Live From Wherever: It’s the awfulcomingdown Top 10 Games of 2020
I graduated from university in May of 2020. In the 7 months since, I haven’t done much. I’ve spent a lot of time in empty homes, trying to get up.
What I have done, though, in this time, is play a lot of video games. There’s been very little else to do. I played classic indie games I’d never touched. I played dozens-of-hours-long-JRPGs I never thought I’d finish. I’ve gotten a lot better at just hanging out with video games.
So at the end of this year I’ve written what might be the only thing I could really write about 2020: a list of my favourite games of the year.
Live From Wherever: It’s the awfulcomingdown Top 10 Games of 2020
The most important thing that happens in The Stanley Parable comes in the first five minutes of the game. You watch the introductory cutscene, leave Stanley’s work station, walk through the deserted office, and come to a set of doors. The Narrator says “When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left.” But you haven’t. You haven’t done that. He doesn’t say that you should or that you would, he says that you already have. But you’re still standing there. You haven’t done anything.
And so the rest of the game unfolds from the brilliance of this opening statement. The Narrator says what you’ve done, and then you either do or do not do it. There are some good jokes in there, too.
But so the point is that the rest of the game, all the possible endings/jokes/things to see, are just a fun sort of way to spend some time, none of them being the actual important part of the game, because the important parts already happened.
Okay but so there are some endings that feel like they’re worth writing about. This one’s called the Dream Ending, unofficially or maybe officially. It goes like this:
When you get to a stairwell, and the Narrator says that you went upstairs to see your boss, you go down the stairs, and when you do that, the Narrator begins talking about how you just couldn’t face your boss. It was too scary. He’d think you’re crazy.
The Narrator then says that Stanley begins to think that maybe he is crazy. He says that Stanley begins to wonder why doors always shut behind him, why he can’t see his feet or body, why the basement hallways and rooms he’s been walking through have clearly been repeating themselves, over and over, the entire time he’s been walking down there.
The Narrator says that Stanley comes to the conclusion that he’s dreaming. He (Stanley) begins to make himself float, and makes the space around him turn to stars. The Narrator says he begins to wonder how he’s got so much control over his dream. And then, the Narrator says, Stanley begins to wonder why there’s a voice in his head, describing all of his thoughts and actions. He begins to wonder why the voice is describing him wondering about the voice. He wonders if this voice speaks to all people in their dreams.
The Narrator says that, of course, this is not a dream. Stanley decides to prove that it is.
He closes his eyes (the screen goes black), and the Narrator describes him feeling the sensation of lying in his bed in his apartment. When Stanley’s eyes open, we see the same repeating basement we were in before. The Narrator says:
“Stanley began screaming.”
Eventually, the screen goes black, and the Narrator begins talking about Mariella. He says that one day while she was walking to work she came across a dead man lying on the sidewalk. He says that the woman knows that the man was crazy, and she becomes thankful that she is not crazy, and that she has her life together, and she generally looks down on this crazy man. Then she turns from the body and resumes her walk to work. Then it ends.
This game has a lot of things to say about a lot of things. They might all be brilliant. Stanley spends his days sitting in front of a screen waiting to be told what buttons to press and how long to press them for. The Narrator says that to most people this would be torturously boring, but Stanley feels like he was made to do it. He’s happy. He enjoys being told what to do and then doing it and then receiving the desired positive result. This is maybe too obvious a metaphor for me to explain here without feeling ridiculous.
So but anyway, The Stanley Parable is most interesting to me as a game that’s taunting video games and sometimes maybe narratives and reality as a whole, or that’s presenting you with the exciting nightmare feeling of reality breaking down around you.
I guess let’s maybe talk about the scene that takes place right before the credits roll.
I don’t remember how you get there, what path you take. All that I remember and all that matters is that you find yourself removed from Stanley’s body, looking down from atop the room where Stanley is first presented with a choice. The Narrator says “When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left,” and nothing happens, because we’re not there to control Stanley. We’re just watching. Stanley stays motionless as the Narrator again asks for him to please make a choice. The asking turns to pleading. The Narrator’s voice cracks as he begs Stanley to please just make a choice. He says it doesn’t even matter which he makes, the Narrator promises that Stanley will win and everything will be great either way so just Please make a choice. It gets desperate and surreal and you’re standing there above it all as the names of the people who made the game begin to scroll past your eyes.
Paratopic is a game made of only the things that need to be there. It cuts from scene to scene in an instant. When it wants you to go in a certain direction, it makes you do so.
It wasn’t until I googled this game for some reason that I can’t remember that I learned that it tells the story of three different characters. I didn’t like that. I much preferred playing this game and feeling like things were just happening. That’s how I continue to think about the game: things just happen.
At the beginning of the game you sit alone in a restaurant, a gun sitting unloaded in front of you. Pick it up, load it, walk around the restaurant if you want. It (the restaurant) is empty. Walk to the door behind the counter, kick it in, point your gun at the man therein, the game cuts to a black screen with the word “Paratopic” at center,. It cuts again, you’re standing in front of an elevator in a dim and faded apartment building. Minutes later, mid-conversation with your neighbour, the scene cuts. You’re driving a car. Your car moves forward on its own, you can steer. You sit there and listen to static-backed radio stations wherein the hosts speak what almost sounds like English. It’s incomprehensible. Different objects (gun, briefcase, nothing, etc.) appear beside you in the passenger seat as you look and look away.
The whole game is like this; things just happening.
That’s the value of this game to me. It just shows you a bunch of things, little sketches of scenes and conversations and forests and atrocities, and then it cuts away and you’re somewhere else, back in the car. The game ends with you finding the corpse of the character you’d earlier been playing as. It costs $6.92CAD on Nintendo Switch.
This game works from a philosophic foundation that all video games would be better off using. You don’t need things that don’t need to be there. You are playing a video game; you don’t need to lie about that. You don’t need to explain things. Things can just happen.
Because of its total lack of video game bullshit, I was able to show it to a friend who does not really play video games. I was able to put a controller in her hands and let her play the game without having to explain a hundred different terrible mechanics and justifications. She could just play it and sit there and feel creeped out by this work. That’s what happens when you make a good video game; it can be shown to a human being.
And so Paratopic is the first example on this list of what I consider to be one kind of great video game: the Straight Razor. Something so fine and clean and simple that it needs no justification or explanation. It is Good and Well Made and Not Full of Shit.
There are going to be a lot of other games on this list that exemplify these qualities, but let Paratopic be a poster child for what a good, clean, focused video game can do.
Videoball came out in 2016 and was a commercial failure. It forced its lead designer back to a day job. It’s near impossible to find anyone to play against.
So I never did. I’ve been playing Videoball alone, off and on, since I first bought the game on my laptop in June. I sit there and I play through the arcade challenges, one after the other, and when I get stuck, I go back and play the ones I’ve already beaten.
There’re a lot of good feelings to be had when playing Videoball. You are a triangle that shoots smaller triangles, and depending on how long you hold the action button (any button), the triangle you shoot will be either small, medium or large. All three have different effects. Videoball is a game about holding the action button until you’ve drifted into the spot wherein you feel you have the right angle to release that triangle towards the ball.
It’s a really simple game. You shoot triangles at the three balls and try to hit them towards the opponent’s goal. The opponent does the same. You can only move the balls by shooting them. If you touch the ball with your body you’ll be stunned and the ball will stop on the spot. If you shoot your opponent with a triangle, they will be stunned and pushed in the direction your triangle was going. That’s the whole game. Best played 2 vs. 2. Use the standard arena.
But so I’m missing 1 vs. 2 out of the required ideal play situation. And so I sit with my Xbox controller and play the arcade modes against robots. It feels good.
I guess the best feeling of the game is letting the triangle go at an angle that you’re not 75% sure was correct, and watching it go across the court, and sometimes seeing it hit the ball just where you wanted. If you were playing 2 vs. 2 with all humans, there would be endless opportunities for cooperation and strategy and disaster. As it stands, I’m having a good time watching those triangles hit those balls.
Videoball’s visuals are as clean and straight as it’s design. It’s all just shapes.
Today I moved from my sister’s home back to my mother’s home in my hometown. I’m sitting there (here) now, alone in the house and listening to Barely Civil’s I’ll Figure This Out. The house is giant and empty and full of other people’s shit. I hate sleeping alone here.
It’s 8:22PM and it feels like midnight. It feels like I have school tomorrow. I feel tired and like a degenerate. There’s nothing to do.
My friend invited me to my other friend’s house, but I’m not sure I want to go. It’s just a lot of sitting around and watching other people drink. The only thing anyone does is play drinking games. It’s not really my thing right now. I’ve got to read more of my book. 18 more pages today, still.
I’m going to stop writing this now, I think.
I feel dirty and tired and like I’m not a part of time right now. Sitting in a big empty house that has no connection to any world. It’s just me here alone and there’s nothing happening out there and there will never be anything happening again in my life. That’s it.
My life starts again tomorrow. In a new old town, still with no job or purpose or friends to talk to about the things I like. Still no purpose. Still not a real person. Not progressing. That’s how it is right now. I just want to get out and go to Victoria, British Columbia and make friends and play in a band with those friends and play a house show with that band and have people who care about video games the way I care about video games and well maybe be able to actually go outside places and speak to people and meet new people and be happy and feel like I’m aiming towards something and spending time out of my house.
Things are okay right now. They just feel weird is all. It’s fine. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself to write things. But I’m feeling it a little bit. Like, I spend half the year being excited about writing this thing, but when it comes time to do it all I feel is a vague sort of disinterest about it. Like I’m not in the mood. Like I just want to play guitar and read my book. I don’t feel excited or happy or interested in video games at the moment. Not right now. Life doesn’t feel totally real. I don’t know. None of this is ever going anywhere so why can’t you just totally fucking relax and let yourself just write whatever the fuck you want and not worry about it because fucking blah blah blah who cares it doesn’t matter no one will ever read any of this and you’re just a crazy person in a minus forty refrigeration baseball cap and it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter so it’s fine.
7: Fire Emblem: Three Houses
My sister asked me what I wanted as a gift for Christmas 2019. I sat and thought and tried to decide between asking for Dragon Quest XI and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I eventually decided that Nintendo first-party games are always good and beautiful and worth getting on Switch. This may have been the wrong decision.
I love Fire Emblem: Three Houses in the same sick sort of way that I love bad emo music. It’s dumb and funny and so long and bad and I love it deeply. At one point during my 50 hours with the game, I wrote into my phone’s notes app “This game feels like an episode of The Weekenders! I love it!!”
So much of FE:TH is spent doing nonsense. I think maybe the entire game might just be nonsense. You’re just wandering around this kind-of-ugly school, talking to kids who want you to, like, go find their belt in the auditorium. It’s awful.
I don’t want to talk about the battles.
I guess the reason you keep playing this game until the end is because you’ve developed some bizarre attachment to your obnoxious students. Hilda, Lysithea, Bernadetta, Claude, that rude asshole one (remembering now his name is Lorenz), the one with the glasses that likes painting (Ignus? Something like that), the big one that I actually do not care about at all and never will (fucking Ralph), the blue-haired one who hates herself because she feels as though she is irrevocably fucked up (Marianne? Marietta?).
There are some real good things in this game. Hilda, a pink-haired axe-wielder, at first seems like a one dimensional ‘lazy’ character. She doesn’t want to train or battle, she just wants to sleep and lie around and do nothing. 15 hours into the game, during a conversation between her and your character (a female teacher named Price), it is revealed that the reason she does not want to battle is that she is deeply afraid of dying. She explains that she likes her classmates, but she would never die for any of them. All of a sudden she’s a human being.
This game was nice. It was the second big game I played once the pandemic started. I’d moved back home, finished my final university essays and exams, and found myself unemployed and living alone in an empty house with no conceivable thing to do. I spent hours each day playing Fire Emblem and trying to not lose my mind. Seeing those kids, those dumb, annoying, sometimes poorly-animated kids wander around and whine about their various ridiculous and deadly serious problems helped me to calm down. Seeing my playtime in the game slowly go up each day helped me to feel better-anchored to the passage of time.
And so I arrived at the end of it in probably May, feeling a real fondness for the whole thing. I still do. It was just a thing that I spent a lot of time with when I had nothing else to do. I’m glad it was there.
I’ll maybe just say that at the end of this game, you get little one-paragraph explanations of what all the characters go on to do after the ending of the game. Some of them get married, or take over their family kingdoms. My favourite character, a blonde, deeply-angry and -driven young woman named Lysithea, had some motivation throughout the whole game that I can’t quite remember. I think she wanted to save her parents from something. She’d been experimented on as a child, and it had ensured that she would die very young. She was driven because she knew she would be dead in her early twenties.
I don’t remember what happens with her inevitable death, or where her parents had been, but I do remember her final paragraph. It stated that after the final battle, Lysithea reunited with her parents and receded into the desolate forest town from which she came, and was never seen again. And that was it. That was the end.
Thinking about Fire Emblem: Three Houses makes me weirdly emotional. It’s been a hard year to remember.
This game is stupid and goofy and it was there for me and I will remember it.
Into The Breach is a game about getting rid of everything that doesn’t need to be in a strategy game. It’s clean and simple and always telling you everything you need to know.
The Epic Games Store says I have 6 hours, 25 minutes and 8 seconds played in the game. I imagine 90% of that time was spent with me staring at the screen, hands in my lap, thinking about what to do. It’s a game that reminds me of playing chess in high school against my one friend who was slightly worse than me at chess. I sit there and stare at a small handful of decisions for long stretches of time. Something about that experience feels good.
It’s story is a thin, crisp coat of pain on the concrete walls attached at right angles to the floors of the game’s foundation.
I guess that I don’t have many strong emotions for this game. It’s just a really well-made thing. Like a comfortable chair that I sit in once every couple weeks. It doesn’t bring any strong memories up. I don’t know how much I’ll really be thinking about it for the rest of my life.
Though, I guess, it does have a lot of things that I would like the sort of video games I hypothetically one day make to have. It’s clean and simple and elegant. I don’t know.
I feel like I don’t have anything else to say. Let’s talk about something else, then.
I got an email today from an online magazine saying that they appreciated me sharing my work, but that unfortunately I would not be selected as a finalist for the essay contest. Well, that’s fair. The essay I wrote was kinda wild, I guess.
I think it had a good ending though.
And so you walk away feeling nothing, and when you leave the warehouse the sunlight hurts your eyes and your head in a way that feels ridiculous, since the sky is grey and the cloud-covered sun has nearly set, anyway.
Well there. At least the whole thing isn’t wasted, now.
The Beginner’s Guide is maybe a high artistic achievement. It feels like one of the few games I’ve played that I can really sit around and think about for a long time. It’s ambiguous in the way that leaves me feeling things about it a lot.
Throughout The Beginner’s Guide you play through video games made by a fictional person named Coda, and are walked through those games by Davey Wreden as narrator. I played the game through the first time thinking Coda was a real guy.
But so Wreden walks you through all these small, experimental games, and he tells you things about the games and about his ideas about them and about his and Coda’s relationship. They’re all first-person.
I guess what we’re thinking about throughout the game is art and meaning and where those things come from. Wreden tells us his ideas about what the games mean, and always notes that this is just his interpretation. It’s some real good David Foster Wallace-type literature. Who is Davey Wreden? Who made these games? Who is Davey Wreden talking about when he talks about these things? Which Davey Wreden are these things coming from? The video game developer or the game character? Who’s writing the book?
“Who’s writing the book?” is a question that’s come to me a lot while reading Infinite Jest. It came loudest when, maybe 500 pages into the book, the writer of the book said “And has anyone mentioned the shape of this guy’s head?” and I thought “Yes. You did. The book did. It’s big and square we already know that, the book’s said it many times.” and the book said “It’s huge and square.” and I thought “Who is writing this book and who was writing it before and who is writing the footnotes?”
So, yes, The Beginner’s Guide has me thinking book-type thoughts, which I guess is probably one of the better compliments I could give a video game. It’s also really beautiful sometimes.
There’s a scene (and here “scene” means “game”) wherein you find yourself in a beautiful home in a dark, snowy place. Upon entering the building there’s guitar picking and airy, distant singing and you’re asked to please straighten up the house. You do so over and over while Wreden talks about how happy Coda was while making this particular game, how he’d been in a really good place. It’s really calming. I could hang out in there for hours.
Coda left that good place soon after, I guess, because things get dark. There’s prisons and labyrinths and obelisks and desperate, shaking narration. It’s a lot to think about.
Okay, well, so let’s maybe start at the beginning.
A friend and I were talking about something on Friday January 31st, 2020. At some point in this conversation, the video game Portal came up. I don’t know how this happened. This friend of mine was not someone who liked video games. I obviously brought it up. I must have been reading the Action Button Review of Portal from 2008. I must have brought the game up. My friend had recently bought a new laptop for school because her old laptop had been a slow brick house. She got one of those Windows ones with a touchscreen that can be folded back into a pretty-big tablet. She downloaded Steam so we could look at the game because well I guess there was nothing else to do this Friday night. She made a Steam account. She searched up Portal. She saw it was only $11.49CAD. She said something like “Oh, it’s only $11? Let’s just buy it!” She was not great with money. She bought it. She did not have a lot of money. “Come on, $11? Why not!” she said. She was that kind of person. I figured Well, yeah, cool, let’s do it. We started playing the game. We started drinking.
I was worried it wouldn’t be very enjoyable for us. I was worried she would have wasted her $11. It was pretty immediately clear that that was not going to have happened. The game was beautiful. We took turns playing. It was haunting. The game was so still, so clean, so direct. Everything was straightforward and simple and showing you what you needed to be shown. The walls were a sickening, sterile white. A robot voice spoke to us.
We continued drinking and playing for a long time that night. We didn’t go anywhere. We both agreed that the game was great. At some point, while she left the room to use the washroom, I felt a lot of things at once. She returned, and I said “This game is minimalist performance art.” I felt that that was true in my bones. Saying it aloud felt good in my head. I’d had a lot to drink. She laughed. I laughed. The next morning we both laughed. We agreed it was ridiculous and dumb and meaningless. I couldn’t help but feel, then as I do now, that I was a little bit right.
We continued to play the game throughout Saturday. As the puzzles got harder, I began to be the one playing more, with her by my side drinking and talking and playing music. Again we went nowhere. The game felt as though it was still deep within itself.
The next day we woke up, sad and detached and hungover. We drank coffee and sat in the living room and played more of Portal while her roommate watched a documentary about Aaron Hernandez. It was Sunday February 2nd, 2020. We both watched the end of the documentary. The roommate reminded us it was Super Bowl Sunday. I felt that warm, dark assuredness that I had class the next day, that I had things I should have been doing, that I could not feel good. I remembered that I’d promised my roommates that I would meet them at the bar near our house to watch the game. I’d agreed to take part in some sort of gambling game. Later I would find out this entailed filling out two sheets of questions about what sorts of nefarious and irrelevant things would or would not take place in the game that day.
I sat and stared at nothing and put off the cross-town walk that would be required of me to get to the bar. My friend and I continued to play Portal. It felt like the end would be soon.
The puzzles got harder, they took longer, my clouded brain felt farther away from my hands and the screen. I planned in my head the exact latest time I could leave the house while still making it to the bar in time. We beat the game. The song played. We did it.
I said goodbye to her roommate and to her and left into the dark afternoon. It was cold and wet and I had a hood up over my toque. I made it to the bar and my roommates pushed a beer-full glass towards me and I drank it and I drank a few more. I filled out the gambling sheet. We watched the game. I accidentally won a free Travis Kelce Super Bowl LIV jersey. I put it on that night. I have not put it on since. It’s in a closet somewhere.
The game ended. My friend drank and ate too much and vomited beside a bridge while my other friend urinated a meter from his head. I took a picture of the scene. We walked home and played video games and I watched them get high. One month later I moved out of that house and left those roommates to finish the semester back in my hometown. One month after that, I graduated. Two months after that I found myself at a parent’s friend’s empty cottage on Lake Huron. On that June Saturday I left early and drove back to that college town to see that friend, the one who’d bought Portal. We sat and drank and talked about a lot of really happy things and laughed hard remembering all of those terrible memories. We drank until very late and played ridiculous drinking games and enjoyed each other’s company. At the end of the night, we hugged, and then she went to her room and I slept on the couch. The next morning we drank coffee and talked about our hangovers. Her roommate showed up and I helped her father and younger brother move her things into the home. It was awfully warm. I drank water with my friend and decided I’d best head out. She walked me to my car and we hugged and said our goodbyes and that it had been nice to see each other.
That was six months ago. I haven’t seen her since. I haven’t talked to her since September. I played Portal 2. I played Portal, again, this time alone, on my own laptop, and thought about her, and thought of that terrible Sunday afternoon when we beat that great game. It took a lot less time to beat, the second time around. Through all the drunken excitement and hungover malaise, somewhere in my brain the solutions to those puzzles were still stored.
It just…wasn’t as much fun that way.
Interludes and Errata: awfulcomingdown Presents the Top 10 Albums of 2020
2020 was the first year of my life where I found myself finding a lot of new albums that I really loved. It was like the first time I’ve ever really followed new releases in what felt like a really enjoyable and meaningful way.
Because of this, I would regret not putting out a little list of my favourite albums of the year. So here they are: The awfulcomingdown Top 10 Albums of 2020:
10. songs by Adrianne Lenker
I’ve never really been a Big Thief guy, but I have a perverse sort of place in my heart for Adrianne Lenker as a human being, for reasons I will not go into. This is to say I’m always more interested in her solo work. This album is just her with a guitar, written and recorded alone somewhere in Massachusetts. In the Bandcamp description she says she fell in love with the cabin she was renting in Western MA in March. She says “The one room cabin felt like the inside of an acoustic guitar — it was such a joy to hear the notes reverberate in the space.” A couple of days ago I was in the empty former-bedroom of my girlfriend’s mother. I was alone in an empty space with an acoustic guitar on the 29th floor of a Toronto apartment building. The sound of the guitar was like nothing I’d heard before. songs is what making music is about. It’s a document of the value of playing music for yourself.
9. Floral Prince by Field Medic
This album cemented its place on my list the second time I heard “it’s so lonely being sober”. The sound made its way to my bones. It’s just Kevin Patrick Sullivan with an acoustic guitar and his voice. The chords are C G Am F G Am G C F G C. Pick the strings however you want. I’ve played this song maybe a hundred times on my guitar since I first learned it. The line that always gets me most is when, after the first refrain of him singing “it’s so lonely being sober,” he says “feeling proud / and my stomach’s feeling better.” It’s such a hopeful and sad little celebration. It’s one of my favourite lyrics of the year.
I listened to this album a lot this year. It was one I’d just throw on any time I was driving around, to get groceries or whatever. It’s clean and calm and smooth and has a feeling that comes from a lot of things that are often not accessible; nature, the ocean, warmth, friends. On “Sunblind,” Robin Pecknold sings, “I’m gonna swim for a week in / Warm American Water with dear friends.” It’s a warm, sad reminder of the good things and people in the world.
7. I Had Everybody Snowed by Growing Stone
This album came out eleven days ago. If I have any future regret about its place on this list, it will be that I didn’t put it high enough. It’s an album made by a now-sober man that is solely about being a drunk. Instead of writing any more about it, I’ll just say that my favourite line from the album perfectly summarizes the feeling of pushing yourself to drink so much, trying to get that good feeling, that warm glow it once gave you, to the point where you’re making your life worse and not even having a good time doing it; you’re just sad and desperate and dejected. The line is:
Or picked up their garbage
6. Ways of Hearing by The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
That looks just like David Byrne
Ways of Hearing is a slow, quiet music. There’s always strings. There’s often male and female vocals overlapping with one another, not fighting for attention but instead seeming like they’re hoping you’ll be distracted by the other and miss what they’re saying. “Joseph Stalin” is my brother’s favourite song of the year. If you’re looking to sit in a darkening room, looking out the window at dusk, this is the music.
5. Notes On A Conditional Form by The 1975
“If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” has earned a place in my top 3 The 1975 songs of all time, along with a definite place in my top songs of the year. “The Birthday Party” is one of my friend’s favourite songs of all time. Matt Healy sings: “Saw the girls and they were like / ‘Do you wanna come and get fucked up?’ / Listen, I’ve got myself a missus so there can’t be any kissing / ‘Oh don’t be afraid, you better wise up, kid / It’s all adderall now, it doesn’t make you wanna do it.’” What a relief.
4. Welcome to Conceptual Beach by Young Jesus
If you’re looking to spend 46 minutes floating and feeling good about things, you should hang out with this album. There’s some ten minute songs. I love those. It’s a big, complicated, ambitious, aspirational, vast and expansive album. Sitting in my mother’s car in a Walmart parking lot on August 16th, I got a text message from a person I’d not spoken to in 7 years. As I read the message, the music got quiet, with only the sound of shiny strings being strummed. John Rossiter began saying “I wanna be around and live it.” He said it over and over. I put my phone down and stared over the steering wheel at the mostly-empty parking lot. The engine was running. He started getting louder. I leaned back and felt myself nearly crying. He was yelling now. The tears wouldn’t come out. “I wanna be around and live it.” He was screaming. My face crumpled and I couldn’t understand why. The tears almost came. Maybe they did. The music cut out. He stopped yelling. The shaking strings faded out. It was silent. I put my seatbelt back on, drove out of the parking lot, and headed South. I didn’t know where I was headed.
“Kawasaki Backflip” is my most listened to song of the year. This surprises me. When I checked this, I hadn’t really listened to the album since it came out in March. When I think about the album while not listening to it, I maybe don’t feel that much about it. I was never able to see Dogleg live. By the time the album came out I was no longer anxiously walking around a university campus, my #1 reason for wanting to listen to horribly intense emo music. I don’t think about the album all too much. But then I put it on, and I hear that opening faded riff, and I know that there is about to be a fucking explosion; I know there is always about to be one.
2. Lament by Touche Amore
Touche Amore is as intense a music as I can enjoy. It’s loud and fast and Jeremy Bolm is always screaming. It’s also insanely melodic. It makes me want to dance. During what was maybe my worst mental episode this year, reeling from the combination of a destroyed tooth and a hurtful comment made by someone close to me, I stood up from my washroom floor and left the room and told my friend I needed to be alone for a bit. I grabbed my laptop and a beer and opened a google doc. I put on my headphones and played Lament. It was the exact sound of how I felt. Desperate and shaking and about to fucking collapse, with an absurd, exciting optimism always pulsing throughout if only as a result of the great melodies of the songs. “I talk myself out of myself / When I’m overwhelmed,” he yelled. It’s an album about feeling better, and on the last song Jeremy Bolm sings — this being the one moment in maybe his entire career when he’s singing and not screaming — two of my favourite lines of the year:
I’ve healed more than suffered
I found the patience for jazz
Nothing this year felt as much like getting better as these two lines.
1. you can never have a long enough head start by floral tattoo
Here is an album that’s not about getting better. It’s an album about being in the dark. It’s an album that came out January 3rd, one that I listened to for the first time walking home in the cold dark of London, Ontario. I played it many times walking home from my friend’s house during sad, shaky mornings that winter. I played it on my radio show. I listened to it enough to start to feel like it was the first time in my life I’d been right there for the release of a great album. I tried writing about it in a coffee shop in a mall while waiting two hours for my friend to pick me up at the beginning of Spring reading week. I didn’t listen to it much once I’d moved back home. I haven’t listened to it for a while, until now, sitting in the now-completely-dark living room of my mother’s home. It was daylight when I sat down to start writing this all. No one else is here. I guess my favourite song on this album has become “(my life fell apart this year)”. It was “Life in Colour” at first, and then “(redding forest fire / fermi)” for a long time. I guess in all that time not listening to the album, “(my life fell apart this year)” began to be the one that stuck out in my mind. I listened to it, just that one song, a couple of weeks or months ago. I guess that was what decided it. There’s an explosion, in that song. It’s the thing I’m always chasing; the desperate celebration. There are monologues about working jobs and trying not to kill oneself. There’s chanting about twisting and swerving and confusing the ones that we love until another voice comes in, and it screams: “I’m letting go.” The music disintegrates and erupts and the voices continue to chant “When I’m 25 / I will look back on / all this mess and think / I was worried for nothing,” while this voice continues to scream “I’m letting go.” Eventually the screaming fades out, and so does the chanting, and there’s just drums being played, and you can’t help but feel like this is very sad music, but that that sadness sounds beautiful, and that this complete darkness is meaningful.
There will be things after it.
What I like about making games is that they don’t survive. You can’t play old games as game machines are constantly changing. The Japanese proverb that says ‘you discard your shame when you travel’ is what games are to me. Games should remain in people’s minds and in history. That means that people forget about the games we make, which is good.
I bought Metal Gear Solid 2 off my friend. He’d gotten a big box of games at a garage sale for $20 and said I could look through it and see if there was anything I wanted. I went through and pulled out three games and asked him how much.
He sold me Dead Space, Mass Effect 2, and Metal Gear Solid 2 for $10. I haven’t played the other two yet. I don’t have an Xbox.
I took home Metal Gear Solid 2 and put it in my PlayStation 2. I played the first six hours of the game. I loved how long the cut scenes were. It was hilarious. I hated playing it. At the end of Christmas Break in January 2020, I figured I was done with the game. I left my PlayStation 2 in my childhood bedroom and went back to school.
Three months later I’d moved back home and decided to put the PlayStation 2 away. I couldn’t do it, though. Not yet. I had to boot up MGS2 one more time. Just to make sure.
I turned on the game. I had no idea what I was doing. I was at some insufferable moment wherein I was supposed to use a sniper to locate and then shoot a bunch of motion-sensors so that they wouldn’t set off explosives so that I could cross a bridge without it being destroyed. I didn’t even have a sniper.
I googled how to find the sniper. I watched a video of someone else shooting the sensors. I got the sniper and shot the sensors.
I kept playing the game. It kept being boring. At some point it became charming.
I remember, earlier on in my playing experience, during December 2019, having a distinct feeling. It was this: I get that this game is cool, and that Hideo Kojima is a wacky guy who was doing some stuff that must have been real wild in 2001, but I just do not think this game is good. It sucks to play and it’s boring and dumb. I still thought the 15-minute-long cutscenes were pretty funny. But I was done with the rest of it. I thought I don’t understand people who like this game.
This is all a long way of saying that I didn’t start to like this game until very near the end. At some point I started to find the gameplay kind of goofy. It seemed alright. The story was doing some funny stuff, I thought. This game’s alright.
But so the ending. I don’t know whether it’d be interesting or not to directly talk about the things that happen at the end. Not the plot or anything. I don’t know what happens in the plot. I don’t think I ever really understood what a Metal Gear was. But there are some things that happen, there, at the end. A lot of things.
Raiden gets caught, and he gets stripped naked and strapped to a metal board. Someone lets him free. All of a sudden you’re playing as a naked man. When standing still Raiden covers his genitals with his hands. Somehow you never see them, the genitals, even while fighting and running.
So you’re creeping around this factory, naked and weaponless. The Colonel and Rose keep calling you. The things they say get progressively more horrific. Things get desperate. Things start to be said about things.
I played the end of this game alone in my childhood bedroom at night. The emptiness of the house made me shutter. At one point the Colonel called. He said “TURN OFF THE GAME CONSOLE NOW.” I got up and shut my bedroom door. I needed less empty space around me. I needed to be enclosed.
After finishing the game, I went and wrote some weird stuff and put it somewhere on the internet. I think I called it my favourite game of all time. I was feeling intensely. I said that I thought Kojima had read Baudrillard and Lyotard and Jameson and maybe George Berkeley. I called it “Our Sad and Messy History”.
At the end of the game, after things have been resolved, Raiden stands in the streets of New York. There are montages of real-life footage of the city. It’s one of the better moments I’ve had in my life playing a video game.
During the montage, Solid Snake speaks. Allow me to maybe contradict Hideo Kojima’s statement, and allow him to maybe do the same, by writing out what he says:
Life isn’t just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature and movies, what we’ve seen, heard, felt; anger, joy, and sorrow. These are the things I will pass on. That’s what I live for.
We need to pass the torch, and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is worth something. It’s got something in it that’s worth thinking about. It’s got something that great art has. It’s got something like literature. It’s informed by cultural theory. It worthwhile.
I don’t know if I’ll ever play it again. I dislike so much of it. I know that I still love those long cutscenes, and still love Raiden, and will forever love Hideo Kojima. I know that this game gets at something so few things do. Thinking about that bizarre contrast, between its literary quality and its mundane video game existence, I wonder if maybe Hideo Kojima has accomplished his goal: most people will never read this book.
2: Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
I’ve been writing these entries and feeling a little stressed out by them. Stressed might be too strong a word. I’m going to try to have a good time with this one.
I don’t really know where to start with Getting Over It. It’s one of the greatest games of all time. It’s a video game that should be put into some sort of and any video game museum. It’s a game that fully capitalizes on the potential of video games. It’s a game about climbing a mountain.
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a game that is very honest about what’s happening. All of the objects in the game exist exactly where they look as though they exist. I’m having a little thought in my head about how the sprite vs. hit-box relationship in video games (this is to say where it looks like something is vs. where the game actually considers it to be (i.e. where you can make contact with it etc.)) is really similar to the the conversation in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous wherein Hylas pleads with Philonous and says that there must be some real-world material substratum underneath the mind-dependent images that we perceive as being objects. The hit-box is this supposed substratum, and the sprite is the image that we perceive as being the thing itself, even though in the code of the video game it literally isn’t. The image isn’t the thing, the hit-box (in coding called objects) is the thing. Holy shit.
Anyway, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy gives us a world wherein the substratum and the images are exactly the same. This is to say the sprite and hit-boxes line up exactly. When you put your yosemite hammer in the indent of a rock, it will hit it exactly when it looks like it will hit it.
At the beginning of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Bennett Foddy tells us about a game called Sexy Hiking. He says that at the beginning of this early internet game, there is a tree that is nearly impossible to climb over right at the beginning. You forced to sit there and poke at it and fuck with it and try things and see what happens. It’s kind of what all great video games should be: something you poke at.
I haven’t beaten Getting Over It. I might never. I recently fell from a very high area back to the very beginning of the game. I’m currently at like the fourth obstacle again, just opening the game up and climbing around whenever I feel like it.
Okay, I made it back up to the top of that building with the fridge at the bottom of it, waiting.
I wrote in my notes somewhere the first night I played this game that it’s life-affirming, that it reinforced two important ideas in my head.
The first was that video games matter and are worth pursuing. This was when I was still learning to code and using Gamemaker to make some god damn games. I don’t do that anymore.
The second was that my ideas matter, and that people’s ideas matter, and that your ideas are worth fucking pursuing even if no one else on earth gives a fuck about them, because if you keep pursuing them you will find people who really, really do (give a fuck).
When I started writing that out, I was gonna say that the first lesson’s importance had faded, while the second was still crucial. This isn’t true. They’re both still vitally fucking important. They’re everything.
I don’t make video games anymore. I focus on the other things I do. I write about art, I write fiction, I play guitar, I write songs. These are the things that are important to me. They matter and I am getting better at them.
There are a lot of different ways to contribute to making great art. This is one of the reasons learning about artists’ lives (whether they be video game developers, musicians, animators, writers, whatever) is so exciting: it reminds me that there are infinite ways to create things and to get to the point where the things you’re creating are good and meaningful and worthwhile. It’s really important.
And so I don’t make video games anymore, but what I do is a lot of things that I deeply love and care about; things that will or could one day make me a valuable contributor to the creation of a video game. The point is to just keep fucking going, keep pursuing whatever it is that you enjoy doing and the ideas that matter to you, so that one day you’ll find the right people in this world who value this work and these ideas as much as you do and you’ll be fucking ready.
So, no, I haven’t beaten Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. I might never. But I for damn sure will be here for the rest of my life, coming back, poking, experimenting; climbing that fucking mountain.
In 1994, Mother 2 was released in Japan. In 1994, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was released in Japan.
In 2020, I played Earthbound and read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I accidentally did this simultaneously.
I started Earthbound on March 2nd. Shortly after, I finished reading Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. I hesitated for some time deciding what book I should take next from my university library. I had planned to have The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle be the last book I ever read during my time at the university. After a lot of thinking, I decided I would just start reading it, right then. I thought maybe, just in case something were to happen, I should start reading it now, to avoid any possibility of me not having the time to read it later in the semester.
Less than two weeks later, classes were cancelled. I packed my essential belongings and moved to my sister’s house an hour East. A couple of days later, I moved back to my hometown, where I’ve been living for eight months now. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle would end up being the last book I ever took out from the D.B. Weldon Library.
So I found myself home, finishing up essays and exams and preparing to graduate into nothing. I played Earthbound everyday.
I guess the thing to say with Earthbound is that yes, I think I consider it to be my Favourite Game of All Time. I guess the other thing to say would be that yes, huge amounts of this game are boring and repetitive and tedious. It’s a lot of pressing A to select attack in turn-based-battles. It’s slow.
I sort of learned how to chill out with a game. How to just calm down and not worry too much about if I was getting anywhere, or if I was having fun. I learned to just play the game and relax. I learned to let myself die and to just try again. I ended up spending 40 hours with the game.
So, I don’t know, yes, Earthbound is my favourite game of all time, though maybe that’s a little bit by default. It’s the most a video game I’ve played has felt like a Haruki Murakami novel. It wouldn’t be until after I’d finished both Earthbound and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that I would learn that Shigesato Itoi and Haruki Murakami published a collection of short stories together shortly after the releases of these two masterpieces. Wild stuff.
Well so okay, I guess there’s one important moment to talk about. There’s a moment in Earthbound and a moment in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that seem deeply connected.
400 or so pages into The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, many, many pages are spent slowly detailing the event of a Japanese man being skinned alive during World War II. He’s been captured, along with his fellow Japanese soldier who is recounting this story to the book’s main character, and is being tortured for information. He doesn’t give up the information, and so he is slowly skinned alive, and Murakami describes this in sickening detail. I was sitting in the D.B. Weldon Library reading this and having to stop every once in a while to look around and remember everything was okay. But so okay, the point is that 400 pages into this book that begins with a goofy guy named Toru wandering around his neighbourhood looking for his cat, we find ourselves staring down a man who can no longer close his eyes because his face and eyelids have been peeled off by an enemy soldier. This is what I love about art: things being hidden deep into long works; things that you could never be told of; things you just have to find.
And so 25 hours into Earthbound we meet the fourth and final party member, a Chinese prince living in a kingdom in the clouds named Kenny. When we meet Kenny and begin playing as him alone (the other party members in a far-off part of the world, unaware of Kenny’s existence, other than Ness, who is dreaming of the following events after eating “Magic cake”), we’re told that it is time for Prince Kenny to undertake his final trial, and that we must “Go to the ‘Place of Emptiness’ and endure this final test.” You leave the palace, and walk over to a narrow cliff with a rope on it. Kenny climbs the rope and sits atop the peak, facing the player. The screen goes black, and we enter the first-person battle screen against a large, disembodied head. The head says:
“To complete the trial, I am going to break your legs.”
He does it and you lose HP.
“Next, I will tear your arms off…
I shall then take your arms and feed them to the crows.”
He does so and your HP goes to 0.
“Now, I’ll cut your ears off.”
He does so and the game’s sound cuts out. It’s silent.
No legs, no arms and no sound…
By floating words through the air, I must ask you…
Do you care if I take your eyes?)”
He does so and the screen goes black.
Now, I can only communicate directly with your mind.
Your mind is all you have left…
In the end, I will take your mind,
though you probably don’t want to allow that, do you?
So…you can’t answer? You can’t even move?
Are you sad, are you lonely?
If you lose your mind, you also lose any feelings of sadness.
I will take your mind, Prince Kenny, know that I will possess it…)”
So it is that 25 hours into a children’s video game about a young boy living in a brightly-coloured cartoon America saving the world from time-travelling aliens, we find ourselves witnessing/experiencing the mutilation of a child first-hand.
This whole thing gave me that same stunned, sick feeling as the skinning scene in the book. All this darkness hidden beneath the beautiful, charming veneer of friendly entertainment. It’s the reason I read books; it’s the reason I play video games; it’s the reason I like art.
I’m really glad that I finally found in Earthbound the feeling I’ve been looking for in my favourite medium for the past three years.
But I guess it’s time to get back to looking.
Well, there it is. I actually wrote something I’d been planning to write for nearly the entire year. I wrote this over the course of like 12 days, one entry a day. I’m sitting here on December 24th, wondering about it all.
I’m feeling a little bit like maybe I’ll be writing less about video games in 2021. I wrote my new year’s resolution into my phone’s notes a couple days ago, when it suddenly popped in my head. I wrote:
I think those are the things I want to pursue. I feel pretty certain at this point that video games will always be a part of my live, but I guess I’m feeling like they won’t be the center of it. They maybe already aren’t.
I’m feeling like writing about art in general is something I’m drifting away from. I’m feeling more and more like I just want to make art. I want to write fiction; I want to write songs. I keep feeling like that’s maybe what I’m better at. I guess I don’t know.
So, anyway, that’s the end of this. I hope if you’ve read it you’ve gotten something out of it. I hope it wasn’t just me saying nothing about nothing. I hope there was some good in there.
This is the most I’ve worked on a personal thing in my life, and so I know there’s at least value in that. There’s always value in doing things.
I guess I’ll end this with a quote from a book I’ve been reading this year:
Until you can do it without thinking about it, play. Just do it. Forget about is there a point, of course there’s no point. The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head.
Happy holidays, I wish you good luck in the new year, and every year after that, too.
Here’s to hoping we can all just keep doing.
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