If you were to steal my smartphone and open my photo library, you’d see something fairly unusual: hundreds and hundreds of screenshots from videogames. My trip to Lestallum next to my trip to the Lake District. “Selfies” of my Final Fantasy XIV character alongside photos of the North York Moors. My in-game photos are all mixed together with my regular photos, as if there were no real distinction between the two. But is there?
It all started with A Hat in Time. Or was it The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? Or Beyond Good & Evil? Actually, maybe it started with Half-Life 2: Episode Two, in which I began to document my journey with the gnome (unfortunately, those photos, and that game save, were then lost to a Windows reinstall). I’d love to know what the first screenshot I ever took in a game was.
But my current practice of storing my in-game photos in the same place as my regular photos? That started when I visited a friend, and we played A Hat in Time.
As soon as we got the camera badge that enables the in-game selfie mode, I started taking pictures. It’s a lovely game, and it was sometimes hard to resist getting the camera out for every achievement or pretty view. We had a great time, and when we stopped, I realised that I wanted to keep the photos we’d taken.
When I got home, I downloaded the photos from his Steam profile. I already had a folder for game screenshots, but while I was filing the new additions, it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually looked at any of the other photos in there for years.
Looking at those old screenshots was just like flipping through an old photo album. So then I thought about how much time I spend, and have spent, playing games with my friends, having fun together and exploring new worlds. And not only that: I have many happy memories of my time in single-player games as well.
So why were my game screenshots consigned to a little-used folder on my hard drive?
The experiences we have within games are no less real than the experiences we have without. To qualify that before anyone gets any ideas: I am not saying that the experience of doing something in a game is the same as the experience of doing that thing in reality. What I’m saying is that any experience you have in a game, whatever that experience is, is a real experience.
If you are blown away by a breathtaking view, or go on a tough journey with a friend, you might want to take some photos to remember it. Just because it happened in a game, your experience isn’t worth any less.
Or maybe it is. At the end of the day, you are the only person who can decide how much each memory is worth to you. Perhaps you do value out-of-game experiences that much more than in-game ones. But I bet I’m not the only one whose photo library is full of screenshots. And even if I am, I’ll be surprised if, in a couple of decades’ time, I’m still the strange one.