Would You Like To Continue?
Getting Over Myself (With Or Without Bennett Foddy)
No podcast this week because booking guests during the holiday season is a fool’s errand and I have not yet hit enough of a groove to have a backlog of episodes.
This week I’d like to wrap up my look back on 2021 by focusing on an accomplishment that on the surface feels like a failure. At the start of 2021 I was a gainfully employed worker in the zoom meeting economy with intellectually respectable hobbies that I could grist for charming chit-chat if and when dinner parties became viable again. I end the year unemployed and alone in my apartment, my face lit by the glow of a TV monitor displaying a Playstation 4 menu, confirming in a twist that would appall my 20-something self that I once again am a Video Game Enjoyer. How did we get here? And why do I consider this turn of events an improvement?
If you had asked me as a child the age-old and, at the time, age-appropriate question of what I wanted to be when I grew up I would have told you with little hesitation that I wanted to write stories for video games. What this meant, practically speaking, is that I wanted to work for Squaresoft, the company responsible for games like Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger, games that had lit my pre-teen brain aflame with possibility. I had been enamored with video games ever since my older sister had allowed me to take hold of her original grey Gameboy the size of my torso and plunk away as one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a foggy green and black display screen. I watched in fear and awe as my older cousins dismembered each other in Mortal Kombat at family get togethers. I cheered along the bully from my elementary school as he piloted what seemed like an impossibly real looking spaceship through enemy fire in Star Fox 64. But it wasn’t until I had a Playstation of my own and heard the first strains of Nobuo Uematsu’s “Opening Theme - Bombing Mission” and plunged into the game’s ecoterrorist opening set piece that I yearned to be part of the action behind the action. Whatever group of people were responsible for making me feel this good was clearly the team to join.
The same friends that I played and talked about video games with eventually became the friends that I played and talked about music with. Once I started playing drums, the dream of writing up scenarios for spiky haired anime avatars receded and was replaced by the good ol’ American fantasy of rock stardom. Even knowing how improbable it was that I’d ever break into the music industry as anything other than a bit player, the path from drumming in my parent’s living room to drumming on stages was easier to conceive than going from scribbling fan fiction in notebooks to populating blue gradient text-boxes for a company on the other side of the globe. I still gamed regularly, but slowly the hobby shifted into either being purely a social occasion, where I would fire up Halo 2 or Soul Caliber 2 to compete with friends, or a way to keep my hands busy while listening deeply to music. By the time I started applying for colleges tunnel vision had settled in, I never even considered buying the next generation of game consoles. I only had eyes for new cymbals, microphones, and synthesizers.
Somewhere along the line I started to think of myself distinctly as a person who did not play games, someone who was too good for the entire medium. This was hammered home by two concurrent developments in my life, one internal and one external.
Following a post-graduation period of listlessness I endeavored to, as all young men must, get my shit together. I started working out regularly. I applied for jobs tangentially relevant to my chosen career. I improved my diet slightly. I began to redirect my sense of self away from the media I consumed and started developing a healthier self-esteem that didn’t involve feeling superior to others simply because I knew more about music than them. I started wearing clothes that actually fit me. In short I started growing up and felt good doing so.
A few years into this shit-gathering process, because if we’re being honest the act of getting one’s shit together doesn’t end until all of your shit is neatly organized into a box six feet under, my decision to grow up was validated when a gang of forum dwelling dorks made absolute asses of themselves by harassing women online who dared to develop or comment on video games publicly. There but for the grace of good sense go I, I said to myself at the time. In the horrible visage of Gamergate I saw a dark reflection of what I could have been had I let my worst impulses and beliefs as a resentful teen fester. I took it as a sign to nuke the entire subculture from orbit. “Normies leave!!” the frogmen screamed, and I seeking to be a normie, insofar as having healthy relationships with women and not being a digital cretin means being a normie, heeded their advice.
For years I felt content in this decision. But in truth I was a hypocrite. I could never let go of games entirely. If a friend passed me a controller for a round of Mario Kart I wouldn’t refuse. I kept a wayward eye on the developments of the game industry from a distance, nodding proudly at the rise of independent games, marveling at the resourcefulness of speedrunners, and even reading/watching legitimately insightful critics who covered games that I had never played. Video games gradually became so mainstream in my absence that I couldn’t rely on my reduction of the entire subculture to its worst actors. After all, I was briefly professionally obligated to prove that the equally maligned world of heavy metal was more than just a horde of smelly basement dwellers with troublingly longwinded thoughts on sun wheels. Surely it wasn’t fair of me to paint every game enjoyer with the same irradiated brush.
So what really kept me away from games for so long when it was clear by my search history and social circle that I wanted to return to them? There were a multitude of minor logistical issues - not possessing a TV for a few years or being deliberately uninformed as to which consoles I needed to play the games that struck my fancy - but these were almost entirely self-imposed limitations. Even when admitting to myself that I would gladly play Dark Souls if I had the means to, I simultaneously convinced myself that I was deficient either in skills or time to play a modern game successfully. I was afraid that games had grown too huge and had advanced technologically and stylistically too far for me to keep up with them. My fear of not being good enough for the games I wanted to play turned all of their most attractive qualities into the very reasons why I refused to play them.
This is a particularly unreasonable thing to worry about when it comes to video games. No other medium is as dedicated to onboarding its audience. A death metal album generally won’t gradually warm you up to the idea of growling vocals. A novel like Gravity’s Rainbow only gets easier to read as it goes because it actively front-loads some of its most confusing prose and hides “the fun stuff” deep in the middle of its duration. Games on the other hand “actively teach” you how to play them, gradually introducing their mechanics over time and ramping up their difficultly to match the player’s increasing skill. Even if this were not the case, why fear failure in a game? You can make critical error after critical error with no real world consequences in a video game. Games are playgrounds for failure.
When I finally did return to the world of games this year I decided to start with a game that would hammer this home as frequently as possible. In Getting Over It you attempt, with mechanically imposed clumsiness, to navigate a man stuck in a cauldron up the side of a mountain of trash using only an oversized Yosemite hammer. While you attempt this Sisyphean1 task, the game’s creator Bennett Foddy chimes in with quotes about failure and occasional pieces of advice, but mostly you are left alone to struggle with the game’s unforgiving landscape. Getting Over It has earned a reputation as a deeply frustrating experience, and there are plenty of examples of streamers screaming their heads off at every mistimed hurdle down the side of the slope. While I made no significant progress in the game, I did not find the experience nearly so unpleasant. Your failure is so pervasive, so commonplace, that is quickly becomes mundane, even meditative. I learned to enjoy the progress I did make and when I failed I learned to enjoy the minor improvements in my technique that I gained along the way.
It almost feels hokey to point out all of the resonances that this experience has with life at large. The texture of life is incremental improvement spurned on by repetitive and persistent failure. If I rage-quit at every instance of setback or, even worse, refused to try out of fear of not succeeding immediately then I would never “git gud” enough to do anything at all. If I let the loudest and most noxious voices in the room convince me that it wasn’t worth enjoying the things that actually bring me pleasure than I wouldn’t find pleasure in anything.
So don’t mourn for me, back at the bottom of the hill of a normie career in customer service while the music industry slowly red rings itself to death. I’ll be back up and running again. And in the mean time I’ve learned to let myself enjoy one of my oldest pastimes. It may not be a story worthy of a Square game, but it’s good enough for me. See you in 2022.
Sorry for wearing my own band shirt on stage in text form, but there really isn’t a better way to describe this situation.