I have a favorite quotation, by a lesser known American Transcendentalist writer named Margaret Fuller in something she called Miscellanies: “Can we make pearls from our oyster-bed? At least, let us open some of the shells and try.”
I’m a heavyhanded analogy user, and this quote works for me in two ways. First, the pearl itself is an object of fixation within the oyster: a wayward grain of sand or some other impurity that’s coated in nature’s nail polish, nacre, over and over until it’s as big as a green pea. The oyster has a natural response to something stimulating, and the results are a prize.
The second way is as the shucker, so to speak. Life may be littered with oyster shells, but you only find the pearls if you look. Taking a second or third look at something in a game you love can be as rewarding as the first day you started it. Reading someone else’s thoughtful take may lead you back to something you thought you were finished thinking about.
I want to welcome these thoughts, and one of my other big goals with Buttonhook is to help less familiar readers understand the context without feeling left out. Games media can be very exclusionary, in all the usual sociopolitical ways like gender and race as well as in the huge divide between hardcore and casual gamers, experts and non-experts, lifelong and new players.
I’m very lucky to have a bunch of people in my life who answer my nonstop (and often pretty basic!) questions about this game or that game, who let me watch them play difficult things I could never do myself and explain lore and mechanics. These friends have picked through the oyster shells ahead of me and given me their best guess as to which ones have pearls inside.
That’s what I want for you, too. Let’s open some of the shells and try.
— Caroline Delbert (@aetataureate)