Sometimes, success can not only be a confusing moment, but a messy one.


Just ask the man who invented the reverse bear trap for a good example of what I mean

Depending on my mood when I sit down and write, the fingers start frantically tapping, and the words just seemingly fly onto the screen. This is further compounded when I’m finally “ready” to write an article, my energy is on point, I’m in position after having put a bunch of hours into a given title, I’m absolutely primed and pumped about the creative process, and then all of my collective notes, ideas, and impressions just wholesale shit themselves in the face of successful responsibility.


Again, success can be a confusing matter

Then you mix in an angle and an approach to the scenario, and you’re left with some queer notion of “giving the reader what they want”, even if by psychoanalysis standards, people often do not actually want what they think they want. On top of that notion, since writing for Active Time Event is not my actual job, though it remains straight up work, it’s always a hassle to not only put in the effort, it’s more or less an issue of messaging and topicality vs time and energy involved. This usually boils down to having to ask myself: how much can we get done, how fast can we get to it, and are we able to deliver in a timely manner? The answers usually turn out to be: not much, not that quickly, and not necessarily as fast as we’d like….though it’s not always just about how expeditious one can be, but the legacy they leave behind.


Like Sonic accidentally creating a forest fire with his speed and burning down the homes of the animals he’s trying to save, the hero gig and legacy creation has it’s ups and downs

This is all obviously ridiculously ideal when one has the want to write about a recent experience, but can’t get far enough out of their own way or successfully pry themselves from their own head long enough to get it into the game, in multiple metaphorical ways. Not that the insights to be shared on a thirty year old game are guaranteed to be played out or totally devoid of merit, but when you’ve got ten thousand other people dipping into the same experience pool, attempting to use the same vernacular, to reach the same demographics in the framing of audience placation, and every painful pun or wacky wordplay comes off as even more try hard than the 90’s level of unintentionally cheesy edge that the particular title you’re writing about has plastered on the front of it’s cover.

You begin to feel a lot like Poochie in your approach to exiting stage left

In an attempt to clear the air, you of course play around with some stress release tactics, like warming up your sense of creative play by dictating yourself in a rough draft you aren’t sure you can even make into an article, which is a follow up to a different article with a similar vibe, cause writing about writing about video games kind of worked out in a similar manner not too long ago. So you go ahead and write the hypothetical theory piece that at least makes a decent point about the inherent insanity of the quality that describes said game in such an ambiguously interpretative fashion, the meaning of the descriptor somehow comes off as essentially meaningless in the process, thusly psyching yourself out and making your job more difficult in the same moment. Somehow, all this doesn’t stop you from being excited about eventually gaining your bearings and finally maintaining enough focus to finally write what was always the focus, albeit the long way around.

You know, when I put all of this into perspective and frame it like that, I’m quite thrilled at the notion of finally writing my Gex 1 review.

Wouldn’t that be a fun article to read? Time will tell. (And now you can too!: my full write up here, and further dissection involving the philosophy of Hegel can be found here.)

~Pashford