You Haven’t Played Enough

Grayson, I want to talk about time this week because I have noticed something as I have been playing Fire Emblem is a lot of people in our audience have been playing Fire Emblem over the past week in that.

i already feel that the discourse the discussion around the game is like getting away from me it's escaping through my fingers and and over the weekend i saw people on discord uh saying things like oh man people are people are already saying that this mission sucks that this path sucks that this character is really good this one's bad and i'm like i asked i started asking people i was like how do you know this Like, who are you? Where are you getting this discussion? And they were, yeah, right.

And they were like, oh, oh, like Reddit? And this funny thing was kind of emerging for me in which the people who sunk in the most time immediately were able to kind of set the stage of the conversation and be the tastemakers for what the real fans thought of this Fire Emblem game.

But also on a personal level, I was just starting to reflect on this.

And I was thinking, man, I go over to my switch to I did this, I go over to my friends list on my switch to and I see people already.

It's not even it hasn't even been a week.

And I'm seeing people say it says you know 35 hours 40 hours already spent in fire emblems fortunes weaves and i and i've and i've gotta wonder at a certain point is the game serving a part of their life that they that they need genuinely that is that is serving them it is filling in something that they lack in a way that like maybe has nothing to do with the content of the game itself and is instead speaking to another kind of need that people have to the point that now when we do come together to talk about the game i find it kind of hard to ground myself on the same level as this person kind of in a in a sometimes i internalize this as like oh if you're like a super fan and a game comes out and you like devour it as quickly as possible where you maybe just so ravenous so hungry for that game that anything was going to taste delectable like is that is that something going on like what are your thoughts on this

I mean, if you're going to, like, gorge yourself on a game, like, it's definitely Fire Emblem's a great choice, you know? Okay.

But I want to back up into, like, your point of, like, what role is a game filling in your life? This, for me, like, to your point was, I came to Baldur's Gate 3 late, but I played it over, like, this one time in my life where I had a whole week off.

i'll be honest i needed something like that and the amount of time i put into it that week you you you would think that something had kind of gone astray for me personally if you knew me you'd be like oh grace doesn't play games that much um i want to say like you know if people have time and they want to do something like great cool uh but with a game like this like to your point with the critical consensus it does feel hard to talk about this game with people who are like that far ahead because it feels like they have something you don't at this point you know like well i've seen these paths or i've i've gotten to this point where i start to see how these narratives interact with each other i'm like 10 hours in maybe a little less i have a lot of feelings respectable

it's still a normal person we can we can talk about the game yeah okay all right i see right But really, I'm kind of doing this this reverse Pierre Bordeaux idea of like cultural capital, where I think you see how hours become credentials for a lot of gamers online.

How many reviews did you see posted during the embargo that were like, I put a hundred and blah, blah, blah hours into Fire Emblem.

And it's like that, you know, so you should listen to me.

It's like, what does that even mean?

So like it is it is a credential, you know, it's both a credential and like a sort of I don't know.

I'm going to be honest.

I might differ from you a little bit on this.

I'm happy to see somebody tell me in a review how many hours it took because then I know whether I can approach it or not.

So on an informational level, yes, I want to know how big is this boy? How much time is this going to take to see through to its completion? But like That I do think is separate from this idea of like, what gives you credence as a person who can be able to talk about it, who can kind of have discourse with it.

If we're eliminating people from being able to even talk about the game, if they've only, only put in 10 hours, which, you know, if we want to back up, that'd be like saying, well, you only read a 600 page book.

You know, like,

wait, come back to me when you when you've when you've devoured at least nine more of those, you know, then we can chat.

I do.

I do quite like this thought experiment that you're proposing here, actually, because they're there because I because I cannot reject the time as credential, because if I if I'm over here and I'm sitting and I'm saying like one hundred and twenty hours into Fire Emblem, does that.

give somebody more authority to review the game than somebody who put fewer hours in uh into the game like i i like initially my gut is like no but then you you kind of propose this this interesting idea here where it's like well what if somebody put 20 hours into the game and wrote a review it's like do i is it is it fair of me or is is that What does that mean? Like, can I? What? How do I value? How do I evaluate kind of that critical lens, knowing that this is a game that I think you're like a big fantasy book, you're supposed to kind of really give a lot of time into? So how do I, you know, weigh those two things?