I was inspired to write this post by Connie Sue, who in turn was inspired by Frances, who in turn was prompted to write something by James. Apparently, the indie web is an inspiring place!1

This morning I woke up thinking about the Tinker Station in Pacific Drive. This is a rather specific feature in a specific video game, so let me backtrack for a moment. Don’t worry, I will climb back out of this tangent and return to the topic at hand after three paragraphs.

In Pacific Drive, you spend time customizing, upgrading, and fixing your car, which you use throughout the game. This takes place in the in-game garage, which you park at the end of a drive (a “level” in the game, basically). The garage has various tools and stations, including the Tinker Station.

The Tinker Station, in a nutshell that would make sense in today’s lingo, is an AI that helps you fix various weird quirks with your car. For example, say the car’s lights dim when you swerve your steering wheel hard to the right, or the engine hood pops open when you put your car in reverse. At the end of the drive with that weird quirk (or a couple), you go to that Tinker Station and outline your problem inside the Tinker Station with an If/Then logic: “hood > opens / car > in reverse”. If you guessed the problem and the cause correctly, the Tinker Station congratulates you in glowing rainbow neon colors and tells you what tools you need to fix the issue.

There’s a lot more going on with the game, which I think is one of the best games I picked up in the last 2 years, and the Tinker Station is only one detail, and a small one at that. And this is what I’m getting at, by taking the long route and smelling the roses.

my website has a games section, which doesn’t see much action. Or, rather, it doesn’t see much action compared to how much time I spend playing video games. I usually clock at least 2 hours of video gaming a day. I have a gaming desktop. I play only in Linux these days, and I usually play games that are not your usual popular alien shooters (ok, I do have a couple, I need mindless games to let my brain cool off at the end of a workday). The point I’m failing to make here yet again is that: a. I spend a lot of time playing games and b. I am somewhat of a niche player with somewhat of a niche gaming choice, and I have a lot to say about said games.

So why does my gaming section get updated once every three months or so? In short: there’s too much to say.

Take for example my explanation above. The Tinker Station is only one aspect of the game that I want to write about. I also want to talk about how the game is scary without being purely a horror game; this is because of a good story and great voice acting, exploration, dreary background music, and letting the player’s mind fill in the blanks when reading lab reports and notes found throughout the game. The *good * kind of scary. The scary I like, without cheap jump scares. Another great thing about this game is how you play it driving a car, but also on foot, which fortuitously makes this game great to play with a friend: one on a controller and one on a keyboard - making this a delightful experience as the two of you work together.

Each one of the three elements I highlighted above can be a separate post, and these are just the ones that popped into my head thinking about this one game. I already have other points like these listed in my notes for two other games I’m playing that I want to discuss as well. See how long this post is? And I’m only using Pacific Drive as an example to explain what I want to do with my Games section - and I didn’t even get to the point yet! (and as you can see from the footnote below, it’s not even all I’m trying to say!)

When there’s so much to say that writing isn’t enough, I usually turn to recording videos. I do this when I want to write in my journal, but I just need to vent. I want to borrow the same consept for video games.

I’m not new to recording and publishing videos. TAONAW still has a YouTube channel, which is mostly deserted, and there used to be a PeerTube channel on an instance that has since shut down. Micro.blog’s new-ish take on video uploads (which has been available for a few months now) is a tempting opportunity just for that. But every time I tried to stick with video content, I failed. Video editing takes a lot of time and effort, and it’s a process I need to unlearn and relearn to find my natural flow. Still, for games, I feel this is the best way to explain and show what I want to say about video games in a way that people would understand and hopefully enjoy.

So I’m going to give it another try soon, hopefully.

Footnotes

1: I wanted to write about what I do next for my website, but I ended up writing about only one of those things - and as you can see, it’s more than enough to be a post on its own. Hence, part 1.