Numb. That was one of my most common feelings in 2021. Cancelled vacation with the family because some people we’d be around are anti-vax? Numb. COVID-19 outbreak at my kid's school? Numb. Inability for Democrats to do anything in the face of an increasingly facsism-adjacent Republican party, let alone deliver upon its electoral promises? Numb.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvnjn5/all-i-asked-from-video-games-in-2021-was-to-make-me-feel-something
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The intro to this is very upsetting to me, it’s what I’ve been feeling all week since Omicron reversed all the progress we’ve made in a single swipe. Just total fatalistic defeat, nothing left to do but march onward, callused, with no direction, no plan, and choose to feel nothing over despair. Been playing a lot of Death’s Door this week since that makes me feel pretty concentrated and driven, but man, what a mess.
Lately I’ve been feeling like even my moments of anger are a performance. When I’m furious about Joe Manchin or the Broncos or traffic, I hit a dissociated nothing at a point. It’s a really not good place to be right now.
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Had a good run about six weeks ago where things almost felt…normal-ish, but it’s definitely that March 2020 feeling all over again and my nerve endings have been sanded away now. What I was really hoping for this year was something like the feeling I got from swinging in Insomniac’s Spider-Man game (or flying in Journey etc.): a low-stakes joyful experience (Boomerang X was a little bit too chaotic to elicit that feeling from me). Ratchet and Clank got closest for me.
