Winding Down: Reflecting on Five Years of Games Writing
As of January 2023, I will have been writing Epilogue articles for five years. That point of origin goes back further than January 2018, however; I started speaking and writing critically about games in the latter half of 2017. These conversations and paragraphs evolved into academic conference presentations and 40 page essays, which is what caused Ben Vollmer to plan a roadmap with myself and Preston Johnston. Here we are, five years and 162 articles later, and I would like to reflect on what that time and effort has meant to me.
I’ve been aiming for a minimum of two articles a month, and I have worked tirelessly to surpass that standard. Doing some back-of-the-napkin math, I learned that I have published a new article at an average 11-12 days, which, given the breadth of time and curve balls thrown at me by life, is an accomplishment that I can live with.
To be frank, writing articles is an isolating experience. Sometimes I toil away at games that I feel obligated to play or have an opinion about, and sometimes I write an article just to hit my internal deadline.
But I say “isolating” because most of my articles have been met with radio silence. You put dozens of hours into a creative endeavor and it sometimes feels like shouting into the void. It’s the rare articles, however, that get shared and spoken about that invigorate me to continue, as narcissistic as that may sound. Having my written art engaged with, my opinions grappled with – that is what justifies the hundreds of hours I spend each year assembling these articles. Luckily, I enjoy writing to a similar degree that I enjoy playing video games, so that effort has never completely felt like a drudgerous chore.
My passion has waned on occasion. Sometimes, the games I’m playing don’t inspire article ideas. Other times, I lack the discipline or desire to play games at all. My career is structured such that I have periods of intense stress and periods of full relaxation, and I can see those ups and downs reflected in the kinds of articles I’ve written throughout the years. No matter how busy, how stressed, how pressed for time I feel, however, I have gotten an article together to meet the deadline I’ve set in my head. And I’m incredibly proud of my proven ability to meet it.
In 2023, I will be stepping back from the output that I’ve maintained these past five years. Due to a number of upcoming upheavals in my life, I will not be able to remain as consistent as I’ve been. Because of that change, I want everyone’s expectations to be clear: I am not leaving Epilogue Gaming, but I am reducing the frequency and volume of my content starting in 2023.
Given the political climate within America – and, honestly, what feels like most of the world – right now, I do not feel safe disclosing the specifics in detail. What I feel comfortable sharing is that right wing fascism has already had an incredibly unwelcome impact on everything from my career to my gender affirming medical care, and I am taking steps to feel safer in those regards. So many things in my life are changing at once that I cannot reasonably expect to have even half as much time to play video games, much less to write, for at least the first half of 2023. When things in my personal life calm down, I have every intention to continue the work that I’ve been doing here at Epilogue.
Articles will still be coming – from me, and hopefully my team of writers. And for those of you who also take an interest in my video game podcast, the Left Behind Game Club, those episodes will still be coming. But the frequency with which both release – at least with my involvement – will be reduced.
I am incredibly grateful to the audience who has joined us – readers, listeners, viewers, and so on. Epilogue has built an incredibly impressive portfolio of content, a vigorous and thriving community, and we’ve never once wavered on the things I deem important: writing at an academic level, building a safe and welcoming place for people of all backgrounds to express themselves civilly, and – this sounds silly, I’m sure, but it sincerely has been a line I’ve refused to cross despite innumerable opportunities to bend or break – finding financial stability without ever once putting ads on our work.
As I’m in a rather sappy and nostalgic state, I want to wrap this article by reflecting on the top ten articles that I am most proud of publishing – articles that I have written and what they have meant to me – over the past five years. I am ranking these in no particular order:
One of the beautiful realities of writing while independent of monetary concerns has been my autonomy to choose games regardless of whether they will bring new readers to the website. missed messages. is one such title. In fact, I’d be astonished if even a hundredth of the people reading this article have even heard of the game, much less played it. But missed messages. is one of my favorite short games of all time, and the way it spoke to concerns like mental health, relationships, self-harm and suicide, completely connected with important and difficult encounters I’ve had with these aspects of life. It’s an article that was quite literally therapeutic, one I have been unable to let go of since.
Like stepping back from Epilogue, I felt horribly conflicted stepping back from Twitch streaming. I went from hundreds of hours a month to zero in a jarring timespan. Once my enthusiasm to stream diminished, it vaporized. Like any path that follows the “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” adage, the result was that what I loved became a job, one that I lost my passion for. Enough time has passed since publishing this farewell article that I do still genuinely have occasional periods where I miss streaming. But with special events as an exception, I enjoy the separation I have recreated in my life, and will remain generally dormant in the future. Like this article, however, there is catharsis in nostalgic reflection.
There is very little I could say about this article that isn’t present in the piece, because I fully exhausted my emotions and thoughts at the time. It was rewarding to step one foot out of my lane and use a video game to speak about a musician that I dearly love. While anchored in Sable, this article is truly about Japanese Breakfast and the singer’s book, Crying in H Mart, which is up there with Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl for my favorite read in 2022. This article didn’t find traction with an audience, but I didn’t expect it to. Like everything, I wrote this article for myself as a medium to express and understand my thoughts and emotions. My hope is that there are other Japanese Breakfast die-hards out there who can appreciate the same threads that I pulled through each of Michelle Zauner’s creative works.
I avoided Dark Souls for a decade. I’ll never forget the few times I tried to get into it, only to immediately bounce off – a symptom of being academically gifted as a child is that I give up on anything that I’m not immediately good at. I didn’t explicitly state this in the article itself, but that same feeling with Dark Souls is yet another parallel to my relationship to transitioning genders: I avoided facing it until I realized it was exactly what I needed.
When writing, I try to avoid making everything about my gendered experience, but considering the ways in which transitioning has altered my relationship to everything in life, the subject is rather inescapable. Despite that self-consciousness of not wanting to be the trans person who steers every topic back to gender, I couldn’t help myself with this Dark Souls article.
I was thus incredibly surprised when this article took off. One of my favorite gaming websites, Critical Distance, first shared my Dark Souls article. And suddenly, outlets from Anime Feminist to The Afictionado were republishing the piece. It spiked to the top of our website’s hits for several weeks, and I still see it resurface from time to time. I’m fully gratified at the responses I’ve received in Discord communities and Twitter DMs, and I feel validated to explore this subject further in future pieces if I think there is something meaningful to say about both topics.
Elden Ring was my vector into FromSoftware games, and difficult games more broadly. My overall ethos hasn’t changed since my article, “In Defense of Easy Mode,” but I am far more open-minded than I used to be about difficulty when approaching games. Despite this initial apprehension, I fell in love with everything in Elden Ring and one of the primary reasons for that was the humor I found in the game along the way.
I initially described this article as a “rhetorical analysis,” a literary term that investigates the ways in which the framing of information influences our beliefs, and that’s the article I tried to write. I picked a few of my favorite screenshots of player messages and used each of them to speak to how I was enjoying Elden Ring before finishing the playthrough. Ultimately, I am creatively proud of this piece, as I can’t confidently say that I’ve seen another article focus on solely the player messages in this manner. Using these messages and screenshots as a constraint produced a piece of writing that is equal parts playful and passionate.
I do not believe in writer’s block. Yet, I could not figure out what to say about Disco Elysium, the most articulate and intelligent game I have ever had the pleasure of playing. To love a game this much and yet feel intimidated to sit down and offer any thoughts about it is a rare feeling for me. I’m boldly willing to offer any take, however controversial, but the last thing I wanted to do with Disco Elysium is offer insipid remarks.
Then, one day, it dawned on me: when I played Disco Elysium, I stopped playing to take screenshots any time there was a word I didn’t know. Somehow, I had several of these screenshots, and so I did what all writers ought to try: introduce a creative constraint around your writing. My constraint here was to use these unfamiliar words to trampoline my way into confident thoughts about Disco Elysium, a game that a criminally few people that I know have actually played. I am proud of this article because I was able to say a lot with a little, and produced a kind of writing that I had never attempted before.
It’s funny looking back to my first dozen or so articles, because you can see the obligation I felt to offer critically driven academic-style takes on games that are now considered classics or at least influential. In 2022, I cannot see myself picking up Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, but I found it fascinating at the time that I wrote this article – which is not to suggest that I dislike the game or dismiss it now, but that I think I wouldn’t have followed the pop cultural tide as it turned. There’s no denying that Getting Over It is a masterpiece of, as I say in the title of this piece, failure and frustration.
The reason this article strikes me as something worth being proud of has nothing to do with the choice of game or even the article itself. Rather, I was delighted by the reception this article received, as it was the first article I published that taught me the value of having an audience of readers. A friend and former colleague used this article in their college composition courses, which led other professors to yank it off their syllabus and teach it in their own literature courses. I have received emails and Twitter DMs from students and professors alike sending me their papers, asking me questions, and so forth. Each interaction of this sort has been like a bolt of lightning that lights my inner logs on fire. The true gasoline pour here was when Bennett Foddy himself retweeted my article with praise, the first genuine interaction I received with a person making games, and I will forever cherish that feeling of excitement and pride that his words sparked in me.
It’s kind of impossible to avoid describing this coming out article as my most beloved or important. The reasons are obvious: I experienced the relief of leaving the closet; I shared my secrets with the world; the article made me endless connections with queer people; the developers of Tell Me Why and If Found… tweeted out my article and replied to it. I still receive messages to this day thanking me for this article, and I have never once received a hateful comment about it. Coming out as a transgender woman is the best decision I have ever made, and I am a fuller person for it.
Death Stranding was the most hyped I’ve ever been for a game. Yet, when I played it, I spiraled into a depression that I couldn’t have anticipated. That mental health dive caused me to feel isolated and mournful, and reintroducing myself back into the world after playing put a massive asterisk on my appreciation of it. Miraculously, however, especially after seeing the conversation around Death Stranding revive because of its parallels with the COVID-19 pandemic, I revisited Death Stranding when it landed on PC a year later. This replay completely changed my perspective on the game and, this time, it felt like a hopeful, communal experience. Death Stranding is thus one of my favorite games of all time, and writing through that experience was itself a kind of journey.
Calling out the flaws in something you love is never easy, at least for me. But Persona 4 Golden stoked a kind of contempt within me that produced this article. I cannot tolerate the blatant queerphobia present in this game, its embarrassingly childish presentation of both sexuality and gender, and the lessons that the story has to “teach” about these incredibly complicated and vulnerable experiences. The mishandling of Kanji’s and Naoto’s experiences is so egregious that I’m willing to admonish the entire game. Did I spend nearly 100 hours with Persona 4 Golden? Yes. Will I forever remember it sourly because of its toxic dismissal and erasure of queer people? Absolutely.
Winding Down
I feel as though my above thoughts speak for themselves, and I hope readers appreciate the degree to which I have and continue to love the medium of video games. Again, I will be reducing my overall output about them, but I am too enthusiastic to keep my thought to myself, so you can reliably expect additional articles throughout next year. 2023 promises games that I’ve been awaiting for seemingly this entire time, like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and She Dreams Elsewhere. Unless yet another delay impacts these games that I’ve been frothing for, I can anticipate myself writing about them once they drop. As for my “distractions” and other games, perhaps there’s still something in me about how I enjoy playing Nintendo Switch Sports and Just Dance 2022 with my mother that might yield an article. The possibilities remain endless.
My deepest thanks to all who have stuck with Epilogue’s work over the past five years. Having an audience is the kindling to my flame, as vain as that may sound, and I hope that all community members feel recognized for the contributions they have made to this website and our thriving Discord and Twitch communities. It’s frankly miraculous that we’ve been able to sustain ourselves without corrupting the craft or vision that kicked off our initial journey years ago. Perhaps we can keep this ship afloat for years to come; I’d like that.
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