This is a cross-post at Substack, Medium and Patreon. TL;DR: I’m taking some time off in November, December and January to read more, react less and figure out a better way to write that leaves me more fulfilled and feeling less shitty. Over the long term, this may also mean less writing overall, but no less of a commitment to No Escape on balance.
I have a confession to make: I’m not very good at writing. I can write a lot, and I can write angrily, but I don’t think either of these should be mistaken for actually-good writing in any meaningful sense. If you’ve been paying attention, there has been a lot fewer posts coming from me and a lot more contributors. I’m gonna be eternally grateful to them. They have made this site better. But I have been dissatisfied with the quality of my own work for a while, and in general I’ve been dissatisfied with my own ignorance of a lot of the things underpinning the field I claim to be a part of.
Now before anyone jumps in the tweet thread for this post and tries to blow sunshine in the form of compliments or decrying impostor syndrome or what have you, please understand that this isn’t self-deprecation or depression and anxiety rearing its ugly head for its bimonthly lunch date. I’m not trying to insult myself; there is writing I’ve done for this site that I’m proud of, and I’m still blown away that a few pieces have sparked greater discussion in my peer group for longer than a few minutes. That’s really cool, and I won’t take that shit for granted, ever. But my dissatisfaction in my own work has been simmering for a long time — longer, in fact, than this website’s existence. So I wanted to talk to y’all about what I’m doing to work on that, and why I think it’ll mean better pieces in the future.
Lately I’ve been getting back into reading a lot. It’s still difficult to flex this particular atrophied muscle, but within the past month or so I’ve managed to finish Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, gnaw my way into books by philosophers like Derrida, Benjamin and Adorno, finish (and really enjoy) the first essay in Susan Sontag’s On Photography which I just got a few days ago, and just generally absorb more of the work by peers I’ve been reading in the background and weave connecting threads between these pieces. Hi i just described “how many people learn” and i feel a bit ridiculous anYWAY-
I’m trying not to pack too much in my brain all at once, even though now I desperately want to. Instead I’m trying very hard to pay attention to how and why the writers I’m reading chose to write about their given topics. I’m trying to understand how different research methods work. I want to be very clear on how folks formulate their arguments and support them without solely relying on emotional appeal and anecdote, even though these can be extremely powerful in their own right.
Because I’m trying to read more, I’ve been by necessity playing less games. And I think this is a trend that is going to continue into the future. There is something wrong with trying to cover every new major game that comes out for three (now five) separate console systems, to say nothing of PC gaming, as the games come out. This industry legitimately makes people devour a 20-100 hour game in like four days, and then have all of their thoughts fully-formed about that game from every imaginable perspective within 48 hours of launch, and I think that’s kind of fucking silly.
Let’s say that I wanted to talk about the tension between the reasonable minor decisions made during the assembly-line-like development of yearly franchise games like Call of Duty (like, say, adding a nonbinary gender marker) and those franchises’ politics as most people experience them. Again I’m just describing how most people write, but you’d need some time to research, maybe grab primary sources like interviews with current and former devs and players, organize all of this material in a way that makes sense and then write around that material to make it sound good. Can you do that in the short window of a game’s release? No.
Essay ideas like that are not generally part of a given game’s release coverage because they do take time to write. But you know what doesn’t take any time at all to write? It’s 4:31 PM Central Time as I’m writing this line, so let me show you.
The addition of nonbinary gender markers to Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War‘s character menu doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the context of the game, which puts players in the shoes of a CIA agent working for the Reagan Administration.
Ronald Reagan hated LGBTQIA+ people with a passion, letting millions die during the AIDS crisis. It is highly unlikely he would have stood for letting a nonbinary person participate in any number of the illegal acts he sanctioned during his eight years as president, much less take a leadership role in one, like your character in the game does.
The choice also sits at odds with the player base, many of whom adhere to right-wing, trans- and homophobic beliefs themselves. Seeing the nonbinary option in a game like this only inflames the worst among them, causing them to seek out nonbinary and other trans people and harass them online, send them death threats and cause them even more misery.
Besides, who really wants this? Who wants to see nonbinary representation in illegal paramilitary black operations taken against struggling Latin American democracies? Who was going to feel seen as a nonbinary person playing “as yourself” as you get involved in the Iran-Contra scandal? Honestly, pass.
I just finished this at 4:42 PM, Central Time. This is new copy for an idea that I’ve been tossing around; nothing recycled. If this were me even a few weeks ago, I’d throw a couple of supporting paragraphs with more invective in there and slap it up online. It might get 50 views in its lifetime, a dozen or so twitter likes and then it would end up sitting here on the site forgotten. Because it’s meant to be disposable. And that’s primarily the kind of writing I’ve really cut my teeth on for the last like eight years of my life.
There’s some value in this writing. Opinions or op-eds play a role in the discourse by helping to shape popular opinion in one direction or another; they can also be really good at taking the air out of a prevailing argument’s sails. Op-eds are like fast food both from a production and consumption perspective: it won’t kill you to read one occasionally and the people who write them are often extremely talented at what they do; but only reading hot takes and only ever writing them increases the likelihood of contracting salmonella poisoning.
Speaking personally: I’ve been getting tired of only having hot takes to offer. I don’t want to end up as another broken, reactionary, knee-jerk pundit who can only ever shit on things, and whose takes get increasingly disconnected from the world everyone else lives in. I don’t mind contrarianism, I don’t think expressing radical ideas in pure polemic form is bad, I don’t think there’s no value at all in getting angry at stuff going on, because holy shit is there a lot to get angry at. But I’ve been watching some of the people who influenced me as a younger person spiral into exactly what I’m talking about and I want the vaccine for whatever brainworms they’re currently suffering from, holy shit.
The beautiful thing about No Escape is that it absolutely gives me the space to iterate, change approaches, take time off and simply not post for extended periods of time in order to do this.
And so that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Starting Saturday and extending through next weekend, you’re probably gonna see much less of me in general – on Twitter or here. I’m going on vacation next week and I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet but I can absolutely tell you it doesn’t involve Being Online for extended periods. Then, in the month of December, I’ve got a single commissioned piece from a writer I’m extremely excited to publish, maybe a review of a game like Yakuza: Like a Dragon or The Pathless here or there, and then towards the very end of the month the typical end-of-year shitposts I started doing last year. Other than that, I don’t really expect to post much in December. Or January, for that matter.
During this time, I’ll probably be doing a lot of reading and research. I want to establish a new standard to hold myself to when it comes to writing this blog and I want to see, first of all, if it’s even viable, and then if it’s easier or harder to maintain than the previous way I’ve been doing things (constant angry shitposting). You will probably not see the messy parts of any of that work.
After January, who knows? I’m operating on a simple principle right now: the age of conflict I referred to here isn’t over. It’s barely just beginning. Video games are an absurd bauble in the world right now, but they’re still important to reckon with. You likely won’t see a flood of pieces from me starting in February, but I’ll be back with something.