Control
I first played this when Epic released it on their PC store, and I played it again for a Dark Acre livestream, but I only continued in earnest in October of 2024. —Ed.
Video games have always been a fascinating endeavor for me. From the time I first played a stand-up version of Asteroids sometime in the early 80’s; to my abandoning a lucrative career as an English teacher in Tokyo, Japan to attend game design school; to my tenure as an indie game developer; all the way up to tonight, when the credits rolled on Remedy’s Control. I’ve had a life-long love affair with adventuring through an untold number of virtual worlds. And now, as I approach my fiftieth year, I want to chill out.
This doesn’t have anything to do with Control. The game’s great. If you haven’t played it, and enjoy cinematic, story-driven, third-person experiences, you’ll find a lot to love. If you enjoy esoteric weirdness, this game is a waking wet dream.
It’s just that I was looking at the activities I’ve chosen to chronicle here on the website: reading, playing, and watching—never mind the languishing writing, music, photography, and game development—and I realized that everything aside from reading has recently felt like a waste of time.
Reading could be, too. It depends on the content. I’ve chosen a lot of meaningful books to read as of late. I’ve not once come away from a session with a novel and felt that I’d lost anything. But from the hours spent with a controller in my hands, or eyes languid as they consume yet another director’s vision in the form of a television show or movie? I turn the screen off and think, “That time would have been better spent exercising my imagination on literature.”
Video games are great. Amazing, even, if that word still has any meaning. Movies, too. Comic books, pulp novels, you name it. It’s all got its time and place. And I’m thinking those aren’t resources I have in long supply.
I’ll finish the demo of Metaphor: ReFantazio and clean up the remnants of the current Watching list. Once that’s done, it’ll be books-only for a while.
I want to see what that does to my brain.
2019.08.27 – 2024.10.07