How do you communicate what it’s like to live in a body that’s become hostile and cruel? It’s a question that haunts the writing of a piece like this. In the imprecise language we possess to describe a spectrum of pain that is just as inexact, it’s almost impossible to make people whose pain is only ever passing understand what it’s like to live with a pain that is all-encompassing and never leaves.
“I think unless you’ve experienced it yourself,” Kolo Jones, a content creator who works under the name helloitskolo, says, “it’s very hard to appreciate the isolation and exhaustion and boredom of being disabled.”
As Kolo suggests, chronic pain is about more than pain. It exacts an existential toll as well as a physical one. It’s from under this umbrella of chronic pain that we really begin to understand how important video games can be as a distraction, as an escape, and as a balm to, in our cases, a literal world of hurt.
Though how we speak about chronic pain is often imprecise, talking to gamers with chronic pain crystallises themes within the disorienting diapason of our agony. Hands, backs, the stiffness of inertia, a need to be supine, and more: threads of consistency wind through gaming with chronic pain that bely the imprecision of our ability to describe it.