leaving the party

You may have clicked onto this page, thinking:

Kerry, I hear you’re starting a blog. Is this because you’re smarter and funnier than everybody else, and everyone needs to hear your mind? Well, unfortunately I don’t have a very high opinion of myself, so no.

So then… what is this? This is Leaving the Party: a chill, journal-style blog where I play through a bunch of role playing games and report my findings and feelings. Here’s the long and short of it: I love role playing games. It’s sickening the way I play these games, which is to say constantly, and whenever I sit down to play a game, they are what I’m always drawn to the most. I love to gain experience points, invest points into skills and trees, select perks, find equipment. I love to think about what these things mean for my character; to see a story reflected in these collections of statistics. I love character creators. I love science fiction and fantasy, and the word “magitech”. I love to defeat a dragon. What I want to do here, though, is be a little bit more of an active participant in what I’m playing. I love to interrogate what it means to defeat a dragon. I journal a lot, and write about pretty much everything privately, so I often will be taking little notes about what I think is neat or what provokes me when I’m playing games. Because I love these games, and because I think that it’s basically a miracle that games exist at all, I want to more seriously and critically engage with them from within that place of deep appreciation. I figure it’s a short leap from there to get to something like Leaving the Party.

Why this though? Well okay, that’s a better question. Mostly, I love to talk about games. Probably the best part of getting to play a game is getting to talk about it with others. I also think that a website is an incredibly fun thing to have, which helps quite a bit. Here’s the problem: the website is dying.

The internet as a cultural space has for a long time now been a series of platforms. With this platformisation of the internet comes the death of all the things that makes the internet unique and cool. With this comes the pained, struggling gasps of breath we hear from games media today, strangled by the monopolization of the internet and the proliferation of private equity and venture capital. I’ve been a reader of games media for my whole life, ever since I was getting Game Informer magazine delivered to my house every month from the subscription I got at Gamestop as a kid. Recently, Polygon was purchased by Valnet, laying off the entirety of its unionized staff in the process. Valnet, of course, is the SEO bait Canadian media company founded by the humanity criminals that brought you Pornhub and Brazzers. Before that, Kotaku Australia got shut down and Vice shut down it’s own games media page Waypoint. This is an industry that is no stranger to layoffs, shut downs, and union busting. Games media is contracting rapidly, and with the money going away, so too is so much of the easily accessible and talented writing that it supported. I’m not a part of the games industry in a meaningful way, but I care about games pretty deeply, and watching the foundation for discourse around games get scrapped for parts by ghouls like this sucks! I want to see more avenues for games writing out in the world right now. I want writers to get paid fairly for their work. Now, I’m very poor and can’t do any of those things really (lol) but what I can do is start sharing my own writing, to keep my own little place on the internet that I have control over. So basically if you think about it it’s actually quite selfless and heroic to start a blog.

All that stuff is true, and I think pretty valuable to think about in this current moment. But with Leaving the Party specifically, the most truthful answer is this: Lately, I find myself in need of a project. As mentioned, I’m not a member of the games industry, and although I’ve taken a shot at making games a couple times throughout my life, I’m not a game developer either. I have a pretty much daunting and all consuming full time job, and personally speaking I’m looking to make something out of what I’m interested in here, anything at all. I’m looking backwards at the dozens and dozens of RPGs of all kinds I’ve played throughout the years and all the ones I intend to get to one day and I’m thinking: that seems like a project to me.

So this is the blog: every month, probably once or twice throughout the month, I’m gonna be sharing some writing about the role playing games I’m currently invested in. Importantly, I’m not setting myself up with a big process or a bunch of rules: I’m not interested in forcing restrictions upon myself. Sometimes I’ll write about my experience with the game as a whole, other times I’ll be doing a more literary look at a game’s narrative or themes, and other times still it’ll be something else entirely. I want this to be a place where I can write about what I’m interested in when I’m interested in it. Speaking of, what I’m not currently invested in is the current trending games and release schedule. It’s totally possible that I’ll be writing about some of the newest RPGs if they interest me, but a priority here is to not hold myself to that schedule in any way. I want to talk about old games, weird games, games that I haven’t heard about yet, alongside the essential parts of the RPG canon like your Final Fantasies, your Dark Souls, your Fallouts and Baldurs Gates.

Is that it? listen man relax. We’re kind of working on it. there’s a lot of moving parts here

Okay. Okay, cool. So like I said. Leaving the Party. It’s gonna be a little games criticism, a little literary analysis, a little of whatever interests me. Mostly it’s gonna be a casual and chill little journal where you can read my thoughts on the games in my favorite genre. Remember, we’re leaving the party. We’re winding down okay? You’re entering the chill zone…

One last thing. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts! Have any questions or comments about anything I write, suggestions about what games or ideas I should be paying attention to, thoughts, feelings, judgements, et cetera? This is what email is made of. You can reach me at leavingthepartypod@gmail.com. You can also find me at my bluesky, which will be linked here and throughout the blog.

Hey, why does it say pod right there in the email??? get off my back

and remember: It’s 🐝 yourself Friday, don’t forget to 🐝 yourself today. stay easy bro

-sweet kerry eleanor

PS: Forgive me for my ugly website. I will get better at that eventually but for now this is what we got. You gotta admit though it’s got a certain something to it that’s for sure