Smash Mouth was right: the years start coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming. 2023 felt like it was one of the hardest years I’ve lived through, both in terms of my personal life and regarding everything else going on. Of course these aren’t simple things to have standing next to each other, and I would never make the direct comparison between, say, the months I spent afraid of having to move house and the literal genocide in Gaza. But there are lots of other ways to measure the feeling of it being a shitty year without doing something that crass, and by all accounts: 2023 fucking sucked.
Sure, there were good video games to play in the moments between staring directly at the torment nexus. I’m still turning Alan Wake II over in my mind as I play through it a fourth time on New Game+, and Armored Core VI provided me with ample opportunity to turn into the true unmitigated sicko I always knew I could be. Jusant, a game I reviewed for PCGamer, ended up being one of my favorite narrative experiences in a hot minute, and Suika Game is sitting in the background threatening my life at gunpoint in a way I haven’t felt since I started playing picross regularly. But the impulse to make the narrative around this year “the best year for games” sucks, frankly. Over 9,000 game devs lost their jobs to cuts and layoffs. Embracer Group, to name just one egregious example of a publisher with its head fully and squarely up its own ass, spent literally all of 2022 gorging on mergers and acquisitions, only to end up firing hundreds of people across something like 17 different layoffs. And more are to come. TinyBuild just shuttered the publisher of Pillars of Eternity, Versus Evil, three days before Christmas. Before a full terabyte of its data was leaked onto the internet by hackers looking for ransom money, Insomniac was also looking at doing layoffs before the new year. In case that wasn’t enough, Bobby Kotick is (blessedly) out at Activision-Blizzard, but he’s taking a $155m golden parachute following the closing of the Microsoft deal earlier this year. Motherfucker never needs to work another day in his life, but I bet we haven’t seen the last of his scumfuck ass.
There’s a lot of bad shit we could focus on. Games media has been undergoing a contraction for the last few years, and this year sucked especially hard with the closure of both Washington Post’s Launcher and Vice’s Waypoint verticals as well as Uppercut Crit, the best indie publication on the internet. Social media’s worsening fragmentation sucked. Conventional media has really come into its own as a mouthpiece and amplifier for white supremacist shitbags like Christopher Rufo at the Manhattan Institute, spreading fascist propaganda and instigating culture wars in the leadup to another one of those election years everyone says is “the most important election in your lifetime.” Superhero movies continue to saturate cinemas, but their influence might be finally fading out as both Marvel’s The Marvels and DC’s Blue Beetle and Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom bombed. Taylor Swift has fully stepped into the role of cultural hegemon. Elon Musk’s public reactionary spiral continues. Israel’s dismantling of occupied Gaza continues unabated. Oh, but you know what? Henry Kissinger finally died. I’ll drink to that, bro.
Shit sucked. I don’t feel bad saying it. But there were good moments. Like, I started working with Critical Distance to do some social media and curation work. And the people in my Discord, as well as Kritiqal and Deep-Hell’s Discords, made getting through the year bearable—whether it was through watching Arrow reruns and the surprisingly solid Dynasty Warriors Netflix movie with the folks at Deep-Hell or playing through FFXIII with the Kritiqal Game Club or simply posting wild music and game takes in my own little corner of hell. I didn’t always have energy to participate or hang out to the fullest extent but I’m glad to have been there. Deep Kritiqal Escape continues unabated.
And despite shrinking a bit in terms of my own scope, 2023 was a really, really good year for No Escape. I wrote a bunch of stuff I’m proud of, and despite taking a couple of breaks, somehow managed to get 50 posts out the door (including this one). That’s almost exactly a post a week! Not bad for someone who has felt increasingly like their life is falling apart lmao. I started the year out with an interesting idea for a series – the “Year of Games” – but honestly, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to play 52 separate games in a row. It did get me through the slow months in January and February, which was cool, and I got to play Waste Eater, a piece of interactive fiction that rocks, because of it. I wrote some pretty alright pieces of criticism, about Zelda and Disco Elysium and Cyberpunk, that people seemed to resonate with. I accidentally wrote a manifesto, and even started dabbling in music criticism (though we’ll see how long that lasts).
As a knock-on effect of playing Alan Wake II more times than is healthy, I now can’t take seriously the declaration “I’m a writer,” but I need to use it here, so, just know I’m cringing: “as a writer,” the fact I can look back on my year with some muted amount of satisfaction and even pride means that, all things considered, I did what I came here to do. I fucking wrote, man.
But does that mean I’m looking forward to 2024?
I’m going to be so up front with you: it does not. I am not. I’m fucking dreading this election cycle. It starts in like a week and a half. I’m dreading the terrible media discourse. A part of me wants to crawl into bed and wake up next December to a world that has either fully committed to ending or one that has miraculously been saved by one or several major political figures having devastating heart attacks or strokes in tandem or separately. I’ve been tired and sad and scared for a long time, and I’m not done being tired, sad or scared in the slightest. But I also know that to hide is to instigate a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ve spent 15 years being loud online. This is a bad year to quit that.
We’re about 87 percent of the way to a full fascist dictatorship in the United States. Whole bunch of conservative governors, regional bureaucrats, and state reps out here trying their hardest to hurt folks I love and care about. There are a lot of things happening on the federal level that worry the shit out of me, like KOSA. And of course election nerds will be arguing over whether Joe “Provides Material Support to Genocidaires And Inches Us Closer To Fascism With Tiny Imperceptible Moves On The (Literal) Borders” Biden is the “safe bet” against Donald “Will Absolutely Seal The Fucking Deal On This Whole Fascist Takeover Thing” Trump. As far as I’m concerned motherfuckers get one more “harm reduction vote” out of me before I reach deep into myself and fully transition to “Make Total Destroy.”
I’ll still obviously be writing about video games here in between more political shit, I think, but it’s time to get back to what I know.
Some housekeeping stuff: The No Escape From Book Club Book Club starts on January 1 with an introductory meeting in my Discord channel and the start of our reading of How To Play Video Games, a “media keywords” textbook-type deal edited by a couple of my favorite games studies scholars, Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina B. Huntemann. If this sounds interesting to you, the price of admission, so to speak, is a simple Patreon subscription. That’ll get you access to my Discord. If you want to participate but are unable to afford a Patreon sub, email me at [email protected] and we’ll work something out.
Additionally, PITCHES ARE NOW OPEN UNTIL JANUARY 6, 2024. I’ll typically have some kind of announcement like this every month but since this is the first month we’re doing this again, I’ve decided to open the floodgates a week early. Check out our “about” page for more information on pitches (it’s toward the bottom if you get lost).