Super Nerd Sundays Presents: An End to Regular Updates!

I have been writing Super Nerd Sundays for over six years now.  They began as an outlet for me, an attempt to present a kind of writing that was absent from the discourse surrounding video games as a medium.  In 2009, when I first started typing them out, there was a dearth of intellectual discourse surrounding video games, and what few discussions were occurring unfolded in ways felt off, unfulfilling somehow.  So I wrote, once a week, about games, trying to illustrate how they existed as a medium of artistic expression capable of displaying the complexities of human existence just as effectively as every other medium out there could.  I did that, with some awkward interruptions along the way, for more than half a decade.

But lately I've felt like the pieces I'm writing have been getting stale.  I feel like I haven't been discussing big issues, the issues that really captivate me when I'm thinking about games as a medium: things like representational politics in games, metastatic narrative constructs, and the malleability of story structure that games necessitate in order to operate effectively.  I still get a chance to talk about these things every once in a while, but just as often I spend three or four hours of a Saturday hurriedly attempting to cobble together something to say between grading papers and falling asleep.

That isn't what I want to be doing.  It isn't the kind of discussion that I'd like to have, and it distracts me, both from the games that I want to play, and the projects that I'd like to develop.  So I'm no longer going to be releasing Super Nerd Sundays on a regular basis.

This has been coming for a while: I spent a long time working on serialized content, and I've done things with it that, I hope, have been enjoyable, maybe even interesting.  But I'd prefer not to bash my head against a keyboard, and I'd prefer not to phone in content to people who have been engaging with my work for years.  So I'm not going to be posting SNSes every Sunday anymore.  I will, however, still be writing them when they come to mind.

With a bevy of upcoming titles on the horizon that promise to introduce fascinating new elements to the discourse that is "video games," I'm sure I'll have plenty to discuss in the near future, but I'm going to wait until there are games that I've played that evoke the same kind of visceral reaction Bioshock, Fallout 3, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare did.  I want to write essays that are meaningful, and that come from a place of personal urgency: I want to focus on telling you all things that I consider profoundly important about this medium we all love again.

Thanks for sticking with me all this time, and I hope you drop by again, after I start producing new articles.  For now, though, I'm going to go back to playing games.  Maybe something will come up sooner than I think.