Cara Ellison - Embed With Games: A Year on the Couch with Game Developers

EMBED WITH
GAMES

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Polygon Books,
an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright Cara Ellison 2015
Foreword Copyright Kieron Gillen 2015

The moral right of Cara Ellison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved.

The author has made every effort to clear all copyright permissions, but if amendments are required, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements for a reprint edition.

A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84697 344 4
eISBN 978 0 85790 889 6

Typeset by Freight in Brown and Poynter
Printed in Spain by GraphyCems

Contents

Foreword

Kieron Gillen

I met Cara three times in the year she was travelling.

The first time was in New York. She was there, working on this. Id been there meeting my corporate paymasters at Marvel, and was waiting for a car to the airport and had time to grab a drink beforehand. Cara was late, so she joined me in the car for the hour drive to the airport. We spent the journey giggling like teenagers, telling awful stories about awful people. She mainly said how much she liked The Weeknds Often because he likes to do it, often. As I boarded the train and she got a train back into New York, I felt assured she was fine and the adventures were good for her.

The second time was at Nine Worlds convention, at one of the asteroid hotels orbiting Heathrow. You get that close to an airport, and time and space warps. You are not in Britain any more. You are in a Ballardian land, a liminal space. Cara looked wan. I dragged her to the expensive hotel restaurant and fed her steak, then stole the red wine to take to the fireside conversation panel we were meant to be doing. We were both tense and tired, rowed a little, and I left worried about her.

The third time was near the end, in a basement flat in Brighton. She was passing through on one of her journeys, and had arranged a night of boardgames, which basically turned into a load of us doing Rock Band at 3 a.m., like everyone was back in 2010 again. She seemed tired and strained, and disappointed. She had done so much, but wanted to do so much more and felt that it was impossible. I left on the train, glad that her adventures were nearly over, and hoped that whatever came next would be kinder.

What came next was Cara deciding to step away from games writing. Well, at least thatll be kinder.

Ive worried about her a lot this year. To be fair, Ive worried about everyone in games this year, but Cara more than most. There is a psychic strain to playing videogames for a living, which is little to do with the work and more to do with the sense of vocation to it. If you dont care, and you dont mind the lack of money, you can amble along, playing games you like, writing some just-enough copy, and then go home and do whatever it is you like doing.

The problem comes when you actually care about games in a way above and beyond just liking them. You can double that problem if you actually care about the craft of writing too, because then you end up wrestling with all the problems in the industry. And trust me if you care about games in that sense that you feel theyre capital-I important, you eventually come to care about writing too. You learn to care about the writing because working out ways to communicate that napalm in your head as effectively as you can is about all thats keeping you together.

Games writers are writers and writers are fuck-ups. We wouldnt do this if we had any sense. It is, to quote someone Cara hates, the hardest way to earn an easy living.

I write that in part to have a little whine, but in part to give a context to what Cara Ellison of Aberdeen has done for you lot. This is an emotionally punishing job anyway, especially if you do the sort of open-ribcage writing Cara does. Shed have been exhausted and broken at the end of 2014 even if she had a staff job somewhere. Instead, she decided to start a Patreon and use it to fund her travelling the world, to give a global portrait of the games industry, the people in it, what they do and why.

This obviously sounds like a lot of fun. Wait till you read the book. It ends up not being that much fun at all. It ends up feeling even masochistic. By halfway through, I was hoping that Cara just went home. By the end, I was hoping Cara found a home to go home to. I pictured her as a pillar-boxred square in an existential platform game, CARA ELLISON WAS ALONE.

Luckily for us, we didnt have to do it, and we just get to see the results. As a whole, in its Rashomon structure, it ends up being a snapshot of the games industry in 2014, from the top to the bottom. Delete everything in that last sentence after the comma. There is no top or bottom here this is game development as a rainforest. These are a dozen ecological niches being filled, with Cara as our hair-dyed cyberpunk Attenborough bringing us footage. When the media still gives us one idea of what games are like, those sterile glass fortresses of Electronic Arts, this is a kaleidoscope. As a gonzoid apostle of Thompson, Cara is as much of a character in it as anyone else. If I wanted to create a time capsule to show what it was like to live through This Turbulent Year in games, I may give you this. This is what it was like for us, guys. Learn. It was awesome and terrible, and it was the future being born, red and screaming.

Caras also lucky. Im from an older generation of games writer. I joined early enough to catch the tail end of the decadent 1990s and left at the peak of the first indie boom circa 2010. Ive got a bunch of anecdotes from the time, but one dates from around 2000. I find myself in a social situation with a developer from Looking Glass, specifically someone whod just worked on Thief II. All things Immersive Sim are basically my speciality at the time. I float a theory namely, that I look at Looking Glass a little like The Velvet Underground were to the 1960s, in terms of power vs influence vs sales. Its my sort of theory. They dont blink. They passionately agree. Thats absolutely what they are.

Theres two reasons for telling that anecdote. First, the wonder when meeting people who believe in games just as intensely as you do. Oh. Youre not wrong. Im not alone in this. Second, that I was surprised at all at that happening, or thought it worth remembering. Because something like thathappens to Cara on every second page.

I read this book and felt jealous of Cara, wishing I had a chance to do anything as audacious in scope as this. Yes, shes sundered herself from her emotional support groups and any sense of permanence, but the results speak for themselves.

If Cara never writes about games again, it will be a huge loss. If Cara never writes about games again, these 50,000 or so words are a worthy monument.

Kotaku once sorta said that Kieron Gillen invented Games Journalism, which still makes him laugh. He first wrote about games in the Byzantine period of Amiga Power, was full-time for PC Gamer in its Imperial Phase and left games writing after founding the Viking Tribe of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. When he decided to earn some money, he started writing comics, which he presently does for Marvel, Image and Avatar Press. Hes also the Father of New Gam (Dont Mention The War Ed.) He lives in South London. He still hates Zelda