Status Updates From Free to Play: A Video Games...

i like this more and more with each (short) essay and tbh i think people who don't were hoping for something a little easier on the brain. more of a mismatch of expectations. but for me, i like essays and analysis and the blurring of the personal/confessional with the serious. i feel like i'm hearing them speak directly into my mind. so i am having a blast.

"Who wouldn't want a more forgiving world, one where failure was only a chance to learn, and others would keep helping you level up? Not many of us get that in life. Impossible and haunting, perfection wraps around our wrists. Inflates. Pull us away."

"We had shit mind-killing jobs that gave us the time to sneak in daily role-play posts, or illnesses and hostile publics that made staying indoors on a screen far more bearable. It was better bonding than raw reality and the rejections, tiny or soul-crushingly huge, that stopped us from being the free adventurers we wanted to be."

"Our world has more to offer when we are not shackled to the roles we are born to play."

"Games have long evolved past the side-scrolling simplicity of Super Mario Bros, as our technology-mediated self-construction has evolved past the unitary identity. It would be foolish to cliam that video games can instruct us how to live satisfying and meaningful lives in the age of fractured identity, just as it's always folly to claim that, any kind of art should be an authority on life."

"Perspective isn't just a camera trick, it's how we see each other."

"Sometimes, in order to remake the world, it has to be broken first."