The Patreon Letters - 19th May, 2018

Hi everyone, Em here. Before we get into it, I wanted to mention that if you haven't yet please check out the pieces me and Jackson did for the relaunching Deorbital. You can find my piece here and Jackson's piece here. If you want to help bring Deorbital back you can check out their gofundme campaign here.

If you've noticed, the Patreon page got a big update this week. Needless to say, it was a lot of work, so you'll excuse me if I just get into the letter.

( not my game collection, but how my brain feels sometimes )

It's a strange thing to feel yourself growing older in the video games space. Now that I'm done with God of War and ready for our next game club a bit early, I found myself looking for something new-to-me to play, which is a thing we always try to work on here so our breadth of experience grows and thus our frame of reference for talking about games expands.

I did this while talking to Jackson, who was going on about their enthusiasm and desire to play through series that they have just started or are only a little bit into: Zelda, Castlevania, The Witcher, etc. They jokingly said that I didn't have anything like this to do any more. The problem is, upon reflection, they were right. I don't have very many good projects in my ahead. Most of the really enthusiastic projects are behind me. 

I've been playing video games too long.

It is partially a function of being a Nintendo kid, partially the function of the way games were back in the day, but after twenty five years of playing games there are very few series I haven't at least dipped my toe into and many popular, famous series I outright have played all of. I've played almost every major Nintendo franchise release ever put out. I've played almost every Castlevania. I've played the Witcher, Uncharteds, and Bioshocks of the world. It is a strange conundrum that affects very few people, but it's affecting me, and I both know I'm not alone and wonder about this as the end state of a certain type of person who focuses on more than just new releases.

I look around me and I see a lot of my peers and those slightly older than me struggling with what it means to have played decades worth of games. Money and families are often what drives people out of this space when people hit their thirties, but I also think a certain sort of fatigue sets in also. It's easy to look at every new game and just see the parts of games you remember the first time around, rehashed and remixed and reheated for the twentieth time in the hot new release that everyone treats with kid gloves because it's So Unique and Special. It's hard not to feel cynicism and even despair in the face of these sorts of accolades, as you feel like the one person ruining everyone's fun by shouting that this emperor is not only naked has hell but that we did this a decade ago. 

The alternative is to retreat into a sort of comforting old games nostalgia. I think a lot about how Jeff Gerstmann primarily streams obscurities from a childhood playing arcade and early home computer games. I think about Jeremy Parish's lengthy breakdowns of Mario and Metroid, and his quest to make a video for every GameBoy game. There is a definite appeal of returning to what you know, of wrapping yourself in the lived experience that now passes for expertise in a world where everyone around you is younger and lacking context. You can become the lead voice in a niche you came to naturally, from young fan to middle aged authority. 

But I also worry about this being a trap. I could easily become the person who settles into mostly talking about Final Fantasy and Mario with my energies. I love them so much, it would be so easy. There's always a market for that sort of work if it's well made. But also I look at our podcast and the games that have surprised and affected me in the past five years, and almost all of them have come from seeking out broad new horizons and playing older games that are new to me. Uncomfortable genres and uncovering blind spots are the lifeblood of my enthusiasm as a critic. 

I can't just settle into what I know. What I know is already well covered, if not exhaustively covered, by people with jobs based entirely around covering it. 

What I know is boring, mostly to me but by transference to most of the work I would make on the subject. It takes so much work and the help of Jackson's own experience taking in these things for the first time to create good Zelda, Mario, or Final Fantasy content on Abnormal Mapping. I cannot create such things myself. They would be inert. They often feel inert to me when I play them now, memories carved into stone through decades of remembrance.  

There is a third option, of course, which is to become the champion of the left behind and obscure. Many of my peers have done this. You take the games that aren't canonized and you treat them as if they were. Sonic is a great example of this. Sonic isn't treated like Mario or Zelda, but I know people who insist that it should be and will give it that consideration. I don't even necessarily disagree. 

And I've certainly done this too, going around stumping for handheld entries of long-running franchises, of talking to you about how good Mega Man 6 is even if nobody agrees. 

I have played nearly all of Ys at this point, and can talk to you with authority about it, because I wanted to play an RPG series most people don't ever talk about. I love Ys. It doesn't matter. It's never mattered. I care because it doesn't matter and it probably should, at least a little.  

But increasingly I find myself out of big franchises like that to touch that aren't huge time sinks like Tales of games or becoming an authority on Sid Meier properties. I'm not interested in that sort of pedantry. I really just want to feel enthusiastic about games again, in a way that's very hard for me to muster any more. There are thousands of new things to play, and thousands of old things as well, but the possibility space of old things that surprise and delight me is smaller every year and the work we do actively makes it smaller. 

Which is a strange lament, I know. It's foolhardy to sit here and whine about how much playing older games have spoiled me finding new old games to enjoy, when I do it to myself and I got what I wanted. I know a lot about games. I'm an 'expert' I guess. But I also will never have a Castlevania period or a Metal Gear period or a Zelda period ever again. All of those things, those broad swaths of discovery where everything is interesting and fresh? They are closed off to me. I can go digging in the obscurities bin, and I do. I can wait for the franchises that are still kicking to come out with new games, and I do. But the more games I play the less the possibility of games delights me and the more the reality of games wearies me.

Which leaves me in such a discouraged place. But I picked up a Castlevania recently to record, even though I've played it before. I'm going to publish this piece and start Assassin's Creed: Origins, the latest in a franchise I've played almost all of to great exhaustion and yet I'm still excited for this one. There are new things to see and new old things to see and I'll find them and enjoy them. 

I implore you to do the same. This might seem like a cautionary tale, but it isn't. It takes literally twenty years to get to this point, and when I look at Jackson playing Castlevania III I remember when they were an Xbox only kid who didn't know a Famicom from a Final Fantasy. Going back and going wide past your point of comfort is good. It broadens your horizons and sharpens you ability to see past the manipulation of the PR machine. It might rob the new games of their ability to ensorcell you, but it'll also save your budget as you realize there are more exciting things than the next big thing. 

I'll find new projects, even if they aren't as easy as 'play all the X' anymore. I'll find the things to be excited for. Looking for them gets harder with time but also it becomes very easy to recognize when you're wasting your time trying to get blood from a stone. And there will always be surprises, both in the past and coming down the road, and the only way for us to be taken by them is to be ready and aware of them.

Until next time,

Em