The truth is that the fruit of the Spirit of Christ, according to the Apostle Paul, is self-restraint, among other things. There is no supernatural consolation prize for those of us who don’t get to have sex with whoever we want. Prayer, even the most focused and God-centered kind, doesn’t feel the same way. And as much as we like to convince ourselves otherwise, winning a game of Settlers of Catan simply doesn’t feel as good as intercourse.

The Christian ideal, of course, is that waiting until marriage to have sex is supposed to be right, but not fun. It’s supposed to be fulfilling, not exciting or even engaging. Not yet, at least.

Fun is sometimes a monster that dominates my spirit, and convinces me to follow my impulses until I am satisfied or stuck. It finds me starving for entertainment or play, and insists that I can do something about it. So I go days without writing or cleaning the house. Instead I drink, play Bejeweled or watch 10 episodes of Saved by the Bell in a week for no other reason besides the fact that it’s what I feel like doing in the moment.

And when it’s time to get back to work, it’s less like flipping a switch and more like crawling out of quicksand. My life is not always characterized by self-control, as the apostle Paul says it ought to be. Part of the reason is because I don’t often realize I have lacked it until it is too late. I awake from a stupor of dumb TV or jewel-matching and I’m not mad at myself, but I’m like, “Why did I do that?” I’m frustrated.

For Christians, sex is more of a bold line to cross than it is a gradient. But it’s a frustrating line. Its very existence acknowledges what we’re missing out on: a lifetime of carefree and unattached sex, of feeling good – really good – with someone else. It’s a kind of life that so many others have endorsed wholeheartedly and vocally. Shame and risks associated with extramarital sex have been minimized to the point that, for most, the decision is a no-brainer.

I’ve tried, but I can’t really convince myself that virgins have the most fun. And as a divorcee, well, I’m particularly screwed, pardon the pun. I know what sex is like, and I can’t lie about it: it’s fun. It’s probably the most fun anyone can have.

You don’t really even have to be super attached to the person, either. It’s the basic physical act itself that’s such a viscerally satisfying experience. That’s where we get the trope of the angry couple that fights and fights and then suddenly makes out, gets busy on the floor or whatever and comes out the other side relieved and happy. They’ll last another day before they start arguing again, but that doesn’t minimize how good those 30 minutes to an hour were the previous day.

So yes, okay, fine, I admit it. Sex is fun. Way more fun than “not sex.” Way more fun than holding out for marriage.

So it’s weird, then, to forgo that opportunity for fun. It’s hard to convince myself that I don’t want this opportunity for something that feels so, “Oh man, this is it – I am really living now.” It’s an existential apex. It’s a perfect realization of the human ideal.

But I’m aspiring for something besides human ideals, so I have to restrain myself. It’s not just counter-cultural – it’s against my very nature. It’s not natural. I have to hold out for something called “marriage,” because I do not, unlike others, believe it to be a man-made institution, but an institution put in place by God Himself.

I hate this. It is a struggle. It does not feel okay. But, I tell myself every day, it is what I believe.

Weirdly, the more I focus on living out my beliefs consistently, the less I go around chasing fun. For whatever reason, Halo and Bejeweled become less satisfying and Cart Life or Kentucky Route Zero seem transcendent. I find myself indulging my own desires less and allowing things to challenge me, to challenge my patience, and sometimes my spirit swells. Those moments are rare, but they are worth it. They’re not what I’d call “fun,” but they are what I would call “better than fun.”

Those very same youth pastors – the ones who look their youth groups straight in the eye and insist that Christians can have just as much fun as the world – are the same people who then launch into an explanation of some hilarious game they’re going to make all of the youth group play together. Maybe they’re playing “fluffy bunny” and seeing how many marshmallows they can shove in their mouths. Maybe they’re trying to pass oranges to one another’s necks without using their hands. Whatever these youth groups are playing, these games – sexual overtones, forced intimacy and all – rest squarely in the shadow of the sort of intense intimacy and payoff that actual sex offers.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the best thing we in the abstinence-only crowd can do is to ignore the shadow of fun and play entirely and focus more on the foreshadowing of something deeper: the gift of married love, the intimacy it entails and the eternal relationship between Christ and His church that it represents.

It’s about time I admitted this: they are all very fun, but they mean nothing to me. Not right now. Not anymore.

I have nearly a hundred games just sitting on my iPhone. I have them in folders like “favorites” and “classics” and “classics2”. Every month or so, I comb through those folders and delete them. As accessible as they are and as easy as it would be to simply launch and play them for just a minute or two, I never do.

Instead, nearly every night I impulsively launch the Touch Arcade app, searching for the latest new app. I want another quick fix. But gosh, gross, the last thing I want to do is make that same tired “games are like drugs and encourage an addiction to novelty” argument. It’s too easy. It’s too false.

The truth is, I’m not addicted to novelty, but resonance. In every app I download I’m looking for something that will meet some deeply felt need, whether it quell a temporary loneliness or instill a sense of empathy for someone unlike me. It’s not that I’m looking for a new mechanic or a new graphical innovation. I’m looking for a new way for meaning to be made and conveyed.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me; my life is full of meaning. Every Sunday, I go to church and worship with a building full of people I genuinely consider to be family. I leave there every week with a renewed purpose and focus.

Every day or so, I have conversations with people about the things we fear, the crap we hate, the joys that make our lives feel substantial and the things that inspire us. Sometimes I talk to them about games, but not too often.

Why then do I almost always go home and attempt to find solace in the app store? I collapse in my bed, more nights than not, convinced that I don’t have time to read great books or even play more substantial games. Then I spend thirty minutes attempting to beat my Game Center buddy Brendan’s score in Time Surfer. I fail, again and again, and go to sleep. I have nothing to show for it. I suck at coping, sleeping and Time Surfer. Great.

Having nothing to write about isn’t so much a professional crisis for me as it is a personal one. Not having anything to write about means not having anything to say. I don’t know. That just feels wrong. But maybe I could start listening for a while. And maybe that might result in some original thought. At least, that’s what I have been told happens.

But I have been having a really hard time relaxing. I can’t bring myself to simply take in a book. I can’t bring myself to sit still and think, to consider the day that passed. I can’t bring myself to spend significant time merely playing a game, unless I’m committed to review it. Not lately.

For the most part, games in the app store don’t ask me to listen, or invest. They don’t want me to step back and wait. Few of the games that I can purchase for .99 cause me to consider. They indulge me with rewards and feedback loops that encourage me to do little more than to keep striving.

I’m not one of those people who is always desperate to climb a career ladder or move on to another town. Instead, I have very specific personal goals, (some of them bleed into the career sphere) and I have always been laser-focused in attempting to achieve them. Every day is organized around two or three Ultimate Visions and everything I do revolves around my ability and desire to achieve those things. If one goal becomes unattainable, I keep trying for several months before I replace it with another.

Maybe that’s why I’m tricking myself, as I am settling down to sleep every night, into meaningless striving. Maybe striving is just what I do, and rest is merely striving that matters less. Maybe that inadvertent commitment to low-stakes attempts at high scores and virtual success is actually the very thing that keeps me sane.

But right now, wide awake and with my wits about me, I find it hard to convince myself that such a thing is healthy. Instead, it may be merely unavoidable. Whatever it is, I know that it keeps me from physical sleep, the kind of rest that makes a difference the next morning in a concrete way.
I know that it leaves me with little to say. I know that it sometimes leaves me frustrated and agitated.

These smaller, simpler games used to mean something to me, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Now they’re just a reflex – a knee-jerk reaction to a lack of rest. The truth is, I don’t even know what rest is anymore. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced it. I just know it’s a lot harder to achieve that merely clicking the sleep button.

———

Richard Clark is up all night on Twitter @DeadYetLiving.

There are, of course, plenty of exceptions. In fact, I make it a point to spend time with friends as much as possible, at bars, at the movies, at church and at restaurants. When I work and indulge in my own personal hobbies, I’m usually doing so at the expense of camaraderie. The feeling of belonging vanishes, which is why so many of my games writer friends and I cling so tightly to Twitter; it’s the only way to share the experiences of writing, reading and playing games. Those are three things we all do regularly that are, for the most part, solitary.

I’m not unaware of the scores of multiplayer videogames that are out there. In the days of Steam and Xbox Live, online multiplayer is a regularly touted feature of some of the most popular AAA games – yet their multiplayer offerings often get little love. The latest installments of Assassin’s Creed had a truly unique multiplayer offering, but very few bought in for the long term. The Call of Duty franchise splinters its multiplayer base every six months. Asynchronous iPhone multiplayer is convenient for everyone but can also feel detached and meaningless, like taking turns pushing a rock uphill.

There has emerged a pattern of convincing one or two of my friends to buy the multiplayer game of the particular month, insisting that we will play it enough for it to be worth it and then slowly realizing that there’s way too much out there to do and play instead.

We are, we writers, we gamers, we friends who live across the world but together on the Internet, like ships in the night. What we need is a lighthouse.

When the Halo franchise was passed on from Bungie to 343 Industries, it was hard to imagine the point. Why not just create something new, imaginative, and bold to lead us into the next generation? Why labor under the already tired and overwrought story of Master Chief and like, the universe and stuff?

The reason is because Halo is that lighthouse. It’s the one multiplayer game that everyone seems to play – even those who hate Halo. I count myself as one of those people. I bought Halo 3 because everyone else had it, but the game itself didn’t intrigue me.  Still, I carried on for the sake of a few souls out there who lived far away from me and owned the game. I wanted to spend time with them and, slowly, I learned to love the game, not because of its mechanics but because of its characters.

The characters are your friends. It’s like Cheers, where everybody knows your gamertag, except that the beer is optional.  Your regular Halo-group is like an extended family, a solid network of established relationships that suddenly found a reason to convene under one “roof”. Sometimes extended family drops in: the crazy racist uncle who everyone’s embarrassed by, or the cousin who rarely shows up except for when he’s bored. We tolerate those. Sometimes we kick them out and talk about them behind their backs.

The people I’ve known from social networks and web sites for years are the ones for whom I play this game now. It’s a crew of about seven or eight who started calling themselves “HaloSibs” (morphed to be more gender inclusive than HaloBros) and started organizing regular games of Halo 4. The games are constant, regular, and within reach of a number of acquaintances. Those three traits meant that finally there was an opportunity to band together again.

When we are so enamored by the different ways games are evolving and the many ways games can impact the player through a single-player experience, it’s easy to forget just how dynamic, engaging and life-altering a solid multiplayer experience can be, even over the Internet. It’s not that it changes your life in a holistic sense, but in a gradual sense, having my HaloSibs to go back to makes me feel better about that inherent loneliness that comes with being a person who regularly plays videogames and writes about them.

It’s about expectation: picking up a game controller in the living room of an empty one-bedroom apartment and ending up having a night of genuine camaraderie and group-oriented play. Look, I’m not naïve. I know that it wasn’t that meaningful; but it paves the way to something that is. And in the moment, it’s a heck of a lot better than playing alone, with a forgotten drink on the coffee table, determined to beat the next level of some single-player game, for whatever reason I’ve convinced myself it matters.

———

Richard Clark wonders daily on Twitter @DeadYetLiving what Master Chief would look like with a cardigan over his armor. In case he gets chilly, you know?

It’s not the first time I’ve cared deeply for digital imposters, either. I remember playing Half Life 2, desperately wanting to save Alyx Vance, not because it was my arbitrary mission, but because over the course of hours and hours of gameplay I had spent with her I had protected her, she’d protected me and, well, she seemed to kind of like me. If there was ever a videogame character I’d had a crush on, it was Alyx Vance, which is probably why her dad intimidated me so much, even when he seemed like such an unassuming and nice fellow.  After a while he overcame that intimidation by his dogged and obsessive care for my well-being, and I started to like him too. I thought about how much fun it was to hang out with these two.

This is all very stupid. These are fake people. They’re dreamed up in order to fit discreetly into our escapist fantasies, which may be part of the point. But both The Walking Dead and Half Life 2 are more than escapism: they’re resonant statements (or questions) about the lives we lead. They call to mind real-world circumstances and possibilities.

Once we understand them fully, we see that these games are not escapism, and their characters aren’t mere exercises in wish-fulfillment. They’re well-crafted people whom we’ve had a significant amount of time to get to know. And that sensation isn’t limited to the medium of videogames.

Books give us the same prolonged experience with and insight into a protagonist, offering up their thoughts like openly. The reader spends hours delving into their psyche and relating to their trauma, their struggles, and their victories. It’s no wonder we found ourselves pining after Harry Potter in between books or moving on as quickly as possible to the next installment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

We miss Harry. We miss Arthur Dent. And we miss their friends, just as they would.

Films are slightly less trying in this way. Two hours is enough time to root for someone, but barely enough time to truly feel a personal connection. We walk out of the theater happy about the abstract concept of redemption, but we could care less that it was them who found it.

Television is a real breakthrough in terms of viewer-character relations. Episodic dramas and character-driven sitcoms give the viewer something slightly deeper than checking in on their best friend’s life every week. We’re not hearing this stuff second hand – we’re observing it as it happens. By the end of every episode, we understand what it is that our characters feel is most important in their lives, we understand the stakes, and we understand what our characters hopes and dreams for next week might be. In other words, we know them. And, again, we care. Which is weird.

But when we play a videogame and are given the chance to interact with three-dimensional characters, they sound like actual people and they seem to have all the qualities of a person, with a soul (aside from visually looking a little strange). They may move somewhat robotically and their face may animate in weird ways, but we still see them as living and long for them to be all right.

This is because we spend a lot of time with them, not just watching but participating. In the more ground-breaking games, we participate in their mundane moments. When the action lulls and there’s nothing left to do but talk, we have an opportunity to get a more full idea of who they are.

But still, it’s creepy right? If anything, it inspires me to do more to experience similar moments with my real-life counter-parts. I want to participate with them in the mundane moments, and I want to be as active and thoughtful in those moments as I am when I interact with The Walking Dead’s Clementine. There may not be zombie apocalypse level stakes, but reality is on the line.

Get to know Richard Clark on Twitter @deadyetliving.

Forgive me for abandoning you. I have no real excuse, but I can explain.

In the early days of iPhone games, I was convinced I could never love one like you. You required a kind of finesse that I had no desire to give. I wanted buttons – you required touch. I played Angry Birds in those days, because I needed something to pass the time. But my heart was not truly given to Angry Birds.

In those days my heart belonged to my consoles. I was in awe of Red Dead Redemption – I’ll never forget the way that game challenged my cynical assumptions with one moment while crossing over to Mexico, watching the sun set and listening to an acoustic ballad so melancholy. I knew in that moment that this was a game I would never forget. I played Burnout Paradise for a year straight, and spent my time playing online with nice people whom I didn’t know. I marveled over BioShock and wept when I finished BioShock 2.

Games like those got me excited about videogames again. I started writing about games after discovering resonant experiences like Portal, Braid and Left 4 Dead. I played them a lot, but I thought about them more. The feeling I got from those games stays with me, even today.

But I got busy, and ran out of time to really enjoy games like those as often as I would like. Still, I was infatuated with the medium, so I sought out alternatives. In the early days of the iPhone, we all found hope in games like Canabalt and Spider. They both resonate with me still today.

Canabalt put us in the mindset of that faceless hero desperately attempting to escape from an apocalyptic reign of robotic creatures. The immediate environmental concerns dominate the moment as we jump across skyscrapers and billboards; the robots themselves never show up. Canabalt captures a moment in time and sears it into our brain. Facing down those giant robots is a challenge for another time. Canabalt is about the bare minimum of that moment of survival: to avoid falling to your death or being crushed by uncaring and inanimate debris.

Spider perfected storytelling on the iPhone. It left the pacing, method and degree of discovery entirely up to the player and his current availability. The player crawls around an abandoned mansion, stumbling upon a tale of genuine heartbreak and tragedy. The game emphasized the transient nature of these life-changing events by emphasizing with the gameplay the spider’s ultimate lack of concern for trophies, wedding rings, leftover alcoholic drinks. They are mere stepping stones.

I still revisit these games today. They linger in my mind like great works of art. They may be simple on their face, but they contain a kind of timeless embedded meaning: Canabalt, with its sense of momentary intense stress, serves as a reminder to focus on the here and now; Spider with its reminder of the brutal meaninglessness of our worldly legacy.

But most importantly, those were the early days, when great iPhone games were few and far between. I’m sorry to say that as time went on, it became harder to devote my time to those of you that demanded it. Every Wednesday night, I’d wait breathless to see what game would capture my attention. I wondered when the next Canabalt or Spider might arrive, and by midnight I would be sure I had found it. I fell in love with so many games over the past couple of years.

Rat on a Skateboard showed me what pure, unadulterated and goofy joy could look like on a mobile-gaming device. I felt young again.

I found delight in the singular, serious silliness of Jeff Minter’s Llamasoft series of games, and rediscovered the value of fighting my friends for leaderboard dominance. I wanted those games to like me back.

I found refuge in the slow, methodical pace of the strange, surreal Sir Benfro’s Brilliant Balloon. I was sure that game knew something I didn’t, and I wanted to know what it was.

I literally freaked out for an entire weekend because of the minimalist gameplay of Cubes. It made me feel obsessed in a way no other iPhone game had in quite a while. I wanted to proclaim my love for it from the hills. I settled for Twitter.

I felt feelings toward a robot when I played Go Robo! It made me want to say, “Go Robo!”

The minimal aesthetic of Love Me Not that seemed not to care if I liked it or not; the clever, measured word-play of Lumicon that won me over with its wittiness.

My love-hate relationship with Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes went down in flames.

Today I can feel myself slowly growing distant from Happy Street, partially because Puzzle Craft seems to be the more interesting world-building game. It’s less domineering and hand-holding. Puzzle Craft respects me as my own person.

Can you see my problem? I love each of you from the bottom of my heart, but you deserve better. I can only truly devote myself to you for one week, at the most. By then I’ve found something new, if not better. I keep you all around on my iPhone, in folders called “Favorites” and “Classic” and “Classic 2,” but when I revisit these folders, all I can do is go back to my first loves.

I often dwell on Spider. I often go back to Canabalt. I think of Red Dead Redemption and that moment with the music and the sunset. I think of BioShock’s sucker-punch twist that pointed its finger at me as a player. I remember Braid’s accusing story of heartbreak. These games represented eras in my life – not weeks.

In the days of consoles, I would buy a game for $15-$50 and play it for months. It felt like an investment. Now, I buy you just to try you out. I pay a dollar while you’re on sale. I dedicate five minutes to you and move on to the next. I come back to you the next day, and play for one minute. I feel confident that I’ve gotten enough out of you. I don’t toss you out, but I neglect you.

It’s not that I don’t love you. I proclaim my love for you to my followers and friends every week. But then – and I am so sorry for this – I forget about you. I leave you on the fourth page of my iPhone.

Maybe one day the steady stream of beautiful games will slow, and I will be able to devote myself to some of you. Maybe one day I will learn restraint and patience and will cease to be overcome with a love for novelty.

That day is not today. I already have a date with a beautiful game called Super Hexagon. I loved you dearly, Swift Stitch, but it’s time to move on.

———

Richard Clark is always falling in love at the drop of a hat on Twitter @DeadYetLiving.

In some ways, this is a comfort to me. I have always loved writing because I consider it to be the most beneficial way to seek and share truth, whatever it may be. Since I started actively writing and editing years ago, I believe I’ve become a better, more well-rounded writer. And yet, what still plagues me is the days of agonizing that come with any 500+ word piece. I’m terrified that I will write something untrue, hard to relate to or boring. I type sentence after sentence, deleting each one, starting over every time until I finally get a paragraph down. I delete that paragraph and try again. Five nights of this go by until it’s 2 a.m. the night the article is due. I hammer something out that’s magically decent and start the cycle again. I will have you know, this is a writer’s hell.

Writing about games is particularly difficult, because the games writing community is both close-knit and extremely opinionated. It’s not just that every writer has their own particular perspective and opinion about what makes a game good, bad or not a game at all – they have their own thoughts about games writing itself. So often, those opinions clash.

This is a largely beneficial exercise, as games writing must mature as fast as the medium of videogames itself. Still, it results in a lot of hand-wringing, especially as a general consensus starts to unveil itself that feels, to me, as if it’s kicking down my own door, threatening to come inside and tear down everything I’ve built up as a writer over the last few years.

This is the kind of thing I imagine and react to internally (and one unfortunate time, externally – in the form of a slightly misguided Twitter rant) as I read various iron-sharpening sentiments often meant to build up other writers. Take, for instance, Cameron Kunzelman’s insistence that:

We need fewer [Tom] Bissell imitators. Ninety-nine percent of the readers of this blog know exactly what I’m talking about – cloying attempts at being smart, shallow readings of games to find some meaning that “speaks to us all,” and assertions that, yes, Final Fantasy VII actually is the best game of all time.

The way we get out of this pit is rigor. We have to play games and actually pay attention to how they are structured. We need to understand how they are assembled.

Oh, and then there’s this deceitfully cordial pondering from Kill Screen’s former editor, Ryan Kuo:

Perhaps the issue is that wishful thinking, such as the notion that one is important or magical or smart or even interesting, or maybe Batman, still pulls a lot of weight in making videogame systems appealing to play with. These fantasies are as thin as the skintight costumes of Silver Age superheroes. The mouse click in Diablo III transforms you into a cool demon slayer, but also a vegetable with arms. The nature of videogames is that we are not currently able to decide which one matters more. 

Finally, there’s this punch in the nuts from Michael Thomsen:

It is a particular sickness of writers to want to make sense of everything. Writing about a game requires a logical and linear sequence of ideas to be connected. Criticism says that works are important, but that one’s interpretative understanding of a work is even more important—even in praise it is a defeat at the hands of the audience. Videogames agitate this phenomenon to an unusual degree because of the discrepancy between their functioning as systems and their signification as art, which critics like me hasten to interpret with stern attention. 

None of these necessitate the reaction I had to them: utter rage, followed by despair and frustration at myself. After all, I had proposed and started writing a column called “Navel Gaming,” where I inject my own experience and perspective into a game experience, not to mention my other weekly column about mobile games, wherein I do things like draw a direct analogy between the bird in Tiny Wings to myself and my own failures. If these guys were right, I was very very wrong. Right?

———

Throughout my misguided academic career, I have acquired two theology degrees: one bachelor and one master. In both programs I had to take classes on hermeneutics, which is the art and science of interpreting a text. In this case, the text in question was The Bible, considered by the institution and myself to be the infallible word of God. Needless to say, we were taught to interpret with as little subjectivity as possible, to consider the author’s background, the context of the audience, the context of the rest of the canon of scripture. We were taught, most importantly, the difference between exegesis, which was the approved method of interpretation, and eisegesis, which was forbidden.

In exegesis, which means to “lead out of,” the reader diligently examines every aspect of a text in order to discern the actual intended meaning. The reader then applies the actual meaning of that text to his or her own personal life, whether it is instruction, a type of life philosophy, or some kind of biblical warning. Eisegesis, on the other hand, means to “lead into” and refers to the reckless appropriation of a biblical text to one’s own assumptions and whims.

Practiced readers will recognize this as a helpful distinction for reading any text; it is better to get something out of a text than it is to read something into a text, particularly when that text is meant to be an infallible guide to life, the universe and everything. Even when a text is mere entertainment or art that implies a subjective response on the part of the consumer (and videogames certainly fall into this category), simply reading into that artifact whatever meaning I like is self-serving. Much like doing a crossword puzzle, it may be personally stimulating, but it is little more than a type of intellectual play.

———

When we play a videogame, we’re playing already, aren’t we? The writer doesn’t need to spend time toying with different arbitrary meanings, because the game itself involves every player, writer or not, in intellectual and emotional interplay. When a writer feels the need to draw strained analogies and forced metaphors from a videogame, he is providing a redundant service for the reader who has already done that work and who is, in reading the piece, essentially watching the game being played in front of him rather than playing it himself. That reader is either bored or lazy.

Personally-skewed games writing doesn’t have to be that way. Paramount to writing any kind of good personal essay is the necessity of absolute honesty on the part of the writer. The reader needs to be able to trust the writer, or else the piece becomes a deceptive and useless hypothetical. The ironic nature of the personal essay is that through the sharing of a subjective experience, the reader stumbles across some form of objective truth. This may not happen if the writer is lying or stretching the truth, and it will not happen if the reader discovers or senses the lie.

The key danger in writing personal essays about videogames is that the writer might read into a game in order to have something to write about. This is not bad writing – it is a lie. Unlike lies we may read in news and journalistic pieces, these are lies that the writer themselves may believe. It is an insidious danger and it’s worth agonizing over on the part of the writer.

As I started writing more frequent and consistent personal pieces over the last month or so, I felt this danger becoming more and more prominent, and eventually found myself face-to-face with the inevitability of the thing. One week, maybe sooner, maybe later, I will find myself with no real sense of how the games I’ve recently played have directly impacted my life. I will do what I have to do to make it happen or I will conjure up some imaginary impact a game has had on my relationships. I will compare a game to my struggle with busy-ness or loneliness, and the comparison will not exactly be apt.

I have taken to asking my girlfriend what she thinks of my articles after she reads them. Sometimes she volunteers constructive criticism or tells me specific reasons she likes them. Lately, as I have started thinking through the pros and cons of personal games criticism, I have started asking her: “Does it seem like a stretch?” Usually, she answers, “No, not really.”

About a week ago, I asked her the same question about that piece wherein I compared Tiny Wings to my struggles with personal failure. She hesitated. “Well…”

I still say Tiny Wings is actually about graceful failure (even its designer speaks of a “tiny metaphor hidden within the game”), and I insist that the game served as a subtle and consistent encouragement to me in the midst of my own. But one crucial rule of writing is that if the reader doesn’t buy it, it’s not going to be effective. To not convey a sense of truthfulness in my writing: that is failure.

———

The jury is still out on the “proper” way to write about games and I think this is the way it’s supposed to be – there is no agreed-upon method for movie or music criticism. As games writing matures, it will become broader, more varied and more confident.

I believe strongly that personal games writing is an essential style for a medium that relies so heavily on subjective personal experience. When even the most linear game experience can vary so dramatically from player to player, it only makes sense to indulge in a little bit of self-centered subjectivism in order to convey a broader truth about how the game works, whether it works, and yes, what it might mean.

That question of meaning in games is one that has yet to be explored enough to be fully answered, despite the naysayers who may balk at the attempts. Games mean things to themselves, to our industry, to our culture and, yes, to individuals. Each of these meanings matter in their own way and the effect a game has on a specific person is particularly important, because it often sheds light not just on the potential of games, but on the ways in which we “play” with difficult and complex issues in our own life.

Games are a safe space to explore all sorts of things: faith, friendship, death, loss, loneliness and ambition are all themes we benefit from being able to experiment and play with. Games also have a host of inadvertent effects on the player, beyond simply distracting them from their real life. Games can dominate our headspace, they can haunt our dreams and they can make us feel loved or hated. They can make us feel, when nothing else will.

The personal interactions we have with games are profound and meaningful enough that writing about them is not just an interesting exercise, but also a way of conveying truth about the world and human nature, whether intentional or not.

Like a mosaic, though, we can’t see the entire picture by simply looking at one tile. It takes all kinds of subjective experiences to illuminate a broader truth, which is why I think the best thing that could happen to this genre of games writing is for people like me to indulge in it a little bit less and other people to try it out a little bit more. At the end of his aforementioned provocation, Cameron Kunzelman writes that he’s “just tired of reading article after article about how Final Fantasy makes straight white men feel.” And I agree with him. As a straight white man myself, my desire is to read more from a broad spectrum of thoughtful writers. I want to see the whole mosaic.

What game writing needs isn’t less personal writing, but more voices, more brutal honesty and more grappling with diverging viewpoints and perspectives. More than anything, we need a community of writers who are open to second-guessing themselves, in their writing and otherwise.

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Richard Clark tweets stuff like this all day, every day on @DeadYetLiving.

For me, the most influential television show during my pre-teen years was Saved by the Bell. I watched it after school – usually two to three reruns a day. As a young kid with no real faith or philosophical direction to speak of, I took the show and its approach to life deathly seriously. Saved by the Bell didn’t discourage this treatment, either. Though it was transparently absurd to anyone over the age of 13, those awkward kids who were just beginning to think deeply and obsessively about relationships and themselves took its lessons at face value. The show dealt head-on (kind of) with issues like drug abuse, distant parents, divorce, drunk driving and other hot topics that gave kids a sense that they finally understood what all the fuss was about.

For many, myself included, Saved by the Bell was the first introduction to incredibly complex and sober social issues. And 18 minutes after introducing those issues, they solve them. The show doesn’t blink in the face of any of them – even the multi-generational effects of slavery are solved in a single episode (Lisa (whose ancestors were slaves) allows Jesse (whose white ancestors were slave-traders) to take her on a mall shopping spree and all is forgiven). All of these socially conscious vignettes are deeply serious but are also weirdly crammed into the context of a high-school sitcom fantasy world. As a result, they are unavoidably simplistic and misleading.

Still, the singular focus of Saved by the Bell was on something that was a deeply felt need of preteens everywhere: what it meant to be cool. Over every other value, cool was esteemed and offered free rein over the world of Bayside High. Zack Morris, the literal epitome of “cool,” managed to remain at the top of the Bayside food chain for his entire academic career. He dated the hot girl, he got away with everything short of murder, and he did this with little to no real effort. His hijinks were far from ingenious, and involved such blunt force instruments as sabotage, dressing as women and bald-face lies. Oh, and the clever use of a giant mobile phone.

Zack served not only as the central protagonist in the series, but also as the primary communicator with the audience. He had a habit of breaking the fourth wall, explaining the insane inner workings of the high school to the audience. And, while all of the other characters maintain a cartoonish and unthinking stereotype, Zack exhibits his ability to indulge in shallow self-awareness. Essentially, Zack seems keenly aware of the startling fact of his existence: he lives in his own television show.

It is, after all, the only explanation for his overblown ego and flippant attitude toward the feelings of real human beings. Other than this, Zack plays his part dutifully, exhibiting a shallow repentance and deep insecurity whenever his hare-brained and self-aggrandizing plans go off the rails. Zack knows that these characters must ultimately accept him back into their good graces – otherwise the show won’t work. Still, his constant need for reassurance from what may be most shallow characters in existence demonstrates that Zack suffers from a deep, existential loneliness. Zack understands his role perfectly: the only human being in a world of cardboard cutouts, separated from mankind by a one-way mirror. He is starved for relationships with those who watch him. He communicates with them as if they are his best friends, but he can only find reciprocation within his carelessly crafted world. There, the girls worship him, nerds fear him and jocks revere him, but Zack can never be truly fulfilled. Zack is stuck in a white male escapist fantasy hell.

This speculation is not merely a thought-exercise. It has an immediate effect on the viewer, who feels an innate trust in Zack and, as mentioned before, tends to take the show seriously in its demonstration of everyday high school life. Young viewers see Zack’s sincerity with them as a show of solidarity and truth, and they devote themselves to careful study not only of Zack’s techniques, but his ethos.

Of course, in writing “they” I am referring to myself, as well as the vague hope that this also includes someone else out there in the world. (Please God, let it be true.) In middle school I applied my Zackist worldview with fervor, expressing my attraction to girls with a misguided and inconsistent self-confidence, walking around with my thumbs in my belt loops, lying to get my way and laughing at those I dubbed uncool. The fortunate truth is that I couldn’t pull it off: very few girls took me seriously, my belt loops sagged and the “uncool” were actually quite cool. The joke was entirely on me. I was the nerd, desperate enough for acceptance that I would attempt to imitate a television personality. I was the one who wore my heart on my sleeve and made my affection for girls just a little too visible. I was the one who wore trapper-keeper designs on my shirts. In my school, that didn’t make me Zack Morris. It made me Screech. And in reality, being Screech meant more than being patronized and mocked – it meant being stuck with the emotional and psychological repercussions of those things, something Screech never seemed to struggle with.

Zack did his audience a disservice: he allowed us to believe we were one of him, when in actuality it was he who so desperately wanted to be one of us. He let us in on the inner workings of a fantasy world and lent it all the gravity of a Sorkinesque presidential drama. In the last episode of the series, “School Song,” Zack finds himself worried about his legacy. Though the show spins this as concern about what later Bayside High students will think of him, it’s clear that at this point Zack is concerned about the increasingly critical eye of his audience. He tells Screech, “You know, no one wants to be remembered as the school’s biggest goof-off. What I need to do is clear my name.”

Screech is, at least, honest: “The only way you could clear your name is to change it.” He’s right – Zack’s attempt to clear his own name involved brutally sabotaging his friends’ songwriting attempts so that his own would win a best school song contest and be sung for generations following. His friends discover this and embarrass him with an even more high-stakes moment of sabotage that results in public humiliation. Zack, with no other choice but to play along one last time, provides the show with a heartwarming moment in which the cast sings about their friendship. It is utterly unconvincing, and Zack goes down in history as the school’s biggest goof-off… at best.

But he never forgot Screech’s blunt advice. In his surreal appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Zack explains: “After school I became an actor. I had to change my name to Mark Paul Gosseler because there was already a Zack Morris in SAG.” But Zack is saving face – he had to change his name because, well… he had ruined his own. Just one more lie; and this time he deceived not Kelly or Slater or Screech, but his dear beloved audience.

But who are we kidding? Zack Morris has been lying to us all along.

And, if I’m being honest, that was the one exhibit in the Smithsonian that I was most excited about. It was something I’d wanted to go to since I heard about its existence a year ago—at the time, I assumed I’d never have the chance to make it to D.C. to see the thing. Now, here I was, and there it was. I wanted to dash up the stairs and speed-walk to the exhibit like a little kid. But I held myself back. Here in the Smithsonian, I felt a need to be a renaissance man. So I took some time browsing through the Renaissance paintings first. Then I went upstairs.

When you walk up to the third floor of the American Art Museum, you are greeted with a sign that points you directly to the videogame exhibit. I saw kids run past me at full speed and became even more self-conscious. I told myself that The Art of Videogames was just one exhibit among many—after all, there were so many more transcendent and resonant experiences to be had in the rooms on either side of me. I forced myself to stop and slowly browse through either one of them. I’d be damned if I was going to look like one of those stupid kids.

So I studied a giant structure made out of wire that vaguely resembled a skyscraper. I sat and observed a 15-minute light-show that was cast over a painted installation in a dark room. I thought about what it might mean. I wandered into a room full of abstract paintings, and I considered what I might glean from them were I to have an entire hour to simply stare at them. I thought about all the time I could spend in that museum and museums like it if I only made it a priority. (But I didn’t. I had better things to do.)

I meandered toward the videogame exhibit, and cringed. Projected on the wall was a cyclical video, displaying pixels and spaceships and polygons, chiptunes blaring and distorted explosion sounds emanating from the speakers. The name of the exhibit flashed in a standard retro-game font. This was not an exhibit about defying expectations. These were the videogames we all know and love. These are not images most people would deem as “artistic.”

I turn the corner and kids are everywhere. Great.

The entire exhibit is framed by the words of game developers and critics, with quotes adorning the walls, insisting that “Video games foster the mindset that allows creativity to grow” (Nolan Bushnell) and “Games have so much freedom. You can go anywhere you want” (Jenova Chen). These quotes are convincing in such a setting, coupled with the unavoidable progress of the medium demonstrated in chronologically arranged displays. These displays contain both hardware artifacts and games on display, with commentary explaining the groundbreaking and artistic nature of even the most purely entertainment-focused pieces.

After browsing a museum full of purposefully unpleasant and bewildering paintings and sculptures, these games seemed somehow unworthy of the Smithsonian treatment, like finding popsicles in a classy restaurant. Meanwhile, sandwiched between the two places wherein the exhibit makes the case for games as art, there are five games available to be played by whoever is willing to stand in line.

Again, mostly kids.

The first game is Pac-Man. A long line forms, and older parents explain to their children how to play. One tweenager says “the controls are actually kind of sluggish.” The young critic does his best to provide insight without any real context, and the kids around him nod in agreement. The parents seem despondent. I roll my eyes.

Next, kids stand patiently in line to play the original Super Mario Bros., a game that is best played at home with all the time in the world. This version is on a timer, and resets after just a couple of minutes of play. It’s safe to say that none of these kids will experience the joy of finding a warp pipe. To their eyes, the game seems substandard.

No one is playing The Secret of Monkey Island. A woman in her twenties plays Flower. There is no audience. A young child attempts to play Myst, but he and his mother seem utterly bewildered by the seemingly random – no, actually random – gauges and switches.

It is, to be honest, an underwhelming exhibit in terms of artistic splendor, but the execution is nearly perfect. Screen shots of 80 different games are displayed in high-resolution, backlit and splendid looking. Even the 1980s primitive platformer Pitfall seems genuinely intriguing in this setting – each pixel seems deliberately placed.

That’s the really striking thing about videogames: as much as they seem silly or trivial, a closer look and deeper thought reveals something else. These games we played when we were kids, the ones that seemed like sugary sweet entertainment, are actually incredibly rich and dense works of art on several levels. Images from those older games remain embedded in our minds as we grow old and have children who will never appreciate those games in the same way.

We didn’t realize it until later, but those archaic and trivial games meant something to us. In this exhibit, we learn that we’re not alone. They meant something to the creators too. In the shadow of artistic endeavors from all over the world and from throughout history, videogames don’t seem trivial as much as they seem like a brand new world, whose key quality is a low bar for accessibility. If videogames are for kids, it’s not because they’re trivial, but because they’re accessible.

It’s not art for the highbrow, but it’s not art for the rest of us either. It’s art for us all.

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Read all of Richard Clark’s artful tweets @DeadYetLiving.

Then came Words with Friends, a smartly inevitable idea that made Scrabble something we could play with whomever we wanted – kind of like chess by mail, except that it was instantly delivered, took a minimal amount of effort to participate in – and wasn’t chess.

I never liked Scrabble. Sitting across from my equally intelligent opponent was too much pressure and, because I could always spend more time to come up with a better word, there was never enough time to do my best. Every single turn, I had to settle for less than my best play, simply because the person across from me was growing impatient.

Words with Friends gave me the ability to spend as much time as I wanted agonizing over different letter combinations, even trying them out to see if some random string of letters might somehow be a winning word. In the meantime, my friend assumes I must be busy. Little do they know, I’m spending hours trying to come up with the perfect word from my seven random letters.

The only problem is that Words with Friends appeals just as much to a significant number of my actual friends, and the number of games I started to have going on at once was overwhelming. I was, once again, unable to spend any length of time I wanted thinking through every possible solution. Soon it became evident that many Words with Friends players were cheating. My paranoia got the best of me, and I was convinced I was the only unstained Words with Friends player left.

I quit in disgust, leaving the rest of you to your own devices. I hope you had fun.

But the asynchronous revolution was just getting started. Next was Carcassonne, a popular board game that was smartly ported to be an asynchronous iPhone game. It was extremely well executed and, more importantly, allowed for more than two players to play at once, providing a buffer between the moment you take your turn and the moment you are notified that the next person has taken their turn (and is now impatiently waiting for you to take yet another turn).

If I’m honest, that’s the moment that most epitomizes the asynchronous multiplayer game for me. Once the trend went beyond the dedicated gaming console and applied to a device that I use every day for all sorts of things and have with me all the time, it became a constant demand on my time and attention. I would take my turn, feel accomplished for 10 minutes and then hear that sickening notification sound yet again. And I knew: I was going to have to just ignore it.

I have an active imagination when it comes to what other people might be feeling about things. I spent every spare minute ignoring these notifications, but unable to ignore my imagined friends, sitting in their dark room with their arms crossed, watching the clock and waiting for their phone to notify them of my turn. Sometimes those friends would reinforce my worries, asking me when I was going to take my turn through a Twitter @reply (a kind of unfortunate public shame that it takes days to cleanse oneself of), a Facebook message or in person.

That problem was curbed just a bit with Carcassonne allowing more than one other player. Now I could blame the delay on someone else. Unless, of course, both players now felt frustrated at me at the same time. And, yes, that is what I imagined. And that is what often happened.

Because, look, let’s be honest: I don’t ride the subway, I don’t do a lot of loitering or waiting in lines and I have a lot of other games and reading material on my iPhone. It’s all I can do to keep up with Twitter. When I go to my iPhone, it’s almost always with a specific purpose: to play a specific game, to catch up on Twitter, to do some bite-sized reading. More and more I’m just learning to ignore that notification for a while, even when I find myself unable to ignore the visions in my head of my friends gnashing their teeth in the asynchronous darkness.

Still, I find myself instantly buying almost any game with decent asynchronous capabilities, and begging my friends to invite me to a game. Not because I am addicted to games, but because I am addicted to connection. If I read some Twitter buddies or Facebook friends discussing their asynchronous victories and defeats, it’s impossible to suppress the need to fit in. All I really want is to be one of you.

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Follow Richard Clark on Twitter @DeadYetLiving while you wait for him to make his next move.

“Is that a bad choice?” asked Jeff, who had volunteered to go first in our group of four. None of us had really done this before, so we were open to advice.

“You want something popular and timeless; something you sang with your parents growing up. If you choose something newer, you’ll get this table of young people over here, but you’ll lose the rest of the older people in the bar. You need to know the lyrics. You don’t want to be glued to the monitor.” What began as a lark became an ordeal. Jeff and I took a step back and started thinking really, really hard about our choices.

After poring over a list of thousands of songs, I asked the gatekeeper if Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” was a good choice. “Sure, that’s a good enough choice. I think enough of these people will know it.” It was settled, and as far as song choices go, it was kind of perfect for me. When you pick a song for karaoke, it’s sort of like picking an avatar: it’s a reflection of who you are and what you stand for. And, uhm, who you look like; in my case, “just like Buddy Holly.”

Here are some things I have done in the past to prepare for this moment: I sang and played bass in a band during my high school years, did frequent solos in high school choir, played Rock Band several times with friends. Yet, walking up to do karaoke in front of a bar full of spectators, I realized that I was not remotely prepared.

Karaoke is played out in TV shows and movies as some haphazard whim, as if all that is necessary is to simply walk up to the mic and let yourself go. This is not how it worked for me. I knew “Buddy Holly” like the back of my hand, but there’s one area in which I wasn’t as prepared: stage presence. In my high school band, playing the bass WAS my stage presence. In choir, I was expected to stand perfectly still, hands by my side or behind my back. Here, I found myself rocking back and forth like some kind of inconsolable psychiatric lost cause, holding the microphone with both hands as if it was trying to escape. I hit every note, sang every lyric, but the internal monologue in my head raged on and I inflicted on myself a sort of bizarre self-consciousness I hadn’t experienced in month. I understood perfectly that I was supposed to be doing things up there – something fun, surprising, exciting. But I had nothing to do. I could come up with no gesture or movement that I wasn’t afraid would make me look utterly stupid. I froze – and apparently, when I’m singing, freezing transitions seamlessly into aimless rocking.

I don’t mean “Rocking!” I mean rocking: back and forth, back and forth from one foot to another, like a rock-star Weeble. The whole song.

Still, it was pretty darn satisfying to have the table of younger folks in the front cheering me on and singing along with the chorus like it was the greatest thing they’d ever seen. That’s the amazing thing about karaoke: expectations are lowered significantly and the audience is easy to please. All they ask is that you sing a song they like and try not to ruin it. When I was done, a number of people I didn’t know complimented me. No one mentioned the rocking. I’m not going to lie: it was nice.

But what most of my friends do instead these days is play Rock Band in our living rooms. More often than not, none of us sing. When we do sing, the time leading up to the song flies by in a few seconds, time spent merely choosing a song we kind of know and getting on with it. There is no agonizing over what will please an audience or whether we know the song. After all, Rock Band is all about diligently keeping your eyes glued to the screen and the only audience present is generally obsessed with playing their own part.

That is the worst part of playing Rock Band – that moment you realize that even though you might be playing the game with several of your friends, you’re not nearly as interested in each other as you are in getting your own part right. The guitar player pulls off an amazing solo, and waits for acknowledgement of his achievement, only to notice the drummer banging away and the singer trying to nail the cowbell. The singer finishes singing the song perfectly, but the drummer and the guitar player are too excited about their high percentage to care. At the end of the song, you all compare scores and move on.

This is what it’s like to be a part of a videogame band. You do what you do well for no other reason than personal achievement, a high score. You forget about one another until a distinctly visible failure surfaces: the audience boos loudly, the song falls apart, and all eyes turn to the weakest link. You assume success and acknowledge only the worst.

But at the karaoke bar, failure is the default state. Anything else is a miracle worth praising and singing along to. The audience just wants to feel that you tried. During those few minutes, you have the undivided attention of everyone in that bar. Rock Band is all about teamwork. That’s nice and all.

But karaoke is about glory.

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Oh, wee-ooh, Richard Clark only looked like Buddy Holly on Halloween, but his hair is pretty awesome every day. Watch him tweet about it @DeadYetLiving.