Everyone talks about the books that changed them, and by everyone I mean the leftist academics that I read and listen to from afar, in some cases with literal decades of life separating us. It was Ursula K. Le Guin who wrote in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, all the way back in 1976, that:

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find — if it’s a good novel — that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we
never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”

And books have changed me. Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell fundamentally changed how I view human nature during moments of crisis. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything made me realize that history has not been a linear progression toward “civilization.” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass had me reevaluate my relationship to both humanity and nature. And of course, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed showed me what an anarchist society could look like.

I find myself returning to the central theses of these texts again and again, as they shape the words I write, the projects I pursue, and the ways I move through the world.

However, in many ways, video games have had an even more profound impact on my development. While I could get lost in a book for ten hours, some video games took months of my life. They were treats I would whittle away at a bit at a time. Things that I threw myself into to dissociate from a world that I don’t think I have ever fully understood, not even now.

And these games taught me so much about the world, because they quickly and viscerally plopped me into situations in ways that books and music have rarely done for me. I still think about whether I was an asshole for tormenting a refugee in Knights of the Old Republic or if my trainer truly loved his Pokémon, decades later. I would struggle to recite a monologue from a book I love from memory, but give me a pen and I can recall one from Zero Horizon Dawn that still brings me to tears.

Video games have had such a profound impact on me, both emotionally and politically. So over the next few months, I want to map the curves of my life through these games. I will be going as far back as I can remember, and like memory itself, this process will be distorted, emotional, and sometimes, just flat-out wrong. It’s an entirely self-indulgent project that for now will be relegated to the exclusives on my Patreon, website, and Substack (basically anywhere you pay me directly), which is where I tend to keep such parasocial things.

So go there if that sounds like something you might enjoy — my life, one game at a time.

Otherwise, I will still be doing my more analytical deep dives on pop culture and politics here on Medium, so no need to change anything if a chimeric autobiography that also serves as a history and critique of early 90s video games (up to the present) isn’t your thing.

The following is a preview of an article; the full version can be found on my Patreon/Substack/website. Unlike my other articles on Medium, this preview is not paywalled. The full article can be found here.

Long-term followers of this blog are aware that I am positively obsessed with Dimension 20, a tabletop anthology series that does a different world and sometime seven system every season. I have written glowing reviews of previous seasons, such as ‘Dungeons and Drag Queens’ and Cloudward, Ho!, and ‘City Council of Darkness’ was shaping up to be one of my favorites.

A cutesy World of Darkness story about cynical vampires learning to love small town politics— what’s not to love?

But then it came to its end, with a finale so off the rails it kind of killed the show for me. And so for my monthly exclusive (something you can find on my Patreon, Substack, or website), I wanted to talk about what I think it did so terribly wrong.

Check out the rest of the post here.