“Genuinely loving games isn’t even enough. You have to love the idea of loving games. You have to listen to music about games and tell jokes about games and dress like characters from games. You must completely obsess over games until you forget how to relate to people in any other way. It’s kind of like being an Evangelical or, worse, a Boston sports fan.”
Today a conversation with a friend of mine prompted me to recall this song from Akira Yamaoka‘s Silent Hill 3 soundtrack, ‘Letter From The Lost Days.’ It’s a wistful track, in which a person writes a letter to her future self, wondering about what the passing of time will do with her relationship to her family, friends and her happiness in life.
The song did particularly well in the context of Silent Hill 3, which at its core is about a teen girl exploring her origins and her relationship with her father once the extent of her disassociation with those things become clear. Even though the lyrics of the song don’t literally translate to events of the game, the abstract association is very effective.
Coincidentally, I’ve been watching shows I’ve already seen before when I’m on a treadmill or elliptical at the gym (they have these internet-enabled screens there so I can Hulu or watch streaming television! The future!) I generally choose to watch things I’ve seen before — consuming new media often requires more concentration than I can allocate when I’m working out, so favorite shows are just engaging enough.
I had the bright idea a few days ago to stream the Cowboy Bebop episode ‘Speak Like A Child’, which sees rambler-gambler Faye Valentine accidentally stumble on a cassette that she recorded for herself as a little girl (before being injured in a space gate accident that left her frozen in cryogenic stasis for years and waking up with no memory, but anyway).
It’s one of the most poignant scenes in a long, highly episodic series which assembles its presiding character arcs through occasional vignettes, so it’s natural that I found myself climbing an elliptical machine trying not to get choked up about anime in front of other people at the gym. These are powerful ideas — who you used to be, who you will become, these discrete temporal editions of yourself that are deeply you, yet somehow are still strangers.
Video games have this weird power of permanence. Maybe it’s because they’re often abstract and allow us to project ourselves into them, as Kirk and I have been talking about in The FFVII Letters. But whenever we tend to think about our most favorite games, we tend to remember less about the game itself and more about where, when and who we were when we were playing them. That impact, that power of instant recollection, is more pervasive than the capsule experience of the play experience, which is generally finite.
This month at Kotaku I wrote about games’ power to influence the way we think about the world and our lives, so you can tell I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Related: this Kotaku feature I wrote last year about how much my gaming experiences have been about who I shared them with at the time. When I hear ‘Letter From The Lost Days,’ I most miss with whom I played Silent Hill 3, who beat all the too-scary parts for me.
We’re coming to the end of The FFVII Letters — just one exchange left. I wanted to begin the letter series to examine whether FFVII really was a Great Video Game, or whether my relationship to it over the years has been more about who I was as a high schooler. We’ve talked a lot about what makes the game special along our way, but the letter series and the re-play I engaged in has ultimately been a letter to my past self, from the me I am now to the me who loved FFVII as a teen. I think it’s amazing that games can form a bridge like that.
You’ve seen me recently express overwhelm at social media and a world where, when a significant global event occurs as it did this week, none of us can avoid being steeped in the noisy tide of others’ emotions and opinions (and fake Martin Luther King quotes). Maybe that’s why it’s been such a comfort to think about escapism; when headlines about PSN hackers rapidly propel us into a seductive world of future-fiction (I just wrote ‘Why We Love Hackers‘), it’s tempting to miss your past self, to want things to be simpler.
I’ve wistfully retreated into the sweet, perma-youth simplicity of Pokemon games, and I thought it might be kind of fun to watch Pokemon cartoons at the gym and I wondered about how weird that would seem, a woman my age working out to Pokemon battles. I felt kind of bad that that’s a thing I should have to worry about; I wrote ‘I Am An Adult Pokemon Fan‘ at Thought Catalog too, your consideration of which I would appreciate.
The world can be an ugly, noisy place quite often. And people talk a lot about video games as ‘power fantasies,’ testosterone-fueled grindfests geared at making us feel superhuman. But so many games can help us form meaningful retreats from the obligation to be empowered, from the scariness that, thanks to the magic of the internet, is often shouting chaotically directly into our faces.
I would hazard that while we like games that make us feel cool and powerful, we better like those that give us a place to belong — where your present self can go back and visit your past self whenever the future-self seems an unknown beast shrouded far ahead in the mists.
It’s finally warming up in New York. Of course, now that I typed that, I’ve jinxed us for another week of 45-degree gray skies and perma-drizzle, because the weather here’s sadistic. Sigh. So I’d better catch you up quickly, because I want to do as little sitting-inside-typing as possible.
While it was raining I finished watching Twin Peaks and started playing Portal 2. Early opinion, besides the obvious “it’s awesome”, is that the people who complain about its length are probably trying to wolf it down too fast. You can play Portal 1 in one sitting, but this one’s meant to be done in small bites, I think. Besides, it’s not like I can rush into co-op while PSN is still down.
I also wrote an article about procrastination and one about escapism over at Thought Catalog, being something of an expert on both of these. I also talked to Randy from Gearbox about games as art. Ha, I mean, I actually kind of did, but we’re more talking about the sophistication of content in an evolving landscape blah blah blah no don’t go away.
The FFVII Letters are still going strong as we approach the end of the game, so stick with us on that. I’ll be sad when it’s over, but then I’ll probably just start playing FFVIII or something. And if you want me to go on a podcast for an hour, having two excellent accents is probably the way to get me to do it.
[Today’s Good Song: Actually, it’s an entire album. Go listen to the new Fleet Foxes at NPR!]
After answering exactly 2871 questions, I’ve disabled my Formspring account. Having one has been a fascinating, puzzling and often unsettling experience — I don’t regret wading unarmed into the pool of madness, but it’s gotten a little overwhelming.
It’s such a strange commentary on the nature of social media that so many people wanted to write in questions to me. I’m not a celebrity, a pop star or a politician; I’m a writer, and not even on anything of particular global gravity — at the end of the day, it really is just video games, which hopefully are a relatively small thing in the grand scheme of your place in the world. If I am considered exceptional in my field it’s because the bar’s not high, which isn’t much to write home about.
That’s part of why Formspring was such an interesting experiment for me, as someone who also likes to write about web culture trends and social media. If you have the opportunity to ask someone who writes about video games any question you like, it seems to make sense you’d decide to ask them something about either video games or writing, assuming those things interest you.
However, I’d say more than half, possibly more than two-thirds of the questions I received were not about video games, by the end: the proportion had ramped up exponentially the more widely-visited my Formspring (and the service in general, as I was a relatively-early adopter) became.
In other words, the more people who came to ask me questions, the fewer of them were actually germane to my work. People wanted relationship advice, to know about my preferences in food, music, liquor, clothing, haircare, art and literature, about my experiences in childhood, about what I am looking for in a partner, and any number of things.
I like answering questions; I’ve said before that I look at my writing online as a way to be engaged in a large-scale conversation on a topic that I love with other people who share that interest. And I’ve observed with some curiosity the trend toward all interactivity, whether that’s gaming or writing and talking online, away from the long-form toward the quick-hit.
I wrote last year about that trend, and how being able to take the pulse of the gaming audience through Twitter contributed to me blogging less, and Formspring was another way to make me feel connected to my audience with more immediacy and more brevity. I guess in my fascination, it stopped mattering whether we were even talking about games too much.
At first, I tasked myself with not refusing any question that was submitted, even if it was nonsensical or something like “y u mad girl” (an actual question which I answered with “iono”). It was its own kind of game; even if someone was saying something offensive, I’d initially respond instead of delete simply because I thought it was so funny and so strange that people would behave that way when we don’t even know one another.
During an interesting period when I’d weighed in about the Dickwolves Thing, Formspring became a place for people to stage arguments with me. That was a contentious topic and many people wanted to challenge me one-on-one. I sort of liked that; if something’s heated and makes me feel passionate, it felt like a brave experiment to take on trolls and debaters alike directly.
I began to get more and more questions; in the past months, occasionally up to 20 a day. I spend about eight hours a day online working, sometimes more if I’m socializing too, and I’d get email alerts and immediately answer the Formspring question. I could probably do an entire extra article or blog post in a day with the amount of time I spent typing answers to Formspring questions about what people should do about something their significant other said, or what my views on religion are, or even something related to my work, like in what contexts I don’t mind long cutscenes and why.
Interestingly, I observed that answering a particular type of question would solicit more of that type. Engaging trolls or talking about sexism would bring more trolls and more confrontational gender questions. I had to start drawing a line — and I learned saying “I don’t want to talk any more about that” would cause people to submit things equivalent to “so you won’t take a stand or express your views, huh?” As if the fact I’d been doing so extensively was disposable to them because I didn’t answer their question, or because my paragraphs-long response was no longer at the top of the page.
But I continued answering questions. Partly because I’d become hooked, the same way you get hooked on your Twitter and Facebook feed. It got to where I’d soldier grimly into that Formspring inbox, dreading what I might find, and yet feel like I’d committed: It says ask me whatevsies, and so I’ve gotta answer.
I felt I was doing some kind of “research”, as if analyzing the volume and tone of Formspring questions could answer my questions — who reads my articles? How are they being received? How am I being received? And yet there was no pattern, no meaning. For example, what factors contribute to Kieron getting questions mostly about his X-Men work versus the weird Wild West of mine? Probably lots, but I don’t learn anything by pegging ‘em. And none of it helps me get my head around what makes people want to stray from the path of their natural life activities to say something chillingly hateful to me.
But even that was empowering and fascinating — I will never know those people, but they all know me. If there are truly such sad assholes in the world, I’m glad I have the ability to make them angry simply by existing. And confronting it on Formspring made me feel even thicker-skinned — I can be as vitriolic as anyone should I want to, but I can’t think of any person I hate enough to motivate me to submit that hatred for their evaluation (and rejection). I must be a pretty big deal to these people.
It goes to one’s head. And it’s distracting, and for what? There was no useful information, no dot-cloud to be gleaned. My friend Mitu Khandaker wrote yesterday at GameSetWatch about how the human brain is incapable of accepting the very real concept of randomness, but that’s what it is.
People ask me questions for the same reason someone Tweets about their breakfast — because someone’s listening and because they can. Because it’s the kind of interaction people do not get to do in their real lives, where you cannot tell everyone in your office unsolicited information about your meal or ask a stranger on the subway whether he believes in God.
It’s been fun, but there are probably better things I should be doing with myself, including prizing my privacy more. There’s definitely a tipping point for social media exposure, and as I said earlier this week, I think I’ve passed it.
[Today’s Good Song: Moon Duo, ‘Mazes’]
Kirk Hamilton and I have been writing all those FFVII Letters at Paste, banging on about how special and imaginative the game is. Yet as Kirk pointed out in our last letter, it contains a Meteor called “Meteor,” a Weapon called WEAPON, and stuff called Black Materia and Huge Materia (to differentiate itself from regular old Materia, of course). Creative.
But in today’s new edition in the series, I talk about how the simplistic names are abstraction at its happy work yet again — when we don’t have to think much about what things are called, it gives us more mental resources to think about what they are. Simple names make important concepts intuitive, second-nature. And then when something is named rather prettily, like the sunken Gelnika or Turks leader Tseng, it makes more of an impact on us.
When I was a kid, every game I played was painfully basic in presentation and interface. The only explanation I have for why I so loved these ancient computer games I wrote about in Thought Catalog today was that I was young, had an overactive imagination and had little else I wanted to do with my playtime — not to mention it’s not like we had many more sophisticated adventures in the 1980s, right?
I also think they impacted me so much because they were SO terse, so crude. That blob on the wall is a cabinet I’m supposed to open? How the eff would I have known that without stabbing in the dark? Why does the game tell me I’m holding a map if it is of no use to read it? I must type ENTER HOUSE and not OPEN DOOR or else the game will tell me that area is not available, and if I go WEST at this intersection I’ll be instantly killed? Cool.
That cursor blinking at me, demanding my next move, frustration a constant pall — and yet the continual possibility of sudden, lucky solution teased at the fringe of my awareness just as much as did the threat of sudden, accidental death. I’d hold my breath and get chills; they remain among my favorite gaming memories.
When young there was nothing I loved more than rich universes. I’d write about my favorite games, draw pictures and play pretend. That’s why so much of my writing lately has hinged on parsing exactly what’s changed — either about games or about me — that makes me so inattentive and easily bored.
When I play games that give me lorebooks, diary entries, character stories hidden off the beaten path, I’m surprised at how little I care. It’s not so simple as impatience for reading — I like reading, and I don’t even mind when reading in text adventures or visual novels comes at the expense of interactivity. “I’ve changed,” I shrug to myself when I have a million New Unread Notes blinking at me in this or that UI and I just scroll through them quickly because the star or dot or highlight or exclamation point that tells me I haven’t read them yet bugs me like it does in Gmail.
Yet as we observe in the FFVII Letters, some types of games can make me go way, way out of my way and to much inconvenience for even the possibility of discovering a new piece of information. Why will I do it for characters and plot threads that are so minimal, when I won’t do it for things rendered in much more depth?
Because I like minimalism, I guess. I like to do the brain-work myself, the imagining myself. And I get such a thrill from looking at the title screens of these old adventure games I can now revisit thanks to the magic of this web-based IIe emulator that I don’t even try to play them that often, because it still feels good to think of them as ghosts I never conquered, awesome machines that have forever outsmarted me. It still feels good to preserve them as half-remembered, near-legendary things.
And also because I still can’t beat most of them without a walkthrough, and you know once you open a walkthrough for one puzzle your tolerance for future ones steadily decreases, and before you know it, you’re just going through the motions, and that’s no way to honor my past. I get addicted to hints (you should have seen our phone bill, and my parents’ consternation, back when Sierra still operated that buck-a-minute hint line).
Anyway, you might have missed this 2009 Classic Moment In SVGL History when I wrote this “open letter” to Bob Blauschild, the designer of two out of five of my best-remembered — and most frustrating — adventure games, whose name sketched on the title screens always stuck with me. I did it mostly as humor, never expecting that he’d ever see it, but he did, and here’s what he wrote back to me.
Hearing from Mr. Blauschild was frankly a little dazzling, because I still maintain that lifeline to the way I felt about those old computer games and the invisible, sadistic entities that made them. Once in a while if I think about it, so is the fact that I now have periodic occasion to be in the same room as “Lord British”, whom as a kid I presumed had to be some real-life mysterious English lord, sitting on a throne made of mainframes, silently challenging the world’s peons to encounter him at Ultima. When I was tiny I thought he maybe wasn’t even real, some artificial consciousness assembled in green pixels.
I think that’s part of the Minecraft juggernaut today, actually. There’s the idea of a single figure who goes by the moniker of ‘Notch’, creating the weather in a savage and lawless, endless world that challenges its players to eke out defiance — and beauty — one hard-won step, one precious discovery at a time. Awe and death are both certain in Minecraft, and you just never know which is coming next.
[Today’s Good Song: Memory Tapes, ‘Today Is Our Life‘]
For a while I had comments turned off on the blog. This was mainly because they only ever caused me stress. The internet’s a funny thing, offering literally everyone the ability to react immediately and be heard. In some cases, that’s a good principle; it’s done wonders for media and creative thought.
In other cases, it’s obnoxious and destructive. If you’re one of those people who’s addicted to Twitter, you might get an inkling of that — you end up hooked on a drip of irrelevant information, a sea of thought and opinion noise that you can’t really explain why you’re reading but can’t seem to stop.
That’s how it is for me and comments some of the time. Yes, I write so that I can hear what people have to say back on a given subject — for me my work is a form of large-scale conversation — and yet paradoxically in order to do it I need to do it in a vacuum, in a way that’s for me, that could exist whether people are listening or not.
Writing for the commenters is a bad policy. This is because so few of them are ever actually useful to the writer; commenting is something that in general benefits readers more than it does writers. I turned comments back on because I feel like that’s something you guys need, want and deserve, but I very carefully cultivate a state of remove from the obligation to read them all.
I wrote my latest Thought Catalog piece, “The Different Types of Commenters There Are“, mainly as satire, but there’s a grain of truth in all humor, right?
Coincidentally, someone asked me last night on Formspring what kinds of questions annoy or tax me, and I began the response thinking “oh, very few,” and concluded it while realizing, “actually, that’s kind of a lot.”
People ask me a lot how I manage to “put up with” the internet. It’s not particularly easy. And yet I am such an active Twitter user, such a high-volume Facebook user (sorry, friends!) and there is nothing in the world that says I need to maintain a Formspring and make myself so available, but I do.
I think because being engaged in dialog with people in general, my readers in particular, is important to me. Even when it’s hyperstimulating or exhausting, it helps me feel realistic, if that descriptor makes sense. But general word of advice to anyone who’s of a similar need and mind: Careful you don’t let people feel entitled to you. Do it on your own terms. Be aware of how people are responding to what you put out there — yet remember, you are not some object in need of being constantly shaped by ‘constructive criticism’ from the outside. You’re you and at the end of the day people can listen or not, and you can detach.
I think I let myself be so available that some people became more interested in me — and not even me-as-a-person, but me as some kind of visible entity that could be commanded to react and share herself on command from strangers — than in my writing, even when my writing’s what made me initially visible to them.
Sometimes you guys write me and say I’ve grown some teeth, or gotten an “edge”, or that I seem angrier than when I was a friendly community blogger puttering around SVGL mostly undisturbed. I think that’s because I don’t always know how to deal with that feeling — that everyone feels entitled to be heard by me or answered by me, no matter what they want to say. I mean, that people observe changes in my public personality and can talk to me about them is sometimes surreal enough.
One exciting thing about me being freelance now and having a little more free time and emotional space is I can really concentrate on shifting my focus back, away from “being a video game writer for you” and back onto “writing about video games for you,” if that makes sense. Excited about that.
[Today’s Good Song: Papercuts, ‘Do You Really Want To Know‘]
Clearly I’ve been thinking lots lately about how your relationship to games changes as you grow older. Games are changing as they grow too, and that has a lot to do with it. (I mentioned “Why Don’t I Lose Myself In Games Anymore?” from Kotaku yesterday and if you’ve been following the FFVII Letters, you’ll recognize some of the themes).
Besides the stuff I’ve already shown you, I’ve also found a slightly more obnoxious way to state my impatience with modern roleplaying games. If you follow my Twitter feed, you might have heard of Suparna Galaxy. For background, here’s a helpful transcription of the conversation that started it all. Then we began to take it really seriously, and a big group of us made a wiki of lore for our fake game world.
Now we have done a podcast with the excellent Big Red Potion crew. There is professional voice acting. There is soundtrack material. And we thusly offer ourselves for interview as the developers on the project. We are very, very serious. I can’t explain it. You should just listen.
And in more straitlaced commentary on the changing gamer, I’ve done a Gamasutra editorial today about the portable platform market and how, with his comments about how people are “too old” for the Nintendo DS, Jack Tretton suggests Sony might be misidentifying the market a little. Still really want an NGP, naturally. I get gadget-lust easily.
In other craziness, I am apparently a centerfold. Look, ma! In good fun, I participated in GayGamer’s ‘PlayNerd Centerfold of the Month‘, following in the tough-to-follow footsteps of friends of mine like Anthony Carboni and Andy Schatz and gave an interview and did a photoshoot. I had so much fun, as the team there’s so cool.
Today’s Good Song: via Pasta Primavera, Loud Valley, ‘The Refrain’ — there is a Red Dead vibe here, I think.
Hey, so we have a new editor in chief and business director at Gamasutra! We’ve made a few notable and very exciting changes over there, which includes my decision to become freelance Editor at Large for the site. As you might’ve noticed, I’ve usually got so many projects going on that many people have assumed I’ve been freelance all along, ha.
I’m still very much part of the excellent Gamasutra team, except now I’m at liberty to take on all kinds of other projects, too. I’ll continue to develop original trade-focused reporting and interviews for Gamasutra as I’m doing other work — for one thing, you’ve probably spotted me doing some more social media and general-audience type stuff at the fantastic Thought Catalog, where I’ll be appearing twice a week. You can still find me monthly at Kotaku as well, doing my column on the culture surrounding games and gamers.
I’ve also taken on the games section in NYLON Guys — the May issue of NYLON’s bimonthly men’s mag came out really lovely so, if you want to read my feature on storytelling in L.A. Noire, or see some indie devs and Facebook games I thought were worth spotlighting, keep your eyes peeled for it.
I have a few other projects underway I can’t say much about just yet, and I continue to work with other outlets both in the games press and outside of it on various things that you’ll likely see surfacing soon. And of course I’ll continue to look after SVGL! It’s pretty much the most exciting time in my career thus far, and I remain deeply appreciative of everyone’s support and attention.
And I want to do all kinds of other things in all kinds of areas, so if you’d like to work together professionally in some capacity, I’m available to discuss — no idea is too crazy, so hit me up! I can’t wait to see what will happen.
Meanwhile, this is MY NEXT PROJECT SRSLY (see also the wiki and the twitter convo that started it all)
Everyone has a Really Great Idea For A Video Game. When I meet new people and tell them about my job, they sort of launch into their Really Great Idea as if they think there’s something I can do to get it made (sometimes they even ask me to “tell Xbox about it” or something).
Back in the 80s and 90s, I can’t imagine how many kids sent pencil-and-crayon “design docs” to game companies about the kinds of games they wanted to see made. I don’t think I ever did that, but I hear from a lot of people who have, and I really hope the longstanding game companies kept those letters from kids. What a fun little gallery that would make, huh?
Cute kids aside, I actually don’t think all that much of people who aren’t game designers telling game designers what they should do, as they don’t necessarily have the mind for systems and how they work in practice (not saying I do either, or anything). Even most indies don’t seem to feel too strongly about their first game, and talk more of what it taught them than how it was a Really Great Idea. But seriously guys I had a Really Great Idea wait don’t walk away –
Last night I dreamed I was playing this really sweet oldschool Resident Evil — third person, wider-angle, where the challenge was more exploration than action. It was set in the Umbrella Mansion, except years later and in ruins after the Raccoon City incidents. And you can play as either Leon or Claire, just like RE2, probably like, mining the old site for information or cell cultures or something they only just now realized were left behind, like, trying to get it before Wesker does (let’s make him not dead or let’s set this before RE4 & 5 or something because u guys i totes <3 him).
The cool thing in my dream was if your character dies, you don’t actually die, you become infected by whatever killed you, with different viral effects depending on the type of monster that bested you. You get different abilities, but with some trade-offs — like, okay, now you have a sweet tentacle arm but you can’t use your gun anymore. Maybe the abilities can give you advantages in the environmental puzzles, like you can jump higher and reach an area you couldn’t otherwise, or break through a wall to a secret room.
And then to keep you from totally powergaming, you will die if you don’t use antidotes on yourself, like you have a certain amount of time depending on the virus. And if you’re killed as a zombie you are actually killed and have to try again.
Wow. Yeah. Sorry about that, I just HAD A DREAM ABOUT RESIDENT EVIL and got all excited for a second.
In all seriousness, though, the way the RE franchise has changed over the years is one of the things I grieve most (maybe even more than missing Sonic!) . Part of it might be the principle I wrote about at Kotaku yesterday — that as we advance toward clarity, realism and direct versus abstract representations in games, they’re becoming less immersive.
Another part of it is the “Westernization” of the franchise, according to how Capcom seems to perceive the West’s tastes. And, honestly, based on what sells at retail and what the mainstream gamer seems to love, it could be naive of me to say “you don’t have to make a first-person guns and muscles game to sell a lot of copies in the U.S.” Numbers beg to differ, so what do I know.
People still make and buy niche JRPGs, but I think the survival horror genre has been the biggest casualty of the decline of the Japanese industry. The numbers may say I’m in the minority when I say this, but I don’t find a sustained gameplay pattern of direct confrontation to be as satisfying as the mystery of exploration, the uncertainty of lurking spectres. I wrote, somewhat clumsily, about this in this ancient 2008 article where I wonder if the “survival horror” genre really still exists.
Again, it comes down to the literal versus abstract, the direct versus the implicit, the real versus the unreal, and I continue to believe that in an eagerness for accessibility and instant comprehension, we’ve sacrificed all the things that can really suck us into a game brand when we develop for the former rather than the latter.
On a related note, we continue to do The FFVII Letters over at Paste. We’re at part six now, and I kick it off by talking about how concepts of “the map”, or the world of an RPG, have evolved. Kirk and I’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response you all have given us for the letters; if you’ve been following along, thanks for joining us! We’re having so much fun at it.
Finally, because it’s so fun to revisit things from your past, I have also written ‘Why You Should Watch Labyrinth Over Again.’
[Today’s Good Song: Panda Bear, ‘Last Night At The Jetty‘]
This fantastic piece by Heather Chaplin says pretty much everything I’ve wanted to say about the gamification ‘movement’ and all of the entrepreneurs that are driving it. Enjoy your venture capital bucks, guys — I’m gonna stay with the real world and just play video games for fun, okay?