Violence is a dominant means in fiction, where conflict is a fundamental need. Force is certainly not the only resolution, but frequently, if there is an evil king, in an evil castle, in the evil lands where everyone is conveniently just so evil, there’s probably going to be a sword to swing, and a throat to cut. Violence in video games is a common means to an end—one could say the default, by most standards. Unless the game is specifically designed around it, no, you cannot talk to these creatures; you must super shotgun, chain dash, ice grenade, meat hook, chainsaw, rocket launcher, rocket launcher, rocket launcher, etc. There are many theories as to why this is, but certainly a contributing factor is immediate visual and mechanical appeal. Violence is flashy, fast, visceral, and many other ten-dollar game review words.

Nowhere is more apparently indulgent in the power fantasy of violence than the AAA gaming space. Space marines were especially popular for a time; proud soldiers who exist in omnipotent armor tear through disgusting foreign “xenos” and this is the way things are, spoken uncritically with lesser or greater levels of self-awareness. This was replaced in time with the morally grey dad: a choleric older gentleman who can only seem to resolve his problems with a .44 magnum and a drinking problem—trying to justifiably deal with the loss of his daughter/wife/dog/car. This also came to a point of saturation in which people could see it for the trope it is, and grow tired of it.

In all these stories, violence is expected, justified. It fulfills a reactionary belief in the healing power of destroying your enemies before they can deliver the same unto you. In the revenge fantasy, they have already wronged you once, making you a perfectly justified force of violent righteousness. Such violence in turn comes to reinforce the already violent cultural norm which walks hand in hand with performative, reactionary masculinity. 

“Protect what is yours; destroy what threatens your way of life.”

The unsophisticated and one-dimensional violence of such works breeds the counterpoint video game. Stories where the entire thesis is about the unproductive destruction that is murder. What began as deconstruction, has in turn become just as common and as stale a trope as violence in the first place. A game where the character all but stares into the camera, realizing that the people they deliver violence unto are just like them, heavily saturate the same space as the righteous violence.

It’s easy to hate this kind of thing. Making a game where it is fun to shoot someone in the head with a sniper rifle while an impact font “you are a bad person” burns in on the screen, only gets so far as an examination of violent behavior. A game where violence is fun yet discouraged is annoying when anyone with problem-solving capacity can understand that violence is the only method of resolving problems when programmed that way. My irritation at games like Off calling me a bad person for committing violence—the only solution the game affords you—would not be quite so pointed if there were any other way.

Violence is meaningful when presented as a choice; one you’re making with intention. As much as Kojima receives—for good reason—a massive amount of criticism, I’ve always been impressed by the degree with which violence is a negotiated action in his works. Shooting someone in the head is always an option, frequently a convenient one, but it’s almost always just that—an option. Death Stranding shows us how easily choices can be reweighted. Violent options are given in spades yet I used virtually none of them. The inconvenience of dealing with my bloody aftermath was just not worth it. Rather than being as easy as I was used to death being, with pacifism being something of a challenge run, it was interesting to see the script flipped; killing someone being such a harrowing act that I screeched in terror if someone jumped out in front of my truck.

We’ve seen the opposite side of this coin articulated with much more bluntness, one frequently more evident in indie and lower budget titles. The disempowerment simulator, manifesting typically as horror games and other pointed-message games. Games like Pathologic come to mind, where an attempt to be an action hero is met by seven people beating you to death while you clutch a six-round firearm. The flipping of the script feels contemplative by comparison; suddenly, you are the victim of circumstance, and the forces of righteous indignation are no longer on your side. You scavenge, you survive, and you watch as the forces which would victimize you only seem to grow in strength. Yet, in just as much an extreme, it too can become tedious.

My feelings on this matter are complicated. I am often repulsed by the indulgence in the simplistic conservative violence which many games present as uncritically as any other hegemony-approved ideological framework. I’ve reached a point where the heroic action man genre of military shooter only disgusts me. In a world where I can see all too real images of genocide and death, I fail to find the heroism–the catharis–in any of this. At a certain point, such games are yet another recruiting arm for the military industrial complex and fuel for its resultant self-justification.

Just the same, I frequently utter my annoyance with games which seek to make you small and disempower you. I am already disempowered, doing my best in a world which wants me to feel small, unconnected, and constantly under pursuit by shadow people in my mysteriously red-lit apartment. A game can receive critical acclaim for its removal of the power fantasy, for its commentary on the nature of strength, and I am left feeling nothing. My eyes roll at stories with moralistic blanket statements about the perverting nature of violence, especially when the people who applaud such stories tend to feel substantially less of inequity’s boots than I do. 

Sometimes, I think this is a me problem: I’m some kind of indoctrinated violence pervert. Clearly, something wrong has happened in my brain to make me desire violent resolutions to life’s problems. Catharsis, in this way, evades me. Just as often, however, I felt anger, a resentment for people who endorse a status quo that may not be physically violent, yet still reeks of blood. 

Such thoughts stuck with me. I struggled with the feeling of cognitive dissonance that comes from enjoying violent entertainments, while immediately cringing at what such entertainments endorsed. Does enjoying the mechanical act of putting a bullet in someone need to carry your soul as a price tag? Does espousing non-violence need to come with an inherent acceptance for the way things are?

Metal-Jacketed Body Farmer

Armored Core 6 is not a game where you get to be a pacifist (okay, except like maybe the one time, but who is going to spare Swinburne, are you fucking kidding me?) You are an AC pilot and, as such, a murderer. You are a war opportunist, killing for credits. The most heinous act you can imagine is ultimately just part of the job.

All of Armored Core 6 is couched in what one could loosely call a power fantasy. As the pilot of a monolithic steel icon of death, rare is the occurrence which meaningfully threatens you. Most casualties tend to be MTs—the AC’s less glamourous, less armored, and less deadly cousin. You destroy these by the dozens in salvos of missile fire on the way to more “mechanically interesting” targets. Yet, even as I repeated the missions through the game’s three routes, I was fascinated by how differently these engagements felt.

Your first playthrough is–even if you attempt for better–the most corporate-controlled route, with minimal options to deviate from the script. On subsequent new game plus routes, previously hidden options present themselves. In the third, and typically final, route, the status quo of the original story shakes itself further and further apart. You are given the option to shirk the corporate factions altogether, betraying and breaking ties where necessary, before finally going MIA. Your protagonists forge an alliance with a predominantly metatextual AI. Through its procedure, it comes up with what it imagines to be the best possible ending, one which kills most named characters, and leads to a new state of being for humanity. Even it, in the end, is an authority you must shirk. 

Killing for a corporation feels fundamentally different than killing for an underdog, or even for yourself. The Rubicon Liberation Front, when acting as your opposition, frequently makes calls to your humanity, demanding justification for why you kill them for nothing but money. For an empathetic player, these certainly sting; but given the elevator pitch of the game, you take them on the chin and keep going. Engaging in corp-on-corp warfare often has them making yips of audacity: how dare you bite the hand that feeds? Killing for an AI feels like an optimization game; ones must become zeroes; it’s the only way to avoid a worse death in the future. 

One path feels like fighting a hopeless battle against insurmountable odds, in the faintest, dimmest hope of making a better future; the other like being another firearm for a jackbooted authority. It impresses upon me what I’ve come to see as a truth to the nature of conflict: all violence is not born equally. When the Rubicon Liberation Front fights, their violence is born out of desperate necessity, to protect the only home they’ve ever known. When the corporations fight, they battle to strip-mine a planet of a living and thinking resource to continue fueling a needless capitalistic forever war. When the Planetary Closure Administration fights, they fight as authoritarian thugs, even the worldbuilding of how their firearms work reinforces a belief that they will always be firing from upon high, and come crashing down the moment something stands at eye level.

Armored Core 6 does not advocate an idealistic platitude that all violence is unilaterally bad. I think its story simply understands that systems which inflict violence—and this includes the bloodless political violence of authorities—are devoid of humanity. When survival is on the line, violence becomes a necessity, especially when the political position of your opponent requires your death. Someone feeding on mealworms while being shelled from orbit need not tolerate a lecture on how their violence is unattractive or incapable of changing minds—clearly, the minds have already been made. The violence of an authority which can mark you a persona non grata, bloodless depersoning and disenfranchising, yet it is just as murderous as a gun barrel to the head, and it is an aggression which often comes first. The unattractiveness of retaliatory violence should then be understood as a product of necessity; they simply cannot build towers as high as their opposition—it was never allowed.

There is additional textual commentary on this when you realize that options to work for the underdog were obfuscated from you, only made available in those new game plus playthroughs. By the achievement percentages on Steam, we can see a substantial portion of players did not complete this journey; they followed orders, and let Rubicon burn. Frequently, people do what the natural curvatures of inertia prime them to do–taking the easiest path. People do the work of monsters because better options did not come intuitively, or were made inapparent. In this, the game seems to believe, “I was just following orders” is a phrase uttered by cowards, unwilling to find a way. The simplest path is walking forward when you are told to, unwilling or unable to make choices for yourself. Even if the most individualistic path kills the most, it is a choice, not death born of passivity.

This is the element I find most compelling about AC6: the violence is never optional. You must kill; but it is the why which makes you. Every route features the death of named characters, some of whom you might be quite fond of. Conflict and the differences of ideology will cause bodies to crash against one another time and time again. Some labor against you for simple greed or pride; while others fight you because they do not believe your dream is possible. To many, whatever heaven you attempt to construct will only be their hell.

You are denied a clean answer, one which perfectly saves everyone you wish to save. It is your answer. The blood on your hands is yours to decide, but there will be blood nonetheless. Choosing to stand perfectly still only makes you an ideal tool for the one who wishes to wield you.

Morality’s Firing Solution

The power fantasy of being a moral arbiter is not new to video games. RPGs have long lost their monopoly on deciding if people live or die. The amount of leash a game gives you to be a monster has an immense amount of flexibility depending on what game we’re talking about. I’ve complained before about the binarism of morality and the seemingly unslakable need to paint options morally black or white. Evil red-flavoured morality for boys and good blue-flavoured morality for girls, etc. Yet, here, I speak specifically on the tendency for morally grey stories to paint all sides as equally monstrous in their magnitudes.

A morally grey story frequently has an obligation to make sure you understand that the people fighting for freedom might be “fucked up” to make their retaliatory violence appear more morally nuanced. A grievance I have with efforts to peddle an “emotionally mature” story is that they frequently need to paint the downtrodden as just as deserving of retaliation as the people they fight back against. Worse, when war is depicted with no victims, and the world simply becomes a conflict of factions devoid of people. 

I appreciate then that Armored Core 6 allows for people victimized by the way things are to fight back without having a morality fairy in your head wondering “ah… aren’t we just as bad as the people we’re fighting?” I say now what might be a contentious opinion, but I’m tired of stories which feel the need to undercut their own morality in the name of alleged equality. It might seem morally nuanced, but you’re only making excuses for why the oppression was valid. An angry person might be frightening, but you don’t get a license to kill just because you’re scared. While fighting alongside the Rubicon Liberation Front, it’s hard to feel mercy for the people who gleefully shoot civilians defending their homes from the safety of their $75,000,000,000 death machine. Even then, the status quo destroyed Rubicon before it was lit aflame.

What value does it add to a story, to scold people driven to endure the unendurable? Sometimes, the fairest thing you can do is simply comment that the scale was never balanced to begin with. I understand, of course, that such decisions come from higher up, from people uncomfortable with games having any beliefs at all, but it’s the only way I can be comfortable with such stories.

Armored Core 6 understands that violence is not glamorous. Death is ugly and it comes in screams and gunfire; war is filled with people who don’t get a moment to have a catchy one-liner before dying. But, depending on the route, that same violence can be cathartic. I’ve said it before: the aesthetics of death and violence are loud. Blood is bright. Some emotions are too loud to whisper. A story where a violent regime is overthrown by the downtrodden is not the same power fantasy where you uncritically protect the status quo. Both stories are violent, yet that violence is not equal.

I am a pacifist. I love violent media. This is a contradiction which exists within many people. I adore the sensation of cathartic violence. Being able to see the highest possible authority and having the fictional catharsis of saying no, to have the power to refuse, is liberating.

In times of great moral turbidity, it’s understandable to hunger for stories where good and bad are easily demarcated, but I think for many, that is a privilege. As someone who is frequently victimized by the status quo, my expressions of directed frustration are not compatible with a desire for life to get simpler. Life, unfortunately, is complex. Morality is always a consideration when interfacing with other people, and this should carry over to our interactions with stories. We must ultimately ask if this morality is simply easy and convenient, or if it represents what we actually believe about the world. Violence can be fun, but understand too if that desire causes you to encode odious beliefs in the name of your pleasure.

I would not want violence to depart from the media I engage with. Games which allow for non-violent problem resolution are welcome, but violence too has its place. I simply ask for a more nuanced portrayal of the nature of violence, of its necessities, and the way this reflects the tumultuous world we live in. I would ask that we understand that violence does not manifest exclusively in glory kills and quick-time-event dismemberment; it manifests too in policy, in culture, and in norms. I would ask that we do not equivocate the violence of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressor.

For the audience, all I can ask is this: if you must live life as a bullet, be one that always knows its trajectory.

The post Deathmachine: Living as a Bullet appeared first on Gamesline.

There’s also something buried underneath it all.

Esoteric Ebb presents an agreeable and progressive view of the world: Feminism is good! Genocide is bad! But for all its words, it has no bite. 

One of the thematic banners Esoteric Ebb flies most proudly is gender. The main character must come to grips with what it means to be a man in a man’s world. After an early game dispute between some nationalist young men and the youth of the game’s socialist party (the “Azgalists”) you have a chance to mull over feminism versus ethnocentric men’s rights activism. Mechanically this comes down to choosing between Strength (your toughness and masculinity skill) and Wisdom (your smart and kind skill that’s also feminist), a dichotomy that immediately put a sour taste in my mouth.

I went with my Wisdom stat, which allowed me a diceroll to figure out gender. As your Wisdom stat explains to you why feminism is good, the voice in your mind tells you women and men are the same… except they aren’t.

The thesis of this feminist pondering is that statistics will reinforce what a cruel, patriarchal society already thinks. For my character, this was the climax of feminism. Nothing ever challenged this conclusion he came to, not even the dialogue written specifically for hitting on every woman you see. 

It’s no surprise why nothing changes: this thesis stinks. It admires women but doesn’t take them seriously. It comes to the brink of basic feminist thinking then falls back on just enough bioessentialism to keep things safe and comfortable. It has nothing challenging to say, and frankly, if the dumbass main character doesn’t really have anything to say I think that is fine, however the game around him feels thoroughly in this camp.

It leads multiple conversations involving women into awkward innuendo for cheap laughs, focuses heavily on keeping white men important and logical, and even makes a pretty homophobic joke about sodomy at one point. 

This is a recurring theme: Esoteric Ebb goes to great lengths to make the status quo seem like a heartwarming triumph. In the game’s final hour, its ability to take the world at face value and repackage it is equally impressive and horrific.

In Esoteric Ebb you’re in pursuit of a murderer who is planning to kill twenty-seven innocent civilians to resurrect his god who pursued human superiority through mass genocide. When you, a human cleric, meet said genocidal god, he’s quite nice and level-headed. 

He feels so bad about creating a system that encourages bigotry and violence. He is the face of warmth, the god of your character’s religion. And honestly? Despite the tonal-dissonance, this material is interesting. This is a great launch point for conflict and intense emotion. It’s overly charitable to fascism, but it could go somewhere.

Unfortunately where it goes is the credits.

It made sense for Urth, the human god, to show up as part of the pretty big infodump at the end of the game. I thought it was strange though, how polite it all was. But it makes perfect sense when you realize all he represents: another guy that killed a lot of goblins.

He gets to be reasonable because fantasy dictates there are dark races that must be slain, and that’s something our fantasy-loving culture views as problematic… but reasonable. 

“I told myself every Goblin on those red hills needed to die for the safety of man… that without clearing these lands entirely of these hostile natives, there would be nothing but… perpetual war.” (He eventually changes his mind after making a goblin friend.)

That’s it. Wrap it up and put a bow on it.

It was only once I sat there, bow-wrapped story in hand, that I started to really ask questions, hoping maybe I could find a deeper meaning.

It drove me mad.

When I speak to the genocidal god of fascism in the final confrontation of this game, I’m seeing a man who represents tangible crime and injustice done in the real world. But who is really standing here? Is he Adolf Hitler? A literal embodiment of the genocide textually done by his character, eroded into the visage of a kind old man by time and the endurance of white hegemony? Or is he Gary Gygax? An avatar for D&D itself, reputation laundered through comfort and placidity? 

Why is he standing here, polite and fatherly at the end, ready to relieve us of our inner discomfort towards the gross, white fascism of fantasy? And why the hell is everyone so damn polite?

The first ever election is happening in the city of Norvik. Nationalists, liberals, and proletariat are butting heads. With everything at risk, you’d expect mass civil unrest, volatile smear campaigns, or even violent clashes out in the open. But outside of the culprit’s awry machinations, the biggest open conflict is teenagers stealing leftist newspapers. 

Your party member for the vast majority of the game is Snell, and he’s a goblin. He’s also a well written character in a game where most characters are two halves of a bad character. He gets pretty quickly fed up with your character, but he’s not emotionally shut off the whole game. When it’s time for him to confront the god that slaughtered his people, he has a few choice words. He shouts, he swears… and that’s about it.

For most of the conversation he’s just sort of waiting for his chance to speak, and when he’s done raising his voice he fits back nicely into decorum, even entertaining Urth’s offer to answer his questions. Snell is quickly disarmed by this old man, and despite his outburst, the conversation is civil. Urth gets the last word on this one.

The god Urth, who in death has had lots of time to reflect, gets to talk a bit about Nationalism and Fascism. 

“One is a fairly new idea of a united nation-state, whether by culture or folktype or anything else. …Fascism is…It does feel rather abstract doesn’t it? …I never particularly identified with it. They seemed to hate liberal ideas, while I was always quite fond of egalitarian pursuits.” 

This sounds like it’s leading into an exploration of the relationship between liberal nationalism and fascism, but there’s no follow-up argument. We just get to see how recent political developments are affecting him. Your inner monologue at times points out the hypocrisy, but the lens of sympathy is rather thoroughly on Urth. This is a game where foreigners and women are wrung out for jokes at every turn, but the god of your hegemony has the final say, even when you know better.

There is some wisdom in Esoteric Ebb, but the game is so focused on finding the logic of cruelty, the lessons received by white guilt, that it fails everywhere else, all in service of feeling less guilty in the end. Urth’s genocide was incomplete because he in his greatness simply chose not to finish it, which is pretty insulting to the reality of genocide. In real life, genocide fails to reach totality for reasons aside from the generosity of the perpetrator. But the reality of this need not be confronted when we’re talking about goblins and orcs.

Esoteric Ebb’s greatest shortcoming is that it presents a lot of very flammable topics and chances for riveting introspection, but ends up pushing you to feel nothing. It’s not a source of introspection. Despite all the time it spends in your character’s head, it seems overly willing to take the conclusion out of your hands. The stats aren’t just informants of your character, they are a Greek choir. They say things like “woah, cool!”, “that’s not nice!”, and “gender is hard!” as if they are here to make sure I don’t come away with a complex opinion.

What is the purpose of a fantasy game where you meet the kindly face of genocide? Is this supposed to absolve my character of guilt for being a human male? Am I supposed to feel good about having a cordial conversation and then voting about it? Is it a big payoff when the genocidal god sides with whatever party I already plan to vote for, going so far as to encourage me to fix nationalism from within? Am I supposed to feel bad? Am I supposed to feel anything?

Or could it be that this is just another fantasy game with a modern sense of humor wrapped up by a feel good message? Where the only brown people are bugbears and orcs. Where I can go to imagine how much good is done by loving Dungeons & Dragons (but not those bad parts). A fantasy story where genre convention can be wiped clean without being challenged. Where evil is always tucked away out of sight, slowly looking older and kinder.

Ava is a writer and illustrator that draws colorful robots and writes gross, visceral literature.

The post Esoteric Ebb Soothes Where it Should Incite — by Ava Ayers appeared first on Gamesline.

Over the past few generations of video gaming, I have noticed a trend, a fascination which started as a conscious or unconscious desire for more. Games grow bigger, wider, deeper, and yet satiation never seems to come. People dream of infinity; a world that is worlds.

This desire, which I have seen in myself, in others, and in the profit-minded industry, leads to a hunt, a chase for a fleeting, impossible creature. Artists and audience, industry and media, all seem to be hunting for one thing: the Omnigame—a game which encompasses everything.

Lying, in Hope a Truth Falls Out

To better articulate a term I just pulled, in its entirety, from my ass, let me articulate a phenomenon I’ve noticed. Let’s talk about the fantasy of VR.

As Virtual Worlds came to embed themselves in our lives—and in some cases even before—humanity has imagined the departure of the mind to places elsewhere. Immersive VR—Virtual Reality which fully tricks the mind into believing it exists elsewhere, often called full-dive VR—has been an ambition among nerds for a long while now. When VR headsets first hit consumer markets, nerds worldwide rejoiced.

“Finally, an escape from this intractable shithole,” they cheered.

“You can even be a catgirl with RGB light-up ears,” said another demographic.

“I’m going to make a virtual Kmart,” said a third.

Yet, the ambition, the promises of these headsets, didn’t match up with what was experienced—which in most cases was a lot of forehead sweat and motion sickness. But this never stopped anyone from dreaming.

Human beings are creatures of stories, I’ve found. The realms of fiction can be utilized to explore trauma, fears, hopes, and dreams. Speculative fiction can be a way of expressing anxiety about how the world could be. Post-apocalyptic fiction and cyberpunk are all expressions of fear, but they are just as often conduits for hope. Lots of people simmer with excitement and fear both for the promise of something like full-dive VR and the inherent transhumanism lying beyond. In some cases, the initial fear or anxiety expressed in those original stories is expunged all together.

For example, The Matrix, in its original iterations, expressed a terrifying world; a world where you could be completely unaware of the powers that be and their ability to fully control everything. Jacks installed into the body with cables stabbing into the brainstem, sending dreaming humanity to a world which usurps reality. It imagines a setting where one can generate infinite creations, indistinguishable from the real thing. Across several decades, we have seen many dozens of parodies to a point where it has entered a sort of cultural undercurrent of memetics. The Matrix has become bullet-time, black trench coats with designer sunglasses, and the bridge between real and virtual worlds.

The anime .hack//sign similarly features a story where a person is immersed in fantasy, trapped in a virtual world and divested of identity. It is less intrusive, only requiring a headset, but the result is similarly difficult. The main character is reduced to an avatar, forgetting themselves completely. In all their fear and isolation, they are both literally and metaphorically lost in the dissociation of an MMO. 

It is far more common in the modern day to see permutations of the .hack formula. There are dozens of manga and anime which borrow a central conceit of being trapped in an MMO while removing the teeth of the premise for the purposes of comedy, farce, or simple wish fulfillment. Even where there aren’t direct analogues, there are many cases where pieces of media directly borrow the concepts of an MMO or single-player RPG while ascribing it as another world altogether–the Isekai. The video gamey nature is now, at heart, a baked-in part of the fantasy.

Now, many years later, games like Crosscode emerge. Your protagonist, Lea, is trapped in a virtual world, but one decidedly much friendlier than either The Matrix or .hack//sign. It offers a vision of a world where something like a completely immersive MMO can exist and be as banal as a smartphone today. An entire planet is treated as a theme park in the setting, and people log into it through remote-controlled bodies just as easily as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. Though Lea’s life is complicated by her imprisonment in this technology, it still presents this world in a way which comes across as desirable. If your name is not Lea, within the world of Crosscode, you get to live an impossibly lush fantasy life on an alien planet cultivated to construct your wishes. 

Over the years, many such stories have come to exist. Stories about games, and frequently games about games. Games have become commonplace enough that we can write fantasies about what indulgences they may be in the future, surpassing the scope of what would be possible in our version of reality. We imagine a world like The Matrix but with all the worst parts removed; we imagine a world like .hack//sign but without interpersonal politics and identity loss. The gamer takeaway, despite everything negative in the original stories, is ultimately how cool it would be to be part of something quite so large, so immersive, containing so much, or at least in potential. In a sense, such stories are told in an attempt to one day inspire the creation of their subject.

We have lived through a time where the ambition of capital has attempted to generate such dreams. The embarrassing stumbling steps of something like the Metaverse—a name even evoking its origin point in cyberpunk fiction—were handwaved with promises of what it would eventually become. That is, provided everyone forgets that the origin of cyberpunk is terror at the control of oligarchic corporations.

The dream of the virtual world is, as I described at the onset, the dream of an omnigame. An usurpation of reality, traded for something more favourable. A video game where you can do everything you can imagine and where the limits are basically nonexistent. Genre becomes a thing of the past because the game is a world in of itself; a monolithic effort which, within itself, contains multitudes.

Yet, virtual reality is not the only thing affected by this fantasy. Yes, nerds will continue to dream about the promise of immersive technologies, but I think I’m also fascinated with the underlying thoughts which cause such obsessions. It isn’t truly enough for VR to be immersive or for worlds to be as lush as the real thing. I think, digging deeper, people are obsessed with dreams of “more.” This, I will admit, is an obsession I have also seen within myself.

Ultraviolet Recursive

Once more I must talk about myself, because despite wide sweeping statements about “people” in the abstract, I cannot truly know their hearts. I am not a sociologist; all my notations are anecdotal. Just the same, I can’t help but be fascinated with the trends I see, which at heart are born from obsessions similar to my own. I know this because the fact such media exists to flatter such fancies shows that other people carry the same affliction. 

The affliction in this case is an obsession with expansiveness and depth. As a person with many difficulties, it’s very easy for me to shrug at the material realities of the world around me and slumber in another one for a while. My love for Final Fantasy XIV has been mentioned before but, in so doing, I buffed out the worst of the rough edges. Let me express some of those uncomfortable serrations now.

As I’ve mentioned before, my first experiences playing XIV were coupled with immediate distaste. My disdain here was particularly performative because it was so tightly associated with Final Fantasy, a franchise which has won countless hours of my life. When I finally began to appreciate Final Fantasy XIV, it was because of the unfortunate shape my life had contorted into. Life was awful and I wanted something with uncountable hours of capital C Content to steal my time away.

When it started hitting, it hit hard. I played through every expansion, and every bit of side material I could get my hands on. Final Fantasy XIV came to be the medium through which I experienced life itself. I grinded out relics; I conquered raids; I made zero friends at all. Just the same, I was utterly captivated by the yawning abyss of the world in front of me. One land gave way to the next; one story read after another. Moving from biome to biome, I felt like I had traveled vast stretches of time and space, without physically moving at all. The scope of the project in front of me made it all the more immersive and, without a life of my own, it superseded reality. Yet, as I approached what I knew to be the finite end, I grew frightened. The appropriately named Endwalker was the open palm demanding my attention. The true bounds of the game, and its world, would not allow me to proceed.

“Stop,” it said. “You have reached the limits of creation.”

It was a command I did not have the ability to deny. So, I stopped. This realization, that the world I imagined as infinite was all too finite, was painful in a way I don’t know how to articulate. Drinking from an unending cup only to one day find it empty, makes your throat burn all the drier.

With eyes still bloodshot and an appetite unsatiated, I turned my eyes to greener pastures.

That’s when Elden Ring came out.

Elden Ring is, at this point, a famously capacious game. The first time I was teleported far from where I expected to be by one of the game’s many traps, it was too late. Elden Ring fully had its hooks in me. The map zoomed further and further out, revealing a world so much larger than I could have anticipated. Many others have experienced the same. That moment will be in my memory forever. Provided I don’t have yet another memory-effacing incident. 

Nearing the end of my binge of Final Fantasy XIV, I somehow also made time for a full-time Elden Ring addiction. I played Elden Ring for so long many of my friends began to speculate if my sudden positive mood boost was not, in fact, a bout of mania. Without sleeping, I played Elden Ring for thirty-two uninterrupted hours, stopped only by my eyes’ refusal to focus or unfocus. 

Even after thirty-two hours of consecutive gameplay, I still held onto the experience which had begun in XIV. A world big enough to feel like something real, something I could not hold in my head all at once. I would exit the game world, and people online would speak on the things they had seen and the detail of the world, and I would yet still be shocked they were seeing things I had not yet.

However, at the same time, I was disgusted with this game I desperately wanted to insert myself into. The world seemed to push me into a set of “video gamey” behaviors. What was supposed to be an open world turned into a series of velocities to the same copy-pasted cave to get an item for a build I didn’t give a shit about. The enjoyment has trickled out even further over time. What felt like an impossibly detailed world turned into an arena for violence and backtracking. I saw the borders of a virtual world and recoiled in terror. There was detail, but the depth I was looking for was not there. I dug, even when the realization was too harsh to deny.

I don’t like this game very much. It’s fine if you do, but after 200 hours this shit kinda ass. 

There is a lot to be said about my behavior here. While this is obviously a hyperbolic example born out of abysmal mental health, I still have never forgotten the feeling this period of my life left me with. When I was at my worst, spinning out and unable to control myself, the taste of artificiality lingered on my lips, and I was disgusted. I stood at the borders of two worlds and felt myself wanting for more. Even after everything I have just said, I do not believe this was simply the product of a diseased, consumerist mindset. I think the reason I grind my teeth against the imposed limitations of virtual worlds is because in many ways it reminds me of my own limitations in the real one. There are many limits—either by my own body, society, or elsewhere—imposed upon me. Contrary to observations made of me, I cannot do a full 720 front flip while wielding an ultra greatsword (I’d probably go for a more lithe and elegant weapon, like a scythe or some kind of claw thing.)

TTRPGs called to me for a similar reason. I wanted a world powered by the limitless fields of imagination, a world which imposed no boundaries. If I could imagine it, I could make new worlds, new peoples, new ideas. A play session could go as far away as the ends of the universe, or as close as the nearby room; the depths of either would be whatever I cared to describe. Speaking even more candidly, it was the reason I got into writing fiction in the first place: I just wanted to make something, a story beautiful to someone like me. Everything I wanted, and nothing I didn’t.

When we were younger, based on the memories I can piece together, we were fully smitten by the allure of a multi-disk epic. It wasn’t exactly the length or the sophistication of the mechanics which captured my heart. It was a world with more than I had the avarice to ask for. A place where I could unfocus my eyes a bit and be there. The people contained within the story were those you could walk alongside for many hours, and as they lived beside me, they would begin to become real. The craving I felt—and sometimes still feel now—is the same hunger people have for this “omnigame,” a game which denies them nothing. 

I know how compelling this was, even as an illusion; how bad it was for me to indulge in excess. One should not run through their life utterly addicted to a desire for more. Pleasure is fine, but it should not infringe on your ability to feel future pleasure later; my way of acting was an utter abandonment of the future to glut on the now. 

A Limitless Astroturf Lawn

It’s not just by our own wishes that we think about bigger and better games. It’s the part of the essay where we talk once more about the undue influences of corporations and marketing on preferences. 

As people come to desire more from games, having higher demands of their substance, corporations come with promises of impossible things. It was at this point a readily quoted joke, memetic from the moment of its conception, was spoken:

“If you can see that mountain, you can most certainly climb it.”

While those things have certainly become truer with the advancement of technology, it does not change the fact that corporations benefit from telling lies about the nature of the worlds they produce to better make a sale. Further, they benefit from the inclusion of greater amounts of material in their product. A game packed with hours of content keeps a consumer captivated and justifies the labor that went into making it—especially when such time can provoke post-purchase sales.

In a world where games are expected to make an exponential amount more money than the price of making them, it is—to the financially invested—ideal to have a product which can keep as many eyes captive for as long as possible. Thus, we see a development cycle where expansions to the base material is an expectation. I’ve shit talked Destiny 2 in the past, and this is the reason why; a game which is, on paper, a wonderfully fun time, became a content mill which kicked you off the ride if you ceased to purchase and guzzle down Content. Season passes, character DLC, expansion packs, features added as quality of life or just fan expectation. Yes! You CAN pet the dog; $90 please. The disinterested gacha woman pet raising game can now also be an extraction shooter, tower defense, rhythm game, in-depth mahjong sim roguelike VN.

These additions, while being good for the lifeblood of the game on paper, shape fan expectation. A game must generate a certain amount of Content over time to coerce continuous play from your community, or the game, by the most vocal parts of the fandom, is considered “dead.” It is never that the game simply had a set and met expectation of scope; the game must “live” to placate a fanbase perpetually starved for new content and who stand desperately at the boundaries of the world wanting to push them ever outward. Eventually, with mandatory growth, this creates a game which must be everything to everyone. Keeping players in a world is obviously beneficial to the company who owns the devs who make the game, and on and on the content-production cycle goes, until the game stops making money or the people who own the studio realize they can save 100 percent of their money by just firing everyone.

Even though it is a cynical sentiment, I think it bears articulation because, ultimately, a problem needs to be made visible for a person to see it as a problem. The corporate influence of what a “gamer” desires, ends up influencing and impacting what culture demands. Obviously, there still remains a subset of tightly designed, specific games, but often in the most traditionally marketed and visible works, we see a push for homogenization and broadness. As a game’s scope widens to let everything in, they become infinite in the most capitalistically craven way. A digital Golden Corral—everything for everyone.

As expectations grow, certain demographics get frustrated when a game has a narrowed, intentional focus. They cry out when they feel their needs aren’t being met, fair or not. Such demand most negatively impacts the developers who can least afford to balloon their game’s scope, which says nothing of artists who have something specific and precise they wish to articulate. You can look in the discussion section of just about any indie game–bad idea, never do this–and see people begging for things completely out of scope with what the game even promises. Or complaining about “woke,” either or. Even if I have expressed distaste for something like The Witcher 3 or Elden Ring, neither of those games would benefit from arbitrarily including a farming minigame, gacha system, or seasonal engagement trap.

Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon; people have asked for things they shouldn’t have for as long as speech has existed. The newer change is the massive amount of interconnection between audience and art. An artist can make something they believe in with all their heart, and instantly get feedback, alongside numerous points of comparison of other artists and pieces of art. It is possible to talk about a game entirely in passing, untagged, and somehow the creators will still have it foisted upon them. The industry, as it is, is better equipped than ever to impose a sort of self-regulating state of permanent expectation and discontentment. You can be compared to peers, and people you have literally never met, before your project even so much as has a name.

I don’t want to believe that people are so easily seduced by the machinations of industry, but just the same, I see a rising lack of engagement with art itself, replaced with a cicada-like urge to stripmine a game for content. As long as satiation is prioritized over satisfaction, we will see a trend of expansion without end continuing to proliferate. The content consumption mindset is here, and we’ve all seen the way it insidiously snakes around even our language, until all things are rendered into generic infinite grist.

And the Snake Swallows the Snake

People will always wish for more. Despite everything I’ve just said, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Wishing for something more than is possible, or wishing for something to be easier, or for something never done before, is how we push the limits of what we think is possible.

As we wish for more, it’s only natural that games become larger to encompass the size of the dreams people have. The resultant obsession with the capaciousness of games is an expected byproduct. Just the same, I think the size of a game, in the sense of the things it contains, is on some level an expression of love. Having something be more is justification for the time you spend in something destined to be fleeting and ephemeral. The whim to remove your memory of something, to experience it again, to once more become an audience fascinated and unbothered by the prescribed limits of a game world, is commonplace. I can’t judge them for this, even if it sometimes results in negative outcomes.

It is bad actors who exploit this wanting in us, and resultantly cause people to spend exorbitant amounts of money for a dream. These dreams have monetary and labor ramifications which impact the entire industry, and only play further into the hands of a capitalistic system wanting to turn an art medium into a grocery store decision. From a commercialistic perspective, a family-sized package is the expectation—it costs the most. It’s something to be mindful of.

This is the contradiction born of extremes. At heart, wishing for something bigger, deeper, more expansive, more expressive, more immersive, is how we got to a point where we could start making the technologies we see today. Just the same, it is capitalizing on that desire which creates an industry that cares about content over people. It is capitalism’s greatest strength: to steal people’s desires and sell them back for profit.

Despite the dangers of exploitation, I think people should dream for more. It is where inspiration is born. You see something, something big and beautiful, and even when it satisfies your desires, it sticks with you; it lingers and against even your own interest, you hunger for more. Though you can choose to simply reindulge with diminishing returns, or turn to the AI slop engine which gives you a version of Skyrim that infinitely generates quests for you, I think the dream of more can also be something which inspires new creatives, new creations. The cycle of inspiration and creation is as an ouroboros, continuing so long as people have a desire to make art about the things they care about, and the capacity to be dissatisfied by what has already come.

You can’t truly make a game containing everything without immense cost or compromise. That’s the beauty of creation: you can’t have the whole world, so you must pick and choose what you want as your craving hands leave behind something else, falling from your grasp like grains of sand.

I don’t think we can truly ever capture infinity. But, there’s still nothing wrong with trying.

_{The header image was acquired from Wikimedia Commons, and remixed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Yukterez (Simon Tyran, Vienna). Source material for the Milky way background (also available on Commons): ESO/S.Brunier. Code for the relativistic raytracer and other angles: Yukterez.net/}

_{The video was originally sourced, unedited, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyNQGOo0hsc}

The post Ouroboros: The Game and Everything, Forever appeared first on Gamesline.

On the list of archaic platitudes I’ve heard since childhood, that is the one that bothers me the most. A lot of life lessons can be truncated or adapted for comprehension by even the smallest child, leaving nuances or more complex concepts on the shelf for “when they’re older.” You do not have to look far or wide to see the material harm wrought by this adage at all levels of human society. Words have an exceptional capacity for infliction and damage, and they should not be underestimated or dismissed.

The goal of this proverb is to teach kids to avoid becoming disproportionately upset when another child mocks them, typically through ignoring the problem. It idolizes a very “stiff upper lip” mentality, and in some cases it’s a valuable approach and a worthy skill to teach kids. However, that’s not true in all cases. I’m sure we’ve all heard revisions or corrections to sayings like this in the past, with one example being “blood is thicker than water” being extrapolated out of “the blood of the pact is thicker than the water of the womb,” which flips the meaning of the shortened form entirely. Yet, I’ve never heard a revised variation for my least-favorite of these old sayings, so I shall endeavor to rectify this now:

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but bones can heal just fine. Words written with hate and scorn will scar me time after time.”

———————

As a gacha game, Limbus Company regularly adds new units to its roster for players to pull for via random draw banners. One such unit was added toward the end of June; a unit anticipated by the playerbase for roughly half a year. I’m going to call this unit “Thumb Rodion.” Her full label is The House of Spiders: The Thumb Nursefather Rodion if you’re curious, but all you need to know is her name is Rodion and as this unit, she is a member of The Thumb, one of the five big-shot criminal syndicates in the game’s setting.

Limbus Company does a lot of unusual things that separate it from other gacha titles, and one of these deviations is in how it conceptualizes its units. Normally, a gacha game will field a roster of various characters, but in Limbus Company, players only have access to the same cast of 12 characters. Instead of gaining new characters outright, players gain alternate versions or “Identities” of those 12 characters, typically from alternate realities where they’ve taken the place of other characters in the story, or became members of the myriad factions in the setting. Imagine a hypothetical Legend of Zelda gacha game where you build a team out of Zelda, Link, and Ganondorf, and instead of getting new characters like Midna or Tingle, you unlock versions of the trio such as Happy Mask Saleswoman Zelda, Zora Link, and Lon Lon Ranch Owner Ganondorf. That’s more or less how Limbus Company works.

As Thumb Rodion, Rodion takes on the role of Valencina, a major antagonist in the game’s 9th chapter, “Canto IX: The Unsevering.” Valencina is a Nursefather of the House of Spiders. To truncate a lot of details, the House of Spiders is a dead-end facility where the Five Fingers have dumped powerful once-members of their syndicates who have fallen from grace for one reason or another. They’re called Nursefathers as they’re effectively nurturing a special sort of person for a specific goal in order to prove they still have some value to the Fingers.

In Valencina’s case, she was promoted to a high position within The Thumb, a mafia-styled faction with strict rules and decorum, and despite her family name, was demoted and disowned after three days. When a war breaks out, she’s called into service as a formidable combatant, and though Valencina seeks to regain her lost glory and status, successfully fighting tooth and nail as a war hero of sorts, she is denied reinstatement. She’s abrasive, alcoholic, and aggressive. She treats two separate characters as items to be used and discarded, literally calling them “Textbook” and “Ticket” instead of their actual names. She’s the epitome of a prodigy being cast out for a single mistake, spiraling down into the depths of every bottle, and erupting into curse-laden diatribes at anyone who so much as looks at her funny.

Valencina (or more accurately, Thumb Rodion) had been a long-awaited unit, since Canto IX launched back in December, as she’s one of the first characters introduced in that chapter. This makes it all the more disappointing that in the English translation for Thumb Rodion, one of her dialogue lines features a slur.

When you unlock units in Limbus Company, and upgrade them to a certain point, you unlock a story vignette. These provide some additional background information; glimpses into the life of that character in this new context as they take on the role of another character, or work under another faction. As Limbus Company is a Korean game, its contents must be translated into English, and one line in Thumb Rodion’s Identity Story reads as follows:

“*puff* All right, then. Never thought that stuttering ****** with her E.G.O and the clankin’ tin-girl could stop ya, anyway.”

I’ve censored the slur, as it has no place here. Truthfully, I was hoping this would be a simple error of judgment, where those responsible either weren’t aware of the charged nature of the term or didn’t think it would be as big of a deal as it insidiously is, and the community at large would request its alteration. After all, regardless of what Korean term was used, the translation team would be savvy enough to know not to heedlessly implement a slur in the official translation, right? Surely it would be patched out and remedied within a week or two, right?

That does not seem to be the case, as we’re now weeks from the unit’s launch and there have been no changes to this line. This particular slur has gained more and more usage in online spaces over the last couple of years. I personally have seen it used in social media posts and replies the most, but there has been one instance last year where someone I was in a Discord call with said it out loud as a self-admonishment. One thing that’s clear to me is that this slur has become a lingual crutch for a decent number of English speakers online. I don’t want to simply dismiss this as the “erosion of morals among younger generations” because while I do tend to see its usage more often among younger people, it’s not like people my age and older unilaterally stopped saying the word, and the recent spread of its usage has permeated throughout the age strata. I’m mentioning younger people here because they tie into a hypothesis of mine regarding this slur’s use in Limbus Company.

If I had to guess, I’d say the slur’s application in Thumb Rodion’s Identity Story is a thoughtless inclusion banking on the “social credentials” of using current-era slang. Consider a unit released much earlier in the year: The House of Spiders: The Middle Apprentice Ishmael. Much like how Thumb Rodion is based on Valencina, Middle Apprentice Ishmael is based on Kira. I bring this up because Kira is written as the sort of person who says things like “aurafarming” which make her stand out as a more youthful character, and her language reflects that (Middle Apprentice Ishmael also uses this style of language.) Had Limbus Company been released a few years earlier, Kira would be written with different slang terms and phrases, to match the ones in use by youths at the time; she’s exactly the sort of character you’d write to say things like “sus” and “pog” since she’s also a gamer. My reasoning is that since they wrote Kira in that specific way, and Limbus Company‘s translation has a tendency to keep up with modern English language trends, the translation personnel were aware of the rise in usage of this slur and thought it would be okay to insert it into this vignette. That’s the extent of thought that went into using it.

I could make the case that by not saying which slur it is, it makes it more difficult for “proponents” of its usage to vie for it. Because it’s a slur they deem acceptable to use, and it’s one that’s unfortunately in vogue in the cultural zeitgeist of today’s lexicon, they’ll impishly claim that it’s “actually fitting for the character,” or that it “makes sense in context”.

Bullshit.

Would they make these arguments if it were a different slur? I suppose that depends on the individual, and I have no doubt some who bristle at that question would defiantly claim that they’d still make those arguments, when they know full well that using such terms in public and professional contexts would and will have consequences. The fact remains however, that Valencina never says the slur once in all of her dialogue. She was already written with a more fitting form of dehumanizing speech with her calling people objects and denying them their names, so such a vulgar term was unnecessary. Its inclusion here is even worse then, as while Valencina never says the term, Rodion in Valencina’s place does. Rodion is a complex character, but not the sort of person you’d expect to sling any kind of slur given her history and general demeanor. Now, it’s not strange at all for these characters to adopt different personas and attitudes as they use these Identities. Hong Lu often retains his upbeat joviality across his Identities, but this can be extinguished outright or twisted to juxtapose against the violence he commits depending on the context of the Identity. The normally uptight and strict Outis can be seen in more mellow or casual hues in a likewise manner, and this applies to the full main cast of Limbus Company. But never has there been a situation where a slur was involved in the localization, either in the narrative or in these little vignettes, and in such a callous and careless manner at that.

The language we use matters. For five years, I worked with children with learning disabilities, from kindergartners to fifth-graders. I’ve worked with people who have ADHD, ODD, autism, Down Syndrome, etc. You name it, I’ve probably worked with somebody who had it. One afternoon, during the after-school program, outside on the playground, I overheard a student say this exact slur. I called him over, and had him sit on one of the picnic tables for a timeout. I do not remember what I said to him exactly, but I remember being very clear and stern about the fact that such a term is not to be used. It wasn’t a term he specifically was disallowed from saying; none of us should be saying it. It’s not a term one should want to say, and if any other student said it, they’d be in the same situation he was in now. I told him that his mother, a coworker of mine at the school who worked with many of the same students I did, would be very unhappy if she knew he had said such a term. I told him that I wouldn’t mention this to his mother as he was already taking a timeout, and it was a singular mistake, but he needed to make sure he left the word unsaid.

He never said it again, at least in my presence. I would like to hope he left it behind, as I did in middle school. Because that’s what it sounds like to me whenever I hear it. There are two kinds of people who use this slur: middle-schoolers who are wont to make as many mistakes as humanly possible as they grapple with entering the tumultuous period of life where you’re not quite a child and not quite an adult and your pituitary glands are wreaking havoc all over; and people who were eligible to vote in 1980, who have given up growing as people in favor of living within the small confined worlds they’ve built up around themselves. Apart from this resurgence where I cannot go a week without reading that slur in a comments section or thread, that anecdote with that student was the most recent time I can recall hearing it; a snapshot from an afternoon almost ten years ago.

It may sound silly to stipulate on a singular slur in a video game where the setting is such that every horrible cyberpunk dystopian thing you can think of is somehow a million times worse. Where an entire district has legalized cannibalism, public transportation is a certifiably incomprehensible nightmare (and in the game too,) and you can be teleport-murdered for having a clone of yourself be alive for too long. Surely some people in this setting use slurs and pejorative terms for one another. But I’m not arguing about the slur’s suitability for the setting or the plausibility of its usage by this or that character.

I’m arguing that the slur has no value here, and only serves to tarnish the image of Limbus Company and the reputation of Project Moon along with it. This is a term with an extremely compromised and gruesome history; it should not be used without due consideration and an explicit, deliberate purpose. One must ask: “What was the objective in its usage here?” Is it being used in an academic context for a linguistic study or dissection? No. Is it being recorded as a matter of historical authenticity, accurately reflecting decades-old documentation or interview transcripts so that we maintain a complete understanding of a particular time and place, eschewing the desire to paint the past with a rosy tint? No. Is it being leveraged by a person who has been scarred by the slur as a means of connecting their experience to others through writing or song or poetry or some other medium? No.

When you work with people the term has historically been weaponized against, in order to demonize them and divest them of their humanity and rights, you will never want to stop seeing it, hearing it, witnessing it being used so flippantly, not just in creative works like video games, but in everyday life as well. There are other, less intense words that can be used in its place in virtually all contexts. But those who regularly employ it in their casual vocabulary know precisely why it “hits” just a little bit more when they use that word instead. The difference is in the measurable, tangible cruelty that laces the word, the history behind why it’s even considered a slur in the first place, and the knowledge that it is a slur and it is taboo to say it, which makes saying it or using it “exciting.” Just because people are mindlessly parroting it more often these days, feeding into its increased usage as they do, doesn’t change the fact that it’s a harmful, awful thing to say.

The truth is that it has no artistic merit in the context of a game like Limbus Company. It doesn’t do anything with the slur aside from drop it in one line for one backstory that isn’t even critical to the primary narrative, for what I can only surmise is shock value. It is flavor text.

And that flavor is rancid.

The post Sticks & Stones: The One Where They Put a Slur in a Video Game and Now I Have to Write about Why It’s Bad. appeared first on Gamesline.

My memory condition is not as open and shut as I made it out to be, however. Yes, 2014 is the cutoff date for what I remember for the most part. However, it’s more accurate to say that the memories before that time are like sun-bleached photos. Their backgrounds are destroyed; only certain subjects remain; I can only assume the context. Some are more destroyed than others and it is difficult to find out which is which until I examine them. Whenever I tell stories about the past, I’m left in a position where it seems like I’m being disingenuous about my condition. I can remember certain details, but it’s like telling a story about a dead world. I have a memory of visiting our grandparents’ house at some point, but everything outside the door has been scrubbed from existence. I don’t know what I looked like, what age I was. I don’t know that girl, I just know a body visited a room with wood-lacquered walls and crosses on every surface.

I tell you all of this to explain the strange way the following anecdote is conveyed. This is a story about video stores. This shall be both exposition and education; a story, and a demonstration of what memory is like for me.

At a certain point in ████, in ████, I visited a humble chain of video stores, once known as Blockbuster. I was visiting with my friend, ████, and their family. A faint smell of cheap theater popcorn lingered amid aisles of plastic cases. This friend, excited at their acquisition of a PlayStation 2, was eager to acquire a game with which to test out their new purchase. █ █████ ██ ███ ███████ █████ █████ ███ ███████ ████ ████ █ █████ █████████. I was ██, and from what I can surmise from context clues, easily impressed.

From other stories I’ve been told about myself, I know I was sheltered, almost entirely reliant on my uncles for any sense of taste. They, being teenage boys, were more than willing to corrupt the mind of an impressionable girl by making her listen to metal, play violent video games, and say swears at people knowing it would create amusing consequences—for them at least. █ █████ ████████ ███ █████ ██████ ████ ██ █████ █ █████ ████████ █████ ██████ █ █████ ████ ██ ████ █████ ████████ ███ ██ █████ ██ ███ █████ ██████ ████.

Being told by a █████ █████ that I could pick out any game I wanted was something akin to being given a blank check for an uncountable sum of money. I wandered down the aisles with ████ and saw a case. Upon the box was a black and red cover; a sword-wielding anime man sitting in a pose of indescribable despondence/ennui. Overtop, in stylish, curving handwriting were the words Devil May Cry. Some previously unexpressed sense of aesthetic called out to me; I absolutely needed to know what happened inside that svelte, black-jacketed case.

“Oh,” said ████’s mother, “are you sure?” She eyed the incredibly prominent mature rating on the box.

“█ ████ ███████ ███████ ██████ ████,” I said.

It seemed she accepted this as an answer as we left the store with our newfound acquisition. We went out into ████ ████ ████ ███ ███████ ███ ████ ████████ █ █████ ████ █████ ██ ████ ██████████ █ █████ ████ ███ ███ ██ █████ ██████ █████ █ █████ ████████ ███ ██ ████ ████████ ██ ████ █ █████ ████████ ████ █ ████ █ ████ ██████ ███ ██████████ █████ █ ████ ████ █ ██ ███████ █████ ██ ██ █████ █ █████ ████████ ████ ██ ███████ ███████ █████ █████ ████ ███████ █████ ██ ████ █████ ██████. Even so, I have loved the franchise ever since.

If trying to read all that gives you a headache, imagine the headache that still pounds in my head trying to remember it and we can call it even.

Resurrecting My Dead Self

Staring back at the person I never was, I am jealous. Without realizing it, I’ve escaped the purity of that feeling: of finding something, resonating, and simply choosing to be curious, damn the consequences. Crumbling memory makes it even harder to get back into this state. I have a somewhat unique experience of being “born” an adult.

Adulthood means an essentially unlimited ability to pursue the things I like. My aesthetic sense is more developed than ever, but I still struggle to choose art based on what I like. I mistrust my ability to identify what is and isn’t worth my time. I tend to try to “hear things out” even when it is apparent my time is being deliberately wasted. The opinions of others often convince me into or out of things, further confusing my ability to self-select.

I talked previously about the oppressive burden of enduring other people’s thoughts. You open social media; you are told something you like is overrated. A fond recollection of a childhood favorite film revisited tells you it was never good; 45% on Rotten Tomatoes. Media piracy websites will feature prominent reviews, and star ratings aggregated from places like Metacritic—what the fuck is that about?

With free time being more limited than ever, there is an impulse to min-max. There have been moments where I have spent longer stretches researching a good time than actually having one. The Trails franchise, for instance, was one I put off for years because I operated from an oppressive point of view: I believed I could get something better, more polished, more refined, elsewhere, where a “mostly positive” was not enough.

It gets even worse when you must consider the politics of the things involved. I cannot begin to count the number of times I have been ecstatic for a new game release only to realize several of its prominent developers are scum of the earth. For my own sanity, I have avoided things seemingly developed in a lab for me, because the lead dev espoused a hateful ideology. Research becomes necessary and it is much harder to simply consider “the fun of the game” when such actors are publicly available and their words are a matter of record. Our purchases become signals to others about what we value, what we endorse, and so we endlessly submit ourselves to a panopticon of our own making.

Art has always been political. I’m not trying to assert there was some ideologically pure time where a person could just consume art without thought. Often, we imagine such a period, but it is just that: the product of imagination. Most people simply just had a time where they were sheltered from the political ramifications of the things they engaged with. I think we have a responsibility to others and ourselves to find beautiful things without giving up on what we believe in. There is a balance to be struck between cold logic and idealistic passions.

With all this in mind, I engaged in a thought experiment. I would attempt to revisit the mindset of this long dead person. I would play a selection of PlayStation 2 games, chosen entirely from the information I could glean from the box. I gave myself permission to drop whatever I felt like, and permission to be repulsed by what I found inside: The aesthetic need not be defended if the contents were vile.

I permitted no review scores, no research, and no gameplay footage. All I had, in some cases, was faint recollections of what others might have said or interest which came from a contextless fancy in the things associated with the game (soundtracks, keyart, ect.).

My Beautiful, Blue-Bottomed Disks

Bloodrayne

I’ll admit to being a bit on a mid-2000s vampire kick for this one to have fruited into anything. Bloodrayne’s box art was less enticing to me than █ ████████ █████ ██ █ ██████████ ██████ ██ ████ ███████████ ██████ █████████. Whatever effect of intelligence I may have completely crumbles in the face of a hot lady surrounded by dead bodies—I’ll admit to that being a me problem.

I have fond memories of ██ ███████ ██████ ██ ████ and being a passing vampire enjoyer, having an excuse to play a game predominantly about one seemed like a good enough time to me. Bloodrayne surprised me then, by being one of the games I played for the longest. A big part of that was the presentation; I am a sucker for any game which allows me to blast my way through a gothy, gravitas-filled world.

I was also quite taken with the gore in this game, as concerning as that sentiment might be for any psychologists present. Gore in Bloodrayne is fascinating because unlike many other games in the murdering genre, it lends itself a sense of permanency. Dismembered limbs, bloodstains, and corpses lay strewn about like the boomer shooters of old. By comparison, with the interest in increased visual fidelity and the need to regain system resources as quickly as possible, bodies in modern games often dematerialize as if the world’s most efficient black-bag service is following you around. I have played modern AAA shooters where the bullet holes disappear before the magazine is half empty, and here is Bloodrayne leaving corpses strewn around lobbies until I kindly choose to get on with the plot.

Compared to some others on this selection, I will likely play Bloodrayne to completion. The gameplay required little adjustment for someone spoiled on polished, modern control schemes. There was an even split in the game’s attention between showing me Rayne being cool and showing me her ass but, anthropologically speaking, it could have been much worse given the era it was produced. That said, I’m willing to do anything for a goth lady.

Evergrace

Of the games I chose, Evergrace was the one with the most prior baggage attached. Evergrace’s soundtrack by Kota Hoshino has ensured my productivity in writing about as much as having a keyboard. █ ████ ██████ ███ ████████ ██ ████ █ ██████ ██ ████ ██████ █ █████ ██ ███ ████ ██████ ███ ████ █████ █ █████ ████████ ████ ████████ █ ██████ ████ █████ I had not seen a second of the game, however, and the boxart itself had always intrigued me; it seemed, if not actually, spiritually in conversation with my beloved Devil May Cry. A white-haired anime swordsman sitting upon a rock and staring at an unseen point, carrying some emotional burden. What can I say, I have a type.

Considering FromSoftware’s current position as the Dark Souls factory, Evergrace was surreal. The control scheme was completely different from the one which has gradually crystallized into a soft necessity in action RPGs for nearly two decades. The ambience was consistently surreal and dreamlike in a way I haven’t experienced outside of indie games. And of course, it was great to finally hear my beloved soundtrack in its rightful place. That title screen experience was immaculate.

The gameplay is more interesting to talk about than to play, unfortunately. There is a combinatorial smattering of durability management, ability selection, and enemies being weak to certain types of damage which all persist even into later games, but it is far more crude here. I am not the most patient person in the world, but the cumbersome slowness which pervades every system, from combat to just getting around the place, is more aggravating than pensive. It reminds me of ██ ███████ ██ ██ █████████ █ █████ ████████ ████ █ ████ ███████ █████ ██ ██ █████ █████ ████ ████ ██ ████ ███ ██████ ██ ███████ ██ ██ █ ████ █ ████ Threads of Fate or Dewprism in Japan █████ ██████ ████ ██ █████ ██ █████████████ ███ ████ ██ █████ █ ████████ █████ ████ ██ █████████ █████ ███ ██ ██████ ██ ██████ ██ ██████.

Though I did not personally enjoy what the game was going for, the sense of aesthetic was wonderful. The sights and sounds on display really inspired me, and it was intriguing seeing the chrysalis of a beloved game studio before they become what would define them.

Shadow Hearts

I love Legend of Dragoon; it’s an imperfect game, but one I know was acquired in a similar fashion to the earlier anecdote. A small girl saw a game with a word similar to ‘dragon’ in the title and ███████ ██ ███ ████████ █ ██████ ████ █████. ██ ███ ███████████ ██ ██ ██ ███████ █ █████ █████████ ██ ██████ █████ ██████████ ██ ██████ ███. Shadow Hearts has been often recommended to me because of said appreciation. its timing-based combat being a major point of similarity. I never went out of my way to seek it out and as time passed it was always in a “someday” category.

Now fully immersed in this experiment and only burdened with hearsay, I decided to give it a try. Immediately the box art presents an interesting aesthetic and it always makes me laugh to see a damsel in distress psychically menaced by the world’s most normal looking man.

Shadow Hearts, in the first hour or so, disappointed me. It wasn’t the gameplay or aesthetics which bothered me, it was the writing. I don’t know how many games would exist in this category, but Shadow Hearts earns a shiny “homophobic caricature in the first hour” sticker. This was the year 2001 we’re talking about; there have certainly been bigger label bad influences to take umbrage with, but that on top of the protagonist’s flippant desire to sexually assault the woman he’s travelling with made me immediately feel the need for a shower.

All that considered, my sense of aesthetic did not let me down. There is an interesting world here, there are interesting points raised. The negative first impression did not diminish my desire to see the story further, simply because of the strength of the game’s mechanics and the interest I had in the setting. The promise of a dark world is still here, even if it is a little greasier than I would like.

Dark Cloud 2

Dark Cloud 2 was interesting because I was not intrigued by its cover but by the back of the box. The in-game screenshots displayed an art style I now see frequently replicated in the modern day. Cel shading is now common, but I still felt compelled by what the game was showing me. Within moments, it captivated me with its first areas. I ██████ ███ █████ ████ ████ █ ███ ████████ █ █████ ████ ███ █ ████ █████ ███ █ ████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ██████ █ █████ ███████ ███ ███ ██ ██ ███ ████████ ███.

I’ve always been a sucker for an RPG town. Show me a space which allows me to linger and feel a sense of time and place, and I will love it no matter how mediocre your game is. The first town of Dark Cloud 2 being a combination clown zoo and steampunk menagerie was so interesting that I felt compelled to continue playing just to see what else the game had in store.

The absolute breadth of the voice acting talent on display here was incredible. Paul Eiding, Michael Bell, Cam Clarke, Mark Hamill, and Scott Menville all made these fun and strange characters come to life. It was so stacked a cast I felt compelled part way through my first play session to double-check what I was hearing; a moment of offense at the fact that none of these professionals are apparently credited in the game.

The first forays into the gameplay loop of Dark Cloud 2 show an interesting gamut of interlocking systems so diverse that it made my head spin. You have dungeon crawling, weapon growth management, invention photography, mech building, world building; each tightly clustered within the first 2 hours. It was so much variety that I genuinely forgot for a few moments the first dungeon they put me in was a sewer.

Dungeon crawling has never been my first choice for a core gameplay loop. I first learned to hate dungeons when █ █████ ████████ ██ █████ ██ ████ ████ ██ ████. It takes a lot of convincing for a big dungeon central premise to hook me. Dark Cloud 2, in the time I played, couched the need to enter the dungeon in human necessity. The protagonist needs to leave the city and can only do it through a sewer. This is naturally because of the evil clowns extorting the local politicians—just like real life.

I’m not certain if I will play to the end, but I am more than curious enough to see where the story is going. Dungeon crawling will always be a less-than-ideal conduit for my personal investment but I’m willing to see it out, which is more than I can say for some other games in the genre.

Living Dead Girl

After finishing my little experiment, I had a long period of reflection.

I thought about the girl I once shared this body with and wondered if I did her justice. Passion is something I have in large quantities, but it’s often the part of myself I trust the least. Learning to trust my sense of aesthetics was freeing, in a way. I didn’t need to burden myself with the many details I would often find floating around my mind. Length, whether I would engage with the microsystems of the game, if I can justify whatever price the game is presently going for, what my clique of friends have come to believe.

In a world where games have become synonymous with the commercialism that constructs them, it’s easy to submit to the desire to research. It’s easier than ever to find several thousand games with which to indulge in; we can’t just settle on “middling.” At least, so we tell ourselves. If one spends a dozen hours finding the exact, optimal game you are desiring at the moment, you won’t have wasted any time! Except all the time you spent researching instead of doing. I don’t mean to imply a person can’t enjoy researching games for fun, but I, myself, have felt the dissatisfaction of trying to find something ideal, and ending up not doing anything with my time.

All the same, a sense of emptiness pervades me from doing this. The story at the beginning was not just a somber anecdote; I showed you what memory is like for me, but it was also an attempt to convey something I feel I’ve lost. As time has inevitably gotten away from me, I think often about the experiences other people have and feel jealous. Intellectualization has rarely been helpful for me to express the parts of myself I hold dear; yet, trying to get in touch with parts suppressed—or in truth never existed much to begin with—still requires conscious effort.

Nostalgia and I have never gotten along. When people talk about the experience of loving something, potentially for what they feel are childish, or stupid reasons, I feel pangs of envy. I have said I am immune to the cloying, choking fingers of the past because my history is so foreshortened; I think today, I realize it isn’t true. The nostalgic recollections of others compelled me to behave in this way in a desperate attempt to capture something I cannot hold.

No matter how hard I try, I can never be this backspaced person. I am her living dead recollections reincarnated as an echo. She deserves peace and she deserves it from me.

This experience has not been without value. I can appreciate the newly built trust in my sense of aesthetic, even if my reason for seeking it is unattainable. Research will not be completely abandoned, but I will permit myself more forays into the unknown. This kind of thing needs to exist on a spectrum: intellectualization and passion.

Opening myself up to novel experiences has always been worthwhile. It hasn’t always shown me some hidden version of gaming perfectly tailored for me, but it has given me more tools to hone my critical faculty. More so, I also think giving myself a lens to find things aesthetically appealing while also being bad gives me the most important thing an artist can have—spite. The times I’ve seen something beautiful, only to see it not executed in an appealing way, gives me an infinite amount of energy to construct something from its pieces.

Give yourself permission to love something imperfect. Find the things which speak to you, and if they don’t exist, you can make them. At any point, you can become the person you most need yourself to be. Video games might be a silly hobby meant for people who enjoy the tactility of virtual experiences interfacing with mortal flesh, but I think such things are best enjoyed when you’re the one holding the controller. Give yourself permission to love something only you can love.

✶✶✶

It has been one year since I joined Gamesline. Even when it has made me curse or miss out on sleep as I try to stick to my self-imposed deadlines, I wouldn’t trade it. I’m glad I got to be here.

Thank you for reading.

The post The Video Store in My Mind appeared first on Gamesline.

The trailer shows a continuing focus on the “one camera” cinematographic presentation that Santa Monica Studios has been consistently proud of. Sequences seamlessly transition from gameplay, to quick time events, to minute-long cutscenes. This was one of the most talked about aspects of the 2018 game’s design, commonly referenced with the words “immersion”, “scale”, or “consistent”. This approach mostly works with the presentation of the game as a road trip-esque trek across a fantastical Scandinavia, mainly because Kratos as a character is built like a tank you literally could not stop. You don’t need to worry about time’s passage, fatigue, or moments of enforced rest when your character is the quintessential angry guy who’s going to rush his way through every conversation and situation.

It works a little less when you’re a woman who is alternating between resurrection, doing air combos on plant monsters, stumbling down hallways, and being imprisoned as she’s held down by enemies she’s going to unmake within moments.

This is not a problem unique to the one camera format of the post PS3 God of War games, and it’s not even a problem inherent to the AAA cinematic approach that Sony has made their bread and butter over the last decade and change. While Ludonarrative Dissonance is perhaps best known by its usage in discussions around characters like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake and his propensity to alternate between quippish “I’m just a little guy” routines and the slaughtering of dozens, it’s a problem continually plaguing games big and small year after year. In all the years since, this situation hasn’t improved in the slightest..

Part of this is caused by video games’ propensity towards violence. While every medium has expressions of conflict, video games—being a mechanical and heavily interactive format—are understandably dominated by replications of the most visceral form of human engagement. People have always yearned for the physical sensation of impact (take a look at any sport to understand this), and gaming functions as an extension of this. We yearn for the crunchy hit stop, and the particle effects of collision and destruction. 

The other, more simple answer, is that in any creative field, people are going to rely on shortcuts or “standard” solutions to any problem they run into. We expect all fighting games to have a move list, so it becomes inherent to the genre; visual novels should have a text log; live service games demand a battle pass, and so on. Often these conventions are desired, but just as often we run into ideas that exist simply because it’s viewed as a necessity, e.g. the deluge of open world games adding loot systems straight out of Diablo even when designed to be static, or gacha games 1:1 copying the UI of Genshin Impact half a decade out from its release. 

The most egregious of these obligatory concepts to me has always been what I colloquially refer to as “the microwave hallway problem”, after Metal Gear Solid 4’s scene where a suffering Snake pushes his way through a hallway that’s killing him with radiation, as the imagery jumps from perspective to perspective.

In Metal Gear Solid 4, this scene is about Snake, as an old man, pushing himself through absolute misery for a moment of heroism. MGS4 itself is a fairly slow game focused on stealth, so a paced and deliberate moment like this doesn’t feel too out of place, and matches the artisanal tone that director Hideo Kojima has historically gone for. It’s iconic and remembered for plenty of reasons, especially for its place in gaming at a time when the average storytelling for mainstream titles was done through a purely divorced cutscene and gameplay split.

Unfortunately, this concept has been used again and again throughout countless games in the decades since MGS4’s release, and typically without much direction beyond the surface level. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game ostensibly about the dying V, a struggling mercenary whose brain is being torn apart by an entire other identity forcing its way through them. Aside from the consistent interjections from a ghostly Keanu Reeves, this fact is mostly removed from the player’s standard means of engagement, in favor of the expected techno-power fantasy… except for the random moments at ends of quests (and similarly-timed event triggers), where V will suddenly double over with a pixelated and messy screen, and start to move at 0.25x speed, before immediately regaining full and complete motor function without the slightest inconvenience. 

On the surface, this is the visual and mechanical language we have come to expect from cinematically driven video games, many of which are often free-form and non-linear. Developers, of course, can’t plot a set course with moments of defined strength and weakness if they’re providing you a venue with which to do things in any potential order. At the same time, however, is anything truly being gained from these moments of appropriate tonal resonance amidst a sea of completely untethered gameplay? Are these moments of weakness displaying a peek into the intended narrative, or are they showcasing just how limited the language of the common game is?

Countless games follow this format. There’s Red Dead Redemption 2’s concept of tuberculosis that involves the occasional cough and hallucination in between hundred-man slaughter sprees. There are several Resident Evil games that do this, but most notably this year’s Requiem, where Leon Kennedy’s T-Virus infection temporarily makes everything slow, blurry, and blue, before restoring perfect parry and suplex potential almost instantly. Even Kingdom Hearts 3, a game I broadly love for its absurdism, isn’t immune to forcing Mickey Mouse through a slow moving facsimile of the microwave hallway.

To reiterate: what do we gain from these moments of control? Indeed, putting the player behind the wheel of an ailing character is a powerful tool of empathy and connection, but when you jump away from that almost instantly, does that empathy persist beyond a fleeting moment? Does the dissonance not showcase the cracks and limitations of what you’re trying to do with the medium, and fall back on the base expectations of what a video game is rather than what you want it to be? 

It’s easy for me to armchair game design over here from my ivory tower of gaming critique, but we don’t have to conceive of new and innovative ways to fix these problems, when they’ve been executed on in multiple games since the genre’s inception. 

The Fear and Hunger series has a constant potential for characters to lose limbs and abilities as you face down the many horrors of that world. Kenshi, or freeform sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud, are able to showcase all sorts of gameplay systems related to loss of power by changing the means of engagement in a tangible and permanent way. Action oriented titles like Sifu or Eternal Sonata are able to demonstrate the gain and degradation of stamina and means of engagement as their characters go through various stages of life. Hell, many FromSoftware games are predicated on the concept of an “unpowered” or “hollowed” form that can only be temporarily salved. Even games like Final Fantasy IV, a mainstream RPG from 1991, work with the concept of mechanical and narrative intertwining through the character of Tellah, an old man pushing himself to the brink with dwindling stats on each level up. 

Indeed, an argument posited against many of these examples in the wake of their larger budget contemporaries would be that they’re more elaborate or hardcore games for niche audiences, despite games like RimWorld selling over 4 million copies, and persisting in popularity many years down the line. Another could be that these moments of disconnect function fine as abstraction; surely the core act of playing a video game is abstraction from reality enough that we can accept these limitations (this one I’ve seen in opposition to discussions on ludonarrative dissonance consistently). 

Regardless of reasoning, I believe these limitations come not from the medium of games, but from the nightmarish production management of many modern titles, as well as the expectations of capitalism; from operating under the belief that the market is truly something that exists, and not an artifice propped up by manufactured evidence and stubborn belief. 

When we look at how games are made, especially when it comes to titles with larger budgets, the creation process reinforces this issue. That need for a common language—a blueprint that can easily be executed on—becomes a requirement when we think about how many games are being created by contract workers. 

Looking at something even midscale in budget such as last year’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we can see that hundreds of contractors were hired temporarily to work on things like art, rendering, sound, and quality assurance. If we look at Halo Infinite’s development, we have consistent reporting that workers were limited to 18 month contracts and then placed on a 6 month cooldown before being re-hired, to suit arbitrary leadership requirements and skirt labor laws that would afford these employees more rights in their workplace.

It’s not hard to imagine the difficulties faced by these contract workers in a broad sense, especially when it comes to getting to grips with the project they’re working on, or asserting creative agency over it. They have to learn the toolsets, the project outlines, the deadlines, where the last contractor was forced to leave work unfinished… so on and so forth. In the process of all this, there’s also the unending fear that they could be laid off on a whim, so there’s not going to be much of a desire to shake the boat with more radical creative interjections. From the side of more stable employees as well, things are consistently in a state of flux from the hands working on a project having to be retrained, with pipelines consistently altered like the Ship of Theseus. 

Taking all this into account, it’s easy to understand exactly how so many games end up eerily similar, or formulaic to a fault. Sure, this applies to things like Unreal Engine 5 becoming dominant throughout the medium as workers are able to pick up that shared understanding of how something works, but it also applies to how these works end up being made. If you’re pushing through a logistical nightmare, why wouldn’t you rely on the most commonly used or easy to understand tools? Why wouldn’t you frame a scene as so many other scenes have done before because that’s what’s easiest to convey to your detached creative team? Management has to be appeased as well, so there is a pressure towards showing them something that wouldn’t feel out of place in another successful game, matching the tone of another rather than cultivating it organically through the creation process. 

This is made worse through the intersection of marketing, management, and manipulation. When we talk about the artifice of things like focus testing or evaluating what an audience might “want” (an unrealizable notion, given that the “audience” isn’t a real group of people, but rather a handy abstraction of guesswork), it’s not an exaggeration to refer to it as an “unreality”. There are lessons to be learned through experience and inquisition, but they cannot be done through the means of our current economic and creative climates, lest we continually repeat the sins of things like the hastily edited ending to the theatrical release of Blade Runner.

When we surrender to the idea that games should be more than pure idealized “fun”, or more accurately, when we give in to the notion that fun can only be defined by unlimited player control and power, we limit the ideas of what the medium of games can be. Fun can be had in planning around and experiencing things like a dismemberment in Fear and Hunger. There’s joy to be found in those moments of overcoming the challenges of a game like Demon’s Souls. Not everything is killstreaks and SSS combos; sometimes a power fantasy can come from overcoming incredible odds, situations, or indeed even the way we control a video game.

A few years ago, I had a lot of fun with the presentation of Citizen Sleeper; a sci-fi game about functioning as a being trapped within a proprietary and expensive robotic body, trying to make ends meet and solve problems inside of an old space station. The conceit of the game is great—balance the needs of your mechanical body (allegorical of chronic illness), the needs of your community, and the imposition of societal pressures working against you—but in practice, it unintentionally becomes this oddly weightless and almost dismissive work. 

Within an hour of starting the game, the idea of balancing meters, or struggling against any sort of representation of chronic illness, can be thrown out the window with relative ease. Minigames let you play the stock market and gamble for infinite money. You can get a trait to start repairing your body infinitely with very little effort or risk, eliminating any chance of experiencing the detriments of disability. You can solve the issues of every NPC you meet, and complete the main story without friction or fear. On a certain level, I admire the game’s willingness to take the conceits of an economic manager and try to instill the idea that it’s all artifice and can be changed with luck, but it’s also limiting and ineffectual as an experience. 

I don’t expect every game to be Marathon—a complex and punishing game wherein the core experience is determined by a mechanical conceit that suits the type of narrative they’re trying to tell—but we can do better than serving (and in some respects, outright conditioning) an audience that exists in our most insecure assumptions. It’s understandable to rely on what’s easy and known, but we show the most interesting parts of ourselves when we mold what’s known into something only we can.

There will always be abstraction and ludonarrative dissonance in video games. There will always be that struggle to separate what a character should be able to do within the bounds of the narrative versus what makes an engaging and interesting game to play. However, this does not mean we should accept the absurd compromise that these patchwork microwave hallways provide. The medium of games allows for collaboration between creatives and viewers in ways other art forms could only dream of, and we should be trying to cultivate that charm, instead of abruptly ending the dialogue out of convenience.

The post In Cutscenes, You Can’t Double Jump appeared first on Gamesline.

It goes by quick: the story of an imperfect yet happy family turned into a placid examination of an estranged and resentful relationship that forms between mother and daughter after the passing of their husband and father. The daughter – Adora – is tasked by her aunt to find an old key in her childhood home. During her search, she uncovers old memories by cleaning and restoring certain small objects in the house – like a record player and a typewriter – that each house their own unique anecdote.  

She catches glimpses of her mother’s old accolades as a writer, a pursuit she seemingly dropped out of nowhere despite some modest success. After her father’s death, Adora takes up making music, a hobby that reminds her of her father, and makes for her mother a cassette tape with music that reflects her desire to connect and comfort her. But her mother, predictably overworked in her drive to repress her own feelings of grief, throws it in the trash and admonishes Adora for being so reckless with her future, in wasting her time with a pointless hobby. Understandably, their relationship worsens, and when Adora goes off to her adult life, she refuses to call her until she’s proven her wrong. Her mother dies before they ever reconcile with each other, and her regret is obviously sour.  

I love to engage in anticipatory regret. One of my more pressing regrets is that when my parents eventually pass on, it’ll be a righteously unsatisfactory ending to a deeply dysfunctional familial situation. There’s no reconciling, because the situation only persists thanks to my casual lifelong performance as anyone except the kinds of people they deeply fear (gay, leftist, etc) and they allow themselves the peace of sweet ignorance. It’s alienating and weird. I think of it as a thin veil – we are opposed in virtually every way that matters, but they are all I have, so I know at some point I’m going to be like Adora, wishing for different circumstances, a better end to a path that only goes in one direction.

My own memory is pretty spotty, specifically in terms of my own childhood and periods of my life that occurred farther than ten years in the past. Letting a memory attach to something physical is a pretty powerful tool to keep an internal narrative going, especially as a person who never took up writing in a diary. I’ve been dragging around things for over a decade now, from apartment to apartment, simply because it holds the potential to help me remember something I at some point wanted to remember. Occasionally, during the few times per year I wander around the house I grew up in, I’ll pick up some old toy or stuffed animal given to me in a brief moment of harmony in an otherwise turbulent childhood and feel the fog of war lift from some part of my mind. Cleaning off the objects in Undusted feels similarly peaceful, brushing out the crud in the corners and wiping off grime; and finding little pockets of dirt in old gadgets opens the moment of reminiscence to breathe and reach its natural conclusion. 

The end of Adora’s story is the realization that she and her mother were suffering similarly but separately, needlessly for the fact that they could have met each other on equal grounds if they took the time and space to acknowledge their grief. Both had unspoken needs and tragedies through which they filtered their interactions with each other, which led to redundant animosity and miscommunication. Every time they had a moment to reconcile, they stalled.  

It’s a very personal story, and the depth and detail remind me yet again how a certain experience can be elevated by the player rather than the reader or watcher. Cleaning, thinking, coming to terms with each step of the story. Taking the time in its fullness, along for the ride with the author. Part of my bitterness is seeing a familial relationship that could be mended so easily in comparison to my own, but Adora’s story is familiar in its inevitability – there is no ending reflective of an entire life, all the rights and wrongs, things said and unsaid, perfectly preserved in a final moment of satisfaction. Mend what you can, brace for what you can’t.    

I won’t sit here and insist that every relationship is able to be mended—some are destined to be weird and fraught until the very end— but that regret may still remain. Someday I’ll be in a similar position to Adora: sifting through stuff in the garage, boxes of unorganized ephemera (and probably like a hundred bibles), cleaning off the dust and picking apart both the good and the bad memories, waffling between contrition and acceptance. 

The post Facing a Bitter Mirror in Undusted: Letters from the Past appeared first on Gamesline.

I am not angry about this, even though I’d rather things be different; art can thrive in any condition. I think there have been good revivals that play to the past, and reboots that interpret characters and stories through a modern lens. However, the ones that don’t work are the ones that don’t bother to reinterpret, purely playing the hits instead.

When I played Pokémon Pokopia a few months ago, I knew there would be callbacks to Red and Blue’s Kanto. Folks online had looked at the maps of each area and lined them up with cities in Generation One’s landmass, and the story in-game quickly told me that this was a Kanto, nay, a Pokémon world ravaged by some form of climate catastrophe that left the land bereft of both humans and Pokémon. When the player character, a Ditto that just so happens to be freed from its Poké Ball, begins to rebuild the land, Pokémon return and begin to emulate human society in a hope that people will also come back. 

The Pokémon are interacting with the world in a way that emulates the past, yes, but they are also bringing things forward. You aren’t tasked with re-creating the cities as they were before the disaster (you can if you want, but there’s no real guidelines). Instead, the Pokémon are inspired by what they remember from their lives with humans and want to show how capable they are by their own means. They want humans to feel comfortable if and when they return, but the Pokémon have their own needs, and request amendments to the cities to fit their likes and dislikes. The Pokémon are characters in themselves, and many of them act very differently to how people have always imagined them. There’s a reason the valley girl/gyaru Bulbasaur and Southern-drawling Kyogre stand out so much. It’s novel! 

If a remake of a game retreads the same roads with little deviation, it is not for those of us actively interacting with the media. It’s there only to court those searching for a cheap hit of nostalgia. Pokopia posits that building on top of a foundation while introducing new things for new inhabitants will still appeal to those returning.

There was a moment about a week into my playthrough where, even though I was already immensely enjoying the game, Pokopia became something special. I had created a good amount of homes in the Withered Wasteland, the starting area where Fuchsia City once stood. I got my little town of Pokémon to around environment level six or seven (shh), which means the residents were on the path to absolute contentment. For the whole game, a unique set of tracks played for each area, mostly original save for the Pokémon Center healing jingle as a common motif. 

Suddenly, without drawing attention to it, the music shifted to a new remix of the Fuschia City theme. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and as soon as I did, I broke into a fit of sobbing. I don’t exaggerate here, I didn’t just tear up a bit, I started bawling. The use of an old piece of music, of setting this game in that first Pokémon world, was artistically resonant and moving. It wasn’t the song itself, even though it is a nice melody and I had memories of it playing in past playthroughs of Kanto titles, but it was more about what was being conveyed in that moment. No longer was this a Withered Wasteland, unfit for people or Pokémon. Ditto had brought life back to this area. This was Fuschia again, but in a new form. Sure, I may be a bit weak to Pokémon as a concept, it has always been a special interest of mine, but this was a use of expectation, subtlety, and the medium of video games that still impresses me. I was initially confused as to why Pokopia was the only big Pokémon release during the series’ 30th anniversary, but it’s not a mystery to me any more. 

Compare that to the other ways the Pokémon franchise has celebrated “milestone” anniversaries. We got a game that respectfully and lovingly reflects on the past while stepping into a new territory for the franchise for the 30th. For the 25th, there was the incredibly bare-bones and outsourced Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Okay, we also got Legends: Arceus, which made me feel similarly to how Pokopia did! For the 20th, Sun and Moon on the 3DS were excellent games and a huge step forward for character writing in the series, but this was also when Red, Blue, and Yellow were put onto 3DS Virtual Console at a higher cost than any other Game Boy game on the eShop. I’m not opposed to remakes or re-releases from a moral standpoint, but I will always prefer a new take on concepts over a retread.

The first time Game Freak brought us back to Kanto is still the best, and it’s because of limitations and remixing. In Pokémon Gold and Silver, a limited version of Kanto is explorable, with a handful of areas slimmed down and the gym leaders all at the same power level, as the player can reach any of them at any point. These limitations can be frustrating at times, and Generation Two’s slow level curve is criticized for good reason, but things such as Cinnabar Island’s volcano erupting and forcing the people of the island to a new location does far more to expand the Pokémon world than Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee ever did. It moves the world forward instead of arresting its development to avoid rustling the feathers of those only looking for safe stasis.

When I watched the 1986 film True Stories for the first time a few nights ago, I was immediately enthralled. David Byrne spends an hour and a half talking about the concept of the Texan from as many angles as he can muster, and he loves every single one of those angles. It felt like an episode of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, but with a bit more affection for its characters. Afterwards I poked around at some of the special features on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray. One that stood out to me as a frustration, a short film called No Time to Look Back, in which filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross travel to the locations where the fictional town of Virgil, Texas was set. The Ross duo drive around and recreate a few shots from the original film, quoting it along the way. At one point, one of them says something like “David Byrne hates nostalgia, but we’re allowed to do this!” Yeah, dude, you are. It’s still really boring! They speak to almost nobody from the area, and when they do it’s either basic platitudes or straight up telling them “we’re visiting because a movie we like was shot here” met with “oh that’s cool” by the locals. 

This short’s title is a quote by David Byrne’s Narrator character from the film, said while exploring a mall and commenting on how shopping centers replaced the town square. Comparing this truth to today’s truth of the dead mall and the lack of third spaces notwithstanding, this walks in tandem with how I feel about nostalgia. It is an acceptance of a world moving forward while considering and incorporating the past. It’s an understanding that the world often rhymes and echoes, but letting it fully repeat leads to stagnation. While the Narrator says there’s no time to look back, I disagree. We can look back, but we shall not move back. We must take this information with us to forge the new. 

There’s another scene in which the Narrator speaks on revisiting things that holds far more truth to me. “I really enjoyed forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don’t notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.“ What the Narrator posits as forgetting is experiencing something in a new light. It’s novelty, it’s finding something new in something familiar. Creative Pokémon fans prove this every time they make a ROM hack that improves on the original game or creates something completely new in that framework. That same passion is palpable in Pokopia, and it’s why Ditto’s journey means something to me, and a re-release of FireRed and LeafGreen on the eShop doesn’t. I’ve gotten very used to Kanto in that form, and Pokopia finally helped me forget what I knew.

The post I Get Used to the Place and I Don’t Notice Those Things Any More appeared first on Gamesline.

Human memory has been on my mind a lot. It feels like on the internet it’s almost impossible to escape talk of nostalgia. Everyone seems to want to do things that will remind them of when they were a kid. In February The Pokémon Company announced the release of minorly updated ROMs of FireRed and LeafGreen versions, games from 2004 that are themselves reconstructions of games from 1996, and that they are seriously for real genuinely charging money for them. Endlessly we watch games get remade, remastered, rereleased, reimagined. I look at this and think it must mean there’s a demand for the chance to relive the past.

I don’t really relate to feelings of nostalgia as I see them described. Replaying a game is extremely rare for me, as when I’ve tried, I’ve typically found nothing of value. Maybe my knowing what happens saps the appeal out of a game. Maybe for those ones I forget I’ve just changed so radically that I couldn’t even figure out what younger me saw in this thing. When I do replay a game, I usually find my attention is caught most by the parts I hadn’t remembered, and just how much there can be, even in only a couple years since putting a game down.

And yet I have my own ways of trying to hold on to the past. I maintain not just a backloggd account, not just a letterboxd account, not even just a Rate Your Music account, I also dutifully fill out a Google Sheets file with details on every game I have played or am currently playing, a numeric rating of what I think of the games, to reference at a glance, and the dates on which I both started and finished them, going back four years. This is not so I can write reviews, it’s because in recent years I had found myself more and more disquieted by how little I had committed to memory of the art I was experiencing. I had hoped a more active form of engagement would encourage me not to sleepwalk through my own life. I don’t want to think “what the hell was I thinking with this one,” I want to be able to recall what those thoughts might have been.

This hasn’t really worked that well. Especially with music, so many albums tucked away in my Spotify likes mystify me. When did I listen to or enjoy At the Drive-In? Apparently, I thought fondly of that one Brave Little Abacus record with the long name. Records tell me it was less than two years ago I listened to this album and liked it enough to hold on to. Couldn’t tell you what I was thinking because I don’t know what any of the songs sound like, or are about. If I pull at the foundations I uncover one thought: their vocalist sounds like SpongeBob. Very well done.

In my fervor to make my time spent living and breathing mean something, to pull feelings out of art and chew on them for longer, I have played and loved and hated quite a few titles by now. My poor, poor screenshots folder is now absolutely packed with things I wanted to keep with me. In an effort to better understand my habits, and learn to mediate with these feelings I hold, I find myself now writing a few words about a few games that, to me, did something that mattered, that stuck with me, for better or for worse.

Long Season

A few years back I played through Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 with my girlfriend, via the wonderful fan translation put out by Hilltop. We committed to syncing Boku’s life to our own, playing one day at a time, through the month of August, passing the controller back and forth each day. 

I think part of what kept the game alive in my heart was this consistency over a long period of time. Had I binged it alone, it may well have been a footnote on my backloggd account. But more so than the matter of pacing, Boku no Natsuyasumi 2, in keeping with its predecessor, is a game that encourages you to absorb it. Time only passes in game when you move between different areas, and if you want to stay somewhere a little longer, you can. Stare at the river if you like, it’s not going anywhere. 

The knowledge that time will stand still as long as you do works to discourage the player from leaving a scene unless they’re certain that’s what they want to do. You immerse yourself in the mundane because there is no penalty for doing so—only a limit on how many different things you can do in a day. I find it quite counter to a lot of other games’ philosophies. Xenoblade Chronicles was made by sick, sick people. But even something like Persona, something made to limit how much you can do in a way that comes across as a “carpe diem”—they’re still, at the end of the day, something to the effect of ten billion hours long. Those games are jammed full of Game to be Played, and while I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing, I find the Boku approach much more emotionally liberating.

Central to this, in my mind, is that our main character, Boku, also keeps a journal. Every night, just before he crawls into bed, he writes an entry about something he did that day, accompanied by a cute little drawing. On many occasions in my life, I’ve tried to take up journaling. It’s never stuck, the book will always find some forgotten crevice to sink into for years at a time, but that meant it fascinated me to have this little record of what I’d done that I could reference whenever I wanted to. I think part of what captured my heart was the game’s system for deciding what your journal entry will look like—even if you shape his overall adventure, Boku is the one deciding what he will remember. And while the game tries very hard to ensure you get an entry each day, if you do nothing it deems technically noteworthy, it tells you this:

The way that Boku cultivates deliberate slowness in the player is beautiful to me, it makes its environments truly sing. You begin to understand, and feel, someone else’s memory. If you can believe it, I was never a little Japanese boy growing up in the countryside by the sea, I never made beetles fight or anything like that. I’d never even seen a firefly until I was in my 20s. This is what I mean about creating a sense of time and place, though. Through the game I was able to be so engrossed that there wasn’t any incongruence to be felt. I could almost imagine what the sea breeze must have felt like. I grew attached to the little emotional arcs of the various characters. Towards the end, when one of them said, “I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I fell in love with this town,” I felt the game was talking right to me, the player.

Of course, these games never left Japan, not officially. I think this is also a vital consideration. The dialogue here wasn’t really written for someone like me, necessarily. If anything, Boku no Natsuyasumi is itself a deeply nostalgic work. This game had strong staying power—I even still remember what I named my first truly accomplished beetle wrestler: Red Lightning. Perhaps, then, the trick to making me feel is not tapping into my past, but rather, showing me yours.

The Summer Ends

A few months ago I played Umurangi Generation, a photography game that positions you as a courier during the end of the world, equipped with only a camera. I had expected a slam dunk; I’m very fond of my own silly little instant camera, personally. There’s an easy appeal to having a physical memento like a picture, something so much sturdier than human recollection. Having had this essay brewing in my head, and recalling the praise I’d heard for Umurangi Generation,  I booted it up and found something unexpected.

At first, I really wanted to root for it. I thought I was on board with what it was doing. You get placed into these little vignettes—a rooftop gathering, or some commotion going down at an intersection, or a vigil for someone we’ve never met—and given a list of things to find and snap photos of. I felt that by being forced to stay in one spot, I was encouraged to absorb details. I wanted to know the story of this world and the people in it; the minimalistic storytelling was really working for me. And then the game and I stepped out of sync.

After a couple of stages of contemplative stillness, the game pivots towards action shots. Battlefields with soldiers bleeding out and kaiju fighting giant robots. Suddenly I found it all tonally dissonant. I wanted it to be over with. Where once I saw a tasteful degree of restraint, I now felt I was wandering through a world that had failed to reach my heart, being asked “isn’t it so sad what’s happening?” Objectives that used to give me reason to linger in a space were now actively forcing me to search for graffiti with the word “boomer” on it while the world was meant to be ending. Maybe there’s commentary in that—the atonality of life, negotiating with yourself over your continued existence in a time of strife—but for me, it broke the spell. “There is no one right answer,” I thought to myself. “Weren’t you just telling me I won’t be told what’s right or wrong? That art is subjective?” The pictures I took ceased to have meaning when it occurred to me they would be roughly the same as the pictures everyone else took.

Even if I was sad to be fighting with this game, I still did see it through to the end, and something really interesting happened. After you complete all 8 stages, you get dropped into one final area, with no camera this time. There’s no pause menu full of objectives. I breathed a sigh of relief, that I could freely explore, take in my surroundings without being pushed any which way. I stared at the starry night overhead, lit up crimson. I thought about the game’s mascot telling me that Umurangi is a Te Reo word meaning “red sky.” I saw birds and flowers that seemed to be made of stardust. I saw something great and terrible, perched atop a mountain, blocking out the moon. The game handed me a camera again, and with irritation, I didn’t check to see how much film I had, didn’t think about making what was to be the last shot really count, and,

The game didn’t continue, didn’t chastise me for looking at the wrong thing. It showed me a mirror, and saw itself out.

The thing that I haven’t really been saying here is that part of what I wanted to find in Umurangi Generation was that special quality that I think a photograph has, that feeling of a particular moment, something normally fleeting and ephemeral, cauterized to staunch the flow of time. Even if I didn’t personally resonate with most of it, I kind of love how it ended, for me. This is a permanent symbolic impressing of my thought processes, encoded in zeroes and ones, that any computer screen can replicate. Whether or not I think Umurangi Generation is good means nothing to me—it told me something about what I value, and this final captured moment is far more interesting to me than any critiques I might have.

Fresh Flowers For All Time

This section will spoil critical plot details from Seabed. I think spoilers can work to give you a reason to enjoy a piece of art you might otherwise not have, but I also recognize that Seabed is a mystery novel. If you want to preserve your modesty, go read it and come back. I promise my words aren’t going anywhere—they will last until entropy takes them, like insects in amber.

Beginning to pull apart my feelings on Paleontology Soft’s 2016 “yuri-themed mystery visual novel” Seabed feels something like trying to split the atom with a butter knife. But we will try all the same. I’ll start with the age-old adage: women can do anything. Unfortunately, sometimes this includes suffering greatly.

Sachiko, our protagonist, is an amnesiac, unable to cope with the sudden loss of her life partner Takako. The entire visual novel traces a record of her winding path towards recognizing the symptoms of her trauma as they manifest in response to Takako’s death. In all but explicit terms, the novel is clear that she has DID, and the shock of that traumatic event destabilizes her and causes an increase in symptoms: dissociation, switching, hallucinations, and other sensory phenomena that might be classified as Not Super Normal. She realizes she had forgotten Takako was dead at all, and had lived her life talking to a ghost for years. What I want to take a look at is how she tries to cope—she flips through her old journal. Records of time spent with Takako. She hopes to find a passage that might cover her lost memories, and make it all make sense.

I will be forthcoming: it reminds me of my own experiences. Sometimes you find an old journal entry was torn out to protect you from knowledge you weren’t ready to process. Sometimes you find one you once wrote, and then later angrily scrawled out, in thick pools of ink, as if trying to measure out in millilitres your sense of disavowal for feelings you had earnestly held before. “Not even I will know what it said, when I’m done.” I may be so fixated upon journals, photographs, these physical records of life, because I know how easy it is for those memories to be stricken from the record while you’re not looking.

Seabed bills itself as a mystery, though its approach is not so direct as I think that might imply. If you ask me, I think it fits more into the iyashikei subgenre. It is Slice of Life, sharpened to a fine point, a knife’s edge to twist into your heart, and leave you feeling a little better and a lot worse when some of your humors are on the floor. 

There are dozens of scenes of mundanity. In that same way Boku asks you to contemplate, Seabed ensures it. Sachiko makes her breakfast and talks to the innkeeper about how she likes her eggs. She goes to the inn’s library and talks to a child that reminds her of her younger self. She gets pounced on by the innkeeper, drunkenly confessing her love for Sachiko, who proceeds to get up and go for a walk. Every suggestion of a fast-paced, forward-moving plot is snubbed by this novel. Prose is matter-of-fact and simplistic, and taking all of that along with the way the soundtrack will loop in these scenes, whether mundane or emotional, while the core mystery is mostly left to simmer, it works to pull you in like quicksand.

And so it really does something to me, deep in my core, when I listen to a song from the soundtrack, and it reminds me of my favourite scene in the novel. It makes me feel every bit of heartwrenching pain Sachiko does, as she discusses with her alter how she may never meet another person who could so easily understand her as Takako did, juxtaposed against the quiet of the hotel room she’s staying in, and the gentle thrum of life happening just outside her door. Scrolling through my phone’s camera roll helps me remember when and where I’ve been—but even recorded videos don’t put me into my old headspace the way this game can transport me into the heart of a grieving widow. It’s some kind of magic, to me.

But I mentioned I played through it twice. Over and over throughout my second reading I was struck by the same familiar feeling. “I don’t remember this part,” I would say to the friend I was reading alongside. “I thought this happened, like, WAY earlier.” It seemed despite my love for Seabed I still couldn’t really commit all that much of it to my mind. Not even the broad-strokes sequence of events. I had felt like I was somehow letting myself down—how can I be this bad at remembering things that matter to me?

I had to get worse before I got any better. My curious bookkeeping habit metastasized, over time, and became a need to record everything. My spreadsheet became a backlog, hundreds of titles long, paralyzing in its breadth. I dutifully held myself to finishing everything I’d started for the sake of some elusive, truer form of understanding. In this state I set so many arbitrary rules I had to follow—I would not start a new JRPG while I was on a break from Trails, because what if I came back to Trails and forgot everything? No, better to turn this hobby into homework for myself than to keep forgetting things. I hung a sword over my own head and called it discipline.

Fingernails on a Chalkboard

This leads me to my time with Final Fantasy 7. This game may have been the single worst victim of my compulsion to treat the hobby as a responsibility. When I see that something is critically acclaimed, historically important to the development of the medium, and even has Vincent Valentine in it—I’m gonna come running to see what’s going on.

At the outset, my adventurous spirit was rewarded! I still maintain that the Midgar portion of Final Fantasy 7 is great. I noticed a few little gripes—the translation in particular standing out to me—but for the most part, it was all killer, no filler. So much was new to me, too, and the novelty of my first Final Fantasy game was a big draw. The possibilities whispered to me by Materia seemed endless, the world and its concepts were all fresh, and while I may have known Cloud Strife and friends through cultural osmosis, seeing them in their game lit up my heart. I even liked that weird translation at first. This guy are sick! Tell ‘em Aerith!

The slow fading of its shine was subtle, and hard to detect, but without realizing it myself I had checked out. Something along the way broke in me. I think it’s less important that I detail what I didn’t like, and more so, that I kept trying to play. I had been playing this game for my partner, intending to go through it in chunks when she was in town. And all that time I kept guilting myself for not playing it when I had the chance. Deep down, I wanted to spend my time with someone I love on something better than Final Fantasy 7. Why was this something to guilt myself over?

Final Fantasy 7 leached out of the space between my eyes, leaving behind the suggestion of a game that I struggled to play, and yet held myself to finishing for years. The way it failed to stay present in my mind, failed to compel me to engage, began to feel like my own personal failing. It’s my fault for spacing out my playthrough so widely. I should be focused enough to know where I’m going, it shouldn’t matter that the translation is famously confusing. If I just cared a little more, I’d finish this thing. It didn’t strike me that I’m under no obligation to care about everything until my partner encouraged me to drop this game without remorse. I think I had still yet to understand what Boku might have been trying to tell me.

You Forgot It In People

Here we reach the core of it: feelings of obligation. The reason I felt so drained by Final Fantasy 7 was not just spacing out my playthrough, though that didn’t help me retain information. It was holding myself to it so ardently that really killed it for me. In the same sense, Umurangi Generation instilled a different sense of obligation. Artistic expression through photography felt stymied by a formula that produces nothing but an album of all the same photos each playthrough.

In contrast, Boku no Natsuyasumi and Seabed each remind me, through beautiful expressions of not-a-whole-lot happening, the value of deliberation and slowness in everyday life. Neither title fixed me on their own, it was and still is an ongoing process of self-discovery. But the ways they make me feel are relevant, in my opinion, to this process, and their lasting places in my heart stand as testament to their efficacy. If it wasn’t already obvious, I recommend both games wholeheartedly. You, too, should remember to slow down once in a while, and take in the art you love, rather than consume it. On another note, I haven’t remembered to update my spreadsheet in a while.

Isabelle is highly preoccupied with hype moments and aura, and the weight of human emotion. You can find more of her words on Bluesky.

The post Games About Nothing Mean Everything to Me — by Isabelle appeared first on Gamesline.

I often find myself in a similar rut between games. Not everything can sing to your soul; trying to find the importance in something you don’t give a shit about just makes you feel fraudulent. So I found myself in familiar trappings: games which weren’t breaking new ground but felt like I was doing something. I did my Final Fantasy dailies; I dallied with Monster Hunter; I tried out Marathon—the new one, not the original one, we live in Hell. While fun, none of it filled the void in me demanding satiation.

You can imagine me, head on desk, various drink cans piled upon my noggin, making sounds reserved for cats and bored games writers.

I found myself thinking about speed, about motion, the primal building blocks to my satisfaction. I played through all of Pseudoregalia, a free and flowing platformer. I wrote several drafts worth of thoughts on it; all of them found their way to my recycle bin. I replayed the majority of Super Mario Sunshine thinking about our long-standing relationship, a game which has followed me though all of the stages of my life. Those thoughts didn’t even exit my head; they were too abstract and sentimental to encode into something worth reading.

The groaning exiting my mouth and the grinding sensation in my brain intensified. I wanted something quick, something which could accelerate my heartbeat and make me feel alive again. I wanted competition, my primal darkness which compelled me to hunt down fellow gamers.

I scrolled through my games. Dead faces stared back at me from digital blue-grey tumulus with resounding goose egg player counts. Games, once played, interred in silicon graves; Ozymandias’ trunkless legs standing in the midst of a vast digital desert.

A dark miasma coiled around the room, pouring out of my monitor and clouding my thoughts. A nightmare more frightening than anything a mortal could imagine presented itself before me: Counter-Strike 2. It batted its eyelashes at me from my Steam library.

“You could always give it another try,” it said. “You’re probably still halfway decent.”

Beads of sweat collected on my forehead.

“Hey. Unreal Tournament 2004 is having a comeback,” said my partner from across the room.

“Oh shit, for real?”

A Shock Combo with Twenty-two Years Lead Time

Unreal Tournament 2004 in 2026 was a fascinating experience. It is both timeless and dated in a way only an arena shooter is capable of. The music pounds with an early 2000s industrial trance beat, immediately hypnotic yet non-descript. The weapons are these obtuse, strange things constructed by a gamer mind only obliquely aware of how a firearm works. Movement is sublimely clunky yet flowing; side-hops chain into momentum-boosting double jumps, which chain into exploding into meat because you fell into a spiral of cluster rockets. UT2004 is the only—non-pornographic—game in recent memory which could force me to read the sentence “Memphis was carved up by Cleopatra’s Green Shaft.”

It was a beautiful and sublime crystallization of a time I never got to experience new. CTF-Face is a map I only ever got to see as a pseudo-nostalgic drum and bass playlist on YouTube and now I got to see it in-engine; it felt like some kind of inevitable prophecy coming to its final act.

Yes, I write this with zero nostalgia of my own, playing only as a person seeing the game for the first time. That being said, I was fascinated by the differences in game design ideology between then and today. The game is feature complete, with no battlepass, and no promise of additional characters or skins in the content pipeline. All maps are either in the base game or provided by the community. New game modes are invented in real time out of a robust suite of “mutators,” modifying the standard gameplay. This game is finished, “dead” even in the eyes of some, yet we’re still playing it. This is the product of a twenty-two-year long resurrection made by a loving fanbase.

My partner and I played into the wee hours of the night, roleplaying as 800kb/s internet wielders listening to D&B while vaporizing one another into piles of cartilage. It was, in a sense, a playable museum, albeit one where a rejected Transformers design can coldly say “Die, Bitch” in a way definitely intended to sound hard to a demographic devoid of maidens. Yet, even as I raised an eyebrow at the misogyny of yesteryear, I was fascinated by the return of this “dead” game.

Back in the modern world of gaming, it’s dire out there. Games are announced, cancelled, and expunged from memory within a year of release. A community might call a game dead when comparing its player base to its contemporaries, because it doesn’t have a “content” pipeline which suits their tastes, or in some cases, simply because a YouTuber told them so. Yet, are such proclamations truthful? I still sit in a lobby with other people, twenty-two years after the release of this game, and it has the audacity to still exist. Old Unreal is easy enough to find, easy enough to download from, and off you go; people cared, and so the game is allowed to exist.

Many other games haven’t passed this test of time. My Steam library is a veritable graveyard of games which haven’t received the same love or attention. Strike Vector, Loadout, dozens more. Those games died despite all the happy memories contained within. Most people, it seems, just take it on the chin; this is simply the fate of all online games. One day, the lights go out, and the game dies.

Is this truly necessary though? We see this game make a return to a fanbase still willing to play it even if they only number in the hundreds. I believe, genuinely, that as long as there is someone to keep the lights on, someone to pass the torch along, there is no reason a game as a piece of art can’t live forever. How many apocalypses has something like Team Fortress 2 weathered? Yet the fanbase continues trucking along, for better or worse.

Ultimately, games only truly die when they are killed.

Trash Decade

In a less healthy period of my life, I played a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4—Black Ops 4? Black Ops IV? Black Ops IIII? Who is responsible for this?

Anyway, I was playing a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops 𒇹 in a state not dissimilar to how I described myself in the first segment: I was between games and desperate to satiate some dark urge inside of myself for murder and violence. Humble Bundle delivered unto me this piece of shit, which would take over my life for approximately one summer but no longer.

The game was ever so slightly more textured than the usual CoD fare. There were still killstreaks, but this foray was hero-based, and made you heal for yourself instead of sucking your thumb until the screen stops being goopy. The game was hypnotizing, dreary yet intoxicating, like the last 4 to 5 cm of a tallboy. The content, the battlepasses, even my fellow players meant very little to me; I was just here for something to jolt my brain and remind me I was alive every now and again.

Yet despite my criticisms, it was not by my own hand that I ceased playing; that decision was made for me. I was queuing one day, as per usual in my apocalyptic spiral to avoid checking what day it was. I was queuing. I was queuing for a very long time. This, I felt, was an exceptionally long time to queue, even for a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops 𐍆𐌹𐌳𐍅𐍉𐍂—this is the last time I’ll do this joke, I promise.

My frustration mounted but I kept waiting. It was only after getting up and forcing myself to live in my own thoughts for a while that I realized no game was coming. I exited the queue and stared at the loadout which had ferried me to something resembling catharsis. A phantom image of a dying horse begging to be put out of its misery popped into my mind, a decidedly not normal thing to think while staring at a firearm. I left the multiplayer menu; a jovial popup informed me it was time to purchase the new Call of Duty, to replace the old Call of Duty I was already playing. I made a throaty sound, roughly like a parent discovering a child entering the house past curfew, and exited the program. I have not opened it since.

I feel like the experience I just described is familiar to most gamers. We play multiplayer(or just online) games until we get distracted and find the doors closed, or we watch horrified as they unbuild themselves from underneath us. It is rare to decide your relationship with such a game has run its course, as there is no fixed narrative conclusion. We use it up until it is gone, or gone from us.

But it’s not solely on the consumer in such cases. Obviously the most guilty persons in the room are those who turn games into nothing but products. A game can live but must die because there is no profit motive for allowing it to stay living. A server browser might confuse your audience, after all; you have to handle the queuing for them. Sometimes 200 people isn’t enough to make a single game; you can only deliver the highest quality match. You cannot simply hand over the rights to run it off to the fans; think about your brand! It is childish to assume that these things can live forever, eventually the servers just need to come down, says a sales rep interested in selling you your dreams.

There is a learned helplessness, or at least an apathy, which emerges from such eventualities. We cope with the terror of the things we love being snatched away from us by pretending it is all inevitable—just move on to the next thing. This works ideally for the executioners of games: those who continue the commercialization of an art form into discardable toys, disposability with intent to incentivise more purchases. Live service games fill you with anxiety, a terror of losing out which manipulates your behavior to be more receptive toward choosing a single game to rule your recreation time; that is, until the game meets end of life and all of it was for naught anyway.

“Buy the new game”, a helpful prompt in the menu says underneath an end-of-life banner, flickering like a halogen bulb in a soon to be bankrupt grocery chain. “It’s all the same shit with a longer number at the end.”

Graveyard Planet

Being in the industry of games sucks right now. Discord sucks right now. Credit card companies would still really like for you to not be able to buy completely legal material. Your genuine attempts to preserve art will be met with a cease and desist orbital strike.

This is not, however, the inescapable fate of things. It is useful to call these trends unpleasant and to bring them to other’s attention. Knowing one’s material conditions are not acceptable is only the first step, however. Being able to imagine a better existence is the next step to building it, and while one pithily stating that something sucks and everything was always fucked since before you were even born might be attention grabbing, it doesn’t need to be the truth. It cultivates despair, but it should drive you to action, not simply angered capitulation; you do not have to simply accept that the things you love will be taken from you and then sold back to you in glorious, fucked up DLSS5.

Unreal Tournament 2004 still lives past its expiry date. Even the aforementioned Black Ops 4 has a modified client enabling play years past the expiration of its servers—I didn’t even know that, I discovered it while writing this essay, crazy right? Even the previously mentioned Strike Vector and Loadout have fan servers!

People have a tendency to always look for what is new, for the next new dopamine hit. I get it. The world is a really stressful place and we’re constantly looking for a feeling as big as the first time we ever loved something. A lot of my own personal attempts to find a new thing to light my heart on fire have been fruitless, but there is just as much beauty to be found in old things as new. The last essay I wrote was about how I looked backward and found something to love in things I missed, and just as often I could keep digging.

There are more games than I could ever learn and play in a single lifetime. I could play through the entire NES catalogue and find things nobody ever talks about. I could go on a quest to dig through an obscure console and find beautiful gems overlooked by people whose entire childhood was the PS2. I’m not insulting people who don’t go off the beaten path; I think there is much to value in even the more obvious places. Yet, cultivating a taste beyond what is obvious will open doors you never knew existed. Who cares if they’re dead; you, the player, are the one bringing it to life!

The old will always outnumber the new. The more you allow yourself to appreciate things outside of the immediate era, the more you can bring life to things beyond the year you live in. You don’t have to simply end your choices with the things sold or advertised to you. If MOBAs have gotten stale, try learning about where their inspirations emerged from. If you don’t enjoy the current extraction shooter trend, play the games from before they emerged. You will likely be surprised that other people still play them, or could be convinced to play them, if you’re insistent enough.

Nosgoth, a peculiar asymmetric team-based shooter entry of the Legacy of Kain series, has been resurrected; it can be played with the assistance of a modified client and a Discord server, if you’re so inclined. Anarchy Reigns, an often forgotten PlatinumGames online beat ’em up, has returned in the form of PS3 emulation, online functionality restored. All returned because people cared enough to gaze backward.

A sense of curiosity can foster a change; incuriosity often puts you at the mercy of those most invested in making a sale. Digging deep in forgotten places, in the areas which aren’t immediately appealing, can lead to great discoveries, and in turn bring vital blood back to the origins of the hobby. A little care and attention can resurrect the dead.

As long as people continue to care, a game can continue to exist. Modders will make custom clients, emulators will enable old games to live on new platforms, and even the most passionate will take server architecture into their own hands. The Concords and Highguards of the world are dispiriting, yes, but as people who care for this medium of art, it is our duty to take the things we love and carry them with us. A corporation preserving the things they make should never be the expectation, especially when they are financially disincentivized from doing so. Preservation is not impossible; we can love the things we love, provided we hold on tightly and refuse to allow them to be taken. Doing the work is hard but I think the effort is necessary.

A lone server in a game’s server browser, for those who will play can be enough. A person developing a website which enables others to remember that old things still exist can be enough. A person with a following and a curiosity in dead things can inspire others to pick through this graveyard with them.

So, won’t you go graverobbing with me?

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