Everyone who's ever owned one has a different story. This is mine.
"I don't remember when it started. Only that it never really stopped."
"Voices through the wall. Then through the floor. Then — everywhere, all the time, even in the quiet rooms."
"The noise never stopped. Not out there. In here."
"I tried everything I knew. Music. Walking until I couldn't hear anything else."
"None of it reached through that door."
"So I stopped trying to make it stop."
"Then, one day, without much explanation, my dad brought something home."
"It sat in its box for a while before anyone touched it. Like we weren't sure yet if it belonged in the house."
"I didn't know what it was for. Not really. I just knew it was new, and new felt like it meant something."
"There was already a game on it when it arrived. Pre-installed, forgotten by whoever put it there."
"I didn't understand the menus. I didn't understand half of what was on that screen."
"I pressed play anyway."
"And then. I was somewhere else."
"In here, nothing was broken."
"In here, I made sense, in a way I didn't always make sense out there."
"In here, I had something like control. Maybe for the first time in longer than I could remember."
"It was never really about winning. It was about how quiet a world could be, when you knew exactly what it wanted from you."
"One afternoon became a habit. The habit became a place I went to breathe."
"Years passed. The machine itself changed more than once, upgraded, replaced, rebuilt from scratch."
"What it gave me stayed exactly the same."
"Somewhere in all those hours, something shifted. So slowly I almost missed it happening."
"I stopped wanting only to play in these worlds."
"I wanted to build one."
“If you look closely, this isn’t just my story.”
Before I understood what was happening in that room, the data was already recording it.
“What comes next is hard to read.”
It includes real numbers on self-harm — if you need to stop here, that's alright. You've already read the part that matters most.
depressed mood / suicide attempts, by number of adverse childhood experiences (0 to 4+) Felitti et al. (1998) ↗
“Adolescence’s central developmental task is forming a stable identity. When family context is disrupted, that resolution fails — leaving role confusion in its place.
— Erikson (1968), Identity: Youth and Crisis ↗
Direct empirical link between ACEs and adolescent identity development and mental health outcomes.
Patrick & Noor (2024), Journal of Asian Development Studies ↗“For some, that need for control found its way into a screen.”
Vicious bidirectional cycle: family dysfunction predicts problematic gaming, which in turn deepens family isolation.
When control and achievement are missing offline, the virtual world becomes the primary refuge for identity.
“This started as a project about escapism and technology. Somewhere along the way, it became a project about my own family, too.”
Above the Noise: A Scrollytelling Exploration of Escapism, Technology, & Identity
Digital Media & Media Studies | Final Project, 2026