Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters speech, November 2014
Thank you for joining me in 2019.
I mean that.
I started this blog in a very strange headspace earlier this year. At the time I had no pretensions to being a “serious videosgame writer” or anything, I just wanted to write Hot Takes about video games, and I was mad at another publication for being shitty.
I didn’t think it would lead me to finding the community of intensely passionate, incredibly intelligent and dedicated writers, artists, designers and personalities I’m lucky to know today. I didn’t think it would lead me to maybe probably doing Real Games Criticism or Journalism or whatever. I didn’t think it would lead me to realize I’ve been disguising self-hate as self-criticism for nearly a full decade and that sometimes it’s okay to let someone give me a fucking compliment without making contrary noises (sorry Catherine).
I have a lot to learn, a lot of room to grow and No Escape has a lot to do in the new decade’s first new year. The roaring 20s are upon us. So let’s begin without delay.
Starting in… well, a week, I’m pledging to record at least one No Escape podcast a week. The podcast will be focused on rounding up the week’s news (so it’ll likely be recorded on Thursday or Friday and posted Friday), and my goal is to pepper interviews with other games writers and developers into the feed. I might take breaks on this front, because I’m not looking to burn myself out immediately in the new year.
I’m also planning on streamlining the content that goes out on this page. Specifically, I’m looking to do away with the news section. It’s been dead for months anyway, and it’s just taking up space. I’m going to fold Hot Takes into Features and rename the category as “Essays.” Reviews will stay as-is, and I’ll probably be doing many more First Impressions as we enter the new year.
I’ll be maintaining the dot-blog version of this site as well, and will in fact treat the site’s old home as an archive – I’m going to be working on moving any articles we’ve posted here over there as well, and basically just have a mirror site in case anything happens to this one.
Finally, I need to find a truly good website theme, something readable that you’ll enjoy. That’s a longer-term project, though.
No Escape has meant a lot of things to me in its short existence. A spiteful fuck-you to “games journalists” who’d willingly throw marginalized people under the bus. A defiant statement of determination and hope in the face of rising global fascism. A place where I can obsessively write thousands of goofy words about an MMO sci-fi shooter. A self-serve therapy session.
In the site’s first “statement of purpose,” I framed my idea for No Escape‘s entire existence around a talk by Austin Walker, where he said, “Games will not save us, but we can’t escape them.” I wanted to write politically about games, but it felt inherently silly. I don’t think that anymore. I think I have a new framework now:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable–but then, so did the divine right of kings.
Ursula K. Le Guin
See you next year.
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