There’s no bottom, no end. It grows faster than I can shrink it. If you were to stand on the ground directly next to it (this is impossible, since we’ve established that there’s no bottom), and fire an arrow at its peak, the arrow would surely miss the top. Not because of the height, no; he gravitational pull of the mass would be enough to draw the arrow into its mouth. Yes, it has a mouth. It chews up the arrow, and spits out an arrow skeleton. Nom nom nom nom.
I’m referring, of course, to the Everlasting Backlog: the perpetual pile of games that I own and haven’t touched. Old games and new games. Critically-acclaimed games and curiosities. All of them wind up in the pile, and are pulled out and consumed in no particular order. Sometimes I consume one that I had consumed before, because it was that delicious. When it comes to games and orally-fixated metaphors, I am a gourmand. I am a veteran of countless fictional wars. I go out of my way in public to look for treasure chests. I have worn armor made from gold and diamonds, even though neither of those materials are practical in the construction of armor. For the past couple of decades, I’ve had countless adventures. Now, I’m sitting on a pile of adventures that should last a few decades.
This doesn’t discount me as a normal human being, of course. I spend most of my time being a professional web developer, paying off my taxes and insurance payments. There isn’t much in all of that for a creative outlet, though; many of the things I build are things that I cannot see or touch. As such, I am prone to actions that would discount me as a normal human being. For instance, I try to convince people that I am a bird. So far, I have one person who genuinely believes I’m a bird, and two people who go out of their way to remind me that I am not, without any provocation. Ultimately, being a goofball does little to stave off the madness of having no real outlet for creativity.
In the past, I was the webmaster and webcommander of a site called Disaster Labs, which served as my creative outlet at the time. My contributions to this site included comics, writing, and animation. As time went on, my career consumed more and more of my time. The other contributors to the site were distracted by life as well. Eventually, there came a time when I couldn’t afford to keep the site up, so it was closed in 2010. Since then, I have only worked and played, and gave nothing back.
I had no active medium for creativity, and yet, I had ideas to build one. One of these ideas was to start a blog. It had been bouncing around in my head for months, like a lottery ball, frantically trapped in a lottery ball torture device. The blog idea would get knocked away by other ideas, or get dismissed in respect for time. It wasn’t until recently that I was reminded that people actually enjoy what I write. This motivated the idea to rise above the others, and get sucked up into the pneumatic tube of realization. So, I took the effort, and started a blog.
Naturally, I decided to write about the gigantic pile of games that I’ve perched upon. It’s the kind of thing that I am prone to discussing. In the past, I’ve made some long reviews on the worst games that I’ve ever played. In this blog, I am not going to stick to any particular quality, genre, theme, or system. I will be writing about games that I had recently played, not just to articulate the impressions they leave upon me, but to create and record strange new strands of thought from them. They could be reviews, but they don’t necessarily have to be. What I want to do is write about these games, dwell on the details, and just get lost within them. The purpose for this blog is to stave off creative atrophy. If anyone is entertained as a result, then that would be a perk.
I do not intend to adhere to a posting schedule for the immediate future. For now, I will proceed with a “when it’s done” approach for posting (If this somehow gets popular, that will definitely change). The main content that I have described above will turn out to be rather long, so be prepared to read! In additions to essays on specific games, I also plan on writing essays on games in general, or on something completely off-topic. If I should find myself in need of filler material, I have plenty of old content that I can republish, rewrite, or discuss.
And there it is, the obligatory introductory statement. It gets less serious from here. Bring on the backlog.
If I had a sled, I’d slide forever down it.