Easter Eggs (emphasis on “egg”)
2.
When I first discovered Geller’s “The Future of Writing about Games,” it’d been half a year since I graduated from my MFA. I’d wrapped up one underpaying, part-time gig, started another, and was scrambling to figure out the next. I was in debt and trying not to fall back on old vices, like drinking, moping, making lists, and, occasionally, messaging men fifteen years my senior on Grindr (sans face pic, of course). Unable to do anything other than scrape together rent and utilities, I felt trapped. I wasn’t reading. I wasn’t writing. Not without a voice pressuring me to hack out another cover letter instead. I picked up gaming in part because it let me bypass that feeling, but mostly I wanted to reconnect with a childlike wonder I thought I’d lost.
One night, after beating The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for maybe the eleventh time in my life, I switched to YouTube, curious what others had discovered in their playthroughs. I watched a video called “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda.”
I watched “Staring into the Sun, and Other Ways of Capturing Transcendence.”
I watched “The Intimacy of Everyday Objects.”
I watched “The Future of Writing about Games.”
Aware that Graywolf was publishing Critical Hits in a month (I’d tried to manifest a copy from my ~200 followers on Twitter, something to the effect of “I would do terrible things [i.e. write a review] if it meant I could get a copy of this”), I followed the suggestion sidebar to Geller’s profile. These weren’t just YouTube videos, I thought, they were essays. I heard myself think this, then thought Of course they were essays! (I mean, they were literally subtitled “video essays.”) Geller was making the kind of art that got me writing in the first place. With its fixation on awards and prizes, its circular definitions of genre, and its obsession with publishability (God, publishability), MFA Land™ had rotted my brain.
In the three years before my gamer-era-cum-third-puberty, the question of “What is an essay?” got tossed around a lot. At first, peers and I listened to our professors as eager students do. How thoughtful, profound! But by the third or fourth positing, we faded a little. I gotcha, cool, cool. By the seventh and eighth, we met the question with eye rolls and snarky group texts. (In one instance, I think someone left the seminar to throw up.) Thusly, “What is an essay?” joined our rotation of small-talk memes, alongside words like “thusly” and something called “hot-dogging” (when a writer tells an anecdote about their first time doing XYZ, then cuts to a weird, clinical history of XYZ, à la @Jake_Wolff on Twitter). It wasn’t an obscene thing for a writing program to ask about essays, their what-is-isms and whatnot, no. But the repetition lacked context: no matter how many times we responded to “what is an essay?”, few professors and fewer administrators registered we’d even spoke. If they aren’t listening, I thought, was anyone reading essays at all?
For the world outside the world of literature-as-career (which, frankly, is like ninety-nine-point-five percent of the world), the term “essay” evokes a haziness. A haziness that translates to voiceless nonfiction that withholds or imparts information. You know, five-paragraph screeds, academic theses. Research gathering dust behind a paywall. Occasionally: a New Yorker think-piece with pithy lessons for suburbanites and/or micro-memoirs interlaced with bad dates, bad sex, middling politics, uninterrogated trust funds, and quotes from Barthes. The kind of nonfiction content—and I mean content in the most internet-y sense—prime for skimming. Like, seriously, as a thought experiment, I suggest you picture an editor—I bet your portrait pans out from an overflowing inbox. This editor, they’re on an office toilet. Their pants crape around their ankles, while they sweat over one thought, and one thought alone: Oh, baby, I hit the motherlode. A controversial pop psychologist just pitched a manuscript entitled WHY WE SNEEZE. This shit’s going to scrape whole-ass nickels from the pockets of NPR donors!
Surprise, surprise, damn-near every nonfiction syllabus features a unit on “What is an essay?” If not for education, then perhaps repetition for the sake of relevance. Considering STEM students and those who never attend college are unlikely to ever encounter “literary” essays unless they seek them out—and considering that even humanities students tend to forego “literary” essays after graduation in favor of novels, essays, as a genre, come off as defensive—or at the very least, resigned to failure. Bless instructors’ hearts, as their students refer to Didion as an “article writer.” Bless instructors’ attempts to evangelize about “capital-T” and “lowercase-t” truth: essays can be whatever they want, actually, so long as they’re kinda sorta vaguely real. I get it. I really do. I’ve been a writing teacher for seven or eight years now, and the adage it’s about the process, not the product never had the same ring as “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger: I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.” Catering to this disconnect, however, fulfills a self-defeating prophecy. There’s a witty parallel to show don’t tell here, but alas, you’ll have to hire me to hear how it ends.
That night watching Geller, I realized I’d lost the plot. I let the most insular, commodified worldview of a practice distance me from how I—and so many others—experienced it.
For the first time in a long time, I splattered my notebook with doodles and quotes. I strung a sentence together, and then another. Here we are now.
1.
There’s a half-naked twink on my screen, and he’s beating the shit out of pig men with a soup ladle. I keep crouching into their clubs when I need to sprint away. The in-game glossary informs me the pig men are called “Bokoblins.” My partner thinks they’re cute. They come in red and blue and black and silver and sometimes, when they’re feisty, they don leopard-print thongs; they seem to have gotten hip to CrossFit or Jenny Craig since I was a kid, stretched from 2D Nut Rolls into 3D Laffy Taffy (talk about a 2003 to 2023 glow up. And yeah, I mean, totally, Bokoblins are cute. It’s just that these Bokoblins (I fear I sound like a Boomer dropping a “transgenders” into the convo) are trying to hurt my beloved twink, Link, who’s already lived and died a handful of times this past hour, who’s lived and died countless times over fortyish years of Nintendo franchising, who will go on living and dying for in-game millennia, because, like, cyclical lore or something.
I jam the joystick and crouch again. A Bokoblin’s club passes through Link’s stomach, and he goes limp, like a ragdoll. No blood spills though. A sad piano twinkles. Red text: Game Over.
My partner tells me they’re going to bed.
I tell them I love them, because I do, it’s just that I have some unresolved trauma to process with Link. More than combat, I want to reach the other side of this monster-filled cave. IGN foretells a wolfskin miniskirt-tube-top combo awaits.
You’re the hottest skirt-wearer I know, my partner tells me.
I believe them. But I feel like Link needs to hear those words, too, somehow. Not necessarily the Link on my screen—as in, the 2023 Tears of the Kingdom enby icon Link. I mean the Link I grew up with, the Ocarina of Time Link, who probably looks on like some ancestral ghost. Since I first played Ocarina of Time on my cousin’s Nintendo 64, two decades ago, that Link could only wear some homely variation of a green tunic, and, canonically, never spoke. “He” was always referred to as a “he” because the world was ending, and everyone needed him to make sense of their problems. The one “boy without a fairy” fetching chickens, eyedrops, beans, medicine, and gems; battling frogs and dragons and demons and ghosts and Bokoblins. Other than save the princess—an out of body metaphor?—Link seldom expressed any desires, except when he laughed or yelled in pain.
I’m not saying I’m needed like Link is needed. I’m not saying I’m voiceless, either. I’m saying it’s funny how I can play a game I’m mildly bad at and feel something on the other side—past the power fantasies of swords and shields, past the indentation of a joystick against my thumb.
I’m saying someone must’ve felt something, too, as they encoded Link’s silhouette against a godfire sky. His small frame bruising purple as I plunge him into the cave once more.