Looking Up
In just over 18 months, I lost two jobs and graduated from university. As soon as I graduated I was stuck in job-search hell in the middle of an economic slump and a pandemic.
Five years before that I was in a slump, I had dropped out, worked in coffee shops for a year and moved back to Glasgow, where I’ve mostly lived for the past 10 years, trying to figure out a plan. The first thing was to decide what to do with my life, which I just sort of tumbled into. I had been making music, taking photos, trying my hand at graphic design, trying to find my niche after my social space and sense of self had collapsed around me when I dropped out. My friend Ben lent me his Playstation 4 for a few weeks while he worked away from home, and I started playing games in my personal time for the first time in several years.
I’d played non-stop FIFA, Rocket League, etcetera while I was studying, multiplayer games with my flatmates constituted 80% of my social time. But the single-player game had started to elude me, and when I moved back in with my mum I was left with a pile of games that I hadn’t been interested in for years. So there was a slump in playing games too, and when Ben gave me his playstation I booted up a handful of games, including Firewatch (The Campo Santo masterpiece of a first person mystery game). In a wonderful hot summer reunited with a lot of those friends I had been away from for a couple of years, the resounding memory I have is playing through Firewatch and Uncharted and marvelling at what the PS4 was really all about, and how magnificently realised games could really be.
The resounding memories of 2020 are a little different but walking around the exact same route — park, museum, river, home — will probably be tattooed on my brain due to repetitive strain. I usually walk with my headphones in, eyes trained down at the ground, one foot after another, absorbed either in trying not to be noticed or else some other material stress and then back in, make a coffee and sit on my sofa for 9 hours. I’m fed up with games at the minute, sitting spinning the camera around half the time instead of playing these things. I think the people who work on sky-boxes in video games are the most underrated artists of all time. Destiny 2 has these awe-inspiring vistas of starfields and cosmic storms, a universe in jeopardy that could make you feel tiny against the backdrop of its apocalyptic storyline. But most of the time you’re scavenging the ground for the right piece of ammo, or trying to spot out an enemy down the scope of a sniper. You rarely get to enjoy that skybox. It’s just about the only thing in games I want to write about at the minute.
The occasional swing of good luck is always a huge bump to my mood, and my ego, and the few of those I’ve had I tend to walk with my head up, taking in my surroundings, trying to drink in even the most distant of human contact. Another outcome of this is seeing some of the parts of the city I’ve taken for granted for the last 5-odd years, just how amazing this city looks in the sun, even after a shitty 12 months predominantly in rain and darkness.
Firewatch is the only game I’ve played that really encourages you to look upwards, to keep an eye on the horizon, the grandeur of this ancient redwood forest jeopardized by potential forest fires at the hottest point of the year. There’s dread in the growing forest fire that you are trying to protect this natural park from, sure, but Firewatch is unbelievably visually striking. Unforgettable reds and browns that surround you when you’re playing it. The game gives you a polaroid camera to take photos — once you’ve finished the game you can order these polaroids to be printed as mementos. The fact I even considered it is a testament to the game, I wanted to capture these moments of grandeur even if I knew anyone else had experienced it, because I was so present, so absorbed in the woods that it became impossible to disconnect from my real, physical memories that happened in the real world.
That summer was really hot- this one is too, and I’m hoping to find ways to keep my eyes on the sky-box no matter how hot the fire rages.
