Sunday 23 March 2014

An update on NWAP


By Owen Jones (Writer of Words)



Sometimes I like to imagine that someone actually pays attention to my musings on No Work, All Play. I’d like to think that somewhere, someone is wondering why I never followed up my promises to review mods (mainly Amnesia Custom Stories) on a regular basis, but I know they don’t. So I wrote this article, because I like pretending.
 Perhaps I’m simply trying to justify myself, after all I’m the one who loses out by not posting reviews. I don’t suppose it really matters why I’m writing this, only that I am writing this, and that we have a lot to talk about, you and me.

  I don’t know who you are or where you come from; hell I don’t even know if anyone is reading this. I might know you, I might never even recognise you exist, and yet here we are, discussing games reviews. I’m writing this in the present (or at least my present) and you’re reading this in the present (or your present). Though this present will be gone and perhaps even forgotten by the time you read this it’s still as real as your present. In a way this is breaking down the boundaries between our presents (not the woolly socks type) and allowing just a small amount of my ideas and opinions to be transferred to you. These ideas and opinions will change, more to the point I’ll change, but in a way a record of this me (the present me) will still exist and can communicate with someone (more specifically, you) across the gulf of time and space, as pretentious as that seems. And that’s amazing, even if it is about something as mundane as the ‘present’ me’s laziness.
Look, my point is writing is amazing. Stephen King (to whom No Work, All Play owes our title) once described writing as telepathy, and yeah, that’s pretty accurate. The truth is it doesn’t matter what I think about gaming (or any subject, really). The very fact that we’re communicating in itself is amazing, and that’s reason enough to do it. As I’m sure I’ve made clear I find this is amazing, and I love writing. Which is why I feel bad about not having posted anything in a while. Which is why I’m writing these very words.

 And I also love videogames. Sure, they’re narratively imperfect and have a long way to go before they can compete with mediums like literature or even films, but that’s what’s going on right now. Video games are still a relatively new medium, and are still developing and finding their voice, and that’s something that can’t be seen in any other medium. Only now are games starting to push the boundaries of what makes a ‘videogame’ and realise their full potential as a form of interactive media, and I find that fascinating. I want to be a part of that development, even if it’s by doing something as small as writing my thoughts about why videogames deserve to be talked about. Which, you’ll note, is what I’m doing right now.

So why haven’t I posted anything in a while? There are a whole load of excuses for me to choose from, but what good would that do us? Let’s just put it this way, time continued its procession and I failed to keep up, resulting in a lot of things that I wanted to do ended up not getting done. Like this blog for instance.
And now I have to make sure that I do post stuff regularly, or I’ll end up feeling bad and slightly disappointed with myself. Sure, I could say that I’m busy and have exams coming up and I’ll start writing stuff more regularly later, but then I run the risk of never actually doing it. And you know what they say, there’s no time like the present, even if all time is a present (just not this present).

And this also gives me an opportunity to explain how my posts will differ in the future. There’s no point in me posting traditional reviews, because whether you buy/play a game shouldn’t be determined by what some bloke on the internet said. Besides, I can’t tell you whether you’ll like something or not, I can only say whether I liked something or not. I can say what a game did well and what it didn’t do well, but at the end of the day it’s how you personally react to the game that matters. So instead I’ll be concentrating on just giving my thoughts on games, whether that’s my opinion or interpretation on a particular game or on games in general. And I’ll try to concentrate on the more obscure stuff, stuff that won’t get as much coverage elsewhere around the internet.

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this post, and I’m still not too sure where I did go. Still, I felt that I needed to let the world what was going on with NWAP, even if the world wasn’t listening. So thanks for reading all of that, you really didn’t have to. But hey, seeing that you’ve made this far you might as well stick around for a while. You never know, you may well find it to be worth your while after all...

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