sometimes I think about a hypothetical scenario, where I’m made immortal and immune to entropy, and ask to be given every bit of media that I would personally enjoy from the entire history of humanity, past to future. if I stretched the time it would take to enjoy all of these things, even half-heartedly in a rush, back from the heat death of the universe, I wonder if I would be able to fit it all in between the big bang and the dissolution of matter that would hold such media. I don’t know!
the world is full of an overwhelming number of people with creative drives, unique contexts, and myriad interests, and this concurrent number only grows with time, to say nothing of the accumulation of art and its artists across history, imperfect as its conveyance may be. new specialties are created or rediscovered constantly, each community a domain of ideas in and of itself, and our own world is shaped by the domains we visit.
all of these facts make me feel slightly better about never feeling like I have the time to do all the things I want to do. new hobbies fascinate my ADHD brain and I fail to make them consistent enough in my life to actually remember to be doing them several months down the line. (I own a lockpick set and several locks to practice on! I have not done so since january.) new media shows up in my life and I am transfixed by the thought of it, but it takes another level of energy to actually start in on it. accruing a backlog is its own hobby, I suppose, and one I indulge frequently.
despite that, I somehow always find time for games, which is really funny, because games are the densest timesinks I’ve had the misfortune of being raised to fixate on. a full decade ago (nearly eleven years, actually), I wrote a post titled “completion & the value of your time”, where I ruminated aimlessly about the value of my time in particular, and the phenomenon of people insisting “oh, the game gets good this many hours in”, among other things. nier gestalt is to blame for that post, among a great many things.
to quote myself, the poor “cis” bastard,
Games can be, and often are, in the case of RPGs, a long-form medium, but they’re a medium that always requires you to be engaged with them in order to proceed. […] You have to be engaged, and you have to constantly fulfill the game’s requirements to see progress.
That’s quite a bit different from reading a book, watching a TV show/movie, or listening to music, where you can multitask to a degree and have the media in question as auxiliary consumption. Games have to be largely front and center due to their interactive nature. For that reason alone, criticism of a game is always going to come from people who care enough about games to devote a not-insignificant amount of time to playing them, and it, and taking in what of it they can for the purposes of forming an opinion.
this came to mind recently because of team cherry’s announcement that hollow knight: silksong would be, first of all, coming out, with a concrete release date, and second of all, foregoing advance copies for reviewers. a prevailing position is that this is a red flag of some sort, but frankly, I think it’s more or less positive decision. at worst, it’s neutral, in my eyes.
reviewers trying to crunch a game that has only just been given two weeks advance notice for its release would not be great, and while I do expect some publications are still going to apply undue pressure to their review staff, it is at least one more defense that said reviewers can lug out against aggrieved fans.
frankly, though, the reviews don’t matter in the slightest; the game is so big that multiple indie games that were planning on launching in the same rough window have postponed said launch. people are treating it like the second coming of bug jesus, because this thing has been quietly simmering for seven years, while their fans pelted every nintendo direct with what became a memetic level of interest in this DLC that got scope crept up to a standalone title. team cherry has simply been vibing.
the thought of reviewers being forced to cram a game with, apparently, over 40 bosses in the, optimistically, two weeks before launch seems like straight up worker abuse; that’s before you even consider the petulant nature of gamers regarding reviews. honestly, game reviewers and critics don’t get enough credit for doing what they do, and trust me, this is me saying this despite my own distaste for taking credit for my writing.
in my opinion, games are an immense pain in the ass to discuss as media, from either a production or consumption/critique standpoint. they’re interdisciplinary in specific ways that are rarely given the weight that they ought to be, and when they’re considered in these complex, interlocking ways, it’s often by people who are dismissed by gamers who are only interested in how the play functions.
writing relies on words, comics on those and still images (and the context between them), music via instruments and vocal performances tempered by music theory, TV/movies on all that and the additional means of conveying deeper meaning via acting and editing (themselves being specialized fields, assisted by myriad specialized roles involved in ways that aren’t immediately obvious)… video games are all of these, and also programming so they can involve some rando from the audience in a way that makes them feel important, more or less.
I’m simplifying things a lot, but the degree to which all of these aspects play into video games and then have to intersect with a complicated toy is really wild to me. and gamers really only care about the toy so incredibly often; I could take potshots at particular companies on this front, but frankly, the biggest franchises and companies are all about producing toys. there’s nothing inherently wrong with making toys, but it’s not exactly a healthy balance of toys to artistic intent/output that we have in the modern gaming industry.
narrative, occasionally, gets praised as part of reviews that gamers will accept, but largely, attempts to seriously critique or examine a game outside of “yeah but is it Fun” are niche compared to “I am going to look at metacritic and see if this game is over an 80 before I buy it”. the highest echelons of the industry chase photorealism like it’ll save them from their crunch epidemic, and music is often a boring orchestral ordeal because that’s the instrumentation they feel will get them taken seriously. it’s a shame, downplaying or outright ignoring the contributions of all the component creators, but the gamers want their toys.
these complicated messes of art are compilations of specialties: story genre, visual style descriptors, and/or expectations for the style of gameplay based on touchstones found elsewhere in the space. there are too many combinations to come up with unique terms for all of them, so we instead talk in data points, where they fall on assorted relevant spectrums, occasionally with more interesting details that escape these axes as they’re relevant or novel.
I think, actually, this is fine. if I say something is like mario, it gets information across, which is the point! communication! at this point, we have a whole bunch of overarching genres, and we can use specific games to evoke more precise comparisons, and it might sound dumb to refer to things as a roguelike, but trying to force neologisms is a recipe for a headache. you know how people tend to understand when you call something a metroidvania, but if you use the term “search action”, someone will call you a nerd and shove you into a locker about it, even if you explain what you meant? even if it’s a more neutral or unattached term, what hits first will stick hardest, and fighting that is a fuckin’ mess.
despite all of this complication around talking about games, though, I still find myself captivated by them, to my detriment. as I said in my post a decade ago:
I don’t have a specific listing of my time played in MapleStory, but it probably rivals the time at left, which comes from my RuneScape account’s Adventurer’s Log. That totals up to two months and eighteen days, a little over eleven weeks, or 1875 hours of my life. […] In those 1875 hours, I could have cleared 12.5 Disgaea games at 150 hours each, read hundreds of books, or a great number of other things in different configurations, all while keeping touch with people via social media.
…oh, you sweet summer child. final fantasy xiv will do so many things to you.
anyway, to put it bluntly, games require a truly devastating number of man-hours to create. frequently, they take a frightening number of hours to play, too, even if it’s less than the number needed to make them.
my standards are fucked. a 30 hour RPG feels like light work to me, overall, even though I literally could not sit down and play a game for that long without needing to sleep in the process. how long to beat is a horrifying trove of dedication to data collection on this front, with other people providing the information and corroboration to the scale of trouble you’re in if a game strikes your fancy. hollow knight sits at 27 hours for the main story, 41.5 hours for the main story + sidequests, and 65 hours for “completionist”. silksong threatens to hold more bosses at launch than its predecessor, and still there are complaints that this is “too few”. yes, really, I have found at least a couple people on reddit complaining that 40+ bosses is, somehow, not enough compared to hollow knight’s final count of 47.
depending on how focused I am on reading, I can read a book with 50k words in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I read 18 volumes of konosuba in the span of a week earlier this year, totaling about 820k words. if I were to be tasked to read a book for review, short of being assigned a wheel of time entry or war and peace, I could sit down and bash it out pretty quickly, depending on how it captivated me. most anime I’m likely to watch is 12 episodes, totaling 4 hours a pop, which I have frequently sat through in one go. a movie will probably not be more than 3 hours.
meanwhile…
some random indie game has been designed to be a horrifying black hole for my time, so every (successful) run is short, but a small chunk of progress to completion.
an AAA game that I find myself compelled by despite opposition to the morality of the company and its very probable crunch culture is a checklist of stuff to do in a world that doesn’t need to be as big as it is.
the shortest game remaining on my list for the year is still estimated at six hours, and the longest nearly eighty.
there is literally not enough time, nor vals, to enjoy everything I would like to in this world. this is the conclusion I come to every time I consider the hypothetical I previously mentioned. to get lost in games is broadening my horizons and making the dives shallower in the process. but that’s life. I’ve come to be fine with that. optimizing my life is not how I’m built, if me being a high school dropout was not obvious enough.
I wouldn’t take up that offer of immortality anyway. even if I truly had forever to peruse the memories of those who created through their works, I wouldn’t want to do it alone. so much of why this matters is because another person made something, something for us to see, to experience, to talk about. all of the emotions bound up in that are why we talk about media.
games are too fucking much. too many of them, with too many layers, expecting too many hours out of my short and finite life.
but damn, I love them too fucking much to give them up. for better or worse.
