The Ninth Art

I

The year that my mom set a password on my iPad, I was ten. “This thing will ruin you,” she said. 

It was around 2017. I remember that on TV, a documentary kept saying “video games turned our genius kids into monsters,” an online advertisement against the newly rising video game industry, where the video game World of Warcraft (2004) was translated to “World of Magic Monster” on Chinese social media. The documentary was about a doctor named Yongxin Yang, a psychiatrist at the Linyi Mental Hospital in Shandong. He had opened an “internet addiction treatment center” and developed something he called “mind awakening therapy.” Parents sent their children there for “internet addiction,” a term broad enough to include gaming, online friendships, staying up late, poor grades, or becoming impossible for their parents to control. The treatment involved attaching electrodes to children's temples and fingers and sending electrical currents through their brain. 

Yang claimed the current was only 1 to 5 milliamps, safe and painless. But former patients told a different story. “The feeling was like sticking a knitting needle through one temple and out the other,” one wrote, seeing only “snow, like watching television without a signal.” Some said the current reached 40 milliamps. One boy’s skin was burned around his temple when he left the treatment bed. 

The treatment took place in a room called room 13. When patients broke rules, like trying to escape or questioning authority, they were sent to Room 13. Held down by multiple men, they received shocks without warning. The goal, Yang explained, was to make them “uncomfortable.” The child had to experience something unpleasant for the treatment to work. 

But none of this appeared in the news report I saw as a child. 

What I saw, on the official channel CCTV, was something else: a story about saving children from the grips of video games. Yang was presented as a hero. He smiled for the cameras while describing his methods, smiled while standing in front of Room 13, smiled as patients’ parents knelt before him in gratitude. The program showed the kneeling scenes: parents bowing, children bowing, Yang accepting their thanks like a savior. It was presented as evidence of his success. 

The message was clear, even as a 10 year-old I could get the message and purpose that the producer conveyed: games are bad. They don’t just waste your time; they are a disease, a disease so terrible that doctors must use electroshock to cure it. In children’s perceptions, if your parents send you there, you are over.

I was 10. I watched this on the same television that also showed cartoons. I didn’t know what to believe.

Around that time, someone told a joke. I still remember it because it was ridiculously funny, and also because so many people seemed to believe it was true: “American children don’t play games. They make games and then let Chinese children play.”

Games were perceived as a trap. They were something the West built to weaken us, to waste our young generation while their own kids learned to code. I felt terrible. Games were not  just bad for me individually, but bad for the whole country, for the future, bad for everything.

How could I love this thing?

One year, there was a parents’ conference. My mom came home and said, “The school says video games affect your child’s grades. Why don’t we stop playing them?”

That was the time I learned that even though some sentences are phrased as a question, they are actually a statement. 

I justified it to myself: “But my grades are fine. I’ve been playing, and nothing has changed.”

That was my earliest memory of disagreeing with my mom. I was 10. You don’t argue with your mom when the school, the TV, and everyone else are all saying the same thing. 

But I did. The final word in this "argument" was my mom saying, “See? You are even disagreeing with me now. It’s all because of the video games.”

The iPad was gone. 

A year passed. I carried that early impression with me through elementary school, even as the world around me slowly changed. The moral panic about games never fully disappeared, but it receded as the eSports industry developed. However, Yang Yongxin, I later learned, never stopped. After the documentary’s national exposure, after the Ministry of Health banned his treatment, after investigators confiscated his illegal machines, he continued. Room 13 stayed open. Parents still sent their children. By 2015, the center was treating nearly 900 patients a year.

A former patient reflecting on his experience years later said, “More than the physical suffering, what really made me feel desperate was my parents’ complete trust in Yang, instead of me, their son.”

Maybe the real suffering wasn't being shocked in room 13, but being told by the people who were supposed to protect them that this was love.

II

By middle school, the world had changed. COVID hit. School went online. I needed a computer for class.

I got one.

My mom didn’t say much about games anymore. Sometimes she’d ask what I was playing. I’d tell her. She’d nod and move on. There was no longer a lock on my devices.

But the lock in my mind stayed.

Even now as I write during my senior year of high school, if my phone rings and my mom asks what I’m doing from the other side of the world, I still say “nothing.” Not lying, exactly. Just…umm…omitting. The old reflex: games are something you hide. Games are something you do after you’ve earned the right, after the work is done, in the hours that don’t count. They are the cigarettes after work, the laziness after production. They are the offset, not the thing itself. 

I felt that guilt as I secretly downloaded the game, Journey, that I’d heard about. Even as I told myself it was fine. Even as I clicked  “install” on the app .

Journey is simple. You’re a figure in a robe, walking through an endless desert. In the distance, a mountain glows. That’s where I am going. There are no instructions. No enemies, really, just wind and sand and ruins.

I walk for a while. Then I see another figure in the distance, also walking. 

I walk toward them. They walk toward me. We stand face to face. They make a sound, a kind of musical chime. I chime back. That is the only way to communicate in this game. Just one simple and short chime. 

We walk together after that. Through the desert, through tunnels, past ancient, unknown machinery. When flying creatures attack, we hide behind a giant stone together. When we reach the snow, we light the torches together. No words. No names, no way to know who the other person behind the screen is, where they live, how old they are, whether they are having a good day or a bad one. None of it matters. 

Then the server lags. We get separated. I stand there chiming into empty space. In a world where language is over-simplified, the only chime I can do carries a much more complex meaning. I wonder if he’s made it to the summit without me; I wonder if he is nervous seeing me disappear, or if he has just kept going without me like I never existed. 

Ahead, I see another figure, also chiming. I am sure it is him, because we are the only two figures crazily chiming for no obvious reason. We run toward each other and chime cheerfully for a long time. Then we keep walking. 

The next time the server lags, I can’t find him again. 

Even though the world was fake, the emotion was real. This unknown person appeared in my life for just an hour, but still stays in my mind. 

I’ve been told my whole life that digital things aren’t real. That what happens on a screen stays on a screen. That games are escape, not experience. But lying there, missing a stranger I’d never actually met, I couldn’t keep believing that. The missing was real. The wondering was real. The memory of walking together through the snow. Those experiences were in my head, the same as any other memory. 

If games were poison, what was this?

III

Journey taught me that games could make me feel something. But other games taught me they could make me think, and think differently than any other medium could. 

Disco Elysium is different. You play a detective who has lost his memory, investigating a murder. But most of your time isn’t spent solving the case. It’s spent arguing with the voices inside your own head. Twenty-four different aspects of your personality, including intellect, psyche, physique, and motorics, each with their own opinions, each demanding to be heard. They interrupt each other and you. One tells you to stay calm; another tells you to run; another wants you to humiliate yourself for a joke; and another whispers that everyone already hates you anyway. 

In every conversation, every decision, I’m not choosing between “good” or “bad.” I am choosing which part of myself deserves to be listened to. The game made my own mind feel crowded, not in a metaphorical way, but literally. After playing for hours, I started hearing my thoughts differently, as if every decision already contained an argument inside it. I realized that being a person is sometimes just managing the noise well enough to keep moving. 

The Witcher 3 gives you choices that have no right answer. There’s a quest involving NPC Bloody Baron, a drunk, a wife-beater, a man whose family has been destroyed by his own violence. You make choices to help. In the end, no matter what you choose, you give up at some point. The game doesn’t just tell you whether you were right or wrong. It just shows you the consequences and asks you to live with them. The developers are Polish. In interviews, they have said, “Poland has experienced too much suffering to make optimistic games. The glass, for us, is always half-empty.” But even in the darkest world, they say, there is still love, friendship, sunlight. Putting these together is sincerity. 

IV

Some games aren't clear what they’re about. But, somehow, they tell players what they’re about. 

The Witness is a single-line drawing game set on a beautiful island. It gives the player very little instruction, no story, no explanation. The only tangible goal is to walk to the top of the mountain and solve every one-line drawing puzzle along the way. Just one-line drawings, hundreds of them, arranged in patterns that slowly teach you to see. 

I almost gave up when all I was instructed to do in this game was just to walk through rivers, waterfalls, woods, and other terrains on the island, finding puzzles, and then solving them. Especially when I arrived at the top and solved the last puzzle, a weird animation with voiceover played, and then I was kicked out of the game, and found everything was reset, none of the puzzles saved. I stayed with it because my gaming experience didn't match the 4.5/5 rating, and it thus shouldn’t take up 10 GB of my storage.

Then I saw the river, the one that I had passed by many times. 

The discouragement of restarting killed all the excitement to rush to the top. I dazedly watched the river, thinking about what was hidden under the puzzles. A puzzle panel stood on the far bank, dark and unreachable. But its reflection shimmered on the water, including the maze pattern. A ridiculous thought surfaced, but that I deeply believed was true: “What if I draw on the water?” I traced the reflection with my mouse. The screen vibrated, and a door underwater emerged. 

The world itself was the puzzle. Reflections, shadows, gaps between leaves, arrangements of stones—all of it could be read. I just hadn’t known what I was looking at. 

The moment that truly broke me open was in a forest. A panel’s clue wasn’t on the panel itself but in the trees behind it. Branches cast shadows that formed a path. My job wasn’t to solve, but to find the right angle, let the shadows fall where they needed to, then walk that path. I then understood the name of this game: The Witness. 

“Seeing” is passive, where the eyes receive information.

But “witnessing” is active, where I realize what I’m seeing. When I understood that tree shadows could be clues, that reflections could be drawn, I witnessed. Seeing needs only eyes. Witnessing needs a heart.

The game creator has explained, "I'm interested in whether there are forms of communication other than language that could be distilled.” The Witness is that experiment. Now walking through real life, I notice things I used to miss: light through blinds, sky in a puddle, accidental geometry. They never become puzzles. But I now stopped, I witnessed, when my friends didn’t understand what I was looking at. 

V

People do things that other people don’t understand. Some read the Bible ten times a day. Some write poems after work every night. Some spend twenty hours competing for the fastest speed-through in Mario. There is no external truth that unites them, only the devotion itself, the chase. 

Something can matter deeply even if others think it isn’t real. 

I think about that stranger in Journey sometimes. I don’t know who he was. I don’t know where he lived or what he believed or whether he’s still alive. I don’t even know if he thinks about me, too. For all I know, it could have been a different person after the first lag, someone chiming back at me just for kindness. I’ll never know. 

But we walked together. We waited for each other. We called out when we were lost, and we found each other again. And then we didn’t. That happened. That was real. 

The children sent to Room 13 were told that games were poison, that the things they loved were diseases, that the pain they suffered from electric current was love. I grew up in the shadow of that lie. For years, I believed it. I hid my playing. I felt guilty for loving something that was supposed to ruin me. 

But I also grew up finding something else: a stranger in the desert, a family’s death that I could feel, voices inside my own head that I had to learn to hear, choices that forced me to live with their weight, an island that taught me to witness the world instead of just seeing it.  I found moments that stayed with me long after the screen went dark. I found experiences that became part of who I am.

None of this can be measured in milliamps. None of this appears on any news report tonight. None of this requires anyone’s approval or understanding.

I know what I found.