FUN2: GET TO THE NORMANDY (2024dec1)

I wanna think more about the subject of having fun. Part of my motivation is that I want to be having more fun, and I happen to enjoy both rumination and recursion, so the idea of thinking about fun is itself quite fun to me. The hope is that I’ll get somewhere interesting and useful, but I know from experience that I rarely get that sort of outcome by trying to get it. I usually get it by simply immersing myself in describing things.

I’m trying to make it a habit to write ‘overview’ summaries of each of my essays, for future reference. My overview of my previous essay, Are you having fun, son?is “To continue to have fun is to participate in a dynamic process, to adapt to the situation.” In that post I reminisced on an evening I spent watching a concert DVD while eating chocolate, and on playing LAN games with my friends. I also got into some details about how things got more complicated as I got older and accumulated more responsibilities. This has indeed only gotten more complicated as I’ve become a father who both cares and provides for his family. The situation changes, and my task is to adapt. I was just watching a youtube video where a gamer talked about how, since becoming a dad, he’s spent more of his time in video games just walking around, decompressing and taking in the scenery. I’ve noticed myself doing the same, and it also reminds me of my more general proclamation that I never understood the concept of monasteries or monastic living as a child, but the older I get the more I see the appeal. (I still don’t think I could bear too much of it, but I can imagine bearing much more than I could as a child. The first two weeks would definitely be blissful.)

I have a lot of fun goofing off with my son (1yo), making silly voices and gestures, matching his energy, doing anything and everything to get him to laugh. That’s fun for me in a very immediate, grounding way. But I notice that… it doesn’t sustain me totally. There are other elements that I need in my life. Particularly I start to feel ‘dry’ and ‘withered’ if I haven’t written anything in a while. Writing is something that I’ve accumulated a lot of experience in, and yet if I’m not careful even now it can become something quite wearisome. That’s partially because I’ve designed a life for myself where I’m self-employed as a writer, which means writing is my job. Last year I wrote on here that it’s my job to be interesting on demand. Or I should say, it’s part of my job, or it’s one of my many jobs. I think it’s important to be careful not to accidentally oversimplify one’s situation. I am my own boss, so I get to decide what my job is at any given moment in time. Sometimes it’s my job to stop doing work, to forget about work entirely and just relax into whatever’s going on within myself. It’s difficult to be interesting if I’m not having fun. And I don’t have fun if I feel like I’m forcing myself to do something I don’t wanna do. It’s all a bit of a twisted game, and it requires a certain ayy lmao energy to find enjoy in the tension.

What would be fun for me right now? I feel like I wanna talk about video games more. Do I have time? Do I have space? What would I say in just a few sentences if that was all the space I had? Well. I’ve loved video games all my life. I hesitate to speak assertively about them because I’ve often felt like I’m not a “true gamer”, I’m just a guy who’s spent quite a lot of time playing video games compared to someone who hasn’t. But there are also lots of people who’ve spent far more time playing games than me. So I’m something like a semi-serious casual hobbyist. But, oh my god, who cares? Only those who are insecure about their perceived relative status in a made-up hierarchy get all twisted about ‘gamer credentials’. I play games. I have thoughts and feelings about them. I’m a pretty good writer. I can write about my feelings about video games. That’s allowed.

I think a part of me also worries that I will alienate some of my core readers if I spend too much time talking about games. Also didn’t I just make a commitment to writing ‘Frame Studies’? Well, I could synthesize the two. Gaming is full of framing-related insights. But also, really, so what if I alienate some people for a while, or even forever? The most important thing for an author or an artist is to do what makes their heart sing. So I suppose this is me making a proclamation, mainly to myself, that I feel like I wanna write about video games, and so I will write about video games, for some indeterminate length of time. Maybe I’ll scratch the itch by writing a couple of posts. Maybe I’ll write a dozen posts in a row. Maybe I’ll write something about games every second or third post. I don’t know yet. But I do know that… it’s unlikely that I’ll be satisfied only writing about video games. I’m stewing on essays about wretchedness and about the movie Inception, and I have much to say about language and public commons and smartphones and navigating our modern media environment and so on. I’ll get to everything eventually, as long as I’m still alive.

But for now, I find myself looking at my past year of writing, or more accurately from my perspective, my year of not-writing-that-much-actually, and I’m struck by how much of it felt like I was exerting myself. And I’m reminded of the days I spent in Starbucks as a 20-year-old with no audience, happily lugging along my secondhand laptop, ordering a Java Chip Frappaccino, writing about whatever the hell I was interested in at the time, not having any clue about how it might add up into a ‘writing career’.

I was still doing the same at 24 – this was my work laptop at the time, the tiny 11 inch Macbook Air that no longer exists – and look, there in the wallpaper is Commander Shepard from Mass Effect 3. That’s all the gamer cred I need to persuade myself, really. Evidence that the game mattered to me, years after I had finished playing through it.

✱

The first mass effect game I played was ME2, at a friend’s house. It was a strange time in my life. I was in junior college and I was absolutely flunking everything at school. I was sleep-deprived and smoking cigarettes… wait, no. Mass Effect 2 was released in 2010. So this was actually when I was already in the military. And I was still going to my friends’ houses on free evenings and playing video games and smoking cigarettes.

As a standalone video game, Mass Effect 2 is kind of perfect. You pick up squadmates… /abandoned