My Games of the Year
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In January, my game of the year was London, Rock Paper Shotgun and London
London’s black towers and grand squares and pockets of receipts
Every bar a dungeon
Every train a Half Life
The street lamps bore down like detectives in high collar coats
The weight of ambition like a fat-jewelled pendant
And Rock Paper Shotgun on late nights on empty stomach
And a shared cigarette over pints in the street with tall girls
Kohl smudges the streets
Haha, our streets and no one else’s streets
In February, my game of the year was BBC Broadcasting House
Blitz bombings and service proud in the mouth
Ran art deco corridors high on 80 years’ transmission, paper in hand
Drank muddy coffee on lazy-ended shifts
Doodled blue IN/OUT tattoos on hands
CD cases clattered in the archives next to a lonely Wurlitzer juke
Nights in the sound box, squinting at heroes
Laughter to manage, and jokes to record
A thousand people and a thousand programmes stared
Paperwork and legal and scripts with hurried biro
Counted blips to broadcast
The news roared down throats
And tweets upon tweets chattered how and why
David Tennant is in the lift, and John McCarthy’s car is late
Gemini Rue in the dark at home
In March, my game of the year was GDC
Faces and faces of unfamiliar familiar
Jenn’s smile
Lewie’s lanyard
Kirk’s hangover
Tim Schafer is touching your elbow at the bar
Ben is peering at you with curiosity
One Life Left is storming through crowds
Bastion‘s voiceover was recorded in a cupboard
A day queuing at Blue Bottle is a week of conversation
San Francisco’s early streets are a lifetime of San Francisco
And every morning was a lifetime
In April, my game of the year was rent, food and bills.
Weeks of staring at a screen or a manuscript
Words crawling down my face and hands
Proofreaders’ symbols scrolling across my dreams
The bank account scowling with teeth
Stovetop espresso and off bagels
Six hours of pub wifi drinking only one Coke
And people asking why I wasn’t there
And who I was
I took a cheque to cash and ate dry bread, ego hiding
In May, my game of the year was not crying at my temp job
And wondering when my career would start again
And thinking so little
And yet the secretary wished she was me
I did not wish I was me
Jubilee weekend in underwear only, sheet-rain tears
Ate nothing, wished nothing, wrote ugly paragraphs and
Was abandoned over and over I had a too-obvious heart
And terrible opinions
And a face that looked like the dullest kind of past
I was not my achievements
I was a look in a bar and nothing
In June, my game of the year was Dys4ia
And my body seemed my own again
Was it ever someone else’s?
And Twine and the book would not go away
And there were words unused on a broadcast
And they were important words
They were words that would be heard
That struggled to get out and needed to get out
And they used me and bothered me and wouldn’t go away
They woke me up like an old boyfriend in the middle of the night and demanded that I attend to him
And I looked at Rock Paper Shotgun
And I made it in the only way it was natural to make it
And knew it was something
It was the first time I knew
And I have known ever since
In July, my game of the year was DOTA (again)
But the head of a BBC department scowled at me
Why aren’t you already a producer, he said, waving my CV
Why aren’t you already making the programmes you want
When you were twenty you could have been the head of this department
Why haven’t you done it already
Now tell me who is the head of the BBC
Remember his name
Because it certainly isn’t yours
In August, my game of the year was dancing like fireworks over rooftops
Dancing was for the empty fire in the soul
And I planned to fill it
There were twenty gin and tonics on every corner
There were couples in every bar to hate
There were birthdays every week to forget
There were ways I could write and be heard and be insulted
There were ways and I forgot them and remembered them and forgot them
And I ate what I liked but lost weight because I spent so much energy trying
I kicked hot men up and down aisles
I bought underwear to dance in and laughed
In September, my game of the year was becoming what I’d always wanted to be
We went to Bletchley and lay in the sun by the BBC Micros because I wanted to
And at work I lay in the sun and made games
I sold articles and wrote about things I loved
I played Journey and cried
I turned 27 and felt seven years too old to be a producer at the BBC
It was The Cure at their most happy
And I wondered why and I stood next to a tall girl and wondered why
And it was all because I was a passion in a little container
And I never shut up
Never shut up
Never
In October, my game of the year was cresting and being thrown onto rocks
It was a month of exhausting misunderstanding about myself
And mistaking my ground for another ground
Another ground that does not matter
Once you stand up on that ground, no other ground exists
And there is just you under a light reading your first print article
And people will come and embrace you just because they heard
Make a pact with the devil it said: sacrifice happiness for words
Others will sacrifice other things to gain happiness
But you, you just devour yourself or are devoured
In November, my game of the year was writing. Writing, writing into a coma
People asked if I was okay
No one is ever okay
Don’t people know that no one is ever okay?
Are you okay?
I don’t like you if you are okay
Write about how you are not okay and I will listen
In December, my game of the year was GOTY lists, like hundreds of shopping lists caught in the wind
Lists that chart journeys like sailors yell gesturing over pint glasses
Lists on a scrawled curly-printed map across my pale papyrus skin up to the neck
All connected to the heart
My game of the year was you, it was you it was you and it was me and it was everything we gamed
We gamed the world and the black letters on the glare and the runners out in the dark
We gamed our feelings and our code and our hope
We gamed innovation and we gamed our bank accounts
We gamed black and white and rich and poor and male and female
We gamed what the world thought and how we are put together and our structures and unstructure
We gamed love and lost
Every year we game love and we lose
But in January, it will be our game of the year again
And we will play again
Continue
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Follow Cara on Twitter @CaraEllison. Photos were taken by Daniel Griliopoulos during an outing to England’s National Museum of Computing Bletchley Park, the birthplace of the modern computer, and they mostly depict the guts of those early machines.
