The Patreon Letter - 17th June, 2018

Hi everyone, Em here a day late for the letter. Sorry for the delay. E3 week and general malaise really ruined my scheduling this week, beyond what I would have assumed. 

I've been playing a lot of The Binding of Isaac lately, despite myself. It's the closest I've ever come to a forever game, that mythical idea that if a game has enough content and appeals to you enough you'll never have to buy anything else. A desert island without the desert or the island, a single-game exile of your own choosing. I can tell you right now that such an idea is as close to gaming hell as I can imagine.

It's not that Binding of Isaac is bad. It's quite good. I put 200 hours into the original PC version, and then another few dozen into the Vita version. I wasn't even going to get the game on Switch until I found myself really struggling with the lack of new things to play on Switch last fall. I messed with it. Then I got depressed. And then my hour count started climbing. And climbing. And climbing.

There's a very real inertia with depression gaming. Part of it is that Isaac is one of my original depression games—I dropped dozens of hours into the PC original back when I was unemployed six years ago. I would just spend and hour or two every day playing it when I couldn't muster the energy for anything else. It was comforting. It was the one daily ritual I had left. So now I find myself half a decade later falling back into those old patterns on the nights I can't sleep or when I can't focus on writing this letter. I'll just boot up Isaac while I watch an old waypoint stream, or listen to an audiobook, or (in a true pit of self-inflicted suffering) watch northernlion play Binding of Isaac while I play Binding of Isaac. 

He's good. They are a great LP if you want to understand what the game is about. 

There are approximately 7000 episodes. I can relate.

Part of it is the reality of my situation. I'm playing club games but need to be a little more alert for them. I have to think critically and play with care so I have material to talk about. Outside of that I find most games bothersome right now. Especially coming off of E3, where I've never felt more tired being adjacent to this space. I'm supposed to care about Anthem and The Division 2? Not on your life. Let me sleep. 

But also my situation in 2018 has become much more financially tenuous, and if you've never booted up the Switch store, lemme tell ya... steam it ain't. Every game is five to ten dollars more expensive than on any other store front, and the sales are almost never as good. Nintendo is selling us back every Wii U game at basically full price, and while that's great for everyone who didn't have a Wii U, I did and bought all those games the first time. So I'm left with very few games to buy, and the ones I might want I either already bought or could get for significantly cheaper on PC or PS4. It's depressing to even think about. Easier to boot up Isaac.

I've angsted about this tendency for the past five weeks or so, watching my hour count in Isaac creep up again. It passed my hour count in Breath of the Wild some time ago. I'm sure it'll double or triple it. I feel like I should be doing something more constructive with my time, and if I do need to just tune out and live my life without making it work, I should do it in something a little more restorative than a video game I've played for hundreds of hours. Not because people can't get that out of games, I believe in that, but because it's coming at the expense of my other hobbies and relaxation times. 

I shouldn't be playing Isaac over meditating, or writing. 

That hasn't stopped me. 

There's no solution to this, because there isn't really a problem here. At some point I will find new things to do, either because something catches my attention or my mental state improves such that I can pick back up my other leisure activities. Maybe I'll just exhaust what I can do in Isaac. It's very close to an infinite game with the amount of content, but I know I'll never get all of it and eventually I'll get all that I assume is within my power. Some day. Three hundred hours from now.

But it still isn't a problem. If I play Isaac over seven platforms for the next thirty years it's not a problem. I make it one by attaching so much meaning to the act of doing it, that time is mine to spend however I want and this isn't worse than any other expenditure. I know this in my head. But telling it to my heart only goes so far, and I still feel guilty enough to write this piece as an apology to myself. But I'm not going to stop. 

Not when there's more things to do, and maybe next run is the run to do it in. 

Not when nothing else is getting better. Because at least with Isaac, they aren't getting any worse.