and one for semi-professional reasons, but I find this distinction troublesome. For better or worse, there seems to be only one thing to be said about this necessary distinction: it’s life; it happens.
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