Patreon Letter - 17th March, 2018

Good morning, friends. Lately me and Jackson have been joking about a time in which we don't play games anymore. Right now, they're just jokes, responses to the stress in our lives and the easiest target for frustration in a world where we both have many many other problems to tackle. But today I'd like to think about the reality that it isn't a joke, that it will one day happen, just as it will probably happen for all of us. 

Today I want to talk about the death of games.

It used to be that games writers were, for a time, focused on the idea that the demographics of gaming would age up and the types of games we would all enjoy would change. Games would mature, the medium would gain nuance, and we'd all enter some sort of golden middle age where games would all be tailored to the wants of people with the media literacy of well-read adults looking for something more out of their interactive entertainment software.

Nobody talks much about this anymore. And it's not hard to see why. Gaming as a culture has taken a hard shift into a product- and technology-based conservatism, where all we want is a 4K rig and 4K consoles and the games to absolutely always run 60 FPS on them. Also these games have to be on the switch, too, because why not? The customer is always right. We got lootboxes out of Star Wars. We can have anything we want.

Everyone streams a survival shooter. Drake. Waypoint. Kotaku. Your fav problematic boy on twitch. Games journalists who scorned the idea of streaming five years ago wake up every day to stream games because that's how they get paid now. Because that's what the gamers want. Gamers, in this instance, being people with the time to watch so many hours of video to get those numbers up. That means younger people, who often have more time than the aging demographic. The average age of game players might be going up, but the culture of games is getting younger and younger in this push to market longform video to audiences that can consume it.

I have many friends who have been in and on the periphery of games writing for a decade. People who took their shot, didn't make it, and got out. People who are still hanging on the edges as a semi-invested outsider like me and Jackson. People who made it and are undoubtedly going to have long careers at the media websites because they work their asses off. Every group of us laments the pivot to video, the focus on the half dozen games that have the highest engagement levels with their player base, and the general lack of a more thoughtful coverage. 

Good writers exist but jobs do not, and with even freelance programs seemingly drying up left and right, nobody should be expected to write for free in games. For those of us who don't have a lot of wealth, the people who often provide the most interesting takes when given the opportunity, why would any of us actually waste our time when we're just going to be forced to opine about the new PUBG map?

And what of the older people, the generation before my peer group? Most of them pivoted away and out. Some, undoubtedly, stopped playing games altogether as they grow older and have kids and careers that pay well but take up time and energy. Maybe they just play some casual games on their phone now and then. Maybe they pivoted into dad games like World of Tanks. Maybe they focused on the one game they really love like Dota 2, Final Fantasy XIV, or Crusader Kings 2 and just pour infinite amounts of time into that one game. There's nothing wrong with that, but those people have basically taken themselves out of the conversation I'm talking about here, the people who make up The Culture and The Conversation as distinct ideas. 

Lately I've seen people start talking about the PlayStation 5 as a concept. An inevitability, something that games like Cyberpunk 2077 might be released on in that cross-generational way. The idea of new machines fills me with an exhaustion so deep I cannot find the jokes to make it sound more trivial than it is. I can't imagine buying a new PlayStation. I feel like I barely have begun to get good games for the PlayStation 4 I bought at launch. It still feels to me like we're in that period where people are figuring out these consoles and trying to develop the first wave of original software. When I remind myself these consoles are going to be five years old this year I wonder what has happened to time and get mad at how I spent $400 on a machine I've played maybe 20 games on and really only loved like 4 of them.

A new PlayStation will undoubtedly come out, probably in 2020? That's a good round year to release a product in. But I cannot guarantee I will be there to play anything for it. When I look around I see a culture that cannot help but kill its history over and over on the altar of new markets to soak for money. The older people, the people gaming would adjust to accomodate, either get too poor to keep up or too stodgy and old and spend their rich dad money on collecting TurboGrafx-16 games or whatever the hot retro collectibles are anymore. 

I see what came before and what is coming up ahead and I realize that games culture will never end, we will only end our participation with it, too old and potentially too broke to continue. Unless we subsidize our jobs making videos for the kids about games we should all fucking know better than to invest in. Unless we spend our time rewarding games like Horizon Zero Dawn as being steps forward in storytelling and games like Hellblade and Life is Strange as steps forward in representation. Unless we make sure to chase the hot game and put up videos of Getting Over It or Fortnite. Unless we chase that money and those eyeballs, chase the hot new games that rehash the same tired shit we've been mad about since Bioshock Infinite came out a decade ago. 

Some of us will just stop. Some of us will become niche genre- or era- specific nostalgia wonks. Some of us will find the one game we play for five or more years at a time, hundreds or thousands of hours worth. Some of us will chase the endless churn of new product at high cost both financially and mentally. But games will not change. They never have, and they never will. 

Our ideas about that possibility were not hope for the future but the lack of a past, assuming that the changes a peer group went through were the changes of an entire medium. They are not. They never were. There will always be more kids to fall into the same ruts we did, crawling over our bones happy to enjoy the latest Smash Brothers, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls, or whatever else you want to dangle in front of us. 

Recognizing this inevitability gives us, I hope, the permission to leave when we no longer gain anything from our time here. We can leave, nothing will be lost on either side, and the world will turn on. I just hope we all can actually do that when the time comes, and save ourselves years and paychecks worth of anguish on a line of products that were never giving us the fulfillment we would try to imbue them with in our desperate bid to wish software into an importance it cannot and should not have. 

Until next time, may we all stop playing games someday if we are tired,

Em