A Grand Quiet

I hadn’t realised that this was E3 week. It’s strange. I definitely watched it last year, and the year before that. The year before that one all my housemates stayed up together until 4am getting blazed and watching the press conferences. I think one of them had just brought an xbox one and we had this gay couple who were squatting in our living room so there was always money around for weed and video games.

I think that’s the last time I felt properly connected with the scene and I don’t really remember what was announced that year. The one I remember vividly was 2011. That was the year that they had the first Mass Effect 3 trailer, Bioshock 2, Rayman Origins, Skyrim. I would later in the year go to the Eurogamer Expo, meet up with some friends that I had made online, that year in games was pretty much baked into me.

I am currently setting up my workspace for streaming. I’ve the webcam, got a decent microphone, setting up and agreeable lighting situation and am sourcing a second monitor. It’s how you get eyes nowadays. Even when it comes to gaming content the mediation of youtube is being displaced by the allure of the unfiltered immediacy of the now. It seems also, in my naivete, like the more approachable platform. It allows its users the opportunity to find their place within it, a working evolution rather than a purely self reflective one.

Yet I feel more divorced from the dialogue around games than I have ever been. I don’t think I’ve played a new game over the past few years, the interests of the larger organs of the medium don’t appeal to me. And me internal well of patience for the capitalist bullshit that coats the space has run more than dry.

I started watching EA’s press conference yesterday a few minutes in they announced that their upcoming games would not include real money gambling mechanics. People cheered, as if they hadn’t been the ones propagating that shit, keelhauling their most anticipated titles with their reliance on these predatory devices.

Earlier in the week, Valve announced that hate speech deserved a place on their distribution platform. Shortly after doing so they removed the LGBT tag from their site. It becomes hard to hate the worst excesses of Silicon Valley, the bro libertarians and capitalist stooges if you’re ignoring the rot that infests your house.

Maybe it’s that so few outlets are prepared to take a view on them as something positive and joyous. Cool Ghosts is doing its part but they’re only able to get an episode out every few months or so. Not addressing the day to day activity of the industry works well for them, it’s hard to maintain enthusiasm when covering something that by design attempts to destroy everything in it.

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I haven’t written anything since Tuesday. Which is probably fair, I went to the cinema on Monday, had a day’s worth of rehearsal on Thursday and have worked every other say of the week. I shouldn’t hate myself for that. I should be proud maybe that I am working towards other avenues of content creation.

I should stop using twitter.

It only makes me hate myself. I never got into facebook because i could never find it in myself to actually care what the people who surrounded me every day were doing. Now I find myself trapped in the self destructive cycle, only with people who I never see. And I can’t see them at work on an off day, and I can’t bitch about them behind their backs.

One of the people who I follow put up their twitter analytics for the month. Their tweets had got something like 4 million impressions. as far as I’m aware they don’t do anything. they don’t write, they don’t make anything, but if you can tweet 30 things a day to 4000 followers… There you go. The numbers themselves make me scared.

and I can’t help but think that these people got it together. Maybe I’m in the wrong parts of trans girl twitter but they’re all passing and in happy relationships, they’re able to talk openly and reassuringly about their bodies. They’re engaged politically and when they post something like they need people to send the £300 for rent, I can only admire at how confident they are to live life on their own terms.

I despise myself and my body, I work a tedious job that necessitates staying closeted, not that I would come out publicly anyway. The idealistic part of me dreams of a day when it is revealed that all of this pain was worthwhile, that something inside me crystallised as a result of it forming a personal lens through which one can glimpse the world’s transcendence.

I believe that less and less though. The suffering seems pointless and infinite.

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Next week I’ll have a review up of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Esther
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