Art can help us find ways to deal with our problems, says Lana Walters. This is the story of how her boyfriend’s online gaming addiction became an inspiration for creativity.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler or read on.
In 2013 four friends and I met at my director Trish’s flat. We had just come off the back of making a 48 hour film together that actually turned out pretty well so we wanted to brainstorm ideas for our next project.
We threw around a bunch of ideas talking about what kind of projects and shows inspired us. We all loved Girls and Breaking Bad and discussed that we were drawn to stories which depicted humans at their most desperate, where they would do drastic and often hilarious acts to attempt to fix their lives.
Springing from the theory that you should write what you know, we started sharing what struggles we faced in our own lives. My friend Suzy turned to me and asked me if I would tell the rest of the group a story I had told her about a strange night which had happened to me recently.
So I proceeded to tell them about one night when I had arrived home late around midnight after work and pulled into the driveway of the flat I lived in with my partner in Mt Albert. I was just about to hop out of the car when suddenly a man came running out of the dark and starting banging his hands on the window of my car and yelling at me. I waved my hands and yelled and him to go away not sure whether to reverse the car out of the driveway or call my partner to come out of the house.
The man had stopped banging his hands on the car and had backed away slightly. I heard his voice crack in such a way that I could hear he had been crying and he was younger than I'd initially thought.
I wound down the passenger side window and I yelled at him, “Go Away!” “Please”, he sobbed, “I just got robbed, I walked all the way from town, I’ve got so far to walk home and I’m so tired. Please can you give me a lift?”
I paused, torn between the voice in my head saying not to believe everything a strange man yelling in the middle of the night tells you, and how much he reminded me of my younger brother.
I told him: “Wait here, I want to give you a lift, but I’m gonna go get my boyfriend to come with me”. He nodded and hung his head, standing outside on my lawn.
I ran up the stairs into our flat and straight to our room where my partner was in the middle of playing the computer game League of Legends, which he liked to play a lot. Trying to calm down enough from the adrenalin coursing through me, I rapidly told him what happened.
I was just about to hop out of the car when suddenly a man came running out of the dark and starting banging his hands on the window of my car and yelling at me.
“There’s a guy outside, a teenager, he’s just been robbed, he’s crying, I want to give him a lift home, but I don’t want to go by myself, can you come with me so I feel safe?”
Trying to continue the game while he talked to me he looked up. “What?!”
“Can you please come with me now, to drop this kid off?”
He looked back at the game, struggling to continue playing. “I can’t go now, I can’t abandon the team.”
I looked at him directly making sure he was looking me in the eyes. “Are you serious?”
He looked back at me and said, “Yes, I’m serious.”
Facing such compelling logic I didn't know what else to say. I walked straight back out the front door and told the boy to get in the car. I drove him home to the far end of Hillsborough, which took around 20 minutes and would have been a miserable trek home if he'd walked.
We got on surprisingly well. I found out he was 15, he was at high school and lived at home with his parents. He’d been out with his friends that night on Queen Street and had his brand new iPhone out in Burger King. It must have been too much for envious eyes because it got snatched along with the credit cards he had tucked into the case of the phone.
All he had left was the $20 note he had in his pocket, which he knew would never get him a taxi home. He insisted he wanted to give me the $20 to thank me for the lift, but I refused - insisting he’d just lost everything and I couldn’t possibly take his money. Later after I'd dropped him off I realised he’d left the $20 on the passenger seat anyway.
Now I know what you’re all wondering at this point: did they win the computer game?
I have to admit I can’t recall.
I told the girls the gaming drove me crazy, about how I would fantasize about smashing his computer, or calling the friends he played with to ask them to cool off, or to call their girlfriends or wives to find out if they felt the same way. I thought maybe we could help each other.
If you have seen any of our web-series Game Over you will know this is the premise for the show: four girls whose boyfriends play computer games together team up to try to solve their problem and end up becoming friends in the process.
We began writing the pilot for the series, meeting after work in the evenings or weekends to flesh out the story and the characters. Then after dozens of storylines changes and quite a few false starts, we shot the pilot over a particularly long weekend.
Perhaps somewhat bizarrely, we shot a lot of the pilot in the flat I lived in with my partner, where the inspiration had sprung from. He was an excellent sport about it all, demanding authentic representation of his treasured pastime.
He completely refused the notion that a person could become addicted to computer games.
Weeks later, after being passed through various stages of post-production, we had a pilot ready to release online to try and garner Kickstarter support. After being sent the link to the video before it was released, I nervously watched it by myself and then excitedly asked my partner to sit down and watch it.
I don't know what I was expecting, I hadn't planned on creating something which would affect him but part of me felt like this was an important moment. Would he gasp in realisation? Break down in tears? Propose?
I sneaked little glances at him throughout but as usual he was unreadable.
“What did you think?” I asked him at the end.
“It was good”, he said.
“It didn’t offend you?” I asked.
“No” he said, and laughed off the suggestion. I was glad he wasn't offended, but perhaps wrongfully disappointed there hadn't been a flicker of recognition.
I was asked recently if my boyfriend had found the gaming an issue in his own life, if it was something that he struggled with, aside from my issue with it, and the answer was no.
He completely refused the notion that a person could become addicted to computer games. It was something he enjoyed and had told me honestly and clearly on several occasions that if I didn’t like being around it, I didn’t have to be with him. Which was true. I wasn't sure if I could live with it, but I didn’t know if I could live without him.
The answer came much clearer when I emerged at the end of the theatre show I thought he was in the audience for, but when I couldn’t find him in the crowd I called him to find that he’d forgotten. When I asked if he’d been playing computer games instead the phone was tellingly silent.
I was starting to consider the fact that if you make a web series about the elephant in the room and it doesn't affect the elephant, maybe it's you that needs to leave the room. So I did. I had been waiting for him to change, but he didn’t need to change. He was happy, I wasn't.
I think if I can take away anything from this, aside from the fact that trying to change people is a fool's errand, is that even though it can be awkward, sometimes when we make art about problems, it can help us find ways to deal with them.
We recently had a launch party for the web series and there were around 100 people there. We had wine and nibbles and we screened the first five episodes of the season. It was a hugely exciting evening and I was so grateful to be there alongside the beautiful women I worked with to create it and all the friends and family who supported us.
It was a bittersweet moment knowing that something that sprung out of a moment in which I felt so alone, lead to an evening where I felt so much a part of something.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held in Auckland and Wellington. If you have a story to tell email or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Daniel Blackball Alexander
This content is brought to you with funding support from NZ On Air.
