This isn’t a post about Zoe Quinn
In fact, she’s not even mentioned after the opening here and in the final two lines of the piece.
If you don’t know who Zoe Quinn is, that’s fine; this post isn’t about her. If you do know what happened recently, that’s good too. Although I’m using a very loose definition of the word “good” here, because what happened to her is another example of a problem that’s run rampant in gaming for years and just keeps getting more problematic. But she doesn’t want her personal life being dragged out for discussing something that’s completely unconnected to what she does for a living, and the fact is that asking that is beyond fair. Her personal life is hers. The whole “scandal” was, essentially, someone violating that boundary.
And there’s been a lot already written about it, many pieces within days of the event, and they all had the same tone to them. Hell, some of them had probably been written beforehand and were just sitting around ready for use as soon as something happened, because something was going to. It was inevitable. There was always going to be another one of these situations, and the same wave of “I can’t deal with this again” began to break.
Some people clocked out more or less as soon as it started happening. Because exhaustion had already set in.
Who wants to play my idea?
“Megaman without Capcom” is a pretty solid idea, admittedly, but it’s still just an idea.
You there! Would you like to play my idea? It’s a really great idea, and you can play it on whatever system you choose to play games on. It’s cool, too, especially as it has separate but linked components for your smartphone, consoles, and desktop computers. It’s got all sorts of exploration, a dynamic set of objectives that it can generate, and a deep and moving storyline that you’ll want to complete your way. And you can! There are romance systems and important decisions and epic combat, it’s great!
Oh, and if you like all of that, you’ll love my idea’s voxel support and robust physics engine, because those just make the game even better. And it has online or offline co-op! It’s the best idea you’ll play all year!
You’d like to play? Great. I’m going to need to see the cash up front, sixty bucks. Great. Have fun with my idea! What do you mean “how do I play it?” That’s not my department, dude, I just make the idea. What do you mean you don’t like playing it?
A game like a warm hug
When you were young.
My copy of Secret of Mana is long since dead, and this makes me very unhappy, because it means I don’t have a copy of the game right now. I know, I could buy it on the Wii’s virtual console (although I’d prefer it on the 3DS – Nintendo’s strict limitations on where you can buy older games is kind of absurd), but at the moment I can’t always justify the cost. But that’s not the point. I miss the game and I would play through it again right now, despite having dozens of newer games to play that I’ve never even beaten once.
Is this partly because of the ways that players gravitate toward the familiar over the novel? Naturally. But there’s something more to it. Some games just feel welcoming, even if you’ve played them countless times before, even if the game’s plot is anything but warm and welcoming. There are games that just feel like a big warm hug, welcoming you back no matter how long you’ve been away.
Frozen and the art of unlearning
If you don’t like it, I’m not going to convince you otherwise, but I question your decisions.
I was born as a child of winter, in the midst of a blizzard. I feel it down to my bones, feel rime creep in around the corner of my eyes when I close them, feel my skin exult at the biting air that blows in when October starts to die and make way for November. When snow falls, I smile. The cold really never did bother me anyway.
That is not why I feel a connection to Frozen. But it certainly makes the film’s chill landscape feel that much more welcoming. A kingdom of ice and frost looks less like a lonely wasteland and more like a comfortable place to be, if not forever then at least for a time.
But the connection goes deeper than that, and it ties into the fact that both of the main characters in the film have such a profoundly personal journey that you kind of half to check yourself on occasion to remind you that is, at its heart, a film for children. The themes of the movie are a lot deeper than you’d expect, and for me – for a lot of people – this is a story detailing the same journey that adult life has already put us through, but with a great deal more compassion and acceptance than you’d think possible.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 