If you’ve been reading MoeGamer or any of my other work for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m a strong believer that anyone should be able to enjoy what they want (assuming it’s not outright illegal or harmful) without fear of being shamed for it.

By extension, I also tend to believe that anyone who enjoys something should have the freedom to talk about the thing they enjoy — again, without fear of being shamed for it, and with others showing them at least some basic courtesy and understanding, even if they don’t share the same tastes.

It’s this latter bit that the world today seems to struggle with — and it’s an aspect of life that, with increasing frequency in the modern age, leaves me feeling desperately lonely and frustrated, even surrounded by these things I love so much.

I’m writing about this today following a discussion I had earlier on popular chat program Discord. I’m a member of several different communities on there, and while there’s a certain crossover of interests between them — primarily video games — some of them have a marked level of resistance to certain topics.

For example, earlier there was a discussion happening about narrative in games, and particularly effective examples of female protagonists. I happened to mention that an awful lot of Japanese anime-style games make a real point of featuring excellently realised female characters — often to the exclusion of male cast members, in many cases — and provided some good examples.

Rather than this kicking off an interesting discussion, the main response I got was the assumption that Japanese games had “paper-thin plots”, “saccharine characters” and “poor mechanics”, followed by the admission that the person in question hadn’t really explored any RPGs since Final Fantasy VIII on PS1. (That was 24 years ago at the time of writing, before you get the calculator out.)

The discussion didn’t progress any further from there, because that initial rebuttal then prompted several others to come out and complain about story-centric games in several ways, leaving me feeling like I’d just been excluded from the conversation without being able to provide additional context to my opinions.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone has to agree with how I feel or anything, nor do I wish to suggest that the folks I was attempting to talk with about this sort of thing were somehow “in the wrong” for having different opinions to me, but one thing I have found with increasing frequency over the course of the last few years is that it’s just plain difficult to have a meaningful conversation with people about things that are somehow seen to be outside the “mainstream” or “norm”. It always feels like a fight to be heard.

This happens with the group I refer to as my “real-life” friends, also; a group who, today, I primarily keep in touch with via a WhatsApp group, but whom I refer to as “real-life” friends due to the fact that we all went to university together, all live relatively near to one another and, prior to several of them having children, used to meet regularly for board game sessions.

On multiple occasions I have attempted to recommend games to this group — both smaller-scale titles that I think they might enjoy, and larger, high-profile titles like Final Fantasy XVI — and, again, habitually get rebuffed without any real indications that they want to know more, or, perhaps more importantly, are willing to learn more.

This is frustrating. And it’s one of the main reasons that I set up MoeGamer in the first place. Hell, further back, it’s one of the reasons I ran Games Are Evil the way I did, and it’s the reason I started my JPgamer column at USgamer. I have had so many great experiences with video games and visual novels that I want so desperately to share with people — and, by extension, to encourage them to try for themselves — that I had to have some sort of outlet.

That outlet ended up being writing, because when I write something on my own site, I can talk about it entirely on my own terms without interruption by others — and at that point, it’s entirely on someone else’s shoulders whether or not they choose to engage with what I’ve written. I’ve laid out on paper exactly how I feel about something and why I think it’s interesting, noteworthy and deserving of respect — so if I present that to someone and they choose to ignore it, that’s kind of their problem, really.

This isn’t an ideal way of doing things, of course. I’d much prefer to be able to simply talk to family and friends about the things I love, the reasons why I love them and why they are so important to me. But so few people these days appear to be in any way receptive to anything that isn’t spoon-fed to them by supposed opinion leaders and (ugh) “influencers” that it often feels like being a simple man in the street like myself confers very little in the way of “authority”, for want of a better word.

That’s frustrating and, frankly, upsetting. It upsets me because not only do I feel like I have hobbies that I can’t easily enthuse about with many people, it also makes me feel like people are missing out on things I’m pretty sure they would enjoy themselves. One of my aforementioned “real-life” friends refused to try Final Fantasy XVI for himself because one review he read didn’t like it that much, and this was somehow a more important opinion to him than that of a personal recommendation from a friend that bore his own tastes in mind.

And so this is why I’ve always done things the way I have here on MoeGamer. I’m not here to pick things apart and find the flaws in them. For me, it’s much more enjoyable to find the fun in something. Because it’s honestly pretty rare that something exists in the world of gaming that has precisely no redeeming features whatsoever — and it’s easy enough to avoid the things that are so far out of your own wheelhouse that you know you probably won’t have a good time with them.

That latter aspect is the tricky one, though. Some people make assumptions that various works won’t be to their taste without taking the opportunity to find out a bit more about them. I’ve certainly been guilty of this in the past — and I do my best to be better about this these days — and I’ve definitely encountered it with an increasing degree of frequency when attempting to have conversations with others about the things I love and enjoy in gaming.

To be honest, that constant resistance has, on more than one occasion, made me consider simply giving up on writing and making videos about things. If no-one’s going to listen, then what’s the point?

But at the same time, if something I’ve written or made a video about brings just one person a certain degree of joy or makes them feel like there’s someone else on this planet who understands the things that they love, enjoy and appreciate, then that’s worthwhile, I think. And so here I am, still tapping away at my keyboard despite the feelings of frustration that surround me.

The things I write about here are things I love; things that I feel have genuine value, and that have made my life better in one way or another, even by a miniscule amount. Writing about them, expressing those positive feelings and allowing that joy to be visible to someone — including my future self — is helpful in its own small way.

And if just one of you reading this discovers something that has a similarly positive effect on your own existence as a result of something I’ve written, then it’s been worthwhile.

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