Words: 2099 Approximate Reading Time: 15-20 minutes
Back in November of 2024 some stuff happened that took the wind out of my sails and made me decide to stop doing regular updates to this blog. As I recorded in a post a month later, that was itself a culmination of some other issues that I was running into in the writing process.
In writing that post I made two promises.
First, that I had a batch of essays that were at different stages of completion, and I would post the whole batch once they were done.
Second, that I would continue writing, but instead of a weekly essay I would try to do deeper dives on topics that really interested me. These essays would be posted when they were finished, so there wouldn’t be a set schedule.
What’s New
So on that first promise…they’re done.
I have seven essays on a pretty wide variety of topics that I had accumulated over quite a while. Some were ideas that I had started but didn’t know how to finish, so I just left them for something else, hoping inspiration would strike later. Some had been half-finished and just needed time to reach a conclusion. And a couple were nothing more than titles to remind me of a concept for later.
Since there’s a lot, part of the purpose of this essay is to serve as a kind of table of contents. Here is a brief overview of each essay so you can make sure that you don’t miss anything (assuming you don’t want to miss anything), and to let you better decide which you might want to read (assuming you don’t mind missing some things).
An exploration of tabletop mechanics in video games and in particular a journey into my own mind. I have devoted a lot of essays to talking about how hard it is to understand why we like and dislike something, and here I wrestle with that very question in relation to my dissatisfaction with Baldur’s Gate 3. I felt this kind of dissection was valuable precisely because it illustrated the change in my own opinion of the game and mechanics as I spent more time sitting down and re-thinking that opinion – a process that involved trying to write this very essay.
A pretty straightforward essay on how challenge can be used to create a mystique about a game and encourage a player’s sense of wonder. I am particularly fascinated with the enemy that is far too powerful. That kind of obstacle presents the player with a kind of promise that they can hope to cash in on down the road, and gives the world a slight tinge of realness that makes it more interesting to engage with. It may not always be done right, but when it is done well there’s a certain magic to it.
I find it really valuable to revisit old essays, because thinking is never really done. You reach a conclusion, but you can always spend more time on it. Not least because there are different lenses through which you can view the same question. This essay was an opportunity to sit down with one of the first topics I wrote about: how we interpret things. And in particular I looked at authorial intent and the nature of “canon.” But rather than looking at the question through mere interpretational technique, I wanted to examine the role that canon itself plays within our engagement with a game’s story.
Another revisiting of an old essay. This one flowed together with other essays I had written on toxicity within gaming communities. But my aim here wasn’t simply at the toxic players themselves, but the way in which their language and ideas seep into the minds of normally non-toxic players. How methods of play that should be regarded as legitimate or valid are perceived as “wrong,” leading to players steering away from those methods, possibly to their own detriment.
Yet another revisit to one of my first essays. I have long been interested in genre because it’s a way that we use concepts to communicate. Back in the day I was really obsessed with the definition of the soulslike in particular, but the more I think on the topic of genres more generally I find myself unsure why I cared so much. I think I felt that if we simply stood firm with a solid definition we could “rescue” the genre. But now I understand that any attempt to perfectly define a genre is an exercise in futility.
On Storytelling: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
One of my interpretive analysis essays – and the last one I will likely do on a FromSoft game (I have zero intention of writing one for Elden Ring). A deep dive into the idea of immortality and how the pursuit of it is inherently corrupting.
Another interpretive analysis, but with a twist. This time around I found myself with very little to say about the theme of Rime, and through the struggle to find something realized that maybe I didn’t need to find something to say. That a game can have a theme that isn’t particularly deep, but can still be beautiful and engaging.
What’s Next
As for the second promise, I actually have some ideas of what I want to write about. Two of these are partially done, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be ready soon. Since as I mentioned they were intended to be deeper dives, they will require a lot more time and effort – and in some cases thorough research.
Nevertheless, I did want to lay out the broad idea for those essays as I currently envision them. Call it a way of whetting a reader’s appetite…which is actually rather cruel given how long the wait could be for any of these essays.
Cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the Mythology of Ownership
When NFTs (non-fungible tokens) were taking off and being shoved into video games, I tried to write a couple of essays on the technology and in particular examine the ways in which they were bad for games. One of the core ideas I tried to present was how a lot of the appeal of NFTs was built around some stories about money – getting rich or earning back some of the funds you spent on a product.
These things thankfully ended up crashing out and now they exist mostly on the fringes, always trying to squeeze their way back in. And so both in the hopes of making sure the doors stay closed to this technology, and also as a bit of inoculation against any similar technology in the future, I wanted to examine and dissect more broadly the stories about ownership that were constructed around this hype.
The basic idea was that game items now are something you effectively “rent” because if the game is no longer supported or you stop playing or you get banned, you lose access to that item. The supposed appeal of NFTs was that you would “truly own” those items, and get all sorts of perks with that – transferability, tradability, resale value, etc.
And I thought it useful to deconstruct this mythology down to its very core. That this idea was not only incorrect in how it was and would ever be applied, but that it’s not actually even desirable. Which might seem weird given how much money we can end up spending on stuff within a game (and that certainly warrants all of the critiques that have and ever will be leveled at microtransactions). But leaning into this idea does not actually create anything valuable for games or players – it turns engagement with a game that is meant to be fun into a sort of value extraction.
Difficulty, Fun, and Retrospection
I have written, just, so many essays on Dark Souls and similar games from a lot of angles. So chalk another one up on the board.
In watching a playthrough of Elden Ring I observed a player really struggling with some bosses and looking…frustrated. There was something almost uncomfortable about that experience, and yet at the end of it this player won and ended up talking about how much he loved the fight.
And that gave me a bit of pause. To what extent do we understand our own experiences? It’s a rather strange question to ask (why not just trust what a person says?), but another topic I’ve written on a lot is how we often struggle to really express ourselves and comprehend why we feel a certain way.
So I wanted to dig into what research I could find on how we process fun and especially how experiences change across time. Put a different way – the story about these difficult games is that they’re frustrating when you’re hitting your head against the wall, but once you win the thrill of victory more than makes up for it. But how well does that narrative actually hold up?
Lore and Interpretive Analysis
In the same vein as the prior essay, I’ve also been sort of fascinated with the growth of games that focus on telling their stories through tiny bits and pieces, presenting a world that you as a player must construct bit-by-bit.
These games have led to a proliferation of channels and essays and forum posts attempting to decipher clues and put together information in a way to make a kind of cohesive story. And the focus often ends up being a kind of “true” reconstruction – the collective aim is to figure out what is really going on.
But the more I have seen people engage with stories in this way, the more concerned I get that it’s a sort of poisonous approach. That the idea of a world and story existing as a set of puzzle pieces that simply need to be put together results in missing a lot of things through what isn’t said. This ties into the essay above about canon.
I wanted to use this essay to ask if “lore analysis” ends up presenting a narrow view of a game’s story, locking us into a mindset that all that matters to an analysis is hunting for that bit of information that somehow brings all of the pieces together.
The Pathologization of Design
Spurred, oddly enough, by watching a playthrough of a game on YouTube, I was interested in how people treat the concept of “design” for video games. How the knowledge that things can be designed leads to weird conclusions about how things are designed.
The crux of the matter is intent – is bad design something intended, or merely a mistake? By knowing something is designed, we can end up attributing a kind of malice or meanness to something that was simply overlooked. Or we might see an auteur designer and believe that single person was responsible for every detail of a game, even if the game itself is developed by a large team.
So I wanted to sit down and dissect how we can end up taking the idea of “a game is something designed” to a strange conclusion, such that we end up “pathologizing” the very idea of design itself. That design essentially infects all parts of a game, and all parts of a game must be understood through the intentionality that comes with design.
Concluding Remarks
It would be cool to say that this batch of essays marks my triumphant return. But it isn’t so. I have worn myself out too much to produce writings at the levels I used to, and my schedule wouldn’t allow me to even if I had that energy.
But I do still like the process of thinking through these big topics and writing about them. I do want to keep doing it. I just need to do it at a different, much slower, pace.
The four essays above are not the only posts to expect. I may play a game and be struck by its design (for good or ill) to do an analysis of something, like with my recent-ish Blue Prince post. I’m sure it will happen. But I need to stop forcing it to happen.
I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read this blog, whether it’s only one post or all of them. I hope that I have been able to inspire at least one person to engage with games more critically, and I hope that in the future I will be able to inspire at least one other person.
Abstracting Games 