Reflecting a Bit - Why Video Games?

Asking the Big Questions

Required Music for this week: With another week being spent waxing poetic about how far I’ve come in the last year and how happy I am, the only appropriate music I can think to use is the Living Memory theme from Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail - their latest expansion. This theme is sombre, quiet and reflective, as the name might suggest. If you’ve not played the expansion yourself, there aren’t any explicit spoilers in this track, but do listen at your own discretion :)

Since writing my icebreaker last week, I’ve been constantly running over things in my head and figuring out topics to talk about - shaking off that rust is the best thing I could have done right now. I’ve not been this compelled to just write in such a long time and it feels brilliant. Every time I sit down I want to just get back down to writing something rather than actually play my growing backlog. Which isn’t ideal but hey - I’m being productive.

I’m most excited to be finally breaking out a bit and sharing my work with some people offline too - which has been surprisingly scary. I’m used to having the (very kind) support of everybody on social media, so it felt odd when people started earnestly asking about what I do and why. Felt good! It feels nice to be able to take myself seriously and actually talk about things I care about and not get an eyebrow raised at me for not being into sports.

(Shoutout to my new boss - who in doing a background check on me for my new bartending job, ended up finding my portfolio and has talked to me about it several times! Terrifying to be noticed but awesome too! Hi, if you’re reading this!)

Bartending becomes a lot more fun when you remember that Tifa is also one - it’s the small things.

In terms of the question in the title - it’s a big question for someone who talks about games a lot, in their spare time and in a professional capacity. And it sounds like I’m questioning why I even bother - and that isn’t true! If there’s anything I’ve gotten from 2024, it’s a renewed passion for the gaming industry.

Attending Gamescom in August was a reminder of just how many wonderful people are in this industry, and meeting some of them for the first time was an incredible privilege too! It really helped me to realise that this is what I want to be doing, more than anything else in the world. This year has been dedicated to making those connections and I hope that at least someone out there sees my name and thinks “hey, I know them!”. People reaching out to me to discuss review scores, share laughs and invite me to collaborate on exciting projects; it finally feels like something I can point to and say “this is me”.

Imposter syndrome be damned, I love what I get to do and I hope other people enjoy it alongside me, and I look forward to carrying it on - hopefully for a long time!

Gamescom was an out of this world experience that really brought everything home for me. I might go next year but if I don’t, it was wonderful when I did go.

But that all means nothing without the thing that brings us all together - and those are the games themselves. Which is obvious, to a degree. But it’s also something that really comforts me too. There’s a real sense of cameraderie from knowing that someone else has had the same experience as you, and has gone through the same challenges as you along the way. When someone tells me they’ve played one of my favourite games and they loved it, there’s a real connection in knowing that we walked down the same hallways and fought the same battles.

The same is true of all art - there’s a universal element that brings us together to discuss our own interests and interpretations. We all watched the same film, we all saw the same painting and we all played the same game.

I think it’s this that draws me to video games particularly, it’s so fun to talk about the ways that we went about beating the same challenges and what we thought about when we did it. Even before I knew any of my friends today, we were out there playing the same games and having those shared experiences - like an invisible string that ended up bringing us together, even in the bad games that we play. I think this hits really hard now as we move on from the Nintendo Switch into a new generation of system, in what was an uncharacteristically long hardware cycle for Nintendo.

I remember my Dad meeting me off the school bus in town with the console already picked up from the pre-order, and us sitting together to set it up before I went in for the longest day of classes I could remember. I was an actual kid when that happened and I had (understandably) no real platform or ambitions to even be a writer. I just wanted to play the new Zelda game and that was it - truly visionary. So there’s a part of me that occasionally looks over at the Switch and smiles thinking about how a teenage me held that exact same system and had no clue what they would grow up to do.

The fossil in question - sat in the living room and just trying to survive to the end. Please ignore the irresponsibly left out Switch cartridge, it has been moved.

It makes revisiting those games from my childhood all the more fun, when I remember where I was and how those worlds were everything to a little me. Now I have more games than I know what to do with and a seemingly unending list of games to get through, which seemed like a luxury at the time.

It’s all in the comfort - I can’t go back in time to simpler times but I can play Super Mario Galaxy for the nth time and fly through the stars again like I did back then. And I’m sure most people who work in games now have those same foundational experiences that won’t ever leave them. Every person has their own start but we were all lucky enough to come together now, and I think that’s pretty neat.

And it’s this that underpins every bit of writing and discussion that I do - I love knowing that other people are doing the same thing as me. With how many unknowns there are, we all find the time to sit down in front of the screen and pick up that controller, and we all found joy in that before we even knew each other!

I promise we’ll move beyond the fluff next week, I just wanted to wax a bit poetic before actually getting down to some more concrete anecdotes. This year has been one of ups and downs but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t lucky to be supported by some of the most relentlessly positive and encouraging people I could hope to know. I’ve had the chance to connect with people who I didn’t even know before this year, and it’s those connections that keep me plodding forward and doing writing like this.

It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in the cynicism and gloom in the industry right now, so I like to remind myself of the good too.

So, thank you for reading - and I hope you come back again!