Why Academic Writing Feels Like Pushing Treacle Uphill

Okay so I just finished writing about Ethan and his lovely little texts and it was like, I don't know, like having a conversation with myself? Two hours maybe, start to finish, and I knew where it was going the whole time. Not in a planned way but in that good way where your brain just sort of unfolds the thing as you're writing it.

And now I'm supposed to write this conference paper about environmental games and procedural whatever-the-fuck and I've been staring at a blank document for forty-seven minutes.

Forty-seven minutes! Of nothing!

Well, not nothing. I did type "This paper examines" and then immediately deleted it because who talks like that? Nobody talks like that. But apparently I'm supposed to talk like that when I'm being Academic Writing Me instead of Regular Writing Me, and Academic Me is quite possibly the most boring person alive.

I know what I want to say, which is the maddening part. I've been playing this game called Spiritfarer where you're basically a boat-driving psychopomp helping animal spirits resolve their unfinished business before they can move on to whatever comes next. And the boat mechanics—the way you upgrade and customize this vessel that becomes your home while you're shepherding souls through their final requestsit's—doing something really profound about how we process loss and letting go.

But the moment I try to turn that into Academic Speak, something dies. "This paper interrogates the procedural rhetoric of vessel customization in Spiritfarer as a metaphor for..."

See? Dead on arrival.

I think the problem is that Academic Writing Me has to pretend to know things. Like, really know them. With references and theoretical frameworks and methodology sections that make it sound like I approached this topic with a clipboard and a very serious plan. When actually what happened was I was playing this game because someone somewhere somewhen said it would make me cry (it did), and partway through I had this moment where I was like oh shit, this boat isn't just transportation, it's like... it's how you carry people while you're learning to let them go.

But I can't write that in a conference paper! I can't be like "So I was sobbing over a pixel cat and suddenly realised..." Although frankly, why not? Why can't academic writing include the actual experience of discovering things?

My former supervisor would probably have words. She's great but she has very firm opinions about what constitutes rigorous analysis versus personal reflection, and I suspect my boat-crying revelation falls firmly into the second category.

The thing that's really doing my head in is that I can write about peripheral friendships and empty restaurants for hours without stopping, but ask me to analyse a game that I've spent dozens of hours with and I suddenly can't string a sentence together. It's not like I don't know how to think about games. I've been thinking about games my whole life ever since The Legend of Zelda on the SNES. But there's something about the academic format that makes me forget how to have thoughts.

Maybe it's because personal essays let you be confused? Like, you're allowed to circle around an idea and poke at it from different angles and admit when you're not sure what you think yet. Academic papers want you to show up with your argument fully formed, like you just stepped out of the Thesis Factory with a brand-new position on procedural environmental narratives, still wrapped in theoretical plastic.

But that's not how thinking works. At least not how my thinking works.My thinking is much more like... you know when you're doing the washing up and your hands are busy with the plates and your mind starts wandering, and suddenly you understand something about a conversation you had three days ago? Like your brain was working on it in the background and only tells you the answer when you're not actively trying to figure it out? Most of my best insights happen like that. They sneak up on me while I'm doing something else.

Academic writing doesn't leave room for sneaky insights. It wants everything laid out in advance: here's my thesis, here's my methodology, here's my literature review proving I've done my homework. Still. Even years after graduation and PhD. Very organised. Very responsible. And very fucking boring.

I mean, I get why it has to be that way. You can't just rock up to a conference and be like "I have some feelings about this boat game" and expect people to take you seriously. There are standards! Protocols! Ways of doing things that separate proper academic discourse from random musings!

But oh Dear, it makes the actual writing feel like having to pretend you understand wine when the sommelier starts going on about 'notes of wet limestone.'

It's mental because look—the Ethan piece just poured out, right? Like having a proper conversation with someone who gets it. Two hours and done. But even the more academic-ish pieces I've written here—the footnotes thing, the iceberg theory stuff, that rant about conference participation requirements—they're harder. Not impossible, but definitely stickier. I can feel my brain switching into a different gear, trying to sound cleverer than I actually am.

But there's something different about writing critique versus trying to produce the thing you're critiquing, you know? When I'm moaning about citation culture, I'm still just... moaning. When I have to actually write a proper academic paper with a methodology section and everything, suddenly I'm supposed to transform into this version of myself who never has a stupid thought or changes their mind halfway through a sentence.

The Ethan piece felt like explaining something to a friend. The academic piece feels like being interviewed for a job I'm not qualified for.

Which is ridiculous because I DO know what I'm talking about when it comes to games. I've been playing them since I was eleven or something. I've written countless words about how they work, what they do, why they matter. But the moment I have to frame it as "contributing to game studies discourse" instead of "here's this cool thing I noticed," my brain just... turns to concrete.

Like, yesterday I sat down to work on this Red Dead Redemption 2 paper and I swear I could feel my personality just... draining away. I kept writing sentences that sounded like they'd been generated by a committee of very serious robots. Everything had to be 'significant' or 'compelling' or 'warrant further investigation.' I wrote the word 'moreover' three times in one paragraph and didn't even notice until I read it back. Moreover! Who says moreover in real life? I spent twenty minutes googling whether other people use 'ludic' unironically or if it's just something we all pretend sounds normal. Then I got distracted reading about whether you're supposed to italicise game titles (spoiler: nobody agrees) and somehow ended up watching a YouTube video of how to clear the whole map in Elden Ring Nightreign.

By the time I'd written one actual paragraph about virtual photography, I felt like I'd been academically processed. Like all the interesting bits of my brain had been filtered out and replaced with citation anxiety.

I just want to write about playing games without having to pretend I'm solving the mysteries of the universe, you know? Like, I was playing this thing called A Short Hike the other day—just wandering around this tiny mountain helping random animals with their problems—and there was this moment where I realised how my breathing had slowed and deepened because the game was so... gentle? And I wanted to write about that. About how some games create this weird kind of safety that you don't even know you need until you're in it.

But how do you turn that into academic writing? 'This study examines the phenomenology of digital gentleness in contemporary indie gaming narratives'? Fuck off. The whole point was that it felt like breathing after holding your breath, and the moment you start analysing the mechanics of breathing you've already missed what made it worth talking about.

Maybe I should just quit and become one of those people who writes game reviews for a living (I don't think one can make a living from that). At least then I could say 'this game made me feel like I was being hugged by a mountain' without having to cite three different theorists about embodied cognition or whatever.

Although knowing Academic Wrtiting Me I'd probably find a way to make even that sound pretentious.

But wait. What if there's something in between? Like, what if you could write about that breathing thing in a way that helps other people recognise it when it happens to them? Not because you've wrapped it in proper theoretical packaging, but because you've described it clearly enough that someone else goes 'oh shit, yeah, I know that feeling.' And maybe they start noticing it in other games, or in books, or just walking around their neighborhood.

That's still scholarship, isn't it? Helping people see patterns they hadn't noticed before? Understanding something better that they want to understand well? Making connections between experiences that seemed unrelated? You don't need a methodology section to do that. You just need to pay attention and then figure out how to share what you've seen.

Maybe the conference paper can wait. Maybe I'll just write about the mountain hug and see if anyone else knows what I'm talking about.

Image: © Victoria Mummelthei rabbitingyears