I’m not going to engage deeply because, at this point, we’re talking about the fact that we’re talking about talking about it. Adaptations of incredibly famous works adapt the original, of course. But more importantly, they adapt our ideas about the original. When Nolan went into this project, he knew he’d be competing against and responding to Madeline Miller, O Brother Where Art Thou?, what we know about the late Bronze Age, and broad cultural references just as much as, if not more than, he’s adapting Homer himself.

Nolan also is making a film for 21st century westerners. He’s responding to our own ethics and mores at least as much as he’s coming from Homer.1

The cyclops Polyphemus is more monstrous and less ‘civilized’ in Nolan than in Homer. Same goes for the giants. Circe breaks xenia out of justified fear, though we may believe her methods too extreme and her victims undeserving.2 Odysseus doesn’t kill all 108 suitors; every modern audience would find that a bridge too far, so Nolan may think. Or Nolan himself at least would consider it too far. The clearest example of Nolan having to contend with 3000 years of fan-fiction and re-interpretation is probably his inclusion of Sinon, who does not appear in Homer but is identified as the person who tricked Priam into accepting the horse-gift by Virgil and others.3

And this brings me to simulacrum. Nolan’s The Odyssey is one. It has references to references, some completely absent from the original. Most of our conversations about the film also participate in some simulacra: we talk about concepts divorced from the starting point.

End of hook.

The term

Neither “social construct” nor “meme” fully capture the uncanny feeling you get when something is taken as absolute, factual reality but in truth is just a reference to a reference, not anchored into anything that matters.4

To this we give the name “simulacrum” - something with only the appearance and veneer of reality, but is merely held up and enforced by some reference to itself. This is when something still controls our lives but is 5 layers deep in metaphor and allowance. An agreement we make with others around us for modern society to function, with the consequence that we can imagine no reality outside of the agreement.

So when we say that Polyphemus is a monstrous beast, we’re going off of our ideas of cyclopes more than we are the actual discussions between Odysseus and Polyphemus in the story. Fantasy and myth are the most at risk of becoming references unto themselves.

When Tolkien wrote about Orcs, he knew none of his readers would know what they are. It was his job to present them as soldiers of the evil armies, but not without complications: they have languages, societies, desires, etc. By all means, they are a people held captive by Sauron’s power and malice.5 Today, when we see an Orc in a fantasy setting, we already know what Orcs are, and the creators of this story/game/setting know that we know. Their goal is no longer that we might take their version of Orcs completely originally or independently, but instead as part of a larger media ecosystem. Modern Dwarves are based on Gimli; The Lord of the Rings shows a much more diverse set of dispositions than Gimli son of Gloin alone.

All tropes and genre conventions work this way now. They have had an originator or a source of their popularity, but now they are ubiquitous and expected. Terry Pratchett once claimed, by analogy with Mt. Fuji in Japanese prints, that every fantasy author has three choices with regard to Tolkienian references: either you incorporate them, you ignore them entirely (which is its own statement), or you stand upon them.

And yet, at least for me, the best fantasy cannot only be based on Tolkien and later fantasy writers. They need their own source material from which they draw. For Tolkien, it’s medieval mythologies, what he called fairy-stories, some Biblical motifs, and romances.6 For Martin, it’s medieval histories, especially those about the War of the Roses and the Anarchy (the civil wars in England before the English Civil War). For R. F. Kuang, it’s Chinese myth and early 20th century Chinese history. For Jemisin and Okorafor, it’s several West African traditions and afro-futurism. All of these authors also put plenty of themselves and their desires into their works so that they aren’t just recreations of older material.

But a lot of assumptions we bring to media come from popular imagination and reduced ideas, rather than anything that actually comes from the source material or reality. Adapters of history must ask themselves which concepts must be true to the era and which concepts can be fudged toward modernity so that the audience gets the right idea/feeling/vibe.

To bring it back to the epigraph above: when we artificially separate ourselves from where we began, we are in danger of losing what made the thing special in the first place. We become determined and one-sided. Commercialization and spectacle operate as simulacra. The idea of the Super Bowl has immense cultural power, even when most people don’t want football. The nostalgic idea of the 1980s allows us to sanitize and romanticize the mall as a location, even though we were complaining about suburbia, conformity, and consumerism even back then (as in “Subdivisions”).

Watch out for when you bring references to a new work of art, and wonder whether this work deserves those references to be read into it. More importantly, watch out for when forces (usually not good ones) want you to care about the idea of something existing, even when the original reason for that thing no longer matters or exists.7

A few game examples

First for me is alchemy. Alchemy games are based on player expectations that alchemy = potioncraft, which is not really what alchemy was 600 years ago. The vast majority of alchemy games ignore the metalworking and chemical compounds that made up the lives of Albertus Magnus and Michael Scot.

And that’s okay, probably. We have a new understanding of what I call “ludic alchemy” in these games, based on the search for the elixir and on what alchemy looked like in other games and media. Alchemy in games primarily refers to how alchemy has been used already.

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Experience points and leveling up are simulacra as well. Originally invented as a quantitative way to show improvement over time via practice (which is how real improvement works), XP has only gotten more and more abstract over time, with some odd exceptions. D&D first used the amount of gold you plunder to track your XP—a stat completely divorced to whether your character actually got better at any certain task, but at least requires you to have done something first.

XP becomes so abstracted from the character’s improvement that God of War (2005) has the player collect Blood Orbs in order to improve weapons and abilities. Demon’s Souls (2009) uses Souls for upgrades and currency. This is blood sacrifice on its face, human sacrifice made unto the demented gods of digital worlds. As a buddy of mine likes to point out, because XP is so abstract and is based on violence as a matter of expectation, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004) questions whether it’s at all ethically defensible to kill and therefore improve. Undertale (2015) is similar.

But, in general, it goes unquestioned. The RPG-est Assassin’s Creeds (Origins [2017], Odyssey [2018], and Valhalla [2020]) reward players with XP for completing quests, discovering locations, killing enemies, killing enemies in fun ways, completing optional challenges, etc. Abstract in such a way that it plays on our expectations of XP more than on what it means to improve at something. Simulacrum.

Plenty of games retain the practice-makes-perfect concept, though. Skyrim (2011) levels up individual skills based on successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) actions, not rewards for combat. No human sacrifice here (well, not for XP at least).

History-inspired games deal with simulacra a ton. I won’t go through all of them. Let’s take Skyrim again, for the sake of keeping small the number of examples. And because I’ve been talking about Skyrim’s alchemy in my scholarly writing a lot, so it’s on my mind.

Legends of the Norse are a major influence, of course. So is the way in which premodern people conceptualized magic. Some of these have direct references or equivalents in Skyrim, such as Hrothgar (a character in Beowulf) being the name of a great keep atop the tallest mountain. That’s cool. The hero goes through trials and tests like characters in Norse myths do. The Dragonborn battles a dragon at the end with friends, also like Beowulf.

But most of Skyrim is based on references of references. Magic especially has no relationship to anything that’s actually been practiced on Earth. Check out this video from Religion for Breakfast:

Fantasy magic has its own rules and logics, based on themselves. This is most true with quantitative systems, which games tend to require unless the magic is not gameplay-determined.8

Skyrim is also based on our ideas of the Norse more than the Norse themselves. But more than that, it’s based on other pop culture media inspired by the Norse. Whiterun has aesthetic, mythic, and environmental similarities to Tolkien’s Edoras (the capital of Rohan and home of Theoden). The mead-hall Jorrvaskar is its own place in Whiterun and should be taken on its own terms, but it’s also clearly inspired by Heorot (from Beowulf) and Meduseld (from Tolkien). Jorrvaskar diverges in that it is not the grand hall of the town’s leadership.

End

I’m going to end this discussion here, rather than ramble on with more examples from more games. So you all tell me: what’s a time when you realized that something you were looking at was based on other references and pop culture imitations, rather than an original or trying to be original itself?

Does this bother you? Do you enjoy when we can separate our media from a supposed starting place? What games only exist in reference to themselves while trying to be grander? Which games have obvious real references and therefore feel realer?

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Would love any comments, emails, etc with any thoughts you might have, including on any future topics or things you’d like to read from me. My last two posts (on God of War Laufey and on Sony discontinuing physical discs) are two of my most-viewed and most-liked. Do you all want more industry criticism? News analysis? Updates on my teaching? The things I’m researching, reading about, and writing? I write best when I know it’s something people will enjoy seeing from me.

My next piece will be on alchemy in Chants of Sennaar (I’ve teased this one already), and after that I plan to return to some older series and get a few friends in here for a collaborative article on anti-fascist games. Stay tuned!

Jesus wept.

John 11:35

In case you haven’t heard, Sony just announced that PlayStation will stop making physical disc releases of their games in 2028. Feel free to read more here:

https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-production-ending-in-january-2028-for-new-games-releasing-on-playstation-consoles/

And this piece from Stephen Totilo, a journalist who used to be important at Kotaku:

Game File

Sony will cease production of discs for new PlayStation games in 2028

New games sold for PlayStation consoles will only be available digitally and won’t be sold on discs effective January 2028, Sony has announced…

Read more

a month ago · 33 likes · 18 comments · Stephen Totilo

He’s got a graph! My perspective is one of an academic; I care about preservation and analysis.

I got mad enough that I decided to write a whole thing today instead of working on the next five articles that I already have drafts for. Stay tuned for those!

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Digital good, kinda

My greatest worry is, of course, access. It’s hard to trust companies when they gain so much power over the materials we supposedly purchased and when they seem to never do anything beneficial with the money they earn. Abuse the Global South for labor and resources? Always. Allow fans, critics, scholars, and archivists permanent access and ownership of their copy of that artwork? Never.

The industry has already been moving in this direction. Steam is digital; Xbox and PlayStation released all-digital versions of their newest consoles, which sold very well, and they sell more digital copies than physical. Nintendo sends out cartridges with access codes, not the game files themselves (PS discs have done this as well).

Not adding to physical garbage is a good thing.1 That’s not the reason they’re doing this, of course; discs and their cases cost about $1 each, according to Totilo above. Sounds to me like Sony has decided that they’d rather save themselves a little money. Plus, they wouldn’t have to include an option for a disc drive on the PS6, which will save on manufacturing cost. Sure.

It’s also convenient, and discs have a habit of breaking. Downloading digital files is the best way to do something like PlayStation Plus, which I do take advantage of (that’s how I’m playing Assassin’s Creed Mirage). Digitization is also more accessible for indie creators who don’t need to waste their time or money finding deals with disc manufacturers.

Three arguments for physical media that I don’t always hold to

I have a problem with this—this is probably neither surprising nor a hot take—and the PlayStation digital-only announcement is incredibly disappointing. First, I prefer physical ownership for the sake of access without Internet or connectivity. I prefer CDs in my car, rather than downloaded files from my phone.2 I’d rather the disc play (and repeat) without my thinking or worrying about it. I don’t want my phone’s Bluetooth to be on all the time, for the sake of its battery but also for the nebulous concept of ‘usage’ in general. If I’m driving through an area without any signal, the music continues. I bought the thing to support this (usually very small) artist, and I get to enjoy it on my own terms regardless of my access to mobile data and without having to use a touchscreen.3

Second, physical items offer buy-in and care. If you have to figure out where physically a thing will go when you obtain a copy, you’re probably more careful about whether you should buy it in the first place, or (in this case, with gaming) play one of the 19 other games you’ve saved up in your library but haven’t booted yet. If we thought of our games like we do our clothes or our books, we’d keep track a little easier. There’s also the added benefit of being able to sell used copies.

Along with this point, it’s important for us to give ourselves to the art in our lives. If we challenge ourselves to only buy the games that can physically fit in our dedicated games shelf, and therefore we buy fewer of them, we will engage with them much more deeply and meaningfully. We’ll replay the ones we love. Again, I’m likening this to music: before streaming, we allowed ourselves to listen to full albums and enjoy the deep tracks—sometimes even more than the hits or singles.4 I’m kind of saying that we need to be okay with accessing fewer pieces of media in order to enjoy, love, and analyze the ones we do encounter to a better degree. But that’s not the whole picture: physical releases all do that higher buy-in even if we buy the same amount.

This is because of my third premise: a physical object in front of you means more than a potential access to a software program hosted on a server that’s located in a data center you’ve never heard of.5 It impacts us more, if even just for the ritual of opening the case when it’s time to play. But it also gives you a constant reminder on the shelf.

It’s our fault

Here is the PlayStation blog, in full:

As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.

This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.

We’ll continue to prioritize our resources to drive innovation in how players can access games and provide choices as to where players prefer to purchase new games, whether that’s at retailers or PlayStation Store. We remain committed to delivering a world-class gaming experience to our fans and we thank you for your continued support.

They’re blaming us, which is the most obvious move since Rockstar announced that GTA VI will not have a physical disc release (they claim it’s simply too big).6

And, of course, they’re not wrong. We have chosen it. We have chosen it even after it became widespread knowledge that digital ownership is only digital access as long as the host company allows it. We continue to choose it. It’s just too convenient. We left tapes and CDs behind; we left Blu-rays behind.7 What did we think was going to happen?

We should not be shocked, and there will come a day when several games we bought will no longer be available. I’m not often a man without hope, so join me in this frustration. These companies have already started it with some films; here is a Gamerant article by Michael Brandon Ingram about Sony’s newest removal. And you know what? I bet we’ll get over it. I bet we’ll complain in online articles; that company’s stock might even dip. I bet we cancel subscriptions. But I bet they get away with it, if we’re as placid a people as it seems. Unless we can push back a little now—and a lot more when the time comes. Let me be wrong. Be mad about this.

I would love for enough of us to buy physical games over the next year so that Sony reverses their decision. I would love for CDs to continue their renaissance, too, and for cars to put CD players back. I think we all know they won’t; this is a definitive blow. But this is also a time ripe for a company to become a bastion for physical and/or shareable media; otherwise, piracy is sure to increase.

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A commitment

I promise to be better, for one. The only digital games I’ll buy for the foreseeable future will be from indie developers without a physical release. I will buy them on GOG or itch, if possible, since they are such bastions for shareable media.

This gesture won’t do anything, but I’m gonna do it anyway in hopes that it makes me a better person. Permanent physical release is probably too much to demand; the cost and waste should not be ignored. But can we get some anti-DRM8 promises? I promise to avoid DRM as a principle, which I have not been as good about in the past.

Support indie artists, go to live shows, and share your media with friends. In a sense, flashdrives are praxis, and discs are still based. Just please, dear God, we can’t let them make all games a subscription service. Where is our Rubicon? What is too far? When do we resort to the high seas, and when do we demand access to what we bought?

Looks like Faye (played by Deborah Ann Woll, who is good)1 has her work cut out for her in the afterlife. The reveal left me with far more questions than answers (good). The reception seems almost universally positive from my standpoint; both irl and online conversations I’ve had over the last few days have been quite excited and optimistic. There have been plenty of complaints as well, but I’m ignoring them for now. I have other things to say, and I am absolutely not in the mood to try to make a response to “it’s a walking sim starring a middle aged suburban woman” (yes a real opinion I saw from a blogger bigger than I).

A single afterlife for the immortal

The thing I actually want to talk about is the presence of an afterlife for the gods, evidently across all the pantheons. At least one Egyptian god of war (Sekhmet) and one Mongolian Tengriist/Tibetan Buddhist god of war (Begtse) have appeared so far. We have no clue why they’re here, why they seem mean to Faye, etc. I will not speculate.

This should seem weird on its face for two reasons. The first is that, nearly universally across the world’s ancient religions, all gods are either annihilated or enter the afterlife realm of their own cosmos upon death, or they simply cannot die at all. The Norse approach was probably annihilation—ceasing to exist. We could spend hours coming up with examples from across the worlds’ mythologies of gods dying and being cast into their version of the underworld. After losing their war with the gods, the Greek titans are either eternally punished in a thing like a Hell, or they are trapped in Tartarus (the lowest pit of Hades), usually both.2

An afterlife for the gods gets tricky because, well, aren’t they immortal? Isn’t that the main difference between gods and humans? It was in the ancient world, across cultures. Gods are powerful and immortal in ways that humans can never become, excepting rare heroes and demigods. When Adonai3 said that Adam and Eve had “become as gods,” he was referring to their new knowledge. His great fear next (Genesis 3:22) was that the humans would eat also from the Tree of Life and live forever. They would then not just be like gods. They would become gods themselves.

The earlier God of War games confirm this worldview. Demigod Kratos can die (causing the player to reload) because he’s mortal, but he has incredible divine power already without full godhood. After attaining godhood and being made immortal, however, Kratos can still die, and the player will have to reload. This time, we can’t take it as an admission that Kratos the actual character is able to die. It’s a signal to the player to improve—no, Kratos doesn’t die here in his story because he can’t really die, but you need to play better in order to guide him through the tougher challenges.

Even so, Kratos does in fact enter Hades in the original trilogy. He dies and fights his way out of Hades, eventually killing the three Fates and gaining back his life. (This type of story is called a katabasis [CAT-uh-BASS-iss, bass the fish]: a journey to and return from the Underworld. Katabases can be found in Dante, Kentucky Route Zero, and R.F. Kuang’s 2025 book Katabasis.) So gods in Greece live out eternity damned in Hades. Makes sense, and aligns more or less with the titans.

In the Norse games (and the mythos as well), gods do not go to Hel when they die. When a god is slain, they simply cease to exist. Divine grief and protection is stronger among Norse stories than it is among the Greek ones. As represented in God of War (2018),4 godly death is final, and no gods are found among the dead in Hel (though Hel’s effects still work on the gods and jotnar alike). Freya protects her son from harm and death out of her fear of losing him. Kratos and Atreus’s killing Magni and Modi, who are supposed to survive Ragnarok, disrupts fate and causes Thor (their father) immense grief. At the beginning of GoW Ragnarok, Thor and Odin treat these deaths as humans would: they demand recompense and truce.

The second reason this should seem weird is that all of those gods should belong to their own lands and to their own underworlds, even if they should die. In the ancient world, gods belonged to their nations and to their peoples; the Romans were one of the exceptions to this general conception, and even they recognized gods coming from certain and specific areas. In general, nations had patron deities and pantheons, and they were often in conflict; Moab’s was Chemosh, for example, and Israel’s was Adonai. There was an understanding that gods ruled supremely over their own land and had difficulty in others.

A major question in GoW discourse over the last eight years has been something along the lines of, “How can both Greek and Norse pantheons exist without overlapping their territories or breaking even magical laws of physics? Surely Yggdrasil from the Norse games includes a pathway to Greece on it, right? How can Hel and Hades both exist?”5

In 2018, we saw proof that Tyr, the dead former god of war in the Norselands, had traveled around the world. One of his jotnar shrines, which Kratos and Atreus find, has symbols from Egypt, Greece, Japan, and the Celts of western Europe. You can watch that cutscene here:

It is evidently quite difficult to travel between the realms controlled by separate pantheons, and immigration almost never happens. Kratos and Mimir are the only two who have successfully traveled between the realms that I can think of. There could be others. Tell me if I’ve forgotten one!

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This makes the Afterlife of the Gods peculiar for its confluence of diverse and severed powers. How can all these gods communicate? More speculation will have to wait until we get the game in our hands.

So here we are, now witnessing through Faye’s eyes confirmation that the Norse gods and jotnar do not cease to exist, and all of them, no matter their original land, come to the same fate. They have their own afterlife, separate from humanity. Thus we are answered within five minutes of this game the question that plagued Odin throughout Ragnarok: We know what happens to humans, but what happens to gods? Other questions spin off: Is there some greater force out there than what we know? Are gods to the Universe what humans are to gods?

I’m fascinated by the choice to explore an Afterlife of the Gods, rather than a Laufey prequel. I’m encouraged.

This happens once every few lifetimes
These chemicals hit me like white wine
…
Honestly, who are we to fight the alchemy?

Taylor Swift, “The Alchemy”

Swift does an interesting thing with alchemy in that song, from 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department. Using “alchemy” instead of the more usual “chemistry” to describe an innate romantic connection is cool. She used to associate love with the color red (“Red,” Red [2012]), but calls it “golden” in the song “Daylight” from Lover (2019). While the original use of red didn’t have an alchemical meaning at the time, she turned it into a possible alchemical symbol when she turned love into gold. In the traditional alchemical process, the Philosophers’ Stone (a powder that you’d cast onto the thing you want to turn to gold) should look reddish, and it becomes gold upon the casting.

Kinda neat.1

I moved pretty fast in the first Alchemy Games introduction. There are more things for me to explain more clearly that I did not think I could fit into last week’s post. Read that one first if you haven’t yet, or don’t! That’s okay!

This week, I’m going to go a little slower with extra context that I think is both useful and fascinating. Then I’ll talk about demons, as promised.

Games next time.

Hiding Methods in Secrets

Let me begin today with an acknowledgement that learning anything to do with alchemy is notoriously dense and nonsensical. This is because, from the Arabic writers around the year 800 to the European mystical and occult texts of the 1400s, alchemists wrote their treatises with incredible metaphor and symbolism.

Today, scientists want their material to be repeatable, reproduceable. Lab reports contain “methods” sections (as do surveys, psychological studies, sociological analyses, and humanities papers) so that everyone reading it can transparently see exactly how the scholar went about their experiment. We consider this a necessary part of good scholarship. I should be able to copy everything you say you did and find the same result; otherwise, your findings are put into question. I can trust that you (evidently “you” and “I” are both scientists now) do not mean to deceive me, but I can’t trust that you didn’t make any mistakes. We’re human.

But in the Middle Ages, even after the development of the scientific method and the importance of experiments, such methods sections were not considered as important. In fact, medieval alchemists thought about it the other way around: if I tell you how I tried to make the Philosophers’ Stone, then you might be able to make it better and more efficiently than I can, and then I’ll be out of business. Lab work was intellectual property before there were good intellectual property laws.

In order to hide their experiments, they disguised them in allegory so that only certain readers with the gift of “alchemical hermeneutics”2 could uncover the way to the Sun, to gold. The most important alchemical book from the Islamic Golden Age was literally called The Secret Book of Secrets because alchemy was already shooping itself into shrouds of esotericism (Compare: “I shoop me into shroudes as I a shepe were” [I put myself into shrouds as though I were a sheep]).3

Colors and celestial bodies are two of the codes that were best learned by outsiders by the end of the Middle Ages. In the alchemical process, the substance being turned into the Stone was supposed to go from black to white to yellow to red. These four colors start showing up in metaphors in order to refer to certain steps of the process, to certain metals, or to other four-part concepts, like the humors.4

Tricksters

This is from Pope John XXII, the beginning of his 1317 denouncement of alchemists.5

Last time, I mentioned that I wrote my dissertation about alchemical fraud (those are the first two words of the title!) and that, by the 1300s, alchemy and fraud were very closely associated. This is one of my favorite topics, so I’ll spend a few paragraphs on this.

Geoffrey Chaucer (the Canterbury Tales guy, c. 1340-1400) lived through the Black Plague.6 So did William Langland (c. 1330-1385?), a lay clergyman7 who wrote the expansive dream vision allegory The Vision of Piers Plowman. For a long time, scholars argued that Chaucer and Langland believed alchemy was black magic (some argued that Chaucer was a secret alchemist, but this was never a majority view). Both Chaucer and Langland seem to denounce alchemy in their poetry. Chaucer says that the “fiend” (Satan) is in the alchemy lab during the experiments, and Langland compares it to necromancy.

However, more recent scholarship has argued that Chaucer simply believed that alchemy didn’t work. He said that the devil was in the lab for rhetorical effect: Satan is a liar, and so are the alchemists. They didn’t literally summon the king of demons to hang out with them. I followed this line of reasoning in my chapter on Chaucer.

Remember that last time I included a long quote from Chaucer’s The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. That tale, which comes close to the end of The Canterbury Tales, is Chaucer’s discussion of alchemy (The CT is several stories being told by different members of a group of pilgrims all walking to Canterbury together, an oft-trod pilgrimage at the time). A canon is a clerk,8 in this case a learned alchemist, and a yeoman is an assistant. At the beginning of the tale, a canon and his assistant come up to the pilgrims, interrupting the tales. The alchemists look disheveled and tired; they are on the run. Chaucer includes some alchemical symbolism for them right from the start: dressed in black (the color that begins the alchemical process), they disrupt the pilgrims’ travel. In other words: alchemy prevents our approach to God.

Some more interesting symbolism is how the canon appears; Chaucer dresses them in poor clothing, and the yeoman says that their experiments will leave them destitute. Remember that Pope John XXII specifically calls alchemists poor. They spend all their money on foolish endeavors, and the second they’re able to scam a lord into funding them, they blow the money on yet more useless experiments.

When the yeoman says that they “doon illusioun” [do delusion/illusion] to many people by promising to multiply their riches, the canon becomes upset. He cries out that the yeoman is giving away their secrets, and he believes everything that other people say about him (thus my reference to The Wiz).9 The secret of alchemy, according to Chaucer, is that alchemy is fundamentally fraudulent. It doesn’t work.

I also argued that Langland was using moral/religious language in his denunciation of alchemy. Here’s the relevant passage, from Passus X, lines 209-215:

Ac Astronomye is a hard thing, and yvel for to knowe;
Geometry and Geomesie is gynful of speche;
Whoso thynketh werche with tho two thryveth ful late—
For sorcerie is the soveryn book that to the science longeth.
Yet ar ther fibicches in forceres of fele mennes makynge,
Experiments of Alkenamye the peple to decyve;
If thow thynke to dowel, deel therwith nevere!

[But Astronomy is a difficult matter, and evil to know;
Geometry and Geomancy are full of treacherous speech;
They who seem to work with those two will prosper afterward
Because sorcery is the primary teacher of those sciences.
Yet there are tricks in chests of many men’s making,
Experiments of Alchemy that deceive people;
If you want to do well, never deal with it!]10

Langland probably means what we call “astrology” by Astronomye. Feel free to check out that chapter in my diss for more. I’m working on editing it for separate publication, but we’ll see how that goes. The word “fibicches” is one of my scholarly hot takes. I think it’s the Middle English equivalent of “fibbage,” as “fib” + “-age.” In context, it definitely means “trick.”

In short: these writers didn’t think that alchemy was magical and powered by malevolent forces (unless you think lying for profit is a malevolent force, which is fair). They thought it was a scam, and they used religiously-charged language to condemn the scammers.

But, like, wasn’t it a little magic?

No.

At least, not in the way that we think of magic today.11 There were no codified spells, no conjurations or wands. Cauldrons, sure, but that’s just boiling stuff. I’m happy with D&D’s new Artificer class (alchemists referred to their work as a craft or an art).

But alchemy was mystical and theological. Mystical, insofar as their physical effects had an impact on metaphysical reality simultaneously and they believed spirit and body weren’t really separable. Theological, insofar as they wanted to understand God’s creation as they thought it. They lived inside the Firmament, and God’s handiwork was evident all around them. Mystical does not mean witchy. Their world was a world of miracles, visions, saints, and salvation.

Their world was also a world of connections between all things, logical or not. The lyric from Cradle of Filth above refers to the Stone as the “menstrual grail,” a reference to a several-lines-of-logic-deep association in a medieval worldview, which definitely feels pseudo-scientific and insensitive to us today. I’ll illustrate it here as convolutedly as possible:

women take on the receptive role during ‘normal’ sex → vessels/cups are filled → grail, like those stories of Arthur, from which Jesus drank wine → communion wine is Christ’s blood → bloody cup is a menstrual grail → menstruation! back to women

//

separately, moon → silver and moon → menstruation and moon → feminine in Latin

//

grail → a thing to seek, even unto death → elixir or Stone

//

silver → an important step along the path to alchemical gold.

Isn’t that fun? Cradle of Filth are hitting right on the ridiculous ways that alchemists used to hide the real meaning of their writings. Notably, the alchemists fail to find the grail. They just can’t make seem to make real gold!

So, to mysticism and magic they turned. What physical experiments deny, power and allegory can grant.

I’m here for demons.

Alchemy was pretty devout at first. Theologians were the ones who took up the mercurial call in the 12th to 14th centuries. But, unfortunately, yes, eventually some alchemists started looking more and more demonic. We do know of a few medieval examples of demonic alchemy. I’ll share one here.

- real life horror story incoming -

The Cradle of Filth epigraphs come from their 2008 album Godspeed on the Devil’s Thunder. There’s a reason the intro song is called “Shat out of Hell,” and later they refer to the main character as a Babylon addicted to greed and infernal desire (the “decadent tastes of Hell”). The album is a narrative of the life of Gilles de Rais, the 15th century French serial killer—according to legend, he was in love with Joan of Arc and started worshiping Satan after she was burned; no contemporary source corroborates the love story.

Gilles12 was a low-level noble who got himself a castle at Tiffauges, in southern Brittany (northwestern France). He had a standard arranged marriage, but the love was cold, if ever it had been there.

We do know that Gilles, as part of his dive into the occult, hired the alchemist Francois Prelati to regain his previous wealth. The two worked together for some time in the 1430s. Prelati was never able to create the gold that Gilles desired, but he was helpful in many other ways, namely by helping his patron murder children.

While on trial, Prelati claimed to have summoned a demon named Barron, but when Gilles saw no proof of the conjuration, Prelati said that Barron required a child sacrifice. This almost certainly happened after the start of Gilles’s unimaginable cruelty and grotesque debauchery. Over the 1430s, according to the findings of the ecclesiastical trial, Gilles killed at least 140 children. Sick shit. As Cradle of Filth call him: darkness incarnate.

I will not quote from the most heinous or disgusting descriptions that fill the lyric book of Godspeed. This one I find interesting: it’s got astrology, fear of demons, and child sacrifice. Later in the song (again, not quoting the whole thing, because gross), blood is called a “red secret.” Medievalisms plaster the screams all throughout the album, alchemy squarely among them.13

The demon Barron, supposedly, came for and because of Prelati’s alchemy. Conjuration was a constitutive part of the alchemical process. However, note that Barron’s appearance was determined by blood sacrifice. Prelati seems to have been both an alchemists and a conjurer.

Prelati was arrested as an accomplice and placed in prison. Gilles himself was put to death rather quickly. Prelati escaped his prison and was later put to death for torturing the Treasurer of France (out of revenge for the former’s involvement in arresting Gilles). His actual death sentence was unrelated to his whole helped-a-guy-kill-a-ton-of-kids thing.

- the horrors cease, but I do not -

Alchemists didn’t do themselves any favors in the 1400s or 1500s. This is the same time (the emergence of the so-called Renaissance) when the witch hunts, inquisitions, and anti-science rhetoric that we all have heard about became popular in the Church. Alchemists became increasingly associated not just with fraud but also with mystical and occult secrets, even with demonic magic. We went from metaphorical religious condemnation to actual accusations of demon-conjuring. There are jokes about this subtle and secretive fraud in Ben Jonson’s 1610 play The Alchemist (whose main character is an alchemist named Subtle). (Great play).

By the time of Jonson’s satirical play, there was a resurgence of alchemists, like Isaac Newton and John Dee, who wanted to reform and rescue the study. They still thought the whole lead-to-gold thing would work, but they abandoned most of the unnecessary secrecy and focused on physical experiments. They did a pretty good job. Their experiments paved the path to chemistry.

Next Time: Games!

Now that I’m good with the amount of yapping I’ve done, we’ll get back to games. Come back for Chants of Sennaar’s use of alchemy: all metal, some mystique, maybe demons.

Same bat time, same bat channel.

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And all the winds would cry, and many men would die
And all the waves would bow down to the Loreley
Blackmore’s Night, “Loreley”

There are a few epigraphs today to break up sections. This first one is from a song about a big rock on the Rhine. Such power over nature the alchemists sought.

I’m working on a larger scholarly project about alchemy in games, and while I write and research for that, I wanted to share some of my biggest take-aways and thoughts with you all.

In this introduction, I’ll show off some basics about alchemy, good sources for more information, and a little bit of history. Going forward, I’ll do some deep-dives into specific games.

First, some disclaimers

My expertise and where to go for more about alchemy

I’ve been studying alchemy—especially as it appears in medieval literature and religious writings—for about 5 years. I’ve been studying the ways it shows up in games for just as long. A conference presentation I gave about Skyrim in 2021 was my first step into this subsubsubfield. I was a chemistry guy in high school, so despite studying medieval literature, it in a way felt like coming home.

The study of modern media/culture that uses medieval references or ideas is called “medievalism.” This is stuff like fantasy, but it’s also the ways that far-right groups will call themselves “knights.” Robert Houghton recently coined the term “ludic medievalism” for “the study of medieval-inspired ideas in games,” so my look at alchemy in games comes from that new tradition that’s still establishing itself.

I wrote my dissertation about alchemy being used as a literary device in Middle English poetry. You can access it here for free, if you have a few open hours ahead of you and you’d like to be bored. There are a couple typos, but otherwise I think it’s pretty good. I’m not a leading expert, but I’ve read most of the best scholars in medieval alchemy. What I’m going to add is the games angle.

You should check out plenty of other sources if you want to learn more than the (very) brief info that I’ll provide in this “alchemy in games” series.

Esoterica has several videos about alchemy (here is his “start here” video, on Pseudo-Geber). The channel is run by Dr. Justin Sledge, whose work is really great. He’s an excellent place to start. His channel covers a lot of occult stuff and religious topics more generally, and he discusses the mystical side to alchemy much more than I will.

If you’re interested in primary sources, get a copy of Stanton Linden’s The Alchemy Reader. It’s a compilation of texts that discuss elemental transformation from Aristotle to Isaac Newton.

On the scholarly side, I recommend Jennifer Rampling’s 2020 book The Experimental Fire and Eoin Bentick’s 2022 book Literatures of Alchemy. These were huge influences on my dissertation. Lawrence Principe is a big name in alchemy history as well; he was recently a guest on the podcast Unexplainable for the episode called “Who are we to fight the alchemy?” He’s got a book called The Secrets of Alchemy.

For now, know this: alchemists were, in general, really trying to discover truths about physical reality. Without them, we don’t get modern chemistry. They were doing real experiments. They had their critics, but they aren’t a joke, nor were they all fools on a pointless endeavor.

Alchemists are now infamous for having written obscure and metaphorical texts, to the point where—alchemy scholars are now pretty well agreed on this—almost everyone who took up the mantle of alchemy after the 1600s entirely misunderstood what was going on. Sorry Carl Jung. It’s not about transformation of the self. It’s about metals and medicines.1

Most scholars, like Principe and Rampling above, focus on the early modern alchemists, most of their work concerning the late 1400s and after. I focus on the earlier writers, from the Arabic world and through the early 1400s in Europe. The medieval alchemists weren’t as crazy as the latter generations.

Experimentation = Gaming

Games are a really excellent medium for discussing alchemy—both are intrinsically wrapped up with experimentation, as a concept. Just as an alchemist has to try and fail and try again with new information on what not to do, so too the gamer. Most scholars I’ve referred to previously have touched on this connection between gaming and experiments: Jagoda, Chang, Juul, Ruberg.

The equivalence of games and experiments is more than metaphor. I find a lot of power and use out of thinking about games in this way. It’s helped me not get so angry when I fail a mission on a first attempt.

Alchemy’s weird metaphors and tricks

Let’s go over some concepts, just so we’re clear.

Alchemists wanted to make the elixir—from Arabic al-iksir—which could refer to either a potion that grants everlasting life or the Philosophers’ Stone. The Stone is what most of us probably think of today, no doubt in part due to Rowling’s first Harry Potter book. The Stone was not a single rock; it was a solution that the alchemist would cast upon whatever he2 wanted to turn into gold. Some alchemists believed the potion and the Stone were indeed one substance.

Alchemists were university-educated for a few centuries in Europe, until the 1300s, at which point most of this fledgling academia had dismissed it as a curiosity. Alchemy, you see, had still not worked. They just couldn’t seem to get it to work. Their materials wasted, and their trust plummeted. But for a while, it was what we would call a “science” today. Alchemists sought truth through physical experimentation.

Alchemy, as a mystical proto-science, was deeply intertwined with theology, astrology, herbal medicine, and the Aristotelian elemental theory of nature (water, earth, fire, water, aether). Each planet had its own alchemical metal by association, and these names were swapped fairly frequently to more poetically describe a laboratory process.3

My work previously focused on alchemical fraud in literature, the ways in which medieval poets criticized alchemists by calling them liars and scammers. That is, when Pope John XXII denounced alchemists in 1317,4 he didn’t command that we avoid them for fear of black magic.5 He commanded that they cease defrauding people with false promises of gold; their punishment, on being caught, was to pay as a fine the amount of true gold they had promised to produce.

When Chaucer claimed that the fiend (the word he uses for Satan, or the devil) was with the alchemists in their lab, he’s exaggerating for rhetorical effect. He didn’t think they were literally summoning Satan to assist them in altering objects to appear like gold. He was invoking the Great Falsifier so that we’d know the alchemists are liars, both morally and economically bankrupt.6

Alchemy: More metal than magic

Here is a very brief overview of alchemy’s history, from the ancient world to the medieval/modern border.

Alchemy emerges in Roman-era Egypt. Bayek of Siwa may have met a couple in Alexandria. The proto-science gained traction in the conflagration of neoplatonism, Egyptian metallurgy and ancient writings, and nascent Christian mysticism. Between 200 BCE and 200 CE, alchemy had become systematized, but its textual origins are still pretty obscure. A lot of early writings are attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-great), a Greek name and epithet for the Egyptian god Thoth. Thoth didn’t actually write anything (I assume he was busy), but the treatises were given his name.

The first famous alchemist we have good records for is Zosimos. His work is important because he names a lot of alchemists whose works were not preserved over the centuries.

Alchemy was officially studied and brought into academic good standing during the Islamic Golden Age, between 700 and 1100 CE. Basim knew some alchemists. Altair should have, too. Jabir ibn Hayyan and ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna, so he was called in medieval Italy) wrote extensively about the elements, about the alchemical process, about medicine, about astrology, mathematics, new steam inventions, you name it.

In the 1100s, during what is sometimes called the “renaissance of the twelfth century,” Europeans translated Arabic texts into Latin and worked with their Muslim and Jewish colleagues to massively expand scientific efforts and philosophies in general.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, we get some big names: Michael Scot (yes this is a real dude), Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon among them. Scot gave up an archbishop appointment to keep studying and translating. Bacon you need to know. He significantly altered curriculum at universities across Europe, introduced empiricism (experimentation, testing, and not taking other philosophers at their word alone) into standard European scholarly practice, and was the first European to describe and record the formula for gunpowder. He was also an avid alchemist and was celebrated for it.

In the 1400s, into the early 1500s, alchemy gets weirder and more mystical. George Ripley, Paracelsus, and Agrippa are the big names here. These guys get named the most today, especially since popular imaginings of alchemy are usually based on the more mystical early modern pseudo-science. Eggers uses Agrippa as his clearest referent for the alchemist von Franz in Nosferatu (2024).

But the alchemy that I find in videogames is pretty squarely a medievalism based in experimentation with magical effects. So I end the history here.

The End (for now)

Consider yourself calcined. The first step in the alchemical process was almost always calcination, smiting a substance into a fine powder. Ritualistic death, ready for purification and eventual resurrection.

To keep this brief, I’ve cut out a large section about alchemists who actually did claim to summon demons with their craft. I’ll revise it and post it in a few days as its own thing.

And now, to end off, here is one more hopeful, to give you confidence as we go further into this subject:

Have a friend who wants to transmute themself into a subscriber? We’ve got 150. Let’s keep multiplying, that our Work may ever grow and our Sun come ever closer.

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I’m covering the three final comments, which together asked six questions.

Without too much done, let’s jump into these final questions that I’ve been stewing over since December. Read to the end for a couple personal updates and announcements! This one is long.

The most important original research

Our first question today comes from (a good person):

So, since you're an institutionally recognized scholar, I bet you'll have an opinion on this: who do you reckon is doing the best and/or most important original research on gaming right now?

I suppose my institution recognizes me, yeah. It’s funny that a PhD should feel like the end of a long road, but for me it’s basically like taking my first step. I can finally do the things I’ve been wanting to do for over a decade.

Anyway, original research. This is a rich question. Obviously, I could name 10 people for you from around the world whose stuff I’ve really enjoyed recently.

Bo Ruberg just released a new book via NYU Press called How to Queer the World.1 Ruberg’s writing is both precise and expansive; they’re talking about difficult and abstract concepts with clarity and exactness I could only dream of. They present interesting discussions across their scholarship, and this new book is no different.

Other huge names worth mentioning, of whom I am a fan, are Anastasia Salter,2 Patrick Jagoda,3 and Alenda Y. Chang.4 Most important for my own scholarly interests is Robert Houghton, who has written several pieces about the Middle Ages in games, including his 2024 book aptly named The Middle Ages in Computer Games.5

These scholars are best known for their monographs (book with a single author) or edited collections (they edited a bunch of chapters by other people into a single volume). There are so many academic publications putting out new gaming research all the time that aren’t academic tomes, though. Eludamos and Gamevironments are both open-access journals, which means they don’t charge anything. JSTOR lets you make a free account.

How to become a game studies professor

Next, we’ve got four questions from my friend — which, by the way, if you haven’t read our collab piece on grief and God of War Ragnarok, please go do that at some point:

The Video Game Storyteller

Stories of Grief and God of War Ragnarök

This week’s article is going to be a bit different. For one, it’s the first proper collaborative piece I have had the pleasure of being a part of on Substack. A massive thank you to Evan from Play Moore for reaching out and suggesting we do something together. I’ve been a big fan of his work ever since he started writing on this platform as his scholarl…

Read more

5 months ago · 35 likes · 10 comments · The Video Game Storyteller and Evan C. Moore

Anyway, he asks:

Firstly, how do I get your job?

Firstly, I have no clue. I’m not even properly a game studies teacher; about half of my time is still ENG 101 and introductory literature courses. My games classes are things I’ve eked out because of student demand and because of support from our larger “Videogaming and Esports Studies” initiatives on my campus.

My path was pretty traditional: undergraduate philosophy, master’s in literature with some media theory, and doctorate in literature with game studies on the side. You do not need a traditional path in order to live a good life or examine the media in your life with good methods. One of my goals online is to share those methods.

It’s tough out here, man. I’m lucky to have a full-time teaching job in America’s current academia landscape. My job security is better than most, and it’s still not great.

However, I’m not going to advise people not to go to graduate school or become an academic. If you can make it work, then do it. We just need to be up front that you can’t go into academia right now thinking that you’ll get a job. Go for the sake of going, and make sure they pay you. It’s still the best life I can imagine.

Even so, as long as you’re starting interesting conversations, holding yourself accountable, and willing to spend your time searching for nebulous Truth, then you’re doing my job.

On mediatized textual narratives in digital ludic environments

Can great stories in visual novels be considered great video game stories if the level of interactivity is minimal beyond simply scrolling through text?

I enjoy academic-sounding nonsense as much as the next guy, so forgive the title.6 The short answer is yes.

First, let me assert the possibility that visual novels (indeed, kinetic novels, which have no player choice) can conceptually still be considered videogames (sorry bud, I use the one-word variant). The level of interactivity I think is a contingent aspect of what it means to be a videogame, not sufficient or required. By “contingent” here, I mean in the metaphysical tradition of “it can be an important aspect for some items within this category, but not all items in this category need it in order to belong.” That is, while some games are identifiable as games based on their interactivity, there are other games that—while having very little—are still themselves videogames.7

Sharing enough other aspects can still allow visual novels into the larger videogame umbrella. For simplicity, let me borrow Riccardo Fassone’s two-part description for what a videogame is: “digitally-mediated game” (i.e., the play is most important, and it’s easily identified as a pure game put into code, Civilization, SimCity, chess dot com, Animal Crossing) or “designed procedural experience” (i.e., the computer is taking me on a journey via my button presses, and so includes the player choice spectrum from kinetic novels and Dear Esther to the choice-based Telltale and Detroit: Become Human to the difficult Silksong and Elden Ring).8 This is not a strict binary: plenty of games are both. For the sake of this topic, we’re talking “designed procedural experiences.”

To your main question. I suppose this depends on whether a “great video game story” is a great story put inside a videogame (think Uncharted, maybe: could have been movies, but I’m glad they weren’t) or if it’s a story made great by virtue of playing/controlling/revealing it ourselves (think Uncharted,9 the story of which is enhanced by its relatively simple combat, exploration, and puzzles).

Sorry, I’m being cheeky. I actually think these are the same thing when done well. A great story within a game will be made greater by the playing. Even in a visual novel, there is something about being in control of that “next” button that feels more important than flipping a page in a book. It isn’t, not in itself; it’s the same type of movement and engagement. It’s a comic book or manga with a soundtrack, and sometimes good voice acting. But I don’t know, man. The transition on the screen and the animation of static sprites really seem to affect their players.10

So yeah, I think they can still be great video game stories despite belonging on the lower end of the interactivity spectrum. Steins;gate and Misericorde are the two that come to my head right now with pretty interesting stories. I’m not a big visual novel guy, so I can’t give too many recs there. The most powerful stories that visual novels have brought to me have come via combinations with other genres (I’m the alchemy guy, I love me some conjunction and solution): Ace Attorney, Citizen Sleeper, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Coffee Talk all bring some VN ideas with them (DDLC being the most VN of these).

Are videogames “art”?

What’s your go-to response for people who say that video games aren’t art or a serious art form?

They are just so obviously art. Graphic design, narrative design, intricate modes of interactivity and engagement, acting, prose, structure/progression, … I could go on. Every minuscule aspect of videogames as we create and enjoy them are art forms in their own right.

Fun things can be art. I mean, there’s like colors and stuff. There’s words. I realize I’m preaching to the choir.

I also try to mention that there’s real craft and careful consideration in the creation and development of game systems, mechanics. We don’t often think about them as artistic expression, but we should.

How do I develop my class outlines?

How do you develop your class outlines?

Slowly, then all at once.

I start with the large structure and the types of assignments I know a class like mine needs to have. For example, in the 300-level that just ended, I knew I needed to assign a final research essay with a drafting and revision stage. I built backward from that: final thing due at the end, one-on-one meetings to discuss their drafts in the weeks preceding, so I knew that by the beginning of April I needed to have official instructions and discussions about the research.

For lower level classes without a strict final project like that, we can have more fun. For those, I tend to start with what games we’re using as case studies (I teach based on themes and concepts, rather than time periods or from a specified canon).11 For the 200-level adventure course in the fall coming up, we’re going to use A Short Hike, Night in the Woods, and The Drifter as our main out-of-class games; in-class, we’re going to look at Colossal Cave Adventure, Christminster, The Secret of Monkey Island, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and a lot more. So I start there, and I plan out how long it’ll take us to play and discuss each game. I’m aiming for 3 weeks for The Drifter, since it has 9 chapters and we meet 3 times per week. One chapter per class meeting is a little too easy of a break-down to ignore.

Readings, lecture materials, and anything else that needs to be scheduled gets filled in after that. I try to make sure we hit good introductory and approachable texts for the literary study of games and for examining games in their own right (as a cross-listed course between English and Videogaming and Esports Studies, we ride the fence).

How might anendophasia and aphantasia affect play?

And finally, here we are. The last question comes from :

How do mental processing differences like aphantasia and anendophasia affect gaming experience?

I’ll be real: I’ve not a clue. This is where I admit my ignorance. I’ve done a little research into these over the last couple months, and I know a little about how aphantasia affects it (from stories of a dear friend). But I’m not finding enough stuff conclusive.

This topic requires a lot more discussion from people who actually have these themselves.

If you don’t know, aphantasia is the lack of picturing an object when asked to imagine it. Anendophasia is the lack of an inner voice. The articles, friends, and studies I’ve relied on to learn about these conditions have not helped when it comes to gaming. Christena, next time we talk, let’s get more into this, because I’m pretty lost.

I’d be surprised if either of these conditions affect gaming experiences a lot, outside of text-based games, since videogames are pretty forward on the phenomenological engagement (i.e., we approach them as appearance and can only understand them insofar as they appear to us). What you see and hear is what there is, so there’s not a large room for different imaginative processes to create different experiences. Just different interpretations, I’d think. Maybe immersion could suffer with aphantasia. Colorblindness and face-blindness probably have more to offer here? I’m open to possibilities; there definitely needs to be a study.

Th’end

We did it. Great job slogging through all of that!

I have things to share with you! First, join the Good Game Lobby discord server: https://discord.gg/u9QWuthz

We have a Gaming Club that chooses a game to play each month and has a discussion about that game at the end. This month, we’re playing Disco Elysium. In June, we’re playing Tunic. We just finished Chants of Sennaar, one of my favorites, in April. Come, hang out, and play.

Second, I’m going to publish more frequently now that it’s summer! You can expect some reviews, some more medieval stuff, and some more topic deep-dives in future weeks.

Third, and finally, I’m gonna let you all in on some early plans. To help my own motivation and my goal of spreading scholarly info as far as possible, I’ll be doing videos soon. A couple friends and I have been talking, and we’re excited. Not sure exactly what form those videos will take yet, but I’ll let you all know as those plans get realized.

Good things are coming.

Let’s get more rigorous

Today, I’m answering three questions that had more of an ironic tone. I’ll start with , who asked:

Yeah I got a question, man, why don't you make your students play REAL games like Doom and Quake and grapple with more important themes like how to kill a fiend in a tiny room or why the Sandy Peterson levels suck? Doing a class on videogames and then only doing glorified short stories is like doing an English Lit class and only covering The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Shouldn't a baseline competency be expected for registration? We're trying to expand perspectives here, not lower standards. Make everyone finish Hedon in Bearzerker mode for finals. What did you learn this semester? 'Melee only in a shooter can be cool if its cool and sexy.'

This gave me a good laugh. If you don’t know Jim’s style, you should check him out. Love the Hedon mention (it’s an indie FPS that looks like a 90s Doom-clone and with very hot characters). I’m imagining a classroom full of people trying to conquer the Bearzerker mode (hardest difficulty).

Off the top here, I’ll admit: yes, students should have some competency with playing games by the time they leave a game studies class, in the same way that more difficult works of literature help to make us better (and more attentive) readers.

But putting that aside, let me overthink Jim’s question here. I’m going to take this seriously. My answer has three sections: first, on what we usually mean by “real game” (requires dexterity); second, on my classes specifically and why it’s different; and third, on what difficulty means for mastering gameplay.

Real games do appear in our classrooms

Why don’t I assign Doom and Quake? We actually do cover these in class, sometimes with gameplay but other times in video. They’re important for context and getting used to genre conventions. It’s probably obvious that we teach across the gamut.

I can also dismiss the “glorified short story” as a way to describe the games I’ve assigned. That has to do with timing. In my 200-level adventure games class, for example, we simply don’t have enough time in a semester to play the really impactful storygames1 that take 20-60 hours to get through (adventures tend to be short, anyway). I try to keep playtime between 1 and 2 hours between class sessions, and I’d rather dive deep into a few games than have to take a surface-level view of a single larger one. It should go without saying that everything I teach has oceans of value worth examining greater than The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Games like Kentucky Route Zero and The Drifter fit well because they are somewhere in the 10-15 hour range. That’s about 2-3 weeks’ worth of homework for my 200-level class. I’m actually replacing KRZ with The Drifter in the fall semester.

Now, games with heavy dexterity requirements for progressing are absolutely possible to teach. We sometimes call these “hardcore” games: they require skill, patience, good reflexes, and willingness to fail and try again. I have had a few of my classes play several of these (though, remember that I’m in an English department, so naturally we look at games with heavy a emphasis on story).

Usually, this looks like: I bring in my PS5 or use our department-owned PS4 (or Steam Deck, or Switch; anything that hooks up to the computer at the front of the classroom), and I pass around the controller so that we all go through the game together. This has worked very well so far; it makes sure that people new to games don’t have to get good (yet), and it keeps the class engaged. Not dissimilar to a film class viewing the film together. I’ve done this with the predictable suspects, from interactive fictions (Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, Deadline) to newer storygames (The Last of Us, God of War). It always gives us plenty to analyze, and we discuss the combat and other gameplay mechanics just as much as the story itself.

Plus, there are instructors who aren’t me who teach these things more often. At my institution, we have classes that discuss games like Hades, Stardew Valley, Smash Bros., and mountains of action-adventure and esports titles.

In short: yes, we do teach real games (all games are real—in this case, we mean games that require dexterity).

My classes specifically

There are two reasons why hardcore games don’t make up a large amount of my syllabus. The first is that some of my students have no experience with gaming outside MarioKart; I’ve had a few who had never heard of Steam before. I ask students to play in groups to cut down on cost and so that people without a good amount of gaming history don’t feel to intimidated. We have a “game room” as well to make sure students can always access what they need to.

The second is that my classes mostly cover adventure games and interactive fiction, which are not genres that require any dexterity. They’re still real games, and the kinds of experiences they provide cannot be delivered in a medium other than that of a videogame. Let me be clear: I don’t teach games with obtuse logic puzzles, not even the Monkey Island games. We focus on narrative-heavy games with approachable puzzles, usually quite easy, since we’re focused on the cerebral side of gameplay and analyzing the play and the dialogue and themes at the same time. Other departments and classes cover other games; all of us together make sure our students grow in their playing.

Difficulty and improvement

Jim points to a real concern, about halfway through the paragraph: “Shouldn’t a baseline competency be expected for registration?” I take seriously a worry that we shouldn’t lower standards, that gaming analysis requires that we play tough games, and that expanding horizons is a good goal—often through discomfort, almost always through exposure to new texts and ideas.

So, Jim, I’ll answer you: Yes. There should be a baseline, and it shouldn’t just be “I click ‘next’ to see the next image.” Plus, our students should get better at playing over time. That’s how all skills work. Adventures have a simple solution to this: the gameplay happens in your head.

That “baseline competency” is usually understood to refer to dexterity-based mechanics, but the critical thinking required to notice and understand difficult themes is a competency as well. So too is the method by which we need to interpret adventure game puzzles in order to know how to move through the game. Scholars have called this the euphoria of these sorts of games. Finally realizing a puzzle solution is an incredible moment.

The gameplay is in your head because you still have to figure out what to do next and how to solve the puzzle. There is skill. There is considerate and careful thought. Yes, even in the games without traditional or difficult puzzles. You need to pay attention and take notice of important details (including taking notes, which I do require).

Traditional point-and-clicks are great for this as long as the puzzles emerge naturally out of the story instead of requiring some moon logic. I recently taught Loom, which does require some true puzzle-solving. My students were greatly frustrated, but by the end they had a new appreciation for what the game was saying and how the game inspired those feelings in them. We looked at it as an artistic experience. They got through the puzzles, which they are not used to having to deal with in modern storygames (in which all plot is delivered through cutscenes or in a cozy atmosphere). Expanding perspectives.

The same applies when we look at interactive fiction works in class, or when we go through the prologue of The Last of Us.

Finally, I’ll add a point to the virtue and value of difficulty in gaming. Scholars like Jane McGonigal, Bo Ruberg, and Jesper Juul have long built careers (in part) off of discussing the fact that gaming is difficult and gamers are uniquely okay with loss and failure. The key thing here is that failing a dexterity challenge, like a boss fight or a run-and-jump escape sequence, affects the brain the same way that failing an intellectual challenge, like weaving the wrong draft in Loom, does. We have to be patient, accept defeat, and try again.

I make sure to introduce my students to forms of gaming and gameplay that are worth analysis and consideration but aren’t super popular. I’m not worried about their ability to play and seriously engage with Fifa or Mass Effect.

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Name every game

This comes from my friend Dean, who asked:

Oh, so you’re a fan of video games? Name all of them.

All games are just Colossal Cave Adventure or Spacewar! in different clothing. So there are really only two games.

Favorite hot take

The last one for today comes from :

Do you have a video game hot take you like to pull out at parties while nursing a glass of scotch?

Not as a trend. I had to think about this one. I don’t think there’s been a specific opinion or concept that I’ve gone to a lot. Maybe my wife can correct this (I will edit this if she does).

I’ll go with this: Most negative reviews for games have to deal with unmet expectations rather than the game’s quality. This is not necessarily a scholarly consensus, though I know many scholars of gaming cultures who hold this view.

Those expectations can come from false advertising or hyperbolic hype (ha). A significant amount, though, can come from our own preconceptions of what that game is (and games in general are) allowed to be.

For digital experiences like Her Story, and very often for adventure games as a genre, folks use “not a real game” as a criticism, but this misses the point. 1, you’re coming to the text with assumptions of interesting and meaningful gameplay instead of engaging with the systems as they are. 2, who cares what we call it? Don’t deflect from interesting themes and conversations based only on what you enjoy playing for fun. Sometimes, art requires we question the form.

Obviously, there are some games that are just terrible, but they’re a minority, and they almost never become popular.2 People are also allowed to dislike certain games or experiences. Not everything is fun.3 But “fun” is not always the goal; sometimes, examining themes and pushing boundaries can be fun in their own way. We all have different tastes, so it’s important to let the games speak for themselves and admit that not everything is for everyone. We shouldn’t define what they can and cannot be before we even experience them ourselves.

I have many other rants, including daylight saving time (summer time), people who complain about “woke” games, and how little people pay attention to the lessons they’ve tacitly learned from the games they play. But I’ll save those.

End

That’s all for now. Have peace and rage. Join the discord: https://discord.gg/GYXdCnCNC where you can hang out with me and several other wonderful people. We have a gaming club. This month, we’re playing Chants of Sennaar, a puzzle adventure game about translation. It’s a great time.

Let’s jump right in:

Not frivolity alone

1. How do you best persuade others (especially those outside of the gaming community) that game studies is legitimate and not seen as frivolous classes/courses?

Fantastic question. I have found, anecdotally, that the perception of game studies classes depends almost entirely on whether the person (1) grew up with games, or (2) has some experience doing a new thing in academia.

In general, if an academic administrative higher-up or tenured faculty is over the age of 55 (the majority of them), they’re likely to be skeptical. They have heard of gaming only as a distraction that students have in their dorm rooms, if not something worse (like the long-debunked Fox News claim that games make us violent). So we do have work to do there to legitimize ourselves. Usually, we talk about the gaming industry, film studies as a precursor discipline (insofar as it is multidisciplinary and had a long fight to become legitimate), and funding opportunities. My program leans heavily into esports and the humanities, and the administration is mostly supportive.

For folks outside the academy altogether, usually I lead with something simple: “I meet students where they are, and I trick them into doing really interesting analysis with the things they get to play. We’ll read tougher books later.” Of course, it’s more complicated that “tricking,” but it’s more or less right. My goal as an instructor is that my students will leave the class being more critical, more attentive, and more specific in their conversations, reviews, and independent thoughts. Hopefully this means they’ll be able to see through propaganda easily and not be afraid to defend games against unfair criticism (“not for me” =/= “bad”) and against unfair glazing (be critical with what you enjoy and why).

So we get students in for fun, and we have to do serious work in the class. Most people believe me when I explain it like this. Some will still write it off. Can’t win everybody over.

AI expectations

2. From your professional standpoint as well as your experience in higher education, what do you think the impacts of generative AI will be in the future? Whether that’s this year or ten years from now or even longer? It can be about AI in general, or focused on games and/or game design!

There are general trends with AI that will continue, without a doubt. Students will use it to cheat because they view most college work to be unimportant for their lives, and they believe college is a requirement. Many don’t have an independent buy-in for why education matters, so they’ll use it when they think they can get away with it. Some of them will be caught; fewer will be sanctioned.

For higher education, we need to admit a few things about the way that we teach and what college is for. Assigning longer essays doesn’t work as well as it used to, and online classes are…well, I don’t want to say “hopeless.” Difficult. This is a huge bummer, since writing solo is the best method we humans have got so far to bolster critical thinking and to work out hard problems without perfect solutions.

Expect some college classes to look more like the 1970s in the next 10 years, if our institutions don’t dogmatically force us to integrate AI into every course (bad). You can see the difficulties with game studies here. I’m a medieval literature guy, but most of my job now is very computer-heavy.

Now, as for game design, I’m hopeful that AI will be much more promising. In 10 years, we’ll see several massive procedurally-generated games (a la No Man’s Sky) that use AI to help the procedural generation. People who love them will love them, and their divergent experiences will be fun to talk about.

LLM writing will be identifiable in mobile, gacha, and pulp games that never cared about the quality of their writing in the first place. We’ve already seen it some; expect more. Many of these kinds of games, excepting a few outliers, already used boilerplate and generic language to get you from one task to the next. Prose was never their focus.

However, I doubt its use becomes standard. There’s been some blowback, and I expect that the companies that are trying to make semi-unique and evocative art will stay away. For now, I believe Larian et al. who have said they won’t use it to generate any player-facing art, dialogue, or story beats. There may be some use behind the scenes. “No Generative AI was used in the making of this game” will be the best sales tactic for indies over the next 10 years.

Sales-focused AAAs will probably use it for both back-end and player-facing material; they’ll be criticized in the same way that we already criticize them for not caring about the missions or messages they carry. Black Ops 10 will feel like Black Ops 9, and they’ll sell a few million copies; Fifa 2032 will have entirely AI-generated crowd chants, and they’ll sell a few million copies.

But I do think that people want to know that other people designed and carefully crafted the experience they’re having. The kinds of weird experiences, experimental mechanics and stories, and heavily thematic games that largely define the “Oscar bait” of gaming I think will remain largely untouched by generative AI. Same goes for music, novels, etc. The things that make us think, that reviewers, critics, and academics will be drawn to, and that will help to define the next eras of their art forms will be proudly human. These are the creations that weren’t aiming for large audiences, commercial blockbusterhood, or even mass cultural recognition in the first place.

To offer an example that goes in the face of my predictions, I recently heard someone talk about creating a new, unique choose-your-own-adventure text game (more properly called “interactive fiction”) with a chatbot—how their experience was tailored and personal, and how it was a fun couple hours. Considering there are thousands of works of interactive fiction and hypertext games, and as someone with some scholarly expertise in those forms, that really pissed me off. Using an LLM to construct an interactive fiction seems like an outlier to me; I’d bet a lot of good money and some bad that most people who want AI in their games don’t even know what interactive fiction is.

Gaming means it’s easy, right?

3. As bit of a fun one that I’m curious about: Do many students expect your classes to be blow-off/easy classes to breeze through and pass?

Some do, but I wouldn’t say many. If any of my past students are reading this (or god forbid a current one), then I’m sure they can let me know if I’m wrong. I’ve also been teaching at the same university for 6 years, so students recommend me to their friends, and that’s a blast.

My deal with them, every class, every semester: I’m cool as long as you hold up your end. They almost always hold up their end.

I thought that my professor reputation would be “tough but fair,” since that’s more or less what my favorites professors in college were. But I think I ended up something like, “he’s cool, but he grades.” “He thinks he’s funnier than he is” is my favorite student eval to date.

Anyway, yeah, students tend to think that a game class will be fun. They’re not usually wrong, but reading for homework sometimes requires me to get tougher on them. We’re gamers, after all. We can’t read.

Defining the next generation

4. This is more of an open question, but if you could look back to this generation of gaming 20 years from now, what game or game series do you think will have made the biggest impact in terms of the overall direction that gaming will head towards? Or in other words, what do you think will most influence future games that come out 20+ years from now?

My first thought is, not to shock you or anything, about adventure games. I think that The Drifter and Dispatch proved in 2025 that adventures and adventure-descendants are here to stay. Commercial and critical success all around. Expect us to look back on these as new influences for more narrative-heavy non-AAA games going forward. The reign of Kentucky Route Zero still isn’t quite over. While that game is some indie experimental nonsense, it’s also beautiful; it’s getting more and more canonized year by year.

Silksong and Hades II will have an afterlife of praise at least as long as that of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Those sequels won’t die any time soon and have ensured that Hollow Knight and Hades won’t be forgotten. We will be flooded with copycats of those games, Mouthwashing, Undertale, etc. pretty consistently for the next 10 years at least, as the kids who grew up with those games become devs. I’m personally looking forward to that.

If the remakes go well, expect the newer God of War games to live on. Same goes for Horizon and its third (and final Aloy feature) release. They’ll probably be put up with Uncharted and The Last of Us as Sony-specific high-res story-heavy masterpieces (slightly less likely with Horizon because of the lengths; it isn’t likely to outdo cultural rankings of open worlds any time soon).

Within 5 years, opinions like “Odyssey was the last real Assassin’s Creed” will start popping up in earnest, and people who maintain that “real” AC games ended pre-Origins (currently a large and incorrect group) will have a fight on their hands.

But, all in all, my real hot take here is that Minecraft will still be the #1 game in 20 years. Stardew Valley will still have an active and massive fanbase.

5. Lastly, I have tried to play God of War (2018) a couple of times but always ended up putting the controller down a few hours in, and have never finished it. Honestly, I just didn’t care of it. I LOVED the old games, but could never get into the new ones for some reason. I’ve read that you played the 2018 game a bit, so if you had to convince me to play it after I’ve tried multiple times now, how would you do it?

Hm. Always the toughest question to answer, right? Sometimes a game isn’t for you. The mechanics don’t “click,” or there’s a buy-in with the story that you missed. Some expectation you had isn’t happening; some itch isn’t getting scratched. I’ll do my best, but no judgment for not going back to it.

But first, an advertisement! and I are collaborating on a piece that reflects on our experiences with grief while playing God of War Ragnarok. It was difficult to write, but I’m so happy with what we have. Go subscribe to him so that you don’t miss it! It’ll should come out next week.

Should you play Dad of War?

My hook into GoW 2018 was only a few minutes in, when you realize that the tree you cut down as your first action in the game is the fuel for your wife’s pyre. If that didn’t land for you, then chances are a lot of the rest of the game might not either. And if you were a few hours in, then you already saw the basic idea for what the traversal puzzles, optional exploration, and major fights were going to look like. You already know about “the stranger” who demands a fight and can’t die.

I’d encourage no comparison with the older games. You probably noticed that the combat is more methodical: slightly slower hits (at first) with heavier impact, enemies that take several hits to take down, and no bombastic combos. Fighting through draugr and other enemies in the first several hours of the game matches Kratos’s position in life, I think. Your weapon doesn’t just glide through bodies like the Blades did in the first few games; the Leviathan Axe (name goes hard) pauses on every hit, and you should feel the impact.

If you’re willing to give it another go, then you should. The characters are the highlight, even more than the combat system. The friends you meet along the way are unforgettable. Some of the more cinematic moments in the latter half really got me; I think about them a lot. The optional exploration and side quests are also phenomenal. There aren’t too many (completing everything is about 40 hours, I’d say), and every single one adds in to the major themes of the main story in new ways.

It’s also deeply funny, the more time you spend with Kratos and Atreus on their journey. Great, now I want to play it again.

End

That’s all I got for you all, today. Thanks, Joe, for the wonderful questions. Go check out The Video Game Storyteller. More soon!

(Moore soon?)

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Class Discussion, however, needs to be split apart. In the interest of attention spans and inboxes, I’m going to send my answers in batches. This will be the bulk of my writing for the foreseeable future. I’ll have more thematic reviews, scholarly wrap-ups, and open opinions as we near the equinox.

There were too many excellent questions, and they deserve our attention. If your question(s) is not in this issue, it’ll come soon. I’m currently teaching full-time, preparing for an academic conference that I host, and now starting to write my first scholarly book—all said, I’m still trying to prioritize Substack (because fun) whenever I don’t get distracted playing a Civ V mod for 20 hours.

What makes Kirby so compelling?

This comes from :

Imagine an alternative future where Sega remained in the hardware/console space. Discuss.

Or

List all the reasons why Kirby is the greatest hero of the universe. We all know he is

Sega

The first question is easy for me, so I’ll start there. I don’t know.

In general, I am a fan of more competition and less consolidation in media industries. If Sega remained a true option for at-home console gaming, I would expect a more diverse set of classic, standard characters most people recognize. They would probably compete most closely with Nintendo, but if we as a people were still invested in a new Sega console by the turn of the millennium, I think Sony wouldn’t have become as dominant with their PS2 as they did.

We shouldn’t forget that the Saturn sold incredibly well on release in the mid-90s, and there wasn’t really a “writing on the wall” for an eventual exit from consoles until much later. The Nintendo 64 a couple years later seemed to seal the Saturn’s fate. After some brief research on my end,1 it seems that the Dreamcast also did very well upon release in 1998 (‘99 in North America) but lost out in the long run against the PS2 and then the GameCube a couple years later.

I can’t tell you exactly why this happened. It’s not my wheelhouse. Other smarter people with real knowledge of the company and the industry know better. But it does seem to me that Sega’s console decline was not guaranteed until close to the end. And an alternative was certainly possible (history is like pottery; it’s not static until it’s over).

The fact that Sega has remained active in software makes me think that the general trends of games wouldn’t have changed much, but an additional console could make things more interesting (so I say, as Valve/Steam plans to sell a new PC-as-console later this year).

But what do you think? [cheap ploy to increase engagement]

Kirby

But the second question is special because I get to mention stuff I know a lot about. Disclaimer: I’ve never played Kirby outside of Super Smash Bros.

Kirby’s main ability/power is to consume and transform into what he breathes in, right? That’s amalgamation and capital, babyyy.

[insert Deadwood]

It’s also alchemy, of course (the subject of my dissertation).

By consumption, all is brought together unto me. By swallowing I conquer. By inhaling I am become all things.

My enemies cannot touch me, for I beguile ere they approach.

As the lead is brought low and made into a powder by great fire, and thus dies its first death, is afterward wrought white then red in the midst of Soul and Body, and is finally resurrected to see the Sun, so too shall I adopt your power within me and never cease to breath and dominate.

Transformative powers are alchemical through the fact that alchemy, in general, was focused on understanding how to change the elements of physical reality. But they’re more apt within Kirby as a character, since his transformation takes place as he copies others around him and takes them into himself.

Consolidation, or amalgamation, is his pathway toward illusion. That’s enough to make him my favorite. He isn’t just the greatest hero in the universe. He is the universe. Where all things end, he remains.2

What bourbons I prefer

asked:

I’d like to pitch in here with a question/challenge... as I see you like bourbon :)

I’m a whisky enjoyer myself and I find sometimes I love to pair some drams with what I play. E.g. a Flowery Japanese Whisky like Nikka Days with chill games like A Short Hike. Or a Cherry dram like Dalmore with winter games like The Long Dark :)... how about you? Take a few fav games of yours and what bourbon would you pair them with? Why? :D

I do love bourbon. I’m from Kentucky, and I fulfill my obligation to my hometown. Since I grew up smelling its mash, I tend to stick to Buffalo Trace for normal drinking (I currently have Basil Hayden in my Atari decanter). I admit that I always prefer Kentucky-made bourbon, but I have no actual preference for one brand over another based on real metrics. I really love the framing for your question, and I’ll have to pay more attention to what drinks I prefer at what times and with what games.

So let me interpret your question as a type of drink rather than individual brands or bottles. My favorite gaming ritual is, without doubt, a hot toddy and a strategy game. Tea and coffee also work. These days, it’s been Civilization V with the Vox Populi mod or a board game with my wife, snowed in as we’ve been. A nice bourbon just works well in the evening with a strategy game on normal difficulty. This is not all that common, but every now and then. About a year ago, I was playing Spiritfarer with hot toddies, and that was a really special time. Over the summer, it was Ace Attorney, Tales from the Borderlands, and Crusader Kings III with bourbon gingers and gin & tonics.

That’s it for this issue of Class Discussion. I’ll be back soon with more answers, which get a little bit more into my research and the way I teach. Until then, be good to each other. I have ended all of these with “be at peace,” but that’s a harder and harder sentiment for me to maintain. Be calm and considerate. Also, best of luck standing against the fascists around you.

The boar’s head in hand bear I,
Bedecked with bays and rosemary,
And I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio [As many as are at the feast]

“The Boar’s Head,” late medieval English carol

And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give me a hand of thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught
For auld lang syne!

Robert Burns, “Auld Lang Syne”

This is the real feast. On this sixth day of Christmas, I cannot express my gratitude enough to you all, who are the spirit of this newsletter. It’s the time for gratitude, it seems. My friends and have recently posted their thanks (check them out), and here I’m doing the same. Happy New Year!

100 Subscriber Post: Class Discussion

Let’s start with the future. As of my writing this, I have 99 subscribers on Substack. Many of you came from recommendations on the app, others from email forwards, word of mouth, and coming across my posts in the wild. Thanks for checking out what I write and for not yet deciding to leave.

When I started this about 7 months ago, I figured it would be a nice exercise to get me excited about writing things that had nothing to do with my dissertation. I figured I’d get a couple dozen followers. 100 is a surprise. I don’t care much about the number as a metric; I’m trying to remember that the point is not for me to gain a number, but for more people to read stuff that I think is interesting.

But I do want to celebrate this milestone, so I’m inviting all of you to participate in my 100 Subscriber Special post. It’s going to be about you, who fuel my writing, not about me.

I’m calling it “Class Discussion.” This is your opportunity to completely throw me off. I have a few ideas of what to get to in our discussion, but you didn’t do the reading. You need to get me on a tangent. Ask me insane stuff, and offer your worst (and therefore best) opinions.

Give me your gaming hot takes, and I’ll take them seriously. Ask questions, and I’ll answer as I am able. Anything you’ve got, throw at me. I will respond to everything I receive. You may offer such questions as, “Do you even play games?,” “Are you really taking our tax dollars to play videogames instead of preparing your students for a real job?,” “What was your least favorite class to teach?,” or “What is the scholarly consensus on the fact that my favorite game is actually the best game of all time?”

Alternatively, you may offer such fantastic ideas as, “Silksong is the greatest queer game of the century,” “Your reviews are terrible; I bet you don’t even play games,” or “I’d like your thoughts on the reinvention of the adventure genre in the 2010s.”

My next post is yours. You can leave a comment here, send me a message, write me a note, get me on discord or over text. Whatever it is.

Leave a comment

I need all comments and questions in by January 10.

I think this can be super fun, and it will center you all in my writing—not just me.

My 2025 in three nutshells

(1) I finished my dissertation and my PhD this year. It was very cool.

(2) I played many games this year, some of which were even fun! Dispatch helped to get me back into writing during the slump of the fall semester. A Short Hike was a welcome surprise (which I played as part of ’s gaming club: more on this later). I also very much enjoyed Inside, Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Crypt Custodian, and Tales from the Borderlands. I started Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and have been having a wonderful time with it.

(3) But in all, for 2025, my top experience has to be Loom (1990) and the thrill of teaching two different classes that took well to Kentucky Route Zero. I have mentioned KRZ before: it’s a weird experience, with some sections decidedly not truly appearing as a game. I have taught it for two years now as part of my literature course on adventure games, and it’s a hard sell. But this year, both of my groups enjoyed it, and the conversations it created were fantastic.

Loom is special. Even though it came out 35 years ago, and I have played plenty of other point-and-click adventures, I have never experienced anything quite like Loom. It’s logistically obtuse, but if you’re up for it, give it a go. Take notes. The narrative, the puzzle-setting, the actual setting/game-world, and the magic/gameplay system are just so very much themselves.

Loom is my top experience of the year, and it’s not even close.

Others you should know, and my favorite discord server

Here is a short and incomplete list of other gamestackers you should know. These folks do a lot of work for the community on here. Many of you only get my emails, so I’ll encourage you to get theirs as well. They deserve your support more than I.

TVGS always has something interesting and novel to share. The essays follow a “this is what I’m thinking about” pattern (my favorite), and they consistently leave me with some new insights. I think I leave TVGS posts a better man than I was when I went in.

Harrison is one of the pioneers for gaming on Substack and for highlighting other writers. He features other writers sometimes, and his money is where his mouth is. Great essays on games development, industry, and journalism dominate his posts, and I rarely see a miss.

Now I’ve got two Alexes for you who focus very heavily on community. Stasenko posts a note every single day asking Substack for a games publication category (currently, we have to call ourselves “culture” or “tech” or something else terribly vague and imprecise). Gamedev Relay is a great, short, weekly newsletter about some big news in the industry. Alex shouts out a different gamestacker or related writer in every post.

The next Alex runs Reconnect Recap, which hosts an obscenely massive amount of game writing from across the Internet. Always worth checking out.

I linked Good Game Lobby above. Sey runs it. I like him a lot. He recently wrote a very sweet recommendation for me, and, while I’d love to wax poetic, I’ll keep it simple. He writes excellent indie game reviews and has become my favorite recommender. A true tastemaker. Subscribe.

and

I’ve shouted out these wonderful women before, and I linked to Oya above, but I have to include them again. Two of the best reviewers on the platform, and two of the best people.

There are many, many others that I very much enjoy on here. You can always check my homepage for recommendations, or my profile for all the newsletters that I’m subscribed to.

Sey isn’t just a really neat dude (though he is that). He also hosts the Good Game Lobby discord server, where Margot, Oya, Sey, Harry (from TVGS), Joe, and many more all hang out. We also have a monthly gaming club. January’s game is Undertale.

You can join here: https://discord.gg/3ZT7XWER

This discord has been a place of comfort and joy (comfort and joy!) for me over the last couple months. If you’re into indie games and want a community, come chill!

Two-headed Janus smile upon you. Be at peace.

And now we have Alive Internet Theory. It’s the theory that, even though most of the Internet is bots, or is people who’ve got what I call “bot dysmorphia”—it’s like body dysmorphia, but you’ve read too many bot comments and now your head’s gone—there is still another side to the Internet. And it’s up to us to make those two sides… because who benefits when you feel hopeless? It ain’t you.

From this video:

I hold that gaming can make us better people. I hold also that gaming can be a subversive act, one that always invites (and sometimes requires) individual and independent thought.1 These standards and axioms apply to the act of gaming, regardless of the game in question. Some games are better at inspiring independent thought than others, but the fact that games are co-creative phenomena, built from code by the player’s input (no matter the amount of choice), tells me that games, as a tendency and as a matter of course rather than at all moments, inspire us to become better versions of ourselves…

If we can cultivate gaming’s greatest lessons beyond the screen.

So, today, let me briefly discuss the act of gaming, why my scholarly community and I like it (as opposed to just analyzing games as texts), and how this sort of lens might affect the way we play. This is Gaming 230: The Study of Videogaming.

Welcome! Many of you are new here, and I hope you’ll stick around! I’m Evan, and I have an ongoing series about the academic study of videogames and gaming. It’s from my perspective and not meant to take the place of academic writing. I also write thematic reviews and essays on general themes and trends as I find them. Coming soon are pieces about queer gaming, environmentalism, Colossal Cave Adventure, and alchemy games (not necessarily in that order).

Gaming is a process

I said “process over product” about two dozen times to my ENG 101 students this semester. I included the phrase and a few other, related sentiments in my Dispatch review in order to bolster my preference of “choice” over “consequence.”

As I pointed out in Gaming 102, games aren’t static texts like books or films. They’re created as they are encountered, and they can change (as text, and as experiences) in themselves.2 Phenomenologically, games exist insofar as the player allows them to appear on screen.

Games take time and interaction, so we should view them as processes, rather than products. Doing so also emphasizes the art, expression, humanity, and vision that went into the development process. The development of games, that is, is intensely human and therefore imperfectly beautiful (or beautifully imperfect). When we engage with them, we should reflect on our time spent to realize—literally, to make real, to bring about the appearance of—what the game can be in our hands and for our senses.

Games, while being mere appearances on screens, are deeply, unflinchingly, and often unsettlingly real. The fact that they are appearances actually helps with this view. Alenda Y. Chang offers such as a foundational claim in her 2019 book Playing Nature (Minnesota University Press):

…games are intermediary objects through which swirl both imaginative fantasy and real activity and places, with real, if not directly predictable effects. Put in the language of Thoreau’s rapturous cries, are we not, in playing games, shown matter, and also coming into contact with it? We may choose to play deliberately, and when we do, we underscore the slippage between solitude and community, wildness and civilization, matter and media, not unlike Thoreau himself (p. 4).

When we walk through the Rockies in Firewatch, we know we aren’t actually taking a (stressful) hike through nature, but we feel some of the same sublime and awe. When we smash a large frostbite spider in Skyrim, we feel powerful over fear. When we overcome a difficult boss, we hopefully feel accomplished and relieved. When we get the hotel’s generator running in The Last of Us, we are afraid of what might be summoned by the noise.

When we play, we come into contact with matter and are forced to confront it. The feelings are real, and we are changed by them. Our interaction opens us up.

Because games are processes that we enact through our input, that we reveal by expressing ourselves into the controller and keyboard, they also let us experience real and true feelings otherwise inaccessible or available only in abstract. If we can only reflect on those experiences and feelings, we can learn from them just as we learn anything in the real world.

Gaming and hope

The game studies scholarly tradition has, so far, been dominated by voices that are interested in using the act of gaming to discuss some sociological, psychological, pedagogical, religious/ritualistic, or economic phenomenon. Most academic journals dedicated to game studies are focused on how we encounter and analyze the act of gaming (that is, ludology). They tend to look at games from social science disciplines. The literary, or narratological, analysis of games is not as often prioritized but has found homes across several different disciplines, including media studies, English, and anything dealing with adaptation.

This shouldn’t surprise us, and I think this is for the best. As I mentioned in Pleasing and Practical 2, videogames (even those without a “video” component) do not emerge out of narrative-heavy media. They emerge out of analog games and TTRPGs. They are games first, with narratives discoverable in the playing, and then we started adding firm stories.

We, especially those in my own program, believe that videogames should be treated as the experiences and softwares they are. When we engage with them, we reveal a little bit about who we are and what we want.3 We also reveal what is changing within us, what we’re willing to learn and come to understand.

For me, game narratives are indistinguishable from gameplay in the lived experience of the game. When we use “game narrative,” we tend to mean the hard-coded baked-in story of a game, which might be revealed through cutscenes, dialogue, or the full structure of the game. But I like a dichotomy between “story” (the summary of plot events; the “what” of a novel’s content) and “narrative” (the way that narrator is telling the story). Where, in a book, a narrator reveals the story to the reader, in a game, gameplay and cinematics are that method for revelation. In games without a baked-in story, the narrative is the gameplay that allows for your actions.

This is not a hard-and-fast line, of course. But thinking of our gameplay as the narrative vehicle lets us see ourselves as co-creators of the unique game-story we tell through the playing. It’s powerful, and I gain a great deal of hope by reminding myself that “beating” a game can be choosing to walk away when I’m satisfied with it.

Even though I come from literature and am often introduced as the guy who tends toward the more “narrotology” side of things in games, I’m not so sure we should put such emphasis on the separation between the gaming and the narrative.4 At least, not in our daily engagement with our own gaming. It’s useful to break things apart for analysis, but we miss something when we ignore the impact our playing has on what we think the narrative is.

So I find a lot of hope in the gaming, and the scholarly work of looking at the act of gaming for its own sake is just beginning. Games give us a way to create our own worlds and tell our own stories, within the frames constructed by the developers. We live in others’ shoes, walk in their bodies.

Today, it seems that every power structure wants us placid, tacit, and passive. They earn—they glut and gorge themselves—while we lose hope, doomscroll, and forget to make ourselves better for the sake of others. Gaming helps us spite such a dismal outlook. Hope is adversarial; so are playing games, if we are brave enough to feel powerful and embrace empathy when we aren’t playing.

Angry hope

I admit that this isn’t a normal conception of hope. But it’s all I have left. Some may call it a fool’s hope.

But, my friends, I want you to join me in some reflection about what we do when we play, who we are when we play, and how we can take the best versions of ourselves into the world beyond the game.5

I am thankful today for my ability to reject. I don’t know about free will, but I know about free won’t.

I can refuse. I can turn the game off whenever I want. I can look into the face of corporations that want me to believe that the Internet is dead, that actions mean nothing, and that art can be automated. And I can tell them: No.

It might be futile. I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway. Be at peace, if you can. If not, scream, and have hope.

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End note: My first critical book review came out yesterday! It’s part of the 2nd issue of the 16th volume of Eludamos, an open-access academic journal on gaming. I wrote a short piece on Robert Houghton’s The Middle Ages in Computer Games. You can find it here: https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/eludamos/article/view/8334 or at this doi: doi.org/10.7557/ejcgc.v16i2.8334

Check out all the other wonderful scholarship that was published in this issue, as well. We’re trying to get better about making sure academic research is logistically accessible.

Is it hard understanding
I’m incomplete?
A love that’s so demanding
I get weak

My Chemical Romance, “Famous Last Words”

That’s right. The epigraph is back. Evan. Dispatch. Go.

I was initially confused. After speaking with several folks around me in real life and online (students, friends, game critics), I knew that I needed time to reflect on the game.

But now, I’m ready to play it again on the terms the game was designed around.

And I’m ready to write this review, which I hope offers a few different perspectives than others you may have seen.

Check out my week-by-week thoughts on Dispatch (and a couple other short pieces) here: https://playmoore.substack.com/t/reviews

Today, I’m going to look at a couple things that make Dispatch stand out; the excellent execution of its central theme; and the importance of choice. If you’d ever like me to expand on any of the claims or frameworks I use, please let me know! I want to be sure that my writings here respond to real curiosity and questions.

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Dialogue

This has some of the strongest dialogue I’ve encountered in a game in a long time. And what makes it so special is how the humor was formed organically in three parts: in Robert’s defined character aspects, in the near-unpredictable banter at work, and in the quiet moments.

Robert is his own guy, with my help

My favorite part of role-playing in videogames is that, often, my character is pre-defined with some specific aspects or required roles to fill. Shepard in Mass Effect will always use violence against bad guys in order to save the galaxy. Aloy in Horizon has motivations, concerns, and worldviews separate from my own. Lee in The Walking Dead always steps up to be Clem’s father figure and dear friend. I enjoy an open character creator with no preset requirements, but I enjoy slightly more the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes and see what they will do—with a little bit of my guidance.

And in Robert, we got that. Dispatch gives us more control over Robert than most Telltale games allow for their player-character’s inner traits, but the definition is there. Robert will always throw something at Flambae in episode one. He always takes the SDN job and, outwardly, supports the company. He wants to be a good person and a hero (the deeper motivation is up to you, but little changes because of it). This worked for me. I loved his quick wit and his ability to keep up a bit. When I had an impulsive thought that an Evan with fewer inhibitions would do just to see what would happen, Robert had that option (and I went for it too often in my first playthrough—they really appealed to my inner chaos).

The variability within that set character, then, had some really nice moments. I could guide him more calmly, more sardonically, and more strictly. Every step made me feel like I was Robert—like I was complicit in his actions, and like I could help him become who he needed to be. I was, unsurprisingly, most reminded of Bigby (The Wolf Among Us) and Rhys (Tales from the Borderlands). Real and corruptible, but ultimately mine.

Banter always wins my heart

These characters really came alive in only ~10 hours of playtime. I’m genuinely impressed with how well I know them. Discovering synergies and applying skill points was satisfying and memorable, made all the better by the quips and the long-standing remarks as well during the dispatching shifts.

Also, seeing this pop up is still one of the funniest moments in my whole gaming history:

Sad but proud of good work. I can relate.

While the ending left me wanting a lot more to finish developing these characters, it seems that there’s a season two in the hopes of AdHoc’s team and a couple of the voice actors. I’d be utterly shocked if they weren’t thinking about a season two before launch.1

This is excellent news, in my mind. I should leave the game wanting more, rather than dreading the last few hours.2 But I dreaded nothing here. Give me more Malevola (my most used hero by far).

Back to the dialogue during shifts. I can’t help but reflect on the level of care and passion I got from the development team and the VAs. They gave their all. Laura Bailey and Aaron Paul especially stood out to me (and I don’t pay quite as much attention to acting as others), though they had my confidence before I began to play. Bailey just rocks every chance she gets.

The quiet moments

In game studies, we sometimes use the term “long shot” to refer to moments when the game forces the player to slow down, perform mundane and trivial tasks, and most importantly reflect on their decisions and situation so far. Ian Bogost uses the phrase to discuss Ethan taking care of Shaun in Heavy Rain (2010): Ethan must slow down, come to terms with losing his other son, and place guilt on himself all while having to prepare Shaun’s dinner and take care of a couple other tasks around the house.3

I like the idea of the long shot. It certainly sets games apart from most manifestations of other media, specifically in the culpability and immersion games provide. Even if it wasn’t necessarily my choice for the player-character to do some horrible act, I accept the reflection, guilt, and sorrow that comes from it.

In Dispatch, the long shot appears in a few crucial scenes, all of which telling us yet more about Robert’s motivations and desire for companionship. Biggest of these was when he cries at Chase’s hospital bed. I’m glad the scene lingered there. I needed the time to soak it in.

The dispatching shift immediately following it was uncharacteristically slow and somber. It was an easy shift and so presented the player with a lighter urgency for reflexes and a greater ability to…just sit there and think about what’s happened and what might happen next.

Quiet and long moments came during the romance choices, too, and it is in reference to those moments, especially, at the end, that I apply the epigraph (which comes from the finale of The Black Parade). The romantic endings require attentive and close-to-perfect optimal choices to really achieve. It’s a demanding love, for sure. And regardless of your ending, despite victory, Robert feels incomplete to me. He has more to do and discover about himself.

Community, important work, and virtue

One of the greatest assumptions about Dispatch is that all people can always become better than what they were. There is never a doubt that the Z-Team will improve, never a belief stated that the work is hopeless. Part of Robert’s defined character is that he will always approve of, support, and work toward a Z-Team that truly turns former villains into heroes.

Second chances appear nearly nonstop throughout the game. Robert has the explicit and obvious opportunity to instigate or directly fight with a few characters in the beginning episodes, but none of those lock out your playthrough from eventually burying the hatchet and becoming close (or, in the case of Flambae, at least not directly harassing Robert as much).

The work of SDN for their subscribers is important, and the whole teams knows that. They put in crazy hours, including consistent evening shifts, to save bystanders’ lives, attack the Red Ring, and get coffee for some rich guy (I didn’t do this one, but you can!). Like I’ve pointed out before, while the game features tons of paratext that lends itself to satire or criticism of SDN as a corporation, the game itself presents SDN quite positively. I bet their hinted-at season two complicates it, but for now it’s clear to me that the work matters and our characters know it.

This leads me into thinking about virtue ethics, the ethical theory that is concerned with an agent’s inner character traits and habits far more than their intention (mapping better onto deontology) or their effects and consequences (utilitarianism). Games often make me think about virtues. I posted a note a while ago about Black Myth Wukong and virtue ethics’s claim that we become better people by practicing good habits and developing or cultivating our character traits (virtues).4

I’ll talk more about virtue ethics in the future (I find it easily the best ethical framework for applying our gaming to the rest of our lives and fixing a lot of personal issues we create for ourselves). But for now, I’m enjoying the fact that Dispatch placed me in the shoes of a man dedicated to bettering himself and the people around him through consistent work, through tight community and loyalty, and through forgiveness.

The game loves a redemption in which each person can discover their niche, their part of the larger organism, and so I love it.5

Choice over consequence

This is another topic I might talk about more. Basically, I find it unhelpful for my own enjoyment or analysis, and I find it unsatisfying and even kind of boring to discuss, to prioritize or demand in-game plot consequences for my choices. Some of the best games I’ve ever played have allowed the player to chose dialogue or make moral decisions without impacting the events of the story almost at all.

But making decisions without consequences still matters. Those choices still make a difference, make a distinction between two playthroughs. This partially comes down to that virtue ethics thing from earlier (the choices determine the character’s inner traits and, well, character, but they aren’t as concerned with the outcome). But the importance of choice regardless of consequence is becoming a larger consensus in scholarly circles.

That is, when a game doesn’t provide the outcome you were hoping for by committing to a certain action, that’s not the same as the action not mattering. It still matters, but in a different way and for different reasons. (This is not an excuse for when a game is advertised a certain way and doesn’t live up to the hype, or when a game still doesn’t create satisfying choices in the first place—it’s simply a more thorough schema for looking at choice broadly speaking.)

Dispatch allows for both. Obviously the story itself is malleable based on your version of Robert. But some events will always happen, and some of your decisions won’t be as important in the end as maybe you hoped. This has been a constant trend with Telltale games of the 2010s, and now AdHoc is continuing that legacy.

I like it. Some of my choices can have long-standing impacts, but all of them should matter in the moment the choice is made. In Dispatch, that was certainly true. I always felt the weight of the decisions, even if they didn’t meaningfully impact future options or endings. Because plot is not all that is important in a narrative game. The characters (and their virtues!) are important, too. Their outlooks, their impulsive jokes, their regrettable comments. They all matter because I got to make them and I got to feel what they really are.6

I wouldn’t say I was disappointed at my outcomes in my first playthrough of Dispatch. More confused. Some of the outcomes seemed pretty opaque. But really, I needed the ability to reflect on what I was doing through the game. I also had to remember that I wasn’t playing for any certain outcome in mind. I chose in the moment to fit what I wanted my Robert to do in the moment. And it worked. I’m happy with it.

Choice over consequence. Journey over destination. Process over product. Dispatch works, and it works really well.

Let me end things here. Thank you, deeply, for following me for the last month or so. This game inspired some incredible conversations and independent thoughts, and I look forward to many more.

Drop me a comment with any reactions you have or something you want me to talk about in the future. Did your ending disappoint you? When do you want to see a second season? Should they have done live action?

Be at peace.

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These are the two best episodes so far. We’ve got our found family, our actions have consequences (both in the game and in my own perception of the game), and the dispatching game continues to capture my attention. I have a few notes, but they say as much about me as they do about the game. This is the best I could hope for.

The puppy is great. Characters are working. There’s some interesting thematic information and an openness for us to explore our own ideas as we reveal the plot. That is, there are many avenues for interpretation here; the game doesn’t over-analyze itself for us (at least, not often), and I think that’s a hallmark for solid art.

Make sure you check out my previous Dispatch Thoughts, and I’ll get into these new episodes.

Dispatching

What even is genre?

AdHoc Studio is formed by former Telltale devs. You’re probably sick of hearing that by now. We should expect this to be an adventure game, as a kind of Return of the King, since the last Telltale-associated game was The Expanse (2021), and Telltale was already defunct and nearly out of the adventure sub-zeitgeist by then.

But Dispatch is not an adventure game. In this section, I’m going to explain what I mean by adventure, introduce “modes” as a missing dimension in online gaming conversations, and show that the mode makes for sense for viewing what the dispatching is really doing.

The quick-time events and dialogue options from adventure standards of the 2010s are still here (indeed, they exist far beyond the companies that first popularized them). But the dispatching game and the ability for different players to do differently based on their skill at that game creates enough urgency and requires enough dedicated focus to disqualify this game from my categorization of a true adventure (which tend to have the player force the story forward through puzzle-solving, sometimes with only some minor time requirements). Strategy-adventure might fit better, similar to the action-adventure genre we created to allow for player-controlled action (usually violence). Maybe even a more generic story-driven? But I don’t think that’s a genre in the first place.

Genre is hard, dude. I mean, what is it? Why do we use them? Why did we borrow this word, genre, from books and film in order to express mechanical differences in the experience of playing games? Should we go by what the developer uses to describe/sell their game, or by user tags on Steam? Should we stop thinking in terms of genre altogether and just use adjectives?

I have many more questions than that, and I will try to deal with them in fuller and longer and better ways in the future. For now, I want to talk briefly about the primary mode of Dispatch, or the way it inspires us to act and engage as we play.1 You may know all about modes, but give me a minute.

Mode is often more important than genre, and some categories that I think are modes are so common and useful in popular fan discourse that they are often called genres. The distinction between mode and genre is not helped by Steam’s community tags not being able to make the distinction on their own. It’s not the fault of the community; both are integral and deserve to be listed in tags.

The best example of this is probably soulslikes, which usually fits within the larger multi-genre designation “action-adventure RPG” (AARPG). But note that it does not always fit into AARPGs, and that’s a problem for genres. Soulslike mechanics can be implemented in card games, in puzzles, in action, in survival, in horror, etc. Since it can mean the same thing in Hollow Knight as it does in Elden Ring (for just one aspect of this mode: difficult bosses that require patience, cunning, exploration, greater player skill, and several attempts), it’s better to think of “soulslike” as a mode rather than a genre. It tells us about our experience as a player and how we should think about our engagement with the game, not the type of game we’re discovering as we access more and more of the software.

It’s a useful designation, but it needs additional information to communicate a meaningful idea for what playing the game is like and what the game is.

Dispatching in service of a whole

The primary mode of Dispatch could be listed “story-driven” or “narrative game” or similar. This is a super common mode in adventures, so it tracks, and it’s exactly what we expected out of this title. The dispatching game is incredibly fun, but it only works in service of the narrative surrounding it and the character interactions.

I’m not good at dispatching, at least not as good as I wish I were. This screenshot is after a particularly difficult shift (it’s supposed to be difficult; there are narrative reasons). I played episode 5 within a day of its release, and up to then 90% of players had done better than I did at dispatching.2

But the game is inherently forgiving, and the narrative gets full priority: even just doing okay at dispatching still levels up the Z-Team and Robert. And that leveling feels earned. They are getting better, whether the player does or not. We certainly will—it is practice, after all3—but that’s not as important as the community being formed.

Here’s why this matters.

The game, so far, as mastered a balance between accessible and narrative-driven gameplay (the narrative has not been harmed by my mediocre work) and providing a challenge for us players to overcome (I still want to do well).

Dispatch, I think, is hoping that we feel a real connection to the characters. I don’t just want to improve Robert’s life (he really needs help, man). I also don’t want to let my team down. I brush off a failed mission if I knew it wouldn’t go well, but failing a 71% success chance in episode 6 was a bummer.

For the sake of time, I’m going to end this here. The dispatching serves the narrative, rather than the other way around, and I consider this an absolute win.

Characters and themes are better pronounced

Everything has developed really well. I’m happy with where we are and deeply excited for what comes next. Episode 6 begins with Robert suffering yet another injury:

Episode 6 ends with some tragedy—fully expected for the penultimate release, still got me. Several questions remain, and many fates hang in the balance.

The greatest joy has been the Z-Team’s acceptance of Robert and their additional trust in each other. Most of this happens in banter during the dispatching itself, but plenty comes through the dialogue-choice-driven scenes that surround dispatch shifts. The romance plot has progressed (slightly) over the most recent couple of episodes—not to the extent I thought it would, though.

In my playthrough, I have sent Malevola on the most missions, and I’ve paired up Visi and Golem so frequently that they have unique dialogue and skills to reflect their growing teamwork. The game literally has a “synergy” system, to use its word.4

This brings me back to the discussion I’ve hinted at previously about how this game treats labor and the workplace. Working for SDN is all-encompassing. Their shifts go late into the evening (makes sense for the type of work they do), and nothing of note takes place outside of work or the relationships created at work.

Is this a normal pattern for a story like this? Yeah, basically. Does AdHoc want to trample on workers’ rights? No. Am I applying my own cares and feelings onto a text that did not ask for it? Yes. Does it matter? Not really. But is it there? Absolutely. This game pushes the workplace as a center of action and identity far more than normal.

Robert is injured at work, is visited in the hospital by coworkers, and leaves as soon as he’s awake to go back to work. SDN is not a job. It’s a lifestyle, maybe even a cult. Paratext that surrounds the game continues to participate in a little bit of workplace satire, but continually nothing in the game itself is really aimed at or geared towards a critique of SDN as a corporation. As with my take last week, Dispatch is trying to set up a world in which work is purposeful and meaningful to the worker.

And, you know what? If work is life and coworkers are family, then let’s make the most of it. Let’s go out drinking together and accept Robert as one of the team (ep 5). Let’s bring his work computer home with him, throw a party to celebrate his return from the hospital, and plan a major breakthrough in the subtle long-plot (ep 6).

The long-plot

And that brings me to the long-plot and the real meat of Dispatch. Slowly and carefully, the game has layered in overarching details of underground organized crime and continued threats from Shroud, the “bad guy” from the prologue.

It’s been really nice to see repeat offenders while dispatching; I’ve started to get a sense of dread when I hear Vanderstenk’s name. Separately, a new organization has been causing mayhem over and over again. Keeping a—what’s the ear-equivalent to the phrase “a watchful eye”? A listening ear?—Keeping a listening ear open for clues about this group has proven fruitful through the newest episodes.

And in episode six, things come together. And I really enjoyed how it did. Debates flared among the SDNers, with Robert trying to counsel. It was foreshadowed well and written well at the big moments so far. I’m enjoying it, and I’m looking forward to some heavy heartbreak and grief going forward (at least, I have to assume).

A small issue

The romance plot was not as heavy as I would have liked in these episodes, especially since the fourth one ended with a choice of who to go on a casual date with.

I saw the love interest only a few times, but only one dialogue choice carried an important decision. Robert hasn’t spent any more time with them outside of work or a large group gathering. Dialogue has made it clear that the romance is still happening, of course, but the game has been focused on other issues. Good enough for me, but a little odd.

And, I mean, can I just add again that everyone is so hot? All these characters work in one dimension or another. Except for Golem (no offense, buddy, you’re just a little big for me) and Flambae (all offense, may your dreams be filled with feeling like you’re drowning). So the romance more or less on pause while Robert gets in with the Z-Team leaves me wanting more sooner.

But that’s it! The end! Really liking it. Hype for the last episodes this week.

I will end by sharing another two bangers from Phenomaman this week:

I’m reasonably excited!

and:

I am glad that [going through the breakup with Blazer] has given me time to learn about myself, but unfortunately what I’ve learned is that I hate me.

Until next time. Peace.

Hey folks. I’m Dr. Evan Moore, and I overthink the games I play.

On Wednesday, 29 Oct, episodes 3 and 4 of AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch were released. I played them Wednesday and Thursday. I’m very impressed.

I’m reviewing Dispatch as it releases to celebrate this newest installment from former Telltale developers. If you missed the first one, you can find it here:

Let’s get into it.

We got romance, baby

One of the more exciting aspects of this game in its run-up to release was the introduction of romance options. Telltale has long been famous for its story-driven games with a large capacity for player input.1 In Dispatch, most of that input comes in romance and other relationships.

The two candidates are Blonde Blazer, a classic hero with flight and something akin to a plasma beam shooting out of her palm, and Invisigal (Visi, formerly knows as Invisibitch), a reforming villain with more than enough goth aesthetic and punk attitude. Sadly, though we live in a post-Karlach world, Malevola the demon with a massive sword is not an option. You can see my previous post for my full thoughts about that:

While Visi and Blazer seem like the same classic binary depiction of women as love interests we’ve seen plenty enough times already, I’ll give the writers credit: these characters are very fleshed out for only 1-2 hours of screen-time each. I won’t analyze them too much here for fear of spoilers, but I’m pretty happy with the level we know them at this point. I’ll put it this way: Visi is not subtle, and I like it; Blazer is quite subtle, and I like it. No wrong answers, my friends.2

It’s telling that the player-character is a white man and the two love interests are women. Not exactly ground-breaking stuff, demographically speaking, but that doesn’t take away from my engagement or enjoyment. It may for others.

Banter

The dialogue takes a massive step up in these newest episodes, and I thought it was already in a good place at the start. The jokes hit and reflect their characters very well. There aren’t even that many “jokes.” Like most high-quality sitcoms, Dispatch relies far more on banter and character-based interactions than on typical jokes.

This sometimes comes in the characters speaking past each other or winding up in a weird situation. Often, it’s ridiculous dialogue that could believably happen but is still shocking to think about. For example, Visi in ep 4 asks Robert whether he’s ever masturbated inside his Mecha Man suit. Insane question. One of the options in response is, “Yes,” and Robert’s actual voice line goes even further (of course that’s the line I picked). Royd (my main man) calls the whole conversation an HR violation.

But at other times, humor comes from the characters ripping each other apart. I wanted to list a few examples here, but I want to make sure you can find them on your own. Ask for my favorites in the comments or in messages if you want to know! Several moments in these episodes made me guffaw and/or pause the game.

The Dispatching part of the game

It’s not easy; it’s fun; it’s well-crafted for each narrative moment. The screenshot above is from early in episode 3. This is the game: Robert chooses which of his eight Z-Team (aka Project Phoenix) members to send on a mission. The player needs to strategize here; there have been a few times when my best team member for a certain mission was already busy on a different one, so I had to accept either missing that mission entirely or going with a sub-optimal group.

By the end of episode 4, I was in the 30th percentile of dispatchers. There’s a learning curve, and I missed some pretty obvious points.

However, I’m improving at this part of the game, and the game goes easy on you. Missing a few and failing at a few others still allows Robert and the team to increase their skill points, and the narrative still moves forward.

Really, I’m impressed at how each shift at the dispatch desk has felt unique. There are new stresses, new situations, and new issues for the team to overcome—both in and out of the dispatching itself. It also helps to show some of the more satirical parts of the game so far. To quote one of them during a mission, “If we unionize, will Blazer kick our ass?” I like that they’ve already unionized in one way: they share a single ass.

Workplace satire, or workplace hope

Each episode’s title is a business-speak term, and the description is a quote from the Employee Handbook that relates to the crucial moment of the episode. In 3, Robert has to let someone go. The game is poking at the justification for the firing and even the situation as a whole. That is, there is no clear reason why someone has to be fired. The company is not losing money, and none of the team members are actively taking productivity away when on their missions to help subscribers.

Blazer (Robert’s boss) says that it will show the Z-Team who’s in charge and that they need to take their jobs seriously. She also vaguely hints at a quota, that the company should increase turnover by cutting the worst-performing hero. There may have been more here that I missed, but it seems shaky at best. We’re cutting someone because we can and in order to instill fear in the other members of the team. For some extra drama, it seems that Visi (she works for Robert) is the lowest-performing on the team.

The game doesn’t press this point. It’s a choice Robert doesn’t want to make, but he accepts that he has to. He doesn’t push back. He instead assumes that responsibility and stands by his choice. I can admire that, though I’m left wondering whether the references to the handbook, the obviously negative corporate culture, and the presentation of work are not supposed to be satirical at all.

Robert gives a Jeff Winger speech to his team.3 I think work is more hopeful in this game. It’s a purpose, a goal, maybe even a reason to wake up. Their work is both gaining a community together and helping others, literally, by answering the calls. Reforming villains is noble, and it seems to be working, though not easily.

A final remark on Phenomaman

Let me end with Phenomaman, the Superman-like figure. He is not part of the Z-Team, but rather the front-man for the company (at least, in the beginning).

Without getting too much into it, I have to admit that the way he’s presented in episodes 3 and 4 doesn’t work for me. I know we’re making fun of Superman and that this is a more accurate version of what that character would be: uncaring, unconcerned with others, observant but unwilling to act, unable to truly connect or understand any other perspective. And it works. It’s funny, too, I guess.

But I hate characters that cause harm and have no knowledge, recognition, or sympathy for that harm. I don’t care that he’s sad. Someone teach him basic etiquette. Or at least sue him for the damages he’s causing???? Can we get some reparations please? No? It’s just to show how sad he is and how oblivious he is to human suffering?

But I get what he’s representing, and I’m all for that.

That’s all for now! Episodes 5 and 6 come out next week. This is long enough. Be at peace.

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Since I love and study adventure games—and since I became an adult and a fan during Telltale’s heyday in the 2010s—I thought it most appropriate for me to dig into AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch as it releases. The first two episodes are out now, out of an eventual eight.

While I’ve been a fan of Telltale for quite a while (2015 was when I first played The Walking Dead), Dispatch is the first time I’ve been able to catch a Telltale-style episodic game as it’s coming out, so I’m taking advantage.

Join me over the next few weeks, or wait to read until you’re able to play the whole thing yourself! I’ll stay away from major narrative spoilers, but I’ll refer to basic mechanic and story-line information. I took no screenshots from my PS5 play-through, so I apologize for these being long without many images.

I’m a fan so far. That’s understating it out of an abundance of caution. I’m impressed, I’ll admit it, but a couple things give me pause (including my own inability to let myself just like things, I wonder what that’s about). Not only am I having fun, choosing interesting dialogue, and truly moved by some character moments, but also I found myself taking in the animation style, body models, and even character dynamics that in any other game would be unimportant, just for flavor, or set-dressing.

The Good

Characters/World

Dispatch takes place in a world in which superpowers are relatively commonplace: you can’t assume people have them when you pass them in public, but powers are common enough that folks with those powers are able to sustain their own economies, communities, and social circles.

I love the way the game has constructed and introduces the player to these superpower-influenced industries and spaces. Robert, the player-character, takes on the persona of Mecha Man, a title held by his father and his grandfather.1 He has no powers himself but has gained access to their environments, and he does so anonymously (at the start).2

There are bars that cater only to the powered and not to normies.3 Cops and firefighters work alongside (or against) the powered as part of their standard duties. Entire corporations have emerged to support, take advantage of, or employ the powered.

Within these superpower communities, individual characters have already begun to stand out, even in only a few hours of gameplay. Blonde Blazer (superhero, big thighs, voiced by Erin Yvette, you get the idea) isn’t just an obvious romantic choice, nor does she fit into a reductive girlboss role. She saves Robert (sometime subversive, now fairly common; nothing innately special here) and offers him a job as a dispatch operator for the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN)—a corporation that sells subscriptions which entitle the subscribed to call for superhero assistance. Over the two episodes, Blazer has said and done a few things I wouldn’t expect. She drinks straight ethanol (or Super Beer, which is awesome) and contains a fascinating mixture of direct and noncommittal conversation styles (she knows what she wants to ask and says everything she needs in the lead-up, but she keeps talking around it, seemingly to give herself more time; is it possible to procrastinate while doing it?).

The other eventual romance option is Invisigal, formerly Invisibitch, which is admittedly much better (dark hair, contrarian, voiced by Laura Bailey, you get the idea). Like Blonde Blazer, Invisigal shines from under the trope pretty quickly. We see some real introspection, places where she errs and where she’s right, and emotion other than anger within an hour of meeting her. Her power is cool, too: where BB flies and is strong, Invisigal can turn invisible only while holding her breath.

For a game that’s trying to please Telltale lovers and also move forward with their medium at the same time, I’ll take these slow relationships as a real win. It’s been great to talk to everyone so far and learn their deals. A surprisingly fascinating conversation comes at the end of Episode 2, with Phenomaman (the front-facing hero for SDN). He reminds me a little of Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and for now that’s a good thing. More to come, for sure.

The other characters are interesting so far, but I just haven’t been with them enough to tell much. Robert’s team available to him for dispatching are called the Z-Team, and some of them are already nice standouts. Sonar and Prism are my current favorites.

Hacking and Dispatching

The game exists in, basically, four separate mechanics: dialogue options, quick time events (which are optional—you select whether you want them the first time you boot the game), dispatching your team of reforming supervillains to respond to subscriber calls, and hacking into different softwares.

The hacking is fairly simple so far, but it does benefit from some true engagement and I assume will continue to become more complex as we go along. Robert is able to hack into other systems. The player guides a ball through short challenges. Fun enough.

Dialogue options are as Telltale has had them for nearly 15 years and where adventure games in general have adopted them for a decade now. Industry-standard, reliable, and welcome. And now with smoother and sleeker graphics!

I’m playing with the QTEs, and so far they’ve had a nice balance of ease and challenge. I missed a couple in the first major fight (which Robert/Mecha Man always loses). Another Telltale staple that I am glad to play.

The dispatching is…odd for me right now, and I think that’s good; it shouldn’t feel familiar. I’ve only played the tutorial as HR training and one day at the workplace. It seems on the surface like a mobile management game: respond to a call, choose which hero to send, and wait to see whether they’re successful. Success depends only a little on chance; it mostly hinges on the hero’s skills, which is really nice. The best way to play the dispatch minigame (can I call it a minigame if it’s the conceit of the videogame?) is to know your Z-Team.

I was impressed! The playing is far more complex than any mobile game I’ve known with a similar conceit, and the heroes’ banter was wonderful. The player gets to start knowing them, feeling out their strengths and weaknesses, and even gets to help them on a couple missions. I’m satisfied with how it feels for now and am very excited to get back.

Robert

Robert Robertson (yes, that’s his real name) is really cool so far. Voiced by Aaron Paul, I can get a good sense for his humor (sardonic with a touch of hope), his personal values, and his motivations. After that loss in the beginning of the game, he needs a purpose, a reason for waking up, a paycheck, and ultimately an opportunity to do what he was already doing as Mecha Man: helping people.

It’s classically noble. All good.

So Robert (and we) ask: What do we do after we accept defeat? How do we move on? Community and purpose seem to be the answers.

But what’s unstated yet clear to me is how much Robert needs a dream job. No, he doesn’t dream of labor, but it also doesn’t seem that he ever had a day job before. At least not one he cared about or excelled at like he did working as Mecha Man. SDN might be what he needs most.

The Bad

(kinda)

(these are really just because we’re so early in the game and some simplistic ideas haven’t had time to get complex yet)

A corporation that requires the labor of superheroes

And that brings me to the fact that SDN is a private corporation. I assume that some criticism of it as a private venture will come up in the future, but so far characters in the game have only offered positive views of it (the game itself has included some HR-language satire, inviting us to make fun of the business; it’s a workplace comedy after all). BB is very excited about the company; Robert takes the job because they’ll let him help people, which has yet to be more complex than the “stop that crime” and “put out that fire” type of calls. Looking forward to more pointed and direct satire or even criticism of the company as we go forward.

Protect capital

A lot (not all; see below) of the heroic actions we’ve seen so far maintain the status quo and protect property and capital rights. That’s not evil, obviously, but the game seems to suggest that “doing good” is synonymous with “following and enforcing the law,” which isn’t necessarily true. It’s a problem with superhero stuff more generally, of course, and I do expect this to get more complicated at the game goes on.

Robert uses violence both on his own terms to stop crime as he sees it and for the corporation to protect the interests of those who can afford to pay them. Shouldn’t superheros be working to expand housing access, go after the companies that don’t let their workers unionize, and feed as many as they can? I’m not just saying this stuff as a raging leftist communist democrat woke hivemind queer blue hair having ass bitch with pronouns. In fact, this is a relatively minor issue for me right now. The game shows a few examples of helping people without any law or crime attached.

I just want “help” to mean “improve the situation and material conditions of the poor and the weary” and not only “stop crimes.”

Thankfully, the dispatching part of the game has a ton of places to actually help, whether or not there’s a crime or legal issue. The heroes Robert sends out can assist someone crossing a street, save a kitten, and put out a fire. Great stuff. So this isn’t actually that great of a sticking point for me, and like I said I expect it to be complicated as more episodes are released.

The same or something new?

This is less an issue and more something I’ll be looking for going forward. Is AdHoc recreating the Telltale formula for old fans to say they’re back? Or are they trying to tell us that they want to do something new in the genre?

The increased game mechanics beyond dialogue and narrative choices is certainly a change, though not unexpected or unwelcome. We might remember the money-saving from Tales from the Borderlands as a way to simulate some Borderlands ideas into the Telltale model. Crafting worked in the same function for Minecraft Story Mode. Telltale was all about bringing some specific ideas from their IPs into their five-episode structure, though maintaining a distinct voice and remaining identifiable as adventure games (more emphasis on dialogue and story than on urgency or play-skill).

The trend continues, but the new dispatch element in, well, Dispatch, adds yet another valence. For now, it’s odd, but I’m liking it. The characters are still the heart of the game.

End

And that brings me to my conclusion on Episodes 1 and 2: I really enjoy them, and I’m very much looking forward to more. We’ve got an excellent Telltalian foundation from which the game can continue to expand and explore. Laura Bailey and Erin Yvette both said that Episode 4 was what to look out for, so I will.

Permanent judgments are on hold. I want to see how everything develops and how my decisions shape more interactions and possibilities going forward.

Oh! I forgot! Ashley Johnson caught me off guard playing a reporter in the scene when Mecha Man officially announces that his suit is broken and he cannot continue his work (you know, from the fight we lose). That was nice. In the same scene, MM says that the suit can’t be repaired, and almost immediately a different reporter yells out, “Can you repair the suit?” Incredible.

And even earlier, when Robert isn’t in his suit, to begin a fight, the player is offered the choice between [STOMP] and [PUNT]. I chose [PUNT] (duh), and the mech suit barged through the wall and kicked the enemy clear through the building and out the opposite wall. Choosing that with no context for what the punt would actually entail was very fun.

I’m going to stop now before I list out every little thing I liked. It’s neat, and I’m hoping for even better. Be at peace.

Come all of you poor workers
Good news to you I’ll tell
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

Appalachian folk song “Which Side Are You On,” lyrics originally by Florence Reece, whose father and husband organized strikes during the Harlan County War. Florence’s husband Sam died from black lung after 60 years in coal mines.

It’s been a while, folks. Hope you’ve been well over the last…two months.

Today is Labor Day in the United States, which means our government and bank offices are closed in celebration of laborers whose hands built the infrastructure and farmed the food we need.

It’s also one of the least important and least respected national holidays. So I’m here to talk about the ways games represent labor. This will become a much larger project.

Work is Hell

Several weeks ago, I asked around for games that comment on or portray work as a Hell. I’ve long been a fan of Hadestown (the musical), Severance (the television show on Apple+), and a few games that (I argue) carry on a similar theme: Kentucky Route Zero chief among them.

mentioned the new game The Alters, in which the main character creates clones of himself to do menial labor on his behalf. It’s not as oppressive as that sounds: he genuinely needs the extra hands and the companionship. As he put it, “In that game, work is more than just survival, it's literally the reason for their entire existence.”

responded with Grim Fandango, a point-and-click from 1998. Manny, the player-character, works as a travel agent in the Underworld. His whole job is to sell expensive travel packages to any client who might qualify for them. The better the package, the faster they can make it to the “ninth” realm of the Underworld, but only the best people in life are eligible to purchase faster means on transportation, like a train ticket. Many are condemned to elect for a bike or even just a walking stick. The game is filled with critiques of commodification, meaningless workplace culture, and whether one has any control over their own life at work.

said, “Hades is kind of a work place that the protagonist is trying to escape. There is even a worker of the week (or month) poster.” Indeed, Hades (the realm) is a workplace, with Hades (the god) as the boss. Zagreus had worked in the white collar office for a while before deciding to escape. Hades belongs. echoed her sentiment: “there’s an office where souls of the dead work, complete with a water from the Styx cooler, endless records shelves, and plus the protagonist can inspire the workers with a tone-deaf speech 😂 Hades himself is the big boss behind a large executive desk.”

I’m going to paste ’s entire note: “This is a tiny bit of a stretch but I think Inside (the game) is really good for depicting what it's like to be a mindless drone and how the whole world just wants you to submit. Then of course the ending adds a lot of extra layers in there for autonomy and free will. All of which fall into that idea of a workplace being like hell where you don't have any free will at all. It's more themes based than direct application of your idea, though.” Inside (from the same creators of Limbo) is an excellent addition. Its major theme is, in one word: amalgamation (a word I will write more about in the future).

The situating of workplaces into an Underworld or Hell, or (the other way around) the portraying of a Hell as a workplace, seems to have become relatively commonplace. I think we can make our own judgments as to why this is.

I think it’s because work is supposed to mean something to the worker, but now it almost always does not.

That is, our work is easier, more worth doing, and more fulfilling and restful toward the other areas of our lives when we actually care about what we’re doing, the community we do it with, or even the effects our work might have on the world.

I respect the hell out of coal miners, like the ones who went on strike and died in the twentieth century across the US to help grant better worker protections for everyone. I respect today’s coal miners who do work they know is hard on their bodies and the environment. I’m not going to diagnose the psychological or sociological reasons why a coal miner chooses to be proud of his work. I’m three generations removed from the last one in my family. All that needs to be said is that work—ALL effort, ALL labor we put into something—deserves a little dignity and should provide for the worker in return. Work is work, and it should pay some bills. It should let you come home knowing you did something.

The problem is that the work doesn’t provide for the worker anymore, especially if you’re stuck in a soul-sucking corporate position doing rote and unimportant tasks all day for the abstract wealth of executives to increase.

Gaming is Work

Games are a fascinating avenue for labor analyses because they, despite being fun, require an incredible amount of effort in order to exist at all. The game doesn’t appear before me—the next section never comes to the screen—unless I put in some labor and make the game happen.

Some games go all in. Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, along with the entire suite of resource management games, give the player the opportunity to participate in a simulation of grueling labor as though it were entertaining and fun. And, weirdly enough, it is. These games are fun because they let us labor under our own terms.

Games can be split into any number of schemas or categorization systems. One about labor is as follows:

1. Minimal work is simulated

   1. in which the player must only hit a couple buttons in order to complete a complex laborious task

   2. or else in which the player hands off materials to a different character to be crafted for them, again requiring only a couple button presses

   3. common in adventures and visual novels, or other games without much urgency in their controls

2. Work is required, but in abstract and in raw materials

   1. as with the previous (b), others do the difficult crafting, but the player must find those materials, often with urgency

   2. common in RPGs

3. Work is presented at all stages

   1. heavy crafting games or mini-games in which the player must collect and then create items, but also receives all rewards and joy of production

   2. higher satisfaction because of the higher buy-in

   3. common in survival and sandbox games

This schema is not perfect, and you’ll find games that participate in two or even all three at different points in their play. I offered some general trends of genres, but all genres can have elements in all three of these labor aspects.

For example, Night in the Woods is an adventure game very greatly concerned with labor and our modern options for work. Mae’s dad has an excellent monologue toward the end about how a job is supposed to provide for you, let you rest, give you just a little hope and satisfaction. Because it’s a story-driven adventure game with only a few mini-games spotted throughout the narrative, it fits very firmly with (1): Minimal work is simulated.

However, there are two sections of the game that do require the player to act with urgency (attentively) and with effort. The first is, as a group, the times when Mae plays bass in her band. It’s pretty tough, and I cannot deny that doing well is work. But the pay-off is worth it for some players, and the playing is fun. The second is when Mae, toward the end of the game, must move slowly and great with difficulty to do something the player may or may not agree with. It’s taxing on us to watch Mae move in such pain and weariness, and it’s taxing on us to admit that we have to let Mae do what she’s going to do.1

Those sections I could see as being small moments of (2) or (3), but they are small moments and quite abstract. The game as a whole lives in (1).

Where to go from here

Here’s a bunch of vague platitiudes to end off with.

Play, and put your work into the game. Own the game. Labor over what it offers you. It’s more difficult than television and YouTube, but do it.

Do it a lot, and do it with dignity.

Love live the workers who build our world and farm our fields. Blessed are the weary, for they have sweated that their families and friends be better off.

Work is required, just not for billionaires. Think about how you labor for your loved ones, for your communities. Be glad that you do.

From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. Plow the half-acre as you can. Collect all those korok seeds. Befriend every villager.

I’m going to get more specific on labor in games going forward, and I’ll return to those series I need still to finish. I hope that it won’t take two months this time. Be at peace, my friends, and may you find some rest from your work.

Jeff, as The Dean: Welcome to Dean-dale Community Colle-dean. I’m a silly goose. Honk, honk. Dean-a-lee-do. Look at me. This is my sister’s outfit!

The Dean, directing: Stop! Jeffrey, stop! You’ve hit gold. Save some for the screen.

Community, “Documentary Filmmaking: Redux”

If you’re new here, welcome! I’m Evan Moore; I’m a scholar of medieval literature and videogames. Today I’m talking about less-serious and low-stakes stuff. Main takeaway: buy into whatever works for you, have fun, and find interesting analysis wherever you are.

In this piece, I’m going to highlight some games with narratives or conceits that are silly all the way through and yet held my attention in earnest. I believe that things can be serious and silly at the same time; humor and playfulness do not detract from sincerity.

Intro: Games have always been silly

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about where games come from, what they provide for us, and how we can best approach leisure in games that demand action from us.

Games are not really supposed to have firm, unchanging narratives. We put storytelling onto them because we realized just how good they are at getting the player to feel what the character feels. Games are supposed to be goofy titles you mess around with when you want to do something but not really work.

This is probably odd to read from me, a literature guy who loves linear story games. But it’s important to consider that, as film emerged from photography, videogames emerged from softwares, databases, and eventually arcades. Not books. Games are for poking a computer and seeing what happens. These days, the thing that happens is sometimes the most moving, evocative story you’ve ever encountered (looking at Clair Obscur, God of War, and Ghost of Tsushima as a start)—but they do not need to be; that’s not what makes them games.

The earliest videogames are either textually-unimportant and transitory experiences, as we know in our times in an arcade, or they are single-player adaptations from tabletop roleplaying games.1 Colossal Cave Adventure (1970s) is not really fun because you get a cool adventure story about a spelunker in Kentucky. It’s fun because you the player have to parse out your options with the software, with its database of possible actions and events. The story you get to tell is your own story about your playing. The play is at the center, and the play is, on its own, pretty silly. You need good humor to engage with it.

(Play CCA for yourself at this link. It’s still cool!)

The key idea I’m getting at here is emergent narrative.2 When we’re playing, it’s best to remember that we’re supposed to be playing. Let the playing tell the story, and let that story be different every time you play. If you enjoy the gameplay loop, then it works. And, as often as not, a silly premise, an irreverent tone, or just inclusion of humor are enough to get me to enjoy it.

Donkey Kong and Mrs. Pac-Man are really, really dumb. That’s why we love them. Games that don’t take themselves seriously and admit that they’re just stupid games are absolutely still interesting to talk about and fun to play.

Here are a few of my favorites from the last couple years that revel in their unserious conceits. What’s your favorite silly game?

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Duck Detective

I just finished playing Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (2023). I’ll play the sequel soon. It’s very dumb, but its absolute commitment to the bit was impressive. You play as a duck—the duck detective—who is the most “detective” someone can be: sad, lonely, congratulates himself, beer gut, has a journal. Someone at a small office stole someone else’s sandwich, and you need to find the culprit: the Salami Bandit.

Everyone in the game is a 2D cut-out, with no variation. The animation is a flat image moving across an isometric space. Super simple. Breaks immersion as much as possible. Hilarious to watch.

The voice acting is incredible. They even got Brian David Gilbert to come in for one of the roles. The voices alone sell the game. I cannot believe these people delivered their lines so earnestly. You can tell the actors and the developers had a blast making this game. It’s irreverent, the humor lands, the case both means nothing and has a ton of real implications, and you can feel the puzzle setting, as clever and smooth as it is.

It’s a stupid game. Nothing in it should work. It does not ask to be taken seriously, and there are many, many more serious, sophisticated, and interesting puzzle games out there. Duck Detective interests me right now, though, because it was incredibly fun and, crucially, it did not ask very much of me. The solves weren’t too difficult, and the narrative moved easily enough. It felt easy to play, agreeable to think about.

Duck Detective does take the player to a pretty important spot: in the end, you choose which of the conspiracy members to arrest. 90% of players have chosen the manager (at the time of writing). There’s some interesting stuff about work culture, time off, benefits, why people resort to crime, and personal forgiveness—but all that is overshadowed by the fact that you’re a duck, and the game refuses to go a couple minutes without some gag or one-liner (including the loading screens).

Garden Story

Garden Story (2021) has a slightly more serious tone and more serious themes (it deals with grief, decay, and growing up), but those are easy to deal with because the main character is an adorable grape named Concord.

Concord has come of age, and he needs to help protect the Grove from the oncoming Rot, the little monsters of the game. Gameplay and aesthetics are largely oldschool zelda-like with some metroidvania and RPG influence: talk to people, explore areas, help the people around you, walk around, fight the Rot, upgrade your weapons, eventually beat a few bosses, walk around some more.

The game includes a time-cycle—Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and Night—and Concord gets requests every morning to help the people of the different towns he lives in. Fulfilling the requests before you sleep (Night is indefinite; it ends when you sleep) gives you more resources but also improves the town, giving Concord access to more things. Plus, you really get to feel like you’re helping.

It’s a really fun game on its own, and its dealings with heavy themes are commendable. The silly premise (you’re a grape that does chores) actually helps the game’s messages.

Turnip Boy

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (2021) is all cringe. The humor is painfully millennial. It works for me when I’m in the mood. It’s a classic zelda-like action-adventure, and it’s short.

Like Garden Story, the premise itself is pretty dumb: you play as a turnip who rips up his tax bill and now owes the mayor service in return (that’s right, it’s debt peonage baybyyy). Like Duck Detective, the playing itself is silly until the stakes massively increase: the journey takes Turnip Boy through radioactive waste, a ruined old world filled with newly-sentient vegetables, and our realization that this is our future, in which humans nuked each other and left uranium-borne plants to inherit the earth.

Which, despite its serious and dire implications, is still silly as hell. Sentient vegetables with some apocalyptic lore is made for me.

Lightning round

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (2002) stars the horniest raccoon, the hottest fox-cop, and the least serious enemies ever.

Ratchet and Clank (all of them, honestly) is like that “this hole was made for me” meme. Unserious sci-fi rocks.

Grim Fandango (1998) and Crypt Custodian (2024) both have super silly premises and great humor throughout, though they feature some serious themes.

The Outer Worlds (2019) is also ridiculous basically the whole time (one of the companion’s special attacks is a drop-kick).

And it wouldn’t be a list of mine without some Telltale games. They tend to include plenty of humor and some dumb situations, even The Walking Dead at times.

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So, what about you? What silly games do you love or come back to? Are they comforting for you?

Coming up soon, I’m going to take a look at labor in games (over the course of several articles), and, for “Pleasing and Practical” Volume 3, I’m going to add my two cents to the ongoing discourse about cozy games and genre. For now, be at peace.

Hi, everyone. In this post, I’m bridging the gap between my two favorite subjects. More medieval stuff will come later, if you’re interested.

Today’s post fits within my tag “The Bourbonic Plague,” so I’m having a little drink and writing more casually about the Middle Ages. Today’s drink is not a bourbon. It’s a gin from Mother Earth Spirits in North Carolina, mixed with some tonic water, lime juice, and a lemon slice. Give a prayer to Tiw (it’s Tuesday) and Caesar (it’s July), and let’s talk about old dead guys.

What writing was like before printing

Before books were books, when writing was a privilege for the land-owning classes, there were no publishing houses as we think of them today. Getting your work out into the world required a few friends who were willing to copy out your work by hand and pass it along to their friends.

In that transmission, texts could change in a few ways, including: (1) handwriting mistakes; (2) adding in a short section for clarity; and (3) removing a section to avoid complexity or a disagreeable opinion. All of these alterations were common and expected.1 Other methods of change included unintentional damage (fires, floods, etc), theft, and book-burning, and of course the illuminations (illustrations) would change, but today I’m just focusing on the things that changed during standard textual transmission.

There was no such thing as a “canon” work until well after the printing press came to Europe.

Before the printing press, when everything was still handwritten and handbound into codices (which we call “manuscripts:” “hand-writings”),2 writing was neither static nor universal. The copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale (1390s) in your lord’s library would not be the same text as the copy in a library 30 miles away. Those two texts were written by different people, so even if (somehow) they kept every word the same, there would be a few spelling differences and different presentation within the codex.

For me, the coolest part about manuscript transmission is that, for most medieval works, we don’t know what the original author’s handwriting looked like. All that survive to the modern day (so far, we’ve rediscovered) are copies of copies. We know Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales because everyone in 1400 said that he did—but we don’t have his handwriting.3

The differences among Piers Plowman manuscripts are so extreme that scholars have needed to name and categorize disparate texts into groups, like gathering several animals into species and genera.

Piers Plowman has at least three genera. We call them A-, B-, and C-texts. Inventive. Scholars agree that these were all authored by Langland over the course of about 20 years, and they include his revisions. In a sense, all three are authoritative: the author was happy that each edition went out to the public. We can think of these as an early copy, a revised “definitive edition,” and a final “director’s cut” of the fourteenth-century religious dream vision about how corrupt the lords and clergy had become after the Black Death.4

The A-text is short and relatively simple. Easy enough. We have a few manuscripts of it, so we know it got around.

The B-text became a mainstream hit, as far as we can tell. It’s the version Crowley printed in 1550, so it became the most popular during the English Renaissance as well. It’s the version most often taught in medieval literature classes (if the professor is insane, like me). The B-text was quoted by John Ball during the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. The words spurred on the riots and the attack on London, and Langland was (probably) mortified that his poem was being used to justify mass violence.5

The C-text is probably a final revision Langland underwent after the Revolt to distance himself from the whole “murdering of clergy” and “enemy of the king” thing. It is similarly popular. Scholars use this text a lot these days.

There is also a Z-text, but it was probably an earlier draft not intended for widespread reading. For more on the separate editions, especially within several copies of the B-text, see the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, which is run by several great people, including former mentor of mine.

The point of all this: There is no one firm, official, correct version of Piers Plowman, and there never can be.

And we can never read Piers Plowman as Langland wrote it, even the C-text. We just don’t have whatever original copy he made and passed along to a friend. All we have are the copies his friends/colleagues made. Out of those, we try to create a critical edition—an edition that comes close to what the original was probably like. But it won’t ever be perfect.

This is true of every text before the printing press.6

When you mod your game, you take ownership over it

And your copy of the game is now entirely different from everyone else’s.

Live-service games and games that have had massive updates are infamous for the same idea: accessing Destiny 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 right now will give you an undeniably different text, different experience, than it would have five years ago. Because the developers have made changes, and the old versions are only accessible if someone happened to preserve them while they were active.

When you buy the definitive version of Mass Effect, you get something demonstrably and noticeably different than if you had bought the three games and their DLCs when they were originally released.

When you add a few mods to your Skyrim to make building your home not as burdensome, you are playing a unique version of the game. It’s just yours, even if you downloaded a mod made by someone else.

So, what’s the correct version of Skyrim? No mods, Legendary Edition? Just vanilla, the original release with no DLC? The Anniversary Edition with extra fan-made mods and (pretty cool) new content and mechanics?

The correct version is whatever you happen to be playing, just as the correct version of a medieval poem is whatever version your friend from Cambridge handed you at the feast last week.

Take power in the version you have. Experience several different versions, if that sounds fun. Choose an experience based on reviews and people you trust.

You have power, and the way you play is often up to you. Just remember that there isn’t only one version out there, even when we’re looking at the same code; adding our experiences together when we talk about a game should create joy and excitement, not frustration that someone else saw something that I didn’t.

A friend and I yesterday had fun discussing the negative ways corporations and some creators altered their original works. We can criticize Cyberpunk 2077, for sure, and George Lucas’s insistence that he needed to add as much CGI into A New Hope as possible (actually, even that name and the episode numbers were similarly messing with an original product). Can you think of any other media that you wish we could have the original form of, but that seems to be lost?

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You can now buy me a coffee!

Be at peace.

I would give my soul
For a girl like you at once
Put your hands up
Let me see you shake your hips

Electric Callboy, “Hypa Hypa”

You know that feeling when you’re at the club and you see an astoundingly hot person?

Maybe not. I guess most of us are gamers. But imagine someone begins to dance with you.

Revere the games you play similarly. Dance with them a little if they let you. Don’t rush anything. Give them time, and enjoy the moment. Let them reveal themself.

Play Moore is a newsletter that introduces ideas in videogame studies scholarship to a wider audience. Basically, I’m an English professor, and I overthink every game I play. If you’re new here, then welcome to our band, and be made at peace!

In Gaming 101, I gave a few reasons why games are worth studying and teaching. Here, in Gaming 102, I’m going to give you a few terms and some questions to get you started. These terms and concepts are important, I think, in enjoying our play as much as possible. This is not an exhaustive list of scholarly terms or of important questions; it’s pretty close to the first day of my 200-level class, but with a lot less syllabus and admin talk.

A few terms

Text

Videogames are texts, and we can analyze them with the same critical tools used in literary, film, and media studies. We can examine the rhetoric of their instructions, the prosody of their dialogue, the sound design, the camera, the settings, the characters. “Text” does not only apply to written words.

The game is something that exists on its own without our preconceptions. We can try to approach it on its terms, regardless of developer intent or personal beliefs (more on this later). There are some things that all people playing will encounter, and we can look at those things. Themes pop out to us. Characters grab our attention. Writing pulls us in.

This works best with narrative-heavy games, of course. The Last of Us, God of War (2018), Telltale games, Night in the Woods, and Firewatch have been my favorite to teach so far. I like these games because they have firm story structures while giving the player some room for interactivity on different levels.

Across those differing levels of interactivity, narrative games function as texts. But that isn’t to say that games are only texts.

Ergodic

You probably haven’t seen this word before, but I promise it will make sense. Espen Aarseth uses it to describe the nature of computer games in his seminal book Cybertext (1997).

“Ergodic,” in the realm of literary studies, basically means a process that changes every time you encounter it because it requires nontrivial effort from the audience to engage with and understand. It is not always the same, even in its building blocks (the required interactivity creates different realities).

This is not (exactly) the same as the ergodicity within physics and mathematics. Ergodic literature was coined independently from the same Greek words: ergon (work) and hodos (path/way). For us, it’s a path that requires work.

There are example of ergodic literature from before videogames were invented: Tarot readings, the I Ching, and choose-your-own-adventure books are all ergodic. More recent examples include S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorset and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (I highly recommend the latter; I haven’t read the former yet).

Non-ergodic literature is that which is always the same and only requires trivial effort: most normal books, films, and superficial experiences of visual art. The thing exists fully on its own and doesn’t ask you to do anything in order to exist and present itself.

Videogames, as we tend to think about them, are ergodic by their very design.1 Even very simple games require a semiotic action (an action that creates meaning) from the player that is distinct from “reading.”

No two experiences with the same videogame will be the same on a textual level. The Last of Us will take Jackson 13 hours and 4 minutes to complete, and Amelia 13 hours and 5 minutes, and Amelia’s second run 14 hours and 36 minutes. These are all different texts. In my playthrough, when I walked through that hallway, my Joel was three inches to the right of where your Joel was. That’s a different text, too.2

Games are not records like other media. They do not preserve what has happened. They present a world or an initial state and allow the player to create—to reveal, as we say in interactive fiction—the story. While they get close, a let’s play (even one with no commentary) is not quite the same as playing the game yourself.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of how we construct reality around us through our senses. A “phenomenon,” technically speaking, is something that appears to our senses—that is, something we can see, feel, smell, etc. An appearance, or maybe a performance. It’s distinguished from “noumenon,” or the true inaccessible inner reality of something.

As I go through the world, as I live my life, I take in perceptions, and I make meaning out of those perceptions. You do, too. It’s how we learn.

Games are not real, and we all know that. The same way that characters in book aren’t real—just collections of ideas hidden behind symbols printed on a page, which I can interpret because I was taught how to.

Think about games with that player-centered power in mind. Your decision to hit “next” is powerful. You reveal the narrative, and you create the world.3 Yes, we can analyze games like we can novels and films, but this extra dimension of sensory reception and interaction means that we need new tools, new frameworks.

So, when we play, we make meaning that doesn’t exist without us.

Revelation

The final book of the Christian scriptures, usually attributed to a John of Patmos, is called Revelation because he is sharing a vision he had, a work of prophecy revealed to him by divine intervention, as he claims in the beginning of the work. The word “revelation” does not mean “end of time” (it’s the translation into Latin of the Greek word apocalypsis, which means “unveiling”). It’s a dream vision, baked in symbolism and poetry.

Game scholars use the verb “reveal” and the noun “revelation” to describe the way a player encounters a narrative within a game. The term comes out of the interactive fiction community, which focuses on text-parser games, but we can (and do) apply it slightly more broadly.

Take what Nick Montfort says in the beginning of his book Twisty Little Passages:

For one thing, the puzzles of interactive fiction function to control the revelation of the narrative; they are part of an interactive process that generates narrative. Roland Barthes offered, in The Pleasure of the Text, an erotic concept of the reading experience. The text reveals itself in a sort of striptease.

A reader who skips boring passages, according to Barthes, is like a man at a stripclub who storms on stage and removes the dancer’s clothes, bulldozing her boundaries and removing her autonomy. Don’t do that. Gross. The pleasure is in waiting for the story to be revealed in due time. She’s the professional.

Games are unique in that the order of the revelation might be different for each person and with each experience (remember: ergodic). For interactive fiction, that revelation comes through the solving of puzzles. Montfort continues:

The pleasure involved in interaction is not simply that of reading… The person who reads and writes to interact is the “operator” of a interactive fiction in cybertextual terminology (Aarseth 1997); in general computing terms, this person is the “user.”… the actions of reading, writing, playing, and figuring out are all involved in such operation or use.4

When we interact with a game, we should revel in its revelation. Remember the epigraph above. Take time for it to happen, and take it as it comes. Enjoy the puzzle-solving, the figuring out.

I think those are enough terms for now. Want me to cover any more? Anything here I can explain further?

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The methods of game studies

Let’s talk about process. Studying games and interrogating our experiences with them sounds like work that ruins the fun. We’re killing pleasure for the sake of sounding smarter than we are. We’re ruining relaxation for elitist dogma. Whatever people are saying these days.

I think we become better players, better enjoyers, and even better people by analyzing what we engage with. The analysis here shouldn’t be ripping apart your favorite media for the sake of an essay. I am not in the business of killing pleasure. I only mean that we should pay attention and think critically because the media we love deserve it.

I’m not going to get in too deep with hyper-specific academic frameworks and methodologies of game analysis. I get bored of that stuff, too. Let’s start with some of the questions I ask my students and I ask myself for game studies in general:

1. What is a game?

2. What genres or modes can we distinguish? Why do they matter? What even is genre?

3. What is the difference between the player and the player-character? Which pronoun should I use when I describe the gameplay? What about games in which you control multiple people?

4. What does agency look like?

And here are questions I ask when I encounter a new game. These questions will usually lead you to the major themes:

1. How does this game teach its mechanics? What knowledge of games does it assume in the player?

2. In what order does information get revealed? Why is some information prioritized?

3. What do I feel in response to what I’m seeing/hearing? What actions do I want to take, and what actions are expected of me?

4. What are some of the symbols or visual effects I’m noticing? How might they communicate certain ideas, and what do I take away from them?

5. What choices do I have? What choices have been made for me? What might those say about what this game is? What is the game telling me?

Wrestle with these, and you’ll be in a fun place.

Data

Follow what the data show.5 Start with your perceptions (the phenomena in front of you), and construct a meaning out of them. You’ll have to bring part of yourself and your preconceived notions to your experience, and that’s fine. But focus just on what the game is showing.

Try not to apply language to the game that the game doesn’t use for itself. Use the game’s own language to talk about it. You can infer some from genre conventions, but otherwise let the game be the game.

And try to follow the data where they lead. That might not sound like advice you’d normally get from an English professor, but this is what careful arguments require, even when they come from some specific lens.

No, not anything can be a right answer if you argue for it. Some conclusions are wrong. Don’t cherry-pick data that support you.

A good exercise is to find data that don’t support you. Think about how your argument must change to fit those data in.

Your arguments don’t need to be fool-proof, and they don’t have to be so absolute as to require all people to agree. But they should be consistent for you.6

The point of analysis

We all analyze all the time, whether we know it or not. We’re taking in data, and we’re interpreting them. We’re making meaning.

One of my challenges for increased enjoyment and more specific, fulfilling conversations is to avoid evaluative language when I can. In the beginning, don’t say the game is good or bad (I struggle with this one a lot). No claim can be universal, so be specific. If a game is disappointing you, try to nail down exactly why rather than simply admitting, ‘oh well, it’s a bad game.’ Once you get those reasons, then you can get evaluative.

When doing reviews, obviously, you need to evaluate the game. That’s the idea: tell me whether the game is good. Your evaluation should come with plenty of thought. Every review I’ve read in the gamestacker community here has done so.

(Side note: check out other Substackers who do videogame stuff [I call us “gamestackers”] because they’re all wonderful; start with Good Game Lobby and Margot Plays Video Games.)

The point of analysis is to help our daily lives, I think. Ask questions, stand by your hot takes, and follow data wherever they lead. Those conclusions are often more interesting than the preconceptions you came in with.

Gaming 102 ends. Next in this series will be Gaming 230: The Cultural Study of Videogaming.7 I’ll talk about what games to do us, how my tradition of scholarship views gaming as a practice, and why it matters.

Be at peace.