I’ll be real in saying when I started writing about videogames I’m not exactly sure what I expected.
No, no: now is the time I think it’s allowed that you can can kill me. I started off with working class stories about people in my life – but when everyone is dead, arrested, or doesn’t want you around, it’s hard to mine your own social circles for stories to tell to relate to strangers on the internet. Less so when the writer in question gets acquainted with people who seem to mostly be on steady ground. They have things figured out just about as much as I do, but they can offer more: places to go and ways to Get Out.

At my most delusional I’ll tell stories to myself about how Deep Hell can see something in videogames nobody else can. Nobody else except a discord full of genderqueers and the lost and lonely: I get to have a little bit of an imprint on all of them until I stop being willing to market the website at all. It feels wrong to put ourselves in the orbit of so many people that need so much. We’re about as terrible role-models as we are at planning community events or leaning on the people around ourselves.

A little network of gaming blogs that keep us around now. Increasingly as we choose real life and roofs and jobs that we can’t do the serious work that they do. In a hundred miles I’m the only person I’ve met so far like myself. Even on Deep-Hell, I feel a certain type of highly visible alone. I don’t know what to write about anymore, if I ever did in the first place. At some point I stopped looking at videogames to be less lonely, I stopped looking at fictions and placed to exist where I could find myself.

I confide in a friend that I’m tired. They tell me not to go anywhere unless they do. I tell them I’m not going anywhere. I don’t feel like going anywhere, but the world right now seems like it’s full of people who no longer know how to bear hearts for each other. There are so many *essays* and *information pipelines* to fall into. If I want to read about a thirty year old emo-scene and hear first hand what it was like to be there, I can. It’s not the same as going out and finding it, and it’s a lot more safe and close to the heart to do what I decide to do instead. It’s all out there if you want it I’m told.

Mining as much queer writing as I kind to come up with the kind of scream I want to put out into the world – all of this yelling about where I was ten years ago, a person I had to be, a box. I try to talk to these people that come to me for advice and I listen to music about not having been in a fight in years. Friends look out for me when I search the one bar I can for drinks. A steady stream of tourists who aren’t cool with how I look in their watering hole, and I think about Tumblr posts a friend of a friend heard about Nazi Bars. Well, here’s the thing: every bar is friendly if you’re spending money. I’ve been around long enough to see show-bar music space watering holes turn into the kind of places only aging musicians play so they can look into a crowd and see familiar places. Will I be up there soon? Will you?

Jumping into this, It’s weird to think of myself as a constantly peer-to-peer violence enthusiast. A lot of Deep Hell out there is a willingness to go to bat over stupid things. Once upon a time, I’d lay in bed saying a place like this was meant to be a megaphone for the voiceless. Well, so far, It’s turned into a megaphone for myself.

At a point in time I used writing to relate to other people. Grandstanding on my own personal accusations that I couldn’t feel complex emotions until I managed to put them down somewhere: well, maybe that’s true, It’s just the gulf between me and getting to know strangers now looks like almost ten years about deep thought over videogames. I still haven’t played Baroque, and it’s like some torture is happening in my heart that I can’t be true enough to myself.

It’s jealousy too, yeah, I’m small, I’m angry that other people practiced writing more and learned more then how to just hit a keyboard a few times in a row. I look back on other years of the website with fondness: god, our numbers were so fucking high. I got so many numbers out of my heart I didn’t know what to do with myself. After a certain respect, I’d get mad people said I ran a blog, that I got to do any more than the equivalent of sounding my thoughts off on strangers. Anxious and worrying that the big websites wouldn’t publish us – a psychotic ski-mask wearing tranny who at best thinks that *Lightning Returns* is worth a critical re-evaluation because of how a piece of clothing made us feel.

Fuck me. I try to bear my heart and soul and I can only tell the people close to me the videogames I think I should play. A heart and soul buried in art made by other people: I think videogames are art not because of what they’re made of, but because if someone really wants to there are about a dozen ways to disappear forever inside of them. Some people out there disappear so far they start making them, and when I talk to people like that in interviews I don’t feel like publishing the words they have to say. It’s all so personal and close to the heart like a deathbed. Nothing I can put a microphone and a sound clip in front of.

It’s tough to know them. My job doesn’t really exist, and I feel like a rube for admitting it, but I used to dream of being a travel writer. Getting to go placed and write about what I see and the people I meet there, a time-and-place world that can’t be visited even in mental tourism where a certain dollar amount could have carried me from week to week. I know artists that used to do it, holding together nuclear families under the threat of meltdown in a place where they love each-other but know that fantagraphics compedium of their work isn’t coming. Plugging away at little blogs and news groups trying to get stuff out there wherever it takes.

Is that why I’m jealous? Jealous I never was serious about all of this past a certain point: that I knew it was going to run into the kind of world where people practiced and made sure they got the art of the basic pitch down. I hoped people would listen and that after a certain point I might be self evident. Never learn anything and make it happen somehow still. If I got the number high enough, if I published enough words, there might be a future here.