Smiling Through the Pain

So last week I sort of mused aloud on Bluesky about the efficacy of doing daily roundup-style posts of Summer Geoff Fest, given the particularly bad time I’ve had with attempting coverage of the week in the past.

It’s no surprise or shock to anyone that No Escape is a one-person band, and I’ve otherwise gone to great lengths to try to stay separate from “games journalism” as a specific identifier – because that’s not really what I’m doing here, this is a criticism website more than just about anything else. But every year, every summer, I feel drawn to the same circus bullshit that countless writers and critics before me have been drawn to, and I get some kind of primal urge to sit at my desk for fucking hours a day watching an endless procession of trailers and the poorly dressed dudes who talk about them.

I’ve walked away from three out of the last four SGFs feeling like absolute shit, mentally and physically; and yet here I am again, watching showcases and writing about them. What’s changed? And if nothing has changed, why am I like this?

Luke Plunkett over at Aftermath has a great answer for that last question in particular:

We’re cosplaying as the 2000s, when these things meant something and were built for the occasion, even though literally everything around us–the economy, the industry, the platforms and ways we learn about and experience games–has changed radically.

As Plunkett notes, the media has been decimated. This is particularly apparent when looking at Switch 2 launch coverage, of which there’s seemingly so little that it’s actually difficult to find. But not only is the media in shambles, so too is the actual industry we’re supposed to be celebrating this week. Plunkett again:

Executives at major publishers increasingly view games and their developers as an impediment to their profits, rather than the source of them. There are layoffs everywhere, whether your game is good or not, whether it sells or not. Increasing amounts of consumer spending is focused on a dwindling list of forever games, while Roblox sucks the oxygen out of the industry for an entire generation.

All this, of course, on top of the fact that the US President is a gross authoritarian who is trying to dismantle the economy and ruin millions of people’s lives via tariffs and ICE raids. But even if Trump wasn’t in office, “Almost every major industry in the world, whether it’s games or cars or music or energy, is now at the mercy of Wall Street Weirdos, private equity in particular. We’re not looking at a bad time for the video game industry, we’re looking at just bad times.”

As I’ve intimated elsewhere the last eight months have been the worst months of my life, hands down bar none. Watching Trump win again, witnessing my mom’s sudden death, trying to deal with that loss in frankly unhealthy ways, constantly reckoning with new shit that’s falling apart every single day, not getting a raise at work in going on three years, slowly isolating myself from friends and family, withdrawing into this little fucking void – it sucks, man. And by comparison, sitting on my ass watching a couple of trailer showcases when I admittedly should be doing adult shit like finding a place to rehome my mom’s dogs or sign a lease on an apartment before the end of the month doesn’t feel quite so tedious or awful this time around. All that I want, is to wake up fine.

Plunkett is, of course, absolutely correct in his analysis of this situation. We’re cosplaying games media of the 2000s when shit seemed fine, and we should be taking a much more clear-eyed approach. These trailer dumps and corporate showcases are not adequate or even appropriate avenues of escape from the daily horrors and lesser pains of our lives, but also – they suck. These aren’t the glittering conferences and presentations of E3s past; a lot of them are barely-curated and shoddily-produced ad packages, glorified Zoom meetings broken up by clusters of game trailers ranging in quality from “the game developer had to record this six hours ago” to “we hired Ben Starr to be weird so you’ll remember to buy our game.” Everyone is trying to go back to a place that is no longer accessible to us and which we shouldn’t even want to be at.

So what’s left?

In the course of Plunkett’s post he quotes and links to GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR’s seminal track, “Dead Flag Blues” (F♯ A♯ ∞, 1997). The song is famous in part for the monologue read over top of the drone intro:

The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt
And we’re on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It’s so evocative of the world we live in, even if it isn’t strictly true or accurate to life at a 1:1 basis. It’s emotionally true, it captures how we feel at all times, how the constant inundation of bad news makes us feel. And in isolation, this monologue feels so totalizing, so utterly consumptive of our experience, that even the very act of recognition threatens to swallow us whole. I love this song, and I love GY!BE, but I always find it interesting that while everyone remembers the belly of the horrible machine, nobody remembers these lines:

I said: “kiss me, you’re beautiful –
These are truly the last days”

You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
Like a daydream or a fever

And to be honest, that’s what I feel like doing right now.