My commencement was today. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t walk with the rest of my cohort. But it doesn’t seem right to let my entire graduate education go unacknowledged. So below is a sort of hypothetical address I’d wish to deliver at one of these occasions, were I in any position to do so.

One of the first online friendships I made was with a boy from Melbourne. Then, as now, the thing that really seemed to bring us together was games. We were both fans of one game in particular called NiGHTS, a sort of obscure Saturn title by the same people who made Sonic.

This was not a game you played to feel masculine. It was a game very much about dreams, about overcoming self-doubt, about standing up to your fears. It was a game for all those imaginative kids who only ever really felt safe in the comforts of their own heads. And it taught us that being a dreamer was an okay thing to be.

Now as an adult, I can say with pride that I’m still a dreamer. I think constantly of how much more the world can offer, and how much more I can offer to the world. I push myself every day to make something meaningful out of those waking hours, so that when I go to bed each night (or morning, as the case may be), I know that I’ve left the world different from how I found it. There is a pervasive stereotype that ‘gamer’ is synonymous with ‘lazy’– we all know that’s not true. On the contrary, gaming is what taught me to never trivialize a window of opportunity.

You are all gamers today because you feel a similar connection with the games you play. Maybe games help you to understand the world; maybe they help you to understand yourself. But you all recognize the potential games have to tap into something deeper, even if it’s just a sense of fulfillment you don’t get from other media. Games validate our creativity. They ask us to explore the connections of things, to link ideas, to shift our perspectives. Long before the rise of social media, being a gamer was what let me connect with people from Australia, the UK, Brazil and Japan from an early age, and I know it was the same for many of you.

But whether by accident or design, the same attitudes that left many of us feeling alienated and looking to our fellow gamers for acceptance have also been used by us to exclude others. You might be saying to yourself, ‘I’ve never excluded anyone because of their sex, sexuality or race,’ but this isn’t just about the actions of individuals here. This is about how we as gamers collectively address the systems of exclusion keeping others from feeling welcome in our community– to the extent of whether we can even say we have a community if the bar for acceptance is so high and so arbitrary.

That’s the challenge I want to put to all of you today: be the generation that actively, vocally challenges what it means to be a ‘gamer.’ Don’t stand by as others protest about being ostracized, harassed or objectified. Don’t shrug and say ‘that’s just how games and gamers are.’ We get to decide how games and gamers are. If games get to be a safe space to negotiate scenarios and possibilities we’ll never have in our outside lives then let’s see to it that they’re a safe space for everyone, from the way they’re designed all the way on down to how we engage them.

We were all ‘that kid’ once. And if the Web can allow me to meet another ‘that kid’ just like me on the other side of the world, and find a brother in someone I’d never have any chance of meeting on my block, at my school or in my city, it can allow us to make all kinds of connections we’ve never had at any time before in human history. Games have taught us to seek the unlikeliest of solutions for the toughest of problems. They’ve taught us that difference is strength and that flexibility is essential for survival. Now here’s a challenge where we can put all those lessons to the test.

Let’s not shy away from that.

(Original photo credit Pierson Clair. Shamelessly altered by your resident dire critic.)

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that.

Well, Meiji (makers of Pocky, YamYam, etc) seem to have discontinued Chocorooms, but apparently they still had plenty of the product backlogged, because now another distributor seems to be hocking them in dollar stores.

I’m not sure what’s weirder. The encouragement that we should have fun eating our fun little Chocoboy friend, or that said friend still looks like someone who can help get you high.

Poor Jacob Taylor.

It boggles my mind when game critics whose opinions I otherwise find to be deep and insightful write off a character like Jacob as “boring.” It’s not that I don’t understand where they’re coming from. I’ve heard it explained to me: he is average, he is unremarkable, his backstory and his problems are all mundane in contrast to a crew filled with scaly raptor men, genetically perfect smarmy assholes, chatty AI, and creepy unblinking blue paladin ladies out to kill their vampire daughters. Compared to all that, yeah, Jacob is practically a blank slate. Kind of like… Shepard.

Here is the thing I don’t think anyone keeps in mind when they write off Jacob Taylor. Of the entire cast of the Mass Effect franchise, he is the only character besides Shepard to bear the distinction of full on player character. Not temporary PC, ala Joker. He has an entire game to himself, Mass Effect Galaxy. I haven’t played it (and I don’t know anyone who has) but I was personally thrilled to come face to face with the only character who might qualify as Shepard’s counterpart. Because that’s exactly who he is, and I’m sure that’s what the developers intended him to symbolize, whether or not that significance got across to the average player.

Granted, depending on your tailoring of Shepard’s backstory, it’s true she can have more interesting origins than most. But over the normal progression of gameplay, she is pretty much flat as a board when it comes to her own personal depth. You barely hear mention of her past exploits, nor do the details ever matter because whichever path you choose never influences the proceedings. That’s precisely why the game surrounds Shepard with the most colorful characters with the most outrageous daddy issues in the galaxy. She’s a freaking Jacob. The only significant difference are the number of opportunities she’s offered to do big and exciting things. Without three epics under her belt, she and Jacob are exactly the same kind of vanilla, utterly malleable stock character.

It’s not that I have no issues with Jacob. Making his loyalty mission yet another tale of black paternal abandonment is lazy in the least and excruciatingly problematic the deeper down into the issue you go. But I refuse to dismiss the entire character out of hand for that. To me, he’s an image of what Shepard would be if the narrative abandoned her before Eden Prime. Mishandled, tertiary, and as an unfortunate consequence: boring.

(Note: I sell most of the games I finish, but even so… my track record for finishing games –or even starting them– isn’t that hot.)

“500 years later…”

For years, this was basically all we had to go on for the ending to Final Fantasy VII. It frustrated and captivated my 11-year-old self in ways I can barely describe. What happened? Did they relocate? Did the Planet wipe out humanity in self-preservation, like Bugenhagen suggested?

That is still my personal interpretation of that ending, Square Enix’s subsequent milking of the FF7 cash cow be damned. It is short, sweet, and seems to tell us everything and nothing all at once. I haven’t seen an RPG pull off quite that same trick ever since. At least, not until Bioware’s latest title came bolting out the stable a few weeks ago.

Which is why, I suppose, I’m greeting this current air of entitled frustration and negativity from these generalized “ME3 players” (contented ones obviously don’t count!) with exasperation more than anything else. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt (and the action figures and keychains and wallscrolls). The only real difference between player reaction to this game here, and the ones of yesteryear is that now a lot more people have Internet access. Which is neither a good nor bad thing, just noisier.

Right now I am thanking the cold unfeeling heavens that FFVII was released back when our understanding of “social media” consisted of AOL chatrooms. We didn’t have to deal with page after page of this. (Note: ME3 spoilers.) It was a simpler, more innocent time, that era before Tumblr and VeryDemotivational.com. Fans were still the vitriolic hellspawn they are now, of course, but trashtalking a developer to a dozen people on Usenet has a different register to it than threatening to drag the FTC into this or convincing Amazon to offer full refunds because you didn’t like a game’s ending.

Here is what Hideaki Anno thinks of your "children's show."

Most of the narratives I’ve known people to decry as “stupid” or “incomplete” are ones which don’t compromise. I can recall vividly watching A River Runs Through It in a high school film class and watching a classmate burst straight out of her seat in front of the projector and start yelling at the film, so infuriating was the idea that Brad Pitt’s character could die, and off screen, of all things! (Oops, I just spoiled it.) We are programmed through mass media to expect certain archetypes to be treated in certain fashions, and of course the game hero is among the more sacred of these.

“But our choices didn’t matter!” you shriek.

Yes, and I hated when ME2 pulled that stunt on me. But for reasons of scale alone, Mass Effect 3 cannot even be compared. You are fucked, in this game. You are so fucked, even in a best case scenario. Why should your decisions have so much more weight than the rest of the universe? I hate to break it to you, but in real life, your decisions really don’t matter all that much.

“But it was a game about our choices mattering!”

Was it? Was it really? One (or more) of your squadmates will always die on Virmire. You will always have that final battle even if you convince Saren not to fight you. You will always end up working for Cerberus. The Collectors will always abduct your crew. And in the third game, there are events which will happen regardless of your actions every single time, because the writers apparently finally realized that you are one person trying to stop a hurricane.

Where is Final Fantasy VII‘s resolution that much materially different than Mass Effect 3‘s? You spend all that time leveling characters and assets, sorting through the cast’s melodrama and deep psychological problems, and fighting a rival human outfit which is doing its level best to hasten the apocalypse, and all you get at the end is a picturesque verdant landscape and a small glimmer of hope that intelligent life will continue. No mention of the fate of your companions. Little to no indication that your actions did anything beyond averting total annihilation of your homeworld. After all those cinematics, all that “emotional engagement,” you get a brief picture of life entered into a different epoch and then finis.

So, again, I wonder if all this furor about “agency” isn’t just the players misinterpreting the rhetoric of the developers, as usual. Mass Effect has never been about actual choice and real, graspable effects of those choices. It’s been about stemming an unrelenting tide, clutching onto compromises like a consolation prize. It’s also no different than business as usual for the roleplaying genre. Final Fantasy VII just had the luxury of releasing in a time before Twitter.

Final thought on the two games: there is some making-of VHS my brother got with his copy of FFVII where Hironobu Sakaguchi says in an interview that the concept for the game emerged in response to his mother’s death. Japanese aesthetic has always been strongly fixated on mortality, the inevitability and even “rightness” of dying as part of the natural cycle. I feel like Western games have gotten into the habit of denying the existence of death, but it wasn’t always so. Old tabletop RPGs assumed player characters would die a lot and were, thus, expendable, not worthy of emotional investment.

I’d like to believe there is a middle ground we can achieve here, closer to the Japanese way of looking at things. We can invest in our characters, and also accept getting our hearts broken when the narrative denies us that oh-so-implausible happily ever after.

Because really, shouldn’t a game about space remind us how tiny and pointless we are?

Disaster imagery has a way of sticking in the public consciousness. I’ve had my misgivings about this franchise’s approach on a lot of things, but at least you can’t say the devs aren’t drawing on some pretty grim stuff in the last 11 years of cultural memory.

I don’t know about you but the pathetic quality to these representations seems to make them more emotional. In a station of billions of people, they can’t even fill a wall with the pictures of the dead and missing. The “full” refugee camp isn’t even slightly cramped, yet security officers are turning away ships full of survivors.

Still not very far into the game, mind you. But it’s a more visually interesting game than I might’ve given it credit for, based on the weakness of its opening cinematics, and that’s good to see.

This post is not directed at any individual. It’s more an amalgam of responses from several individuals, in several different contexts, heard over a sustained period. Again, this is not about you. If anything, this is about why you’re not alone.

I have been publishing stuff online since I was 11.

I normally take this fact for granted. After all, it wasn’t very good stuff. I wrote my first fanfiction at the age of 7 (it was featured in my class’s library and I got some very serious reader reviews from my fellow 7-year-old classmates). I finished my first novel at 16. By the age of 20, I was writing at least one short story a week, often in addition to recurring serials, while also gainfully employed and a full-time student. I am only barely exaggerating when I say I’ve broken my back over getting the approval and attention of readers, and I know from quite a bit of first-hand experience that the harder I tried, the more it backfired. In one particularly dreadful instance, this overwhelming need for attention led to hospitalization (the less said about that, the better).

Again, I usually take this for granted, and at times I forget that the people I interact with aren’t as seasoned with the mad, mad world of Putting Words On The Internet. It doesn’t even all come down to publishing; I’m just very accustomed to interacting with writers, especially of the amateur stock.

Now, “amateur” is an unfairly stigmatized word. Writing done out of passion can be the best writing on the planet. Some of my favorite works of fiction have the prefix “fan-” appended to them and I will not hear a single derogatory word about it. Likewise I don’t mind a whit what you do in your spare time on your own blog. But when you submit something for peer review, “amateur” isn’t simply a work born out of love which is beyond criticism; it means you’re a non-professional entering into an arena where professionals also exist.

Does being a non-professional blogger deserve some leverage? Sure. “Professionalism” is often used as a gatekeeping tactic to serve the privileged and keep outsiders from breaking into a field. As much as I can, I want to challenge that. At the same time, I want to heavily discourage the kind of drama-laden behavior I grew well and truly sick of from my time in amateur writing circles– things I’ve done, in addition to things I’ve had directed at me. And it all essentially comes down to one thing:

Don’t Depend on Someone Else for Your Self-Esteem

I could tell you such horror stories. The all-night benders, the sore tailbones, the pulsating eyestrain, the tears, the aching wrists. All so I could hit “Publish” before some self-imposed deadline. Then the waiting game would begin, reloading the page, checking my inbox. I might’ve been up for three days straight at that point, but I couldn’t sleep without seeing who was talking about it, who liked it. They had to like it! I spent so much time on it!

I have had very public meltdowns as a result of not getting adequate traffic on a particular serialized novel. Thankfully, I was a teenager and posting under a pseudonym, or I probably couldn’t be as candid about it all these days. I’m embarrassed by how I behaved, but I also know why I behaved that way: I was exhausted, stressed out, and I had just put to rest a story I had spent nine straight months writing at near breakneck pace, with very little prep time. Moreover, I had convinced myself that the only way I could prove my “worth” was if I was constantly the object of everyone’s attention. Anything less than floods of praise made me miserable and suicidal. (I also had undiagnosed major depression.)

It took a few very patient friends to reassure me of two very important things, bits of wisdom which I’ve kept with me ever since:

1) The people who comment on your work represent a small minority of those who read and enjoyed it. There are no exceptions to this.

2) You will never please everyone. In fact, you don’t want to please everyone. Pleasing everyone means you aren’t saying anything worth a lasting impression.

You will get excluded or overlooked at some point in your life– probably many times. It’s not a campaign against you and most of the time it’s not even conscious, far less deliberate. It cannot be taken personally. If you think I’m just saying this as a curator for This Week in Videogame Blogging, you’re wrong; all of us, in our capacity as bloggers, critics, journalists, et cetera, grapple constantly with getting acknowledgement and credit for our work in a culture which is often enough forgetful, easily distracted, and capricious, and I am no exception in that struggle. Quite frankly, whatever number of years you might cite feeling ignored and even invisible to your peers, I’m fairly certain I could double it, due simply to how long I’ve been doing this in one way or another. And I know no advice for how to overcome that feeling except to put yourself out there as often as possible and stick to your guns once you’re out there.

Your self-esteem should not depend on the actions of others. It’s an easy way to get hurt, and believe me, I’ve gotten hurt that way. The alternative is not to shut off the outside world and dismiss it as inherently negative and worthless, but you do need to find a more sustainable middle ground. It’s unreasonable to expect anyone, in any community online or off, to be responsible for your happiness. We all take pride in our work and enjoy it when others like it as well. But the only one you have to prove anything to is yourself (and well, maybe your close friends). The only one who can give you confidence is you.

(I would appreciate art sources for the various wonderful Wheatley fanart I’ve used here. I’d love to credit you!)

Me: To leave, they need to gather the seven Elements of Exploration.
Friend: On their mission to the Horsehead Nebula.
Me: Ambition! Authority! Empathy! Honor! Curiosity! Compassion! Geekiness!
Friend: There they will summon the Great Bird of the Galaxy, which will return them home safely.