It’s always so hard to talk about talking about things, isn’t it?
This one was meant to end up as another video, but we won’t have the shells ready for another while yet, so in the meantime I’m running off with it.
Thesis statement: The modern economy of discussion is built with Information as its currency, and treats Spoilers like punishable crimes. This is incredibly detrimental to telling stories, to writing stories, and to engaging with things in any capacity, and generally speaking none of us enjoy where things are at.
Now, generally speaking, we stay out of actual online discussion, but this does still spill over into interpersonal discussion in the private information sector (DMs, casual conversations, group settings), and that’s the part that’s the most bother to manage, because it’s one of those things that seems reasonable on its surface but is far too much effort to peel away every time it comes up, and it’s also difficult to determine when it’s appropriate to fight someone’s entire ethical view on spoilers during a casual conversation. To clarify: I don’t meaningfully consider spoilers a reasonable construct in peer-to-peer settings, but there’s other areas that it also erodes the ability to engage with things in a reasonable fashion.
When I’m recommended something by a friend, usually, it makes sense to trust their recommendation. When I’m recommended something by the internet, there’s usually enough information to figure out if I’m going to like it. Every now and again, there’s something that either starts with or engenders a culture of information lockdown, which somewhat correlates with my tolerance for obtuse design. Things deserve to be talked about, and when they aren’t in the name of some arbitrary purity metric for information or can only be experienced at the two extremes of isolationism or full exposure, it’s like I can see the meter for interest drop in real time. In a way, this is specifically about Rain World. More importantly, it’s about a surprising number of things. Games, shows, comics, books, movies. There’s an uncomfortable dichotomy to any sort of new release or publication in recent memory that’s specific to fiction, where a heavy onus is placed upon each person who dares to so much as have a personal blog or social media account to catalog and flag anything that might upset people randomly browsing, while at the same time everything is constantly stumbling over itself to talk about how new releases and upcoming experiences are great and should be experienced personally all the way through.
And it’s so damn exhausting.
It bothers me most because it’s become so hard to talk about things, to talk about talking about things, to have any sort of discussion about things without couching things in disclaimers and layers of tape. We can analyze movies and films and games if they pass the other arbitrary metric of being old enough[1] that the nebulous concept of an audience* can be reasonably assumed† to have experienced it or to not care, but not otherwise? What are we doing here.
[1] - There will never be a consistent number.
* - I think it’s unhealthy to treat any public conversations like this. People will misunderstand anything and everything even with infinite disclaimers.
† - Provided in case the reader needs something to kill the inner critic and social conformist. Three layers of arbitrary restrictions are far too many. Stop it. What are we doing here?
The past few years have been a very welcome revolution of thought. We are finally capable of not imposing a sense of tangible disappointment onto things that we know information on beforehand. I will pause here to grant the sole tangent that it’s more engaging to have the chance to tackle a puzzle-based experience solo before getting input, but that paltry excuse for information lockdown does not really hold up in the face of such novel concepts as “getting to hang out and discuss things with friends in the moment”, “telling people off for jumping ahead too much if i’m streaming something that i don’t want immediately solved”, “getting help from other people when I get stuck on something”, and even the “talking about other outcomes and paths taken” that is so dreadfully rare these days as games get longer and days get shorter and the world continues to deteriorate but that’s not the focus of the current diatribe so I digress.
Talk about things.
Preserving everything for a pristine experience just isn’t good. It’s not good! It’s bad. There’s so many other ways I could describe it, but it’s bad. Going in blind isn’t real, it doesn’t set reasonable expectations, something that derives its entire value from not being talked about in any meaningful way… It can be art, still, but. Y’know. It’s got cult vibes.
Your takeaway can totally be that jumpscare horror can never be good, and plot twists are terrible, and you should never hold back any sort of information when recommending something to someone you know (or even someone you don’t!). It’d be incorrect, but you could!
We suspend disbelief for fiction anyway, why does it matter so much lately that someone should not engage with other people who have finished playing the thing much for fear of accidentally learning something? Why does it feel like any pushback on the idea of “don’t spoil things” immediately jumps directly to the other extreme of “you will never be able to experience this story un-tainted by future knowledge”? If I can re-read a book, replay a game, and derive enjoyment from that, where does the damage come from? I don’t get it.
I really don’t get it.
Why is it something that so many people care so strongly about that it’s a cornerstone of talking about nearly anything ever? So many games get people stoked to break them apart, datamine the everloving shit out of them to figure out how they tick, and it doesn’t even for a second dampen the enthusiasm of the community for speedrunning or casual playthroughs or even particularly PvP (Obviously excluding cases where there’s some broken exploits and bugs that change how the gameplay functions, such as Zips in Elden Ring, and outright cheating in the other Souls games, yes those are my gold standard of community involvement, can we get that energy for moving the wiki content to a .gg or even back to wikidot instead of the blights on the internet that currently command any reference information and are honestly very often inaccurate? Thanks.).
There’s a whole other argument to be made about how bad everyone is at having fun these days, but maybe another time. Maybe never. Too much work to find non-personal examples for that one, I think.
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