The Patreon Letter - 30th January, 2021

You know I initially typed 2020 up there in the title. 

Welcome to 2021! It's also pretty bad. Immediately whiffing on my new year's resolution to not do these letters at the very last minute but that's okay, we're going to be kind to ourselves for at least as long as COVID is disrupting our lives.

I was going to write a big thing about Final Fantasy XV, which I finished and really liked, but I decided unless I wanted to write two big things about Final Fantasy XV I needed to get through the DLC and the actual book they put out that details the story of the cancelled DLCs and frankly that was just too much FFXV at once. I need a break. So maybe next month or March, who knows what the future brings.

The strange thing about this month is just how many things I've been doing, but they're all along the gaming front. My troubles with enjoying this hobby once I made it work are well documented in just about every corner of our network, but I always believed it would cycle back around some day, because everything tends to. And here we are, 2021 and in full gamer mode, which is great because video games have never been more dead as COVID production grinds release schedules to a halt and the trends of development already ate the calendar down to the bone. 

Thankfully I am frankly more interested in older games than I am new ones anyway, so I'm keeping busy on stuff I meant to get to but never did as I plow through a bunch of games. But also I am trying something that is very antithetical to how I tend to think about approaching media, something that could be seen as a radical act, if you're me and have brain worms about things like this:

When I stop enjoying playing a game, I just delete it.

I feel like this is one of those things that sounds disappointingly small, but it's been a really difficult road to get to the point where I can just admit this is the best way to proceed with things. I'd blame being a working critic, where there's an expectation of seeing things out, but even before I started doing games podcasts I was the kind of person who felt it 'didn't count' if I dropped a game before I finished it. Like I was missing some fundamental part of the essential experience if I wasn't exhaustive in my consumption.

Weirdly one of the things that broke this for me was a thread by Cameron Kunzelman (https://twitter.com/ckunzelman/status/1324064416892100613) about how he read books for his work as an academic, and it mostly involved a high volume process of taking in a lot of stuff quickly, hitting the big or relevant points, but reading more for positional awareness more than exhaustive mastery. The theory being that if his research required going in deep later, he could more easily do that when he knew what the landscape of ideas was more generally. 

This is one of those things I used to do for games, but really fell off as I got busy with other stuff (the world where I only had one podcast was so, so different) and also my life changed into one with more responsibilities taking care of my family. I would regularly spend a Saturday just like digging around on itch, back when Saturdays weren't always recording and prep days, since all the podcast work happens on the weekends. 

Also, games culture was different, the smaller games were smaller. There's so many more itch games that are actual lengthy video games more than two hours long than there were in 2015, which I'm sure is great for people who don't want to play 50 games a year but it meant that given my desire to finish stuff put me more at playing 0 games a year through commitment paralysis. Especially as I've found myself in the spot where watching anime is my real job and video games are the hobbyist project again, just because of how big Gundam is. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, sometimes I just got too depressed to do anything more than watch hundreds of cartoons a year. 

I'm just saying there's a lot of factors.

But the main thing is coming to grips with the idea of total coverage being impossible, and imperfect but honest context being a vital part of individual criticism. The reality is it doesn't matter if I have played hundreds of games or not to do my job, I spent three years playing fuck all outside of the podcast and I think I did all right despite all of that. But that means that if playing games isn't necessary for work I have to find a reason to play them that isn't motivated by the shifting goalposts of being productive.

To which everyone begins yelling "Because they're fun, fool!" and yes, I know, but it took so long to get there. Because sometimes you just get too in your head, and you stay there for a long, long time. 

The reality is very few games change their innate nature after halfway in, and the time cost is high enough that I simply shouldn't force it. I'd love to be the person who just crashed through entire games over and over again, but I'm just too busy and too tired and disinclined in general. And at the same time, I want to be the person who can just play a game as long as I enjoy it, even if it's not productive. I've been spending my spare time playing Geometry Wars 2 now that I have an xbox again, a game I've played all the way 'through' back when it was new. I have nothing to say about that game, I am not going to gain greater understanding if I spend 5 more hours on it. But when I'm just on the couch with some time to kill I will play a round. Again, should be normal, but this feels so irregular to me to feel like monumental progress on 'enjoying things like a person'. 

It's such a strange tension to feel like one needs to be an expert in all the things one discusses, especially since you look at other people in your field and you see their gaps really clearly and how it both isn't a problem and often informs their criticism in interesting ways when it's explored well. I just don't know where doing this job online for ten years begins and where this being a feature of capitalism trying to utilize experience into productive labor ends. Does everyone live like this? Are we all tormented by the things we want to enjoy becoming projects to be tackled? Is there a way beyond this that isn't full societal revolution? 

I don't know. I do know I'm not using spreadsheets to track anything anymore, because I can blame goodreads and our games spreadsheet as easily as I can blame myself. Maybe this will fall apart in a few months or even a few days. But right now? It feels worth trying, worth doing. And if something just doesn't click I shouldn't keep it on my backlog forever, I should just let it go. 

There are always more things to experience. Terrifyingly so, actually. So all we can do is do our best and hope it's enough to bring us peace. 

Until next time,

Em