Adventures in Intimacy–My Top Five Art-Type Things of 2013
There’s a line near the start of the film L.A. Story in which Steve Martin’s character Harris says of how his life has been of late, “Let us just say I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it because I was so happy all the time.” I don’t think I was “so happy all the time” during the past few years of my life, but I would say that if I was deeply unhappy–and, in a way, I think I was–I didn’t really know it.
2013 has been a dramatic year for me, to put it mildly. A year in which I’ve gone from not really wanting anything, from thinking I was content with my quiet, largely solitary existence, to having periods of heartache and heartbreak. profound loneliness and desperate yearning for connection and companionship. These are, in no particular order, the five art-type things that spoke to me the most powerfully throughout this crazy year.
Gone Home
In my review of Gone Home, the astonishing game of environmental storytelling by The Fullbright Company, I wrote, “Some places tell a story. Homes, especially. For the people who live there, every knickknack on the shelf, every little dent in the wall, every refrigerator magnet or faded photograph or chipped mug can be part of their shared history as a family, part of the tapestry of memories both joyous and painful that binds them together. Gone Home gives you a house to explore, and as you do so, that house slowly reveals to you the story of the people who live there. That story is intimate and honest and beautiful, and the active way in which you piece that story together, coming to understand the Greenbriar family through the things you find as you investigate their house, makes Gone Home one of the most captivating story-driven games in the medium’s history."

In Gone Home, all the pieces fit together. The environmental details that establish the mid-90s period setting also inform our understanding of the lives of the characters–Terry’s fortunes change thanks to the tremendous resurgence in JFK conspiracy theory interest brought about by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, and the riot grrrl music that Sam and Lonnie listen to tells us something about who they are at this particular moment in time. But it’s the truth of the game’s characters that makes Gone Home incredible, the way it gets the emotional details as well as the environmental ones just right in its tale of love between two high school girls. Gone Home demonstrates that there’s a whole vast world of human stories and experiences that games have almost entirely ignored thus far. I hope, now that people like The Fullbright Company, Blendo Games, Cardboard Computer and others are challenging traditional notions of what kinds of things games can do and what kinds of stories they can tell, that we only see more and more games venturing into the areas of human experience that games have rarely bothered to explore.
Additional reading:
My post on the year’s best games for GameSpot
Game designer Merritt Kopas’ powerful personal reflection on the game
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The extraordinary work of writer Masha Tupitsyn
“I want out but only because I want in and there is no in with him,” I tell my mother.
“There is no in with anyone anymore. Nobody wants in with anybody.”
“So what am I am going to do?”
“Nothing. You can’t do anything. That is your problem. There is no answer for this. When are you going to learn that there are just some things you will never understand? One day it will just work and you won’t have to do anything other than what you need to do.”
–from ”No, That Wasn’t Our Happiness“ by Masha Tupitsyn
What makes Masha Tupitsyn’s writing so incredible to me is the way in which it’s both deeply thought and deeply felt, intellectual and intimate, profound and personal. She can shift seamlessly from talking about a specific moment in her own life to discussing a scene from a particular film that is relevant in that moment, and because I so often process my own life through films and books and music, Tupitsyn’s work makes an exhilarating, almost magical kind of sense to me. It also helps that during much of the past year, I felt a strange kind of synchronicity between the events of my life and the work she was posting; she always seemed to be writing just what I needed to read, just when I needed to read it.
You can follow Masha Tupitsyn on Twitter at lifeasweshowit, follow her Tumblr, Love Dog, and download and read her wonderful free book Like Someone in Love.

–from Love Dog, September 17th
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Kiss Me
Gone Home is extraordinary among games. Kiss Me is thoroughly ordinary among films, yet this 2011 Swedish drama about a romance that blooms between two women in their 30s and disrupts their steady lives is certainly one of the defining films of my year. In my piece on the film called Kyss Mig: The Break in Every Beat, I said of one of the film’s love scenes,
It’s slow, almost reluctant, the way Mia turns toward Frida. This is not the simple, one-level sex we see in so many films. For Mia, the desire to connect and be vulnerable clashes with the impulse to deny, to stay guarded. When you’ve spent your whole life denying who you are, the chance to start chipping away at that wall, to discover and share what’s on the other side, is both tempting and terrifying. I know this well.
I also see, in Mia’s feelings that a romance with Frida simply doesn’t fit into the life she’s made for herself, a reflection of how I once felt about transition.
I think of how I once envisioned my own future. Transition, I felt, was totally incompatible with my existing life. I could not imagine being known as a trans woman by coworkers, by people in my town. I had to go “stealth,” starting a new life with a new job somewhere. It was the only way I could see it working. If you had told me even five years ago that I would eventually be (very) publicly out as a trans woman, I would have said you were crazy. In her own way, Mia is stuck in that place. This becomes the source of conflict between her and Frida in the film’s final act. When Mia talks about starting over with Frida somewhere far away, Frida asks why she won’t start over with her right there, in their existing lives.
And in that conflict that erupts between them, I see reflected my own internal battles about fighting for love.


Don’t we all hate the feeling that we’re not as important to someone we love as we thought we were, that we’re not a priority to someone who is a priority to us? Don’t we all want to be fought for?
Sometimes fighting for love brings us closer to those we love. At other times it pushes them away. I want to fight for love, and to be fought for. Fighting for love, and for the people and the ideas I love, comes naturally to me. Surrendering does not. I’m trying to learn to pick my battles, and hoping that sooner rather than later I find myself in a battle I actually have a chance of winning.
Additional reading:
Kyss Mig: The Break in Every Beat
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Broadcast News
In the commentary track on the Criterion edition of Broadcast News, writer/director James L. Brooks says that he thinks the film captured a specific moment in time. That might be true, but what I can’t get over when watching it now is how relevant it still is today. Of course, I work in the world of video game coverage, not news, but I recognize the newsroom dynamics in the film in my own workplace, and I think people would be surprised how often my colleagues and I have conversations in which words like "standards” and “integrity” come up. These are real concerns for us. It’s the film’s blending of the professional and personal that speaks to me most, the way that, like me, characters in the film can’t compartmentalize–for them, the work someone does and the person they are cannot be wholly distinguished from each other.


Additional reading:
But One Heart–Broadcast News and My 2013
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“Touch” and “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk
A few weekends ago, I was at the office getting some work done while some colleagues were doing the same, and we were spinning tunes to help pass the time. My friend Peter called up “Touch” by Daft Punk. “Get Lucky isn’t half as good without this song before it,” he said.
I told him that I couldn’t agree more.
Back in May, I wrote about Random Access Memories, and already then, it seemed to be telling the story of my year, though even I’m surprised by the significance and relevance it’s taken on since then. There is no voice I can relate to more this year than the voice that experiences a painful and challenging emotional awakening in “Touch."
Here is what I said back in May about "Touch” and “Get Lucky.”
A frozen figure breaking out of the digital ice in which it’s long been encased.
“Kiss
Suddenly alive
Happiness arrive
Hunger like a storm
How do I begin
A room within a room
A door behind a door
Touch, where do you lead
I need something more”—Touch
The references to doors and rooms recall the earlier track Within (“Many rooms to explore but the doors look the same”) but the kiss, a reminder that this consciousness is alive, awakens the need to escape, the need for something more. For me, after long periods—sometimes years—of emotional flatness, an absence of any real sense of connection or romance or love or hope—that initial touch, that moment of awakening, is intense. It brings with it a voracious yearning for more. Hunger like a storm.
And then the song lights up like a carnival. But is this real? There’s a melancholy undercurrent to it that makes me think it seems real on the surface but is just as hollow as one of Jay Gatsby’s legendary parties.
And then the chorus, digital yet human.
“If love is the answer you’re home.”
Of course love is the answer.
And it’s close, it’s close, it’s so close that you can touch it.
And then it’s gone, in an instant. No, you’re not ready yet. You can’t do it. You’re not capable of that kind of connection.
And then the anger in Williams’ voice when he says “You’ve almost convinced me I’m real.” An anger I know all too well; I start to feel warm and alive and human and real again, and then it fades away.
But this time I won’t let it.
Touch ends with Williams saying “I need something more,” and it is no mistake that the album then shifts into…
Track 08: Get Lucky
“Getting lucky is not just sleeping with (someone) but meeting someone for the first time and it just clicking. There’s no better fortune in this existence to me.” —Pharrell Williams on Get Lucky
“Like the legend of the Phoenix
All ends with beginnings
What keeps the planets spinning
The force from the beginningWe’ve come too far
To give up who we are
So let’s raise the bar
And our cups to the stars”—Get Lucky
So the end of Touch brings us to the beginning of something new, to the place where we’re open again to the possibility of connection, and though connection and touch often coexist, connection with touch is something so much more than touch without connection.
2013 gave me a night with a real kiss (my first in a long time) and a night with real touch (my first in a long time) but no real shot at love, I don’t think.

(from Kiss Me)
I hope my luck changes in 2014.
Additional reading:
Notes
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Carolyn always shares my feelings on many a thing.
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