Release Date

Sometimes it can be fun when nobody's paying any attention. Take the first six months of Hit Self-Destruct, when I'd do things like invert every colour on the front page for one day without any explanation, or imply that I was ending the site forever. If I had stopped doing Hit Self-Destruct back in those days, I would have lied about the reason. I'd say that I was giving it up to realise my dream of being a community manager or having my own MTV show. Now, though, chastened by the existence of an actual readership, it doesn't seem appropriate to say anything other than Hit Self-Destruct is actually ending, this month, five posts from now.

There's no community manager job and there's no MTV show. There's no obvious change in circumstances that would force me to stop doing this, and I'm not giving it up so that I can do something else. Hit Self-Destruct was always something that would end eventually, and this is the ending.

Registering "Hit Self-Destruct" -- third choice of name -- in October 2007, I went in with no expectations or any sense of obligation, other than that I had accumulated enough thoughts about video games that could be exorcised in about four decent blog posts. There's a lot that has been surprising about how Hit Self-Destruct has turned out since then. Certainly, one of those things is that writing about video games on the internet for free could be one of the more fulfilling things I've ever done. And given that, the biggest surprise of all is that I'd ever want to stop doing it.

I never did Hit Self-Destruct full time; never even got to think about video games full time. Very few of the other demands on my time are as important to me as Hit Self-Destruct, but I can't quit any of those. I can't give Hit Self-Destruct as much time as it deserves (or its readers deserve), and so I can't make it as good as I want it to be anymore. This is a depressing reason to stop doing something, but, on the other hand, it allows me to leave at a point where the body of work here is still fairly consistent.

I think that I've probably accomplished about as much with Hit Self-Destruct as I reasonably can. If I kept going, I do not believe that the posts would get any better, or that there would be any more of them. Under those circumstances, I'd rather not do Hit Self-Destruct at all than see it slow to even more a crawl, past the point where anyone even cares if it's still going or not. This is how it ends, then.

There are five posts left until Hit Self-Destruct is done. I won't be done, at least I hope not. I have no idea what I'm going to do after those five posts. It won't be Hit Self-Destruct and it won't be a regular blog about video games, but after writing for this site every day of my life for almost two years, I now can't imagine ever not writing something, or not wanting an audience for it. This was so much fun to do, and thank you for that part. No more MTV jokes: if you were a Hit Self-Destruct reader that makes you a good friend of mine. I appreciate your attention and hope that you'll consider giving it again to whatever I come up with next.

Whenever that will be. I don't know what I'll do until then; I might play a video game. Or maybe I'll try something else.

Move Over Once

It should be to nobody's surprise that the Beatles are still extremely capable of making people very excited. At least, the concept of the Beatles. For instance, personally speaking, the cinematic trailer for The Beatles: Rock Band revealed at E3 last month was immediately more interesting and exciting than pretty much any other game displayed at the show.

The animated trailer, less than three minutes long, doesn't say anything new, but is so completely charming and evocative of the entire legacy of the Beatles. The source material that it draws upon is incredibly strong.

It immediately puts into perspective the Beatles' extraordinary cultural relevance and creative power, and Rock Band, wielding these, shames every other action game with a convoluted plot about Russian warlords. It's not really fair. It's almost like cheating outright. A video game about the music of the Beatles versus a sequel where you still mostly shoot people, but this time it has a "very dark story." How can the Beatles still not automatically trump everything else, unless you are a huge fan of cover systems or anime backflips?

The Beatles: Rock Band, because of, presumably, a multi-million dollar deal, is able to draw on a massive and important cultural cachet. Unlike every other game at E3 which seemed to reiterate upon the comparatively narrow history and inventions of video games.

This is all exciting, then, but also, for a couple of reasons, sad.

First of all, none of the above enthusiasm for The Beatles: Rock Band really has anything to do with the game in question. It's entirely in the presentation, and compared to the new Modern Warfare, Uncharted, Splinter Cell, whatever, The Beatles: Rock Band is going to be the less mechanically interesting of them all. The fictional layer is fascinating, but it's the same game that you have been playing for four years and buying five times a year.

The inverse credit arrangement -- first, 'The Beatles'; second, 'Rock Band' -- is probably a contractual stipulation, and historical precedent for loser acts like Green Day to argue for top billing when they get their own Guitar Hero game in 2015. (Steve McQueen dropped out of starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because he couldn't get credited first on the poster. Welcome to the future of video games.) But the positions are also accurate: the notion of a Rock Band game isn't as attractive as it used to be, and the Beatles are going to carry this game's weight.

And it's sad because all of this music is at least forty years old, and so to a certain extent the excitement is based on nostalgia. Which means either that the video game industry has yet to come up with anything on the same level as the Beatles -- probably true -- or that nothing in your own life is currently as exciting to you as the music that your parents listened to.

The E3 situation reminds me of the Beatles' last live appearance in 1969, the spontaneous rooftop concert in London, because the Beatles were so obviously cooler than anything else that was going on that day. They brought everything to a halt.

Except there was that one guy, the very proper British gentleman who says that, "this type of music is alright in its place, and it's quite enjoyable." That part is a completely transparent lie. "But I think it's a bit of an imposition to actually disrupt all of the business in this area." Then he either calls the police or is glad when they break up the party. And, you know, is the last live appearance of the Beatles worth less historically than whatever typing he had to do that day?

I can appreciate his point: deadlines don't go away just because someone is playing rock music pretty loud. The man's problem is stodginess rather than outright anhedonia, but if you can't get excited about the Beatles playing on a roof after not appearing live in years, what can you get excited about?

Imagine how much the sophisticated young sixties radicals on the street hated that guy. Also imagine him transplanted 40 years into the future onto the E3 show floor and besieged by game journalists who sneer at his conservatism and tell him go play M.U.L.E.

The Beatles' music is now the same age as that guy, but instead of being relegated to the past, it's part of the future. Rock Band is the future of how we experience music, haven't you heard? Or maybe it's not, and that's a hyperbolic dot-com era kind of claim unsubstantiated by the fact that not very much has really happened since Rock Band and Guitar Hero were invented.

If Rock Band is the future of music, what would that mean for the future? That kids' first exposure to rock music will be in the form of a Rock Band challenge, rather than on the Ed Sullivan show or in English dance halls or whatever? They're never going to experience an album as a complete entity, they're not going to be buying anything in a store, and they're not going to be able have songs stuck in their head without 3D guitar charts also scrolling down across their minds.

The cool mod kids who loved the Beatles in 1969 have become the old man who thinks that "this type of music is quite enjoyable in its place", and don't understand what a video game is, and resent how their grandchildren think of music. But regardless of whether Rock Band exists or not, teenagers still aren't going to be buying vinyl en masse -- or whatever a 40 year old's romantic conception of how music should be experienced it is. Everything will change anyway.

It might be too bad if kids who are capable of producing great music but no more than three chords get dissatisfied with actual guitar playing and give up. If Rock Band and Guitar Hero ever get to be satisfaction enough for would-be musicians, and they never produce any recorded material, that isn't a turn for the better. Of course, there's no evidence of that yet, and I guess we've got to wait at least another generation.

Things change. The primary relevance of the Beatles changed all the time. They've gone from being a teenage girl's wet dream to acid-tripping weirdos to a litigation factory and now to video game business leaders.

There are generational shifts in progress all the time, and only when we notice them does it make us uncomfortable. There were people for whom early, early, I Want To Hold Your Hand-era Beatles was something dangerous, and they wouldn't have wanted to surrender their experiential or moral ground, even though, in retrospect, it seems like the easiest thing in the world to let happen.

A generational shift makes your experiences obsolete and little more than a novelty to your children. I can't tell whether Rock Band is an important change or a change at all. But do you just go with it because you as a person in the 21st century would have told that British gentleman in 1969 the same thing? Because you would have told him not to call the police, and just live with it even if he isn't excited about it, since it's so obviously the right thing to do?

Who knows. That's what makes it so exciting, though, right? Or does it?

Prometheus Unlocked

For thirty seconds at the end of 2008 I considered putting together a list of my favourite games of that year. I found it difficult, however, to rank games by quality, because the titles I remembered the most fondly, or that produced the most personally affecting experience -- if either of those are an acceptable definition of "favourite" -- were not necessarily the games that I had enjoyed the most. The games I felt closest to that year were the ones that I had written about.

That could mean that it was a good game, or a mediocre one or something that didn't even come out that year. Neverwinter Nights 2, for example, fulfills the last two categories. Honestly, that clunky anachronism still means more to me than, say, World of Goo, a game that I like far better. 'Cause I wrote about Neverwinter Nights, and then, somehow, it feels like it's mine.

Having never been a professional game critic, I was never under the obligation to turn in a thousand uninspiring words about an uninspiring product. I never had to review a game that I didn't care a little about. The game might have even been okay, but for whatever reason, all you can ever do is limply summarise the kind of thing it was, and then agree that it's about as good as everyone said it is already. I think if I was a game journalist at this point in my life, I'd be the guy who walked into my editor's office a week after being assigned to review Infamous or Prototype (I only barely know the difference, but I can say with all confidence that whatever the difference is, it doesn't matter) and announce that there's no sparks between me and this game, I'm not feeling it creatively, and so I'm taking myself off the review. Fortunately that isn't my profession, because I would get fired so hard.

I only know what it's like to write about games that excite me, and for that reason, those are the games that stick around in memory. Some games are personally inspiring, an extremely unpredictable quality. There are some games, regardless of how much you like them on their own merits, that put a thought in your head. They make you think that you have the capacity to say something about them that has never been said. I can't underestimate how good that makes a person feel.

You like the ideas inherent in this game, you like its successes, or the potential that it implies in its failures. It makes you feel something new about video games. It doesn't matter how good a game it is, it can excite you in any case: about the medium and about discussing the medium. If you feel, truly, that you have something important to say, then you want to write it out regardless of whether you're being paid or whether anybody's reading it. Even if it's not important to some wider discourse, it's important to you, at least temporarily. Some games make you feel like that, and a handful made me feel like that over the last year. It's really something special, not least because you can't force it. You can't will inspiration into existence.

This brand of adrenaline can and often does manifest itself by a reviewer ripping a really terrible game to shreds in an entertaining, linkbait manner. That same enthusiasm can be more subtle, though, and I like it when it's more positive. Even a mediocre game can make you feel good about games in general, and make you feel good about things other than your ability to diminish someone else's work. You want, really, to talk about games in a way that feels like you're making a real contribution to a discussion less tangible than your review. You want what you write to be valuable, and there isn't the potential for that in every game that you play.

This is a weird relationship that develops between games and critics. It's a whole extra level on which to like a game. You get seriously sentimental about it. It's an extra echelon of appreciation, unlocked. I didn't know that I could feel this way.

The reverse of this is: are you only playing games looking for material to write about? They're more worthwhile if you can get that extra measure of enjoyment out of them. I.e., what are you going to do for me, video game? You'd better be more than just fun. You'd better be intellectually exhilarating on a very personal level, otherwise I'm wasting my time.

This is what four and a half years of writing about games for an audience has done to me, I think. What happened to just being able to play a video game like a normal person!

I can't simply "play video games" any more. I approach every game with a different, unusually eager perspective. In many ways, though, the feeling I get from writing about a video game is far better than the feeling I get from only playing it.

It ignites something in you, a sense of temporary purpose that makes you feel more talented and capable than usual. That's something special. It makes you -- the critic, the reviewer -- happy in a very self-centered and unsustainable kind of way that's completely at the expense of the game itself. It's a strange, egocentric relationship, but then again, what are these games meant for if not gratification? The joy of being driven to write about a game that everyone else finds unremarkable is what lifts that game out of mediocrity for you.

To this day, over a year after writing about it, I think back on Neverwinter Nights 2 with sincere and warm affection. Games like that, which I would consider mediocre and not appealing to me at all, still inspired me to say something, and that's where I found it meaningful. It was never fun for me on the terms that it proposed, but I genuinely engaged with it and am glad that I played it. It's a very condescending kind of compliment. I bet the developers can't wait to thank me.

The fact is, you develop a personal connection with games like that; the games that motivated you to write an impassioned editorial and post it on a section of the internet that you know nobody reads. The games you write about, you get inside them. You think about them so much more than anything else; you explore their strengths and their weaknesses because you care. You incorporate those games into your avocation and they become the stories that you covered.

The games you write about, the games you really cared about: they're really a part of you. This is why I can't rank games objectively anymore. Neverwinter Nights 2 is a part of my life. Neverwinter Nights 2 is part of my life? Get it out, please!

I can make jokes like that because, you know, I really do love it.