by Kim Seung-il
Translated from the original Korean to English.
My friend and I, we don't like to exercise. We like to smoke. But we always vow to quit smoking and start exercising. We must live long lives. One day there will be a gaming device that you can plug your nerves directly into. We must play VR MMORPGs with that device. At least, we have to live long enough to see this device appear.
My favorite game is a game that I haven't played yet. My favorite work of literature, too, is a work I have not read yet. I think that is why I became a poet. So that I can personally make that which does not exist yet. Recently I started a game-making club. The three of us have agreed to spend 10 years envisioning a game. It's not that we have to have a game made in 10 years. It could take 10 years more. It wouldn't be bad to keep prolonging it like that. "Vaporwave Project" was the initial name of our club, but since we might actually make a game one day, we decided on the name "Unmade." To start, we decided that we would write a book about the game we planned to make.
It's nice to love something that hasn't been made, but it's also good to write about something that has been created. I love writings about games. My favorite pieces about games are those that kill games. They kill games and turn them into something that doesn't exist.
I don't really watch game broadcasts. This is because game broadcasts do not kill games. Lots of viewers watch broadcasts (videos, livestreams, etc) instead of playing games. To them, it's another way of enjoying games. Writings about games are not much different. When I read strategy, criticism, and essays about games I haven't played, I always felt like I wanted to play the game myself. But strangely enough, the more interesting a piece about a game was, I think I was less inclined to buy the game.
Of course, the fun of a game is that you can make choices yourself. That's why viewers occasionally buy games. But somebody who has watched 100 hours of a game that takes 100 hours to clear is not so likely to buy the game to spend another 100 hours playing it. I don't think that game broadcasts kill games, however. This is the medium that conveys what games are most clearly and vividly. While there may be different variables in your own playthrough, if you play a game after having watched a video about it, you will still be able to encounter the same game.
The problem is with writing about games. Writing cannot convey the game as vividly. Most game essays are about online games that are no longer serviced. In fact, the piece that I originally intended on writing was about the friends I met on a game called "ArcheAge."
Poets are known to kill memories. When you recount a fond memory, it becomes a simpler thing than what it actually was. Sometimes it becomes more beautiful. Anyway, once you bring a memory into words, it becomes something irreversible. The same goes for writing about games. When somebody writes about something that happened in a game, this person loses that game forever. And the same thing happens to readers of that writing. Once you read about a game, it no longer becomes possible to play that game.
Strangely enough, this phenomenon happens both when you read or write game critique. Of course, critique of literature or film can also kill both mediums. But most of the time, whether reading a non-criticism or severe critique or wise analysis, critique of literature or film tends to make me want to actually read or watch the work. I get the feeling that it will be different if I experience it myself, even if it is a work that has been killed by criticism. Upon experiencing it myself, I might fall more deeply in love with it or find it hilariously worse than I expected. When it comes to other art mediums, the critique of a work always makes me want to engage with the work myself. However with games, and especially when it comes to very interesting critiques of games, I am somehow not motivated to engage with the source in the same way.
While I am reading an interesting piece of game criticism, I want to experience the game's rules, story, and world for myself. But once I'm done reading, I find out that the game that this piece is describing does not exist in this world. The marvel that the writer has for this game's systems is one that cannot be mine. This is because I love writings about games more than I love games.
To be more exact: Literature, film, and fine art are works of art that convey what someone has already experienced and interpreted about the world. Criticism or essay about this work can be seen as a filtering of the original author's already filtered world. Two filters. But games, what can I say, they feel a bit different. Even though games are created by this same filtering of the world, it is also its own world. Therefore when someone writes about an experience in this game-world, whether in the form of criticism or essay or other derivative work, it is closer to being a work of literature.
People often also treat works of literature as its own world. They're not wrong. But I think that even the simplest game is more essentially a world than a work of literature. Literature contains rules, but games are its rules. If somebody were to write a poem that lists only rules, it would in fact be a game, no matter how much they insist that it's a poem. Even if poetry is a genre that insists that things that aren't poetry are poetry. Even if writing is the act of creating form (rules) using language, I can't help but think that literature is a sub genre of games as a medium. We make rules within rules. But games are rules. A single game is a single world. And I think that I love literature more than I love games.
To like something is different from loving something. I like games more than literature. Games are always better than literature. It is more abundant in the fun it provides, and it's prettier. I have created more fond memories playing games than reading books. But if I had to pick between games and literature, if someone pulled a gun on me and asked me if I wanted to be a game-maker or poet, I would probably choose to be a poet. I love literature, and it's because it is pathetic.
When playing a game, I feel like I can do anything. In playing games I sometimes overcome my humanity. But I cannot do this when writing or reading literature. Even if an author becomes a god within a work of literature, I am only assuming that the author is acting in a godlike way, I don't actually think that they have become a god. Literature is a medium that imagines the pain of others. But games of the future will, in a scientific way, give you the opportunity to accept the pain of another as your own, to enter a game and lose your self totally in becoming another person. However literature will never be able to do this. If literature were able to do that it would no longer be literature.
I write and read poems in order to face my own limitations. But in a game, I am always prepared to surpass these limits.
Games writing is that which has been written by people who have gone to a game and come back. I love, though I don't like, the reality that people face after returning from a game. When they exaggerate, or make a big deal out of, something that happened in a game. When they confess that a certain game helped them make it through reality. When they describe what a game is, what a great medium games are. When they make a case for what great philosophical insights there are to be gained from the pleasure or mindless violence of video games (such as that there is nothing above pleasure).
I am filled with the loss of not being able to feel what they feel. I am envious that the ecstasy or disgust that they feel cannot be mine. And then it begins to feel like what they are saying is all made up. I have, in fact, read about a game and then picked up that game to play it. It was an impressive game to be sure. To be sure, it was a garbage game. But there was nothing of what they wrote about inside the game. In games I could find things that I saw on game broadcasts, but I could not find that which had been written about.
I think of 2006. I went on a trip to Australia and stayed for more than 30 days. I didn't leave my backpacker hotel. Instead I stayed inside and read the "Lonely Planet" travel guide. When I went to the restuarants or tourist spots that it recommended, I could not find that taste which people had written about. Not the temperature, or the humidity, or the atmosphere either. The Australia that they went to existed only in a book. In Australia I spent my days in bed, imagining their Australia, weaning off a hangover.
When I was younger, I had no money to buy games, so I read game magazines instead. I read the supplementary Silent Hill 2 strategy guide so much, I still remember all of the ending scenarios. That game was in Japanese, so at the time, kids like me couldn't play the game without the strategy guide. We moved our characters and bought the right items in accordance with the guide. I loved a review that a game journalist had written on the strategy guide. I tried to get mad where they got mad, to be awed by the moments they said they were awed by. In a scene where the heroine dies, where I was actually not sad at all, I tried to cry just because the journalist had cried there. The person who wrote about the game was not inside the game. I was always unable to accept that. Then again, it was also not possible to find them completely within the strategy guide. They would never describe why exactly they cried, what they were so awestruck by.
It seems that when you speak of a world using words, it becomes impossible to go to that world. Therefore one must never write about games. A piece of writing about games is one that creates a world that can never be entered. When recommending a game, one must only mention the name of the game. Actually, even that is dangerous. It is impossible to go to a world that is imagined from a title.
One must never write. However we continue to write about the world. We continue to do the work of killing the worlds we have come from so that nobody, not even we, can return to them. So readers of writings about games are faced with a conundrum. In Borges's novels, the vanishing point which contains the entire world, the library of Babel, the garden which extends infinitely into two roads, these are worlds and imaginary subjects that he felt but had never gone to. But the worlds within games writing are worlds that definitely exist and can be purchased and experienced, if so desired.
But I will no longer by fooled. I no longer believe in worlds that I first meet through writing. Writings about games have made me untrusting. To love without any trust—what romance!