new game plus

You know how stand-up comics often have to tour in smaller clubs for months, trying new material, sometimes failing, maybe even bombing, as they figure out what works and what doesn’t, what to sharpen and what to toss out, before having a strong enough set of material for the big live shows and the Netflix specials? And then, after they’ve done the big shows, after they’ve recorded the Netflix specials, they have to start the whole process over again, playing clubs in Poughkeepsie, experimenting and taking risks and facing the possibility of failure as they try once again to build up a whole new set of material?

What with my job and everything, it’s been a while since I’ve consistently made the time to do my own writing about games–the kind of idiosyncratic, personal responses to games that I’d post here in the past. I miss it. I also feel deeply insecure about trying to get back to it. Do I even still have anything of value to say about games? The truth is, I don’t know, man. But I have to find out. 

And I have to do it in a place where it’s safe for me to experiment, to fail, to fumble for something and not quite grasp it. Sure, I have all these skills, all this experience, and that doesn’t go away, but it also doesn’t make standing at this part of the journey feel any less scary or daunting. The starting again part. It’s not like playing Dark Souls Remastered and knowing I can finish it because I finished Dark Souls not so many years ago. This is something scarier and more uncertain, the question of whether or not I can still do something that came from deep inside of me. Am I still that person? Do I still have that perspective, that voice, that desire to be heard? I don’t know. This is me, beginning the uncertain process of figuring out just what I want and need to say about games, if this is even something I still want to be doing at all. 

So I’ll be posting more here again in the weeks and months ahead. Sometimes maybe just a few sentences or a paragraph, sometimes probably stuff that’s somewhat longer. Some of it might be messy. Some of it might be terrible. Right now, I think it’s better for me to put out bad things than to put out nothing. That’s part of the process. That’s where I’m at. So stick around. Get ready for some unique, distinctive, rough and ready or downright awful writing about games. It’s time to start again.