Advertising doesn’t seem to end now: The videogames I play or the movies I watch extend out from the media that they’re captured on. They become Forever topics of conversation.

“Did you think about this [Probably Marvel Movie Thing] or did you see [X Trailer Revealed at E3]”

The most harmful part of it? The conversation doesn’t end, either. Everywhere you go – people are trying to talk to you about the Latest Thing. It doesn’t seem to matter what it is. The draw of pop culture is a tight one. A claw that squeezes the life out of everything in its grasp.

I sweat nervously when people ask me if I’ve seen It. As if there were some large shadow hunch-backed standing in the corner of my bedroom. Maybe it’s that greasy thing I feel slip fingers under my skin late at night. Commercials give me nightmares.

Maybe all of this sweat and anxiety is earned because I decided not to watch Game of Thrones. More likely, it has something to do with the slow way I expect the world to be delivered to me. It may sound funny, but in the days of strange print-media and videogames that ended when you turned the console off, this didn’t get to me nearly as much.

I call it the Great Fear of Not Participating. It’s different from Fear of Missing Out. I’m not afraid I’m going to miss out on anything. I know that playing Halo 5 or The Witcher III or Skyrim or, or, or, isn’t going to enrich my life at all. I’m afraid that when the ugly specter of conversation rears its head, I wont have anything to talk about that the people I surround myself with will.

What a silly fear to have. People are dying elsewhere in the world. Yet, every year it feels a little like going deeper. Every new E3 and videogame trailer feels like another mark on the wheel of things you have to know. I barely played Sekiro and I feel like that was enough to Get It. What scares me isn’t that, because I know that’s definitely a game that ends when the disc isn’t in the drive.

What scares me is the way I see people get all bottled up and consumed by the things that are being sold to them. If there’s an example of a way videogames are art, one that’s absolutely true – it’s probably that commercialism hit videogames the same way it did after Warhol’s life shuffled off of this mortal coil.

Videogames have to sell. I got sick sometime during an E3 press conference this year where the crowd’s raucous response stayed the same for franchise reveals and the smallest of statements. Is that different from previous years? Probably not. Maybe it’s the Social Media Engagement. The promise that I can probably play whatever new videogame on Twitter. Perhaps it’s knowing that videogames, desperate for the attention in conversation movies get, replace good voice actors with performances from bored “real actors”. It’s probably all of it – let me say it again, it’s probably all of it.

Videogames. Have. To. Sell. Maybe everything does now – all of the time. We all have to be engaged.
I didn’t watch the E3 2019 press conferences unless someone else was making jokes about them. Most of what I saw came in the few snippets of what I cared about that I could stand.

Everything coming out feels like it’s tailored specifically for me. A Watch Dogs game where you can be whoever you want, and I really mean whoever? Shinji Mikami is making what looks like a neo-noir urban fantasy horror game? Look me in the eye, but your hand on my shoulder and say “hey”.

We’re going to be getting sold to every day. That’s just life now. Through steam sales, console subscriptions, online platforms, google stadia. Someone else will write this article next year, and that list will probably be twice as long.

Everyone is going to be talking about it. No one will probably shut up about it. People will ask your opinion on things and expect you to have an answer about the things they’re excited about. That terrible anxiety will bubble up from your stomach and make you force out an answer. It better not be “I don’t know.”

That’s the fear now – that the conversation is going to happen without us if we don’t choose to buy into it. You’ve gotta play Apex Legends or use Twitch or hey have you seen that new show on Netflix?

Publishers are aware of it. They’ve gotta be, because the marketing starts two years before anything has actually been made and doesn’t’ stop until two years after the sequel is announced. Social media, play it on your phone. Be talking about it all the time – make sure you buy the extra characters.

How are we gonna keep playing Videogames when all of them want not just our attention, but our entire lives if they can get it?