Editor's Note, 12/5

Here it is, in all of its glory: the last Recess issue of 2013. More specifically, here on this page, you are reading the last editor’s note of the calendar year. With the semester wrapping up in a reliably frantic delirium, I wanted to spare myself the aggravation of wracking my already melted headspace for topic ideas. Rather than muse on the gendering of campus art spaces, I will indulge in a subject that has come easily to me in conversations with friends over the last few weeks: video games.

A video game can be an extremely social form of entertainment. I grew up on Gamecube and PlayStation, developing inside jokes with my older brother as we shrieked about blue shells in Mario Kart: Double Dash!! Last semester, Wii in my friend’s Kilgo dorm was an institution—everyone had a preferred stage and character for Brawl. My brother even keeps in touch with his old college roommates through Call of Duty, or Halo, or whatever. But here I want to evoke the video games that are played alone, the single-player RPGs that take hours and hours, the Animal Crossing before friend codes made outside interactions possible. (And the single-player games still have that social aspect to them if you want, with all the forums and fan art and spin-off writing associated with online fandom communities.)

Imagine the type of character development that can take place when you’re clocking in at 50 total hours of solo gameplay. As with novels or television dramas, a video game can, depending on your level of skill and distribution of free time, take weeks to “beat.” There’s the recognizable element of escapism, but no other storytelling medium has the same level of dynamic engagement.

During Mental Floss co-founder and Duke alum Will Pearson’s visit to my magazine journalism class, he explained the challenge of providing quick, grabbing content in an increasingly digital field. The website of the magazine is full of shareable one-shot facts. "The age of the 30-minute captive audience is dwindling,” said Pearson. A favorite Onion article of mine skewers those who expect anyone to actually watch an entire eight-minute video. Last month, I had a window on my laptop open to a 48-minute documentary about the 1996 Boone, N.C. punk scene for a week before I finally made my way through it. Sometimes narratives take our undivided attention, even if it is split over a longer period than the narrator intends.

When I waste a few hours online, like when I procrastinated from writing this note, it is a disjointed process, fragmented among many sites. I have 10 tabs open right now, and that feels like a relative norm. Even within the confines of one social network, I’m curating a feed that pulls from dozens of different sources with each refresh. It is a constant process of sifting and scrolling. Like/comment/share that content, lest ye fall behind.

So single-player video games fall entirely outside of that. A team of game developers has sole creative control over your entertainment experience. For years, they meticulously craft a game to a vast extent until you come into the picture and make it interactive. You have total agency in an aesthetically thrilling world. You engage with the plot actively, you make choices and customize your experience, you are personally responsible for moving this thing along. You can take your time with the side quests, savoring the complexity of color and texture and design along the way, or you can go as fast as possible through the storyline. People who write off video games as a waste of time are missing out on a medium with unparalleled potential for narrative expression and the construction of alternate worlds.

But, as I said, this conversation comes easily with friends. Sometimes I start rambling, and I get flustered and flushed. I begin to realize what I must sound like, and I laugh too hard to get the next point out. The conversation inevitably devolves (or ascends) to a laughter-ridden nostalgia binge with a Wind Waker soundtrack. It is cheesy and dorky and fun, but this is a medium that warrants the same composed dialogue and critical thought as long-form journalism or the Great American Novel.