Many of our most popular games are designed to extract as much time, money, and emotion out of a player as possible. Maybe the reason that we have so much game boosterism and focus on the present is that looking at the shape of things, and how we got here, completely sucks on an emotional level. Yet constantly focusing on the negative (the down beat the good thing that never comes the dead piled up) takes a strange toll. This column, edited generously by Danielle, Rob, and Austin, has given me the ability to push beyond that boundary and into other contexts and ideas. ![]() If you want to live in this industry, you need some opinions on this week’s newest release, and I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in that genre. Are the guns in this one good? What about the swords? I don’t mean that as a criticism, but as a raw fact that’s produced by the economic conditions under which games writers have to function. The focus on recent releases and their vagaries often makes writing about games feel parochial and small because what always seems to be at stake are video games themselves instead of the context in which those games exist. The small games and the weird games and the games that intersect with real, substantial issues in our world. This column has given me the capability to push my discussions of games beyond the flavor of the week or the new hot thing and write about the things that I care about. I’ve advocated for more pessimistic games and I’ve pushed for more acceptance of allegory in our political games. ![]() After all, the conditions of the real world seem to veer toward the apocalypse consistently, and video games have always used the end of the world (or at least someone’s world) as an animating force to justify and situate all the weird stuff that you get up to in them: murder, conquest, rebuilding, and so on.Īnd since 2016, I’ve had the distinct pleasure and luck to ruminate on the apocalypse and more. When Austin Walker initially asked me about my interest in doing a column, before Waypoint formally existed, I thought that the apocalypse would be something that would carry through a number of topics. The first entries in this column were about the apocalypse.
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