A part of me didn’t think I really deserved to be going to university. You might well agree. On the 13th of August 2015, the day I opened my A Level results and a month before I was due to set off for Falmouth, I wrote this in my diary:
‘Though I am obviously extremely glad to be going to Falmouth, a very, very minute part of me thinks that failing would have taught me a much-needed lesson. Instead, am I going to make the same mistakes at university?’
These ‘mistakes’ encompassed my failure to do a single minute of revision, but more broadly the cycle of anxiety and avoidance that was responsible and that would indeed cause problems for me at uni. It was interesting for me to discover that quote when preparing to write this blog. It’s hard to be sure how much of any recollection is revisionism - real lives so seldom have themes and patterns as neat as that, and any attempt to attribute them is likely illusory - but it seems I had spotted the problem even then.
During the summer of 2015 I had decided I would become a University Vlogger and document my experiences at Falmouth. This was driven less by a burning urge to pivot towards vlogs and more by an inkling that cornering an extreme niche might broaden my viewership. In short, I was shedding the aimlessness that had been my trademark up to now. Where previously I made videos for the sake of having made a video, now I had something to make them about.
I was the first to move into my flat on Penryn Campus. I met a couple of my new flatmates as they arrived, chatted to them, liked them. That evening and the next, we all got drunk and started getting to know each other. Everything, as I observed in my first uni vlog, went ‘Surprisingly okay.’ In fact: ‘Meeting new people went, for Neil standards, pretty good.’
‘It’s ten past six in the evening and I’m in Falmouth. The odd thing is, I’ve been phenomenally calm about moving away. There have been a few nervous pangs, but nothing outside the realm of Normal anxiety.’
-Diary on my first day in Falmouth, 11/09/2015
I still haven’t entirely cracked the code of anxiety, why I sometimes need to rehearse my order in my head ad infinitum in Costa but I was able to move away from home with scarcely a twinge of the stomach. My best guess is this: anxiety is something you build up in your head over time. It’s as laborious and time-consuming as laying the foundations of a skyscraper. I’ve ordered coffee plenty of times, I must have built a respectable 4 storey townhouse of Costa anxiety. But I’d never been to university before, nor had I lived away from home. For me personally, it’s more difficult to be anxious about a complete unknown. You can’t build that foundation on nothing. The landscape was flat, for now.
Block C, Flat 1, Room 2
My early uni vlogs show a boy who is pleasantly incredulous to be meeting new
people, going out drinking, living a very normal student experience. I learned a lot very quickly about being a student. It felt like there was no environment as fractious or as convivial, as relentless or as mundane. Everyone is in the same boat and everyone wants to be liked. I was desperate to be liked. Though I still think I did a good job of coming out of my shell (‘for Neil standards’), meeting this influx of new people brought home to me that they possessed both social skills and emotional intelligence that I did not. I had developed the tools I needed to survive my teenage years, but university was a different beast. I didn’t have to live on the defensive any more. I will never be an extravert, but I realised quickly that sarcasm and superciliousness are unappealing qualities, even if they got me through a fairly hostile time at school.
Like anyone who was once a fresher, I have my share of stories that seemed utterly crazy at the time but seem, in retrospect, pretty pedestrian. I remember keeping a trolley from Asda in my room for about a month to use as a convenient clothes horse. What banter! And I took up home brewing in the pursuit of cheap alcohol, suffusing my bedroom with a pungent, yeasty whiff. I never had many people round for some reason.
Meanwhile, much of this was being documented in just a little too much detail on Kepplemarsh. I never named names or alluded to the more sensitive incidents, but I hadn’t yet gained a respect for my own privacy. I shared, and frequently I overshared. Someone who had seen my vlogs sent me a gift in the post (it was a Jake the Dog mug) because that was how blasé I was: I had freely broadcast not merely the town or the campus, but the exact room where I lived. Thank God it was a mug and not anthrax.
My viewership at this point was measured in tens, but it wasn’t long before people who knew me had found my videos. I must have told someone when I was drunk. Whatever the case, I do know that it wasn’t long until people had started to find them through word of mouth or via some means other than direct from the source.
Of course, there’s another small matter which you may have spotted has been absent from my account so far. You don’t go to university for drinking and drama, you go for crucial further education. Don’t you?
Ludonarrative dissonance
I was disillusioned with my university course within a week. I went to uni to study Writing for Digital Games - a bit like English Literature with Creative Writing, except the literature in this case would be video games. Yet most of my lectures and seminars weren’t about games at all, they weren’t even tailored to my course: they stuck us in with the English students. To study poetry.
My suspicion that the course I had signed up to didn’t really exist was exacerbated by the sessions in the games studio, where we studied board games before being put in teams to make our own. I want to really emphasise this: my first month studying writing for video games encompassed neither writing nor video games. I treated my viewers to my opinions on this at length.
I felt I wasn't being properly catered for, and I wasn't the only one: the games writers in my year, all six or seven of us, held a meeting with our course tutors to air our grievances. The result was a new fortnightly seminar in which we would look exclusively at writing for video games. Now there’s a novel idea, for a course called ‘Digital Games: Writing’.
Unfortunately, as I frequently ranted in my vlogs, these seminars soon devolved from their intended purpose. We started studying games, but within a few sessions we were tasked to watch films, then TV shows. If board games and poetry were the ailment, a fortnightly media club was not the remedy.
A few months into the new regime, the seminars were cancelled. Apparently the higher-ups had heard it was a ‘glorified media club’ - curiously, the exact phrase I had used in a recent vlog. I don't know if my video really had an impact on the decision to wrap up film club. Probably it was a coincidence. But someone at the university was watching - that much had been emphatically proven, but I’ll get to that in a subsequent post - and it was very interesting timing.
Things were at their best when I was in the games studio, actually writing for games (shocker!). But I mentally disengaged from my course very early on and never quite recovered. I had various mental health issues throughout uni which meant my attendance was shockingly bad. For my first two years I made only token appearances, and therefore token contributions to the games made in different teams throughout that time. I kept to myself and made few friends on my course, although that isn’t to say I went unnoticed.
Case in point, a screenshot of my face from a vlog was set as the main picture for one large Digital Games student group chat, which I didn't mind, although since I wasn’t a member of the chat in question I can't help but wonder at the spirit in which that was intended. I sort of get it: people had seen an outspoken and sometimes manic side to me if they'd seen any of my videos, so it must have been bizarre to encounter the aloof recluse in real life.
So that’s my account of three years of university education. Considering my spotty attendance, a paltry handful of paragraphs is probably more than it deserves. I disagree with the lazy, populist talking point that universities these days give out worthless degrees to anyone regardless of merit. But in my case, yeah, kind of.
At the time of writing, Falmouth University no longer offers a degree in writing for video games. It really helps create a sense of job security when your degree is officially discontinued.
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