I’m often kind of hard on nerds: Creative escapism and interactive entertainment are leading channels of communication this century, not a private treehouse you get to keep. The idea of “gamer” has become, to me, an open-mouthed marketing pawn desperately devouring and regurgitating memes, merchandise, sullen and slavish.
I resent it. Nerd culture is a place where dancing to My Little Pony songs becomes a sacred cultural expression, but, like, mocking and disregarding actual human identities is some kind of entitlement the disruption of which is treated as an unforgivable nuisance.
Gross. I’m embarrassed of it. Almost any time I tell a normal person what I do for work, I have to couple it with a gentle unpacking of their prejudices against video games, explain it’s not all hateful garbage and wank fantasies. But it’s complicated.
Earlier this week, someone I went to elementary school with found one of my articles and reached out to see if I was the same Leigh from their class — the one who pulled their hair. I was sort of distressed to learn I was the sort of kid who would have pulled hair, but fortunately my old classmate wasn’t too traumatized, and we got to reminiscing about the odd, dreamlike days we shared in a Montessori program in New England.
Come to find out we both have particular memories of the bark-stripped, termite-eaten sticks that used to strew themselves around our playground: Faerie staves, written with magical runes. For us, anything before our eyes always had the possibility of being something else. One of my closest childhood friends was a boy with autism, and our fashion of communication became Super Mario Bros.-inspired songs and sign-language. No one else could understand us.
It was a beautiful, private time. The language of games was always a way that I mapped my inner worlds. As a child I’d type whatever came to mind with the softly-winking green cursor of a DOS prompt, fascinated by the response SYNTAX ERROR IN 10 and wondering what it could possibly mean.
As my relationship with computers and, eventually, the internet marched on and became more intimate, I undertook fantastical archaeology every day, tunneling through digital holes looking for the passage between this world and some other one.
We were all strange like that in a way I find beautiful. Which is why I find it painful and unnerving that, in the service of those memories, of that culture, we’ve become people who argue about whether the newest blockbuster slog deserves an 8 or a 9, or whatever, who are, like, deeply invested in Microsoft’s commercial narrative.
My latest column in Edge is about how you can still find Your People, by being a participant, a discoverer, not simply a capital-C consumer.
Coming up on Edge’s 20th anniversary, the Kieron Gillen looks at the storied magazine’s once-controversial positioning; the simple declaration that it wanted to do things radically, even if it meant it might not be “for everyone.” And that not being “for everyone” made it somehow controversial, or elitist.
Of course, at that time — and even still, really — there is no games magazine “for everyone.” The idea that games might truly be for everyone is currently difficult for fans to get their heads around, as they get all in a snit whenever ways to include more people or, at least, not to offend them, come up.
Being willing to alienate “gamers,” though, is always an interesting place to start. When I think about what would serve truly passionate fans of games, I probably would rarely write about commercial work at all. No reviews, no how many maps does it have, no hardware wars. If that makes me “elitist,” fine.
Anyone who does the wringing, heartbreaking work of making or writing about games does it because we want something — to be closer to that which we love, and to be joined by more people there.
Probably, though, it’s even more because we want something back.
Simon Parkin is absolutely wonderful at interviewing major figures, sketching them with incredible humanity. It’s really hard to get good interviews out of E3, where you’re squished in among noise and amid handlers and translators for your 15 minutes with someone like Shinji Mikami. But this, just-published, is a fantastic piece about an incredible influencer — and about something I want back, the restraint and dread of old horror games before they all became action titles.