First of all, thanks for making it this far! Tackling a project of this scale was absolutely intimidating and provided its fair share of stress for me, so your attention and engagement with it means a lot to me.

          Video games have been a huge part of my life for about as long as I can remember, though their role was always in the periphery, something I turned to when I had time away from actual obligations. A big motivation for focusing this project where I did came from a desire to change this, to see how my own understanding and appreciation of the medium could change by making it the focus of my work for once. It was also an opportunity to share some of the more abstract parts of the video game experience that make them so important to me, as it’s often hard to articulate the exact “magic” of gaming – and if the length of this project is any indication, I’m still figuring out how best to do this concisely.

         Perhaps a part of why these ideas are still so elusive to me is because there exists very little critical examination of games in the mainstream that isn’t commercially-motivated, examining games as products from the perspective of consumers. That kind of writing has its place, of course, but there’s honestly so much more to games as an artistic medium than that approach tends to highlight. Without this basis, it’s been mostly left to independent writers to try and dissect these more intangible elements of this medium, a group I suppose I can now consider myself a part of, more or less.

      I’m far from the only one attempting to shine a more analytical light on games – I’d point to Anna Anthropy whom I quoted in my section on Heavy Rain, or Hamish Black who has a fabulous YouTube channel called Writing on Games that’s packed with this kind of content – but this approach is still fairly niche… which is my way of saying I feel comfortable contributing to it largely because of how little of it there already is. There’s not a lot to compare my own project against, really, which, while a relief in some ways, also means I’m left totally unsure if what I’ve done is, well, anything at all. I suppose that’s for you to decide.

      Either way, know that I am very thankful for your time reading this piece. No matter how hard it got at times, it proved, and continues to prove, to be endlessly rewarding. Keep reading, keep thinking, keep playing.