#472

To round of Factually Game Theory 2024, I thought it might be interesting to explore some of the negative space on the subject, i.e. what I don't play, even actively avoid. Also it's probably best practices to stress that I know what game theory is and that none of what I have said resembles it. I possess this awareness.

Jokes. They happen sometimes, in your vicinity, whether you appreciate this truth or just drool onto yourself a bunch while you wait for someone to wipe the drool off.

*

One must exercise caution, because the exploration of negative space too quickly becomes "I don't play these games because they are the byproducts of rot and the minds they issued from are morasses of putrefaction aqnd disease". That would be a moribund and sterile effort, noise without meaning, and if you disagree, I have excellent news: there is more of this kind of writing being generated about games per second than there is any other kind of writing on the planet, except pornography involving characters not generated by the author. You can be reading fresh ideas from brave new voices with only a nominal amount of clicks and keystrokes.

*

In my fecklessness and lack of self-regard, only Fallout 3 ever made any purchase on me among all the houses of its throbbing, radioactive lineage. I don't know, it's just true. Never played the ones that came out before 3; think there's two, seems reasonable to guess two, but I have been burned before. Never played any of the ones that came out afterwards.

It is as though I am trapped in my own chronoshard, where 3 condensed from total intangibles and never reproduced.

Anyhow. It is clear, no matter the internal particulars, that this Fallout thing makes me a heretic in the ways that I think are actually suboptimal, instead of making me smile. If I weren't me, I would respect me less--the objective facts of the case speak to me of a person of low character.

Because the person is me though, I give myself a pass. Maybe it's you who might consider that 3 is in fact enough Fallout, an island of sufficiency.

Skyrim is pretty much the only Elder Scrolls game I play, also. This sweeping away of the cape reveals that I merely like Bethesda games developed and released within a particular span of time and at a particular scale and resolution.

Still play Fallout 3 sometimes, and my blatantly unhealthy relationship with Skyrim is something I have had to face quitting the way one quits drinking. I should throw both the 360 disc and the Switch cart in the fucking garbage, today. But I know I won't. Might make the disc into art, though. 

*

Man, this has been like pulling a struggling wombat from the living earth. Well, I can't physically do that and would be surprised if it could be done without a tractor hitch, but I digress.

Long story short: I don't tend to play a lot of shooters or hyperrealistic games, with Halo* being a strong exception, plus the occaisonal spy thriller. Pure puzzlers are not a big one for me, I become completely obsessed, but only with a very few. However, puzzles should be everywhere in all games. If you could do a puzzle every time a chess piece moved in order to secure the move or gain bonus effects, for example, that by itself would be a great game. I don't play games that stress live disembowelment or active rape mechanics or whatever the fuck it is that breeds at the bottom of the barrel of human endeavor. I don't play games where you do nothing but kill without context, or engage in power fantasies for the sake of power fantasies, or engage in the extermination of the Other; I am not opposed to violence in media, but beyond a certain threshold it just makes me sick. Games which are not specifically fighting games that are purely competitive, dating sims, granular-type sims, gem-matching, cookie-clicking-type things are no, and games which do nothing but PvP until the very earth cracks with age are out for me; Overwatch and Unreal Tournament for example, feel to me like just big balloons of nothing. No MMO's. Bounced off WoW instantly and failed to engage with The Old Republic. Whatever Fortnite is, I don't care about it, to the point that I can't even pay the kind of attention it takes to define it, even though I've read a lot about it. 

Anyway. Enough of that negative bullshit.

Let's just wrap this with a story instead. Stories are better.

*

My parents were reticent to provide me with video games, and thus, a large part of my memories of childhood is the waging of a relentless campaign of propagandistic attitition in the pursuit of digital entertainment. My case, almost from the get-go, of course, was that it was digital literature I was after, just like books and movies, which in fairness and praise to my parents, they provided in spades. I grew up reading and watching literally whatever the fuck I pleased basically on my own recognizance. Encyclopedias, young adult literature, and the shorter classics were all part of my repertoire before I turned seven, shortly before I would start on philosophy. Also Quentin Tarantino and Mel Gibson movies, and stuff like The Ghost and the Darkness, Congo, Predator, and of course--of course--Jurassic Park were all included my video diet, along with more regular, defensible stuff like Willow and Star Wars and The Dark Crystal. I had seen Blue Velvet and Silence of the Lambs before I turned six, though. Lmao!

No video games of my own, though. No Mario, no Zelda, no Donkey Kong. Perhaps you knew someone like me in your own game-filled childhood--pathetic wretches, rain running down their faces as they pressed their hands against the glass of your window. The only games they got to play were at your house, man. You'll never know the pain.

Not that I was truly suffering under any real deprivation. Toys--yes. Everything else a kid could have or want? Yes. Only games were dangled out of reach. Well, console games--the PC as a platform was tolerated, and edutainment software was played into the ground, as well as some early browser games, and, for some odd reason, Command & Conquer: Red Alert. So, really, it was primarily console games I didn't have access to.

I have no bitterness about this anymore; my childhood was totally rad, even if bitterness about games was a big part of it. It's not like I sat around pining. You know me: into many things at once. Plus, DK3D and C&C:RA? Pretty sweet groundings in gameplay and design. Disney Interactive games also slap harder than they need to, specifically, The Hunchback of Notre Dame Interactive and Ready to Read with Pooh. Math Blaster is also cool, but Reader Rabbit...I dunno anymore.

Eventually, of course, faced with the twin suns of my long-fought campaign and the birth of my feverish Pokémania, my parents finally cracked and got me a yellow Game Boy Color and a Pokémon Blue cartridge. 

Man, I can still smell those objects new out of their boxes. What a memory.

Of course, human beings are what they are, and this taste meant I needed more--the very outcome my parents had bulwarked themselves (and me) against for so long. I needed an N64. I needed Pokémon Stadium, duh, but I needed Starfox too, so badly. I needed Goldeneye and Super Smash Bros. I wanted Ocarina of Time so bad it almost scared me. Being given Gameboy carts of Tetris and Super Mario Bros Deluxe only stoked my ardor, as well as refining me in the classic senses as a player of games. 

My education about games was piecemeal and patchy. I didn't have access to or even knowledge about many of the periodicals and news sources that would have informed me more broadly about the space and its history. It was mostly commercial and hearsay, sources in their human forms--a buddy who had a lot of games showing me Civ II, the overhwelming presentation of arcades, knowing Sonic was a thing but never really playing the games, etc. Bingo balls rolling in a basket. So it was that it was years and years of life and games and all that stuff and somehow, at the age of eleven, I had not yet heard of Final Fantasy.

Knew about Cloud, sure. Had seen pictures of Cloud and Sephiroth. But I didn't know what game they were from. Incidentally, at this time in my life, all I knew about Samus Aran was a story invented mostly out of whole cloth by an Italian friend. Basically, he said her name was Metroid, and the bakstory he created for her was, shall we say, graphic. The armor, in my mind, did not encase a blonde beauty with all her fingers and toes. There were scars, missing pieces everywhere, in my mind. A cheek that was just teeth.

Our neighbor heard me and my little brothers were into games and she gifted us her son's old collection of game stuff he'd left behind. At last, we had a Super Nintendo and library for it, as well as a Sega Genesis (ah, so you're Sonic! Gotta go fast, you say? I see) as well as bolstering our library for the N64 we'd gotten for Christmas that year.

One of the Super Nintendo games had fancy golden script over the hilt of a sword on a red field, declaring itself to be Final Fantasy II. I didn't try it out for a while, because, well, abrogations of logic tend to confound me, and I know you can't have a second final. Little did I know that this was in fact the fourth final, but that hardly would have improved matters.

Teaching myself to play this game all the way through to the end, exploring every pixel all by myself, securing every weapon and extra boss, all the summons and secret places, ranks as one of the greatest things I have ever done. Pokémon built itself enough out of its bones (the D&D/Ultima bones) to render the source stock instantly legible to me, and so I was able to enter through that little archway into a world I had theorized was possible, a world I had confidently assured my parents existed and was worth exploring, and which blew my mind wide open with its living, breathing actuality.

Digital literature. Yes. I took it up on its promise, and was blessed; now I bear its rod and staff, and its holy word is ever upon my lips.

*

Literature, that is, art, is the Prime Good of All Existence, as is well understood. Video games are a part of it, so, you know, they make life better, a lot better. So, I think they're all right.

I like 'em.

--JL

*Halo's setting--in scale and magnitude--is too powerful. There was a point when I had seen lots of stuff from the game and thought it was merely ok, like, yeah, cool jeep and shit. Nice energy bolt you made there. But seeing the ring, Halo itself, from space shifted something deep inside me and lit my brain up in brand new places. A top-tier game memory.