Three Months Without Xbox (Premium)

On March 2, I turned off my Xbox Series S ahead of our trip to Mexico City, and I haven’t turned it back on since. This was mostly purposeful, but aided by some coincidences of timing, and it turned into an interesting set of experiments by which I tested my ability to game less and game differently.

I’m not sure whether I can characterize my video gaming activities as problematic per se, but I do have an unhealthy relationship with Call of Duty, a series of games that is both excellent and terrible at the same time. At a very high level, I can at least take some solace in the fact that gaming has never gotten in the way of my work—I feel like my writing output speaks for itself and is readily checked by anybody—or my personal life.

But from a mental health perspective, I do wonder. Playing and replaying the same several multiplayer levels, again and again, satisfies some weird ADHD part of my brain, as if I can correct past defeats or improve on past successes through repetition. And over time, these virtual places become real to me, and in some ways indiscernible from real-life locations. I have strong memories of places that are not real.

One thing I have observed in the past is that I can go on three-week trips, as we did in the past with home swaps, and do now with Mexico City, and not miss playing games at all. I have never once wished I had some way to play the game when I’m away that I always play when I’m at home. This is vaguely pleasing, too, because it suggests that this addiction, if that’s what it is, can be beaten.

Anyway, the March trip to Mexico coincided with two semi-related writing tasks: finishing up the Xbox & Games section of the Windows 11 Field Guide with the Xbox App chapter (and moving on to subsequent chapters), and trying to make some real progress with Windows Everywhere, a mammoth book that started as the Programming Windows series here on the site. My wife and I both intended to just get a lot of work done during that trip, so it was good timing for both.

After some hiccups, I ended up making far more progress on Windows Everywhere than I had expected, and I published the finished book publicly while we were still in Mexico. This provided me with a clue about how much I could accomplish if I wasn’t distracted by games, though to be fair that level of productivity is rare and requires the perfect combination of inspiration and desire, plus an unsustainable and almost manic desire to see it through. But finishing the Xbox App chapter meant that I’d need to bring an Xbox controller and USB-C cable to Mexico so that I could finish it. And that meant that I could play videogames in Mexico if I wanted to. Not Call of Duty, which I own on the console. But other games.

I did not want to. But my experience with the Xbox app in Windows 11 and playing Halo Infinite briefly on a laptop gave me the idea to continue my three-week hiatus from console gaming past the end of the trip. What if I just didn’t turn on the Xbox? How long could I go?

Helping me in this effort, we had to move from our house in Lower Macungie to an apartment in nearby Macungie in a span of just over a week. We flew home from Mexico on March 23, had an orientation at the new apartment complex the next day, spent the next week packing and moving, and closed on the house sale on March 31. There was no way to do anything else that week but move, move, move. It was exhausting.

Looking back at my photos from this week, I can see that the very first thing I set up in the new apartment was my little office nook, which uses the same basic layout as my home office in the previous house. It’s not much, just a small white IKEA desk with a keyboard, mouse, and 27-inch display; a similarly white file cabinet; and, perpendicular to the desk, a metal shelving unit on which I placed a second 27-inch display. But there was one key difference: at the house, that second display was connected to my Xbox. In the apartment, it is connected to my PC.

I don’t use two displays normally. But I turn the second one on when I record Windows Weekly and Hands-On Windows so that I have a place off to the side for show notes. I would rather use a USB-C display for that, but as I described in More Mobile: A Lot Less Mobile (Premium), the HP workstation PC I’m using only has DisplayPort connections. Long story short, I got what I got.

I had subscribed to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate before the Mexico trip so that I could write about Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming for that Xbox App chapter, and I had originally expected to go back to Xbox Live Gold. But I kept Game Pass and started experimenting with the PC games that Microsoft offered through the services. This included some old games I’d finished in the past, like Quake II and Quake 4, but also some new titles, like Redfall, plus newish titles I’d never finished, like Halo Infinite.

I resolved to finish the Halo Infinite single-player campaign. On my PC. Using an Xbox Wireless Controller.

It’s been a slog: I find this game to be repetitive and uninteresting, and I think it may be time for Microsoft to really mix things up in the Halo universe. But that, in a way, was helpful too. Because there was nothing particularly compelling about this game, and because I quickly tired of the same endless loop of driving, fighting, and exposition, I never spent hours in front of it in a single session. I just played bits here and there.

And as I write this, I’m almost done: I’m on the final boss battle, which is every bit as tedious as you probably think it is. I want to finish it just to finish it. I probably will.

As for Call of Duty, I don’t know. I don’t have a huge desire to pick it up again, which is good. And my experiences playing games on the PC have been largely positive, meaning that it’s console-like and reasonably seamless. But it’s also been uninteresting enough that I don’t seek it out every day, like some addiction. And that feels pretty good. I’m going to stick with it for now.