The Patreon Letters - 23rd December, 2017

Hello everyone, Em here for the final letter of this hell year. I was considering doing some sort of larger recap for you all, but we already did that in the upcoming Game of the Year Abnormal Mapping dropping on Tuesday, so please look forward to that for our reflections about how we feel about this year. If you don’t listen to that, but do read these, I just want to say thank you for all of your support this year. But also, Abnormal Mapping is good, why aren’t you listening? It’s only our flagship podcast. 

At the end of the year I always bite off more than I can chew in terms of games. I’m so heads down on our projects for the podcasts during most of the year but usually in December we have a good six weeks where nothing is going on that also coincide with me having multiple days off from work. Because I’m ridiculous and have no idea how to slow down, this always turns into me generating work for myself where I shouldn’t. Last year I tore through Pillars of Eternity. The year before that I played through The Witcher 1 and 2. This year I was like ‘I’m good at this, let’s tackle multiple games!’ Which is why I’m in the middle of both Persona 5 and Dishonored 2 and not getting very far in either.

I think as this year has worn on and we’ve become so busy with podcasts on some level my patience for checking things off my list has turned into a very different sort of drive than it used to be. Before I would try to consider everything and give it time, but not get very far before my energy petered out. These days I’ve had such ambitious thoughts as ‘let’s clean out my Vita backlog’ or ‘what if I got a flash cart for my GBA because I find the emulators really unreliable?’ Large, untenable projects that shouldn’t work.

But I’ve actually done really well at clearing up my Vita backlog. I don’t know if its age, disposition, experience, or some combination of the three, but it’s very easy to just boot up a Vita game and decide that 10 minutes later no I don’t want to play this weird rougelikelike beat-em-up ever again, and in fact I want it off my Vita as soon as possible. As much as our network is, at its core, about giving equal consideration to trash and treasure as worthwhile pieces of media, it’s very nice to finally be in a place where I have so many games and have played enough games to know when something doesn’t matter and should get off my memory stick and out of my life FOREVER. Especially if it’s a PlayStation Mobile game, deleting the icon knowing that I will never be able to access the game again because of that service’s messy shutdown, my actual feeling is totally divorced from the Universal FOMO and is instead a small wave of relief that I’m finally unburdened from yet another thing to worry about. 

None of this to say this is especially healthier than any other way of being. On some level, to care about this at all is to be operating under that constant drive to consume and catalogue and advance along this awful fake ladder of capitalist hustle. Art turned into checklists, hobbies turned into jobs, the very act of spending time rendered down into a commodity to be spent wisely at your peril against the onrushing deadline of our earthly demise. It’s all such a drag, but it’s the only drag I know, and I feel like I’m decidedly not alone in this. But the more I do it the less I feel its gravitational pull on every aspect of my life and the more I feel like it’s just a way to while away my hours as much as if I was watching TV or building gunpla or baking bread or whatever people do for hobbies in 2017. 

The increasing sense of futility doesn’t actually bother me, it just helps with this vague sense of freedom with my lot. I’m not actually acquiring some sort of useful mastery of the form that will universally make my work better. I’m just an animal with a lot of down time with a favorite toy to chew on, shredding through stuffed rabbits at an alarming but mostly sustainable rate. And that’s okay. We’re fine. We don’t have to do anything—which is a terrifying fact because it underlies how little everything we aspire to matters. All these games, all the books read, all the movies watched? It’s just ways to spend your time existing. It’s a means, not an end. 

So I’ll continue to whittle down my Vita library. I’ll continue to think about playing Sonic Advance but probably not doing it. I’ll chip away at Dishonored 2 wondering why it isn’t as good as the first game. These things matter in that they matter to me but they don’t matter and that’s okay. Everything that’s mattered in 2017 has been an active flaming train wreck. It’s the things that don’t matter that will, in aggregate, keep us alive.

Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, enjoy Sunday and Monday if you don’t, and I’ll see you all in 2018. <3