Diablo 2

What follows is a clear order that has, in the history of video games, hardly been improved upon: Gray, White, Green, Blue, Purple, and Orange / Yellow.

In more common language, this could be slightly altered to: Trash, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary.

And, finally, for those to whom these terms mean nothing, perhaps less than nothing, perhaps just sheer bewilderment, a greater simplification: good, better, best.

Diablo 2 introduced me to video gaming's fetishization of items, or “loot,” the preferred term. It is a warrior’s id of a game: hit monsters, kill monsters, collect from their corpses – and do it again. Not that all games have complex mechanics or interweaving systems, but Diablo 2 is particularly straightforward. Any thinking person could learn to play it in just a few minutes. These facts will hardly help me explain why, in middle school, my friends and I played it – and re-played it – for hundreds of hours.

With deepest regret, I admit the best explanation requires middle school math. Graphs, specifically. Diablo 2 taught me more about human progress than textbooks, I think. Because the game allows you to carry yourself, frustratingly at times, up a perfected plotted lined of improvement. Graphed, this would be a line worthy of idolatry, without bump or fault. Whoever designed it must marvel at its precision: slight enough to feel no fatigue, steep enough to turn back and gasp – “Look at how far I’ve come!” There are no cliff faces, no stair steps, no parabolas; there is nothing to stop you from bettering yourself in Diablo 2 at almost any moment.

Each item you can equip and use in the game is color-coded. Gray items are trash; you hardly ever use them and instead sell them. Purple items are epic; their statistics are better than blue and green and so on. Complete a task, slay a monster – receive a reward. And, in this game, you know almost immediately if the task you finished has made you better, or has made you money. These are the only two outcomes. Either your character will become stronger, or wealthier.

Look up. Can you see? Can you see the end of the plotted line?

Neither could I.

Years after retiring my sorceress, I taught English language arts to middle schoolers. How could I convey to them that progressing in reading and writing, that acquiring vocabulary and improving one’s comprehension of complex texts, that improving one’s sentence flow and varying one’s reasoning, was an amorphous and indescribable challenge? That along the way, and with luck and thoughtfulness, they might become better people? It was a task for which most aren’t equipped. Some slopes are walls, deteriorating only against the soft spending of time. And, like me, many of my students were trained on a video game’s notion of progress, on a line so crystalline it seems beyond our geometry and algebra – and certainly beyond our humanity.

Humans are neither algebraic nor geometric, and I’ve spent years unlearning the lessons that Diablo 2 taught me.