Alex Talks

The Ultimate “Experience” — Alex Talks

About Best Ofs

This article is one of the “Best of Irrational Passions”, meaning it’s featured on our Best Of page. Along with it, we have both a full read-through of the article and a conversation about the article, the writing process, and where the author is with the piece. Give it a listen! And if that’s how you found this page, we hope you enjoyed!

There is a bit of a caveat to this whole episode of Alex Talks. The unspoken agreement between me, the writer, and you, the viewer, that… I get it. I’m speaking in pretty specific terms about playing a game when it is in reality much more general. In fact, I use a lot of very specific examples that are very difficult to spread out to a broader audience.

My approach here is more philosophical: that maybe a person you respect or like, or even a complete stranger on the internet, had an experience with a game that you could never have. Maybe a bug caused it, maybe an aspect of their personal identity and experience caused it. It’s a very specific, social psychology approach to divisive internet nature, and it’s something I always try and incorporate into my conversations on the internet. I’m maybe the worst at accepting others opinions, but maybe that’s just because I have very stubborn or out there friends.

I have loved games that others have hated, and hate games that everyone loves. That doesn’t mean we can’t have reasonable conversations about them, and dig deeper into the reasons as to why I or they feel that way. That’s the fun part of this whole “community” part of video games.

And if we truly want to be a community, we better figure out how to do this better.

Tell me what you think by tweeting your thoughts @ALFighter27 with the #AlexTalks and I’d be happy to have a conversation with you.

There is one more episode in this first block of Alex Talks Season 3, and after that one there is gonna be a bit more distance between episodes. I’ll have more details on that in the coming weeks, but in the meantime: sit back, relax, enjoy.