Electric Cartilage And The Games That Don’t Exist: The Ending
[~2,200 words]
The very first post I ever made on this blog was on March 19 2011. It was called “Electric Cartilage and the Games That Don’t Exist: The Beginning”.
That’s over 9 years ago. I’ve had this blog so long that I watched the fall of Digg, the rise of reddit, the shift to mobile devices, and the rise of youtube video essays and twitter threads.
Nevertheless, all things have to end sometime.
I haven’t had much time to work on this blog. Whatever time I spend here takes away from my other creative work. I’ve got a lot of creative ideas brewing in my head at all times, but it’s always a struggle to focus on just one. At the moment, I’m working on two board game ideas at various states of prototyping, a Twine story/game I’ve got outlined and 1/5th written, about 4-5 short stories I’m writing, a novelette, and several short stories and pieces of flash fiction I’m trying to get published (but they’re kind of weird and unconventional so it’s hard to find a place that’ll take them). Any time I work on one of these projects I feel guilty that I’m not working on the others, ha.
That wound up being the case with this blog, as well. Whenever I had an idea I wanted to write about I felt this pressure to do it, but simultaneously felt guilty about not working on my other creative work. Getting rid of this one creative endeavor helps free up time and relieves the pressure of working on it.
I thought about starting up a youtube channel of my own at some point, since that’s what’s popular these days. But if I don’t have the time for written essays, then I’m not going to have time for video essays.
There’s also the fact that this blog doesn’t get much attention or traffic. I’ve never been good at networking or marketing myself, so this isn’t surprising, but it also means that it’s not a huge loss if I stop writing here altogether.
For those of you who have been reading my essays and posts, thank you. I’m really glad that you’ve found some value or entertainment in what I’ve been writing here. That means a lot to me. The fact that I actually reached even a few people has definitely been a positive.
Unfortunately, it’s time to call an end to this, if nothing more than to get it off my mind and free up some brain space for other stuff.
What Was The Point To Begin With?
In the very first post I ever wrote, I said:
“… the goal of this blog is to become a multifaceted rubric for what games really are and in so doing slowly reveal their nature and efficacy.”
That statement by itself remains relatively true to why I began and why I continued writing this blog.
I’ve always had a different perspective on things than most people. With digital games, I found myself getting very frustrated with how no one seemed to notice the things I noticed about games. I had all these ideas about how games functioned as a medium that I felt would benefit the community and the industry, but it didn’t seem that anyone else shared my thoughts.
So, I decided to start putting my ideas out there.
The “Electric Cartilage” in the title is an homage to the game Gravity Bone, but “the Games That Don’t Exist” was kind of a reference to the point of the blog. I felt that my ideas outlined types of games or ways of looking at game design that weren’t being done. As I said before, I felt that I had a perspective on games that no one else was really expressing and I genuinely thought that my ideas could improve games as a medium. The idea, basically, was to uncover ideas about what games could be but which they weren’t yet. Ideas about games that don’t exist.
Or something like that.
Looking Back
As silly as it sounds, I still remember the moment when I wrote the very first post on this blog.
I had just read a comment made by Will Wright and some sort of inspiration struck me. The post immediately came rushing into my brain. I wrote the whole thing in one sitting in a kind of manic state where my mind never stopped and as soon as one idea ended another one sprang into my mind seamlessly. I’m sure many writers know the feeling. It’s pretty exhilarating when this kind of creative rush hits you and everything just pours out of you without any effort.
There’s still some good writing I’m impressed with in that post. Some really cringy and embarrassing writing as well. There’s some shit talking and dumb jokes, but there’s also stuff like this:
“The way a medium functions mechanically is not the idea it conveys nor is it the core of that medium’s artistic merit. The fact that I’ve italicized some of those words is not “about” how some things in the world are leaning to the right. Although some things do lean to the right the mechanical aspect of what you’re reading is not meant to convey an idea. It’s meant to draw your attention to an idea. Yes, video games allow players to technically explore potential narratives, to explore possibilities, and yes video games are interactive systems which teach a player to modify his/her behavior based on simple punishment/rewards, but these things are the mechanical nature of games, it is their skeleton and not their personality. It is the italics of the text not its message. Sure, mechanisms can be used to convey ideas in games, the way a movie CAN convey to us the nature of linear time or the way a book CAN convey to us what it’s like to be blind (literally or figuratively), but this is a choice each individual artist makes when using those mediums. They are not default aspects of those mediums.”
Setting aside some bad grammar, I am still kind of impressed that I wrote that. Of course, at the time, it didn’t feel like I was writing it, it felt like it was just pouring out of me from nowhere.
Reading that first post I can still feel the intense energy I had while writing it. The language and rhythm of the sentences really conveys a sort of breathless enthusiasm. It is still one of the best pieces of writing I’ve done on here.
It’s not surprising that with such an opening post I would think this blog was going places.
Unfortunately, popularity does not come from good ideas or talent alone. Marketing, networking, and social presence are a major part of developing a following/community/whatever.
If I had been active in online communities, forums, or social media sites maybe I could have developed relationships that would have built up some attention and community. But, I’ve never been someone who enjoyed interacting with people online that much.
I grew up at the very beginning of the internet. I remember when games first started having in game chat and non-local multiplayer. I always turned chat off. Never liked it. Never really participated in forums or BBSs much, either.
I also never liked following the “discourse” on gaming sites and gaming forums. I only read them once in a while. So, most of the current news and trends went past me. Maybe that helped me keep my unique perspectives, but it probably also made
me disconnected from what people were most interested in reading about.
A lot of my earlier posts were less accessible as I tried to do weird, clever things with my writing instead of just getting to the point. I’m sure that hurt this blog’s chances of becoming even mildly popular. I remember my original “About the Author” page was an absurdist, magical realist short story that included characters named Electric Cartilage, Nuclear Muscle, Magnetism Skin, and Friction. It didn’t convey anything real about myself. The one thing related to video games in that short story was how the names were all plays off of “Gravity Bone”, one of my absolute favorite games of all time, and one which altered my perception about what games can be. Honestly, I love that game too much to ever actually write about it.
The point is that early on I was way too clever for my own good and thought my cleverness and creativity would somehow compensate for my complete disinterest in networking, socializing, getting my name out there, or participating in communities.
It did not. If anything, my excessive creativity probably hurt my accessibility.
As I got older I tried to make my posts more straightforward and easy to read. I tried to answer interesting questions about the nature of games and made sure to sometimes leave questions open ended to encourage people to comment. I tried to make my posts shorter and to the point, I started organizing them into sections, I added word counts at the start of posts so people knew what to expect, etc.
All that probably would have been helpful if I could have been bothered to actually promote my work. But I hate reaching out and self-promoting, so I just never did it.
It probably also didn’t help that I have a unique sense of humor that can sometimes be off-putting or confusing to a lot of people. Oh well. (If I had been born ten or fifteen years earlier I probably would have become really involved in making weird memes.)
Why End It?
I mentioned this briefly, earlier, but here’s me going into it in more depth.
One of the things I’ve struggled with has been just staying motivated in writing this blog. It has often felt like I’ve been writing into the void, basically writing in a private journal that no one reads. When that’s the case it’s hard to get myself to write and very easy to convince myself that it’s not worth.
I have had some people post comments saying how they’ve enjoyed my writing, which is really nice and has lifted my mood whenever it happened. I’ve had a few regulars remain over the years and it’s nice seeing these folks pop up in the comments throughout the years. I even once had a developer email me because of an essay I wrote about one of his games, which was pretty exciting (although he emailed me to correct something that I got wrong, ha!). But it’s mostly been quiet on here.
Ultimately, this blog never formed into a community with its own momentum.
And please don’t take this to mean that I’m resentful somehow. I’m not. It just seems that for any area of the internet to survive, it needs to develop a certain critical mass of active members to keep it going. Without that social activity, writing on here has gotten somewhat draining.
Receiving external, positive motivation makes it much easier to do things than if you are reliant mostly on internal motivation. That seems to be a fact of human socializing. That’s why having a personal trainer or playing on a sports team makes it much easier to get in shape than if you’re trying to exercise on your own.
I think that’s partly why so many of my posts were responses or reactions to something I saw someone say or do. It’s easier bounce ideas off of someone than to generate them from nothing.
Ultimately, all creative effort takes energy and effort. However, while analyzing and talking about other people’s work is fun, it is much more rewarding to create my own original work. So, it makes more sense to devote my energy to that, especially if I’m doing it mostly alone.
What now?:
In the last couple months I tried to push out the five or six posts that I really wanted to make sure I wrote before I closed the doors completely. They consist of some of the ideas I consider most significant or important.
The further back I go in this blog, the less pleased I am with the writing, but the stuff I stand by what I’ve written within the last three years or so and am I’m pretty happy with it.
WordPress tells me that this will be my 98th post, so maybe I’ll write a couple more short, low effort posts to make it an even 100, ha.
I also need to update the “What’s Good To Read Around Here” page as well as the “Posts I Wish I Had Written” page. But aside from all that, I’ll just check in on the comments every now and then.
I doubt there’s much chance for this blog to become popular or inspire large numbers of people, but I still hold out a little bit of hope. Maybe some people will find my writing helpful, insightful, or entertaining. Maybe there’ll be a game developer talking someday in an interview about how part of the inspiration for a mechanic in her game came from this little known blog with a weird name. “Electric Cabbages? Bone Electricity? Something like that.” That would be nice.
I genuinely think I’ve had some really worthwhile things to say on here, especially in the last three years or so. If you’ve liked what I’ve written, think it’s worth something, think my perspectives can benefit someone (designer, critic, fan, whoever), then please share this blog with them. Pass it around. I’d appreciate that.
If you think this blog is garbage, then yeah, don’t do that. Just keep it to yourself.
That’s it.
Goodbye, my friend.
Will You Post Any Of The Other Writing/Game Design Stuff You’re Working On?
Probably not. Maybe the Twin game/story I’m working on. Other than that I’m happy with keeping this blog separate from my other work.
Electric Cartilage And The Games That Don't Exist 