I wanted something chill for my birthday, so I decided to write something about birthdays that I’m both constantly reminded of and also reminded of too little.
I know that people have very different ways of expressing their birthdays—some friends enjoy every day with a countdown to their special day, and others often shrug it off and avoid it. I’m somewhere close to the latter—I often keep my birthday close to my chest, enough that it took my girlfriend a moment to remember without a note in her calendar. I’m sure a couple of my friends will learn that today is my birthday solely through the fact that I’m writing this article today.
Which, of course, will be pretty short. I’d like some time to relax and rest.
It’s just something I wanted to mention as I existed on my birthday—as I grew up slowly, the whimsy around my birthday faded away as I ran out of time and dedication to enjoy it. I’m sure we all remember days of birthday parties and bringing cookies to the class, but things slowly got less and less easy to accomplish. Part of this is my apathy towards the day but a lot more is just due to the fact of growing up. It was just something I wanted to highlight and, as a writer focused on gaming, discuss in relation to games and their joy.
It was the nature of joy and whimsy that comes from birthdays that I wanted to understand should exist within games. It isn’t uncommon for games to ask for your birthday—at least with live-service games or ones that require alternative accounts. Even so, I find that only free-to-play gacha games I touch infrequently will reward my birthday with a couple of easily gathered resources with a pretty standard message. It feels like a product of our time with the early internet, constant safety around our days of birth in order to avoid a dangerous site using it for malice. While this danger is somewhat real, the level of comfort we’ve gotten with sharing our birthdays online in social media means that if someone wanted to get our birthday, they would most likely find it through a couple of searches.
It’s the whimsy that I care about—I’m simply brought back to a time of joy I remember of a very old birthday in which I received a call from Geoffrey the Giraffe telling me about how it was my birthday. Geoffrey—the mascot for Toys “R” Us—was a pre-recorded message and these calls were sent to people who signed up for a “Birthday Club” that gave your kid a message on their special day. No matter how small or simple it was, the wonder and joy that came from that simple thing was something I really clicked with. So, living almost 20 years after this idea first existed, why have I seen nothing anywhere close to the level of love this had?
Just to make sure I’m being fair, I opened up Honkai Star Rail to see what they wrote me:
*“Ashley, you must have already guessed what Pop-Pom is about to say. Happy! Birthday! Your birthday is listed as 4/11 on the Trailblaze Calendar—As conductor of the Astral Express, Pom-Pom knows this date by heart! Here’s a cake that everyone on the Express made for you. Welt and March 7th did the decorations, and Himeko and Dan Heng were in charge of the recipe…and Pom-Pom supervised. We promise that it’s tasty! We hope that, after you’ve walked the span of the entire universe, you can still remember every stop you made. This year, let’s make more happy memories together!
One more time, happy birthday, Passenger Ashley!”*
With nothing but 3 text inputs and mostly a completely non-committal message of only characters that are introduced within the first chapter, the message leave me with 100 Stellar Jades (which isn’t even enough for a single pull on a banner) as well as a “Wayfarer’s Blessing,” a slightly different stylized cake than the “First Voyage’s Blessing” I obtained during my first birthday with the game. The rewards are unsubstantial and the message is somehow less loving than one from a massive toy corporation appealing to kids that didn’t know better, which means that things haven’t progressed in a single way. I’m sure if I did a little more research or had a bit more childlike wonder there could be a bit of joy in some game out there, but I refuse to do that much work today.
And maybe part of this is intended—a parasocial message from a game doesn’t sound like it’d make getting older feel any better. I know there’s the question of if it is worth it when people put in fake birthdays or can try to exploit it for rewards, but as long as obvious systems are in place the freedom to choose whatever birthday someone would prefer would just mean they can choose a day that rewards them even if they’d rather it wasn’t their birthday. The connection others feel to their games can obviously feel much less personal to them, and I don’t want to illustrate this point as something I believe in wrong with gaming. I don’t really care—like most other birthday messages, I’ll forget about it before the day is over. I do think there’s something important to discuss, even if I don’t really want to unpack it fully today. The way that large corporations and large general appeal causes some of the intimacy and connection of various traits of media and games to disappear is apparent, not just during this day but the other 364. It’s something to idly think about as I take a break today.
But if a game wants to know my birthday, the least they can do is send me a gift card.