Asking my friends what they don't like about life, and how a video game could help them with that, is the second and more important half.

Like many women, Kristina's life is very different from her parents' lives. She is the first woman in her family to earn a university degree and build a big career, but school didn't prepare her for office politics or many of the other aspects of her career-oriented life. She is tiny and so even though she is also very smart and very strong, people often don't take her seriously. When she walks to work she is cat-called and when she works late and walks home she fears for her safety. The cost of living in Vancouver is very high and she has student loans. She doesn't know how she is going to balance career and family. Her friends are all as busy as she is. She has no obvious role models. She is figuring everything out herself.

When Kristina gets home from a long day, she doesn't want to battle it out in a game or get frustrated in a game. She wants to experiment with who she is in a social context of characters whom she cares about and who care about her. This is how she felt about Lydia in Skyrim and this is how I feel about the characters in Skyrim too.

"The degree of interactivity in our lives is amazing and wonderful and I wouldn't exchange it for anything, but it is also shocking and overwhelming"
The artist Harry Giles recently put into words everything I was feeling about art and therefore about games. They talk about how artists have often used shock to get through to audiences, but how that technique has been absorbed into our culture and now we exist in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation". At the same time, we are experiencing a "dramatic erosion of structures of care". I really feel this. We're throwing out resources of care our parents had such as religion and housewives (which is fine with me), and not replacing them with much (which is not fine with me). Giles says: "Is providing care thus a valuable avenue of artistic exploration? Is the art of care a form of radical political art? Is care, in a society which devalues care, itself shocking?"

I'm not remotely interested in shockingly good graphics, in murder simulators, in guns and knives and swords. I'm not that interested in adrenaline. My own life is thrilling enough. There is enough fear and hatred in the world to get my heart pounding. My Facebook feed and Twitter feed are enough for that. Walking outside in summer clothing is enough for that. I'm interested in care, in characters, in creation, in finding a path forward inside games that helps me find my path forward in life. I am interested in compassion and understanding. I'm interested in connecting. As Miranda July said, "all I ever wanted to know is how other people are making it through life." I want to make games that help other people understand life.

We are all overwhelmed with shock, with information, with change. The degree of interactivity in our lives is amazing and wonderful and I wouldn't exchange it for anything, but it is also shocking and overwhelming and it's causing us to dig in and try to find some peace by shutting each other out. On all sides of the political spectrum we've stopped listening to each other and I fear we are all leaning toward fascist thinking. We should be using this medium to help us adapt to our new, interactive lives. This is how we become relevant.