Ryan Geddes

This morning, my nine-month-old son knocked over a pile of unwrapped videogames stacked at the edge of my entertainment center. Actually, his hand brushed against them while I danced around the living room with him in my arms. We were listening to Squeeze records, and Pulling Mussels (From a Shell) was on. It is our favorite. My first instinct was to curse under my breath, but I was out of it. Dancing like an idiot is taxing enough when you are not lugging 20 pounds of giggling baby around the room with you. So instead, I just smiled. Or, rather, I continued smiling. Lately, if the timing’s right, I sometimes find it tough to stop. And that’s a good thing, right?

It’s 6:00 a.m., and I’ve been awake for an hour, which is ridiculous. At this time last year, I was still following my pre-baby pattern. Play videogames (sometimes for work, sometimes not) late into the night, fall into bed whenever the feeling struck me, and roll out again at an hour that would allow me to magically appear in the office before my employees. It the world of videogame journalism, that was not hard to do. To most of my coworkers, 10:00 a.m. was the most civilized time morning had to offer, and they grudgingly accepted it as the work day’s starting point, like foreigners ordering in a questionable restaurant.

Back then, the thought of stacking a bunch of un-played games in the corner of my house would have been unthinkable. I should at least open them, right? Throw them in and try them out? When I was writing about games for a living, I had a five-minute rule. Fire up a game, sit back, and start playing. If it didn’t grab my attention in five minutes, I quit and grabbed something else. But these days, I don’t even have time to indulge the five-minute rule.

Let me tell you something about babies. They don’t sleep as much as you might think. For the first week or so, they lull you into a false sense of security, dozing most of the day and night, waking only to blink and eat. I remember sitting on the couch in the afternoon during my paternity leave, the shades in my California apartment drawn tight so my newest family member could doze in the cradle beside me. I played Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes HD for hours on end, thrilled that fatherhood hadn’t hampered my gaming life. If anything, it had improved it. The company that paid me to play games had generously given me a few weeks off to adjust to life with baby. And I was spending a remarkable amount of that time playing games. Suckers!

But, like a demonic antagonist in a videogame, a newborn baby soon wakes from its slumber to bathe the land in blood and fire. The townspeople knew all along that the beast’s sleep was a tenuous illusion. But they chose to ignore it. They went about their lives, one eye always on the cave at the top of the mountain, ears pricked for the slightest sound of rumbling.

Parents do this too. “Maybe our baby will be different,” they tell each other. “Maybe he will sleep through the night from the beginning.” But they know. Deep down, they know. Soon my son was doing what normal infants do: sleeping for a few hours, waking up to eat, sleeping a bit more, waking up to be active, sleeping a bit more. At first, it’s a shock to the parent’s system. Living your life in two-hour intervals forces you to view the world differently. “What should I do tonight?” becomes: “In about an hour, I will have two hours to myself, at best. I have seven hours worth of things to do, including personal grooming, banking, home repair, family communication, eating, entertaining myself and sleeping.” By the time you finish that thought, your body has succumbed to the latter.

New parent, or zombie? Best to shoot first.

It gets better. So goes the mantra of the Kindly Parental Stranger. They’re everywhere, these people. Shopping malls, grocery stores, parks, restaurants. They sense the plight of the new parent like a Scientologist can sniff out a vulnerable actor. When my son started waking up at all hours of the night to recreationally scream and poop, I would take long walks with him during the day, mainly to get out of the house, which had begun to smell like a combination of Wal-Mart and the Humane Society. On my walks, they would always find me. At the time, it annoyed me. Am I really doing such a horrible job at as a new dad that this middle-aged women needs to stop me, lay a blinged-out hand on my shoulder and reassure me that “it gets better?”

[...]

Gaming was never supposed to be an emotional experience. When I was young, video games were sold in toy aisles of department stores rather than electronics or media sections, and the adults in my life categorized them as harmless distractions rather than deeper entertainment moments. But I knew better.

In fact, in the early days, that was part of gaming’s charm. My friends and I understood what arcane power lay beneath the gray plastic housing of those NES cartridges and between the dark, sticky aisles of the mall arcades. These were secret worlds, ours to discover and cherish.

Squashed and jagged as they were, the characters in our games were real to us, more so than the hyper-styled people on TV. They responded to our wishes and empowered us with their potential energy. These new worlds were barely formed, but we could sense their future meaning. Adults would never get it.

Today, gaming is a Real Thing. The videogame industry is worth billions. And more and more, the creative worlds of LA and San Francisco are overlapping, becoming something even stranger than their previous fictions.

I entered the industry (if there really is such a thing at all, but more on that later) by writing, talking and learning about those worlds as an editor at IGN. There was a time when I thought I’d never leave. But things change. Worlds shift.

Late last year, I moved to the product side of games business – the side where people actually make things instead of making lists about them. Now I work at 38 Studios. Its people are some of the most talented and creative working in gaming today, and I’m humbled to count myself among their ranks. There are some amazing things happening there, and I wish I could list them all here. But that would spoil the fun.

Also, this happened.

Leaving IGN, and journalism in general, was a hard decision, but in the same way choosing between two radically different flavors of ice cream is hard. At some point, as delicious as the chocolate is, sometimes you just have to try the strawberry. Especially if the strawberry is making an amazing game set in a massive, brand-new fantasy world built from scratch by some seriously powerful minds. Pulling back the curtain to see the clockwork within – it was just too strong a lure to resist.

There’s something stubbornly magical about the world of videogames, despite our best efforts to turn it into just another respectable entertainment medium. Do we want to be Hollywood? Gore Verbinski, bless his filthy rich heart, says emphatically no. What about the music business, with its emphasis on big hits and fat margins? Or is there room for something different? Something new? Something that sees the audience as something more than a sack of meat at the end of a wallet chain?

Smart people are using large chunks of academic bandwidth arguing about whether or not games are art. But that’s the wrong question. Shouldn’t we start by asking why they’re games? If you’ve listened to me on podcasts, read my work on IGN or followed my ramblings on antisocial networks, you know I struggle with the word “game” as a blanket descriptor for entertainment experiences that consist of both input and output. It’s a nomenclatural shrug that separates fun and feeling, much like the word “comics” sells short a medium which finds its truest utility not in being jokey, but rather in teasing emotion from that mysterious juncture of word and image. Games do that too, but they do it in a scarier, more intense, eerily synesthetic way. Magic.

I’ve spent the last few years trying to qualify that peculiar enchantment, to put it in a box and assign it a number. And while I may have succeeded in helping gamers understand my perspective on various products, I’m not convinced I was ever able to sufficiently explain Why Games Matter. And maybe that was never really my job. Actually, it’s probably yours. So let me know when you figure it out. I’ll be listening.

Although I’m immeasurably excited about my current adventure, it was hard to end the previous one. So hard, in fact, that I’m only writing about it four months later. My fellow IGN editors ceased being co-workers long ago and became friends. We shared unprintable experiences, which I’m sure will eventually be revealed at the most inopportune moment possible.

For the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to have an extended chat with the biggest, best, craziest gamer community on the planet. And although I’m no longer an IGN editor, I’ll always be part of the conversation with gamers, game makers and all the other weird, wonderful online denizens who steadfastly refuse to be labeled.

I’m still on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin this blog and other, stranger places. Reach out. Although it’s not longer my place to criticize games, I still have opinions, and I care about yours. And no, I can’t get you a job. Unless you’re a complete badass who can’t seem to hang onto a pair of sunglasses because they burn to ash each time you put them on, by the sheer force of your badassery.

It’s an amazing time to be involved with games, art, digital entertainment or whatever the internet eventually decides to call this slippery beast. Things are changing, even while they stay the same. New worlds are coming to life at this very moment. There’s something magical about that.

I hosted a few more episodes of IGN’s Daily Fix this week. Here’s one in which I wear my favorite jacket and talk about the rapture (wait for it…)