Any Austin
The psychogeographer of video games.
I have enjoyed video games since I was quite young. I was lucky enough to have older brothers who, although they may have abandoned me and left home when I was very young to enjoy a chaotic upbringing on my own, at least would periodically appear bearing their discarded games consoles when they upgraded. And so I came to discover escapism.
I started with the Nintendo Entertainment System when I was 7 or 8, progressing to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System a couple of years later. Zelda, Sim City and Road Rash were my favourite games. I recall getting a go at a Sega Mega Drive occasionally through school friends, the odd PC game. A fellow horse fool and I used to spend hours playing a blocky two dimensional horse racing simulator for a time.
The year I had my first summer job, aged 14 or so, I saved up all my wages and at the end of the school holidays I purchased the ubiquitous PlayStation. When it was just called the PlayStation, before it became the PS1. Buying it for myself felt very different to inheriting, I was so proud. I recall it cost me £147 with one game: Gran Turismo. I think it was brand new in the box. I felt like I had made it, insofar as a troubled adolescent can understand such concepts.
I have remained loyal to the Sony console ever since, having subsequently owned each one in succession, although I do not go as far as to go out and grab the next one the second it is released, and I don’t keep the previous I trade it in. I have some decorum dear reader. So obviously I currently have the latest version, the PS5 and I love it dearly. I go through phases with gaming, at times playing obsessively then going for long spells without picking it up at all. But I still love gaming unabashedly and probably always will. And yes I know PC gaming is superior, but I do not have the required time and skill required to maintain the requirements to make this worthwhile to me.
Watching videos about gaming on YouTube is something I came to more recently. I did not catch on to watching streamers go about their business when everyone else did, I felt that watching someone else play the game would be boring, or cheating somehow. Just play it yourself, i thought. These views I held were not just wrong, they were not even tested. I just decided this was the case without even checking. Well I have mended my ways and now absolutely love a variety of different types of gaming content.
There are straight up walk throughs with hints and tips. There are live streams and charity streams where you can stay up unreasonably late immersed in someone else’s hero’s journey, joining in with the chat and making donations should you be so inclined. There’s the cut-throat and fascinating world of Speed Running with all its updates and dramas. There’s in depth theories and discussions about deep lore of all your favourite open world role playing games. And then there’s Any Austin.
This young man makes, in my opinion, the finest video games content available right now. He makes videos about the psychogeography of video games.
Any Austin takes us to the places which are more interesting than the prescribed and advised route. He takes us to the mundane and what some may call boring places within video games, but which to me are the most fascinating. The fact that someone somewhere went to the trouble of designing and creating every last piece of these worlds and chose to make some of it unremarkable makes my heart sing, but more than that it adds to the realism. The real world is not a hyper-polished perfect scene, and never will be. I believe that a portion of games ought to reflect that, mostly immersive RPGs.
Whenever I game online with friends I am always the one getting left behind in the squad or shot in the back because I was examining a sign or piece of machinery that everyone else ran straight past. I am like this in real life too (although I have not been shot at so far). I will get distracted by a crane in motion or an unusual road sign when out walking. I was in the National Portrait Gallery recently and got sidetracked in a stairwell for ten minutes because there was a building being demolished behind and the windows provided an excellent view of it being stripped and peeled open, all the different team members at their stations with so much going on. It was like being inside a Richard Scary book. I stood there so long they noticed me and looked at me awkwardly, probably confused by my attention. I was unabashed.
Any Austin highlights the infrastructure systems in video game worlds and tries to ascertain if they would actually work in the real world, sometimes consulting engineering experts. He has reviewed the feasibility of the water ways in the map. One of my favourites was the one which tested whether a Boeing 747 could actually land in the airport in Grand Theft Auto 5. I thought about it for days after viewing it.
Now we could here raise the argument of whether psychogeography applies in an environment which is ‘not real’, but with almost 25,000 players monthly on average in 2024 for the game Grand Theft Auto V alone (over a decade after its original release), several years of development prior to release with a team of around 1000 people working on its creation and multiple streamers and YouTube video makers still creating content about it...that seems real enough to me so I am not even going to entertain that notion here. Video game environments exist. You might not frequent them but a multitude of people do. Regardless of what you think about that, it exists. The fact you might have any thoughts about it at all proves that.
Any Austin’s videos make my infrastructure loving heart sing, but its more than just the enjoyment of that topic for me. I believe these videos are at their heart psychogeography: the exploration of an environment and the act of moving deliberately throughout in ways which are out of the ordinary. For me there’s not many greater pleasures in the world than two uncommon interests combined. So watching Any Austin follow the birds in Red Dead Redemption to see where they go or trying to make sense of the pipes in Starfield gives me immense joy and I am always thoroughly excited when a new video of his pops up. It is more than just fangirling: I feel an affinity for the subject matter. These are the things I want to know about video games, and finally there is someone out there documenting this in an entertaining and delightful way.
I listened to a podcast where Any Austin describes himself as the ‘worst video games content on the internet’, but I would fiercely dispute this and counter that actually it’s the best. It is my favourite anyway. He goes on to talk about other creators trying to make similar content which is less successful and attributes this to a lack of genuine love for the topic. I would agree. I don’t think one can fake enthusiasm for the way a mass transit system works, the journey sewerage goes on or where people dump their rubbish in Cyberpunk. You either care passionately or you are indifferent, I don’t believe there is much in between.
And thank goodness for the enthusiastic assembly among us who do adore such things and are lucky to have found Any Austin as our revered captain, for he so clearly has the devotion required to shoulder such a mantle. ‘I think it’s neat to walk around, and that’s all’ he states in an interview. I don’t think this is a notion to be minimised, and his growing follower count reflects this. I urge you to go and check out his page if you have any interest in psychogeography, video games or infrastructure. I will leave a link below. Now I’m off to go and watch an employment report in Skyrim. Some days it is difficult to leave the house, for myriad reasons, but that does not mean the psychogeography must cease.