The End of My Thirties, Reviews, and Self-Censoring

Last Monday, I celebrated my 39th birthday playing video games. It's not that I didn't want to go out or celebrate with friends; it just didn't pan out. It doesn't pan out. Every year. I'm not here to make you feel sorry for me, or anything. I'm just describing a feeling many millennials, especially male ones, will resonate with: Loneliness.

I'm sitting in a mall right now. I had chicken nuggets for dinner, and I'm sipping on Coke Zero while I write you this letter. My regular readers will notice I'm not in the book shop writing you this letter this time. And the reason is simple: Tomorrow is the Jewish New Year's Eve. There will be simply no time to sit down in a coffee shop and write. So I'm writing this letter a day early, on Thursday evening, to be sent on Friday while I help prepare for the holiday and to meet family at my brother's house.

That is the height of my loneliness because both of my older brothers are married with children, and I'm not. And you know how family gatherings are - "How are you doing? Are you in a relationship? Are you even looking? At your age, I did so and so..."

I'm just so tired of it all.

I guess I'm telling you all this not just to vent, but to show you that you're not alone if you feel like me.

I'm looking for a relationship, as I'm sure some of you do too. But people around us don't experience the multiple rejections a week on dating apps. Those stay on your phone. Our family members just see us at home on our computer or our phone, and think we aren't doing anything.

This week was rough, and the weekend will be the climax, but over the past few days, a little gem has been keeping me sane before bed. A little gem called Blood of Dawnwalker.

Blood of Dawnwalker is my new favorite game

Blood of Dawnwalker has surprised me on so many levels.

I'm playing at the Fair difficulty. Even so, the combat system has been challenging to learn. I spent the better part of one of my streams fighting against soldiers in a camp, and they kept killing me over and over until I defeated them. I was bad. I didn't even try to suck blood out of one of them during the fight.

The game also didn't make it too difficult for me on that difficulty. But I still failed. Tonight I'm returning to fight a boss that has already defeated me multiple times. I just stopped because it was 1 AM.

The story itself also reminds me a little bit of Mass Effect 3's War assets. If you're not familiar with them, it's a sum of everything you did for people around the galaxy, each one scored by how much it helps in the final battle to save Earth. You have 30 days to defeat Brencis - a vampire playing at being a ruler - before he drains your family. You can disrupt his court by doing quests directly tied to his vassals. And you can gain allies to defeat him, both humans and vampires around the world. I'm close to finishing some quests for one of his vassals, and I'm only on day 3 or 4.

The game world itself is vast, too, but the game gives you tools to traverse it quickly. I can become a wolf during the night and run very fast between locations.

(Editing Oren here on Friday: I can tell you I have defeated not only that boss, but also a very challenging one that was one of Brencis's three vassals in a stream that went for almost four hours last night)

Playing Dawnwalker also helped me understand something fundamental about my publishing strategy.

Publish the experience, not the aftermath

I was stuck in the old publishing strategy: play something, review it, and share it around. These days, old-school reviews are way too common. And I'm not much of a reviewer anyway. When I play, read, or watch a thing, I don't look at it holistically, like a reviewer should. I usually focus on one or two things I took away from the experience.

For example, if I had to sum up The Witcher 3 in a single sentence, it's "Geralt of Rivia finds his daughter and learns to be a father to her."

But The Witcher 3 is a huge game. A "proper" reviewer would have so much more to say than to talk about one single thing.

Now that I'm playing Blood of Dawnwalker, I want to document the experience. I don't want to finish the game and then talk about it afterward as a singular experience. I'm playing the game almost every day these last few days, and every time there's something new to talk about.

I'm still refining my updated strategy, but one thing I'm certain of: I'll give myself permission to publish shorter, more concise thoughts. Not every essay needs to be thousands of words.

I used to think nobody reads my random thoughts about a game. "What good does it do?" Today, when much of what you see around the web is not written by a human, that kind of writing resonates. I'm done self-censoring. The worst that will happen is people won't read the piece. I wanted to write it anyway.

Thank you so much for being here!

That's all I have for you today. I can't believe this is issue 15. I have been writing these letters for 15 weeks straight.

Soon you'll start seeing more content pop up in these letters and even on other days of the week.

I hope you enjoy your weekend, and Shana Tova from me to you.

Take care,
Oren