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conditioned place preference
Nov. 2nd, 2025 02:58 pm“Conditioned place preference (CPP) is a form of Pavlovian conditioning used to measure the motivational effects of objects or experiences. This motivation comes from the pleasurable aspect of the experience, so that the brain can be reminded of the context that surrounded the encounter.”
Nostalgia has dominated my life since as far back as I can remember. I imagine this might be true for everyone to some extent, but my extent feels extreme to the extreme. I have a deep, almost unhealthy fondness for times long past, always have. Carefree childhood summers playing PS1 role-playing games at my grandma’s house. Super Smash Bros. competitions in the basements of suburbia. Staying up all night with a good friend in the same room playing our own separate games on our own separate television sets, having our own separate but shared experiences, just talking and laughing and having a good time. Cozying up in front of my old Dell XPS with a Diet Cherry Cola and some pretzels, playing online games from sunrise to sunset, curtains drawn, enveloped in the glow of warm orange lamplight, losing myself completely in those games, the ego falling away, as if I didn’t really exist in the physical realm but in the digital one. That sort of thing. I long to return to these situations, situations I could never possibly return to, so I chase the feeling, try to recreate it. I foster atmospheres redolent of times and places long gone. I do this through carefully controlled lighting, surrounding myself with certain material things, listening to music I used to listen to during those little epochs, and, most of all, playing the video games I enjoyed as a child and young adult. Video games elicit the strongest sense of nostalgia for me. If I had to analyze it scientifically, I’m guessing the medium’s mixture of aural, visual, and physical stimuli releases the most dopamine or something. I spent so much of my youth in front of a screen that my eyes are like permanently tattooed with a glowing box. I associate epochs of my life with certain video games, and I chase these video games relentlessly, meaning I replay them over and over, pretending I’m back there, pretending I’m feeling the feelings I once felt, as if no time has passed at all. For me, nostalgia is like a cheap time machine, one that has no forward option, only back, and when it takes me back, everything is faded, like I’m sort of phased out, relegated to a background plane, unable to truly interface with what I’m experiencing, but it feels good, so I keep doing it, as if nostalgia is like a CAT-1 controlled substance injected straight into the eyeballs that produces a withdrawal so wicked that I have to keep doing more and more just to feel a slight semblance of whatever it was I felt the first time. I cultivate situations reminiscent of old situations thereby creating new situations based on old situations that are never as good as the original situations but they're better than nothing so I keep doing it. Nostalgia, for me, is like a killer of new joys. I am averse to new things because they do not elicit the same nostalgic dopamine response as old things. There is something biologically harsh about all of this, something having to do with the brain and chemicals and questions of free will that I don’t like to analyze too deeply. I say things like, “I know this is a boomer thing to say, but games are actually much worse than they used to be,” pretending that my self-deprecation backs up the claim, when in reality I lack the knowledge to back up the claim because I have not actually played a new game in like five years. The last five games I’ve played are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VIII, Chrono Cross, Pokémon Crystal, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, all of which I associate with the elysian fields of my youth, blissful meadows wherein I popped Adderall recreationally to get euphorically lost in the games. I was prescribed Adderall from age 10 to 20. Adderall made me feel like I was part of the game’s world, like I was actually the hero holding the sword and casting the magicks and saving the world. Nothing else was important when I took Adderall. For most of my childhood, I was a character in a video game. I developed a fondness for digital places and things. My nostalgia is not linked to fields and meadows in the real world, but fields and meadows in the virtual plane. I feel as if this is a big problem but can’t quite place my finger on why. I cannot help but think this is a uniquely twenty-first-century problem, what with so many digital worlds available to get lost in. There’s also something incredibly sad and consumeristic about the whole thing, because it means that so much of my nostalgia is branded with corporate logos. Nintendo, Sony, The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, Apple, Electronic Arts, SEGA, and most of all, Square Enix.
“Amphetamine has been shown to produce a conditioned place preference in humans taking therapeutic doses, meaning that individuals acquire a preference for spending time in places where they have previously used amphetamine.”
Out of all the games I have ever played, Final Fantasy XI, developed and published by Square Enix, produces the strongest nostalgic response for me. Final Fantasy XI is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game released back in 2003, and I’ve been playing it on and off since then. I must have been 12 years old when I first installed the game on the Dell-whatever PC that my mom bought and so naively placed in my childhood bedroom. My first character’s name was “Butterfly,” a lanky male Elvaan with jagged, chin-length black hair. I remember this vividly. Back then, I was taking Adderall in therapeutic doses as prescribed by the pediatric psychiatrist. It was thought that Adderall would improve my ability to focus in school, but all it did was improve my ability to focus on video games. I remember the game launcher, the PlayOnline Viewer, would boot up to some of the most sublime free jazz I had ever heard. Music so powerful that, even thirty years later, hearing it instantly makes me want to play Final Fantasy XI again, like some sort of Pavlovian response. The massive, bustling world of Vana’diel blew my little adolescent brain with its dense forests and rolling meadows and arid cliffs and windy grasslands full of windmills and monsters and beastmen who lingered just outside the sprawling cities wherein actual people behind their virtual fantasy avatars congregated at the fountains and auction houses, wearing their subligars and lizard jerkins and scorpion harnesses and haubergeons, their scimitars and staves and zaghnals and baghnakhs and halberds all tightened to their backs or clipped to their belts or whatever. Massive airships would fly over the cities, taking players wherever they needed to go, which was an absolutely breathtaking spectacle, and a technical marvel when you consider that people were actually up there on those airships. I remember I would stand in the markets of Bastok and just watch in awe as high-level players walked by, hoping that one day, with enough effort, I would be powerful and cool just like them. The pastoral, grounded soundtrack working its way into my undeveloped brain the whole time, tattooing itself there, ensuring that, in the future, whenever I heard the music, no matter where I was in life, I would be instantly transported back there, mentally. But back then, when I was 12, I had no idea how to actually play the game, spending most of my time fishing in the waterways of Bastok and getting myself killed by the giant turtle-men living in the Gustaberg region, all while, unbeknownst to my young self, the game was altering the fundamental chemistry of my brain, forming bonds with my neurons, landscaping the groundwork for all my future gaming aesthetic preferences.
“... dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens have been found to be elevated when rats are placed in the drug-paired environment, compared to the non-drug-paired environment.”
It wasn't until I was like 15 or so that I understood the basics of Final Fantasy XI. My stepdad had moved my mom and me to a fancy island resort primarily inhabited by old rich guys, meaning there were barely any kids around, meaning I had no friends, meaning I spent a lot of time playing games. It was around this time that I started abusing Adderall, hiding pills that were supposed to be taken before school and taking them after I got home, because I was now old enough to realize that this amphetamine stuff was like psychic gold, so I was using it to induce a sort of euphoric trance when playing Final Fantasy XI. I had created a new character named “Einhander,” who was also an Elvaan but had the spiky orange bowl cut. That epoch of my life must have lasted about a whole year, although the exact timeline is hazy. I remember I was listening to a lot of The Police, The Smiths, and Sting back then, and now those songs are like Pavlovian triggers, tempting reminders of Final Fantasy XI. But despite taking Adderall, which improves focus, I was rather unfocused in my approach to the game, leveling jobs up to 30 or 40 or so but then getting bored and switching to another job, only to repeat the process. And back then, leveling a job to 40 was a big deal, a big time-consuming deal, because not only were experience points divided out in very small amounts and traveling the world took literal hours from point A to point B, but also the early era of the game was all about community, meaning you couldn’t solo your way to level 30, you had to find a party of six other real people who had at least three hours to burn, and this party-finding process was often long in and of itself, involving at least an hour of shouting in town or whatever for a party, and sometimes you would go whole days without finding a party. For me, this process looked like the following, get home from school around 4, make myself some Easy Mac, eat the Easy Mac, stock up on Diet Cherry Cola, boot up my PC, stand around Jeuno looking for a party until around 6, get in a party, kill monsters for like 7 hours, get to bed around 3 in the morning or later, go to school the next day pretty much braindead, fall asleep in most of my classes, get home from school around 4, Easy Mac, Diet Cherry Cola, boot up the PC, and so on. The game’s community-minded ethos lent itself to making the world of Vana’Diel feel like a living, breathing world in which you got to know the residents because you were basically forced to, and this was one of the core draws of the game. Back then, Final Fantasy XI felt like a second life because you had to make it your second life, otherwise you wouldn't make any progress. In hindsight, this game-design philosophy is insidious, because it was clearly built around milking as much money from the player as possible, because the game has a monthly subscription fee, so the longer Square Enix can make you play, whether through entertaining means or grueling means, the more money they stand to make from you. And Final Fantasy XI is not unique in this way, this applies to pretty much all MMORPGs, as they’re all built around artificial roadblocks and harsh time constraints designed specifically to maximize profit. But of course, back then, being 15 years old and addicted to amphetamines, I didn’t analyze it in this way, I only wanted to be the coolest Red Mage on the server, which was something I didn’t achieve until years later after taking a long, long break, mostly because my Dad cracked down on me pretty hard and even sent me to military camp one summer, to correct my unfocused, juvenile behavior.
“Most drugs of abuse elicit a Conditioned Place Preference in rats and mice, and the neural substrates of these effects can often be traced to the mesolimbic DA system.”
At some point shortly after high school, when I was working at the animal shelter, a good friend of mine expressed some interest in getting into MMORPGs and asked me for my recommendation. He initially brought up World of Warcraft, which I had played for a bit back in high school but never really got sucked in, so I told him no, fuck that game, you should play Final Fantasy XI instead, it’s quite possibly the best video game ever made. And just like that, we were playing Final Fantasy XI together. I must have been like 18 or 19 or something, and for all intents and purposes I was pretty much a meth head, speed freak, tweaker, whatever you want to call it, because I was hardcore into Adderall. I also had a semi-serious girlfriend, and my mom was paying for me to go to college. But the moment my friend and I started playing Final Fantasy XI, all that stuff took a backseat, because suddenly my life was all about Vana’Diel. I had forgotten the account details to my old Einhander account, so I made a new account with a new character named “Ashleh,” and I would pretend I was an in-real-life girl in the game for some reason, which was kind of an eye-opening experience because guys truly do treat you completely different when they believe you’re a girl, even online. Anyway, my friend would come over with his laptop, pop one of my Adderalls, and we’d both be up until the wee hours of the morning playing Final Fantasy XI and drinking Diet Cherry Cola. Sometimes we’d take short breaks from the game to smoke cigarettes out on my porch, and during these breaks we’d have some of the best conversations in the world. Philosophical conversations. Gaming conversations. Absurd conversations. Philosophically absurd gaming conversations. So many inside jokes were cultivated during this period, many of which still persist between us to this day. WERMZ. WHERE U GET SWARD? Zerva was always trying to get virtually laid by female players in-game. And when my friend left, I’d play all day and night in my room. I skipped college classes, eventually dropping out. I showed up late for work every day because I could never get up on time, and eventually I just stopped showing up. I hesitate to say this, but I was in love with Final Fantasy XI, as much as a human being could love a video game, at least. My identity was intrinsically tied to the game. If something took time away from me playing the game, I would become irrationally upset in an almost drug-withdrawal-like way, like I would become dejected and fuming and just monstrous to be around. I had thrown everything away for love of the game, and it wasn’t until my girlfriend dumped my ass that I realized I had a serious fucking problem, at which point my life was already in total shambles, with only a level 90 Samurai and a blue-colored chocobo to show for it.
“In the standard conditioned place preference procedure, when the unconditioned stimulus is rewarding, rodents will be more likely to approach the compartment that contains cues associated with it. Alternatively, when the unconditioned stimulus is aversive, rodents will be more likely to escape and avoid the compartment that contains cues associated with it.”
Since then, I’ve stopped taking Adderall. I’ve gotten married. I’ve had two kids. I’ve learned to balance my obsessions with my responsibilities in a semi-manageable way. I’ve grown up. And I’ve also played Final Fantasy XI on and off, here and there, every few years. I’ve played it so much, in fact, that Ashleh is now level 99 in most jobs and I’ve got a bunch of colorful chocobos and my Mog House is full of awesome furniture. I’ve played the game so much that the epochs of my life could probably be categorized into “Was Playing Final Fantasy XI” and “Was Not Playing Final Fantasy XI.” Last time I checked, according to the in-game playtime tracker, I’ve played the game for a total of 103 days, 30 hours, and 15 minutes. That is not like “in-universe time,” that is real-world time. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve played the game a lot. And I’ve learned how to gracefully interweave playing the game with tending to my adult responsibilities quite well. I have compensated, adapted, if you will. Yet whenever I play Final Fantasy XI now, despite having grown up, I am always cognizant of the fact that I am sacrificing something else. My focus shifts ever so slightly. Something is always neglected when playing Final Fantasy XI, be it spending time with my kids or work or writing or other games or reading or whatever. Final Fantasy XI becomes my second life every time. Time must always be made for the game. It is almost like, with Final Fantasy XI, I cannot have more than two things going on in my life at once, Final Fantasy XI being one of those two things. And this scares me. It really does. It scares me so much that I haven’t played the game since March 23, 2023. Yes, I know the exact date. That’s how much it scares me.
So, when my friend from high school texted me on Halloween 2025, expressing interest in getting back into Final Fantasy XI, I was both scared to death and excited as hell, because despite knowing the game’s design philosophy is predatory, despite knowing that it has branded my nostalgia with some gross corporate logo, despite knowing that the main reason I like the game so much is probably due to some conditioned-place-preference response, despite knowing that I’ve fucked up my life by playing the game in the past, I still love the game for some reason. The game has like mutated itself into my DNA somehow. And now, faced with the temptation to play Final Fantasy XI once more, there is this internal conflict playing out in my mind. A shoulder-devil, shoulder-angel situation. I worry that I won’t be able to make time for my writing. I worry that I might skimp on my work. I worry that every second not playing the game will once again feel like some excruciatingly long prelude to playing the game. I worry that I won’t spend as much time with my kids. I worry that I’ll become so focused on playing just this one game that I won’t play anything else. And then I start telling myself stuff like who cares about playing other games, it’s all stupid entertainment anyway, why do I need to collect new memories of new stupid entertainments, why not just make new memories of old stupid entertainments, what’s the difference? And of course, I’ll give myself a strict schedule, I’ll only play Final Fantasy XI every other night on the weekdays, focus on my writing on the nights I’m not playing, and I’ll spend every weekend afternoon writing instead of playing, and I’ll never play the game when my kids are awake to ensure I spend as much time with them as possible, and I will strictly enforce this schedule and stick to the path and not stray, because I am a grown man with adult responsibilities and free will.
And just like that, I am flushed with dopamine, listening to some of the most sublime free jazz you have ever heard in your life.
Nostalgia has dominated my life since as far back as I can remember. I imagine this might be true for everyone to some extent, but my extent feels extreme to the extreme. I have a deep, almost unhealthy fondness for times long past, always have. Carefree childhood summers playing PS1 role-playing games at my grandma’s house. Super Smash Bros. competitions in the basements of suburbia. Staying up all night with a good friend in the same room playing our own separate games on our own separate television sets, having our own separate but shared experiences, just talking and laughing and having a good time. Cozying up in front of my old Dell XPS with a Diet Cherry Cola and some pretzels, playing online games from sunrise to sunset, curtains drawn, enveloped in the glow of warm orange lamplight, losing myself completely in those games, the ego falling away, as if I didn’t really exist in the physical realm but in the digital one. That sort of thing. I long to return to these situations, situations I could never possibly return to, so I chase the feeling, try to recreate it. I foster atmospheres redolent of times and places long gone. I do this through carefully controlled lighting, surrounding myself with certain material things, listening to music I used to listen to during those little epochs, and, most of all, playing the video games I enjoyed as a child and young adult. Video games elicit the strongest sense of nostalgia for me. If I had to analyze it scientifically, I’m guessing the medium’s mixture of aural, visual, and physical stimuli releases the most dopamine or something. I spent so much of my youth in front of a screen that my eyes are like permanently tattooed with a glowing box. I associate epochs of my life with certain video games, and I chase these video games relentlessly, meaning I replay them over and over, pretending I’m back there, pretending I’m feeling the feelings I once felt, as if no time has passed at all. For me, nostalgia is like a cheap time machine, one that has no forward option, only back, and when it takes me back, everything is faded, like I’m sort of phased out, relegated to a background plane, unable to truly interface with what I’m experiencing, but it feels good, so I keep doing it, as if nostalgia is like a CAT-1 controlled substance injected straight into the eyeballs that produces a withdrawal so wicked that I have to keep doing more and more just to feel a slight semblance of whatever it was I felt the first time. I cultivate situations reminiscent of old situations thereby creating new situations based on old situations that are never as good as the original situations but they're better than nothing so I keep doing it. Nostalgia, for me, is like a killer of new joys. I am averse to new things because they do not elicit the same nostalgic dopamine response as old things. There is something biologically harsh about all of this, something having to do with the brain and chemicals and questions of free will that I don’t like to analyze too deeply. I say things like, “I know this is a boomer thing to say, but games are actually much worse than they used to be,” pretending that my self-deprecation backs up the claim, when in reality I lack the knowledge to back up the claim because I have not actually played a new game in like five years. The last five games I’ve played are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy VIII, Chrono Cross, Pokémon Crystal, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, all of which I associate with the elysian fields of my youth, blissful meadows wherein I popped Adderall recreationally to get euphorically lost in the games. I was prescribed Adderall from age 10 to 20. Adderall made me feel like I was part of the game’s world, like I was actually the hero holding the sword and casting the magicks and saving the world. Nothing else was important when I took Adderall. For most of my childhood, I was a character in a video game. I developed a fondness for digital places and things. My nostalgia is not linked to fields and meadows in the real world, but fields and meadows in the virtual plane. I feel as if this is a big problem but can’t quite place my finger on why. I cannot help but think this is a uniquely twenty-first-century problem, what with so many digital worlds available to get lost in. There’s also something incredibly sad and consumeristic about the whole thing, because it means that so much of my nostalgia is branded with corporate logos. Nintendo, Sony, The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft, Apple, Electronic Arts, SEGA, and most of all, Square Enix.
“Amphetamine has been shown to produce a conditioned place preference in humans taking therapeutic doses, meaning that individuals acquire a preference for spending time in places where they have previously used amphetamine.”
Out of all the games I have ever played, Final Fantasy XI, developed and published by Square Enix, produces the strongest nostalgic response for me. Final Fantasy XI is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game released back in 2003, and I’ve been playing it on and off since then. I must have been 12 years old when I first installed the game on the Dell-whatever PC that my mom bought and so naively placed in my childhood bedroom. My first character’s name was “Butterfly,” a lanky male Elvaan with jagged, chin-length black hair. I remember this vividly. Back then, I was taking Adderall in therapeutic doses as prescribed by the pediatric psychiatrist. It was thought that Adderall would improve my ability to focus in school, but all it did was improve my ability to focus on video games. I remember the game launcher, the PlayOnline Viewer, would boot up to some of the most sublime free jazz I had ever heard. Music so powerful that, even thirty years later, hearing it instantly makes me want to play Final Fantasy XI again, like some sort of Pavlovian response. The massive, bustling world of Vana’diel blew my little adolescent brain with its dense forests and rolling meadows and arid cliffs and windy grasslands full of windmills and monsters and beastmen who lingered just outside the sprawling cities wherein actual people behind their virtual fantasy avatars congregated at the fountains and auction houses, wearing their subligars and lizard jerkins and scorpion harnesses and haubergeons, their scimitars and staves and zaghnals and baghnakhs and halberds all tightened to their backs or clipped to their belts or whatever. Massive airships would fly over the cities, taking players wherever they needed to go, which was an absolutely breathtaking spectacle, and a technical marvel when you consider that people were actually up there on those airships. I remember I would stand in the markets of Bastok and just watch in awe as high-level players walked by, hoping that one day, with enough effort, I would be powerful and cool just like them. The pastoral, grounded soundtrack working its way into my undeveloped brain the whole time, tattooing itself there, ensuring that, in the future, whenever I heard the music, no matter where I was in life, I would be instantly transported back there, mentally. But back then, when I was 12, I had no idea how to actually play the game, spending most of my time fishing in the waterways of Bastok and getting myself killed by the giant turtle-men living in the Gustaberg region, all while, unbeknownst to my young self, the game was altering the fundamental chemistry of my brain, forming bonds with my neurons, landscaping the groundwork for all my future gaming aesthetic preferences.
“... dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens have been found to be elevated when rats are placed in the drug-paired environment, compared to the non-drug-paired environment.”
It wasn't until I was like 15 or so that I understood the basics of Final Fantasy XI. My stepdad had moved my mom and me to a fancy island resort primarily inhabited by old rich guys, meaning there were barely any kids around, meaning I had no friends, meaning I spent a lot of time playing games. It was around this time that I started abusing Adderall, hiding pills that were supposed to be taken before school and taking them after I got home, because I was now old enough to realize that this amphetamine stuff was like psychic gold, so I was using it to induce a sort of euphoric trance when playing Final Fantasy XI. I had created a new character named “Einhander,” who was also an Elvaan but had the spiky orange bowl cut. That epoch of my life must have lasted about a whole year, although the exact timeline is hazy. I remember I was listening to a lot of The Police, The Smiths, and Sting back then, and now those songs are like Pavlovian triggers, tempting reminders of Final Fantasy XI. But despite taking Adderall, which improves focus, I was rather unfocused in my approach to the game, leveling jobs up to 30 or 40 or so but then getting bored and switching to another job, only to repeat the process. And back then, leveling a job to 40 was a big deal, a big time-consuming deal, because not only were experience points divided out in very small amounts and traveling the world took literal hours from point A to point B, but also the early era of the game was all about community, meaning you couldn’t solo your way to level 30, you had to find a party of six other real people who had at least three hours to burn, and this party-finding process was often long in and of itself, involving at least an hour of shouting in town or whatever for a party, and sometimes you would go whole days without finding a party. For me, this process looked like the following, get home from school around 4, make myself some Easy Mac, eat the Easy Mac, stock up on Diet Cherry Cola, boot up my PC, stand around Jeuno looking for a party until around 6, get in a party, kill monsters for like 7 hours, get to bed around 3 in the morning or later, go to school the next day pretty much braindead, fall asleep in most of my classes, get home from school around 4, Easy Mac, Diet Cherry Cola, boot up the PC, and so on. The game’s community-minded ethos lent itself to making the world of Vana’Diel feel like a living, breathing world in which you got to know the residents because you were basically forced to, and this was one of the core draws of the game. Back then, Final Fantasy XI felt like a second life because you had to make it your second life, otherwise you wouldn't make any progress. In hindsight, this game-design philosophy is insidious, because it was clearly built around milking as much money from the player as possible, because the game has a monthly subscription fee, so the longer Square Enix can make you play, whether through entertaining means or grueling means, the more money they stand to make from you. And Final Fantasy XI is not unique in this way, this applies to pretty much all MMORPGs, as they’re all built around artificial roadblocks and harsh time constraints designed specifically to maximize profit. But of course, back then, being 15 years old and addicted to amphetamines, I didn’t analyze it in this way, I only wanted to be the coolest Red Mage on the server, which was something I didn’t achieve until years later after taking a long, long break, mostly because my Dad cracked down on me pretty hard and even sent me to military camp one summer, to correct my unfocused, juvenile behavior.
“Most drugs of abuse elicit a Conditioned Place Preference in rats and mice, and the neural substrates of these effects can often be traced to the mesolimbic DA system.”
At some point shortly after high school, when I was working at the animal shelter, a good friend of mine expressed some interest in getting into MMORPGs and asked me for my recommendation. He initially brought up World of Warcraft, which I had played for a bit back in high school but never really got sucked in, so I told him no, fuck that game, you should play Final Fantasy XI instead, it’s quite possibly the best video game ever made. And just like that, we were playing Final Fantasy XI together. I must have been like 18 or 19 or something, and for all intents and purposes I was pretty much a meth head, speed freak, tweaker, whatever you want to call it, because I was hardcore into Adderall. I also had a semi-serious girlfriend, and my mom was paying for me to go to college. But the moment my friend and I started playing Final Fantasy XI, all that stuff took a backseat, because suddenly my life was all about Vana’Diel. I had forgotten the account details to my old Einhander account, so I made a new account with a new character named “Ashleh,” and I would pretend I was an in-real-life girl in the game for some reason, which was kind of an eye-opening experience because guys truly do treat you completely different when they believe you’re a girl, even online. Anyway, my friend would come over with his laptop, pop one of my Adderalls, and we’d both be up until the wee hours of the morning playing Final Fantasy XI and drinking Diet Cherry Cola. Sometimes we’d take short breaks from the game to smoke cigarettes out on my porch, and during these breaks we’d have some of the best conversations in the world. Philosophical conversations. Gaming conversations. Absurd conversations. Philosophically absurd gaming conversations. So many inside jokes were cultivated during this period, many of which still persist between us to this day. WERMZ. WHERE U GET SWARD? Zerva was always trying to get virtually laid by female players in-game. And when my friend left, I’d play all day and night in my room. I skipped college classes, eventually dropping out. I showed up late for work every day because I could never get up on time, and eventually I just stopped showing up. I hesitate to say this, but I was in love with Final Fantasy XI, as much as a human being could love a video game, at least. My identity was intrinsically tied to the game. If something took time away from me playing the game, I would become irrationally upset in an almost drug-withdrawal-like way, like I would become dejected and fuming and just monstrous to be around. I had thrown everything away for love of the game, and it wasn’t until my girlfriend dumped my ass that I realized I had a serious fucking problem, at which point my life was already in total shambles, with only a level 90 Samurai and a blue-colored chocobo to show for it.
“In the standard conditioned place preference procedure, when the unconditioned stimulus is rewarding, rodents will be more likely to approach the compartment that contains cues associated with it. Alternatively, when the unconditioned stimulus is aversive, rodents will be more likely to escape and avoid the compartment that contains cues associated with it.”
Since then, I’ve stopped taking Adderall. I’ve gotten married. I’ve had two kids. I’ve learned to balance my obsessions with my responsibilities in a semi-manageable way. I’ve grown up. And I’ve also played Final Fantasy XI on and off, here and there, every few years. I’ve played it so much, in fact, that Ashleh is now level 99 in most jobs and I’ve got a bunch of colorful chocobos and my Mog House is full of awesome furniture. I’ve played the game so much that the epochs of my life could probably be categorized into “Was Playing Final Fantasy XI” and “Was Not Playing Final Fantasy XI.” Last time I checked, according to the in-game playtime tracker, I’ve played the game for a total of 103 days, 30 hours, and 15 minutes. That is not like “in-universe time,” that is real-world time. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve played the game a lot. And I’ve learned how to gracefully interweave playing the game with tending to my adult responsibilities quite well. I have compensated, adapted, if you will. Yet whenever I play Final Fantasy XI now, despite having grown up, I am always cognizant of the fact that I am sacrificing something else. My focus shifts ever so slightly. Something is always neglected when playing Final Fantasy XI, be it spending time with my kids or work or writing or other games or reading or whatever. Final Fantasy XI becomes my second life every time. Time must always be made for the game. It is almost like, with Final Fantasy XI, I cannot have more than two things going on in my life at once, Final Fantasy XI being one of those two things. And this scares me. It really does. It scares me so much that I haven’t played the game since March 23, 2023. Yes, I know the exact date. That’s how much it scares me.
So, when my friend from high school texted me on Halloween 2025, expressing interest in getting back into Final Fantasy XI, I was both scared to death and excited as hell, because despite knowing the game’s design philosophy is predatory, despite knowing that it has branded my nostalgia with some gross corporate logo, despite knowing that the main reason I like the game so much is probably due to some conditioned-place-preference response, despite knowing that I’ve fucked up my life by playing the game in the past, I still love the game for some reason. The game has like mutated itself into my DNA somehow. And now, faced with the temptation to play Final Fantasy XI once more, there is this internal conflict playing out in my mind. A shoulder-devil, shoulder-angel situation. I worry that I won’t be able to make time for my writing. I worry that I might skimp on my work. I worry that every second not playing the game will once again feel like some excruciatingly long prelude to playing the game. I worry that I won’t spend as much time with my kids. I worry that I’ll become so focused on playing just this one game that I won’t play anything else. And then I start telling myself stuff like who cares about playing other games, it’s all stupid entertainment anyway, why do I need to collect new memories of new stupid entertainments, why not just make new memories of old stupid entertainments, what’s the difference? And of course, I’ll give myself a strict schedule, I’ll only play Final Fantasy XI every other night on the weekdays, focus on my writing on the nights I’m not playing, and I’ll spend every weekend afternoon writing instead of playing, and I’ll never play the game when my kids are awake to ensure I spend as much time with them as possible, and I will strictly enforce this schedule and stick to the path and not stray, because I am a grown man with adult responsibilities and free will.
And just like that, I am flushed with dopamine, listening to some of the most sublime free jazz you have ever heard in your life.
