Not here for the beer, but for the sweet, intoxicating ambrosia. So to speak.
I like many different types of games, but have a standing interest in innovation, combined with a growing sense of getting old and needing to find things that are more suitable to my increased craving for meaning and understanding. Sadly, playing video games for me often amounts to being in an abusive relationship having roots in childhood trauma (perhaps illustrated all too well by Lavelles Oíche Mhaith), where I approach my harsh mistress with a desire to be accepted and forgiven, yet once more get cruelly beaten down. Whatever function video games had for me as a kid, they certainly have changed and I've been conditioned to try to regain my childhood through video games, yet even the old school aesthetic amounts to no more than a skeuomorphic shadow of what has been. I do not hope for a return by means of repetition -- although my inner child may yearn it -- but hope instead to reach for the future. Often have I even thought to myself that I should leave video games aside for maybe 5-10 years and explore my issues of becoming my own person through other means, yet the mistress has a strangle hold, and so I persuade myself instead that the only feasible approach is the direct: confrontation.
I've always had the best ideas concerning video games when playing them and imagining what instead the game could be, how differently it could behave, and how much more joyful I could feel when having finished playing it, or less neurotic ticks when actually playing it, since I'm aware I could invest my time in something better. Now, for the first time, I'm actually prepared to set out and make a complete document of a video game, instead of just thinking bits and pieces here and there, and a lot of ideas are now stumbling around in my head. Ideas very much connected to issues within video gaming as such, and their lacks, but also ideas concerning spirituality, philosophy, art, which I have been working on for quite some time in written form, and in my noggin. Perhaps I will voice some of these ideas here eventually.
Until then, perhaps I should link to a letter I sent to Obsidian and Avellone after they asked what I would like from a kickstarter project of theirs. I think this was a deciding point for me, since I'm been lurking round the brainysphere and have seen game criticism explode since 2007 on the net, yet haven't been a part of that community myself, and now wish to perhaps be, and also create.
http://mindinggames.blogspot.com/2012/03/opinions-presented-to-avellone.html
