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.

Leave a comment

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.

There stands Minos with terror, and he snarls.
He examines the faults of those that enter;
He judges and proclaims as he clutches.
I say, when an evil-born soul
Comes before him, that soul confesses everything,
And that expert of iniquities
Sees what place in Hell is fit for them;
He circles himself with his tail as many times
As the amount of Circles he wishes that soul to be sent down.

Dante, Inferno, V.4-12 (my translation is pretty literal; feel free to look at others for better poetry)

Reviews on Play Moore take two forms:

• The Review, in which I give some non-spoiler thoughts

• The Report, in which I have a longer spoiler-filled discussion on the game’s main themes.

My review is partly based on my enjoyment and partly based on how I might use it in a classroom. Generally speaking, I will have enjoyed every game I review. I don’t necessarily claim a game is “good.”

Review

The basics

• Playtime - about 15 hours for the main story

• Difficulty - approachable but requires some practice

• Platform - I played on Steam Deck; it’s available on all major systems

• no major content warnings, but it is about a bunch of animals who had died

  • so it’s just a little sad

• “Whoa” Factor - 4

• Recommendation - yes

The conceit

Games about the afterlife seem to be everywhere now. I do wonder if some greater cultural shift has happened.

Today, I’m going to talk about Crypt Custodian, Top Hat Studios’s newest isometric metroidvania.1 I was sold on the cute art design, the silly premise (you’re a cat doomed to sweep the underworld for eternity), and the promise of exploration and approachable combat.

I was not let down. This game was a wonderful 15 hours for me.

You play as Pluto, a cat who has tragically entered the underworld, waking by some rushing water. Pluto walks around for a bit and discovers that statues are blocking the way to the Temple, where (you are told) he must go to be judged.

Pluto finds a broom and uses it to remove the bothersome statues. It’s the only way.

Kendra is the judge in the Temple. While at first pleasant and agreeable, she quickly becomes agitated at Pluto’s (the player’s) decision (requirement) to destroy those statues (of her) out front. She denies Pluto access to the Temple and instead condemns him to an afterlife of labor: to clean up the underworld with his broom as repayment for breaking the statues and making a mess.

The world is dangerous outside the temple. This is a punishment, after all. So Pluto needs to kill some mobs in order to clean the massive trash piles everywhere. Funny enough, after a couple hours, I met Kendra again, and she admonished me for “having fun” when I was supposed to be working.2

Thus begins Pluto’s journey. Make friends and explore! It’s time to create a community.

The playing

The game itself is relatively simple, based on common tropes from metroidvanias and other action-adventure subgenres. The broom is Pluto’s weapon; you have a light attack, a special, a jump, and a dash. You gain currency (trash bits) from defeated enemies and from those trash piles, and you can use the currency to buy upgrades.

An economy of trash makes sense. The first friend Pluto meets is Pebble, who was also doomed to an afterlife of the custodial arts.

Pebble is great. He made a shrine to Pearl, who has not yet followed him into the afterlife. Pearl’s Shrine is one of the earliest areas that teaches players how to navigate the map, adapt to new enemy types, and find bonus objects off the main paths.

The main goal in the game is to make friends. Very literally, by cleaning the underworld and defeating monsters, Pluto creates a community bound by loyalty and a shared fate. More on this in the spoiler section below.

The gameplay loop is satisfying, and boss fights are difficult enough. You need to pay attention and practice, but if you have some experience you should be able to get through without too many issues. You’ll die, but the respawn is very quick, and traversing back to where you died is rarely onerous.

The music fits very well to each area. There is no shortage of wonderful tracks, including serene vibes for easy exploration and intense energies for boss fights. The sound design as a whole adds into the fuller aesthetic mix without being distracting. It sucks you in.

The map itself is massive for the relative size of the game. Exploration and narrative progression will require you to revisit areas, remember places you couldn’t get to before, and try new things. Don’t be afraid to just walk around.

Thankfully, the fast travel system is super easy, and load times are almost non-existent. I was impressed with the game’s optimization and density.

Crypt Custodian gets 4 “Whoa” points from the times I was impressed at a boss or level design, enjoyed a certain quip in dialogue, or discovered something unexpected. Check it out.

The teaching

I wouldn’t assign this for students to play outside of class, but I’d show it off. It presents its major themes quickly at the start of the game, so we could have some interesting conversations right off the bat.

I think it’s Top Hat Studios’s best effort so far, personally, and thematically it’s both appropriate and accessible for a university lecture.

Crucially, the dialogue is effective. It’s not overly poetic or unique, but it does exactly what it needs to do (give information to the player and allow each character to have their own voice) without sounding stilted or hello-fellow-kids. The short conversations with Pluto’s friends are often funny, and they convey with punctuation—in a style not dissimilar to how I text—more than words alone.

For example, there are many signs that say NOT to go east to see what Grizz is up to. He’s doing something bad, you see.

So obviously, you go over there, and he is [redacted]. He then says, “You better not snitch on me!!” The double exclamation point really is nice to see.

For these reasons and more, Crypt Custodian would be interesting to discuss as part of a unit on how games teach the player how to play, but it’s a little too long and requires a little too much precise and urgent gameplay to have intro-level students play on their own. B+.

Report - major spoilers below

Themes

I quoted Dante up there because Kendra acts in a similar manner as Minos. She judges all who enter her chamber. Unlike Minos, it seems that she is in charge of both the Temple (Heaven/Paradise) and the lands outside of it (Hell). Like Minos, she knows everything that happened to the soul standing before her.3

Grizz, when you meet him, is digging a hole under a fence in order to break into the Temple. That’s right. We’re assaulting Heaven. The digging is going slow, and he is not sure what to do on the other side, so Pluto promises to bring 10 friends along with him. They can attack together. Community.

To me, the coolest part is that no one refuses friendship when it is offered. It seems that the worst fate of cleaning up the underworld (other than the constant onslaught of enemies and trash) is isolation.4 Neat stuff!

With all friends assembled at Grizz’s dig-site, the Breaking of the Temple begins.

You might have guessed it by now. The Temple is empty. Kendra lives there alone, and it’s filled with garbage—her garbage. We knew already that she sucked, of course: she places statues of herself along the entry path so that every new soul must break them in order to reach their judgment in the first place.

But we see now her true treachery. Kendra denied access to the Temple to every single soul that entered her domain. She is a Minos with vicious politeness.5

She exists, only herself, one, alone, in a supposed paradise, but it’s disgusting and bleak. The only thing that separates her existence from those she deemed unworthy is the deeming. She doesn’t have to clean, but she lives in filth. She moves that filth outside, and her banished workers clean it for her.

This makes me think of that common critique of modern capitalism: Western countries create so much waste that we ship it off to other countries. That way we don’t have to deal with it ourselves, and we can keep living lives of reckless consumerism.

Themes so far:

• Community is what makes a Heaven, and isolated work a Hell

• Those who create unjust systems are not fit to judge

• Offshoring garbage creates work for others

• You can turn work into play if the work and your mindset allow

• The answer is friends

There is plenty more to discuss, but I’ll leave it here.

Have you played this game? What did you think? Who was your favorite NPC? Did you notice anything I didn’t mention? Let me know!

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Be at peace.

The importance of games exceeds the admittedly remarkable quantitative measures of their growing centrality to contemporary life. At a qualitative level, the position of games has also been elevated above the status of pastimes and entertainments.

Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games, pp. 4-5

When I was in college about 10 years ago, I would have taken a game studies class without hesitation. We didn’t know at that time what great gaming scholarship was already getting published.1 The writings have only gotten better, and game studies departments are now popping up around the world, not all with a focus on development.

The more dismissive academics are in the process of retiring out of university administration. More and more scholars interested in games are taking on leadership roles in the academy. We do, however, still have to justify ourselves to some of the old guard (as an English major has to justify themselves to their engineer uncle).

Our justifications usually lie in three camps: (1) it will help students in the game development and esports industries, or even work as a reviewer or game writer (less common but still technically possible); (2) games are useful teaching tools; and (3) games are worthy of study just like literature and cinema before them.

I’m going to go a step further. Sure, games are just as valid to study as the other forms of media that already have a foothold in the academy. I think, though, that videogames are the most important medium to study. They make us better people.

Reason 1: Games make us better people

Games certainly don’t make us worse

You’ve probably heard that playing videogames causes school shootings. And, just, no they don’t. Not even some. Even particularly violent games have no correlation with violent crime or mass shootings.2

More recently, you’ve probably heard that playing videogames causes social isolation and depression. Again, no. In fact, “play” in all forms is incredibly effective at helping kids learn social skills. This organization, The Genius of Play, exists to increase awareness and provide resources for parents whose kids would benefit greatly from playing games. On the videogame side specifically, during the height of the pandemic, people of all ages played more videogames—both online and on their own—without any correlation of increased feelings of isolation or depression.3 If anything, for some of us at least, playing online helped us feel more connected.

Game studies scholarship of the last five years has overwhelmingly supported the claim that videogames, in fact, make us better people. They reach us more effectively than any other medium about the lives of others, about action, consequence, and responsibility, and about how we can create our own worlds.

Because gaming requires attention and interactivity, the very act of playing does change the way we interact with the world. Games teach us how to play, and our brain adapts. This is the Tetris Effect: if you play Tetris enough, you’ll start to see those tetrominoes everywhere.

My best and silliest experience of this was based in Skyrim’s alchemy. I was working on a project about that game’s alchemy mechanic, so I had gathered tons and tons of ingredients, including tundra cotton, a white flower that bloom is tall bunches. Every time I saw a white-blooming bush in the real world, I had to stop myself from wanting to go up to it and press X.

When the game is thoughtful, contains interesting characters or an interesting world, and allows us to play with actions and consequences, it thereby also contains a visceral, impactful lesson. As I said in my first “Pleasing and Practical” post, games are always teaching us, even when they aren’t explicitly educational.4

We study literature for similar reasons. If you read a series enough, you’ll start to use their internal language for the real world (I’m reading The Wheel of Time, and I have incorporated “Walk in the Light” into my farewells; also worth mentioning are my generation’s obsession with Harry Potter houses and Percy Jackson cabins). The best literature also teaches us empathy and understanding. Film, too. These media tell us something about being human.

Games, it seems, have yet another level to that empathy, simply because we don’t just read about the character. We force that character on. The player writes their own story each time they play. It’s more personal, more intimate. Indeed, as Bo Ruberg has argued, it’s more queer as well. We get to bend the rules, break binaries, explore realities beyond our own, and inhabit worlds without space. That means a lot for me as a queer teacher, and I know it does for my queer students, too.

Which games have taught you something? Which games have stuck with you because they affected how you go through the world?

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Reason 2: Games are worthy of rigorous study in themselves

Videogames are uniquely apt and poised for critical, thorough analysis, and not only because of what they provide for us.

There’s something to be said for the fact that videogaming is taking over media consumption, especially for younger people, who at least as often will watch a let’s play or a YouTube video about a game rather than traditional television.

Games are where so much of our collective artistic expression lives. If we don’t study them, a significant portion of the stuff we do and love goes without study. I dislike that outcome.

If, instead, we treat games as an art form worthy of academic scrutiny and criticism, I think, our conversations and our lives immediately become more interesting and more meaningfully examined. No art requires academic conversation or analysis to be valid. It’s already valid, and that means we should study it.

We should study games because they’re what we interact with, and they’ve become part of the human experience.5

Reason 3: Yearning for the mines

Kids are playing games. Adults are, too. This is a practical reason, not necessarily in league with the previous two more high-minded ones, but worth considering just the same. If people are playing games, and if we want those people to engage critically with what they do, then we need to study games, teach classes about games, and encourage that critical thinking through games.

The critical thinking is there. We just need to bring it out.

It is as important as it ever has been to engage students with what they’re interested in. We need to meet them where they are and, with a little luck and a couple good teachers, bring them up so that they can approach more difficult texts. I want students to read some of the medieval poetry I love, but they don’t want to read it (I can’t blame them). However, they know Skyrim. We can start there, and after a few months of conversation, we just might be able to do Beowulf—if nothing else, at least so that they can get Skyrim’s references to the poem.

Of course, teaching games isn’t just about bringing the students to a different medium. It’s also about letting them know that I respect the media they enjoy. Plus, I might be an expert in the academic conversation around videogames, but I am not an expert in all the games. There are tons I haven’t played, and there are tons I’m bad at. I love student recommendations for a game they love—they are earnest and hopeful, and I always take the recommendations seriously.

My students love games about as much as they love hip-hop. And whether they know it or not, they are already nerdy about those interests. (See this video for proof that you can be as nerdy about hip-hop as anything else, though that’s a topic for a different day):

They want to know that their professor is a normal person, and I’m glad to be one of the ones that they can talk about games, music, etc. with (at least for now—they already think I’m old).

There’s an old joke now that Minecraft is popular because “the children yearn for the mines,” based on the fact that we players love doing difficult manual labor only in a game. Despite its advanced age (it came out when I was in middle school and most of my students were 4-7 years old), Minecraft is still incredibly popular among kids. I prefer to teach games with the capitalist history of coal mining in the background, rather than mining ourselves, but to each their own.

And it is true that they yearn (for games in general, if not for Minecraft specifically). And I celebrate that yearning, if nothing else because it fills the seats in my classroom and shows them that they can, in fact, engage with critical analysis in ways they didn’t know they could.

Reason 4: Teaching has never been more rewarding

I’ve talked around this point already. You can probably tell how much I love teaching games.

The LLM-generated responses that have overrun English classes everywhere are relatively rare in my games classes. I only catch a few each semester.6

Because writing about videogames and videogaming is so personal, so intimate, and so unique to each player, it is actually pretty difficult to fake a paper about it. Especially because my prompts emphasize personal reflection. It’s easy to spot the hallucinations, as well.

I cannot say enough how much I love reading a genuine reflection about a student working through an advanced concept within a game we played. Their engagement with the texts blows me away. I’ve had them write in a gaming journal, too, and their raw thoughts on games as they play them are fascinating and sometimes quite moving.

The class discussions are also rewarding. While most of my other classes have about a 50/50 chance of leaving me drained by the end of any particular session, the classes about games without fail leaving me wanting more of that conversation and that community. Teaching games brings me to life, makes me a better teacher, and improves my outlook on the profession as a whole.

The communities I’ve formed in these games classes are unlike anything I’ve been able to form elsewhere. And I’m so glad that I can be a support for my students, insofar as I’m able to be. We make real connections, and all of our lives are better off for it.

Reason 5: Games is fun

This one is the most obvious.

I just really like games, y’all.

I’d be talking about them anyway. I’d want to write and ask questions about them. I’d want to play them.

Being able to say that I play games for my job (after all, how can I teach them if I haven’t played through them?) is the best feeling.

I’ll leave it here. It’s the best job I can imagine, and the students prove me right every day.

“Gaming 101” begins a series that brings together my personal playing and my experience teaching videogames in college classes. I’ll offer some thoughts on the importance of game studies, and I’ll share some advice on how to approach games in a way that makes them more rewarding for serious study without taking away the fun. “Gaming 101” asked the “why.” The next installment of this series, “Gaming 102,” will ask the “how.”

Be at peace.

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This is a short post in which I share some thoughts about what gives me motivation and magic in puzzle games. I guess this is technically a review about a super fun game that I’m not feeling, but I’m not including any grading/scoring.

The game

Blue Prince is a new puzzle game with a first-person camera, in which the player walks through a house with randomly-generated rooms and hallways. Its gameplay is essentially an adaptation of the boardgame Betrayal at House on the Hill. At each doorway, the player is given three semi-random rooms to pick from. Each room has its own items, bonuses, and penalties, and each room has a set layout of entryways. The player has to keep track of their footstep currency, which determines how many more doorways they can pass (you start with 50). At 0, or whenever the player chooses, the day ends and the player starts over. Every day, the house has an entirely unique layout.

The goal of the game is to unlock the secret final room of the mansion in order to win your inheritance. Explore away and solve as many of the house’s riddles, puzzles, and design quirks in order to find that final room. Good luck.

I’m inspired by ’s review for the game. Check it out. I’m being slightly harsher here, but I’m with them on how engaging and fun the game can be.

The Drifter

"Blue Prince", is Almost Perfect

“A doughnut hole in the doughnut's hole. But we must look a little closer. And when we do, we see that the doughnut hole has a hole in its center - it is not a doughnut hole at all but a smaller doughnut with its own hole, and our doughnut is not whole at all…

Read more

a year ago · 2 likes · The Drifter

I’ve also been discussing the puzzles and cool discoveries with a friend of mine. The conversations have been great; I want to talk about the game more. The solves are really interesting. The history of the house which the player learns through abandoned objects and occasional notes is really effective: it certainly improves my engagement and buy-in. I want to care about the house.

Again: it is fun. Play it, especially if you like puzzles.

I enjoy games with vague beginnings that rely on the player choosing where to go and what to do: Outer Wilds and The Witness, as many others have already pointed out, are obvious inspirations for Blue Prince. And I dearly love those games (though I have never finished The Witness myself, I’ve seen a few playthroughs of sections I couldn’t solve. It’s hard!).

Nothing is like Outer Wilds

There’s something that Outer Wilds was able to do for me that unfairly changed how I look at puzzle games: it made me feel like the universe’s most important xenoarcheologist. The star system was mine to explore and understand.

The puzzles were a means of knowledge acquisition, and they didn’t feel like puzzles. I was navigating a changing world. We call games like it “knowledge-based games” because the only thing between the player and the “end” is knowledge about the game-world and some logic.

In Blue Prince, the puzzles feel like puzzles, and the games within the house feel like games. There is technically a reason why the cryptic messages and arithmetic games exist, but their explanations haven’t satisfied me. I’m also frustrated at the requirement for luck. That is, as The Drifter pointed out, it is entirely unfair to compare Blue Prince to Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds is, indeed, in a league of its own.

The better comparison

The better comparison is The Witness, a puzzle game with a first-person camera in which the puzzles are just puzzles, and the player is (basically) a rat in a maze. Can you get off the island? Can you figure out why these puzzles are all over the place?

The Witness is not a game about answers, not really. It’s about solutions to its puzzles, sure, but it’s far more about the solving—the action, not the end. And I have yet to speak to any fan of that game who loves it because of the world, the lore, the narrative answers, etc. We love it because of and only for its puzzles.

It’s a game of puzzles, and we know that going in. When it feels too much like a game, with little immersion or narrative motivation, it hasn’t lost anything. The goal of playing it is to play it; it admits that it’s a game.

Conclusion

So, for me, Blue Prince feels like a game without admitting that it’s a game. Unlike The Witness, it advertises a story, lore to discover, and a final ultimate goal. Unlike Outer Wilds, it doesn’t feel real or encourage me to inhabit a role for the discovery (but this is personal: if it immerses you, then great).

It fits in between, and while it is incredibly fun to solve the puzzles, I’m not sure what else I’m really getting out of it. I know tons of others are in love with its design, its novel random-number generation for the rooms, and its relatively simple concept for interesting puzzles. And it does those things well.

But it’s not for me, and I’ve found myself losing the motivation to continue. I’d rather do some variant sudokus. I’ll still play some when I’m in the mood, but—sorry to say—I’m not going to finish Blue Prince.

But that’s just me, though. Let me end with positive questions! What do you love about the game? Have the puzzles really gotten to you? Do you remember how you felt during your first trip to the Secret Garden, or figured out the Laboratory?

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Never enjoy the surface, always digging beneath
You know what you are, when you see
All the hells and all the bliss revealed
As a single god

Wilderun, “Passenger”

Welcome to “Pleasing and Practical.” These are essays on the combination of utile and dulce in modern videogames, why it matters in the first place, and how that combination creates some of the best masterpieces of artistic expression we have access to. I’m going to look at the games we play as a form of art—both the games themselves and the ways we play them.

The epigraph above is from a song about pain’s inseparable existence with our lives, how it sustains us and saps us at once. I find it an apt lesson as I discuss the two facets of interacting with games: the fun of the playing and/or the story, and the pain of getting wrecked by phenomenal art. Another line from the song is spoken from pain itself: “Praise will rise from the ruins and mist.” I’m going to examine a bunch of games and a bunch of ideas within gaming as though I should be grateful to the thing that broke my soul.

To begin, let me give you a couple Latin terms and a short tangent on a medieval poet, then back to games. I’ll throw out some examples of games and some ways to think about them. I’ll end this post with a question about art and the indie adventure game Kentucky Route Zero.

TLDR: Good art should have some serious thematic exploration and some enjoyment, and those two ideas can mean different things for different people. Most of us probably already think along these lines, but I hope this post/essay can provide some useful terms and frameworks.

Horace’s critiques of artistic creation

Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, lectorem delectando pariterque monendo.

[Those who have mixed pleasures with what is practical, teaching and entertaining the reader at the same time, win every vote.]

Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 343-4. Full Latin text here. And here is a full alternative English translation.

About 2,000 years ago, Horace wrote that the best poets are those who can fully and most effectively mix serious and useful instruction [utile] with pleasant and fun entertainment [dulce].1 Scholars still refer back to this dichotomy in art in our critiques and academic writing, especially when the art we’re looking at uses similar language to describe itself.

I used this distinction in my dissertation when I talked about the medieval Scottish poet Robert Henryson. He wrote a serious of translations of Aesop’s Fables and trickster tales, starring Reynard the Fox, around the year 1470. In it, he praises the poet (himself) who is best able to weave together “play” and “ernist” [earnest]. Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) uses a similar “game” and “ernest” distinction for his poetry.2

The way I’m translating utile—practical—is not quite the same as Chaucer and Henryson thought it, with the art having an “earnest” tone, but that’s because of what the medieval world largely saw art as: a teaching tool. To be earnest was to instruct, and so to be practical. Henryson wrote very explicit moral lessons at the end of each tale so that the reader couldn’t come away with the wrong idea. He thought that’s what good art should do and be.

Scholars still tend to talk about texts this way, even if implicitly. We tend to think of novels as having certain arguments or lessons (a theme is an argument the novel is making about the world). Poems have morals or major take-aways. Usually, we consider the poetry with obvious or explicit lessons to be preachy or cringe; we prefer the subtle approach.

And we absolutely learn from the games we play. Tons of research has gone into gaming as a teaching tool, and game studies scholars have been writing more and more about the implicit lessons we get from playing.3 That is, I’m not sure it’s possible to remove the instruction or seriousness—the utile—from gaming. Games are still useful, still practical for teaching, even when they’re fun. Even when they weren’t made to teach an explicit lesson.

The earnestness must be fun, and the fun must be earnest

I cannot think of a better example of a videogame that perfectly merges the pleasing—the fun, the entertaining, even the relaxation—with the practical—the serious, the earnest, the important—than God of War (2018).

I know. What a surprise.

That games takes itself seriously, and it takes its play seriously. But it’s also deeply, unflinchingly a game, and it takes its seriousness as far as its enjoyment.

Some scenes are more silly, and others more serious. Some moments are more game-y, and others more strictly narrative. But they come together in such a way not to diminish each other (reasonable people can disagree on this, but for me it works).

In fact, both the gameplay and the narrative are both fun and serious. (I’ll write a post later on about why I don’t think that gameplay and narrative are wholly different.)

Other games with impactful narratives and satisfying gameplay of any type can fit into this archetypal form: The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn certainly fit into this for me. As do several phenomenal indie games with serious tones and fun mixed in. Telltale games are welcome additions. Others are ones that I think are fun, but through their interactivity/exploration, not necessarily through what we usually call “engaging gameplay,” or through the play itself. Outer Wilds and Night in the Woods are a couple of these. Undertale and Gris deserve a shout-out as well. So do dozens of others, but I must move on.

A problem here arises with the dulce half. “Fun” in gaming is so subjective, so unique. Hell, whether I’m having fun is usually more about my mood than it is about the game (with some exceptions when I just can’t get into it). We’re going to disagree about what is “fun” about playing. I don’t think dying 20 times per boss fight in Dark Souls is particularly fun, but I definitely get how finally overcoming it feels incredible; I’ll consider it a successful attempt at dulce for its audience.

On the other hand, the only gameplay in Night in the Woods is walking, jumping, and dialogue; but I think it’s fun because of what those actions let me reveal in the game. Spiritfarer is fun only if you enjoy resource management and exploration, but like NITW it is undeniably impactful.

So I’m not going to make absolute claims about a certain game being fun, or a certain other game being boring. Take my opinions for what they are, and always let me know what games you would categorize here. Do any come to mind for you that perfectly mix the pleasing with the practical? Which ones scratch that itch?

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When a game has one but not the other

Again, we might disagree on some specific examples here, but I’m going to try to keep in mind popular reception.

I don’t think Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is trying to teach any lessons or affect its audience with something that we might call “an artistic experience.” That doesn’t mean it’s not teaching anything, and that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still a form of art (it does and it is), but on a spectrum between Entertainment on one side and Art on the other, it’s certainly more toward Entertainment.

The gameplay is quite fun, and the vast majority of its fanbase doesn’t need it to be anything else. Smooth and engaging FPS gameplay through an interesting-enough campaign narrative and a few multiplayer maps/modes is the goal. It’s dulce.

I bet no more than 5% of gamers would say that Kentucky Route Zero is fun. That doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any fun moments during the play (it is and it does), but on a spectrum between Entertainment on one side and Art on the other, it’s certainly more toward Art.

It’s a narrative adventure game with very few puzzles, a surrealist and confusing world, and constant reading with very little voice acting. One of the interludes—“The Entertainment,” between Acts II and III—is consistently reviewed negatively and racks up tons of complaints on the subreddit and on Steam reviews alike (negative Steam reviews almost universally claim that KR0 is “not a game”). The gameplay is never really “play” in the way we usually think about it. The game, released in five acts over seven years, can’t be anything but an interactive experience, but I’m not sure that means it’s fun to play. It’s utile.

Of course, I’ve done a bad academia just now. I’m being reductive, and thinking that these games exist along a spectrum that separates Entertainment and Art as two distinct poles, as opposites, is actually a huge mistake in the first place. Thinking like that is what makes academics into elitists and snobs.

So let me be clear: like what you like. I play tons of games that I’ll never teach in a classroom or write about in my scholarship. But that’s because of personal taste, of accessibility issues (i.e., I’m not requiring students to play through a game that requires gaming skill), and of my preference to discuss games with really hard-hitting themes. It’s not because some games are “worse” than others. Regardless of the medium, I can think of plenty of examples of “low-brow” stuff that pulled on me or affected the way I look at the world.

I love music that does weird stuff, incorporates several genres, experiments, and shows off technical skill—but I also love a chorus and a heavy breakdown or solo. In other words, I’m a prog metal guy, but I’m not seeking out avant-garde stuff all the time. I have friends who do, and I admire them. Sometimes I’ve gotta reel in my overthinking and jam to “Which Side Are You On?” to remind myself I’m just a Kentuckian descended from coal miners. I love Kentucky Route Zero because it is a masterpiece—but I’m also currently playing Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus and Crypt Custodian, which aren’t, at least not in the same way (stay tuned for more thoughts on these).

I’m a human of contradictory taste. You probably are, too, though our examples differ.

So let’s get rid of that spectrum between Entertainment and Art, and let’s replace it with several different metrics. How does the game feel? How and what does it teach? Does it seriously engage with its themes, or does it present them haphazardly or keep them at the surface? There are many more questions like these that all get at the same issue here.

Kentucky Route Zero introduces, executes, and is its themes (I joke in class that it’s all themes, no lore; all emotion, no logic). And when we approach it with that view, it’s an incredibly fun experience. Black Ops 6 introduces, executes, and is its fun. When we approach it with that view, we can begin to see its implicit lessons (again, regardless of developer intent).

I have no final answers, but I think this combination of utile and dulce is a framework worth considering. I’ve titled this series so.

Work is play for mortal stakes

The line, “work is play for mortal stakes,” comes originally from Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time:”

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

I’m taking also from its reference in Kentucky Route Zero, Act II, as Conway talks to Brandon, the janitor of Saint Thomas Church (Doubting Thomas and Aquinas come to mind). The church is empty; the congregation hasn’t met here for…well, it seems like forever. But Brandon keeps putting on tapes of old sermons. He performs these recordings for no one simply because it’s his job to do so, and he finds dignity in that work. As Conway says, “We’ve all got a job to do.”

This scene begs the question for me: What is the point of a performance, of an art piece, for no one to engage with? What worth still remains? (Jacob Geller has a video about this question.)

The title of the homily is, “Work is play for mortal stakes.” The protestant work ethic does indeed prioritize the importance of serious work over the foolishness of play, but this line brings the two together. It emphasizes the importance (Mortal stakes, salvation) by uniting the ideas (work is a form of play, a type of fun). The serious does not happen without the silly; salvation comes through work (a distinctly non-protestant idea) and play together.

I’m not saying I agree with that statement, but it demonstrates what KR0 is trying to argue for: real fun can in fact be found in serious work. The pleasing can be found in the practical, for one cannot exist without the other.

Serious art, that is, needs to be enjoyable and enjoyed. It can affect us, wreck us, make us cry, make rethink who we are, open our eyes to the suffering of others, let us know ourselves. Art can do a lot of things that are absolutely important for being a human, and not all of them are fun. But at the end of the day, for that art to affect us the best, we need to take it on its own terms (don’t try to siphon it into Entertainment or Art), and we need to enjoy it.

Art that I don’t enjoy isn’t going to inspire a lot of critical thinking unless some other force gives me the motivation to keep experiencing and thinking about it. It is art’s responsibility and mine to enjoy an experience through the pain it might cause and through the less fun sections. Because that’s how we get to feel.4 Like the epigraph says, I tend to dig beneath rather than sit at the surface; I’m best done in by media when it gives me the hell and the bliss together.

Of course, I don’t really know what art is. I think we all need to figure that out for ourselves. But this gives me a good starting point, and I hope it helps you think about that distinction between things we discard as entertainment (sports, sitcoms, reality shows, hip hop, fantasy) and things we consider art (opera, renaissance paintings, Shakespeare, The Wire, literary fiction).

Fear not: some are still more worthy of serious consideration and analysis than others. Some content really is just entertainment with little technical or thematic thought, and some “high art” is immensely fulfilling and enriching. On the other hand, some entertainment is based as hell, and some “high art” is just…sad, and says nothing I haven’t gotten somewhere else.

We shouldn’t be quick to consider them opposites, and we should open ourselves up to the art that wants us to enjoy the experience. Look for the things that bring utile and dulce together—and find out what those mean for you.

Thanks for sticking it out through this longer post! The next will have much more dulce.

That’s all for now. Be at peace.

Who are you?

This is a long one, but let me own up to as much as I can. Here’s the story of the two games that got me into game studies.

I’m Evan Carter Moore. I’m from Frankfort, Kentucky, and I’ve been in North Carolina since 2018. I’ve been teaching at UNC Greensboro since 2020, and I’m very close to graduating from my PhD program in English (medieval literature).

My BA is in philosophy from Georgetown College, a tiny college in central KY, and I switched to English for my MA at NC State. My real awakening into game studies happened in two stages during my time in grad school.

First, I played God of War (2018) alongside my then-roommate, a semi-famous gaming YouTuber. We sank hundreds of hours into that game between 2018 and 2020. Something in it kept calling me back, and I wasn’t sure exactly what it was that that game was doing to me. I wanted to know that world, those characters, and that story.

It was the perfect game for me at that time: the exploration and side quests, the linear story moments, the incredible cinematics that flowed perfectly into and out of gameplay (I cannot stress how much I did not believe what I was seeing), and the satisfying level design, combat, and traversal puzzles. Everything came together in that game. I needed to study it. And, just to hammer this point home: I was able to enjoy it with a good friend.

In June 2020, while that roommate and I were hunkered down for Covid, just after I graduated from that MA (my thesis was on hospitality in Paradise Lost), Naughty Dog beat the shit out of me. Many of you probably felt the same way. The Last of Us Part II made me cry twice (once just from seeing all the accessibility settings), but the most important moment wasn’t exactly emotional in the same way.

It was that little hovering square button that pops up when Ellies catches up with Nora in the hospital. Red lights flash and pulse. The music swells. The player breathes in after an intense chase scene. And the unsettled camera looks up at Ellie, holding a steel pipe, panting, waiting for me to press that button and begin torturing Abby’s whereabouts out of Nora.

You can watch the short scene here (I love the title: Ellie expresses her anger upon Nora).

I was floored, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. There have been similar moments of player complicity in character actions before: hell, even the ending of The Last of Us presents that same force onto the player. The character has made a choice, and now you have to deal with it. Other examples include tons and tons of narrative games.

But I was floored nonetheless. Ellie made the decision, but it wasn’t in a cinematic. I had to press that button; I had to bludgeon Nora. The switch to Abby in Seattle, the theater fight, and so much of the rest of the game was similarly monumental for me—but having to torture and kill Nora myself takes the cake. The presentation and the patience of the game to wait for player input stunned me, and I admitted to myself: this game is doing something to me, and I need to study it.

This realization was more visceral than the first. Where God of War fascinated me out of its design and powerful story, The Last of Us Part II fascinated me out of its effectiveness at making me hate what I was doing even as I loved doing it. It was just as much about the action and the play as it was about the narrative. (No, I do not consider this a moment of “ludonarrative dissonance;” more on that in its own post.)

Now, I study videogaming and videogames. My university, UNCG, offers a minor and major in the cultural study of videogaming. I’ve been teaching a class on adventure games for two years, and in the fall I’m going to start a new exploration course. Should be fun!

What do you want?

I really don’t know what my ultimate answer will be to this, but I have a few answers that I’m workshopping with myself.

1. Community with people who love talking about games

2. A place to put down more official versions of my in-class rants (here’s one of my more infamous in-class drawings)

   

3. Not be a YouTuber

4. Share my methods and opinions on game studies with anyone who wants to read them

More desires will come, I’m sure, and a couple of these may leave.

Final things to know

I’ll do some reviews on here, but they won’t be standard (mostly because I’m not that good at full-on review writing). I’m going to take the specific perspective that works best for me: as a teacher and scholar. For my own style, I’ll give the game a grade based on how well it executes its themes, how approachable the game is, the strength of the characters and dialogue, etc. I’ll also give a score with no cap for how many times the game made me go, “Whoa.”

Main Play Moore posts will be normal. Game thoughts and whatnot.

Medievalist posts will be tagged “The Bourbonic Plague” because the Bourbon House was a plague on the people, it’s kinda funny, and I’ll be drinking my homestate’s legacy while I write them.

I hope you’ll join me in some interesting discussions!

FAQs

1. What is your dissertation about?

   1. I wrote four chapters about conmen-alchemists in medieval poetry, and I wrote one chapter about the representation of alchemy in the Obsidian 2022 game Pentiment.

2. Other than God of War and The Last of Us, what are your favorite games?

   1. Sadly, I am a PlayStation boy. I’m a big fan of the Horizon series, I recently got really into Black Myth Wukong, and I’ll always have a fondness for Uncharted. God of War Ragnarok came out soon after my dad died, so that one really messed me up, and I’m obsessed with its handling of fate. Otherwise, my top games include Outer Wilds, Skyrim, Civilization V, Humankind, Pentiment, Night in the Woods, and Kentucky Route Zero.

3. You have a cat????

   1. His name is Scott. He’s very floofy. He’s not on my lap anymore. You can see him here, as a belly.

      

4. Wait. You wrote a dissertation about alchemy?

   1. Alchemy rocks. One of my next projects will be a book on alchemy in games.

5. Will you tell any stories about your students?

   1. Rarely, and anonymously.

6. What games do you teach in your classes?

   1. I’ve done an entire 50-minute lecture on that hovering square button. Believe it or not, the students were ridiculously engaged. Awesome discussion.

   2. My adventure game course has featured: Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, The Wolf Among Us, Firewatch, The Witness, Pentiment, Dead Horizon, What Remains of Edith Finch, and more!

Tell me what you think. What should I do here? Anything you want to see or hear from me about?

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That’s all for now. Be at peace.