🫧 On Bubbles
And now, for something completely different!
A brief tangent
When Japanese students of English learn that I’m from Hawaiʻi, their eyes light up. They launch into a one-sided conversation about the time they went there for vacation years ago, or that that’s where they went on their honeymoon, or how they went together with their hula class that they joined because they just love the culture so much. And I smile and nod and quietly dissociate, silently cursing myself for bringing it up and doing this to myself.
And almost every time, the Japanese person regaling me with their lavish Hawaiian vacation will get briefly annoyed at a weird quirk of the islands: “I was hoping to be able to practice my English while I was there, but everyone spoke Japanese! I barely heard or saw any English while I was there.” And they would look at me as if this were an accusation: why does everyone in Hawaiʻi speak Japanese?
The answer of course is that not many people actually speak Japanese beyond a basic level, if at all. Even most Japanese-Americans don’t really speak it beyond the occasional utterance here and there, linguistic relics from the plantation days passed down over generations to kids who have otherwise had the Japanese thoroughly scrubbed out of them. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who can carry a fluent and lively conversation in Japanese outside of the tourist bubble surrounding Waikīkī.
But if you booked a vacation through a Japanese tourism agency, they would of course put you in a Waikīkī hotel where the staff can speak Japanese, and book you on a tour with Japanese signage. The airport and bus announcements are in Japanese, the people on the flight over are Japanese, and since you are all in one massive group in a foreign country, you’re most likely to stick to the areas with a lot of other Japanese tourists.
I have been to Waikīkī Beach exactly once in my life, and it was as an adult with Daikon.
There are what seems like dozens of ABC Stores on every street, giving the impression that they must be prolific throughout the islands (when, to my knowledge, they are concentrated almost entirely in Waikīkī) and the staff there, of course, cater to Japanese customers who are stuck using them because they don’t know how to get to the much cheaper local shops. Locals don’t want to hang around the overpriced and crowded tourist spots, so you see a disproportionate amount of other Japanese-speaking people.
Tourists only see other tourists in this very touristy setting and then get disappointed thinking ah, so THIS is what Hawaiʻi is like when like, no, obviously, it’s not. You are living in a completely different pocket dimension of reality from everyone else.
Anyway. Let’s talk about something else.
Let’s talk about video games
I feel like every few months, there is some online discourse that boils down to: why do people only ever talk about the same five popular games? Why aren’t there people talking about old(er) games, indie games, weird games, browser games, free games, foreign games?
The most recent such piece to catch my eye was Graham Smith at Jank “wish[ing] videogame culture would take more cues from readers”:
The book readers have it figured out. I listen to book podcasts and follow a lot of (I hate this word) bookstagrammers, and the turnover of a new year is the best time to do either of those things. This is because they’re all reviewing their reading goals for the year that was and the year to come. Did they finish the number of classics they’d hoped? Did they finish the bibliography of Ballard novels? And will next year be the year they really commit to #JanuaryInJapan, when all over the world people dedicate themselves to reading translated fiction from the country?
I wish we did more of the same in videogames. Our equivalent discourse gets as far as ranking the best games of the year that was, and then immediately moves on to anticipating the next year’s new releases, pre-emptively stuffing our backlogs with games we’ll rue not having had the time to play when the next year draws to a close. Couldn’t we set ourselves some more interesting constraints?
I don’t mean to put Smith or Jank on blast here, because as I said, I see this sentiment pop up with tiresome regularity. I did choke on my morning coffee reading that he thinks bookstagrammers have it figured out, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Be the games crit you want to see in the world
To start with: the whole “why are people talking about X and not Y?” argument is pretty moot when you’re running a subscriber-funded website that is neither beholden to SEO nor advertisers. Like, if you want to talk about other games besides the major releases, you can just do that, y’know. Be the games crit you want to see in the world.
So maybe this is really just a complaint, and a wish, aimed squarely at us, the videogame websites. We’re the ones that seem to set the tone of the most visible conversations. Several outlets have, over the years, made plays to cover games more often post-release (PC Gamer magazine made a big pitch for this circa 2004), but none of it has really made much of a dent.
So much of games crit lives in this self-contained bubble. They only ever talk about the latest and hottest games (because they are what’s trending, and as news outlets that’s the stuff they need/want to cover) and the only other company they seem to keep is other games writers at similar outlets. And so it makes sense that, from their vantage point, they think the entirety of games discourse is only ever about the same five over-hyped AAA big releases.
But, and I’m speaking anecdotally here… whomst?? Everyone I follow is talking about some PS2 game they’re emulating on a little retro handheld, or a years-old PC game that they got for 75% off in a recent Steam sale, or a free daily browser game about enclosing horses. They’re sharing YouTube videos of some nerd showing off their collection of Dreamcast games, they’re blogging about all the indie games that they found over the course of the past week or the history of some obscure hidden gem, they’re live-streaming themselves speedrunning some kaizo or homebrew game. If nobody around you is talking about anything besides the latest and hottest AAA releases, that’s a skill issue. Get out of your bubble and talk to literally anyone else.
Game outlets are not games culture
The idea that the game outlets are “the ones that seem to set the tone of the most visible conversations” is so self-important, out of touch, and demonstrably wrong. Here’s just one example among far too many to name: the Angry Video Game Nerd has been around for much longer than most of these outlets, and while his star has definitely faded over the years, James Rolfe was never some radical left-fielder for talking about old and obscure games. He was part of the vast, well-established community of people online talking about games that exist outside of the media hype cycle.
And Rolfe is just one guy! There were so many copycats and people inspired or influenced by him, to say nothing of the sheer amount of message board and chatroom discussions that were happening before, during, and after the Nerd’s heyday. In the aftermath of the AVGN, there are now streamers with millions and billions of views who built their empires talking about older, retro, indie, obscure, etc. games, creating their own entire massive cultural wellsprings outside the boundaries of traditional games outlets.
Game outlets of course do impact the culture, but it is wild not to acknowledge everything else that has left its mark on The Discourse. This is some “why does everyone in Hawaiʻi speak Japanese” shit. You are in a bubble and it’s weird that you haven’t realized it yet.
You do not, in fact, have to hand it to BookTok
Okay, I’m sorry to be so mean here, but I do have to put Smith on blast for this part specifically:
Book culture is, by comparison, much less concerned with what’s new and what’s to come. The channels I follow might be hyped for the occasional new novel from an existing author (currently: Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy), and BookTok might occasionally overwhelm all other conversation for a few weeks (eg. R.F. Kuang’s Babel, a few years ago), but by and large all of the readers I follow on social media are making space for books completely separate from the release cycle, and yet still participating in rich public conversations about those works.
If the complaint is that video game websites are heavily commercialized and incentivized to only ever talk about the latest, hottest, biggest games, I cannot think of a worse model for what games crit should look like than motherfuckin BookTok. Book “content,” especially on Instagram and TikTok, is where you get a lot of mindless “don’t think, just Consume” Bingo cards with boxes to check off and not challenge or be challenged by the actual contents of the books. The idea that this is what games crit could or even should look like is frankly nauseating.
Also, like… have you ever, even once, looked at a book site. They are full of author interviews for upcoming books, reviews of books that recently released, listicles of this week’s bestsellers, publishing houses’ release schedules for the year, so on and so forth. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I follow a bunch of book sites because I want to know this stuff. What I’m saying is: much like game outlets, book sites are not what “set the tone of the most visible conversations.” Book readers are all over the place, posting their thoughts into hashtags and Goodreads alternatives, and they are only too happy to chat with you about whatever books they’re currently reading. If you think book readers have it figured out, I have good news: the video game enjoyers have, too.
Leave your bubble and experience an entire world out there full of passionate nerds who cannot shut the hell up about the things they love.