The purpose of my now weekly reviews is two-fold: the first one is that I want to pace my single-player gaming, however, it is worth mentioning why I got motivated to write about games in the first place.
My Journey with Games
I don’t have a living memory where gaming has not been part of my life. When I was 4 years old and starting to develop consciousness, I was holding a N64 controller and playing Super Mario 64, and I played games for whatever time my parents would allow me every day until I was in my teenage years, where I was in the exact demographic to play Halo custom matches with my friends until 4 a.m. in the morning.
A lot of people mention “growing” out of gaming, but it actually just became more important as I grew older: I started spending more time playing more games, and I eventually started incorporating board games, card games and competitive games in what I did. The friends I was spending the most time with where playing board games with me, and even though I studied psychology, even my professional studies didn’t escape gaming, as I eventually created a workshop where I worked something called “perspective-taking” with a social deduction game called The Resistance.
Games also evolved as I aged, with titles such as Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time actively pushing the game forward. Right now, it’s a much more common thought to think about gaming as an art form, but I grew up in an age where playing video games was seen as “uncool” or would “destroy your brain” or something.
Is Gaming an Art Form, then?
I remember the first time I played a game and thought, “yo, this is just art?”, when I was starting my bachelor’s degree in psych and I was seeing the iconic scene where Raiden talks with the Colonel at the end of MGS2. I had never been so impressed about a video game in my entire life; this was different than just hunting stars in Super Mario 64, I was not thinking about what ideas mean or what is true just in time to do college. I remember studying philosophy of science in my first semester and thinking “dude this is just MGS2’s ending”, and it hasn’t stopped there.
Firewatch. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Bioshock. Gris. VA-11 HA11-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action. These are all games whose stories left a pretty strong impression when I first played them, pushing the idea that this medium is about much more than having fun. These are all unambiguously works of art and just saying “they’re fun” or “I liked them” doesn’t feel like enough to express what they have meant to me, or what they mean to me now.
But it doesn’t end there, right? Not all games aim to make us think or reflect about our life, much like in the other mediums, there’s a lot to talk about that isn’t “wow, that’s deep”. Games like Othercide, the Ace Attorney series, The Letter, Invisible Inc. and many others have made me realize that, as much as gaming has advanced in the four decades since Super Mario Bros., we still have so much more. Seeing so many indie devs in my Twitter feed talk about what they’re doing makes me feel fuzzy, as a former creator myself (I used to compose music, though just as a hobby, no pressure to make a commercial success), I can relate to the joy that is creating and the expectation that someone will see it and like it.
The Vision for Quest and Roam
All of this to say, I have a ton of experiences with gaming, and they have influenced my life a lot. I truly love gaming, and I want to see it grow. I also want to share what so many of these games can be, and promote both the games and people thinking about them, so we can all have even more gaming!
Like my music compositions before, I am not aiming for Quest and Roam being some sort of financial pillar of my life; I hope it gives me
some amount of money in the next couple of years, of course, but I am aiming at something that engages me with gaming, and it seems that writing about them has motivated me. League has been quite the time sink and I’m happy to have something anchoring me to other parts of gaming.
That is my main goal with Quest and Roam: the “Quest” part refers to me completing or setting myself something to do with a game, and the “Roam” refers to how I tend to bounce from a few different genres. I might do board gaming here as well, who knows.
My intention is to have a space where we can critically engage with gaming—not just celebrating what’s great, but thinking deeply about how games work, what they do well, and where they can go next.
Quest and Roam is where we think critically about the games we play—not just as entertainment, but as an evolving art form. If you love thoughtful discussions about gaming, welcome abroad!