Pacin and thankin of robbin a bank with the homies I hang with
Why I haven't been streaming God of War: Ragnarok
Part of me wishes I could explain my absence with “sorry, I was busy working to build a media empire” or “I was doing the Lord’s work, volunteering to prepare asylum applications for refugees” or even the usual “I had a book to write.” But the truth of the matter is that any and all responsibilities I had were boxed up and left on the table by my record player because I was playing God of War: Ragnarok.1
There was a bit of a hiatus, though. I’d started the game last November. Fought a bear and purchased a skill on the 9th, upgraded a piece of armor on the 11th. Then the next trophy doesn’t pop up until Jan. 12. Equipped an enchantment.2
I think I’ve spoken before about how my gaming habits have changed—my identity shifting from Mister Melee (Ghosts of Tsushima, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey) to the Ranged Rover (Far Cry 6, Horizon Forbidden West); seeking out difficulty (Elden Ring) rather than sneaking past it (The Last of Us, Pts. 1 & 2). But perhaps the biggest new tension I’ve experienced over the years (since 2019, really) has been the completionist impulse. The same impellent that had me reading every book in a trilogy or watching all 5 seasons of a TV show has sneaked into my gaming. Which is dangerous because games these days can be gargantuan undertakings. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the shortest of FromSoftware’s games, but (accounting for the year-long break between my 1st and 2nd playthroughs) putting that first Platinum trophy on my mantlepiece was a months-long endeavor. I will never 100% an Assassin’s Creed game because there is simply too much to do. Similarly with the Grand Theft Auto series. The idea of 100%’ing a game like San Andreas has me in cold sweats. Fighting games these days require so much online play that my latent misanthropy has overcome my desire for achievement.3 I have no desire to return to that 2018 God of War, even to battle Sigrun. But a post-Sekiro, post-Elden Ring Me is dangerous for a game like Ragnarok. I’d 100%’d previous games, tasted that forbidden fruit. And, in the process, I’d acquired a taste for punishing boss fights as well. You’re telling me Ragnarok has both? Say. Less.
So this explains (more or less) why I played Ragnarok, but less so why I didn’t stream my gameplay. I streamed my final Sekiro run, my passionate affair with Sifu, and, perhaps most famously, my run through the gamut of human emotions with Elden Ring.
So why not do the same with a game tailor-made for the experience?
There’s a part of me that, in this age of permanent and overwhelming connection, wants to retain a private experience. Or, at least, some of the privacy of an experience. Particularly an artistic experience.
Brandon Taylor wrote brilliantly about what to me reads as the seedy underbelly of our public preference-sharing over at sweater weather:
In short, the Spotify Wrapped takes the seemingly random, personal course you take through the universe and reflects it back to you, articulating something about who you are and what you feel and what you value. It renders visible the seemingly invisible elements ot your personality and life. It seems to say that in the deep disordered chaos of arbitrary human experience, there is some order to it, and that order is your personality, some immutable, mysterious facet of personhood that governs who and what you are. Every Spotify Wrapped is a manifestation of this order, an argument that there exists an order out there.
And later in the same essay:
It does more than remember, too, it offers you a record of this time and uses it to say something about you. Here are your Good Works. In easily shareable format that can be exported to both Instagram and Twitter. It’s this element of sharing that makes for an even more interesting business. Because it would be one thing to get your Wrapped and simply sit with the fact that you’ve played the cast recording of A Strange Loop more times than you might otherwise want to admit publicly (it’s really good though). But no, it must be shared. Look at who I am as evidenced by my preferences. Here, look, my personality has been transmuted into colorful graphics that will tell you something about me and my taste and my taste will mark me out in some particular way.
Now, my posting about Ragnarok on Instagram or writing about it here would seem to sabotage the quest I’m on, but success for me sits in the fact that there are moments of that playthrough—wondrous, painful, effulgent moments—that will only replay behind my eyelids when I sleep. My hippocampus is the only place where they’ve been recorded. So much of what I witnessed, what I participated in, effervescent in a way much more characteristic of an earlier, almost Paleolithic analog age. Those days when missing an episode of television when it aired meant you just never saw it unless it reappeared as a rerun somewhere else where the show might’ve been licensed. An age when all you knew of a movie before seeing it was the trailer that played before another movie you saw. An age when curating the audience you raved about a thing to was much, much easier. Was the norm.4
It’s not that I was worried about coaching from the chat5 or that I wanted to avoid naysayers6. And not (entirely) that I didn't want this beautiful thing to be reduced to memes and irony and unserious-ness. Rather, it's that inner voice that discourages me from joining an increasingly cacophonous public arena where I can't learn at my own pace. Learn boss strategies, learn about the process of making a game, learn story points, learn about the ways source material can be transmogrified into a transcendent narrative experience. But there is also something more primal in it, what from another angle may seem like true-blue misanthropy.
I’m not tryin’ to have a conversation about every little thing. And even less so with people I don’t know.
Now that’s a somewhat harsh way of putting it, but rather than lament that everything has been turned into soil fertilized for a discourse, I find the less selfish thing to do is pull my own curtains around me.
Many, many times during this game, I was moved to tears. A turn in the narrative where my jaw drops, another where my heart follows, and another after that where my heart soars. The game is also gorgeous. One of those things you look at and go, “well, they used every tool in the toolbox in service of this; all of humanity’s technological achievement was aimed and pointed at this thing I’m looking at/hearing/playing through right now.” The way the fur of a giant wolf ripples, the glow emanating from beneath the skin of a giant’s face, the panoply of meaning in a particular Kratos grunt. The acting was superlative, the music was a triumph, the combat system magical. It was fun, even as trying to open some of those damn Nornir chests drove me to the precipice of madness. And keeping the specifics of that experience to myself brings me back to an earlier time.
The difference between going to an art exhibit and telling Twitter and going to an art exhibit with someone beloved is the difference between 480p and 4K HD.
Truth of it all is I miss that more private, more personally curated experience of art, of culture. How I would have to sit with the way a particular line delivery in a movie reminds me of a birthday night spent with a friend who’s no longer alive. How a particular Chevelle album brings me back to a gilded moment in high school. How seeing and hearing all the John Wick references in Keanu filled me with elation. How Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa drives the thematic engines of every novel I’ve published. And how it all would inform not just how I wrote or how I made my own art but how I lived my life. Would inform how I learned and spoke other languages, would inform how I flirted, how I loved, would inform how I went about the business of being a brother, son and, maybe, someday, insh’allah, a father.
Some TikToks, I share on Instagram. Most, I text to a person who I know I will enjoy sharing the experience with.7
There’s another side to it all, too. Call it the Anxiety of Influence.
Most of the reasons I’m as online as I am have to do with me. But some of them have to do with the people who pay me. And I suspect it’s this way for a not-insignificant number of people who create. Publishers try to get you to post TikToks, record labels and gallery owners and streamers and whatever push you to post on Instagram, newspapers and magazines nudge you onto Twitter where you can cultivate both sources and influence. And all of it so you can “grow your audience,” which is shorthand for sending your flock to that glowing “Add to Cart” button.
So the consumer worries, in a dark instant, if loving a thing and not telling the world about it is keeping food out of a person’s mouth. Word of mouth as business model. Word of mouth as contractual obligation.
I’m sure there’s a name for the economic concept of shifting this labor of promotion from factory to factory-worker and another still for shifting that labor of promotion from factory to consumer. But MicroEcon was my worst grade in college.
Now, it’s not always like this. Netflix has gone to great pains to tell you that Wednesday is happening.8 And, well, for a while it was tough for a lot of us not to know what American Dirt was.9 But for a lot of the rest, it's a matter of hoping and praying not just that enough people consume your thing to financially justify a decision to allow you to keep making your thing but that, for whatever other reason, the factory-owners let you continue to keep making your thing. We can't all be Breaking Bad season 5. Most of us are Breaking Bad season 1. Or, rather, most of us are lucky to be even that.
So for a very loud time, I raved online about the things I loved in the hopes that enough people would love them too, so that the people making those things I loved would continue to be able to make them. The thing about talking online is that people talk back and, for some, that thrills. We did, after all, flock to early Internet to make fan-pages for the anime and musicians we loved. But I find I rather enjoy going to the movies alone. I find I rather like being surprised by a thing. I find I rather like letting that thing do its quiet, alchemic work on my insides without the footnotes of other people’s opinions. Let the result of the thing, of having seen or heard or played the thing, show in my hands. In my eyes. In the things I write. In the things I make.
There is a coda to all of this. Because this has all gotten very serious and deep very quickly.
One final reason I didn’t stream GOW Ragnarok, which I confessed to a dear friend and which I’m now confessing to you all, is that I’m not a very good gamer. I’m more a persistent gamer. I fought Malenia toward the end of a game on which I’d ultimately logged over 116 hours. And I fought the final hidden boss in Ragnarok at the end of an 84-hour playthrough. I didn’t figure out what a Realm Shift was, that I was capable of doing it, and how until after I’d finished the story and I managed once during a fraught, doomed Berserker battle to do it by accident.10 I died too many times to count and often quite stupidly. And some of the heartbreak of those almost-victories I want to keep to myself not because of any of the above about the pitfalls of experience-sharing but because they are quite, quite embarrassing.11
“But you died a ton in Elden Ring!” exclaimed my dear friend.
“You’re supposed to die a lot in Elden Ring.”
He shook his head at me.
I recorded the battle for posterity’s sake. Occasionally, with boss fights, I’ll hop on YouTube and watch people do Damageless or Level 1 runs (or Level 1 Damageless runs) and glut myself on all that Competence Porn and usually I will discover (often, after the fact) a strategy or one specific move that might’ve made my life a lot easier or even a little. Between all the perfect parries and the liberal use of Realm Shifts, there’s something in there that I might’ve managed to do to stem some of the carnage in those losses, something even I with my oft under-leveled self might’ve been capable of.
But now, watching other people fight that hidden post-game boss in Ragnarok, I see there’s one thing I did that many others (even a few in those Damageless runs) didn’t do. Something I figured out on my own, something I managed to do with regularity and that aided me greatly in finally beating them.12 What was it?
I think I’ll keep it to myself.
Currently reading: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West
Currently listening: ODIUM - lxst cxntury, Kingpin Skinny Pimp
Hereafter shortened to GOW Ragnarok or, more simply, Ragnarok.
To be fair (to myself), I did write a novel in November. However, there’s still no excuse for a GOW-less December.
Perhaps the most insidious feature of the evolution of fighting games is the In-Game Purchase. Back in my day, you unlocked secret characters by beating the game under specific conditions, none of which involved pulling your credit card out of your wallet.
Lest I be misunderstood, I’m not saying I miss MapQuest. I do miss not having to Bullet Dodge spoilers for however long it takes before I finally see a thing.
Playing Elden Ring, I was so grateful for the chat. Because BOY did I need tips, tricks, any advantage I could muster against Maliketh. Also, the encouragement. That mattered maybe more than anything.
Drowned out by the chorus of praise the game has received, of course.
This has the added benefit of keeping my algorithm incredibly well tailored to me. Years of work (by me) have gone into making my For You page that combination of hilarious/enlightening/dazzling/unmentionable unique to the Venn Diagram of interests and fascinations and preoccupations that is me.
Even at the expense of other shows like the emotionally scopic and beautifully specific Mo.
I apologize for reopening the wound, but mans has a point to make.
It was wasted. The boss was already in the air where I couldn’t reach them. And it hadn’t occurred to me to use my spear throw. Am I dumb on purpose? Find out on the next episode of Dragonball Z.
I once had [SPOILER] within one hit of beating them. There was no color in their health bar. And when they prepared their blue ring attack, instead of stunning them with a shield strike, I thought I could sneak in a heavy attack. They ate that shit like a croissant. I had to go for a walk. Related: I’m not good at puzzles. Ragnarok has a LOT of puzzles.
Use of gender-neutral pronoun intentional, as I’m loathe to spoil the identity of this boss.