these wasted days: on proteus, jonathan richman, and life after gamespot

The music of Jonathan Richman is all about real experience. It’s about wandering around late at night and appreciating the faded colors of the world. It’s about being with people you love. It’s about the kind of beauty that you need to look a little closer to see.

He often sings about how he feels as if television and cell phones distract from what really matters to him–real experiences and real connections with real people. So even though I got away with filming a performance of his last Tuesday at the Make-Out Room, I knew I was taking a chance when I tried it again on Wednesday. And sure enough, in the middle of his song, in front of the entire audience, he asked me to put the phone away, saying that he was there to perform not for “electronic eyes” but for my “real eyes.” I happily obliged, of course, but I was sad that the song would go uncaptured. Jonathan performs without a set list, feeling his way through each performance and even through each song–the version of “Let Her Go Into the Darkness” that he performed on Wednesday was entirely different, musically and lyrically, from the version that he performed on Tuesday. A Jonathan Richman show is immediate and alive. To see him perform is to see an unstructured act of creation and exploration and play occur right in front of you.

My own life has had a particular kind of structure for a long time. Even for years before I worked for GameSpot, that was the goal I was working toward. On a professional level, that was all I wanted. That was the dream, and I poured all the energy I could spare into pursuing it. Games themselves are almost always about structured goals. Saving the princess. Winning the war. In the game of my own life, working for GameSpot was it. That was the main story quest. That was hitting the level cap. And I actually did it. Through a combination of hard work and good fortune, I made it happen. And then, once I was there, I put almost everything I had into that job. It was a big part of my sense of my own identity. It was a privilege and a responsibility. It was a platform that I felt enabled me to make some kind of difference, to nudge the way people think about games a little bit in a certain direction. I tried to make the most of it. I spent at least part of most weekends in the office. 

And then, on July 30, it came to an abrupt end. And then I had to ask myself, “What do you do when you had a dream and you worked for it and you made it happen and you lived it and now it’s over and you’re only 37 years old and the structure of your life has fallen away and you have to figure out how the hell you start moving forward?" 

I guess you go wandering.

I’ve gone wandering alone and I’ve gone wandering with friends. Wandering in Berkeley and wandering in the Mission.

Wandering around, I start thinking about what’s really important to me now. Is it having a platform where my voice will be heard? Is it having health care and the security of a steady paycheck? (When I was with GameSpot, my health plan was going to cover my SRS. I was waiting until January because I figured that the site could spare me more easily during that particularly slow time of year. Ah well.) Is it things that fall outside the professional sphere entirely?

I also feel like perhaps, in the review grind, in the structure of my job, I lost the sense of play, and with it, some of the passion for the work. There was still the occasional game that reminded me why I love games—Kentucky Route Zero, Left Behind, Gone Home–but perhaps I had become too focused on the dry mechanics of the system I was working within, and lost sight of why I’d wanted to be a part of it all in the first place. I was like someone who keeps playing an MMO out of a compulsive desire to keep earning more experience and keep leveling up and keep getting better gear, rather than because I actually enjoyed just existing in the world, exploring it, sharing it with others. 

I played Proteus for the first time the other night. Proteus is not like the overwhelming majority of games, about which this can be said:

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Proteus is a game about the value of real experience for its own sake. You wander an island, taking in the sights and sounds as the seasons pass. In so many game worlds, if you encounter something like an ancient, magical circle of stones, the nature of its magic can be boiled down to the fact that praying there gives you a bonus to intelligence, or that touching the stones increases the rate at which you "earn experience.” And the fact that its magic can be defined in these concrete, functional terms means that it’s not really magical at all. It is functional. It has a purpose that can be expressed in numbers. In Proteus, the circle of strange figures on the hilltop possesses a mystery unexplained, and at least right now, given the unstructured nature of my real life at the moment, that seems far more magical.

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Standing in the rain in Proteus, something I love to do in real life.

Proteus is about the enriching act of having experience (or earning experience) for its own sake, for whatever undefinable way that this contributes to who you are as a person. You can’t put a number on it, a concrete value, a “level.” And to do so would destroy the real magic. That’s what this time in my life is doing. It’s pulling me out of the rigid gameplay systems that I’ve operated in for the past few years, in which I came to be focused on the numbers, the things I was working toward, rather than the moment that I was actually existing within. This time is reminding me of the value of immediate experience, of the life I’m living now. 

I know that standing in rare Los Angeles downpours as a teenager, that dancing to Jonathan Richman at the Make-Out Room last week, that striving to work for GameSpot and then actually doing it for almost four years, these all contribute to who I am. And so I know that these wasted days aren’t really wasted, even if I don’t have the professional equivalent of a completed quest, a shiny new helm or a new perk to show for them. If you’re always focused on that, you’re missing out on the here and now.

Games, like books and films, can enrich and inform a life. They can’t make a life, or at least not the kind of life that I’m interested in living. These days, I’m rediscovering my own love of games, and seeing how games can fit into the larger puzzle. I’m remembering what unstructured exploration and play feel like. I hope that when the time comes for me to jump back into a structured system and start playing the professional game again, this time I’m spending now will help me be better at it than I was before. But right now, I just want to be in the moment for a while. I just want to play outside of the system for a bit, whatever that looks like.