Most of these entries won’t have such a rigid structure but considering this is the first one I figure it’s worth defining what to expect from this web page.
With that diatribe over, the meat of my first entry:
I’ve been playing a decent few incremental games lately; if you’re unfamiliar with the term think stuff like Cookie Clicker or all those bullshit mobile games that copied it, but like, not scams or anything. Something about the menial action, passive attention requirement, and fairly consistent “progress” (number going up) makes it easy to fall into one either between activities or during them. This is definitely no new observation, but I can’t help but compare it to the job I tenuously hold. Without bogging down my creative output with memories of my required work I hate, let’s leave the details at my performance being tracked. I resent so deeply that part of my brain finds ‘number going up’ incredibly satisfying, and yet actually getting paid for, boiled down to its essence, the same equation (x = x + 1) feels so soul draining. It almost doesn’t make sense, but thinking one layer deeper actually makes it make perfect sense.
I find it’s kind of human nature to grow to despise something you’re forced to do. Unless you are one of the few who has a compulsion to always be improving and working yourself as much as you can physically stand, it’s easy to dislike a career you got into with optimism and good intentions. The phrase “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” should really only be applied to the aforementioned strongly driven individuals. I’ve seen it happen countless times, creatives growing to dislike a craft they turned into their effective profession. It’s incredibly disheartening and says a lot about how this world was actually designed in spite of creatives as opposed to with their assistance.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between an open world racing game, namely Burnout Paradise, and an open world game with a focus on driving, namely Grand Theft Auto IV. In Burnout Paradise, you enter every event in the game by performing a burnout at any intersection in the game world. You’re also confined to your vehicle of choice, meaning there are no on-foot segments unlike a game like, say, Driver 3 (a driving game inspired heavily by GTA in a similar way that Jak 2 is a platformer inspired by GTA). Due to this, the world doesn’t really need to feel real enough, it only needs to be fun to drive around in. Grand Theft Auto IV takes place in Liberty City, a fictional city effectively parodying the real life New York City. Much like NYC, Liberty City is a largely grid based city meaning that 90 degree turns are rather common, very much not the case in Burnout Paradise’s world which is very loosely inspired by several real life big cities. There are definitely several 90 degree turns and blocks to drive through, but I would argue that’s Liberty City’s defining feature. I find myself coming to the conclusion that Liberty City, the world from a game where driving is only a thing you do, is a lot more fun to drive around in than Paradise City (the one from the similarly titled Burnout game I was just talking about) which is designed exclusively to race through.
I Saw The TV Glow is a movie that came out this year of 2024, and as a transgendered individual (referred to as a TI for the rest of this article) on the internet, of course I have seen it. Shockingly, I found that I have very little to say about most of the film. The part I find most fascinating is the structure of the film. The entire story of the movie is contained to a few vignettes of the protagonist’s life; one in childhood, one in high school, one not too long after high school, and one much later in the protagonist’s life. A lot of people will attribute this phenomena to being transgender, and for some that definitely could be the truth, but I’ve found my life also effectively existing through select vignettes. Maybe it’s just that one’s decisions comprise the entirety of what one is, but like a poorly designed video game, I believe I am who I am and where I am due to a string of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ decisions.
I think Mass Effect gets a bad rap. I’ve emphatically explained this to several of my friends and peers, but it’s still the only video game to get me to actually truly role-play as a character instead of making decisions as myself or making decisions with the intent to see a particular outcome. Sadly I don’t think I could pinpoint why exactly, but I have a theory that it has to do with the simple yet effective decisions you make when you’re creating your Shepard. You first pick between three backgrounds, and then between three defining moments in your military career. It doesn’t sound particularly interesting, and to be honest it isn’t, but it put the idea of a person in my head and made her stay in there through my time through the first game and, so far, about halfway through the second game.
Well this is about school essay length now, so I’ll shut my trap for now. I sure hope not all of these are this long, but I suppose I wouldn’t put it past myself. Stay tuned for more clumsy interlinking of ideas!