Wow! Team Cherry has just announced the impending release of Silksong, the long-awaited successor to Hollow Knight. It’s been a long five years — is what somebody would say if they’d spent five years waiting for it. And I don’t mean, like, casually checking if anything has been announced whenever it crosses your mind every few weeks. I mean waiting, like a guy at a bus stop, for five years.
That would be a strange thing to do, of course. It’s not like there was anything to wait for. It’s not like, by virtue of not waiting, anybody missed the announcement, or was at risk of missing the announcement, or would have felt any special regret for catching the announcement a little later than everybody else. Because the obvious thing about the bus analogy is that Silksong isn’t a bus. It’s not even a concert with a limited number of tickets and seats. To wait implies some inherent consequence for failing to, but it’s usually impossible for a piece of entertainment to leave without picking you up.
And nobody likes waiting, right? That’s the whole thing about waiting: it’s boring, numbing, and it arrests the mind’s capacity to do anything other than what it’s currently doing, which is nothing. If I’ve called somebody and they’ve put me on hold, I can’t leave the house or start doing anything more meaningful than just fucking around while the phone is nearby. I spend five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes waiting, and eventually it feels like I’ve lost the option to stop waiting. Once the sunk cost fallacy kicks in, you’re a prisoner to it.
Sure, it can be a little exciting when the waiting ends, but that excitement has nothing to do with the result; we’re just excited by the freedom that comes from not waiting anymore. Even if I find out my time on hold was wasted, and the person on the other end of the call has nothing new to tell me, the emotion I mostly feel is relief. I’ve regained myself! I can do something else now!
Why, then, would somebody subject themselves to waiting voluntarily for something they don’t need to wait for? If I feel like I need to be on hold, it’s likely that my call has some genuine purpose or necessity that needs to be fulfilled one way or another. But if I’m expecting a package in the mail, and I know for a fact that it’s not coming until next month… why wait? Why not just place it on a shelf in your mind and think about something else until it arrives? All of this is obviously easier said than done — we’re only human. But I think it’s important to be cognizant of a thing which can so easily rule a person’s life, and for nothing.
Nobody had to wait five years for Silksong. I know that seems like an exaggeration: saying you were “waiting” doesn’t mean you were literally sitting there not engaged in any other task. A lot of people are “waiting” for The Winds of Winter, but they’ve probably wised up enough (by now) to let such a hopeful desire fade into the background of regular life. But if you’ve peeked at r/silksong at all since its inception, either out of curiosity or in a genuine attempt to check on the status of the game, you’ve seen something genuinely mortifying. So many people were just… waiting. Every day. For five years. Cursing themselves and each other and the very artists behind what they like, entombing themselves within an entire subculture dictated by the sort of gallows humor reserved for, like, people waiting to get out of jail. All for the fairly bathetic reveal that the game will come out two weeks from now, not because anybody waited, but because it just took five years to make.
Maybe I’m a buzzkill; I just don’t find any of that shit funny. It creeps me out when people make fun of themselves for doing things they could just as readily stop doing, willfully becoming a slave to their own worst tendencies. I would check the subreddit with a grim curiosity, always finding folks cycling through stages of grief typically reserved for dying loved ones, getting deeply emotional over how long they’d spent with their mind turned towards nothing else, building up images in their head that would never possibly be reproduced in reality. There were hundreds and sometimes thousands of people doing this every day, typically under the guise of in-jokey bits and a general expectation that everyone was “unhinged” in that silly internet way instead of the mentally noxious one.
Every so often, some brave and lucky soul would chime in and go hey, thanks for the laughs everyone, but I think I’m just going to do something else until the game is out, leaving the nightmare cave in the process. That is, until today, when they can come back like oh hey, we have a release date! I can’t wait! amidst a crowd of people with bloodshot eyes and greasy hair, all of whom are dropping to their knees and genuinely flipping their shit. But let me ask you: which demographic is more excited for Silksong? Which demographic is just relieved for Silksong, a thing which is certain to provide what they were unable to provide for themselves? That slightly dramatic-sounding but nonetheless real thing called freedom?
Because at the end of the day, Silksong is just a videogame that’s coming out. It’s normal to have expectations for it, but it would be even better if nobody did. At least most of us can say that we’d be fairly happy to experience something that’s mostly as interesting and surprising as Hollow Knight was. But to have spent so long building it up in your brain, inculcating such a hostile relationship between the game and your mental wellness… How do you possibly enjoy it? And what do you do when you’re done playing it, when the emptiness takes over all the space you had previously reserved for it?
Because the thing about Hollow Knight was that, for most of us, it was a nice little surprise. I didn’t hear anything about it before it was released, nor did anybody else I know. I reckon the people who did probably didn’t know what to think about it, beyond the fact that it had a (modestly) successful Kickstarter and looked kinda neat. Then it came out, suddenly existed, and was a cool and interesting thing to spend a couple weeks thinking about. This was the best way to encounter it. No aspect of the game would’ve been improved by spinning it off into a massive cargo cult.
People who become fanatically obsessed with one thing really struggle to get anything valuable out of it. It might seem like a paradox, but things are always cooler when you’re excited for them a normal amount. I hope nothing like this Silksong bullshit ever gains traction again, but I know it will. What a strange way to cheat yourself out of a good time.