Twitter, you drive me to drink sometimes.

A few nights ago, I had a dream I was engaged in a discussion about formalism on Twitter. These things invade my dreams. This is the reality of being someone whose job it is, essentially, to convey information and have opinions in public on the internet. You should drink less, Leigh. Well, then, you should just get off Twitter. I should, I should.

It is so easy for people to tell others what they should do. There’s a technique popularized in hip-hop battle culture whereby your opening salvo involves pre-empting your opponent by saying all the things about yourself that you expect will be used against you. You can disarm your opponent by being bored of their criticisms, by being ready with something better. Hip-hop has mastered the “yes, and?” Internet writers also have to master the “yes, and.”

So I drink and I vent on Twitter. Yes, and?

I was interviewed by a woman today who’s doing an article on some parallels she saw between hip-hop culture and nerd culture: two different spaces that emerged when people reached for the marriage of art with escapist fantasy, as a means of coping with a sense of powerlessness and alienation. And later ultimately became, at least as far as their mainstream and commonly-seen outputs, associated with competition, fronting, rule-bound cultural behaviors and sexism.

I’m overwhelmed by social media in recent weeks. There was the division over my BioShock: Infinite critique (don’t they get points for “trying”? Depends, what would you do with, like, a hundred million dollars?). There was the resurrection once again of the shambling “what is a game” argument, triggered by increasing anxiety about the “zinester” “movement” from everyone except people actually producing the games supposedly in question.

And then today, we’re also talking about games journalism yet again: Ben Kuchera explains the way the click-bait ecosystem works, with the hazardous and privileged but probably not-intentional implication that the eyeballs that sexist trash draws help fund the quality things that we actually admire, while John Walker retorts that it doesn’t have to be that way, that carefully tending the garden of principles over years will buy you freedom from compromising your values for the sake of “the system.”

Fuck the system. I said it, I’ll still say it. That was rude of me. I’m very rude (perhaps one percent of the time, when I’m not living my life in quiet devotion to neutral industry journalism that legislators of my tone will never read). Yes, and?

The fascinating thing is that I don’t think any of this is a coincidence. That we’re arguing about the prized primacy of systems while we simultaneously debate whether BioShock: Infinite, a game rent in bits by its slavish, nearsighted devotion to supposed “systems”, is good or is shit. It’s closer to the latter than the former. I’m sorry, I’m so disrespectful. David Jaffe, an adult man who made games about badass clown cars, called me “That Woman” today, while he proposed his divine ideas for fixing my profession. I’m feeling a little bit uppity. “Am I fucking high?” He asks. Yes, and I’m drunk.Yes, and?

I digress. Or do I? Is this a conversation about what I “deserve” (whether money for good work or scathing criticism from fanboys) or about something darker? Is the “what is a game” conversation really about systems, or is it about inclusion and diversity, and the fact we celebrate wild experimentation from some kinds of people and not others?

Is viewing sexist clickbait as a “necessary evil” spooned sugar for some, harsh medicine for others? If I make my living — and I do — by being vocal, by giving a shit, by fighting for things I believe in, and I disdain the idea that I should ever have to write content I don’t wholly want to be writing, am I a lucky fluke?

Is BioShock: Infinite everything it was supposed to be, or do are we just indoctrinated to valuing its systems? Should I control my tone? It is so easy to tell others what they should do.

These are the arguments that have been giving me approximately one new Twitter notification every fifteen seconds for the past few weeks. Am I offensive to the system? Do I have a moral obligation to try to break it, or can I simply disengage, with a sardonic and aggrieved salute to the authorities? It’s closer to the former than the latter, for me, and that’s why I sit up late shedding hair when the only article I materially have to do tonight (this morning — it’s getting late, I could be sleeping better, yes, and?)  is about The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, a game we all loved when we were children.

We all loved games when we were children. I loved them too, but I get to cry in front of my computer tonight, because the community we’ve created is a critical mass of opposing fields, ripping us into two realities as if we lived in some corny videogame world where mad relics controlled the narratives. Some people leverage their sense of alienation to welcome others. Others use it to harm and exploit them. Am I using too many big words? That’s another one I’ve heard lately, that I use too many big words. Yes, and?

And I should get off the internet. Yes, crying on the internet about the social cruelty and inbred violence within video game culture is foolish, when we have had such tragedy in Boston, when our government voted to allow whoever to have access to weapons with no background check, when lives were lost tonight in Texas. And social media ‘reportage’ has overall been a detriment to our information process around important things — rumors, fake accounts, overstimulation, sensationalism, all user-generated. It’s probably not a coincidence that some of us respond by having a big ancient debate about whether we are skilled workers in our tiny little worlds or not, whether being a journalist, a curator, is a role that matters.

Things are happening in the real world, and our circular arguments, our social media present shock, are keeping us insulated and allowing us to escape, are sideways means of processing. In a way games are doing for us what they’ve always done. I feel ambivalent about this.

Judging by the extreme polarities I see on social media, we as interactive entertainment consumers are presently defined by ambivalence.

A prior generation came in droves to games because we couldn’t control the narratives and systems of our lives, and we reached longingly for contained worlds where we could have that control. I pre-empt your criticisms — I drink, I Tweet too much, I’m upset about my work at an entirely inopportune times as a method of anticipating and controlling the meta-narrative of my participation within games. Yes, and?

All I can do is master the “yes, and?” If you make that affirmation, and pose the next question often enough, you eventually arrive at a vortex of helplessness. You run out of “and”s. It is so easy to tell others what they should do, yet we don’t know what to do right now. The world is a scary place. We compartmentalize; games are compartmentalizing.

Is there anything worse for a gamer than polarities that can’t be reconciled, than conversations that cannot be “won”, a salvo of senselessness from our supposed safe places as well as the outside world? I need to sleep more. I need to stay off Twitter. I could stand to be less outspoken. I should ‘pick my battles’. I should be more ‘respectful.’ I should be doing something that matters, instead of getting upset about video games. I am being perhaps overly-personal, here. I need to get to a point, here.Yes. Yes, and?

Okay. Gotta go play a SNES game and write about it. Video games.