The Ninth Art
By: William Sun
By: William Sun
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.