It’s that time of year again: when people start thinking about how they’ve spent their time and try to construe meaning out of this cosmic absurdity. Reflections on experiences had, moments cherished, and things appreciated.
I am not immune to this kind of retrospective. This year has been a massive learning experience for me. I’ve started writing about video games beyond just talking at my friends about them; my novel, which sounded like an insane combination of words just a year ago, currently exceeds 100,000 words; I’ve made and kept a group of wonderful friends.
This is also the point where I begin reflecting on my relationship with media. My ruminations on media were extensive and my entire relationship with art has changed—or at least I’d like to believe. For a long time, I was a victim of my own bad habits: I would devour art. On the surface, that doesn’t sound bad. Devouring implies a ravenous appetite for sure, but devouring something can also imply appreciation, right? For me, I fear I would have to say no. Often, I felt like others were getting something out of this medium that I was not.
Watching my friends play video games, I was enamored with their greater sense of appreciation. They were not suffering from my own checklist-minded, objective-oriented approach to gaming. They lingered in these digital worlds, remaining for only as long as it pleased them to do so; the pleasures of the fantasy taking them to places unknown.
The change I wanted to manifest most in myself this year was to find the same sort of appreciation. This little hobby of mine isn’t food; it shouldn’t be something I suckle the bone marrow from until I’m satiated, moving ever onward to something else.
Put simply, I wanted to stop and smell the digital roses.
My success was mixed, if I’m honest. I tried many new games, and I had many new experiences. Some stuck with me, others I forgot shortly after playing them, surprising me when they reappeared in my 2025 Steam replay. But truthfully, it was never my intention to “remember everything.” I had only ever intended to find the things that mattered.
So, after this lengthy year, I have come up with something of a framework for myself, something for me to share with you; the journey I have been on this year, and many years before.
The conceit of video games which has resided in my mind and has colored the very framework of their existence.
Connecting a Dream and a Machine
The humble gameplay mechanic is, to many games, a skeleton which forms the foundation of the experience; the rules as the game—and to an extent you—understands them. The jump of the platformer, the inventory and resource management of survival horror, the spatial, projectile dance of the first-person shooter; these traits, where they exist, define the games attached to them. They are a series of personal choices defining the feeling behind the game’s actions. These decisions are the formation of a fantasy.
The fantasy of gaming is what drew you to it in the first place. A set of rules which enables you to experience things, internalize stories that aren’t possible or feasible in the real world; what it’s like to be an expert sword fighter, the leader of a solar empire, or an impossibly precise musician. A game designer dreams a dream and chooses to express it to an audience. When you and the game design are in sync—when you agree to the fantasy and its means of conveyance is well constructed—you feel the things the game intends. Sometimes, you transcend the dream and manage to find one of your own. A game’s successes or failures are determined by how well it manages to capture the dream it set out to convey.
A single-player action game typically should have a fantasy which synergizes with its narrative. If the fantasy of something like Cyberpunk 2077 conceived of something like augmentation being a metaphor for losing yourself to corporate control and then didn’t have an augmentation system, that would feel incongruous; in its presence, the story and the mechanics inform one another to create a copacetic fantasy.
Fantasies can also exist metatextually. A multiplayer first-person shooter or fighting game grants the audience a fantasy of clear self-improvement. Learning a set of behaviors makes you into an ideal player and by agreeing with the game on what its own game is, allows you to be in sync with the conveyed fantasy. Fantasy, here, is more in the execution than in the narrative; by dedicating time and energy to this set of game behaviors, you can get constant feedback of improvement in a way real life skill development doesn’t tend to have. Even then, the core fantasy at the end of the day is still there: you may indulge in the dream of being a street fighter or a gunslinger, by engaging in game mechanics analogous with the fantasy.
To better illustrate my meaning, I’ll use two specific, personal fantasies. These will be superficially similar—at least, similar enough that your grandmother might mistakenly purchase one for the other under duress.
Devil May Cry 5 is an easy example that allows me to talk about Devil May Cry in an essay. The fantasy of Devil May Cry, at its simplest, is about being an effortlessly stylish devil hunter. In the best entries, the synergy between the narrative and the mechanical intricacies are perfectly in sync.
The skillsets of each character differentiate them mechanically, but also add interest and appeal specific to how they orbit the central fantasy of being a hyper-competent monster killer. Stamina is never a concern because, core to the fantasy, the player character would never question if they have enough juice to get through a single encounter—they simply know they do. The character’s most effective tools, in accordance with the fantasy, are metatextually limited by the abstract concept of style. It doesn’t matter if a weapon is technically the dominant, most appealing strategy; if you are playing in an efficient but homogeneous way, you will not score well.
Death in DMC is typically a momentary, fleeting inconvenience. You die and—especially in DMCV—you are granted the ability to resurrect on the spot, albeit with less style points than if you had not. Damage isn’t especially frightening unless you are attempting to go for the best score possible.
By abiding by these mechanics and the spirit they carry, you become the ideal player: you become the devil hunter seeking your own personalized journey of self-expressive violence, and ultimately your own sense of style.
Compare this to something like Dark Souls 3.
Mechanically, Dark Souls 3 encourages, at least on first play, a far more conservative, pensive approach. The game is quick to punish missteps and will require you to adroitly use the right tool for the job. In microplay, you must manage your health, stamina, and encounter-to-encounter resources like magic; this includes managing the durability of your armaments, builds, and the ablation of your resources which determines the arc of an entire play session. There is no style gauge here, no punishment for exploiting the world, the enemy, or any advantage your accumulated bank of knowledge gives you access to.
The game primes you to become the person the narrative fantasy suits: a hardened adventurer surviving a world which has all but rolled over and died. The punishment inflicted by the narrative ideally shapes the game mechanics to punish you in gameplay.
Anyone who knows anything about either of these games would obviously be correct in saying these games could not be further apart in tone or feel. But consider why this is. The games are remarkably similar when stripped of their aesthetics: you are a primarily melee-weapon-equipped dispatcher of monsters in a hostile environment. Each location requires dodge rolls, parries, ripostes; each engagement requires the ideal tool for the job and the situational awareness to know what that is. Where they differ is their mechanical approach, which grows from the fantasy they are attempting to evoke, which in turn shapes their aesthetic, making them grow apart from one another.
This divergence does not indicate either branch as being superior to the other. There is a lot of talk around what makes “objectively good game design;” I would argue such a thing does not exist. When new games come out and their design is said to be a high watermark, there is an unspoken or spoken expectation that it should somehow supersede that which has come before.
“This is how all open worlds should be designed now.”
“This is how combat should work now; everything else is inferior.”
Not every game benefits from capitulating to the same fantasy. Trends can be useful for understanding what is common, or what is most desired on average; fantasies can be demanded by an audience as well, especially when no one is seen to be building it. This should not dictate what the fundamental building blocks of art must be however.
No, I don’t believe new designs are somehow objectively superior to the old in the same way I don’t believe this year’s smart phones are objectively superior to last year’s. There are different needs for different people, different stories; ultimately, some design is as temporary as the tech waste filling tomorrow’s landfill.
Paying attention to these Mechanical Fantasies has been foundational to improving my consideration this year. I feel I am better prepared to receive what games are telling me; I am more interested in coming halfway. Where I would have griped at a particularly frictive gameplay mechanic, I find myself more likely to identify whether it captures the spirit of the game’s dream.
Streaming Signalis back in October, I was vocal about my irritation of the oppressively limited inventory. In the moment, I found it cumbersome and a contributing factor in lengthening the game. Now, I am brave enough to admit I disliked it for how it forced me to feel the pressure of resource management and scary monsters—I am, after all, still a gigantic weenie.
Considering the exact fantasy of Signalis enabled me to say it works even if it’s unpleasant to play. You are a creation of a fascist government; the programming of institutional hegemony limits your language, stymieing your ability to articulate that which oppresses you—and in the video game also. Ultimately, you can still find it distasteful, too frictive to deal with, but it does suit the story Signalis wishes to tell. Without mindfulness I wouldn’t be able to say that; I’d be just another person saying, “the game should never inconvenience me” even if that inconvenience was thoughtful design.
For less mechanically frictive games, like the Trails games I’ve indulged in this year, considering the fantasy made me something of a better actor. I was able to slip into the role the story had planned for me. Slotting into the story in both tone and spirit allowed me to find a place for myself, which the game had helpfully left open for me. Fitting the role of the role-playing game makes the experience more thoughtful, engaging, more immersive. You care. This is the heart of my understanding of Mechanical Fantasy: the calibration process which comes from wanting to meet art where it’s at.
None of this comes easily though; it is often an unintuitive process. Many outside factors can contribute to forcing you out of sync with a game’s mechanics. Let’s talk about those factors now.
The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts and Our Own
In this era of internet communication, we are more or less constantly burdened with the weight of other’s opinions or consideration. The moment a game releases, if you’ve shown even a passing interest and find yourself victimized by discovery feeds, you are burdened with an unrelenting tide of gamer opinions. They linger in comments, they post YouTube videos, they even live in your Discords: gamers are coming to deliver their opinion, telling you that your method of playing a game is stupid and wrong.
Elden Ring upon its release, back when I still used the dipshit website for morons (formerly Twitter), was a veritable mudslide of angry gamers in the mood to talk smack. I saw everything from Spirit Ashes to the concept of magic being stated as inferiorities in playstyle.
Accidentally, in my essay about loving games, I have maneuvered myself into a gamer catastrophe: I might need to talk at least a little bit about difficulty in gaming. Let me get my opinions clear: regardless of the game in question, the best way to play a game is by maximizing the amount of fun you find in it. Completionism, difficulty, mods, they’re all distractions from the fact that this is a hobby. You are meant to be fulfilled and have a good time doing all this; let’s not pretend we’re Oakley-wearing dads yelling at the little-league mound, none of this shit actually matters, Richard.
Yet, we are all burdened with the weight of other’s thoughts. Even speaking as flippantly as I have, I have second guessed my own ability to have a good time because of other people. There are games I have spent dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours on, because someone argued I had an obligation to calibrate myself to the whims of another person. When calibrated to someone else’s whims, it’s easy to find yourself in positions of discomfort or pain. The desire to prove yourself to internet strangers, even those who don’t know or care that you exist, can cause you to contort yourself into positions where the fun becomes unfun.
Beyond society is our own personal inbuilt ability to carry bias. I am often embarrassed by the amount of times I just thought I knew better, or was somehow better than the game trying to instruct me. This could manifest as thinking I already knew the material and carried an in-built advantage, or just the smug certainty that I wouldn’t need to care.
This refusal to match with the fantasy of a game, either out of a misinterpretation of what the fantasy is or because of the dreams imposed by other people, leads to disconnection and friction. You throw yourself against the game’s mechanics; you burn yourself out doing the things the game isn’t demanding of you; you forget what you’re even doing this for.
This doesn’t even need to be out of bias; sometimes, our own prior experiences render us incompatible with a story. That is a topic one could discuss at length, but in short, sometimes it’s not anyone’s fault—there’s nothing to correct. The correct action is simply choosing to walk away and find something better aligned to your dreams.
I’ve made the mistake of not walking away many times myself. To illustrate how easy it is to fall into such mistakes, I shall share two such cases now. Mercifully, in these cases I learned from my mistakes with time; though, there is still the potential for me to make them again in the future. My intention is not to paint myself as a victim of circumstance. I am a fallible person but in making my mistakes public, perhaps you–and even I–might derive some meaning from it.
Exhibit A: Beyond the Pale
We are once again forced to dwell in the bygone year of 2019 or so; forgive me, as an amnesiac I only have so many memories to call upon; we’re probably going to be here a few more times.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a 2019 FromSoft action game of some repute. I was not originally going to meet its release date—life circumstances being what they were—until a friend’s generosity saw my life’s trajectory once more altered. FromSoft had ridden high in my mind for years, hitting home run after home run; each of these releases from Dark Souls to Dark Souls 3 had compelled me into a hundred-hour transaction. I had expected Sekiro to be no different.
To reiterate a rhetorical passage from an earlier review: I fucking hated it.
Sekiro, to my fascination, is simultaneously similar and dissimilar from FromSoft’s prior Souls offerings. The slashing of swords and the presence of bosses to slay is staple, yet there is only one primary melee weapon and no real “build-crafting” to its gameplay. “Stealth mechanics? In a FromSoft game? How odd!” many felt. Self-resurrection featuring prominently in its identity had many speculating if this wasn’t to be the easiest FromSoft game yet.
One internet firestorm and an incredibly funny copypasta later, it was determined this was not the case.
So, where did Lily fall on this?
First, some background context. Credits had been rolled on basically every contemporary FromSoft game in the Soulsborne sphere (even some Armored Core, but that is a story for yet another time). I was not immune to frustration or feelings of “stuckness,” but having played them some dozens of times to completion, I felt like I was well equipped for a new challenge. I don’t say this in the gross, gamer meritocracy way: a person need not have beaten the entire game with a plastic guitar or a banana before critiquing a game the internet likes. I say it primarily because it better articulates the mindset I was in. I was, I thought, someone at the best possible state to engage with Sekiro fairly.
I am not immune to the perspective-warping arguments that circulate around these games. I am mature enough to admit I had been subtly coerced into a mindset which did not suit growth. Playing the game with a big sword, no shield, no spells, no tools, without summons, friendless, very sweaty, made me hot or attractive or cool or all of the above, so said the internet; and up to that point, FromSoft’s games had not pushed back hard enough to disabuse me of that notion.
Then, I played Sekiro.
From the get-go, one could imagine Sekiro would be almost easier to fall into this mindset with. There were no summons; there weren’t any other weapons to make wrong choices with; there was no easy way to grind your problems away. The first few hours passed easily. The first enemies were dispatched with ease. I started appreciating the improved agility, the tactility of the audio queues of the parry system; I was permanently mutated into the plastic-plinking parry pervert who writes this essay now.
I found the first shinobi tool. Within moments, the previous web of connections and neurons in my fried, elitist brain drove me to an inevitable conclusion: this is to be discarded. Mentally, I cast it aside. It was something to distract me from the purity of my precious sword-fighting game. Even as the currency to use said shinobi tools accumulated in my inventory, I elected not to use them; I didn’t need it, so I wouldn’t use it.
The game, within a matter of hours, ceased to be particularly kind to me.
Enemies, now far greater in number, with far better weaponry for dealing with me, began to—phrased as delicately as I am able—kill the absolute fuck out of me. Bosses expanded beyond the scope of what I was capable of comfortably dealing with. Flailing, crab-crawling Voldo cosplayers; Headless corpses who would actually, literally, fist your soul out of your ass; a really, really fucked up bull.
How had my prior experience failed me so? I asked myself.
I managed, through immense effort and no small amount of mental-illness-induced refusal to give up, to get to the first Guardian Ape fight. I will not belabor this point. I got systematically and humiliatingly destroyed. I got destroyed in the way that makes you question why you even play video games. I got owned so hard it makes you feel like a child; like a bully has specifically targeted the load-bearing piece of your self-esteem and kicked it out from under you. I knew, even then, it was unhealthy to base this much of my self-worth on my performance in something as stupid as a game. I just didn’t care.
“I fucking hate this game,” I told anyone who would listen.
I dropped my controller and closed the chapter on Sekiro.
A year passed. A pandemic happened, and while I listlessly played what had been old comforts, Sekiro continued to gaze at me from my Steam library. I had nothing better to do, I reasoned, and I decided to take the plunge again.
The first chunk of the game passed in much the same way. I played, got frustrated, took breaks, came back. In lockdown, it wasn’t like I had much else to occupy my time, and the confidence-bruising boss fights couldn’t make my mental state much worse. Grinding away, I made many of the same mistakes and found myself descending the same path again.
Then, through sheer coincidence, I met a character I had not given much attention to previously. Isshin Ashina is an important character in Sekiro’s world. Mechanically, he is a vendor who grants you scrolls which improve your already robust abilities; narratively, he’s mentor, opposition, and provisioner of lore; but in that moment, he acted as a bridge between the narrative and the mechanics. He gave me the gift of a single set of lines.
“About the ways of the Ashina blade… It’s our school of fighting, but there are no hard and fast rules. You just win your battles. That alone is the most important rule of the Ashina style.”
It seems simple, but it was a revelation then—it single handedly broke down every wall in my way. “None of this honor shit matters, there are no rules,” he seemed to say, “just win.” The gears, previously grinding, found their tread; I had recalibrated.
Connecting to the fantasy of Sekiro—that of the Shinobi inured to bloodshed and willing to do anything to win—did not suddenly make the game easy. There were still fights to win or lose, there was still training I needed to grind into my fingers and hands. But suddenly, there were no rules to force myself to abide by. The game didn’t hurt anymore.
The idea of needing to synchronize with a game was certainly planted then, but had not grown. Arguably, it made a secondary, worse idea:
“I can’t trust my gut instinct. I need to give everything a fair shake or else I risk acting like this again.”
More to the point, it also made me hostage to the fear that I was “missing” something. People did not like things by accident; they were clearly seeing something you weren’t. This prompted me into the second parenthetical to come. A second revisitation and another anecdote; my apologies.
Exhibit B: A Perpetual State of Indifference
My partner is a superfan of Final Fantasy XIV. Over the course of about 3 years of our relationship, she tried to convince me to play it approximately 94,608,000 times. At the time, I smugly asserted—despite my previous and ongoing affection for the Final Fantasy series—it wasn’t for me. MMOs were something I could not imagine the appeal of; the grinding, the social interdependency, and the general fantasy did not sit with me. The wrath of Counter Strike’s finest had ensured I wasn’t interested in environments where social conduct was something I needed to count on in others.
At heart, I’m still a romantic though. Seeing the excitement in her eyes during one of her visits from over 1500 miles away as she watched the world premiere of the Shadowbringers teaser trailer in 2018, I was inspired to give it a try.
To reiterate a rhetorical passage from earlier in this very article: I fucking hated it.
Once more, I’m emotionally mature enough to admit wrongdoing. I played Final Fantasy XIV wrong in just about every way possible to play it wrong. If Sekiro was the finger painting in the art of playing games wrong, this was me sculpting marble busts dedicated to playing them wrong.
I played the story singlemindedly, desperate to find these supposed “good parts” of this game. I walked when I could have rode, in a self-flagellating exercise in better hating this world I had begrudgingly paid money for. I pressed one button in a rotation, when I should have pressed three, all the while saying this game was brain-dead and empty for not forcing me to do better. I zoned out in dungeons and generally made my partner drag my limp body through slate-colored piss cave after slate-colored piss cave. I make myself sound more intentionally villainous in my misbehavior than perhaps is due; from my perspective at the time, I was trying; I simply did not understand how to make the gears click.
To me, the writing was pedestrian and slow, the worldbuilding was cool but constantly forcing me to run this-way-and-that doing favors for people. The coolest parts of the game, I believed, were inexplicably hidden behind hours of busy work. My partner put up with many thankless hours of my grumbling, intolerant prejudging to show me something she loved very much; and to spend time with me.
“Just get to Heavensward,” I told myself. “Just get there, and that’s where the game gets good.” That’s what I had been told, and I had no issues blindly believing it.
Imagine my disappointment then, when Heavensward gave me much of the same. Worse, it had introduced me to, at first blush, the exact sort of traditional fantasy that I went to Final Fantasy to escape from in the first place. Elves in a cold stone castle under attack by dragons.
“Babe. I can’t do this.”
“That’s ok. Thank you for trying it.”
And then we did something else. Even then, it made my heart hurt, disappointing someone I loved so much.
Then a pandemic happened. Then Sekiro happened. Then, as mentioned before, I doubted myself. I decided to give a game I maligned another chance.
So, I booted up Destiny 2. I played it for 500 hours during the pandemic in the most mentally ill state this body could manage and let me tell you: that game is still a piece of shit!
Then, after getting that out of my system, in 2021, I pivoted to Final Fantasy XIV.
It felt strange being back in this betrayed game. I reemerged into this virtual world in the same place, the same position now years later; time appearing to restart as I arrived. Overjoyed at my change of heart, my partner was once more along for the ride. Many of my grievances were still the same: stiff writing, banal world building, snow, dragons. Whatever.
Then, I found the Dark Knight questline. Then, I played the Dark Knight questline. I cried many incredibly complicated tears over the Dark Knight questline; an incredible number of mental-illness-related tears were shed because of the Dark Knight questline.
Another set of clunking gears snapped into place. I found my calibration in the fantasy of the world. In a fashion, I discovered more than one fantasy could exist within the fantasy; if a dream was big enough, it could contain other dreams. Here was a class, a role in the game, whose writing seemed just as irritated at the banality of being a yes man to the whims of fate. Sometimes, you can’t help but express near vengeful derision at being used by people who don’t appreciate you. Yet, it is because you care about people, you care so much about being a protector for those the world would see fit to discard, you must care. Someone has to.
I wailed to myself. I had fucked up again. I had somehow managed to once again get a game completely wrong.
The game whispered, “I forgive you; I forgive you; I forgive you.”
After that, my avatar stopped being a polygonal cage and started being as real as the meat and blood I presently occupy. My calibration afforded me the ability to find a place in this virtual world. I could feel things about it; I could imagine that which the world did not stipulate. It wasn’t about difficulty or the right or wrong way of doing things. It was about reaching out just as far as the game reached to me; letting our gears intermesh until we could understand one another.
Final Fantasy XIV is now one of my most played games. It’s something I still play frequently with my partner. This calibration to the fantasy of the game was not me somehow breaking or lowering my standards; I realized I just needed to be willing to allow myself to connect. The mechanics and the world design of XIV are often at odds. There are flaws in the way it presents the dream it wants you to feel—even I can admit that as a fan. But, even imperfect things can be worth finding value in, if you’re willing to try. Aligning myself, and discovering the dream that suited me within the fantasy, allowed me to care. I clicked into place and found my own in the many disparate dreams which make up this strange, slow, incoherent, beautiful world.
Force Your Way
My framework, my anecdotes, are not meant to convince you my perspective is correct. I have struggled for a long time to feel like I was enjoying things correctly; this is my little attempt to make this make sense to me. Finding the point of synchronicity between myself and a game was something I had to fight for.
Everyone dreams. Everyone has their little, illogical, private dreams. Maybe you imagine being the kind of person who can own a successful business or run an empire. Maybe you’re someone who dreams about brandishing a raw, impossible slab of iron, wielded to protect those who can’t protect themselves. Maybe you dream about just having the energy to clean your room or take care of yourself.
Our shared hobby has room for all these dreams. Allowing myself to sink into the dreams of others has allowed me to find and appreciate things I never knew were within me. Taking the time to think, “what is the fantasy the creator is trying to share with me?” has enabled me to find the stories that best sing to my soul.
I’m not saying thinking this way will liberate you from playing bad or mediocre games ever again, far from it. Playing many games just gives you much more opportunity to play something disappointing. For me, thinking this way is worth it. Games can succeed or fail at delivering a dream. They can do things badly or contradictory and you still endure the lost potential of what could have been. Trust me, I have been haunted by the thought of games just short of being amazing.
Really, this is not self-help. Art is profoundly useless; but it still might save you. This is an exercise for the soul. Feeling things is a muscle you need to exercise. Meeting a game halfway isn’t weakness or rule breaking. Sometimes, you just need to take your feelings out, rotate them in your palm, and find what you need right now.
Play isn’t something taught. You can’t intellectually get into a state of play. It’s something you find, feel, grow within yourself. In this hobby, and its attached parasitic industry, so obsessed with achievement and right and wrong ways of playing, it can be easy to forget this is something we do for fun. Even now, however, this is a part of you that remembers how to dream. This is a part, if you are like me, that you can grow, and grow, and grow; No matter what your age, it can grow. So, make it a pleasant dream, for your own sake.
