Reliving The Past With "A Profound Waste Of Time"

Content originally posted to Instagram on September 1, 2021.

Very glad that my copy of the video game publication A Profound Waste of Time (Volume 2) finally came in the mail the other day! It looks beautiful, it feels satisfying to hold, and (best of all) it smells good 😆 My photos throughout this post don’t do it justice — you can see more pictures of it on their Instagram here!

I’m also very glad that I supported this project awhile back when it was on Kickstarter. What initially caught my attention was some of the content being featured, like the big interview with Keita Takahashi (of Katamari Damacy, Wattam, etc.), or the photo essay comparing real-life Tokyo locations with their virtual counterparts in various games like Persona 5 and the Yakuza series. However, it later dawned on me that, by choosing to purchase this magazine, I was re-living the past in a way.

Physical video game magazines are pretty much dead now, but I can still remember the days when I willingly chose to subscribe to GameStop’s magazine Game Informer. I had a specific taste in games as a teenager like I do now, but I appreciated being exposed to games (and, in turn, ideas) that I was unfamiliar with. It’s that exposure which helps expand my understanding of game development, and gets me curious about the future potential of games as a medium. Though APWOT’s goal isn’t to report on the latest news like the magazines of old, it fulfills a similar (and forever vital) purpose. What’s not to love about that?

For more info on A Profound Waste Of Time, visit their site: https://apwot.com/