Halloween has a lot to compete with these days in the fear factor department, when the every day is already filled to the brim with horrendously terrifying elements to contend with.


The Nope Factor is strong no matter where one looks

Kind of following on the heels of my post from yesterday, which unintentionally ended up veering hard into some existential territory, I ended up talking more about confronting fear of the self, and the frightful nature of what we deal with in the everyday. I normally prefer to write about video games through a philosophical lens on Active Time Event, but after writing every day for months now, I think I’m coming to terms with another terrifying aspect we all face at some point, and that is burnout. When I was asking myself out loud what the first sign of burnout was, while immediately searching for a Youtube video to affirm the symptoms, I did have to chuckle and rethink to myself, I’m fairly certain the first sign of burnout is having to ask whether or not you have burnout.

Which, fair enough, even doing something you love can eventually produce these feelings, work or not, and it is important to not only strike that ideal work/life balance, but also to know when it is time to maybe give yourself a break if you can, or find a new approach to your everyday, in order to mitigate exhausted feelings of pushing yourself too hard. Maybe it depends on the person and or context, but as someone who dreamed about having a job writing about video games when they were young, eventually succeeding in getting one, and then after several years of committing to it, had to walk away due to feelings as if they lost their passion from feelings of burnout, I feel comfortable asserting it can happen to anyone at anytime, even if it is something as silly as sharing thoughts about video games.

This is one of the reasons I decided to just riff again today, instead of my originally planned articles involving more survival horror games, which was a topic of interest I did cover for the grand majority of October. It’s a shame I literally ran out of gas in carrying the vibes of ‘spoopy season right as Halloween was truly starting, but life is a big old clusterfuck of an experience, so I in no way, shape, or form am left surprised by this outcome. I was pondering whether or not it would be tonally appropriate to continue kind of explicating my own feelings about my own hangups involving writing instead of detailing another game appropriate for the season, but then I also thought to myself; if I don’t feel comfortable airing grievances on my own blog, where would I feel comfortable doing it? So in the spirit of not being struck with fear about everyday trivialities, I felt it best to continue to just get some feelings off my chest instead of forcing myself to write another article about my adventures in the realm of the virtual that just didn’t feel quite right in approaching at the moment.

All of this did get me thinking about basic truths involving fear and terror, like the phrase fear of the unknown, which I find kind of chalk full of irony, as it is actually a lot of what comprises the everyday that seems the most terrifying. Simply waking up to contend with what is occurring in the world is scary enough, but having to budget over every little thing due to economic pressures, anxiety that comes with socializing, the stresses that jobs bring, not feeling like you measure up due to feeling exhausted and not keeping up…these are all known known’s, and probably far more horrific than anything imagined I could dream up. I suppose being able to “choose” when or what one fears, or toggling on the idea of fear, in regards to watching a scary movie or playing an unsettling game, may spring from some strange place of privilege? As if one was truly confronted with being scared shitless every minute of every day, the last thing they would want to do is likely subject themselves to even more of it for fun.

This line of thinking may be in line with ideas I’ve considered about difficulty in video games, and games that kind of “demand” one “works for their keep”, something I thought a lot about when playing Silksong. In addressing what I saw as an alienation of sorts that many players had, in struggling with the challenging nature of the game. One of my articles honed in on this occurrence, in that the players felt alienated from their own sense of effort they put into the game, and thusly, felt estranged from a sense of ownership they had over not only themselves in relation to the output they were producing, but from the product of the game themselves, which left them feeling less than as a response. This was all tied into the alienation one feels through the lens of Marxism, just to really cement the comparison to that work/life balance we often feel as if we struggle to maintain, as a result of the exploitative feelings that are inherent in a capitalistic society.

This plays adjacent into the notion of the privilege I was mentioning before, in one being able to willingly “choose ones fear” on their own terms, or having the power to “turn on the terror” at their own pace, in feeling like they have control over their situation, and maybe even their life as a whole, on some small level. I think this likely rings true for games like Silksong, and why in at least that games case, a lot of players maybe felt shortchanged, as they ended up being bamboozled, as instead of “choosing their own work”, how they excelled, the ability to produce a successful outcome, and feeling as if they had a mastery for once, in the face of labor of a sort, they felt just as powerless in their confrontations with Silksong, as they did in their everyday job, not feeling like they made a difference at the end of the day, and thusly feeling alienated as a response.

I think if one looks at the terror of what the everyday represents, stuff like scary movies and survival horror games function in a similar manner, and where we go wrong sometimes when even our choices in media end up betraying us with the intent we have for the product of choice becoming a soured experience, as to say, we shift from satisfyingly scared to fearfully disappointed, and perhaps even afraid we’ve lost control of something so simple, then confronting the notion of fear in regards to our lack of agency, and maybe even minorly horrified at our lack of control thereafter. At least, that’s one quick drive by take of the matter at hand. Even though I did want to “air some grievances” involving the idea of burnout, I did still want to tie this to gaming on some level.

Well, that’s all the time I have for today. Thanks for hearing me out, and Happy Halloween. May what frightens you this day be a terror of your own choosing.

~Pashford