4 - Introduction

Full transcript:

Before I launched this audio zine, I wanted to prove to myself that I could keep up the regular production pace demanded by a periodical. And so I produced three episodes that tackled the topic essentially in medias res, launching right into discussions of highly specific ways that I find the Steam Deck interesting and personally relevant. I promised myself that if I could pull that off, then and only then would I allow myself the indulgence of a first-person-soaked introductory episode. And, I am afraid to say, we have now come to it.

This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

If you’ve followed my audio work prior to this, then you might be familiar with Jmac’s Arcade, a series of video-accompanied monologues that I recorded during the first years of the twenty-first century, looking back at the coin-operated video games that were central to my very young life decades prior. I had originally meant that to be a much longer series, but it felt complete after a half-dozen episodes, in part due to my own self-consciousness about mining my own childhood memories for stories. Beyond that being a finite resource, I also felt a hesitancy about dedicating so much attention to my personal past while a culture of independently produced video games was only just beginning to flourish all around me.

I didn’t realize that Venthuffer is the successor project to Jmac’s Arcade until I had recorded its first episodes, and recognized the voice that I heard. So here is the realization of my long-dormant desire to apply that voice to games and game technology of the present era. Credit also goes to other technology-adjacent monologue series that I’ve enjoyed in the years since, including the work of Jason Scott, Jay Springett, and—if you’ll pardon the hyperspecificity—the increasingly long and always interesting introductions to the Third Strongest Podcast by Ryan Veeder, Sarah Willson, and Zach.

But why the Steam Deck? Why plunge into a multi-part, soul-searching study that centers around this particular piece of heavy, noisy, honestly a bit janky consumer technology, one that isn’t even particularly new?

The single trigger for the idea that became Venthuffer was a Mastodon post by Liam Dawe, who runs the blog Gaming on Linux. He had analyzed the public sales data about the then-new video game Black Myth: Wukong. By triangulating it with changes to the top-sellers lists that Valve regularly publishes, Liam found evidence that ongoing sales of the Steam Deck console were, more than two years after its launch, very strong. And this made me happy! And I immediately questioned this feeling! It felt very much at odds with my sense of stoic self-definition, to find my own happiness bound to the sales figures of an expensive toy, with whom my own relationship was limited to being just another paying consumer.

But this again was a voice from my past that I recognized, and the voice was my own. Like a lot of gaming and technology enthusiasts, I burned with platform partisanship in my youth. As a child I pledged myself to the furtherance of Atari, and in my late teens and twenties would go to the mat for all things Apple, especially the Macintosh. I certainly still admire and use Apple technology, but it’s been a long time since I’ve identified with it, since I’d feel a rush of shared victory at hearing news of strong quarterly earnings. But here it was happening again, from a direction I did not at all expect, this homely little handheld computer, twice the weight of a Nintendo Switch and infinitely louder, with a roaring and infamously fragrant outflow vent.

And talking with friends some two weeks after this realization, the domain name for this audio zine struck me like a thunderbolt. And you know that’s all it took.

So Venthuffer exists as a personal exploration of what intrigues me about the Steam Deck, hoping that in my investigation I’ll uncover a small but glowing cloud of tangents worth writing out, and reciting aloud.

If I had to choose a single thread to pull, it would concern the unusually wide band of history that the Steam Deck straddles, both in terms of the games that it makes accessible, and in the legacy inherent in its surprisingly unhidden Linux-based operating system. In subtle ways, the Steam Deck acknowledges video games as an art form with a long, living history behind the ever-hyped leading edge that most game media focus all of their attention on. And, as my own past projects might suggest, that really speaks to me.

All that said, I do intend to proceed with caution. I’m not that young man with a Performa 6100 and a chip on his shoulder any more, and I have no desire to publicly defend any consumer technology, let alone venerate it. I look forward to examining the flaws of Steam Deck and, maybe, what these flaws have to tell us about the larger culture.

Steam Deck is not gonna be around forever, and I doubt it will be remembered as the most influential gaming console. Still… I think it might be the best one. And I wanna give that a closer look.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.