What’s your dream job? is it, looking far afield and turning the infinite realities of your mindscape into toys for others to play with? Punching code in at a computer? Making conceptual art, dying in the woods? My dream job is to watch cartoons and drive around in a big van, sleeping with the doors open on a beach somewhere. Pulling a gun on strangers that ask me questions while my skin turns sandy and leathery in the sunlight. Telling them “There’s only one way out of this world-” before pulling the trigger. Empty shot and laughter: as soon as I figure out a way to market it to anything other than scum sucking hippies and west coast vagrants, I’ll let you know.

The dream job, like our videogames, is a way out of the world. A final choice we can make, a far off, distant planet to travel to. The dream job rests in the sigh of an office worker who wants to go home and strangle her husband in front of the kids. It’s the reality of gas-station franchise owners who go boating on weekends and don’t know who the president is today, but know who they’re going to vote for tomorrow. I like to think it’s the domain of youtube essays and blank stared content creators who ramble incoherently in interviews with adderall addicted college students about how there’s no life anymore, there’s just Content. Glass eyed and glazed over.

Kaile Hultner writes, at Noescape VG: Does games criticism need quality standards? That old ugly beast rears its head on the social media platforms and darkened discussion boards. It’s called formalism, a type of academic rot that is bloodier than any dog crawled out of a black pit deep behind the brain in that locked away place we call dreams. Three chants for the academy, the institution, the tradition. It’s a good joke how much of the world looks at home on a spreadsheet, and a better joke how spreadsheets look like getting good marks on term-paper homework at the big colleges. We go back to school, of course: living or crying over the cirled two to three digits in blank spaces on copy paper. Now delivered directly to the fever adrenaline of a working student who has bills to pay and people to fuck on top of it all. Are you getting good grades?

It seems more and more as housing becomes untenable and school becomes a cruel afterthought for a steady entrance into a collared and tied (but not in a fun way) workforce that can vote for or against genocide if they care about it, and products need to be sorted neatly into columns that are Good and that are Bad once again. Decades of review score discourse filtered down into gunpowder and metal and aimed squarely at the temple of the reader/customer. What’s that spell? What’s that spell?

Figure 1: SHOPPING MAUL

The game is a product, the game is a toy, and there are worlds and executive meeting branches catered to the fact that there should be toys for Girls and toys for Boys. This is still the fabric of reality I’ve got to work with. Cheesecloth dense enough only the oil on my skin can get through: my tastes are being wrung out, and so are Kaile Hultners, and so are the writers who have a 400% metric for videogames that are “disasters” and videogames that are “masterworks, all of them.” you can’t be mean to developers because they have hearts. Hearing someone put my creative efforts into a spreadsheet would make me go postal in a way they’d have to invent new words to describe how I’d make a besuitted finance executive scream over an intercom.

Don’t you want to enter the work force? Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to think about how the day needs to be spent?. There’s a new lifestyle page coming all of the time, and videogames are struggling to keep up.

My dream job? My dream job is meticulously sorting a spreadsheet back and forth, back and forth. There are numbers and associated meetings with words like “frictive” and “essential storytelling”. We will invent new courses of anguish to describe camera a shake and 3D spit splatter effects. These are words that can mean numbers, I swear to god: and I’ll swear to the audience next. You can be right about videogames, about movies. Follow the well forever until it gets so dark not even the flick of a lighter can register on the cave wall. This is a great way to live – and that’s a deep-hell.com promise.

Years and years ago, mined in the trenches of Critical-Distance.Com an ages old debate raced from the fingers of people like Ian Bogost and Frank Lantz. Snippets of it still exist in those white scribbled tablets of website design. What can still be read sums up both parts of the debate as clearly as it needs to be: there is a right way to name tradition, there is a right way to design a videogame and if people would listen they’d understand there’s a right fucking way to play a videogame. Videogames are not for animals, they’re Art made in the most civilized world to ever exist.

My dream job is writing feature pitches for The Atlantic. I can read a book and make up anything I want about it, put it out into the world and forget about it afterwards. This is good, honest work: it wont pay for a penthouse, but it may pay for a few dentist visits a year and a vacation to somewhere nice during the summer like Baton Rouge. I can walk through a comfortably sized city after a cocktail or two and think about the world I made for myself. If I’m lucky, I’ll find a man living out of a van who can put a gun in my mouth and….

Glossy pages of Videogame Magazines (do they still exist?) used to be a one way connection between Market Function and Players. The crystalized labor of a few toiling individuals being given a metric score: and after all, we love scores so much there’s still a burgeoning industry that exists to just keep track of what the papers say about the playability of a videogame. Do you enjoy the fives-out-of-seven? are you a freak, or were you just born looking like that?

My dream job? It’s so simple: my dream job is telling you what to do with your time. You clock thirty minutes.