This is awkward because I am studying game design.
My attempt here is to untangle the dissonance, to allow me to make a choice about what I’m going to be doing with the remainder of my short life on earth.
Are games as art worthwhile?
Some people think so. ShammyTV had a mental breakdown disguised as a video essay on Outer Wilds. Yahtzee Croshaw self reportedly loves games and the experiences they create as a unique medium.
Have I had worthwhile moments playing games?
Sure. I’ve had many A-ha moments playing Outer Wilds. I was emotionally affected at that games story, though not nearly as much as ShammyTV.
I found playing Changed to be adorable, the game equivalent of a pleasant talk to another furry. It made me happy seeing and talking to Puro. The puzzles made me feel like I was playing a game with the designer, and when I actually saw the designer in the end credits, it felt like only a formality, like I’d already been talking to them the entire time. It gave me a sense of connection.
Far Cry 2 absorbed me with it’s nihilist game experience. It’s core 3c’s and mechanics being engaging with enough friction to allow for a 50 hour campaign were you psychologically, as a player, become disillusioned with the world without it being ever explicitly told to you. Then at the end, that ‘reading’, or for games, ‘playing’, was exactly what the designers intended. It gave me a nihilistic catharsis and the satisfaction of the story reflecting it’s effect on me.
Titanfall 2 gave me countless hours of 3c’s, moment-to-moment gameplay fun, with music in the background and some light secondary/teriary gameplay loop that was also satisfying to complete. Many Held breaths and cheers.
Pathologic 2 taught me that the hippocratic oath is not just moral, but optimal for saving the people you do want to save. You can’t save everyone, but you will try, and trying to cheat it will kill your loved ones too.
I find this a valuable life lesson. Actually playing it, I was mainly invested in the mechanics, as they gave me a asperges/rules fetish satisfaction of playing this large complex machine well. Here in the future, I don’t have any fondness for the time I spent playing it really.
That might be the key. I don’t really hold any fondness of my time spent with games. I don’t have any emotional relatability. And that might be because I have a dissociative disorder, that I’m not having access to that fondness right now. Do I take the potential of fondness with me?
No, because the present is the only thing thats real.
But, if I change rapidly over a short time period, isn’t it foolish not to incorporate that over longer term decisions? When high or drunk, you might refrain from sending sensitive texts to someone because you know that you are not in the best state, and future you might suffer for your bad choices now.
So don’t do anything rash, respect your past choices, and move carefully while you feel too different from when you made those choices. This is a strategy that has kept me relatively stable, especially during times where I wasn’t sure about everything going on in my brain.
So when I played those games, I was making a choice to play them. I know I was enjoying myself at the moment of play. I know that logically but emotionally I am totally apathetic of that. I think I could have spent my time getting better at living. Working out, eating healthier, going to the gym, talking with friends. I know that’s not what I wanted to do at the time but that’s what I want past me to have done.
But these are all pretty much singleplayer games. Looking back, the gametime I actually do hold fondly is the time were games were used to actually socialize with people. I joined a RP guild in World of Warcraft, made a silly character and hung out with people. I remember that 100x more fondly than when I was killing monsters, handing in quests, then going to a new place to do it all over again. The latter was busywork, the former actually mattered.
The moments spent in minecraft multiplayer with my friends, building, mining, playing bedwars. Cherished memories.
Just recently I’ve played a bit of The Finals with my brother and a childhood best friend, and that was really fun, and I retroactively smile that I did that. I wouldn’t want to do anything else with my time.
I’ve also been playing and running tabletop RPG’s, mainly DND, since I was 15, and I consider every second spent on that worthwhile.
I think that will be my conclusion. Although I enjoyed playing single player games at the time, the moments that I actually am fond of are when games were a socialising tool to interact with other people.
Games need to be social for me to consider them worthwhile.
But come to think of it, there is one exception; Visual Novels.
In 2023 I fell in a rabbit hole of Echo Project visual novels, and have since been reading more and more of them. Maybe it’s because they are still recent enough to be in my head, but I find that the experience of reading them to be incredible.
There are a few possible reasons for this.
Maybe their sheer quality is so good that it overrides the social necessity for me to fondly remember my time with games. Like, blows it out of the water and crosses the threshold. Maybe I’ve just been playing terrible games my entire life until I played Echo.
And while Echo is the best game I’ve ever played, it might also have something to do with the medium of Visual Novels.
Visual Novels are very mechanically light. There is no real time action, no primary gameplay loop unless clicking a button to read the next dialogue counts. Experientially, it’s very similar to just reading a book, with some variation of course. Some VN’s feel more as choose-your-own adventure books (Short multi-ending games, dating sims), game books (Back to class fantasy game w/ stats), some just straight up feel more like a movie (Class of 09), and some are purely just a story that you click through (Lookouts, A scary gourmet). There is of course the Dating Sim genre included here, that Echo is actually a horror-spin on.
Anyway NONE OF THIS MATTERS. The point is that it’s just reading. It’s not really a game. And as a kid I really loved to read. It’s just good writing, and so not really a game. Visual Novels don’t count in terms of game design. Theres elements there but you don’t go to university to create fucking visual novels. Fuck you.
So Visual Novels are worthwhile because they are books, and books are worthwhile in my eyes.
Hobbyist vs Professional
There is a well documented case whereby, someone enjoying their hobby, decides to turn it into a career. They quickly lose all the joy from it, and not only are they dissatisfied with their job, their hobby is now ruined. Truly a travesty.
The reason I did game design in the first place is because I will always be making things, and of the things I make, video games seemed like the most viable financially.
(Of drawing, being a dungeon master, writing, making music)
It occurs to me that I would be having this same type of crisis of “What good does [x] medium even do for the world.” Drawing would be relegated to social media fodder, a canvas for media to exist instead of the real world, or jerk-off fodder for an even bigger replacement of the living world.
I might be too into the idea that the internet isn’t real and is bad.