I’m going to say something pretty inflammatory here: I don’t care about every fucking game.
I don’t care about MMOs, and the amount of time you have to spend slogging through gameplay and subpar graphics and interactions with other boring human beings to get to “the good bit of the game.” I don’t care that I haven’t played enough, or I haven’t played the one that you, MMO fan, is currently devoting their life to.
I don’t care about eSports. I don’t care about League of Legends or DoTA or anything else in that genre. I don’t care about the obsessive fetishisation of numbers, the forums complaining of imbalance in the game, the endless tactics, the pressure to succeed, the ostracism of failure. I get embarrassed when I see someone being that earnestly enthusiastic about anything.
I don’t care about Simulation games. They are all staggeringly dull – even the ones that should be exciting, like WWII air combat or Formula 1 racing. Life, crucially, is boring, and I play games to escape from it. Life doesn’t come with clearly-defined stories and well-balanced upgrade packages. I can’t see the point of trying to replicate life in excruciating detail.
I don’t care about JRPGs with their insistence on turn-based combat like we’re still working on 1990’s hardware. It’s not okay any more, guys. You need to let all the characters run around at the same time. It’s 2012. We can handle it. We’ll survive.
More than anything, and most shamefully of all, I don’t care about Hideo Kojima, and I don’t get why everyone thinks his multi-hour cutscenes loosely glued together by snatches of gameplay are so good that they need to drop everything and run to the nearest keyboard and start typing the minute he says anything.
This is more than a simple rant, although it sure reads like one. This is cathartic and this is laden with taboo because, as a games journalist (and as a freelance one at that) you’re expected to care about everything that’s happening – every new release, every snippet of preview or screenshot or developer news drip-fed to you by PRs, every patch and every mod and all the DLC. You have to act like a fan of every single game and hoover up any and all available news, but be ready to destroy it in review when the time comes.
You have to play more than one flight sim to have a shot at comparing one to any other flight sim during review, and playing two flight sims is simply not what I want to do with any of my time. It is over twice as many flight sims as I want to play ever.
You have to stay relevant and aware of the broader world of what you’re writing about, and that involves sinking hours and hours of your time into pretty much every product that comes your way, all the while trying to convince editors that they want your words in exchange for, let’s be honest here, not enough money. You have to give the impression that you care. That you’re an expert on everything.
Because this is a job. This is not a hobby. As a job, more often than not, you can’t just spend it having fun and enjoying yourself. You do not play games for a living. You understand games, even ones you couldn’t give a microshit about, and distil that understanding into something concrete that you can maybe sell. You stare into the depths of blank white documents and fire off pitch after pitch after pitch into the fucking void, and more often than not all you get back are echoes. That’s… fine. That’s all part of it; there are ups and downs, always, in all things.
So this is a brief rebellion. A flash in the pan as I sit staring out of a window on a rainy Monday morning. In a minute I’m going have a cup of coffee and get dressed and become a proper games journalist, a grown-up, one who gives a shit about everything that’s going on.
I know I’m very lucky to have my job, to be able to use my words to earn a living, to be able to find some passion – at least in parts – of my working life. To not be consigned to an endless grey grind of office work again, or to fall back into the white-hot hell of the kitchen. And in a very real way, I’m not entitled to complain about any part of it.
But for now, there’s a thrilling defiance in just speaking the words – I don’t care about every fucking game.