I began the year 2020 with the intent to read all twenty-two of the books in the Boss Fight Books series. The anthology features a different author for each book, and each book is ostensibly about a specific video game. I have completed three of the books so far: EarthBound by Ken Baumann, Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams, and ZZT by Anna Anthropy. I am in the middle of Galaga by Michael Kimball. The authors’ names are important because as much as the books are about those video games (they are explained in detail), they are also about the authors themselves. The style of the writing in these books is what I came to know as confessional writing, the type of vulnerable and honest literature I once associated with my favorite authors here on Tumblr, and which I haphazardly engaged in. I saw many of those authors move on to write excellent essays focused on their personal experiences with film at Bright Wall/Dark Room, which still publishes issues to this day. There have also been projects by creators like Katie West that bring together writers who’ve come up on platforms such as this. It’s a thrill to see that the legacy is carried on and now proven to be a viable option for full-length book explorations that are focused on video games.
My career in video games has spanned fifteen years and dozens of projects. I’ve been dutifully invested in literature as a creative medium during that time, but I’ve always struggled to marry these two important aspects of my life. You know, to explain and expound upon video games in a way I thought would be meaningful, like the excellent writings from Patrick right here on our beloved Tumblr. I was always too scattered to make the effort but felt that there is something important to be written about video games in relation to who we are, who I am. It’s a prism through which I want to be broken into my constituent parts. I see now that I was right, that it is possible, but question whether I can make it happen. I’ve been working on some writings since last year but they’re dry and empty of the rich vulnerability I see in the books from Boss Fight. For now, I read and hope. At the very least, I am so fucking inspired. The authors are amazing.
One of the early book-length explorations of a single video game is 2013′s Killing is Harmless by Brendan Keogh. I just bought it and hope to read it later in the year. Addressing whether it’s worthwhile to look so deeply into video games that don’t necessarily lend themselves to such analysis, Keogh wrote, “now I look back at my whole ‘reading into’ of the game on a symbolic level and I just sort of cringe.” Sometimes I worry about the same thing. These creations are products, things to be sold for a profit and disposable after they’ve generated their revenue. Are they worth such scrutiny and critical investment? But then I see the hundreds of classes dedicated to analyzing Shakespeare and wonder if that’s any more worthwhile. I’m willing to gaze at my navel for a while, to really mine for that vein of vulnerability and find out.