I am Lovepon. A citizen from the internet, and this is my first blog. To start things off, I want to try gathering my thoughts on why I want to start this blog and my plans for the future. It is also like a therapy session with myself I suppose since I don't have conversations with others much anymore.
Anyhow, for the past years, I spent a lot of time thinking about creating a card game. And, damn, I am just garbage. I tried learning to program, making prototypes, writing down ideas and plans. In the end, I get demotivated fast. I am the classic "Idea man", who has wild visions that has nothing to do with reality. In every game design book I read, they say something about how being an idea man is useless, and I just can't help but want to be useless soooo badly <3. Nevertheless, I still wanted to make a card game and learn about game design.
Games. It feels like that is all I got. Nothing else can give me the joy that I get. Games feels like the one key to my happiness. Since all my family members are so against me playing them, I will be obsessed with games until the day I die out of spite.
My life is dedicated to games. I remember when I was 18, completely apathetic about my first year of University. I was sitting by the window feeling a bit of existential crisis and that is when I thought, before I die, I want something to be beside my graveyard, that I can feel proud of, that represents the fact that I have lived a life.
Most gravestones all look the same. Some generic names, some generic family members right beside it, some in dear memory whatever. That is just so depressing to look at. It is as if in the end, most people just did not live at all.
A part of me would respond to my last paragraph with this: “Who the fuck are you to judge the value of their life? They had children who loved them, they were able to survive in this world, you don’t know their story, what have you done to deserve this opinion?” To the voices in my head, I agree every fucking time. That is why I minimize my voice everywhere because I fucking hate listening to me. Fuck me in particular.
Nevertheless, I don’t want to be just another gravestone. That is when I decided that I wanted to make a game and I will do it while I am free from the responsibilities of life at the age of 18.
But I was alone and blind. Making games was much harder than simply feeling the joy in my heart. This statement is obvious, it was obvious, but I can’t help but ignore the obvious.
All the last few paragraphs are just lies. Stories, narratives, inconsistent bullshit. I don’t love games, I spend all my time listening to the same few songs, again and again, watching Vtubers all day instead of learning real skills, scroll Reddit and Twitter all the time now that I quit Facebook. A life dedicated to games? If I drop dead tomorrow I wouldn’t feel any regrets. When I die, I don’t want to be remembered by anyone or anything. The world has too much stimulation anyways to care about anything. If I am surviving and feel some sense of joy, then nothing else matters.
Well, I am not a fan of doing things to survive and feel some sense of joy. Which is part of the reason why I am opening this blog! So that I can distract myself from doing productive things that help me survive and socializing with new people to learn to be happy!
Anyhows back to games. I can’t make games for shit. But I still love games, I love games so much but I don’t play them much, because my family is kinda heavy on anti-games. Despite the shortcomings, I think the few game-related courses in university motivated me to look for games to play. My laptop was broken as hell, but I still started playing games and habitually analyzing them. I ask myself… What is this game made of? What makes each game fun? What are some aspects of the game I wish could be changed?
I wrote about games so much that I thought… What if I try to become a game journalist? Seems like something fun I can do in my free time.
I found out that game journalism and being a so-called content creator generally don’t suit me. Always chasing the next trend, anxiety over trying to get views, word limit because of the “invisible market” would prefer it, even though no one fucking reads our articles. The worst feeling overall is just that no editors want to read my paper. If even they don’t want to read it, who will? I don’t want to read my own articles/posts as well. I am censoring and limiting myself in terms of what can/cannot be said for what?
The reviewers? Are just as qualified as random Steam reviewers. It doesn’t feel like the game sites really offer anything unique… In fact, many articles written by “game journalists” are worse than the most well-written Steam reviews because the so-called game journalists don't even understand how games work. So why do you exist if you can’t offer something greater than above-average Steam players on the internet? I thought game journalists would be better than the average joes, perhaps there would be interesting topics regarding how to improve the quality of the content we write in terms of how we understand games. But it is all about chasing clout and grammar checks. I also didn’t really fit in, since I never play any big titles at all and don’t own any consoles.
I want to emphasize that the people I met on game journalism are good people, and I am the egotistical asshole with big dreams and a small brain, who can’t handle anything slightly difficult. But nevertheless, I have lost the “default respect” for game journalism. I will probably spend more time watching video essays and try to learn from them instead since they are closer to what I “love”. Authenticity, dedication, quality, most video essays seem to have these features, unlike game journalism.
The biggest goal for this blog is just simply that I want to be free in terms of self-expression! 10000 words essay? If that is how long I wrote, I will post it. No one has time to read them? I don’t either. It is purely just important for me to do things that indicate that I have a brain, that I exist. Maybe some bored people would really like it, if no one does, it is the expected.
I care about games. It is a lie, but I do. I hope to be as genuine as I can without holding back. Well, I do hold back, because bashing all the details with negativity is just sad to me as well, those kinds of negativity genuinely don’t reflect me anyways, such as “developers are all lazy suck asses” maybe something like that, not me. I will instead just write about things such as which mechanics I thought were badly designed and the reasonings behind them. I hate having to filter myself and cutting my words for the sake of fulfilling some obligatory standard. Being the owner and controller of my own blog means that I don’t have to worry about that.
The plan for this blog… I want to learn about HTML and CSS so that the blog looks better. I don’t want to get too deep into them so my site will probably be pretty minimalistic so that it fulfills the functionality needed to make my blog good. The main type of blog I would like to write about is Game analysis. Sometimes, I might divulge into creative writing gigs, zatsudan/rants about offtopic stuff like this one, discussions over books I read, any interesting topics off the top of my mind.
I hope this blog will enable me to learn as well. I don’t want to lock myself in jail just because this is intended to be a gaming blog. Anything that helps me achieve my goal of eventually making a game or just anything interesting at all, I will explore it. Books, movies, podcasts, conversations, walking outside and touching grass, whatever man.
That is it from me for now. I hope I can write a few blogs that I will be proud of myself and I hope you as a reader enjoy your time here, whoever you maybe.