The Games Space

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #177. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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On my second day in Los Angeles, I was in the car park outside the Summer Game Fest badge pick up, waiting for my friend (former Unwinnable columnist and Ace Attorney 4 enjoyer Diego Argüello) when, from the corner of my eye, I saw a sparrow chick leave its nest for the first time.

It didn’t fly, exactly. It sat, round and disheveled, on the concrete. Once, it stumbled away from the wall where its nest had been; I shepherded it back in the hopes it wouldn’t get hit by a car. Later, its father came down and was also sitting with it. I know that it’s normal, that fledglings actually pick themselves up from the ground all the time, but it seemed so unlikely.

I got distracted talking to another journalist, and then Diego arrived, and by the time I remembered the sparrow it was gone.

Later, Diego and I sacked off going to the actual showcase in favor of watching the livestream in my hotel room. It was, according to popular opinion, rated D or below, although one commenter tried to pick up industry top hype man Geoff Keighley’s feelings by telling him “some of those ads we’re (sic) actually insane.”

The day after, Play Days began. Play Days is the invite-only hands-on part of the event – getting an invite as a freelancer was a trial in its own right – with press and content creators able to try out demos and talk to developers for preview coverage. To get to the area where all this was taking place, you had to go through Los Angeles’ fashion district; a whirlwind of mannequins and bolts of fabric. The campus itself was equally colorful. On the road outside, a brightly striped crossing would have felt Pride-like were it not so obviously and meticulously Pantone matched to the branding plastered all over the campus.

That first day, there was a repeated explosive sound close to the media area. By the time I got there, everybody seemed to be used to it. More than anything else, this felt like the metaphor that defined the show. Somewhere underneath this slick advertising event, with free coffee, alcohol and Sega-themed lemonade, something was repeatedly breaking down, loudly and shockingly. But no one around me could really do anything about it, so they just kept writing.

It’s hardly possible to say anything about the games industry in 2024 without acknowledging the more than 10,000 layoffs this year so far, compounding thousands more in the years before that. Even Keighley finally mentioned them, calling them “disappointing,” before awkwardly pivoting to say that the proliferation of indie games in the show would show big studios that they “have to treat their developers right,” a claim so self-evidently wrong in the face of the sentence that came before it that it entirely undermined the entire brief acknowledgement.

Then, on our side of the fence, there’s the layoffs devastating the media industry. As well as the number of staff jobs being cut, every week seems to bring a narrowing of opportunities for freelancers, with editors either being directly laid off or being worked even closer to the bone, more likely to miss or ignore emails in their very understandable exhaustion.

For one of my Summer Game Fest-adjacent previews, the site that I was writing it for changed hands between commission and publication. This isn’t the first time it’s done so since I’ve been freelancing for them. Last time, it delayed my payments for several months until I complained about it publicly. This time, I asked my editor who I should send my invoice to – the usual address belongs to the previous owners – and was told to go ahead and send it there anyway. At the time of writing, I’m not totally convinced I’m going to get paid.

All of this was the jarring, inescapable noise underneath the bustle of this year’s big summer games show. Not E3 – that one already died. Instead, its successor, an imitation that overlaps with the other shows that have become essentially seasonal repeats of the same affair. Geoff is excited for videogames at Opening Night Live in August. Geoff is excited for videogames at the Game Awards in December. Geoff is excited for videogames at Summer Game Fest in June. Soon it will be August again.

Before I went to Los Angeles, I went to the Mendip Hills in southern England with my family and some old friends: we’re all ecologists to varying degrees. (You didn’t think I made a full-time salary just writing about games, did you?) We got rained on, and nobody even suggested going inside. Then I went to New York, walked 13 miles the first day I was there, and wrote pages in a notebook about the city. In both places I was excited to write this: a feature length version of my regular column about space in games where I actually got to talk about real space, about being in the world.

But Los Angeles bounced off me. The fragments that meant something to me I’ve described here: sparrows, cloth, the constant threat of being jolted by an awful surprise while you’re trying to work. Also, in the media area, the trees overhanging the tables were shedding constantly. The leaves smelled nice, like a light resin. After the event Diego sent me a picture of his laptop with leaves still caught in the keyboard: “brought Play Days back with me.” I suppose the things that stuck with me were all somehow the same: tactile, unexpected (pleasantly or otherwise).

Not videogames. Sure, I played some. Those rooms were dark, loud. There’s always someone hovering over your shoulder trying to tell you that you did a good job even though I know I didn’t and I don’t find being bad at videogames a moral failing so I don’t need to be lied to about it.

But those moments didn’t feel like being in the world. They felt like being tipped, dizzyingly, into the maw of hype, and emerging in a simulated future. In the future, Summer Game Fest promises, there will be videogames. In the future, Summer Game Fest promises, you will be able to enjoy them. Experience, now, a slice of that future, and tell your readers about it.

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Jay Castello is a freelance writer covering games and internet culture. If they’re not down a research rabbit hole you’ll probably find them taking bad photographs in the woods.