Games
April 8, 2024
I woke up today to the sound of rain outside, and a deep stinging sensation in the back of my throat. This isn’t the sore throat I had from my cold last week. I’ve recovered completely. This is something else. I seem to have over exerted myself screaming for the pleasure of strangers. It’s been two days and my voice is still off.
I am coming to terms with a decision I made last night, a decision that seemed free and easy at the time, but which I now realize, if I'm going to commit to (and I am), will compel me to restructure my entire life.
The decision was: I'm no longer going to make, play or think about video games.
I'm sick of trying to focus on other mediums that bring more value to my life and that are more conducive to what I want to express, then suddenly dropping everything I'm doing to spend several hours or days or weeks or even months on some idea I have for a game that can never actually be realized, because even the simplest games take an unfathomable amount of time to make. Perhaps even more so, I'm sick of being the only person I know who thinks about games the way I do. I'm sick of being in isolation, always working alone. Of course, other people are dissatisfied with games too for their own reasons -- but, like me, all they can do about it is write blog posts and forums posts lamenting the state of games. Maybe they’re working together in the dark on their projects that take a decade, but the effect of that is delayed and slight. To create games is to create art that is necessarily removed from the world, removed from any real communicative purpose. Games are weighed down with non-artistic technical concerns that dwarf those of film, the other hyper-commercial technology based art form.
When I was 17, I was worried about becoming Bob of Bob's Game, who had just published a long autobiographical essay that was so relatable that it felt like some kind of horrifying premonition of what my life might become. This was some kind of “companion piece” to his Kickstarter, meant to finally get his game published (which didn't happen). I didn't want to ever have to experience that degree of isolation. My body can’t endure it. With art in particular, I can only create if it's tied with other people -- people either collaborating with me or communicating with me.
Since I was 19, I've had various environments where such communication and collaboration was possible -- but they were all built around a very different conception of games from what I have. I constantly felt (and continue to feel) like I was being weird and pretentious doing what I was doing. Even more so, I felt like I talked way too much — but this was unavoidable. As I've expressed over and over, games are so incredibly tedious and slow to make. Talking is all you can do while you wait for your silly game to come together.
The reality is that, like in any artistic medium, the sorts of people who make games make them because they played a game once that was meaningful to them. They want to do that too. But because games are a medium that moves slowly and which has its origins in children's toys, this results in an intense conservatism in terms of conceptions of what games can be. The people who actually succeed at making something tend to be the most conservative, as most of the technical skills required to make games have little overlap with any artistic thought. If they are radical, their radicalism gets obscured by “realizable goals”. So conservatism continues to soak from one generation into the next.
This conservatism has always made me very frustrated, yet I've found it hard to talk about this with other games people without feeling like I'm invalidating what they're doing. Even making a "bad" game is incredibly difficult, far more difficult than writing a "bad" pop song or "bad" novel. I don’t want to devalue other people’s excruciating labor. Games are just too difficult of a medium.
So I need to get out of it. I'm never realistically going to make a game I'm proud of. It's just a waste of time at this point. I'm grateful for what games have given me: it's through trying to understand games that I was introduced to film, and through trying to replicate the magic of games that I wrote some of my first short stories. Thinking about games is how I've learned to think about art. But it's time for me to move on. In literature and music, people like me aren't particularly uncommon. The work to establish networks of weirdos who have spaces where they can create the most bizarre and indelible sensations possible has already been done, and for that I am eternally grateful.
Part of why I keep coming back to games is that I have a bunch of acquaintances who are often talking about the weird idiosyncratic old games they play, the kind of stuff that inspires my brain to think of even weirder stuff. The way social communication works in the 21st century is you see your acquaintances posting on social media, talking in discord servers, or if you're slightly more attached to the old web like me, posting in forums, regardless of whether or not they're people you directly talk to on a regular basis. So, the unfortunate casualty of giving up games is that I'm going to have to leave all of those spaces -- otherwise too much of my brain space will again get cluttered with games thoughts. This isn't that bad, as most of my friends who I do have long deliberate conversations with either don't play games, or don't talk about them with me. (There is a single exception to this. You know who we are. We'll have to figure out how to have a videogame-less friendship.) It's still a little sad to leave, as I liked eavesdropping on those digital conversations -- but I think a lot of that kind of internet interaction was a surrogate for deeper connection anyways. Like I said, I'm not capable of enduring isolation, despite my extremely reserved personality. One would hope that cutting out some of these shallower forms of socialization will compel me to actually talk to people more. But we'll see. Even if it just leads to a new social media environment for me that is centered around music and literature instead of games, that still seems like a win.
Finally, having used a word like "shallow" in that last paragraph, I want to say it also applies to the vast majority of my writing thus far. Part of what drove me to this decision to give up games was the realization of how much time I’d spent over the last few weeks on a review of a game which only really made me feel one sensation: disappointment. What’s the point of writing like that? Who cares about my disappointment? Disappointment is the default. It's not interesting. I originally had some vague idea that thinking about what that game could have been would be a useful exercise in someday making the kind of game I want to make — but such hypothetical imaginations of what games could be aren't the limiting factor here, as I've repeated over and over. All games criticism amounts to is another excuse to put my fingers on my keyboard — an excuse I no longer need. I’d rather reread my favorite novels or rewatch my favorite movies than spend hours and hours trying to think of clever and novel ways to express my dissatisfaction towards some artistically ambitious indie game. I want to focus on making art of actual value! If I’m going to exert myself, I’d like to at least direct my energies to things that matter. I'm rapidly approaching the age of 30. It’s clear that my time here is finite. It's time to make some tiny steps to grow up a little (just a little).