Practicing writing about games

My favourite way to discover new things is by other people. I don’t want to find my next game through an algorithm that looks at what I’ve played and what others have played and by making weird conclusions that we must like the same things. I really enjoy reading or watching when other people discuss games they’ve enjoyed and why and explain or show the unique elements and what makes the game interesting.

I’m not interested in nor find much value in numeric reviews because they are so arbitrary. We have wildly different internal schemas of what “8/10” means for a video game but even if our scales align, we will like things for things reasons. That’s why writing about the games from different perspectives is so important.

I want to add my own contribution to this network of ideas. For the longest time though, I have strongly disliked my writing about games. Whether I call them “reviews” or something else, I have a tendency to think that I need to explain all the rules and mechanics and everything else with such detail that the outcome starts to feel mechanical, boring and something that doesn’t really offer anything interesting for the reader.

I started practicing last year after discovering a local library’s Helmet Gaming Challenge and continued with this year’s challenge. I wanted to bring attention to the fun challenge by not only keeping a checklist of games I played but by writing about them so that the list would actually be useful and not just an act of a completionist mind.

It has brought two things to my life: I’ve played games with more intention and I’ve written about the games in new ways.

With notes like Firewatch and Stray, I’ve explored the idea of talking about them more through emotions and experiences rather than information dumps. Others, like Wingspan, have more mechanics explanations which tends to come through more in board games when players are responsible for running the mechanics and that can be an important factor in choosing a game.

One thing I’d like to have more is screenshots of the games but I mostly play either on consoles or on Steam Deck and I haven’t quite yet figured out a good way to get screenshots from those into my blog in a way that wouldn’t be such a hassle than it currently is. So I’ve been using limited amount of images, mostly from company press kits or other sources that allow sharing them but there’s not always the ones that I would like to have. (The image above from Straw I took with my phone from the screen because it was too good to pass.)

In The Last of Us Part II, there’s one moment that I really wanted to talk about but to really get to the core of what I wanted to say required the reader to be able to see, preferably in a short video format, what I was seeing so I could talk about what my experiences were and why the experience was such an emotionally impactful.

I’ve also been writing really short bits about games and individual sub-pieces about games in my experimental board and card game zine Roll the Zine. The format sets its own restrictions and I’ve been intentionally trying to make this zine to be in a format that I wouldn’t normally write in to challenge my creativity and storytelling.

An unexpected outcome from this experiment has been how it has changed my relationship with gaming lately. I’ve been playing with more intention and focus. The gaming challenge’s categories have driven me to look for games that fall outside my usual categories (or to bend the meaning of words to make a game I want to play to fit into a category). Since I’ve decided I’ll write about the games I enjoy playing

When I was younger, I was part of a gaming forum where we played online sports game tournaments and wrote reports of the games. Back then, I loved going full on roleplaying on the concept. I wasn’t writing about me playing a video game with a fellow human. I wrote about it in-universe as if the virtual players were real and the games were real and I was a sports journalist. That was a lot of fun because adding that layer of storytelling on top of relatively bland platform allowed near unlimited imagination.