“Roaming 'round your house
Wasting your time
No obligation, just
Wasting your time
So why are you alone?
Wasting your time
When you could be with me
Wasting your time
I'm a waste like you
With nothing else to do
May I waste your time too?”
Sassafras Roots by Green Day
I struggle to find the first words to say to you. I feel like I should explain myself. But really, what is there to explain? I play video games, and now I write about them online. I mean, there’s too little representation for anthropomorphized starfish in any case!
Well I can clarify that I guess. Yes, I’m a yellow spinning starfish, the headliner of a now forgotten Nintendo franchise. Do I mean that sentence literally? Clearly not, but it’s spiritually true, and if you gonna pretend to be a character you should be original about it. Besides, it might annoy Nintendo and that’s a fun reward.
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As you can tell from the…minimal web design on display here, I’m out to keep things simple. At the end of the day, this is a blog. It should be words, and the occasional picture for illustrative purposes. Trying to be fancy would take more of my time, and I’m already devoting enough to a hobby project as it is.
This blog, as mentioned before, is about video games. I’m a lifelong gamer. My first serious artistic passion was for video games, formed by hours of play on my Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2. My childhood nostalgia is for Nintendo. It is the art form I have the most knowledge of. If it’s gaming related, we might just talk about it. New games, conferences, technology innovations, speculations on the future of the medium. Gaming is the meld between boundless creativity and advanced engineering, and we are out to find all the ways it is welded and kept together
I’m sure, before I even start, some of you have some false expectation that I’m not going to have my personal view cloud my “analysis” as it were. Let me make something explicitly clear: I am absolutly, without question, no hesitation, 100% biased. I’m not going to do a fence sitting neutrality dance like my name is Ubisoft. This blog will be political, we will discuss politics in games, we will have political and social advocacy in this space.
In that vein, you’ll notice a distinct lack of a comments section. There isn’t one, and I won’t add one either. My opinions are insufferable enough, I don’t need any of yours trashing the place. Go on Reddit if you want a discussion I guess. I’m not opposed to people talking about my writing but I believe I have some responsibility to foster a good space and community. Sadly, people tend to be toxic enough nowadays that I ask to keep this place clean and leave your drama for Twitter.
All of that as it were, I wouldn’t recommend taking anything I say too seriously. I’m a non-serious person. I’m trying to have fun, and I play video games to have fun. We aren’t going to shy away from harsher topic areas. Exactly the opposite. But I think even serious criticism is better with a bit of levity, the salt that perfects a dish as it were.
The best games are ones that advance the frontiers: of their genre, of the hardware they are played on, etc. We’re going on a journey to explore those frontiers, see where the edges are, who and what is traveling through and where they may be going. It’s a bumpy ride ahead, one that will leave us unsure at times of what we’re even heading towards. But I promise it’s absolutely a journey worth taking.