Not For Me
taste
It started with Pokemon Blue on the Game Boy Color. Dragon Quest I, Dragon Quest Monsters, Magi-Nation: turn-based combat was part of my upbringing. It’s a language I speak. I think it taught me something about patience. Maybe.
Years later I’m starting a YouTube channel, and genuinely considering writing a piece decrying turn-based combat as old-fashioned and unnecessary. Wrongly of course. It’s the preferred speed for plenty of players and more accessible than most action frameworks. I’d pushed into action games, fighters, and popular AAA titles though, so to me, turn-based combat was old, boring, and pointless.
I never made that video, and I think about that often. The KBash of 2024 wouldn’t so much as entertain the thought, because the utility of turn-based combat is obvious. It’s purpose is obvious. The audience it serves is obvious. Like many mediocre young men, I assumed my perspective would matter, and I realize now how incredibly offensive that assumption can be.
I think perspective is everything - it’s the lens through which any one person views the world, but the fear is taking perspective and making it prescriptive: deciding things for others based on your singular worldview. It takes a pretty open mind and some palpable empathy to understand, encompass, and even embody alternate perspectives. For the sake of experiencing media of all kinds, it’s a worthwhile exercise, even if it’s only going to be a pale imitation: reaching and stretching.
I heard a much younger person say “I’m old enough to know what I like,” and that simply isn’t true. You know what you like right now, and probably know what some of your favorite things are, but it took me 25 years of life to like black coffee, 30 to like stout, and just as many to handle old school Monster Hunter. I turned my entire concept of games around in a few short years. We’re constantly changing and always capable of uncovering new joys. You only really start aging when you close yourself off from the loud varied colors, the diverse perspectives and creations that other people make in perpetuity.
And this is something I only really started to grasp when I got older anyhow. I was always able to account for other perspectives (disallowing ones that would disallow others, mind), but just like the aforementiond Knower Of The Things They Like, I’d decided prematurely that I’d seen the world. It’s hysterical in retrospect. “I taught for a year in Korea, so I guess I’ve seen a lot!” Buddy. You’re killin’ me here.
Deciding you know your tastes, the length and breadth of them, is to kill possibility. It’s like terminating conversation with a non-sequitur or changing the subject. You fear your own possibilities because you know yourself as yourself now, and doubt about that certainty is work. Parsing, thinking, recontextualizing. Working on yourself is hard and it doesn’t usually pay off immediately. People don’t always notice. Enrichment is meant to be it’s own reward, but we’re not always ready to receive.
I think a lot about how my own perspectives changed year over year. I remember being furious that this or that videomaker was pulling millions of views on YouTube when I was scraping for anything, because I thought I knew what I was doing. The truth, of course, is that my earliest work, and most of the work after, was amateurish at best, embarassing at worst, and strictly not on par with other creators. My audio was shit, my ideas were shit, my timing was shit, the list goes on. I had the taste to know what I liked about other people’s work, but not enough skill to execute, and that’s half the reason people struggle with creation at all.
This is not to say that YouTube is a meritocratic platform. To some degree, the palatable takes off, but you have to understand that palatable and good mean entirely different things.
Still, you don’t know the sum of your own ability until you’ve broken yourself down a hundred times. Build up, break down, start over.
This is why I take particular offense to other creators who take the time to smear other creators publicly. Anyone sincerely engaging with the act of creation understands the struggle. Anyone else is a fucking poser. Or an asshole. Context matters.
Just recently, I caught a post from a smalltime creator expressing general annoyance at some habit of another creator. It’s a common occurrence and we’ve all done it. I daresay you don’t have creative bones if some creative choices don’t annoy you. Having opinions about things is at the heart of creation. You want something to be a certain way so you make it thus.
But the creator in question had aleady decided that the target of their ire simply wasn’t for them, and that means disposable. Ignore that their own work was struggling, genuinely lacking in basic fidelity, the works. No lessons to be learned, nothing worth respecting or appreciating. Junk.
It’s a fair enough response and in some contexts necessary. I’m not going to listen to a libertarian screed about how to fix any given country’s healthcare system, because I’d be listening to unchecked malignant dimwititude. But it’s concerning because I was there, once. I remember having already decided what kind of things were good, already knowing what was worthless, and failing to understand how anyone could think differently.
I remember the sand I packed into castles that the tide carried away, or the wind beat down, and rebuilding what I thought I thought was good until it was something else entirely. But I was trying to play near the ocean, and some people want to play in the kiddie pool.