I’m excited about the future.

I mean, people who play a lot of games are usually excited about the future because, on one level, games are about the future, about the acceleration of technology and the impossible Peter-Molyneux-promises we all want to come true right now. Gamers are notoriously nostalgic, but, let’s face it: we’re really bad at holding onto that past. Systems come and go; consoles break; we don’t always have backwards-compatibility; we play so many new games that we lose the time and interest to play old ones. Gamers love the past so much simply because it’s something we can’t exactly touch anymore. We pine away. Whatever old games are, whatever part of our lives they may represent—childhood, happier times, old opportunities and regrets—they’re things we can’t see, have, change, or re-live. Nostalgia is always a kind of sadness, even if it’s only a faint kind.

But, honestly, who wants to be six anymore? The games I played were often dark and grey and kind of blurry when I was six, and things get darker the longer they live in my memory. Today, though, it’s sunny outside. I’m going to go into town and write a thing and maybe read a book, and tonight I’m going to stare at the BioShock: Infinite screens again. I’ve played an awful lot of grey-ass games, particularly recently– games grey in more ways than one. When I think about today’s games twenty years from now, I’m going to be remembering an awful lot of cement. I’m going to be nostalgic about it all, too, and I kind of dread that. It’ll all come down like a second layer of dark. See, it’s already got to the point where I will lose a lot of excitement for a title if the screens don’t turn up with enough green in them. Green and blue together, preferably. Maybe green and blue and white.

On a scale of 0 to rad, the future is pretty rad.