About a month ago I wrote this rambling essay that I might refine at some point. Not sure.
It could do with a lot of editing, but I don’t plan on editing it for readability, nor publishing.
This was written in one go after thinking about writing something on where I am in relation to gaming these days, and I guess I’m thinking a lot about if I’m exiting the overall gaming culture.
I hope you enjoy.
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So I sent a photo of my partner and I doing this pedal car thing to a friend and he said something about having adventures, and it was a nice, silly little message, and it made me think about things, and I wanted to give a thought-out response.
I love gaming. I love how much potential it has, but if I had to choose between gaming and the outside world, it’d be the outside world, no questions asked. Gaming is something that we can interface with and interact with, but I can’t smell the trees or the land in a game. In a sense you can, in that your controlled character does, but yourself cannot, and so it’s merely an enactment of the action of smelling, experienced and left to the imagination to properly fill out the action, and you know, that’s fine. People enjoy that, and so do I, but it’s not something I’d want to live with if I had to choose one or the other.
It’s choosing between two experiential forms, the one in which I exist is the one where I value my ability to move freely, despite my various injuries. I value my ability to engage in motion and move through space and a thin, invisible medium that surrounds me. Gaming presents a fantasy that often is quite interesting in that they seldom aren’t snapshots of a greater world, but it’s a very controlled experience in which the imagination needs to work… which is fine, but the potential for gaming remains there and it remains underutilised.
There are some people who are seen as being geniuses in gaming, but I don’t think we’ve really had one yet. Perhaps someone from Nintendo, or someone else out there, but for a medium that has been around for as long as it has, it’s really good at capping itself on a few defined tracks. At the same time, a new one emerges here and there, but even though video games can be viewed as art in an art form, too often it is that they are obsessed with entertainment, even when reaching for a deeper meaning. As such, they often function as a springboard of sorts.
But then you have developers like Bethesda, who keep failing to make a game, but they keep on trying. They keep trying to build these worlds that make sense, and they keep getting so close before they miss the mark, and it’s frustrating, but it’s also engrossing. There’s a reason why Skyrim is still beloved as much as it is, and there’s a reason why people still enjoy Morrowind. There’s a reason why people keep talking about Halo 1 through to 3, and there’s a reason why people still argue over Final Fantasy (nearly all of it), and it’s great. It’s great, because these are things that have touched people and these are things that people have been able to buy into. They see what is presented and they go further into it all,
I love that stuff, and I really love the Hoenn region in some of the Pokemon games. It appeals to my love of nature and my love of the marine environment in a way that few other games to, and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t want to exist in that world, but that world doesn’t exist, and I can’t make it happen. I can’t put myself into that space; I can only project myself onto an avatar that exists in that space as it is represented by programming. For some, that is enough, and to be fair that is enough for me too.
But if I had to choose, it’d always be reality. I can go and see the stars, and I can go and listen to the ocean at night. I can look at my plants, and I can touch the flower petals, and I can embrace those that I love and care about, and I can be sad and hurt and commiserate with them too. Gaming, of course allows that kind of stuff, but it’s often in the discussion of the experiential rather than it itself, because for all emotional rending entertainment provides, it is a highly linear experience.
But I wouldn’t criticise someone who would choose that, because if that’s how they want to interact, so long as it’s healthy, then who am I to throw stones? There are plenty of people who don’t have the same kind of freedom of movement that I have, and not everyone gets to even choose to just fuck off to wherever.
Two of my friends, D-Man and MB; every now and then one or the other, or both I get to come over to my place, and we’ll just have tea and hang and talk shit and converse. No plans beyond that, and it’s a nice thing, even when the heavier stuff comes up. Sometimes my partner is there; sometimes she’s not. It’s just about being within each other’s company and taking it easy, and seeing where the conversation leads, if it leads anywhere at all, and it doesn’t matter. I’m thinking about how I engage with my friends, and how this small thing is a big thing because we’re just embracing each other’s company, and when we have so little availability in the world, to be able to clear things and make that time and make it happen… To have that kind of experience with gaming… I don’t know if I can.
Maybe the older I get, the more I don’t want to couch so much of my life around gaming, and maybe that’s it. I don’t know, but I know if I had to choose, it’d be the outside world and not the inside one, because the inside one doesn’t speak to me the way that the outside one does, and there’s such limited time. The day doesn’t rest, and perhaps neither do I.
Stupidity Hole 