The Games Industry Has a Cynicism Problem… And So Does Ollie Luddy | Winter Spectacular 2021

Do you remember where you were when you learnt what sarcasm was? I do. 

I was at the annual Halloween party of a family friend, I would have been six or seven. After trick or treating every year, we would come back to their place and hang out in what we dubbed The PlayStation room.

There was always a bit of an imbalance when we came to visit these friends. There were two siblings in the family; a brother, about the same age as my older brother, and a sister, about the same age as my older sister. They were lovely people but my age left me as the odd one out by default. As the youngest, (read: most gullible) I became the butt of some joke while the older brothers played Lego: Star Wars. It was at this point that someone in the room (I have no recollection as to who), said, in a snide tone that only 13-year-olds can muster, “I WAS BEING SARCASTIC”.

This is also the same place where I realised I loved video games watching Battlefront 2 for the first time.

I don’t think I needed the word explained to me once I heard it out loud. I had witnessed people say the opposite of what they meant before and the moment that word was uttered some neurons fired in my brain, making the connection. For the next two weeks I was unbearable to be around. Every question was answered with the most rhetorical of inflections and I am honestly surprised my parents had the patience not to kill me.

The same thing happened when I learnt what cynicism was. Only this phase didn’t just last for a fortnight, I was unbearable for about ten years. I was over everything. No one did nice things for the sake of altruism. Everything “actually kinda sucks when you think about it”. In short, I got really into politics and CinemaSins. Unbearable, right?

The first few hours of exploring Goodsprings is lowkey one of the best parts of any Fallout game.

Recently, Todd Howard claimed that Starfield will have two “step out into the world moments” and I along with much of games media rolled our eyes so hard that we glimpsed the inside of our skulls. You can hardly blame us, to be fair. It is a groan-worthy quote that preys on our collective nostalgia for those wandering out of the cave/clambering out of the vault moments so synonymous with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The problem is I’m not really nostalgic for that moment anymore. We’ve all played through the intro of Fallout 3 or games aping that open world, branching narrative quest-athon so many times that when I think of those moments my first thought can’t help but be “been there, done that.”

But maybe we shouldn’t. 

The last few years have been tough. Really tough. Both for the world and me personally. I‘ve been through more pain in the last four years than I thought imaginable five years ago, and that’s before I reflect on the current state of the world now compared to 2016. In many ways, I have become some bit disillusioned with games and gaming. What was once a vibrant escape has become a somewhat numbing balm I try to use when I can scrape together the time and the energy to try to flee the crushing realities of 2021.

Listen, I am not going to single any one franchise out for encapsulating the dull, gritty, cynical era of games but…

I think the time I got into video games as a hobby, rather than just a passing interest, didn’t help. The early to mid-2010s was a time when much of games crit and discourse was realising just how grey and drab the PS3 and 360 catalogues really were, while games media was just escaping its embarrassing attitude era full of flashy publisher events and reviews dripping with snark and ignorance about the difficulties of development.

I spent a lot of 2011 and 2012 playing Skyrim - I know we all did that, but I definitely spent far too much time playing, you know?. We’d just gotten a PS3 that year and most of the games I played on it were what my brother had been told was good by his friends and not Call of Duty (my parents were very adamant about that). While Skyrim and then Fallout 3, and then New Vegas enraptured me for those two years, I distinctly remember that by the time I was starting secondary school (which would have been 2013), I was certain in my belief that “Skyrim kinda sucked when you really think about it”. 

Pictured: The exact moment everyone gets to and decides to create the exact same character again, instead of finally doing that mage build they have been meaning to run for 10 years.

startmenu received a code for Skyrim: Anniversary Edition the other week, and while I was somewhat excited to revisit that far away land for the first time in a decade, I was really excepting much more than a fun nostalgia trip. That is also why I have been struggling to write a review for this game: it’s Skyrim… again, they added a fishing minigame, gave you some free Creator Club mods and added that damn horse armour “for free”. How do you rate that product? “You have played Skyrim, you know what that entails” out of 10. Does that help?

So instead let this be my review:

After I survived that dragon attack after nearly getting my head lopped off, after creating my character in the updated visage of my PS3 orc, after that damn Stormcloak woke me up on the cart on the way to the keep. After all that, I ventured out of that cave, was blinded by the light of the sun and I had that moment. God dammit Todd, ten year later I had that moment. The possibilities of unhad adventures across Skyrim - no, Tamriel. They spread out in front of me into the infinite horizon. Conversations to be had, caves to be explored, companions to be met, items to be hoarded, snow peaks to be glitched up - they were all within my grasp.

And for the briefest of moments a game made me feel a way that I hadn’t in a long time. Anything in the world is possible and it most definitely does not suck if you really think about it.

Fuck.