August 2020 – Robin Writes

Like most people who’ve seen it, I’m feeling that the new Netflix series on the history of the video game industry is… lackluster. The problem is that it’s a history of the industry. The major points in the story are technological paradigm shifts, legal battles, and corporate marketing strategies. These highlights are filled in with personal stories from people who enjoyed the commercial product as kids, people who are overwhelmingly white or male. But even when the series manages to highlight contributions or experiences from a more diverse group – the Black engineer who developed the cartridge system, the woman who pioneered graphic RPGs, the gay man who made a pride game in the middle of the AIDS crisis – these just feel thin, like drops in the bucket that don’t capture what made video games important. Part of the problem is the storytelling, which seems to assume that its audience is simultaneously middle aged white men who grew up playing games or programming, and young kids who know absolutely nothing about anything. But the bigger problem is one of historical discipline – video games might be an industry, but they are also a cultural phenomenon, and their history has to be a cultural one.

I maybe finished a full draft of my dissertation this week?

The most important thing I’ve been told in this early stage of motherhood is “the postpartum period is two years long.”

The first time I heard the phrase “comfort food”, I asked my mom what it meant, and she told me it was food that made people feel good. I thought that was a strange definition, since at the time I didn’t really have any emotional association with food and so that was a pretty foreign concept to me. I also remember thinking that definition wasn’t it because people seemed to mean something specific when they said it. Comfort food, I realized, was used to describe all the foods I had a viscerally negative reaction to – food that you might see in a commercial being slowly dropped into melted butter or drizzled over something. I guess I did have an emotional association with food after all.

Recently, I’ve seen a couple different variations on this meme:

I was able to get more done in the past week than in the past several months combined, thanks to a little thing called childcare.

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