am I online, or offline? (2024)

In our spare time, we aim for productivity and strive for innovative ways of recreating ourselves. Haven't we heard this before? A new way of traversing life through our devices? From our cellular maestro, immemorial, Steve Jobs: “An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone…..are you getting it?”1 Or how about our favorite, “say hello to iPhone”.

I remember my first Apple product being the 2004 iPod. This was before my family could afford to know the cultural capital between an iPod and an iPhone. I’d beg my sisters to lend me their iPod knowing I’d only have 30-45-minutes to listen to music; just long enough for the duration of my recess in elementary school. There was hardly enough time to play a game of kickball, so we’d scurry into the concrete field, scrambling to make teams matched to player-skill. After the pairing, we’d disperse into our positions, waiting for the first pitch. During the last two years of elementary-school, I fell in love with a cool-gray oversized Adidas sweater, the one that had the integrated earbuds in the laces of the hoodie. I’d sit by the playground fence while listening to Green Day and Oasis until it was my turn in kickball. Any sudden movements and the earbuds would malfunction and cut the song short, forcing me to mangle with the wire until I could get a clear signal. I couldn’t afford to scroll through the songs I didn’t know, and my family couldn't afford to break an iPod. Purchasing CD’s or music on iTunes was also out of budget, so Limewire, being free, brought us a solution. I was ambivalent at first, but I slowly understood how the internet could provide me with what I was missing. If it could give me a song—pirated and free—which led to satisfaction and happiness—what else could the internet make me feel?

My lack of working electronics angered me and proved to me that I’d be dealing with other people’s hand-me downs. The lack of individuality found in a flimsy wire tore me between the interval of time at recess and my own position. Flimsy or not, they provided a buffer between me and actuality; and besides, who cared about the outside world, about the real world? I could listen to all the rock bands pirated from Limewire and still be visually stimulated by the red rubber ball being occasionally skyrocketed onto the roof. Sound helped me ‘slow down’ and analyze the world in terms of my own safety, enjoyment, and self-awareness. Stimulating my ears became a way to disconnect the USB of preconceived judgments and replace it with my hard-drive of my budding individuality. This was the first time I experienced this form of disconnect.

Alternatively, I felt this same disconnect through video games. My intense curiosity of exploring Minecraft and Steam led me into online communities in Counter-Strike: Source, Garry’s Mod, and Team Fortress 2. In these online spaces, I'd closely listen to people, other gamers who’s microphone symbols would flash when they made a sudden noise. Something about being the listener; a person behind the screen watching and reading the text chat scrolling incessantly, felt safe. I didn’t need to identify who these people were, nor did I need to explain or justify who I was. I held the ability to hide behind my online username and thus, chose when to speak. Most of the time, I didn't, because I'd be instantly kicked off the 18+ servers. These new and different structures of communication, mostly dark humor, excited me. In a single night, I’d hear a mixture of 9/11 speculations, jokes on race, and porn spray-tags. At times, the nude female body would be ‘spray-tagged’2 throughout the hallways of the map, The Office Complex, on Counter-Strike: Source, individual to each user's customizable game settings. The withdrawal of my own character was explored through the “noclip” cheat command, which allowed for my character to freely move without constraints of mass or human anatomy; moving through the architecture of my favorite maps with increased movement speed. With this command, I could leave the generated map, seeing it in a void in space, and continue my search for backrooms3 and easter egg locations. My affair with in-game cheating invigorated my curiosity for the marginal, paradoxical spaces in video games.

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it sure as hell heard you."4

A theory behind the backrooms is that they have no purpose; other than offering the aesthetic of liminal spaces, removed from the busyness of the playable map. However, their creepypasta legends made me feel as if my character was being watched, and that an unknown figure will appear in the silence of these rooms5. Backrooms question the purpose of reality in a video game, where reality is already being questioned in what’s created. This piqued my interest because it gave me another structure to examine; from the playground to the online realm. This multi-space of visual and auditory wonders fueled my interest for online spaces, what else could I find in the hallways of other maps?

At a young age, I had a stutter and relied on observing the way people communicated; their speed, tone, and clarity throughout their sentences. I would attempt to imitate them as a means of finding my own voice. Online, I was able to learn abbreviations that allowed me to communicate without the need of my oral voice. I’d keep my sentences short to “brb”, “afk”, or “T @ B” (terrorist at B); this helped me communicate during my high-stake ranked matches.

In these spaces, my silence secured my position as the observer. I’d hold in my voice (usually by muting the microphone on my Turtle Beach headphones or setting the talk option to ‘press to talk’) and adapted to typing quickly to notify my teammates that the enemy was planting on “bombsite B”. I relied on my skills rather than being a good teammate—relying that my 400+ hours of experience will show my reliability. Regardless, I wasn't a cooperative teammate and my lack of voice pushed away forms of collaboration. However, my silence is what saved me from the existential questions of my ASL.6

On the digital – unlike in school, participation is required – I didn’t have to speak, in fact, nobody cared whether I participated or not. Such a priority was the dopamine rush and speed of these video games, that I was able to forget, briefly, about my position in life. “The relative anonymity of life on the screen—one has the choice of being known only by one’s chosen ‘handle’ or online name—gives people the chance to express often unexplored aspects of the self.”7 Escaping through video games removed the reality of being in a lower-middle class family in New York City. It removed my need to worry about my stutter, my low-fi electronics, and the practical questions of my future. It allowed me to be present in ways that removed my lived self; my responsibilities were erased by going into these worlds. As a result, this online community became my form of escape—but I’d call it a trash bin. There’s only so many gum wrappers, receipts, lint, paper straw covers; small trash that you can carry in your life until it becomes unpleasant to interact with while you’re reaching for something in your pockets. I’d collect these small trash and ball them up as a form of anxiety. I was collecting my day’s forage and saving it to remind myself of how much I’ve interacted with the real world before going into the digital world. Though, each day of collecting started to become an obsessive nature of needing to calculate my productivity. Today I had 3 gum wrappers and a small Kit-Kat, maybe tomorrow I’ll aim for a pebble and some loose thread.

As my pockets filled with what you may call “garbage”, my inventory of found objects became delightful. My inventory reflected upon my experience and dedication into my search of objects; nothing felt more achievable than my equipable epic character skins.8 Eventually, my internal voice began to question when I was going to finally take this composite of artifacts out of my pocket. This is where our trusty trash bin comes into play; an escape and suggestive option to throw away your day’s stress, anxiety—your trash. This escape is what frees us, it gives us hope to once again receive the things thatdon’t seem like trash to begin with. After throwing out my week’s collection, my pockets were ready to begin again. Usually, by starting with a new case of orange flavored Trident gum.

As rapidly as I joined these servers and removed myself from reality, I realized how unfulfilled I truly was. The brewing rage and need to respond to myself under the silence confused me—was I actually enjoying the video game or was I escaping myself? I was scratching at the screen hoping to find myself through hand eye coordination and strategy, when in reality I was starving myself from being a kid. I couldn’t stand watching myself lose over, and over, and over. There was no hope, this position only brought me closer to a self-realization that I do have something to say. In a burst of excitement, I unmute my microphone and voice-cracked into it with the fervor of a drill sergeant “he’s at bombsite B!”. I exhaled and sat back with satisfaction, feeling a sense of completion. My outburst was met with silence, none of my teammates responded. I saw the characters moving but there was no audio feedback. It only took a couple of seconds and as I expected, a message pops on my screen saying, “you have been kicked from the session.”