Throughout the all first half of the 2000s I stood with one foot in the video-gaming paradise, resting my other foot on the so-called reality, which was the Leningrad Region. I knew about other regional cities from old Soviet books, from their pictures, which did not coincide much with what I saw during bus excursions.
On trips, I continued to dream of consoles, and I perceived the excursion locations only as references to games I had already played or desired. Traveling around the region was boring, its landscapes seemed dully-homogeneous and only the gaming experience somehow enlivened what was happening.
So associative fantasies erased the memories of real cities and estates, but I well remember the views of a foreign, greater Leningrad region from Soviet books. The photographs in these books seemed simple and clear, like illustrations from a children's Bible - more real than the surrounding visual chaos.
The manifesto of that time for me was a letter from Dmitry Sotnikov to the "Game Land" magazine, it immersed me in dreams of an independent adult life, full of travels in virtual worlds. My dreams did not come true: after a few years I forgot how to play seriously and moved to St. Petersburg, which was packed with Internet.
The new consoles were no longer catchy and I soon realized that I was stuck on the graphics, plots and gameplay schemes of the 2000s. Leafing through old magazines, I saw games that I did not get to in time - they still seem close to me, interesting, speaking a familiar language. In a sense, their labyrinths hide alternative scenarios for my growing up.
This album consists of things that I never got through. Today, these games are available for download, but not available for immersion - like "letting go of the depth", like a maze traversed through walls, without exciting resistance and revelations.
Games that have not been completed turn out to be versions, modifications of already familiar and felt things, like the undiscovered towns of the Leningrad Region become transmutations of houses and streets of my native town. The doors that once hid alternative and better worlds are now wide open and lead into one big boring room, so I want to close them and wander along the empty corridor.
