After seven years, my coworkers finally fixed the arcade cabinet one of us designed back in 2017. The computer powering it got bricked in 2018 for reasons still unknown but one of our out-of-town coworkers was in town for a week and decided he’d spend his spare time fixing it up. Now it’s working again and my team has slowly begun to gravitate back towards it. It’s currently running a different version of Galaga than we all used to play, but the few interactions with it have quickly resurrected the ol’ competitive spirit of some of my coworkers in a way that I find mildly frustrating but ultimately not worth my emotional effort. I’ve got much better reasons to be frustrated with them these days and it’s not like I’ve got the time for Galaga anymore. Back when we were all playing it, there were four testers on my team. Now there’s only three and we’re doing more work than ever, so taking even half an hour out of my day to do something simple and fun like play a round or two of Galaga isn’t really something I can afford to do most days. I might have a bit more time on Fridays, given that I’m usually less productive then anyway, but I don’t think I can pursue my old records as much as I used to. I’m not even sure I want to, to be honest. Not just because of my difficulties with my coworkers, but because I’m doing a lot of learning things these days and am very aware that I have a limit. I can only learn so much on any given day–and that’s a lot less than I’d like thanks to how draining work often is–and I’ve got more important stuff to remember than enemy appearance and attack patterns in a game older than I am.

Still, it reminds me of my first few years working for this company. Back when I still believed change was possible, when the horrors of modern US politics were safeguarded by a centuries-old governmental machine, when I thought this was one of the best jobs I could get, and when so much still seemed possible. I even wrote about this arcade cabinet way back then, in 2018, and it’s so startling to see the stark difference between my attitude then and now, even when I’m finally on antidepressants and just got some rest. I don’t think that my current attitude is unearned, mind you. The last seven years have been hell for me, personally and societally, and while a lot has changed for the better, a lot has changed for worse. Just like this Galaga machine. Sure, it still runs Galaga, but it runs “Galaga 88” and no other games. This version of the classic arcade game is more or less similar, with more defined visuals, but it is also full of cheap little gimmicks and weird little flashes of mechanics that mark it as distinct from the old version of the game. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse, to be honest, in the limited time I’ve played it, but it feels like there’s been a whole lot of “change” that doesn’t actually fundamentally change anything and that everything that’s different is merely cosmetic to make it seem like it got some kind of major overhaul that it absolutely didn’t. My excellent memory for games and stuff tells me that while there’s some new colors and shapes on the screen, none of the enemies really behave any differently. All fluff, no substance. Except items. No ideas how those will impact the game yet since my instant reaction to every object on the screen is to avoid it at all costs.

Once, this arcade cabinet provided this team with a common activity to bond around. We might have all come from very different backgrounds and have very different interests, but all of us could get behind a bit of a competitive gaming. It is difficult, after all, to entirely resist the call of play when there’s no other needs to meet. It was not a constant activity and few of us gathered at once, but almost everyone played it over the course of a week and that provided us all with something to talk about when our normal conversations ran out. It was an important part of our team bonding, back when we had a book club where we talked about what it means to create things, how to discuss projects, and what it meant to be a team. Back when bonding wasn’t sitting in a circle around a table three times a week while our boss held court, our senior coworkers rambled about tangential life experiences, and I held my tongue because I was the only who didn’t think alike. Things aren’t worse now, this all-fluff-and-no-subtance arcade cabinet upgrade isn’t a metaphor for the team, but it is a reminder of back when things were different. Or maybe just when I didn’t know any better. Not all of the change has been bad, but I’m definitely no longer excited about working here, of all places. My blinders have been removed, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and the rose-tinted glasses are gone. Now I see this place through a somewhat bitter, jaded lens as I do my best to earn enough money that I can someday leave this job.

The other parallel I’m seeing here is that, back when I wrote about this arcade cabinet the first time, I was in a very different place in my mental health. I was doing better than I’d ever been before, finally feeling like I was emerging from the tulmult of my life, my depression, and my family problems. It didn’t take long after that for everything to start going to hell, though. My relationship ended (not well, but I had good reasons for ending it), my grandfather was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I began the long process of interrogating the healthiness of a lot of my relationships. It was a turning point in my life, ostensibly for the better but practically for the worse until probably very recently (and that might as well be the slogan of the last decade of my life, given how everything has gone since then). Things are maybe turning around again, if I can figure out what’s wrong with my shoulders and neck now, so it’s possible that I’ll finally climb back to that high, but I’m not sure the world around me will allow that. It’s all I can do to keep my head up, most days, so thoughts of climbing might have to wait until things are a bit more stable…