[Music]

Trevor Strunk: Welcome to No Cartridge Audio. My name is Trevor Strunk, Hegelbon on Twitter. I feel very out of practice, because it’s been a little while since I’ve recorded one of these, which is weird. But “a little while” I guess is like two weeks, so apologies for the one week delay between these. But I’m here, I’m really happy to have on the show Kevin Snow. Goes by the @bravemule on Twitter, and we have them here to talk to us about all sorts of stuff. Kevin, thank you so much for being here.

Kevin Snow: Absolutely. I’m really excited to be here.

Trevor: So you… the way we kind of became acquainted was via this quirky, interesting, underrated game called Pathologic 2, which is a reimagining, reinventing, remastering of the original sort of cult classic Pathologic. I want to touch on this, I just want to get to this early, cause I also want to talk about all of your other work sort of in the meat of the show. But you were sort of, you were the localizer on Pathologic 2. And you were telling me why you did it; I think people would be really interested in hearing why you decided to, to get involved in localizing since it’s not usually a job you take on.

Kevin: Yeah, I’m usually like a narrative designer and writer in games. But actually, part of the reason I became a writer and narrative designer is because the original Pathologic, which came out in 2005 or so. And it’s obviously this really weird, niche — especially at the time — open-world game which in the mid-2000s was pretty unusual. Like, you know, you had some games, but the vocabulary for them, like the game design vocabulary, wasn’t really established. So you had this like, obscure, Eastern European, Russian, open-world game that was super janky, super unpolished. Like, at the time, major parts of the script were like machine translated — which I loved — gave it like this really surreal quality. Like half the time you really couldn’t even parse what was going on in the story.

And it kind of gained traction after like, over a course of years, like Rock, Paper, Shotgun did this article series with Quintin Smith where he played through the game. And that was actually how I found out about it in like 2008 or 2009, I was, like, I think I was like 18 or 19. I was in community college and I checked out the game because the article series. And I ended up loving the game so much that in undergrad I started studying Russian and Russian literature and Russian history, because I was a history major. So I took like, as many courses as I could in that department. I didn’t end up minoring in it, but I think I had the sufficient credits to, but I ended up minoring in something else just because of, you know, undergrad shit.

Trevor: I mean, the good news is from what I hear [from] minors, I mean, I should know this more because I teach part time at a college… But minors don’t really… I guess they’re sort of just vanity things. It sounds like you’ve basically you’ve over overachieved beyond any sort of minor I’ve ever heard of. [Laughs] I mean, that’s really cool. I-

One of the things I was taken by the localization in Pathologic 2, which I paid a lot more attention to after we spoke, I was really impressed by the game initially. And then after I knew that, you localized it, I decided to pay a little more attention to that. And, you know, one of the things that has struck me so much about localization to begin with is how difficult it must be. How, like, absolutely hard it is to pair together things from… you know… over translation, and then make them such that you understand the initial enough that you can produce a quality of, you know, actual cultural transmission in the new version.

And I really was, like… I got the feeling people asked me about Pathologic 2, and I tweeted about it, they were like, “Oh, is it really Russian like Pathologic 1?” And I was like, yeah, no, totally. But it doesn’t feel Russian in the way that like, Oh, I can’t relate with this at all. It just makes no sense to me. [It] totally makes sense. So did you find that narrative design helped you understand localization a little bit better? Or, put a different way, did that skill set help you with what would seem to be a sort of different skill set there?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Especially because so much of the reason I started making games was because of the first Pathologic, which was… like I was fascinated by how broken the story in it was essentially. But it had like this really beautiful poetic quality to how broken it was. So when I started making games, I was thinking, actually, about the processes of cultural communication and translation and localization. Because one of the earliest games I actually made was called The Domovoi, which was this Twine game based off Russian folklore about this Soviet storyteller who’s telling this story to you, the player, about this old Russian folkloric character who- they’re kind of reinterpreting for the political moment. And they’re having difficulty, as they tell the story, trying to translate the story in a way.

So it was really interesting, because after I, like I kind of ended up going full circle when I ended up working on Pathologic because I was originally making games that were kind of inspired by my love of how strange the original game was. And then I had to reinterpret the story that I thought I understood. But actually I didn’t, because at the time, I didn’t know Russian. So I wasn’t really familiar with the Russian script. And then I had to learn to read Russian better for the localization. And I ended up understanding the story in a completely different way. So as kind of, like, comparing my old understanding to my new understanding and, like, tried to retain the mood and the emotions that I had when I played it for the first time but in a way that could be parsed better, I guess.

Trevor: Yeah, definitely. I guess, like, one of the things that- I remember one of the earliest moments where I was sort of thrown off by translation, or the concept of translation — I’ve never translated anything — but the concept of it was when I was in my undergrad, and I got my degree in English. And I remember getting there, doing my undergrad and being like, oh, you know- at some point or another I was like, Oh, you know, I’m fine reading anything in translation. Like, it’s just as good. I don’t really care, like I don’t see the reason to ever learn any languages and read them in the original. You know, just something like a dumb 20-year-old would say.

And someone pointed out to me, they were like, you know it’s… really, translation is essentially rewriting. Like, it is in many ways, like, a total reimagination. And I, you know, I never knew how much I actually believed that it was akin to rewriting or not, but the very- the idea kind of struck me and stuck with me, like. Did you feel like you were rewriting at times, which isn’t to say, like, did you go off the reservation? Or like, I’m trying to get you to tell on yourself, but like, did you… did you feel like you were sort of, like, authoring Pathologic 2 as much as you were translating it?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. And before I kind of get into the nitty-gritty detail on the work that I did, I should also mention that I worked with [localization lead Alexandra Golubeva, or] “Alphyna” who did the raw translations of a lot of the script, but also with her own creative touch and her own voice. And I also had my collaborators — Laura Michet, Bruno Dias, and Cat Manning — who… I oversaw their work and edited all of it, but they also handled large parts of the script on their own. So it’s also just established like a really collaborative process.

Trevor: That’s wonderful.

Kevin: But yeah, like, in terms of “rewriting,” that’s a perfect way of putting it because, like, especially Ice-Pick Lodge, the developers of Pathologic, they expected that when- from our earliest conversations. Actually, my writing test for the game was the character Bad Grief. And so, yeah, the reason they sent me him was because his… in the Russian script, his dialogue is steeped in like, metaphor and wordplay that is all heavily based off language that is highly specific to the Russian language and Russian history. So…

Trevor: Wow. That’s challenging.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah. And it really is. Like, he was… that character took 10 times as long to localize as any other character, because nearly every line of dialogue he had had to be rewritten in a way where it retains the mood and the feeling of the original, and also the meaning in a lot of ways, but arrived there through different language, through different words, through different sentences, through different metaphors. Like, there was a six month period where every morning when I was taking a shower, I was just turning over Russian idioms in my head, trying to come up with some way that I could communicate the same concept in English. It’s rough.

Trevor: It reminds me of how people talk about translating [Jacques] Derrida where they say it’s just hell, because every single thing he’s saying, is or could be or may be a turn of phrase in French. Like he might be making a pun, or a joke or something. And it’s like, how do you- do I focus on making this work? Do I keep it out entirely? And I, I personally agree with your approach, not that I’d be able to replicate it, but the idea of like… rewrite so the puns land. Like, that’s… the character feels very, he feels very witty. He feels very much like a wry smile kind of guy and I think that would have been lost had it just been like, “well, these are Russian idioms, we’re not gonna be able to get anything out of them.”

Kevin: Exactly. Yeah. And that’s not what Ice-Pick Lodge wanted either. Like, they wanted to give the people working, like, the localization team kind of room to creatively interpret the script. And, you know, they had to pull us back sometimes and be like, “Okay, this line is a little bit too off base for the character.” Or maybe like, we need to have a conversation about what’s going on with the script. So they were really protective of their script, which is fantastic. It was, really, I feel like it’s the perfect way to handle that kind of localization, where it’s really in-house, but the localizers still have a lot of creative freedom to kind of do their own work.

Trevor: That’s really cool. So, you know, I want to get back to Pathologic 2 eventually, because I want to talk to you more about what you love in the game, and what you loved about Pathologic 1 and all that. But I guess I feel like I would be remiss not to take this moment to also shift to your work. So you talk about all the things that you did within rewriting and the ways that you were able to craft these characters and work collaboratively. And it really does sound like kind of a perfect gaming ecosystem where in like — or game design ecosystem where it’s like everyone’s kind of working together. And it feels like the skills you brought would really lend themselves to narrative design. So as I do with many of my guests, I don’t want to tell people what your CV is. I think it’d be better if you did. So what is your- what is the rest of your career as a narrative designer look like?

Kevin: Yeah, I started off writing Dwarf Fortress fanfiction for the Something Awful forums… [Laughs]

Trevor: I mean, I can’t blame you for that. That rocks.

Kevin: …In like 2010 or so when I first, like, I got out of the military and I started going to college for the first time. And on the Something Awful forums, I started posting this Let’s Play of Dwarf Fortress. And Dwarf Fortress, if any of your listeners don’t know is like this very-

Trevor: Oh, I hope they know. But please tell them.

Kevin: Yeah, I also hope they do. But it’s this very dense, kind of procedural storytelling game. From a single creator, Tarn Adams. And his brother Zach Adams, who also helps out with the game. I met them recently; they’re like super amazing and cool, and just like the sweetest people. But what I did was I played through a session of Dwarf Fortress, like a single run, cause the game always ends in failure and defeat and your fortress being destroyed by goblins or all of your dwarves getting into a civil war or whatever. It really lends itself to kind of, you know, authored stories. And I paired that-

Trevor: It seems like so I want to say it’s very much a- I’m starting to notice a theme between your favorite games.

Kevin: [Laughs.] Yeah, exactly.

Trevor: But go ahead, sorry.

Kevin: So I paired that with artwork from my friend [Princess?] Catalinas and a musician who… Thomas Ferkol, who was one of the musicians for Homestuck at the time. And so we released this Let’s Play on the Something Awful forums, like one update a month. Sometimes we got a little delayed, but it went on for like three years before we actually finished it.

Trevor: Man, that’s so good. That’s such a forums thing too. Like, I can’t even imagine that happening outside of… I know, YouTube has stuff like that and it happens, but it feels like the best-case scenario of the forums to have something like that.

Kevin: I know, like, and then that was so specific to the Something Awful Let’s Play forums too. And really that was what got me into Pathologic in the first place too. Like that Rock, Paper, Shotgun article series from Quintin Smith was really similar to a Let’s Play; it was essentially just a published one. But yeah… after we finished that, I decided instead of, like, making fanfiction for games, I just wanted to make games.

Trevor: [Laughs.] Fair enough. Yeah.

Kevin: So I started making Twine games. I learned some JavaScript and some CSS because I didn’t know any coding or anything like that at the time — I just kind of knew writing and kind of making things and organizing a project. Like, I felt really confident at the time cause I did this… what was basically kind of a webcomic or Let’s Play. Like I did this weird thing for three years and actually finished it. I wanna finish some other things. So I started making Twine games. I made a couple of those, they usually took about six or seven months to make. And I got really involved in the interactive fiction community through that.

Trevor: So what what kind of interactive fiction were you working with? Because I know that term kind of has become capacious in a way that I always mess up on. Like it could be a visual novel, it could be something entirely different, it could be experimental games, like… What kind of interactive fiction were you involved with?

Kevin: Yeah, it’s… it’s a really dense- it’s a dense term that refers to a lot of different, like, design traditions. So I got started around what people were referring to at the time as the “Twine Revolution,” which referred to a lot of experimental, introspective games with limited branching that you could play in five to 10 minutes in your web browser. Like howling dogs, Horse Master, my father’s long, long legs — games like that. And then I started to kind of get an end road to the parser community — like Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, creators from that design tradition — because they were taking notice of what was going on in Twine. And because I was making Twine games, and they were noticing Twine, and I became really interested in the history of their works. Obviously, that particular interactive fiction community goes back to the 1980s. But especially has been very prolific and putting out really stunning work since like, the late 1990s or so.

Trevor: That’s interesting.

Kevin: So that was really fascinating to me, because I felt like, “Oh the Twine Revolution, you know, this brand new thing; everyone is, you know, doing all this new stuff.” And then I kind of realized around 2014 or 2015, that actually all this actually goes all the way back to the 1990s. It’s just I didn’t notice because you know, this is a really niche community.

Trevor: It’s always great when like, what is old is new again, and what is new is old again. Like that’s just a- I feel like that’s something that always has to happen when you’re getting into something, especially something like Twine or something like interactive fiction. Like, you just realize- you get really confident about the thing you’re doing, and then all of a sudden you’re like, “Well, actually, no. I guess this is this is something that someone has already done…” And then you have to become confident about something else.

Kevin: Yeah. And that’s… that’s, like, really exciting when you figure that out. It’s like, “Oh, okay, so people have, like, already been talking about these problems I’m running into for over a decade.” And even have some answers to some of them already. [Laughs] Which is really nice.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah. What I like about your story too is… you know, there’s this sense of… the sense of, sort of discovery and collaboration that really is shot through all of your design work. And it- you know, it feels… I think Twine gets a bad reputation, or maybe not anymore, because it’s not as widely used as it was in the Twine Revolution. But I remember I talked to Warren[IsDead on Twitter] about my father’s long, long leg quite a while ago. And it was sort of the same thing where Twine games get a really like bad rep, because it’s just- the idea is, “Oh, they’re lazy,” or “They’re from people who can’t make video games. They’re not actually games. It’s just a story.” And on some level, the actual act of massive collaboration like you’re describing, wherein people have stuff that they can do and stuff that they can’t do, and they rely on each other to produce this massive thing that not one of them could do on their own; like, that makes it feel less like… and I mean, I love literature, I’ve dedicated most of my life to it. But it’s different than literature, it’s more than literature in a certain way.

Kevin: Yeah, like, it’s a design tradition. And that, like, there’s bodies of work that people respond to over time, and all these authors are responding to that and also things outside of themselves and adjacent to themselves. And yeah, also, Michael’s work is amazing. I love his… I always feel like I end up shouting him out on every podcast I’m on.

Trevor: I always end up calling him Warren instead of Michael…

Kevin: It’s cause of his Twitter tag… [Laughs]

Trevor: I know… it’s WarrenIsDead and I talk to him all the time. I don’t… it’s really- it’s one of those things where, like, inevitably it’s just one of those names where you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the guy I know. It’s- that person has a handle. That’s this. And that’s their name.” That’s the internet for ya…

Kevin: Michael “Michael Warren” Lutz. That’s his official name.

Trevor: Yeah, that’s right, Michael “Warren” Lutz. Yeah. And I just- I just like to call him his nickname. That’s all. Um, but yeah, no, it’s… I guess the follow-up that I should ask is, Do you consider yourself a… Do you consider yourself a designer more than a writer? Or do you consider yourself like… That’s the wrong question. Do you consider yourself part of a design tradition or part of a literary tradition? Because I could see both being the case.

Kevin: I think at this point, I kind of see myself as being part of more of the design tradition. Just because in the past couple of years, that’s what a lot of my work is focused more towards. Just because it’s what I’ve been getting hired to do. So the balance of design-to-writing ends up leaning more towards design. Not in the case of Pathologic; in that case, the design was Ice-Pick Lodge, and I was purely handling localization and editing. Which is… the design was already in place there. So that was actually kind of nice in that regard, like having a quarter of a million word script that I didn’t have to think about any design problems on.

Trevor: [Laughs] Yeah, that must have been sort of, like, a refreshing change of pace,

Kevin: Right? Yeah.

Trevor: Can you talk about some of the other games you’ve made that- like some of the things that you’ve made in the past? Things that you are working on now? I know we’ve briefly discussed some of the stuff you’re working on now. And I definitely want you to plug away on that. Like, I want to hear all about, like, what you’re- what you’ve been up to?

Kevin: Yeah. So a couple things I worked on that’ve come out… I worked on Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, which I’m still really proud of. I think that was an excellent game and I worked with some amazing people on it. And actually, everyone I worked with on Pathologic were people that I worked with Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. We we worked so well together on that game that we decided to like… essentially, when I got the position with Ice-Pick Lodge, I was like, “Okay, I need collaborators. Who do I work well with?” And we had just finished Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. So it was kind of a perfect situation.

Trevor: That’s great.

Kevin: So other than that game, I’m working right now on Signs of the Sojourner, which is like a narrative deck-builder. And it’s actually currently on Indiegogo. But instead- essentially, it’s like a card game, kind of similar to a lot of card video games. But instead of battles, you’re actually having conversations with people and the card game is a metaphor for trying to build a relationship with them and connect with them in a conversation.

Trevor: Oh, wow. So in a lot of ways, it reminds me of- I mean, do you get any sort of comparisons there to things like Undertale or that sort of like Toby Fox-ish kind of stuff where, like, conversation and restraint, were introduced? Maybe something like OFF or something like that, where it really questions, your choices to battle?

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. Like it kind of makes you rethink about the mechanics that you’re familiar with. Like the tagline that we use is “Your deck is your character,” because the cards represent certain styles of communication. And it- it leads to really interesting narrative outcomes. So there’s Sojourner. There’s also BattleCakes, which is a game I’m working on with Volcano Bean, and I’m narrative designer and co-writer on that. And it’s kind of like this RPG where you play this group of cupcakes who are trying to save the world. And it’s like a game for kids so it’s completely different from all the horror and stuff that I work on.

Trevor: It sounds fun. I mean, do you have to do you have to watch yourself where, like, it seems to me… it seems like- this is what I was sort of, like, teasing earlier. But just to make it explicit for the listeners, it seems to me that most of the games you play and most of the games that inspire you are… are… these games that kind of have a lot to do with failure? Or like ultimate failure? … Difficulty? Is that fair to say?

Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Like 100 percent.

Trevor: I can say a lot about that with Pathologic 2 as well. Like, I think we can definitely talk about that. But first question: is it difficult to write a kids game without kind of just saying, “Okay, this game is about, like, how nothing is possible and like, where- you’re going to fail?” Like, that seems like a rough kids’ game.

Kevin: Yeah. And it would be rough, and they have to to rein me in on that a lot. And I kind of have to like, it- Fortunately I’m growing up in a time where there’s a lot of kids’ media that deals with really difficult subjects, like Steven Universe and Adventure Time. So I can kind of draw on those more for inspiration where like, you know, it’s not hokey and insincere. It’s, like, stuff that’s actually meaningful — in a way that’s less horrifying than, you know, Pathologic or any of the other things that I work on. But yeah, it is difficult sometimes; it’s like a different mindset. I have to, like, it’s like a different brain that I have to tune into for sure.

Trevor: Well, so what is it about… What is it about difficulty that draws you?

Kevin: I think it’s… I just don’t want to, like, get into a box of doing the same thing over and over again. And I’m also curious about doing stuff that’s wildly different compared to what I’m used to, so that I can kind of learn from that and pull it back into what I decided I’d enjoy. I kind of think about how, like, the Mad Max director [George Miller] also worked on Happy Feet. Like, it’s that kind of discrepancy.

Trevor: Yeah, no, that’s totally makes sense. I think, like, the… you know, the question of… so let me put it this way. One of the things I really love about Pathologic 2 and, like, a lot of people were asking me about it when I tweeted about it — or saying like- because I thought it was like ultra well-received. And I was surprised to find out that people had mixed opinions, or people hadn’t heard of it. And it just surprised me. So I was just like, “Everyone should just go play this game.” And people were like, “Well is it like… people said, ‘It’s like, so hard, like, you die so often that it kind of waste your time.’”

And I was like, I just don’t think that’s true. Like, I think it being difficult’s kind of the point. Like, it’s fun to play something that’s hard, it’s fun to play something that puts you in a situation where. Yeah, like, this whole town is extremely screwed up and extremely not going to make it and you are not the hero to fix it necessarily, not without without a lot of work. And I don’t know, like, that, in some ways that feels cathartic? And I don’t know if that’s the same for you, but there’s something about it. That just feels good to me to think about. I just want to think about that a lot.

Kevin: Yeah, it does cathartic. And I feel like that’s the one thing that I’ve been obsessed with in my career of making games, is the idea of the story continuing past failure and engaging with what failure means and what failure feels like. But it’s also the hardest thing to communicate to people who play video games, because throughout the entire design tradition of video games, like, failure means some game over. Failure means you messed up. Failure means there’s a punishment and you have to correct it and continue. Because even in challenging games like Dark Souls and series like that, failure teaches you. Whereas in something like Pathologic, failure isn’t necessarily teaching you anything. It just wants you to fail and think about what it means to fail.

Trevor: Yeah. I mean, it’s like- it’s… It was something in my last playthrough, and I was kind of teasing… I wasn’t teasing this, but I suggested it when we were chatting before the show. I stopped it when we were originally gonna record. And we recorded a little later, which was great; cause what happened was, after I stopped my run of Pathologic I was really stressed out. Because… [Laughs] I had found out I was getting to a point where everyone hated me. And it was early in the game, and everyone still hated me, or will always hate me… I’m not sure; depends on what happens I guess. But I couldn’t get anywhere to sleep. And I was like, “I need to go to sleep, or else this exhaustion’s going to kill me.” But there’s no beds, and no one trusts me. So I can’t go to sleep. And I just caught myself thinking, like, “What if I couldn’t go to sleep in real life?”

Like, this is making me think about what it would be like to just be stuck in this position where I couldn’t sleep. And it was horrifying. And it’s like something that I would never think about. And having to think about it was… I don’t know, this is trite to say, but it was, like, it was a little bit surprising. Like it was eye- opening in a way.

Kevin: Right. Yeah. Like, I think what Ice-Pick Lodge was going for there is, like, this idea that it’s not just hunger and sleep aren’t just like these meters that you kind of balance as you walk through and experience the story. But they’re an actual experience that you have to engage with.

Trevor: Yeah, and that’s like, when people are like, “Oh, you know, it’s just, it seems so hard,” I understand why people are frustrated with difficult games. And I understand why that discourse exists. But also, I think, like, if you made it easier than those wouldn’t be an experience. And that’s just such a tricky thing to balance.

Kevin: I got kind of desperate after the game came out, because of the way reviews were coming- the way that reviews were discussing it. And I think I made this tweet thread where I was like, “Okay, it’s okay to die in Pathologic. Actually, you should die over and over again, because they’re specifically like… at least 10,000 words that I had to translate that you can only see if you’re failing.” Like, there’s… there’s so many-

Trevor: Please, please fail. So my job wasn’t a waste of time.

Kevin: Exactly. Exactly. Like there’s so many instances in Pathologic where… it’s- There are many story arcs where failure actually leads to more interesting and fleshed out outcomes than, quote unquote, “succeeding” in them would. And I think that’s a large, like, there’s not a lot of games that do that. Like usually — you get a game over, or you die and you start over. You load your last save. Whereas in Pathologic, you can’t even do that. Like, if you try to load your last save, it knows that you did that and retains the consequences for it.

Trevor: Right. I think the other thing about it is, it’s very difficult to explain a game like that. And not in a way that makes it seem like it’s insulting you.

Kevin: Yeah. It’s hard not to sound like an asshole.

Trevor: Yeah, right. Like, it’s hard to make it seem like “Oh, no, no, the game like, does not think you’re a bad person for losing.” Or, like, the game isn’t saying like, “Oh, you are a terrible hero. You know, this town needed a better hero.” It’s like the game is trying to tell you that, like, there’s not a lot of situations you’re going to succeed in period in this world. You’re just gonna have to come to terms with that.

Kevin: Yeah. And I was trying to like… I felt like I… it’s, it’s difficult because I feel like the Russian fan community for Pathologic understands the game so much differently than the English audience did. So I ended up doing, like, a lot of tweet threads after the game came out where I was kind of like, trying to bridge that barrier I guess. And Mark, the… you know, in Pathologic when you die. He’s on the theater stage and he talks shit to you about the fact that he died. And I was trying to stress to the English-playing audience that the fact that Mark is scolding you doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, it just means Mark is an asshole who… Mark is a character who has his own priorities, which is his theater production not getting fucked up. Personally, I think Mark is a piece of shitand you should do whatever he can to just piss them off at every opportunity, even if they include dying over and over again.

Trevor: Yeah, I had- like, I’m very, very careful in games like Pathologic. And in Pathologic, for not like- I want to be careful to be like a nice person as often as I can to people I’m talking to. Which is not always going to work at Pathologic, but I was not at all worried about being a jerk to Mark.

Kevin: Right. And-

Trevor: Mark is clearly just, like, full of himself. And he’s a typical villain.

Kevin: Right. And, you know, I don’t want to make assumptions about anyone’s feelings about life and who deserves life… But it’s very difficult to keep all the characters in Pathologic alive. But if you really think about it, how many of them deserve to live anyway? [Laughs] Like, it’s a lot less stressful when you consider, you know… I don’t want to name names, but some of those characters… They- like I don’t want to play favorites either because there’s always some segment of the community who really feel strongly about a particular character, but some of them… the world might be a better place, the town might be a better place if they kind of kicked the bucket.

Trevor: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think like, and this was something that I remember from… And I bounced off of this game very hard. And it’s a super, you know, typical triple-A game. But I remember when I got back into gaming, one of the games- like I had a break in gaming between, I don’t know, mainly during college; I didn’t game very much. And the first game system I got that was, like, properly next-gen after the PS2 was an Xbox 360. And so I was behind in a bunch of games. And one of the games I bought was Dead Rising, because I was like, “Oh, everyone seems to love this game.”

Kevin: Oh yeah, I loved that game.

Trevor: It’s a great game, like, it’s a super good game. And I bounced off of it so hard, because I was like, well, I can’t save everyone. Like, there’s someone dying, and I can’t get there because I’m just this one guy, and I can’t do it. There’re too many zombies, I’m not gonna be able to save this person at all. And I think about that all the time. Because it’s like, why should that be such a problem? Like, why should? [Laughs] Why should I want…? I wouldn’t like that in literature. I wouldn’t like it in a movie. Why does it have to be a power fantasy in a video game?

Kevin: Exactly. Yeah. And it’s… it’s tough in video games. Because when you talk about scope and everything, usually one of the first things that gets cut is, like, routes that most players won’t see. So if you haven’t route where a character dies, that I think players usually associate that with there being less narrative content. And as a narrative designer, that’s something I always stress on projects that involve a lot of this kind of, like, Last Express/ Majora’s Mask/even Dead Rising 1 kind of narrative approach to narrative design — where there’s multiple valid outcomes to narrative situations, that when the player does fail, there should be story threads that are unique for that certain path so that they don’t feel like they had an inferior experience for failing. And I feel like that’s something Pathologic in particular hones in on. That there are many routes where failing leads to more, essentially, “narrative content.”

Trevor: Yes, someone asked me to explain why, like, I didn’t mind failing in Pathologic, because I said, I was like, oh the game just opens it up for you to fail. Like it doesn’t need to punish you necessarily, in the way that like, punishment usually means in video games. And they’re like, Well why? And I was like, well, just because that’s just what’s going to happen in this town. Like you get there and it’s immediately doomed, even if you didn’t see the beginning part. Like it’s obvious that nothing good’s gonna happen here. And that opens things up to be like what’s the experience I’m going to have?

Kevin: Exactly.

Trevor: Which is not really what happens in video games too often.

Kevin: Yeah. And it’s tough, because that’s not the case in most video games, it’s really hard to explain to people that “No, no, this is the opposite of everything you’ve been taught about playing a video game.” And so it’s really easy to kind of go into this experience and die a lot and think, “Oh, I’m doing something wrong, I’m getting really frustrated,” and kind of bounce off the game before you can get a chance to get a glimpse at what it’s doing differently.

Trevor: So let me ask you… you know, one of the things we’ve talked a lot about in our conversation so far is failure. And this idea of difficulty and missing paths and all this stuff. How much of- How much of your gaming design is about recursion? Like, I don’t want to put it too much on the nose, but it seems like, especially coming from a Twine perspective, that inversion might be something that you care about. Or not “inversion,” excuse me. “Recursion,” recursion.

Kevin: Yeah, it absolutely is. Like, it’s… I feel like those are always the games that affected me the most. Like, besides Pathologic, I also reference Majora’s Mask, which is my favorite Zelda game purely from a narrative side perspective, but also the stories in that are incredible. But there’s another game I’ve been working on for a couple of yours called Southern Monsters, and it comes out early next year. I Kickstarted it in early 2017, soo it’s been a pretty long development cycle. But it’s an autobiographical game, made in Unity with ink. And it’s, like, densely interactive fiction; like it has a 120,000 words script, it has hundreds of these gorgeous illustrations from Patrick [Bonaduce], it has an original soundtrack. I- like, we’ve been working on it for a really long time. But the basic story of it is that you play this- it’s autobiographical. You play a teenager in South Arkansas, who believes in cryptids and they specifically believe in a cryptid in their town called the Boggy Creek monster. And…

Trevor: Is that a real cryptid, or is that…?

Kevin: Yeah it’s a real cryptic. There’s like a bunch of amazing documentaries about it that were released in the late ’70s and the early ’80s, like The Legend of Boggy Creek. It’s a really cheesy… actually, not to get too off-track, but the movie-

Trevor: No, there’s no off-track here!

Kevin: [Laughs] Okay, cool cool. It’s a really good movie, you should watch it. It was actually an inspiration on The Blair Witch, because it was one of the first things that merged fiction [and] horror through a documentary lens. But anyway, yeah, it’s fascinating.

Trevor: I love that. And it’s not a cryptid that I’m like… I’m thinking, Oh, you know, I know Moth Man. And I know Bigfoot, obviously, or the Chupacabra. But I’ve never heard of Boggy Creek.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s it’s pretty much a regional Bigfoot variation. Like it’s a big hairy guy.

Trevor: That’s cool.

Kevin: So it’s not too fascinating from a design perspective. But- [Laughs]

Trevor: Listen, there’s nothing not interesting about a big hairy guy.

Kevin: It’s true. It’s true. I mean, that’s what we all aspire to in our lives anyway is, like-

Trevor: Yeah, that’s what I like to think of myself as.

Kevin: -wandering around the woods, and having people spread rumors about our existence. It’s all we want.

Trevor: It would be something… I mean… I wouldn’t mind…

Kevin: [Laughs] Yeah.

Trevor: Um, but yeah, no, it’s, it’s… It’s really cool. Like, the idea of a cryptid being part- being like the center point of an interactive novel is a really cool idea. Because, of course, marrying the idea of something horrifying, with a genre that does not encourage jump scares in video games is… I think something people are not doing enough of.

Kevin: Exactly. And in Southern Monsters, the premise of it is that you play this disabled teenager in South Arkansas who moderates a forum in the mid-2000s for people who believe in the paranormal. So kind of the way you’re interacting with the game is — it’s set across five days in this teenager’s life, and it has a very similar narrative design to Majora’s Mask and Pathologic in that you have a wide range of activities that you can take part in. Like you can do research on the monster, you can leave your house and try to find the monster at night, you can moderate the message board, you can talk to your friends, you can play with your cat, you can eat snacks like peanuts and coke and moon pies and pork rinds and all the other delicacies of the American South.

And the game has this responsive narrative design that tracks everything you’re doing and generates certain narrative threads in response to it. So you can completely fail at locating what the teenager believes is the monster. Like, you can go out into the swamp and get bitten by a snake. Then you can have a conversation with your hick cousin online about getting bitten by a snake and he’ll go out into the swamp and try to kill the snake for you. Like it- All this unfolds across five days. And yeah, there’s like this recursive element to it that… I don’t know, like that’s the most direct example I think of me merging autobiography and what interests me about narrative design and video games. But that kind of Groundhog[‘s] Day, repetition really fascinates me.

Trevor: I will definitely be trying to get you on the show to talk about that when that comes out. That’s very cool.

Kevin: Hell yeah.

Trevor: Um, yeah, I think what’s fascinating about that to me is that it focuses on the element of… one of the things that stresses me out about gaming. And I think it’s something that limits my enjoyment of gaming as well. I was kind of grappling with this when I was playing Bloodstained[: Ritual of the Night], the most recent Bloodstained. And like, that’s fine; like, it’s a decent enough game. I enjoy Metroidvanias, Castlevanias, whatever you want to call them. But it’s good. It’s well-designed, but there’s like a million little things you can do. You can become just like a hypercompletist with it.

And there’s something very unsatisfying with being a hypercompletist with that game, where like, at a certain point, I was like, “Oh, I’m just gonna kill this enemy until I get every single drop it has.” And I just ended up asking myself, why am I doing this? And it’s like, well, I don’t want to miss out on anything. And I think that… that impulse is something that’s really very, very prevalent in gaming, where you don’t want to miss out on anything. And that’s what was so so good to me about Pathologic and Majora’s Mask and games like that, is that they absolutely force you to miss out on something You have to miss out on something. You can always come back, the recursion is part of it. But, like, you’re not going to be able to do everything in one go.

Kevin: Exactly. And, like, it’s freeing in a way with, like- when you have that kind of design and you… it’s… Yeah, it’s kind of like a river with multiple forks. Like you can kind of split off into different streams, but the river just kind of keeps flowing onward. And it doesn’t stop suddenly, and you can’t really go backwards and do something else. You just kind of have to continue forward no matter what happens.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s fantastic… I wonder, can you tell us/me a little bit about what appeals to you in terms of that kind of… I don’t know… that urge to move forward. And that defeat? I mean, it’s such a complicated dialectic — if I can use the word that I’m sure no one wants me to use, but I’ll use it anyway. It’s such a complicated dialectic in thinking about like, you know, failure and not “forced progression,” cause that makes it sound like it’s a death march, but… “acquiescence and progress.” Sort of like moving forward, despite what’s happened to us in the past. I mean, how do you sort of imagine those two things working out with each other? Because there’s plenty of games which privilege failure — thinking about not just Dark Souls, but games like Mario Maker, right? Like, where games like- people design these levels, where you absolutely are going to fail most of the time.

Or even those sort of like 8-bit homages to difficulty, like You Have to Beat the Game [Note: You Have to Win the Game] or whatever. I think those are about difficulty and failure and have no sort of redemptive arc. And it’s hard I think, it’s a tricky thing to distinguish games like that, from games like Pathologic 2 or from Southern Monsters or from Majora’s Mask. How do you see… How do you sort of imagine these games (or your ideal game or… whatever, however you want answer the question) bringing this kind of brutal and crushing failure, but also then providing some sort of salve or redemption or however you wanna imagine it?

Kevin: I think games that are structured that way are the most narratively compelling, because it allows you to tell stories that mirror experiences that we encounter in our own lives. It’s a lot different from… Like, I think of something like Skyrim, which… I love Skyrim, but when- you know, when you get out of the cave and you have 200 quest markers, and you know all that is frozen, static, until you,The Hero, kind of go over there and engage in that story that’ll play out mostly the same other than a binary choice or two. But there’s like-

Trevor: Oh yeah, and you can do it all. I don’t have to pick whether I want to be in the Thieves Guild or the Mages Guild or the warriors guild or whatever — it doesn’t matter. I could just be in all of them.

Kevin: Yeah, you can be the head of all of them. And that’s different from even Morrowind, which is actually another game that I love; in fact, I love the design of that game a lot more than Skyrim, because it deliberately makes you draw decisions between those kinds of things. Like, there’s some overlap — you can be like the head of multiple guilds — but other ones they like- they’ll just, like, kick you out the door if you come in there. And you’re like in the Morag Tong or something. Yeah.

Trevor: Yeah. {Laughs] I mean, I always- I like that more too, because it feels… It’s hard because you have to give up the power fantasy, but it feels better to have things closed off to you narratively, because of course it feels wrong if you are the head of the Black Hand or whatever it is in… the assassins guild in Skyrim or in Oblivion or whatever. And you’ve killed how many dozens of people, and then you also are just, like, beloved in town. It’s like this feels strange. Like I’m pretty sure no one would like me at this point. I’m not sure I can keep up this charade. I’m not sure I’ve done anything to keep up the charade. So having choices? Yeah, I mean that’s… I like that answer because it helps me understand why I find the “Choices Matter” tag on the Steam forums- or the Steam store so upsetting, because it’s like, not all these choices actually matter. Choices just for the sake of choice, just for the sake of stakes in and of themselves, or like characters you miss out on or whatever are… kind of worthless.

Kevin: Yeah, there’s like a big difference between choice in aesthetic and choice as a way of exploring compelling narrative outcomes.

Trevor: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think what you said about recursion,and what you said about having to go back and assess your- assess what you’ve done. And, you know, the fact that Pathologic 2, for instance, remembers your deaths and will refer back to them or impact your playthrough the next time because of them or- you know, you can’t get away from them. That inability to cheat the system, to cheese Pathologic 2, for for lack of a better word. Like, that is it… doesn’t make it more fun necessarily, but it makes it more compelling.

Kevin: Exactly, yeah. It’s also really hard to playtest. [Laughs] That is like one downside of this.

Trevor: I bet! How do you playtest a game like that?

Kevin: So there’s a couple of really cool things you can do. Like, I’m working on Signs of the Sojourner right now — which I mentioned a little bit earlier — and that game actually has a really similar narrative design to Southern Monsters and some other things I’ve worked on, in that it has five cycles that play out about- maybe over… probably about four to six hours of play time. But the game has really dense story arcs that kind of unfold in different ways and are mutually exclusive to each other, like, in the same way that everything we’ve been talking about. You can probably see a lot of common themes between the things that I work on at this point.

Trevor: Yeah, but I like- I really like the common themes because I’ve never thought about Twine games and difficult games in the same kind of… how to say this? In the same breath before. Like they haven’t, like, come into my mind in the same way. And I’ve never really realized that, like, emotionally difficult or, difficult decisions or even something like Pathologic 2 which is difficult mechanically and decision based; like there’s a lot of that in interactive fiction. I mean, that’s not far off.

Kevin: Yeah. Because something that Twine games do, or did, or still do really well, is psychological interiority. And, like, the choices in those feel small stakes, but usually they’re also very deeply embedded with emotional and psychological material that’s really tough to grapple with. And I think even when you kind of, like, get to this design space where you’re working in a more traditional Bioware fashion with, like, narrative outcomes and dialogue options. Like that still remains relevant.

Trevor: Definitely. So let me- I did, I did tease- You know, I dunno why I keep saying tease; it’s like my word of the night. I did kind of ingratiate you into coming on this by telling you that it is a leftist podcast, which it certainly is. I hope that hasn’t- I hope it hasn’t seemed like a right wing podcast or anything?

Kevin: Nope. I wouldn’t be on.

Trevor: But I haven’t been as explicitly leftist- Okay. Good, good, good. But I do want to ask you, politically… this question about difficulty, right? is one of the things that gets the worst possible people talking. Which is to say not the people who are upset about difficult games or want an easier game. Those people are mostly fine. But, like, people who imagine that difficulty sliders or something like that are an affront to gaming as a tradition, or like an affront to sort of their passion or whatever, right? How do you, like- what is your thought on that? Like, what is your thought on difficulty sliders, all this conversation about it? Like, you know, the idea of people who are not True Gamers or- I don’t know exactly the word to say it with just to make it seem like I’m trying to make a parody of these people — which I guess in many ways, I am. Like, how do you approach this? I mean, a) as a designer, and then b) as someone with, you know, left-wing sympathies, “as a leftist,” however you want to imagine it?

Kevin: Yeah… it’s tough because it’s complicated. And I’m going to say, straight off that I’m going to try to avoid both sides-ing this. Because I do think people who get really passionate about not having difficulty options are basically being assholes a lot of the time, because difficulty is subjective. And something else that I also really care about as a disabled person, and particularly a disabled leftist, is that accessibility and inclusion are important. And since difficulty is subjective, that means that the point of difficulty sliders isn’t to rob yourself of an experience. It’s so that players can essentially curate their own experience for themselves based off their needs and their abilities.

And it’s tough to have that conversation because you do have assholes, but there’s also some arguments that… like, of course Celeste handled it really well. And I feel like of course, Pathologic handled it really well where it had these difficulties sliders, but attached to the difficulty sliders is this kind of statement of intent from the developers where they talk about why they designed the game to be a certain way. And then they kind of give you sliders trusting you to adjust them to arrive at that experience.

Trevor: That’s really interesting. I’ve never really thought about… cause, like, one of the things I’m really interested in in my literary work, which I mean… I should say was interested. It’s not like a field that has a lot of options for people — although it comes up my video game work too — like, this question of intention, right, is so so important to me. And I never really thought about statements of intent from developers being something that could produce an understanding of difficulty before. That’s really elucidating. I think it recalls to me going to a modern art museum and seeing something that you think or someone might say, “Yeah, my kid could do that.” Or, like, what’s the comment that people say when they go to modern art museums? They go walk into MoMA and say, “This looks like something someone threw up on a canvas,” or something. And then you read the intention, right? Like one of my favorite pieces ever that I’ve seen in the gallery is Hinoki by…

[Note: Trev spends some time trying to recall the artist; this has been trimmed. Sorry.]

Kevin: It’s, “Hinoki You Can Look It Up.”

Trevor: It’s at the Art Institute of Chicago. I can actually- I found a link so I can put it even in notes.

But it’s by… I think it’s by Robert Evans. I think that’s who it’s by.

And basically, he found this massive tree on the side of the road when he was driving through. Oh, sorry, not Robert Evans. Charles Ray. It’s Charles Ray. And his- I’ll even, I’ll just read his story.

“Ten years ago, while driving up the central coast of California, I spotted a fallen tree in a meadow just off the highway. I was instantly drawn to it. It was not only a beautiful log, but to my eyes, it was perfectly embedded in the meadow where it had fallen decades earlier. Pressure from the weather, insects, ultraviolet radiation, and gravity were evident. Total collapse appeared to be no more than a handful of years away. I was inspired to make a sculpture and studied many other logs, but I realized that I was only interested in this [particular] one.”

And so basically what he did was he wanted to make an inflatable sculpture, he thought all sorts of stuff. And he carved the log from the inside, and working his way out, basically cut the tree apart, transported it back to his studio, made silicone molds of it, and reconstructed it with… made silicone molds, made a fiberglass version, sent that to Osaka, and had a woodworker carve it into reality using Japanese cypress.

Kevin: Holy shit.

Trevor: And then that’s what’s displayed- Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s just unbelievable. I’ll link it to you. I’ll definitely remember to link this in the… Yeah, if you’re ever in Chicago, it’s marvelous. It takes up an entire room and a gallery. And it just looks like this tree. And especially, if you don’t think about it too much, like, it seems like what did you even do? Like, this isn’t anything you did. But like immediately, you start thinking like, “Well actually, the whole point of this is to make me stop and think about what actually is the idea of reconstruction? What’s the idea of representation? You know, what does artistry mean? What does archiving mean? Can you say anything? Is this the same thing as the tree that was in the meadow? Is it something different?”

And once you start getting on that track, you start thinking, “Oh, actually my kid couldn’t do this.” Because my kid if he made- if she made like, you know, if my daughter made a piece that was exactly the same as a rock outside and said, “Dad, I made a rock,” that would be cool. But I don’t think she’d be able to express Charles Ray’s intentions there. Which is the same thing as saying, if my daughter made a really hard Mario Maker level, I doubt she could express the intentions of the people from Pathologic. So that is really, really helpful to me to understand like, this isn’t going to be for everyone, but there’s a reason for that.

Kevin: Exactly. And I think what makes the statement of intent so important, not in the situation that you’re describing and also when attached to these difficulty settings, is that there was also a train of thought after Pathologic came out from people who wanted difficult sliders who were not coming from the same position that I come from — and that I believe in accessibility and people subjectively defining their own experiences in response to someone’s intent. But their position was more that “I should never feel frustrated playing a game. I should never feel bad playing a game. The game should give me options to get rid of feeling bad and feeling frustrated.” And so that was also frustrating to hear. Because when I hear that, my immediate thought is “No, no, no. That’s not the point.” Like, the misery is valid. Like that’s a valid emotion for a game or work of art to inspire in someone. And it’s okay to- for an artist to like want to inflict that consensually upon someone who is engaging with their artwork.

Trevor: I agree. Yeah.

Kevin: So it’s really so it’s really complicated, because ostensibly I completely agree, like, with difficulty sliders as an accessibility option. And also because difficulty is subjective. But not because I think that games shouldn’t explore difficult themes or be frustrating, or, like, I feel like that’s tied in with this, just this very commercial school of thought that comes with game design where it’s very player-friendly. Like, it’s kind of the Skyrim model of, like, nothing should ever conflict. You should be the head of everything. And, you know, should just be full Hannah Montana, just have, like, every perfect life. Like, it’s just not interesting. And it’s unfortunate to me when people who play games, argue against those kinds of creative risk and games trying to invoke those kinds of emotions in people.

Trevor: Yeah, no, I agree. And I think one of the things that troubles me about that too is- I mean, from a political standpoint, a lot of the works that have been most politically revelatory to me, have also been some of the ones that have been least pleasurable in reading. Which isn’t to say, I don’t find pleasure in them after the fact. But like… there’s a Jonathan Franzen essay that I should be upfront about in saying I don’t like. [Laughs] That’s kind of not- neither here nor there, I guess. But Frazen basically talks about one of my favorite authors, William Gaddis, and says that Gaddis’s work, Gaddis’s book, The Recognitions, which is brilliant, is a much better book than his other novel — so his sort of most well known novel J R. Because J R is experimental, and a reader would have a hard time reading it. And so The Recognitions is better because it gets you Gaddis, but most people are going to be able to understand it without having trouble.

And J R, is one of the most important political books to my political development, at least. It’s brilliant. It’s super smart. It tells everything you want to know about, like, the stock market and money and the irrationality of the two. And it couldn’t do that unless it was made the way it’s made. Like with it, you know, it’s all dialogue. That’s the sort of trick that’s the hook of J R. It’s, like, I think there’s like… maybe a page worth in a 700 page piece of like, “action words”; it’s mostly just dialogue and generally unmarked dialogue. So it’s sort of hard to read. But that’s the whole point. Right? And similar to you know, other artists, Kathy Acker is a good example or, you know, provocative artists, artists that don’t want you to enjoy their films or music. Artists that that are intentionally dull… like there’s, there’s… Negative feelings are important for understanding the negative elements of the world, I think. And sometimes, it’s not okay to just like feel sympathy, but you actually have to feel the feeling itself.

Kevin: Exactly. And also, I haven’t read that essay, but I find it completely believable that Franzen has another shitty take out in the world that I haven’t read yet.

Trevor: [Laughs] Don’t read it. It’s… that’s that’s exactly the approach I would say to take to it. And it is like, I only read it for my dissertation. And I was so irritated. I had to read it because I- my intro included stuff on J R. And I was like, I gotta do the Franzen thing. And it is like 30 pages and thick. And the the only takeaway is, “I really didn’t like this extremely important and great novel, because I just couldn’t get into it. I like the one that I could get into more.” Like this this just makes me want to die.

Kevin: I should know this, but what was your dissertation on?

Trevor: Oh, you don’t have to know that. My dissertation was on 20th-century American literature. Basically, I looked at… I looked at works that tried to do, tried to produce aesthetic autonomy or political progress, or both, and failed and then sort of, like, looked at how the failure got us a little closer, you know, ever, ever closer, ever sort of, like, inching towards kind of emancipatory, revelatory literature. Is the short version. But there was a chapter on video games. And that’s where that’s where this whole thing started.

Kevin: Damn, I need to read that.

Trevor: I can link it to you if you’d like. Yeah, it’s out there somewhere. Yeah, it’s free somewhere. I didn’t publish it. But,

Kevin: It sounds incredibly relevant to, you know, the designs of thought I like.

Trevor: Sure. Yeah. Love to- love to have you read it. And that goes for anyone listening. If you want to read my dissertation, at me on Twitter, email me. I’m happy to send it out. It’s not gonna it’s not gonna make me a ton of money anyway. So it’s- I mean, it makes me zero money. It’s better if people are reading it.

Well, Kevin, I don’t want to keep you much longer because we’ve been here an hour. And that’s usually all I like to inflict upon my guests with… Your work sounds so interesting and I can’t wait to play more of it. I never- this is… gonna sound like something I do all the time, but I’ve only ever done it once and maybe I should start doing it all the time. Can you give us a recommendation of one of your games to play? And then a recommendation of… one, like, a game that people should play in order to better understand your work. Excepting Pathologic and Pathologic 2 which is sort of, like, kind of gimmes at this point.

Kevin: Yeah. So I think people should play the very substantial demo for Signs of the Sojourner there’s currently out. And if they enjoy it, they should back the game on Indiegogo. Because if that does really well in its crowdfunding campaign it’ll actually be even more narratively ambitious when it comes out. So that’s like a great way of, like, seeing my work and also making my work better in the near future. So I really recommend that one. I recommend to understand my work would be howling dogs by Porpentine that was one of the games- first games I played that made me realize I had to play video games. That I had to make video games.

Trevor: That’s great. Okay, yeah. I’ve never played that. I’ve ever played howling dogs, but I will.

Kevin: It’s really short, it’s like 20 minutes or so. And it’s beautiful.

Trevor: I love short games. I should say that- I should say, like, I’m saying this while I am working my way through my first MMO ever so of course, like, that’s a very long game. [Laughs]

Kevin: Yeah.

Trevor: But the short games have always been my favorites. I absolutely love them. I love when people have something to say and just say it. That is… oh, it’s so satisfying. Cool, okay. I will check that out; everyone else should as well. I actually- you know, it’s funny. The person I often stream with, my friend Andrew, just- I just realized the reason- I thought the reason I recognized Signs of the Sojourner was because I got an email about it. And then I realized it was because Andrew had linked me to it and said I should get the devs on as a guest. So won’t he be surprised?

Kevin: Excellent.

Trevor: Yeah, but no, no. t looks great. And there’s a yes- a very substantial demo. I’ll be playing it. I will tell everyone what I think of it as well, but, you know, you should just get it because Kevin is a wonderful storyteller.

Kevin: Thank you. I’m blushing. You can’t see it. Because this is audio but I’m blushing.

Trevor: Well, I believe you. I believe you. You wouldn’t lie about that. Well, thanks so much. Please come back anytime. I’d love to talk to you more about all this stuff. Maybe I can… Maybe I can get you on to talk about Signs of the Sojourner with me after I play it. We could do that as, like, a little behind-the-paywall thing because I really want to hear your thoughts on a game that you have not just localized but made.

But it’s been a real pleasure and I hope that the popularity of Pathologic 2 catches up to… trying to find the best way to say this… I hope it catches up as the player base starts to get a little more mature and understanding of what video games can and should do.

Kevin: I hope so too. In the meantime, I’ll keep yelling about it.

Trevor: Me too. So you are on Twitter @bravemule. Where else can people find your work?

Kevin: Bravemule.com has a bunch of links to stuff and made, a lot of which you can actually play for free I mentioned Sojourner because it has a crowdfunding campaign going on, but I also have a bunch of free games on my itch[.io] page. So you know, check out the free games too.

Trevor: They’re free, but you can always pay a little bit of money for it, you can afford it.

Kevin: True.

Trevor: Just toss a few bucks in.

Kevin: And also, like, the ones that do cost money… If anyone has ever, like people email me sometimes and say they can’t afford it, and I just give them the code to it. And it’s, like, I enjoy that too. Like I always have a clause in anything I work on that if, like, unless I don’t own the rights to it, if anyone emails me and asks for it, I just give it to them.

Trevor: [Laughs] That’s really nice. That’s like, well, yeah. I can’t help but sympathize, I’ll say that much. Well, thanks so much. And yeah, I hope to have you back soon.

Kevin: Yeah, thanks so much. Take care.

[Music]

. . .

This episode of No Cartridge was released on Wednesday, October 2, 2019.

Transcription by William Lett.

Two things off the bat:

First, I’m not, technically, out of the academy. My title is a bit misleading. I still teach at a school in Eastern PA as a lecturer, for four classes a year. I also haven’t lost all of my academic knowledge, and I guess I use some of it in my main work now, my podcast No Cartridge. But in terms of the wide and ranging search for a tenure track job? At least in the traditional sense, that’s dead for me.

Second, I am not writing this as a rebuke to any of my advisors. I don’t have an axe to grind, believe it or not. I got my PhD at the University of Illinois, Chicago — I loved studying there and I loved the department. On the first day of orientation, Walter Benn Michaels told us that we probably would not get jobs. The seeds of arrogance that led us all to pursue the program anyway were set in way way earlier than that, and I don’t lay any blame at UIC’s feet. Similarly, my dissertation committee — Nicholas Brown, Michaels, Jennifer Ashton, Anna Kornbluh, Nasser Mufti, and Andrew Hoberek — were inspirational and helpful. They have all done innumerable kindnesses for me, and none of them are at fault for my current position. Finally, my colleagues — too many to name — are also people I still esteem quite highly. Again, any successes they have are occasions of only happiness for me.

So why write the essay then? That’s a good question, and one I’ve been pondering a lot. It’s not easy to face your own failures, especially when you spent 13 years and an entire identity developing the harsh conclusion of those failures. Looking back at 34 and seeing effectively less earning potential than I had at 22 is sobering and sad. And if I’m the only one to blame, isn’t this just pointless self-flagellation? I hope not, but I won’t lie that it’s kept me from writing this for far too long. The thing I’d most like to avoid is some kind of pathos-soaked finger pointing, an explanation for why my life has gone so far from the plan, or whatever. Because, of course, my life is fine in a lot of ways! I have two kids, a lovely wife, a place to live, and a podcast that I like making. I get to teach sometimes. And I got that PhD.

But the latter bit always makes me pause a little because that whole terminal degree thing counts as an achievement for sure, but never really feels like one. Put another way, whenever anyone hears that I have the PhD, I get a lot of compliments or congratulations, and they’re all quite nice, but I can’t help but feel they’re completely undeserved. Like when your mom congratulates you for making breakfast on Mother’s Day and it doesn’t exactly matter if it’s good or not. The conditions and context of the act matter a lot more than the results.

If that’s true, then my PhD is more of a hard-earned anchor than anything else. Don’t get me wrong, I loved every minute, in retrospect, of doing my PhD. I loved reading books, arguing about books, and developing extremely complicated theories of why those arguments matter. I know a lot of disenchanted doctoral students will say that they don’t believe those arguments anymore, but I’ll be honest and say that the conclusions I came to about aesthetic autonomy, the history of the novel, and the latter half of the American 20th century in literature are still conclusions I think are unassailable. I won’t bore you with those here, but the point is that I cared and still care about the work I did for the 5.5 years I was in my program. And I’m proud of my dissertation, and proud of my ability to finish it in the time I did. I really think it’s an accomplishment.

But, like, people do those accomplishments all the time without giving up 9 years of their life. The massive fan fictions that people publish and have pride in with no readers are generally not written in lieu of building one’s resume. First novels, or crackpot self-published manifestos, or artistic shrieks of prose — these are all pretty compatible with a normal trajectory in life. Graduate school is not. Graduate school is a tacit agreement with the university you’ve convinced to have you that, for the next 5–15 years, you’re going to opt out of the world and study in the hallowed intellectual vastness of the academy. Then, even though “the market is bad,” you’ll apply for a job and, if you work hard enough, you’ll get a position at a university. There your years of worldly divorce can go on until you’re ready to retire or, probably, until you’re too old to make it to your one lecture course in the fall.

It’s a fascinating deal, and in many ways it seems like a great idea — enjoy intellectual rigor for five to seven years, really work out some ideas, and leave with a prestigious degree and a sense of accomplishment (and maybe even a job!). In reality, the issue with all of this is the under-examined material one gives up in this agreement — you don’t have to be invested in the world, but the world also doesn’t need to be invested in you.

Bourgeoise nonsense? Certainly! But between the years of 22 and 30, most people are screwing up and finding themselves in different jobs that turn into slightly more sustainable jobs that then turn into some okay-but-not-perfect career. Then they have some stability moving forward. Or, hey, if that’s not for you, then 22–30 is when you build your brand. You write your novel, you make your album, you put out the podcast that changes your life. You make yourself into a commodity. Gary Becker, a real son of a bitch and a Chicago School economist, was obsessed with the idea of human capital, that the “means of production” in the 20th century was not a factory, but the body and potential of a person themselves. The worker, Becker tells us, is their own means of production, and by using that means to produce a more valuable commodity of worker, the individual has bypassed Marx and valorized his own capital. Go to school, learn a language, read a book! It all adds up and helps your earning power down the line, you crafty capitalist, you.

And while this is vile rhetoric…it’s not wrong, per se. Not in our current moment, where literally who you know and what you’ve done is the gold standard. And I know what you’re saying, I hear you — a PhD, that’s wonderful experience and proof that you’re a damn good writer! Sure, it ought to be, yeah. But the flipside of human capital is that if we treat people like credit scores and bump them up based on positive attributes, then we’ll need to bump them down as well.

In the few interviews I’ve ever gotten to in job applications, I’ve heard the concern that I won’t be able to connect with regular people due to my erudite ideas. I’ve heard the concern that I’ll be too slow in writing because academics take forever to finish things. I’ve heard from people I’ve pitched to that my ideas are smart, but too smart for the moment. I’ve heard that my writing is excellent but it doesn’t have the sort of punch and snap needed for quick, internet style prose. Put simply: if an employer sees PhD on my resume, then they will assume I can write, but that what I write will be of no use to them at all.

Indeed, the main thing a PhD is useful for is making you suitable for work in the academy. And the academy knows this all too well. While tenure track jobs exist — I should know, I’ve applied to hundreds! — the far more common thing is to get work as a lecturer, often dead-end labor paid out via contract and not nearly as lucrative as full-time work. Also, of course, no benefits. And while these positions have been and are still filled with retired teachers, they are more and more filled by people like me: smart PhD holders who literally cannot get a school to call me back.

So that’s where I find myself now. I’m good only for the academy, and since the academy knows that, my skills and training are worth…less yearly than I’d make working fast food. Arbitrary rule changes — I was told I could only teach four classes this year and lost 10,000 dollars in salary as a result — are the norm with contract labor like this, and there have been many times I’ve counted on three-months salary from a class that just vanishes in an instant when kids decide not to take it. I’m not on the radar for advancement, if you’re wondering that, and my actual contribution to the department is simple and elegant: I provide cheap but professionally exceptional labor for classes that tenured professors simply don’t have the time or interest to teach.

And so that’s where I’m at, and it’s why I’m trying very hard to move on to a new chapter. All I have available to me is the skillset that I earned through hard work in a PhD program — and all that gets me, sadly, is the opportunity to try and pick up classes by the handful here and there. Most jobs assume I’ll bolt for a better opportunity (it’s not there) or won’t hire me because I will demand more money in salary. I’ve been through the list, and there are some I’ll pursue! But by and large, the only thing that I can do is something that I now refuse to do as a career.

I will not be a career lecturer, so long as it entails a precarious employment at the whim of enrollment and interest, and I encourage anyone considering a PhD to make the same choice. My professors trained me very well to succeed in the field of literary studies — and hopefully I can make them proud through the podcast and my writing. My agent, Erik Hane, is supportive, and I love my work. But, it doesn’t pay many bills. And it involves begging for scraps and hoping for friendly pity. It is not what I or my advisors signed me up for…at least not knowingly.

Ultimately, to be totally cringey and honest, I get frustrated and defeated sometimes because I have a head for the written word but I don’t have the connections, voice, or nerve for writing outside of the academy. And after spending years and years in what is billed as a meritocracy, I just expect to get opportunities. Obviously that’s silly. But you’d be surprised how long and rough that’s been to learn.

Sadly, the academic system relies on people making my decision and then never giving up on the opportunity cost of 10 lost years. I hope to move on soon, and I would encourage anyone who is considering taking the plunge to think long and hard before they do.

[Music]

Trevor Strunk: Welcome to No Cartridge. My name is Trevor Strunk, Hegelbon on Twitter. And I’m here actually by myself today — I’m doing a little bit of a solo show. We took a week off last week partially because of — I dunno — a lot of the bad feelings and controversy that came up after the death of Alec Holowka. You know, I think I’ve talked enough about this online and other have people talked about it online enough too. I would urge you to read Scott Benson’s account of his relationship with Alec, and sort of the mixed feelings and the difficult nature of the whole thing; he’s going to do much better than I can. He has a Medium piece up at his Twitter @bombsfall. But at the same point, we do need to come back. And, you know, in my time away, I noticed a lot of things happening in video game discourse and sort of around video game discourse and I wanted to… I really thought it might be nice to recontextualize things a little bit, particularly in terms of what exactly it is that we do here vis a vis criticism and placing this within the realm of say literary criticism.

So I wanted to start off with thinking about basically, gaming discourse in terms of other mediums that have come into the world. So you know, you compare, say, video game discourse — or video game criticism — to literary criticism, or criticism of novels, or criticisms of poems, or anything like that. And it’s very easy to get sort of discouraged because video game criticism is, you know, notably… I don’t know, “lacking” is probably the wrong word. But it’s a little less than, let’s say that much. You know, one thing that is wrong with video game criticism at the moment is that most of what it does is produce readings of games. Which is to say: I’ll play Celeste and say Celeste is a “trenchant take on depression” or something like that right? And I’ll read the game via that playthrough. Or it’s an account of the creator’s politics, you know? “This person has good politics and the game is worth buying. This person has bad politics and the game is not worth buying.”

You know, there’s good reasons to be doing this. I think especially the recent discourse on Randy Pitchford is worth having and around a lot of games creators. Obviously I mentioned at the top of the show the controversy around Alec and that was a controversy that was widespread. We talked about this on Patch Notes around men in the industry behaving in very, very unacceptable ways and, you know, abusing and harassing people. So of course, yes, we want to talk about the people’s politics. But while a lot of the people I like and I’m friends with in gaming have created great games and I like their politics, that doesn’t mean that everyone with good politics is going to create an aesthetically good game. And it doesn’t mean that everyone with bad politics is going to create a game that has no aesthetic interest at all. You know, there are a lot of games that are quite interesting made by really terrible people, and vice versa. So, you know, this seems like a video game problem in some ways where you sort of say, “Well, you know, what do you with a medium that has so many people, some type of a personal connection, so much of the individual front and center.”

And then I think you have to just say “Well, this is a problem with every medium,” right? People with good politics produce terrible novels; you know I really, really hate that Ishmael novel by… I think it’s Daniel Quinn. And I think it’s awful. Quinn probably has environmental politics I would totally agree with. I don’t necessarily love all the ideas in that book, but certainly the environmental politics: right on. The book itself is garbage. It’s real bad. No offense, if you like it. If you like it… I mean, tastewise, it’s fine. But as a literary piece, it’s just a- it’s a pamphlet. It’s not really a novel. It is barely Socratic. You know, on the other hand, you look at some of the politics people like… I’ll try to think of a good have a good author here… Oh, I mean like Anthony Trollope is a good example. Or Honoré de Balzac. You know, masses of Marxist literature has been- or, Marxist literary criticism has been related to reading these people and saying, “You know, Balzac was, by all accounts, kind of like a bougie landlord type. A petty bourgeois sort of elite.”

And he wrote books that absolutely expose the class distinctions and class animosity between the elite and the working class. Same with- same with Trollope. Actually, perhaps, even more with Trollope… Same with Tolstoy. You know, the question of “do these people have good politics” is less important than the question of “do their novels have good politics?” And that kind of distinction, right, does the piece itself have good politics versus does the author of good politics is a really hard one to make. And it’s one we haven’t quite figured out in video games yet. So one of the things I was thinking about was okay, so like, why can’t we do it? It’s not as if, you know… it’s not as if I feel like I’m doing such a good job and no one else is. It’s not as if I feel like there are specifically people in gaming that are holding us back. You know, gaming has become this fraught space post-Gamergate particularly. But I mean, it’s just a space that we should be able to perform readings in and work in. The fact that we can’t sort of gave me pause.

So the fact that we don’t, let’s say, not can’t. There are good readings out there; I feel like I’ve done some good readings, I feel like lots of people have done good readings. But what I realized on my week off was that video games are in a place similar to the novel in the basically the mid-17th and early 18th century. So you’re talking about like… you know… for a loose, loose estimate — don’t hold me on this — it would be like 1650–1700. This is where we’re at with the novel. But think about- or, this is… how to say this… This is where video games are if we compared them to the novel, right. They’re a fairly young medium in the grand scheme of things. I mean, even if you want to trace it back to… I don’t know. If you want to trace it back to the collectible card game that Nintendo company started out as, even that is an extraordinarily young medium. The novel itself is over 400, 500 years old. Poetry is millennia old, drama: same. These are massively, massively old mediums that, you know, totally are different than the newish medium of the video game.

So I mean… Real quick, just to clarify this. let me talk about why that’s important.

You can mark the beginning of the novel in a number of places, right? This is a very controversial question: “what is the first novel?” Some people say Robinson Crusoe is the first novel. Some people will say Tom Jones is the first novel. Some people will say Clarissa by Samuel Richardson is the first novel. Some people even say that Oroonoko by Aphra Behn is the first novel — though I’m kind of split on that, because it’s more of a short story. It’s a little tricky. But there are a lot of things that could be the first novel.

If you’re ever going to get into comic books, reading about the first graphic novel, this is the same thing that comes up. I mean, think about the question you’d have if you asked someone what the first video game was. It would be nearly impossible to figure out.

But whatever you do, however you mark the beginning of the novel, you are… you’re looking at, like the beginning, and then the first say 50 to 75 years as this… maybe even 50 to 150 years as this kind of solidifying of the medium, this way that the medium actually finds its feet. And within that, there are a number of, sort of, alternate paths it could have taken. The novel wasn’t always going to be the novel as we know it. You know, if you read old books, like Tom Jones, Henry Fielding — considered by someone to be the first novel — you’ll find these weird moments where they’re just kind of… the authors are just like, “Yeah, I don’t know what we’re doing here.”

Fielding writes, just a brief quote. This is on 65 of my copy it’s book two, chapter one of [Tom Jones by] Henry Fielding. He says “My reader then is not to be surprized, [if,] in the course of this work, he shall find some chapters very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day, [and] others that comprise years; in a word, if my history sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly. For all which I shall not look on myself as accountable to any court of critical jurisdiction whatever: for as I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein.”

And, you know, Fielding is speaking tongue-in-cheek of course. But this is absolutely something he was concerned about, the unity of the piece right. Like, oh, every- is every chapter going to be five pages long? Is every chapter going to cover one day? Is every chapter going to cover eight years? This question was absolutely of the moment and Fielding basically says yeah it’s just all gonna be all over the place, but that’s what I think it should be. He could’ve very well have said the exact opposite.

And so how novels become what we recognize them as is actually like a really important study- or I’m sorry, a really important question to study. A really important direction of study within literary studies. And, you know, there’s a lot of ways you didn’t understand the history of the novel, but the three sort of most canonical ways, right, are through these three thinkers: Michael McKeon, who wrote Origins of the English Novel — very famous, very massive text; Ian Watt, who wrote Rise of the Novel; and Nancy Armstrong, who wrote Desire And Domestic Fiction. (Some excerpts available here: https://twitter.com/Hegelbon/status/1171933181949468672)

There are others of course, and in fact, all three of these sort of suffer from being a bit too Eurocentric and a bit too white. But, you know, within the questioning of what do we think of when we think of the history of the novel, academia can be slow to act. So these are still the main ones. So McKeon — just again, brief background — McKeon’s a historicist which is- which means he cares about, like, what actually happened with the novel itself. Like where, you know, can we track the time down? Can we track, you know, what changed over time? What differed, what stayed the same. He is looking for purely formal shifts to explain the historical trajectory of the novel. So for him, the difference between Tom Jones’s novel, and say, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa — which is told through a series of letters — that’s huge for him. It’s- these are two formally distinct things and the way they converge into the novel itself, what it is, is like the story for McKeon.

For Watt… he’s a political thinker. He explores and mobilizes capitalism to explain the rise of the novel. And so it probably should come as no surprise that he’s a Marxist. His sort of way of thinking is absolutely present in games criticism — both good and bad. I think this podcast is a good example — Waypoint, Kotaku; all of these things kind of take the idea of capitalism and use it to explain the evolution of gaming, in the same way that Watt says that mercantilism and differing economic trade routes and such helped cause the rise of the novel. Not just helped explain, but helped cause the rise of the novel; something that a medium in Watt’s imagination that is purely and specifically referential to capitalism.

However, this way of criticism also is a risk of becoming a shibboleth — in a sense of every game and every novel becomes judged on its class politics, which can produce didacticism instead of aesthetics. It’s not necessarily a bad thing; some people would want games to be didactic as opposed to aesthetically interesting. Some people would want novels to be that way. We could talk about that a bit later. However, just put a pin in that now because I think that is something of a risk and I’ll explain why it ties back to our situation very soon.

Finally, Armstrong is kind of like… sort of like… the last person to show up is Armstrong. She- her work is later than both McKeon and Watt’s. But she also is… she’s kind of like the first wave of games criticism. She has a Foucauldian take, an idea that’s sort of like novels operate upon the genealogy of power. And you know, both… let’s see if I can do Foucault in a really short way… Both call into existence and then reinforce power. It’s echoed in a lot of the early ludonarrative analysis of video games, where the ideas- analysts trying to figure out, okay, what do video games do? What is their- what is their purpose? How do they- how do they produce meaning within the systems of, you know, production that they represent. But I think it’s also something that is an extreme issue today, vis a vis, you know, they should be quote unquote “just games” or “these SJWs are, they’re after our culture.” The issue of power, and who wields it, and who should wield it is absolutely of issue.

So what’s the point of me telling you all this? Let’s get to that.

So the novel in its transition to what we know today wasn’t always destined to be the novel, that’s sort of what I brought up. And in fact, this initial novel is so hard to pin down in part because the definition of what it was was so fraught to begin with. So the bit I read from Tom Jones, uh, Henry Fielding-

…Did I say that was “Henry Fielding by Tom Jones?” [Yes.] I’m not actually gonna correct that, cause that is so embarrassing, but it is Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. You can tell I’m not working on my normal amount of sleep.

But the bit I read from Fielding, right, the bit I read from Tom Jones is… Fielding says that the novel itself is sort of this weird thing that he’s coming up with on his own. And a lot of people were coming up with their version of the novel at the same point; Robinson Crusoe, as I said before, it’s sort of like a bit of a diary. There are epistolary novels, which are letters to each other.

Richardson, Tristram Shandy is a perfect example of a novel that looks like an experimental novel of the recent- of recent years, in part because it was experimenting. It was trying to figure out what this format was and what it would look like. People knew what a poem was, people knew what a song was, people knew what a play was. But this new thing was very, very confusing. And games, surprisingly enough, are still in this phase. We imagine they’ve been around for long enough so that we know what a game is and what it isn’t. But ultimately, if you look at them in the long view, they’ve been around for 30 to 40 years — maybe 50 if you stretch. And if you really want to stretch, if you take a super long dureé view, say 150, right? Novels weren’t consistently in the format we expect to see them in for perhaps a century or more after their inception. And even now the debate rages on; you can find a lot of people arguing that something is or is not a novel.

Thinking, in graduate school, a lot of people would write collections of short stories that they would say, “acted as a novel.” And people will challenge that like, “Is it a novel or is it not a novel? Are these just short stories?” A good example for this is the novel Visit from the Goon Squad, which is a great novel. It’s a bunch of short stories, basically, but they coalesce enough to be a novel. Similar would be Lovecraft Country, another really excellent novel by Matt Ruff. Sorry, I actually neglected to say who wrote A Visit to the Goon Squad- Visit from the Goon Squad, excuse me. And that’s Jennifer Egan. But both of these novels are short stories, but also novels. And is, you know, a long poem a novel? Does… does it have to take the form of a series of, you know, chapters of indiscriminate length as Fielding would suggest? Or can it be one extremely long chapter — someone like James Joyce might argue.

Novels are still being debated today. And they are how many years, how many centuries old at this point? It’s no surprise that people are up in arms about what games are and aren’t; there is no historical reason that they should be- this debate should be settled.

So in the other- in other words, the question of what is and isn’t a game is not nearly as self evident as either experimental games creators would want us to believe or extraordinarily conservative games people would want us to believe either, even if I would, of course, side much more with the experimental end of things. You know, arguing that something is or isn’t a game self-evidently is just kind of a mistake at this point. And also, if you think about outside of the formal, the battle for the soul of games is a moral scare that happened in the novel as well. So you know, you see people arguing about what games are, who should be making these games. You know, getting social justice into games, getting gender into games, bringing in politics into games. Or rather, you know, focusing too much on difficulty mode, focusing too much on alienating your players instead of providing access. These arguments take on a moral tone, which basically becomes games had an initial audience. Should we cater to that initial audience as they imagine themselves? Or on the other hand, should we accept that that initial audience was not nearly as limited as we once believed and that contemporary games are providing representation and access that needs to be expanded? Again, much more- I- the latter point is my position, but both sides are arguing with each other and this question of limiting versus expansion is something that happened with novels as well.

Novels were initially when they came out seen as corrupting forces. Like reading a novel would be the same thing as like, I don’t know… I mean, some novels like Madame Bovary,were seen as, like… or Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 20th century. If you want to imagine how controversial these things can actually be… This 20th century novel, it was seen as pornographic. Pornographic, not just because of what they described, but because of their moral impact or their perceived moral impact on women, right? The sentimental novel was a craze in the 18th century because it was basically just instructive, it was didactic; it told women, you know, “behave well and behave like a normal- like a chaste and pious woman or this could happen to you” is like, usually what happens. There’s a chaste and pious woman in the story, she does something wrong, and she usually dies.

You know, novels are seen as corrupting to women unless they are didactic. And they’re corrupting, as opposed to poetry and religion, which are known quantities. You know, reading Homer is fine; it is educating and gives you something that these people recognize. The novel is just this strange, vulgar, common-tongued form that anyone can pick up and anyone can learn from, and it bothers people a lot.

Newer novels are also seen as lewd and dangerous. So not just Chatterley’s Lover, but take Gothic literature. Frankenstein. You know, even actually before Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a book called Maria: or, The Wrongs of Women [sic]. The Monk is a famous one… I’m just gonna start naming Gothic novels if you don’t stop me, so I won’t do that. But you can even think of something like Wuthering Heights. I mean, these are seen as lewd or dangerous — strange, weird, unholy, heretical, whatever. There are critiques to be made of these dark novels by people of the time; they’re seen as like, this is going to cause people to act strangely in the same way we hear about video games. Novels by women are often seen as frivolous — less serious, less important; meant for light fare, gossiping. Penny dreadfuls, which is sort of like the schlock of the day. You know, something that you read if you’re not reading a Serious Novel by a Serious Man.

And I mean novels, even using non-standard English; Tristram Shandy is an early version of this. But especially when black novelists start including non-standard English in their work and then later on Asian novelists, Indian novelists. I’ve seen the use of Tagalog in a wonderful novel called Troublemakers. This is absolutely a huge issue for people — the idea of should you include non-standard English? Should it just be all straightforward English? Or is it okay to include stuff that your average English reader is not going to understand? All of these things echo stuff in gaming, which is like, should we be just- should we be, you know, forcibly diversifying this space to allow for people, you know — women, noncis people, queer people, people of color — should we be diversifying the space to allow them a space to feel comfortable and represented in gaming? Or should we focus on the way gaming was in order to refine it into, what it existed as prior to that? Again, absolutely; I believe in the expansion version, the inclusion version. And I don’t agree with the conservative version there, but those are the two sides, and that they represent the two sides in the same way that the novel does is fascinating to me. In other words, if we’re thinking about games, we should you be thinking about them in the context of the development as an art form. Not even necessarily as some sort of like capitalistic widget, although they certainly are, but that’s everything in the world.

We should be thinking about them in terms of an art form and they’re very early in that development, especially if we imagine them as literary primarily. If we imagined them visually… Visual art has a way of developing incredibly quickly, and in some ways this is because the actual mediums of visual art — that is to say: painting, sculpture, lithograph — are fairly old to begin with. Photography caused quite a stir; the questions of whether or not a photograph could be art were… you can imagine how raging they became, but they were extremely controversial. But you know, visual art kind of moves a little faster; literary art, which I think gaming kind of looks a little more like… we could- I could have a whole episode on that though… it moves a little more slowly. And so, even if we haven’t nailed down what games should be, we haven’t even actually… we shouldn’t actually feel bad about that, because I don’t think we have even nailed down what canonical a game is. Like, the definition of the medium is not particularly clear, which is to say, all the sort of tired arguments about walking simulators are tired but they serve a fairly useful purpose in developing the discourse around games.

You know, this doesn’t change my focus, though, in a maximal sense. It’s not like No Cartridge is going to change. This is more just an introspective point of thinking, you know, we have these arguments, and it feels so hopeless; it feels like a terrible discourse, a terrible art form. At times, it feels completely uncaring and completely awful. And it is, in a lot of ways it is. You know, the controversies, the space itself, it feels kind of hopeless at times. But this is an extremely early point in this development. You know, games are going to develop and change in ways we can’t really conceive of yet. And anyone who says there’s some sort of cultural battle for gaming is selling you a bill of goods. Now most of the time, this is a conservative kind of politics, right? Like a cultural battle for gaming would be like, let’s keep gaming the way it is. Let’s keep gaming for gamers, right. But the other arm is to say, new games like a Souls game or something like that is necessarily bad for gaming because it represents an outdated version of difficulty and progression, right. Both these just don’t make any sense because the soul of gaming — such as it is — the cultural signifier of gaming is not pinned down. It is shifting, it is fluid — just like the cultural quality of the novel is shifting, its fluid. These things are not static, and if anyone’s telling you they are this is simply a comfort. If you’re worried about gaming changing, I really have bad news for you: it has been changing since day one and will continue to for a long time before it even has a semblance of stability.

The idea of a traditional novel, is something that truly wasn’t around until probably… the 19th century? That’s 150 years, give or take. The idea of a quote unquote “traditional game” holding any weight, may be well, well down the line. And the plenitude of games available means unlike with novels, right- the printing press was a huge deal. But novels could not be produced as easily and- let’s say, actually, “produced” is the wrong word. “Distributed.” Distribution is the big thing. Novels could not be distributed in the same way that games are today. And so, so many games are out there, more games that anyone has any possibility of playing. And so, we complain about this; we complain about our long Steam lists, or how many games we have to play whatever. “Oh, I bought another game in the sale, I’m never going to play that.” This plenitude of games, both triple A and independent, means that genres are certainly not at a risk of dying out. You can’t name a genre that is truly about to die out.

There are genres that have dipped in popularity; rhythm games came up recently as an example of this. Adventure games are something that have, like… we talked with Grundislav Games about this. The rise-and-fall of popularity is a thing, but there’s no real danger of a formal narrowing anytime soon. No real danger of a classic shooter disappearing. Yes, the Ion Storm stuff was extremely bad and represented sort of a low point in discourse with what they said about trans and gay people in their Discord, and all the sort of stuff they kept in just because the regressive arm of the gaming populace wanted them to. But it also shows that people still want Quake games, right? Like, you can think back to any version of the game. The platformer is alive, the classic first person shooter is alive, the mission-based first person shooter is alive, the action-adventure games, the pure adventure games live, the visual novels alive, text based adventures are alive. Everything is still existing because gaming can just be produced. And so it’s arguable that a formal narrowing will never happen if this distribution is so easy. If it’s that easy to produce your games, why ever stop producing the ones you want?

So this is all a way of saying that inclusion of other voices in gaming, which is to say: nonwhite, non-male, noncis — however you want to imagine it, but you know the sort of terms that lack representation and gaming — it’s a long dureé, it’s a process. It’s a thing that’s going to happen over time, whether you like it or not, and it’s a thing that we should encourage to happen. It’s not going to result in what I think some people, particularly in the stupidpol left… You know, I know that people like, I think… Jonathan Daniel Brown of- formerly of Struggle Session, some others that probably aren’t worth mentioning right now, have this fear of identity politics somehow infecting left discourse and ruining us right. Which… I took my doctorate at UIC, which is like the home in some ways of anti-identity politics theory. I know how it works and I believe in a lot of it. Which is to say, that capital can co-opt identity politics. The idea of hiring more black people or having a game written by a trans person is not… that’s not identity politics. It’s not woke scold. It’s not ignoring material conditions or something. It’s just representative politics; it doesn’t have to be revolutionary, it doesn’t have to be what’s gonna get us out of capitalism. It can simply be just a good thing. And in fact, it’s going to produce a more nuanced, open space.

For what it’s maligned, people don’t like contemporary art and contemporary literature. But contemporary art and contemporary literature is extraordinarily vital. It has a lot of stuff going forward; It’s a beautiful collection of fascinating genre works, fascinating experimental works, fascinating turns towards the traditional. You know, we hear a lot about Franzen or whatever, but we don’t hear about the Egans and Ruffs, and that’s a real shame. There are brilliant people writing right now and they should be… you know, Teju Cole! Teju Cole should be as much a name as Jonathan Franzen or anyone we sort of complain about online. And he’s not. And you know, I don’t know why. But at the same point, even without that sort of recognition, contemporary literature and contemporary art are producing wonderful work. And it’s not sterile, it’s not uninteresting, it’s not aesthetically bad because all of a sudden, there’s more representation in it. It simply is more capacious, and being more capacious is not the same thing as not being important or not being materially relevant.

Finally, last point. The moral quality of games makers is being and must be divided from the games themselves as aesthetic objects. And this division is actually, you know, fraught. Because of course, sometimes we don’t want to. Sometimes we want to draw a line in the sand and say, “Hey, look, I’m not going to be reading an Ayn Rand book even to critique it. I don’t like her, I don’t like her politics, I don’t like her personally, I don’t like her ideas. I don’t want to read that book.” And that’s like, that’s fine. You know what, that is fine. The thing we have to understand, though, is that sort of critique, which is a perfectly legitimate critique is not an aesthetic critique, right? If I want to say I don’t want to play Borderlands 3 because of Randy Pitchford, that is perfectly acceptable and in fact maybe even admirable — it depends on who you’d ask, but you know, sure. I don’t want to play Ion Storm, for instance; I don’t care, I don’t really want to play it. I will not be supporting it. That’s the kind of thing that I do sometimes too, like, I won’t draw a line in the sand and say which ones I will and which ones I won’t, but everyone has their limits, and everyone buys things that they like and will refuse to support people they don’t and that’s fine. Like, I think that’s perfectly reasonable. And even if you, you know, say it were… you don’t like socialism and you don’t want to support me or whatever right. That’s fine. That’s totally okay. That’s a kind of argument; it’s sort of like a taste argument, and a moral argument, and an ethics argument. It is not an argument about aesthetics, however, which is important. Because this is a quality in art that is consistently part of the tension that produces good analysis and good art.

I’ve talked to a lot of creators I like and whose games I like, but the two don’t need to be connected. I don’t have to like Scott, for instance, in order for Night in the Woods to be good. I can think he’s a total jerk and Night in the Woods can still be good. Right? I have had some unpleasant conversation- I wouldn’t say we fought but I’ve had some relatively unpleasant conversations with the guy who wrote The Talos Principle. And I think he’s a, you know, whatever. I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. And I think The Talos Principle is great like, I liked that game. If you read my article on it on nonsite it’s mostly complimentary. I think it’s a great game. It doesn’t matter if you like the people whose- who are producing the art necessarily; you can stop buying their games, but any aesthetic critique is about what the game is, as opposed to what the creators are. And where that stops is super interesting and super productive of analysis and something that we really should be thinking about. Putting aside the social perception of frivolity, childishness, and unseriousness of games is also going to be double-edged. Games are going to become more accepted over time, but people who are able to create within the scope of that acceptance will shrink. So formal narrowing might seem like a great thing, because it’s always, we’re going to get legitimate legitimacy as a form for video games. But it’s just going to be sort of like a tricky, hard, growing pain-filled process.

Ultimately, the pointed and aggressive pushes towards differing futures in games making, the idea of just like positing a direction forward and producing it until you can’t produce it anymore — which is, of course, how the novel developed. Branching off tributaries that end, tributaries that turn into their own versions of the novel. Modernism, postmodernism, formalism, realism… Games- this is going to happen in games too. Walking simulators were probably the first version of this. It’s fascinating how the true, true walking simulator had its moment as if it was going to be the next move in games… And then, receded. And this is so similar to stuff like realism and naturalism where, this is the moment. And then it recedes. It is a historical moment, it is not a new direction for the form necessarily. They’re going to continue though. All of these pushes forward are going to continue, because the future of the form is up for debate. It’s not however, likely to fall in formal and aesthetic ways we or our conservative opponents can quite yet imagine.

And I think it’s important, when working out our feelings towards gaming, that we remain open to these potential futures. Because of course, it’s very easy to imagine that we’re going to be stuck in this position of… I don’t know… problematic, and frustrating, and bad political actors for all time. Or, if you’re a more conservative thinker, that we’re going to be dealing with the cancel culture — whatever you want to say — of games forever as well. These things aren’t forever. This is something that will be produced… I don’t know. Over time. And it will be something we don’t know… the future of games is something we’re not gonna understand. Let’s put it that way. It’s something we can’t predict. It’s something that we’re gonna have to watch happen. And that’s the interest of the analysis. So while there are moral truths, and ethical truths, and things that I will argue for on the show, it’s kind of refreshing? I guess? To step back and take an aesthetic look at this. Because of course, I’m not going to buy Ion Storm, I’m probably not gonna- I don’t think I’m going to buy Borderlands 3. I don’t like these creators, and I think they are morally problematic and I don’t want to support them. But that is a different argument. And it’s really interesting for me, and maybe hopefully, for you too, to sort of step back and say, “Oh, yeah, these are different arguments. Both good arguments to have, but they’re different.”

Anyway, I hope that was helpful for you too. It’s something that I wanted to get off my chest and something that I wanted to get off my mind. And… maybe you learned a little bit of history the novel too. If you liked what you heard, always Patreon.com/NoCartridge is a good place to go, @Hegelbon is a good place to follow me. And yeah, I hope you’re here next week. I will probably be back to more normal… programming. All right. Take care.

[Music]

. . .

This episode of No Cartridge was released on Wednesday, September 11, 2019.

Transcription by William Lett.

Head over to patreon.com/hegelbon now where, for subscribers of 5 dollars or more, I’ve posted the transcripts from my interviews with Pursel and Ganzman. There will also be an audio version of this article available for patrons, and if you’d rather donate via paypal, please message me or send at paypal.me/hegelbon . Thanks for your support!)

The American university is a uniquely predictable place. Despite its transformation into a for-profit enterprise over the past few decades, and even despite its reputation as a transformative personal experience for incoming students, college for all intents and purposes runs the same path it has for at least the last hundred years: personal growth through a mixture of education and extracurricular activities. For the most part, the division between these two facets of university life are pretty clear, and the subdivisions between those divisions fall on predictable lines too, such that college life is broken up between class, study time, clubs, sports, parties, et al. Technological advancements and hookups notwithstanding, if you describe your college experience in 2016 to your parents, they’ll have a way to contextualize most of it thanks to these handy buckets. And that’s what makes eSports so strange.

The rise of competitive gaming or eSports on college campuses has been fascinating to watch in part because the phenomenon does not neatly fit into any of the buckets mentioned above. Competitive gaming is not quite a sport in the sense we’re used to at the college level, but it’s too close to active and organized competition to simply be a club activity. Add to this milieu that the character of competitive gaming groups changes campus-by-campus, and it becomes even more difficult to pin down how exactly eSports fit into the college landscape. Gaming companies have been trying to carve a space for them through larger organizational efforts, including Riot Games’ University League of Legends, or ULOL, and Blizzard Entertainment’s Tespa. But just as in the world of competitive gaming at large, organizing gaming under a consistent rubric is easier said than done, and the anarchic quality of eSports generally is felt at the college level as well.

Bart Pursel, the adviser of Penn State University’s eSports Club, describes eSports on campus as a kind of shifting signifier, not quite a sport in the traditional sense and not quite a purely social scene. He notes that the club itself, particularly the League of Legends (LoL) division is interested in becoming more codified in its competition, saying that in the future, the team would look more like a “club team” and would “travel to other campuses to compete, or compete online through the ‘official’ college tournaments and leagues for LoL.” Pursel adds that “[PSU’s] athletic department also has some interest in seeing something like a Big 10 LoL division and championship created at some point in time” but is careful to note that both the university and the club itself are “a long way from that.”

Thinking even further ahead, Pursel predicts that “Ten years from now, eSports will probably fill a variety of roles on a campus, from social and relaxing to high-stakes tournaments, where players might even be receiving some level of scholarship funding to participate on a team that competes within athletic conferences.” Pursel’s comments speak to the challenge eSports poses to traditional college sports architecture. If the future of the PSU eSports club is one that that marries the informal heart of the club with a competitive, athletic arm, then it would be different than almost any sport in college at this point. Too closely aligned to be likened to the intramural/school team division we see in traditional college sports, Pursel’s vision of a mix of relaxation and “high-stakes” tournaments pushes the pressure-points of the NCAA’s “amateurism” defense of unpaid student athletes (ably detailed by Patrick Hruby and others) to its limit. ESports, with their nebulous boundaries between professionals and amateurs in other words, might be dangerous or destabilizing for college sports as we know them.

And in fact, at Robert Morris University, where Pursel’s vision is closer to a reality, the borders between adviser and coach are not just blurred but removed entirely. The RMU Eagles, who for our purposes might be the Alabama Crimson Tide of the eSports world, are in many ways the reverse mirror image of the PSU eSports Club, in which professionalization and high stakes competition are the rule as opposed to the exception. Ferris Ganzman, the head coach of the Eagles’ League of Legends Varsity squad, takes this strange contra-NCAA model of eSports as a matter of course, explaining that at RMU, “The past few years for sure I think we’ve developed [the program] into being a professional environment similar to professional teams, but the very interesting thing is that — unlike professional [eSports] teams who do development, but [who very rarely] sign an amateur player without having worked with that player extensively over a period of time and then just incorporate them into your team — we take in players as well and kind of develop them here both as individuals and as part of a team.”

Ganzman, who has professional experience with Orbit Gaming and Cloud9, recognizes the benefit of having one’s development be part and parcel with one’s competitive team. While RMU gives out scholarships for League players, it is also able to develop non-elite talent without the restrictions of roster space, NCAA guidelines, or national scrutiny of roster moves. As Ganzman explains, “Not all players here are looking for that kind of professional level schedule, [that] work that’s required to play at [a professional] level. So we have a mix of coaches and various systems that we use with our players to tailor to what their goal is.”

In other words, Ganzman’s role as coach is not quite Nick Saban and not quite Bart Pursel: he lives somewhere in between, grooming elite recruits to win college championships while mentoring kids who don’t have any real intention of serious competition and just want to experience the club itself. This has become easier, he tells me, thanks to additions of assistant coaches to his staff, but the complexity of the situation still strikes me as unique in college athletics generally. Ganzman agrees for the most part, telling me that:

So like, for our program we’re trying to be competitive always, at least with one of our teams. We want one team to represent the school at the major collegiate competition. So we do go out and actively recruit those type of players, whose goal really is, they want to make the professional scene, right? But the professional scene takes a lot of time outside [the collegiate system] … And the amount of people who make the professionals here are a very, very, very small percentage [of the whole], so by doing that [without college] they put all their eggs in one basket. Whereas starting at our program or any other collegiate program being set up, they can work toward a new career, have that safety net, and get the college experience in general which has a lot of benefits, like there are [sic] a lot of stuff that happens outside the game that wouldn’t happen in a typical amateur team environment.

So the eSports community — and the League team as well — at RMU takes its character cues in part from the nature of the professional scene itself, which is far less regulated than any of the major professional sports generally. College for MLB, the NFL, or the NBA is a method of gatekeeping, a step in a process that enforces reduced rookie wages as well as systematic league parity by way of a draft that gives losing teams a chance to rebuild with premier players. In eSports, the contract is king, and so in the free market free-for-all, players are only limited by their luck and their ambition. For some players, the appeal of a college system like RMU is going to be its ability to serve as a kind of guild-based apprenticeship, an opportunity to test the waters of competition and build a safety net before jumping out into risky waters. And as a part of that apprenticeship, the club nurtures all levels of competitor, from elite prospect to the student who, as Ganzman says, just wants “to be part of this experience.”

But what then do we make of a club like Pursel’s, which is almost strictly for kids who “want to be part of this experience” but which also has ambitions for a larger role in intra-university competition? On one hand, we can see Pursel’s group as an alternative structure for eSports organization at the college level, one which corresponds more closely to the more recognizable NCAA structure than the privatized, corporate organization Ganzman laid out. That said, it seems to me that competitive gaming and eSports, even in Pursel’s figuration, represent a shift in the nature of college sports that cannot be contained by NCAA-style organization. The corporate quality of the sport itself, the international quality of competition, and the rejection of regional-style compartmentalization all suggest that the more traditional vision of sports — city-or-state-or-university-based teams competing for regional glory — might have less sway here than we might expect. Indeed, eSports organization might end up looking more like NASCAR or professional cycling — teams of individuals united around a brand.

And while this vision might seem more contemporary than the Big Ten and the SEC, it would have no real precedent in the deeply predictable sphere of the American university. ESports at the collegiate level, in other words, is the rare new beast for university and postgraduate education. This means challenges for advisers and coaches, who are now not quite coaches, not quite agents, and not quite educational facilitators. We can see this as a dangerous or problematic issue — what does it mean that such a commercialized activity is making its way into colleges, ostensibly not a commercial space — but I think this is probably not the most forward-thinking perspective. ESports do have a corporate aspect, yes, but the for-profit university of the contemporary moment is hardly the Grand Old Campus we know from our national imagination. Ultimately, what Pursel and Ganzman both suggest despite the differences in their clubs, is that eSports and competitive gaming can mean a new direction for athletes in the university, a new conception beyond the horizon of amateurism and the NCAA. As we have seen over the past decade of development in on- and off-the-field organizing in the University, such a challenge is needed and should be followed with the utmost interest.

The Work of Sport in the Age of Its Reproduction Under Gaming was originally published in No Cartridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you like what I’m doing here, consider listening to the podcast, on iTunes and Google Play, and at no-cartridge.net . There are two free episodes — an interview with NitW co-creator Scott Benson, who was a delight; and one on the legacy of creepypasta — and one subscriber episode on Demon Tower, the game within the game of Night in the Woods.

Also consider donating to my patreon — www.patreon.com/hegelbon — for bonus episodes or to my paypal — www.paypal.me/hegelbon — for tips, and a bonus podcast here or there too. Also I’m on twitch: twitch.tv/hegelbon .

And now, on with the show.

One of the primary complaints I’ve read about Infinite Fall’s Night in the Woods is that the game plugs along nicely as a sort of social parable about growing up until it reaches the final stages of the game, in which a supernatural element is introduced. I won’t name names, as the exact critiques aren’t super important (and I alluded to them in my interview with Scott Benson, who with Alec Holowka and Bethany Hockenberry, created Night in the Woods), but the basic idea is that the supernaturalism in Night in the Woods doesn’t quite fit, that it’s somehow tonally incompatible with the coming of age story that came before it.

The usual caveats to this kind of complaint apply — why did you expect realism in a game starring a talking cat? Haven’t you ever been scared by something off in your home town? Have we really come to the point where we complain about ghost stories? — but the question is worth parsing a bit anyway. Because its too soft to say I disagree with the notion that the last acts of NitW are out of place: the truth is I think the supernaturalism of the game is as crucial as any moment in the narrative. It cements the message of the game by prefacing the structurally crucial epilogue with this severe moment of politically charged unreality, a moment that ultimately leads the reader to conclude with Mae that as long as nothing is real or rational or fair, the best we can manage is to hang on to individual moments of social connectivity.

Before this is understood as a sort of kumbaya moment, let me stress that NitW is not really interested in giving you an easy connection with any of your friends. Bea, the friend I spent the most time with in my playthrough, is dealing with the death of her mother and a radically unfair role essentially managing her family’s store. She is understandably resentful of Mae’s blithe way of wandering through the world. Gregg, your best friend, is happy-go-lucky to the point of being almost a total cypher, fun but blank in certain important ways. His boyfriend, Angus, is the opposite: quiet on the exterior, but with a lot of depth behind the eyes (see glasses as a symbol of sight and of occlusion). And in the middle of it, Mae, your avatar, is a college dropout in a town that has no future, trying to acclimate to a life she has never felt particularly comfortable in. There is a lot of support, don’t get me wrong, but while NitW is an interactive story in some ways, it limits your choices such that you have to play the game as Mae. Bumbling, unable to really express yourself, constantly disappointing yourself and (not as often) those around you, but with the best intentions: the game itself is not difficult from a gameplay standpoint, but emotionally, there is a deep challenge in trying to be Mae Borowski.

There’s also a lot of support, though. Your family really cares about you, and it took a long time for me to recognize that a lot of what appealed to me about Mae’s relationship with her mother was how like it was to my own relationship with my mom (that’s a good thing; hi mom!). Your friends worry about you, your dark past haunts you but not in a Marvel MAX sort of way, and while no one really believes that you saw a ghost at the end of Harfest, Possum Springs vaguely religious-friendly historical substitute for Halloween, they want to help you figure it out and pad softly around what might be your own delusions. In short, your core group in the game develops from a place of support; no one thinks you simply need to grow up or get over your mental, emotional, and social issues. While your interactions with the core group of people might be complex, they’re also always positive.

And so the supernaturalism in the game lends a kind of needed pessimism that I think helps round the game out into not just a coming of age story, but also a social commentary, one that pins down what Benson calls “Rust Belt Gothic.” Like its forbears, particularly the British gothicism that accompanied what Schumpeter might call the “creative destruction” of the industrial revolution, NitW’s Rust Belt Gothicism responds to the changing macroscopic economic landscape by focusing on the microscopic, personal terrors and anxieties of individual people in the decaying towns and areas themselves. When the precarity of late capitalism or (in the case of British Gothicism, nascent industrial capitalism) is recast as a ghost, or as a Lovecraftian knot of terror, unable to be disconnected from the shadows surrounding it, we understand it not as misdirection, but as metonymy — replacing a part for a whole. The terror in Night in the Woods, in other words, is much like the terror in Wuthering Heights: the scary part isn’t the ghosts or the hauntings, whether or not you believe in the actual phantoms themselves.

So, here are the spoilers, by the way. I can’t really complete the analysis without doing them.

You gone?

You sure?

Okay great. So in NitW, the “ghost” Mae sees abducting a teen turns out to be one member of a massive cult of, as Mae and Bea put it, upset dads and uncles. Resentful and angry at their changing economic fates, the men who make up the cult (we never learn who they are, importantly), descend into the long-closed mine that fueled the hey-day of Possum Springs, Mae’s hometown, and find a being there who demands sacrifice for the promise of prosperity. While the first victim is an unwitting dad who falls down a hole to his fate as the being’s lunch, the cult slowly starts abducting undesirables, drifters, and kids who won’t be missed. Their justifications are fairly standard — “He wouldn’t have amounted to anything anyway” — and their reasoning is not too much different — “We did it for our families.” NitW, thankfully, does not do the typical contemporary move of giving you the option of empathizing with these guys, and instead, after Mae meets the dark god under the mine for a shadowed and blurry conversation, they are buried alive after a chase goes wrong.

The reviewers I mentioned above maybe feel that the inclusion of a Lovecraftian horror is a bit gauche given the game’s very down-to-earth qualities beforehand. But I’d suggest that reading the beast as real, a true malevolent evil under the town, is a bit of a mistake. The only two witnesses we have that confirm the monster are the cult of men, who want something, anything, to bring the town of their youth back, and Mae, who has been having troubling dreams and visual hallucinations throughout the game.

For the men, the god under the mine may boil down to an avatar for their racialized and bigoted hatred and fear, a way to weaponize their own anxiety into a force for displacement and reinstantiation. Think of it like the burning cross. Or a Make America Great Again hat. It’s simply a central figure by which the hatred itself is made into ritual and mobilized as a practical action. It allows for action that works as a kind of negative therapy, a reactionary pushback against the social order that is as much symbolic as real, repeated as believed. It absolutely does not matter if there’s a monster at the bottom of the mine or not.

Then there’s Mae, who is suffering from…well, a lot. Repressed anger at the circumstances of her life; loss of faith; total uncertainty about her place in the world; and ultimately this strange sense of image impermanence that causes the things around her to become abstract shapes, lacking meaning. This last issue is why she attacked a fellow student in grade school, an incident alluded to often in the game, but never quite worked out. As she describes the incident to Bea, however, she explains that she was obsessed with this video game and that, one day, the game became a series of unrecognizable and unconnected pixels to her. And then everything felt that way. Self-reflexivity aside — it pains me to do that; there are 8,000 things to talk about in this game though — Mae’s sense of unreality is both a mental issue that has material heft in the game, and a symbolic issue that speaks to the qualities of late capitalist abstraction. Money, we acknowledge together, is a real source of value, even as it turns from precious metal, to specie, to algorithmic magics. Meanwhile, we acknowledge that we want certain things, aspire to have and own other things, and we never really ask why. Not because there’s some sort of “open your eyes sheep!” at the end of that question, but because there’s nothing at the end of it at all. Mae’s mental illness is catastrophic and tragic for her as a character, but for the game itself, it reveals the undergirding logic of the world.

So when we meet the anti-god in the center of everything — whether as the cat avatar in Mae’s nightmare or as the darkness, the “hole in the center of everything” — we have to take Mae’s word for it that what we’re seeing is more fact than metaphor. And to Mae’s deep credit as a protagonist, she mostly doesn’t so much care about that distinction. The cultists focus their own angst on “shapes” as well, but in terms of a yearning toward a past world. The player of course wants clarity. But Mae, who falls down a sinkhole to meet the dark god at the center of Night in the Woods, could just as well be repeating symbols, stories, and suggestions that she’s been given through the entire game. And that distinction, between the real and the symbolic, is what finally cracks for Mae by the end of the game. From insisting that she saw a ghost to being largely uninterested to delve into the actuality of what happened to her in the mine, Mae changes over the last two acts in many ways, but most strikingly from a wide-eyed adventurer to a somber, but hopeful adult. And all through the supernatural experience which…may or may not have happened.

In the end, the supernatural element of Night in the Woods works because it redirects the player away from the supernatural and back into the real world. It doesn’t matter if those cultists were sacrificing to a real elder god or not, because nothing actually happened beyond the death of a bunch of innocent kids and vulnerable people. And it doesn’t matter if Mae saw the elder god or if it was another part of her delusion, spurred on by a lack of sleep and terrible physical pain (you play the last bit of the game as a shuffling shell of the bouncy and nimble cat you start out with). Mae’s lesson of the game — that what we have in life is a series of diversions that we get to spend with people we love so long as we stay alive — is formed in the absence of a larger guiding structure, be that the church or the darkness of the mine. In other words, the supernaturalism fits so well in NitW because it strictly does not fit in the ecosystem the game has produced to that point. Be it total fantasy or actual true monster under the town, it does not determine Mae and her circle’s view of life. Indeed, much like the persistent thrum of capitalism just outside of the frame, the monster at the end of NitW structures the experience of the game quietly and by negation. To look straight at it is absurd, but to deny it seems just as foolish.

The revolutionary act, as Mae discovers in her most heroic and humble moment, is to imagine life without it.

The Monster at the End of Capitalism was originally published in No Cartridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the current moment, relationships between capital and labor are fraught to say the least. Fraught describes, in this instance, not only the fact that relations between labor and capital are always antagonistic and characterized by the tooth and claw of class warfare, but also a kind of epistemological challenge to the very categories of labor that we’ve come to appreciate. What’s less widely acknowledged is that such a framework is being eroded by capital on a day-by-day basis, leaving us with a melange of relations difficult if not impossible to chart (or, non-incidentally, to oppose). This raises any number of questions, but the one I want to unpack here is this: what do these changing relations mean for Major League Baseball?

Okay, I understand — that’s a bit of a jump. But I promise it makes sense with the proper background. Let’s start with another question: can you determine who owns the “means of production” in your job right now? If you’re a factory worker, I guess this can still be a fairly cut and dried question, but for the rest of us, it’s a bit harder. In my job as an adjunct, I suppose I have the power in the classroom itself and the head of department owns the means of reproduction of my labor, vis-a-vis contracts. Even more abstractly, as a blogger, I’m effectively self-employed, controlling “the means” of my labor insofar as I can decide when and what to write, limited only by what Gary Becker, erstwhile University of Chicago neoliberal firebrand, might call my human capital. Indeed, as employers shift to decentralized home-office setups, as freelance becomes more and more commonplace, and as gig economy logics infect even the least gig-economized aspects of our society, the distinction between labor and capital erodes and tends toward total ambivalence.

None of this is good for unions. Not only do they now have to combat the ideological opponents they’ve been warring with since Reagan and Thatcher, they also now have to convince workers that there still is a power-structure they need protection from. It’s a hard enough sell when unions tell workers that they are not and likely will not be management, and are natural antagonists; it’s a much harder sell when unions tell workers that their own self-management and apparent autonomy has a limit, that they will never really own the means of production. Ideology, as they say, is a hell of a drug, especially when materiality seems to back it up.

All of which brings us, surprisingly enough, to baseball. Well, as I think more about it, I guess it brings us to Sports in General, particularly the odd relationship between owners and players.

Professional sports are one of the only places in contemporary American culture where we can easily diagnose the difference between the owners of the means of production and the people who produce the surplus value. Indeed, we as stat-savvy fans often fetishize surplus value over on-field performance, reifying the explicit added value above salary that a particularly underpaid or undervalued player provides. We fetishize GMs as much as we do players for this reason: they can get our team a deal, and we can feel the thrill of passive exploitation.

Meanwhile, the owners of the team literally furnish the means of producing a professional sports landscape by pumping money into franchises that are — at this point — effectively guaranteed to grow in value. Players are the widgets they buy that also double as employees and triple as long-term investments, effectively the gears that make the factory of professional sports run as planned. Very cut and dry, right?

Well, yes and no. Because athletes aren’t quite exactly powerless cogs themselves. They make tons of money or at least have the potential to make tons of money. They hold almost no power at the early stages of their career — and there’s another article here about why that’s the case and what their unions ought to do to change it — but by the time they hit their prime, they have often flipped the script completely. Free agents in Major League Baseball, for instance, can wield the cudgel of nine-figure contracts, as they effectively set the market for demand and opportunity cost in a business in which every team wants to compete every year. NBA players have routinely been the focus of intense conservative backlash, especially as their salary cap rises and teams race to keep up with the salary floor that rises alongside it. Players are therefore the ultimate version of Becker’s human capital — people who invested and bet on themselves and, as a result, control their own means of productive labor.

And this would be wonderful and a weird and early validation of neoliberal, Austrian School capitalism if it wasn’t for the pesky persistence of reality. Since the early nineties (and, yes, before that too), unions and management in sports have been locked in a periodic clash over the nuclear option of a lockout. Well, perhaps the penultimate nuclear option, since a lockout occurs when management and the union are still trying in good faith to hash a contract out; the true nuclear option is a strike, the true Big Stick of the labor union, in which work halts entirely until a reasonable contract is presented by management. Those baseball fans you know from 1994 will tell you how rough those can get.

Suffice it to say, players’ unions and managements tend to — as they ought to in an adversarial labor system — clash. Ostensibly, these clashes have to do with player demands for more of the pie that the owners have, the natural antagonisms of the union-management relationship. But as Charles Pierce pointed out during the 2012 near-lockout of the NBA, money is kind of a red herring in these negotiations. What’s actually at issue is not the profitability of the teams themselves — laughable reports of franchises losing money being obvious negotiating tactics, as Pierce rightfully notes — nor, really, is it the salaries of star players. What’s at issue is a creeping demand by the owners to exert more control over the totality of their enterprise. The illusion of players as traditional laborers or even as high-functioning free agents within a competitive marketplace is degraded every time the owners get a concession from the unions in these negotiation showdowns.

This is of course a crummy position for unions to be in. You’re already losing the battle of hearts and minds in the media because, in the battle between “millionaires and billionaires,” the public roots for the meteor. Meanwhile, owners, who we, the flabby masses, can vaguely identify with come on TV and opine sadly about how much they want the season to go forward for the fans. The players begin to look like villains, money-greedy and too-focused on the bottom line to put a few dollars aside and play for the city’s glory. Meanwhile in the boardroom, the union has to deal with a virtual monopoly, their leverage essentially shot because they can’t reasonably offer some alternative work situation for their clients. “What will they do,” the owners can ask, “go become mechanics? Play for the independent leagues?” A lockout hurts the owners not at all — they’ll be beloved the next year when things come back to thirsty fans — and is a massive loss for the players. And so, most unions cave, giving more and more to the owners every two or three years during new contract negotiations.

But in the case of the stronger unions — MLB, I’m looking in your direction — there’s a very unique opportunity. All of this messy reality of contemporary capitalism, from the degrading of labor identity to the internalization of the bootstraps myth of human capital, has a face in the professional athlete and their struggle. And, yes, a lockout unilaterally helps the owners, but a union that is willing to go on the ideological offensive (if not the material one with a strike) would be in a prime position to reveal some of the contradictions we’ve discussed here. The very quality of these negotiations hinges on the mass-appeal of the very wealthy becoming even wealthier. If unions like the MLBPA could come out and say this, as opposed to sticking to the traditional respectful antagonism that is clearly outdated, they could speak to a contemporary, alienated, and precarious capitalism that is at once hidden by and embodied by professional athletes.

Such a vision unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) asks more questions than it answers. What are the historical underpinnings of the MLBPA that produce such a particularly fertile ground for new ways of perceiving and critiquing capital relations? Is there something in its history — Marvin Miller, Curt Flood we’re looking at you — that motivates a kind of class antagonism, or is it simply that MLB players have the last viable sports union standing? And beyond questions of provenance, what are the responsibilities of the MLBPA as a group? Does it keep its members protected enough, or (and here’s a real moment in which I show my cards) are its most vulnerable members — like 15-year-old international free agents — under-represented?

The historical uniqueness of the MLBPA and its responsibilities necessitates at least two more articles, but for now let me end with a question that I feel a bit more comfortable answering, however provisionally: would a players’ union have any reason to force a kind of capitalist crisis? Well, maybe not. But in a theoretical and even a practical sense, they may be in the most strategically viable position to do so. Asking the impossible or the improbable, indeed, is as important a part of anti-captialist praxis as any other, and if imagining otherwise begins with those professional athletes “overpaid” by the owners, then why complicate it with questions of propriety or possibility? As Richie Ashburn might say of anti-capitalism as well as baseball: the game is easy, Harry.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Players Associations was originally published in Unnamed Group Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

PS: The podcast is now available on iTunes under No Cartridge Audio and RSS feeds are up at no-cartridge.net))

The release of Nier: Automata on the heels of the new Zelda, Breath of the Wild, has action RPG fans in some sort of near-shock coma. While the latter capitalizes on the promise of the N64 classic Ocarina of Time, producing what people are calling a game-changer in the open-world genre, the former is a bit more difficult to pin down. And with good reason — Nier: Automata is the sequel to the not-especially-popular PS3 game Nier, which itself is a spinoff of the Popular-in-Japan-But-Not-So-Much-in-the-States Drakengard series. As a result, the genre-bending, meta-fictional action RPGs that lend their logic to the foundation of Nier: Automata aren’t really in the common imagination in the same way that the Zelda series is, and Nier (I’ll be referring to the new game under this title from here on out) is a bit of an odd duck as a result.

Half-Dark-Souls-esque-fighter, half classic RPG, and a smidge of 2D platformer and bullet-hell SHMUP, the genre conventions of Nier could be fodder for two or three blog posts — I’ll be discussing them soon in the podcast. What I want to touch on in a brief reaction piece to the first four hours of Nier is the fascinating way the game does an end-around on Settings menus and typical RPG logic. To paraphrase the game in its opening, when it says that “Saving isn’t available right now, keep playing to determine save function,” it isn’t just being coy. There is a plot decision behind every function in the game, which both locks the player into Nier’s logic while pushing back against the seamless totality of that logic in a self-reflexive move that hints at the game’s idiosyncratic qualities.

Nier focuses on your characters’ foray into a post-apocalyptic earth, in which your avatar needs to kill machines that effectively enforce (what you are told is) an alien invasion that has pushed all human life to the Moon. Your characters — androids — work for the human race and are programmed to perform self-sacrificing labor and combat, constantly being killed and reborn into new shells of yourself with your memories more or less intact. I’m not too far in yet, so I don’t know the full twist yet, but given that the machines seem to have empathy and are producing weird hairless and genitally smooth humanoid bio-machines, I’m assuming that we’re not getting the full story.

This Twilight Zone esque plottedness follows the entirety of the game thus far, with small hints in the corners of our metaphorical eyes hinting at deeper plot revelations to come. There’s a lot in common plot-wise in Nier with the Metal Gear Solid series, particularly as concerns betrayal and incompetence in the higher levels of command…..or so I’d guess. In any case, the game certainly is quick to emphasize your characters’ roles as cogs in the machine of the Yorha forces, fighting the machines on Earth. Certainly, 2B and 9S — the female protagonist and her male foil — are completely likable cogs, don’t get me wrong! But four hours into the game, cogs they are, ready to follow rules and not stray from the rectitude of their orders.

The mediation of such a gameplay choice — that the player is aware of the moral peregrinations and complexities of the plot before the characters that they control — is dealt with admirably by Nier, which insists upon the machine-quality of the androids. Despite their very humanoid appearance, 2B and 9S are absolutely robotic in purpose and function. After a very humanized early mission, in which both 2B and 9S must commit suicide in order to defeat several large machines, 2B is brought back to “life” in the intergalactic “Bunker” by 9S. The screen cuts into black, as 9S attempts to fix the video input signal. When you, 2B, regain your vision, you’re brought back to the settings menu, where 9S walks you through the “calibration” of your visual and mechanical experience.

In this moment, Nier does two things. One, and this is one I can’t properly describe quite yet because I’m not far enough, it gives you the option to turn on or off your “self-destruct” mode. The existential choice of suicide for a greater cause being broken down into a toggle switch is jarring, even with the somewhat on-the-nose OSHA warning of 9S who reminds you that “you should do this yourself. Regulations and all.”

But the second thing that the game does, and this is the interesting thing for me, is that it sets into motion the total integration of the game mechanics with in-game explanations. Your brightness is adjusted so that 2B can see, not so that your monitor can display the game correctly. The voice volume has to be adjusted so that 2B can hear 9S, not so that the player can. There’s even a control option in the menu to allow for autopilot playing, in which a player can let the game play itself through some of its more difficult moments. Everything in this sequence takes the player out of the central subjective position and reorients it back around 2B as an autonomous protagonist. It locks the player out as an interlocutor.

And this mechanical tick continues apace. Your saving is not actually arbitrary — it’s an upload of memories to a database. Loading is booting up an old body. Finding your body in the wild and collecting its information and items is as simple as replacing the parts of a new car with an old one. 2B is at once humanized in form and content as a thinking, personalized character, but is continually made to represent a figure in the gameworld that is figured by the structures of the menu screen. Toggles, choices made in slider graphs, nothing more irrational or complex than a scroll-down menu — these are the explicit brains of the protagonists of the game. They are at once so simple as to be doll-like, and also so autonomous as to reject player input. The world of Nier moves like a wind-up toy, uncaring of its reception or its player, and the game is notable in this modernist ambition. On its face, Nier is a JRPG about attractive androids; under the skin, however, it is a mediation on free will, and one that from the get-go rejects your participation in that debate.

In other words — it’s attempting a true artistic self-reflexivity. I’ll let you know how it does.

The Agony and Ecstasy of Settings Menus in Nier: Automata was originally published in No Cartridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Oh, and spoilers, as always.))

One of the more underreported weirdnesses of the American wilderness is just how many damn people go missing on a yearly basis in our national parks. Well, underreported may be unfair — it’s not as if there are a lot of misconceptions about the dangers of parks, how easy they are to get lost in, and what can happen if one veers off the trail. But the cavalcade of paranormal stories — some along the lines of r/nosleep style fiction, others in the realm of true conspiracy theories — are a bit more subterranean.

Popularized largely by David Paulides Missing 411 series, the nefarious reasons for disappearances in our national parks have gained steam in a national moment where frankly most of us would rather learn about aliens, conspiracies, and the occult than actively engage in the world surrounding and vexing us. So whether it’s just the deeply fatal quality of the wilderness, tragic missteps, or something darker, we’re drawn to stories about the events we can’t readily explain that happen in areas we more often than not don’t really think about. Is it any wonder then that some of these theories end up looking more like questions about shadow governments, surveillance, or unseen forces? No, of course not — but what’s underlying those theories, anyway?

The most gripping storyline in Firewatch, as I discussed in my previous piece, is the story of Brian Goodman and his father, Ned. Ned, years ago, had the job of the player’s avatar Henry, and Delilah, his friend, confidant, and psychological lover in the tower across the way, grew to have a fondness for Ned’s son, Brian. Brian was in the Shoshone National Park in defiance of state rules banning minors from the park during forest fire season. Delilah knew about Brian, but said nothing as he seemed to be enjoying the outdoors and was getting some time with his (fairly bad) dad.

You end up learning about Brian in fits and starts, first finding his backpack full of ropes that allow you to rappel down steep cliffs, and then hearing stories about his (importantly generic) Dungeons and Dragons campaigns that he played with Celia. By the time you reach the fort Brian had set up outside the cave systems that undergird the Shoshone, he’s almost like a third character in the game, a phantom that refers metonymically to the world outside of the park, the past and future of all the world spinning outside of your own personal soap opera.

And as it happens, you need a phantom to keep the massive complexities of the park and its residents in perspective as your own massive problem and conspiracy unravels in front of you. After finding two girls firing off fireworks and lecturing them to mixed results, you find your guardtower trashed, the phone lines cut, and a taunting set of panties left to identify the vandals. Unfortunately, the girls are missing when you find their trashed campsite, and they go missing completely.

Immediately, you are a suspect, as your character is the last to see either of them alive, and even Delilah delicately asks what happened to them and if you know…anything at all. You don’t, and suddenly the specter of disappearance is brought up — a sheer drop, a drowning, a murderer. It’s unclear, but it’s also potentially incriminating to Henry.

And this is exacerbated by the discovery of “Wapiti Station”, a seemingly abandoned research station that is surrounded by a massive fence and is inaccessible to everyone, including rangers. The discovery comes after the girls go missing, and directly afterward, Henry is assaulted from behind after finding notes that dictate his and Delilah’s conversations, copying routes and exact diction. Suddenly, the two realize they’re being watched, and the teens disappearing seem like an harbinger of future danger than an isolated tragedy.

The danger continues to mount as both Henry and Delilah start to doubt each other, begin to see the entire forest as a sinister set of unspoken threats or misrepresentations. Quickly, after the introduction of Day 75, where Henry is sitting, legs dangling on a rock face eating a sandwich, the whole relationship unravels under the force of the threat of Wapiti Station, one part Paulides, two parts the spy novels littering the rangers’ stations in the Shoshone. The facelessness of your confidants suddenly become deeply suspect, and no one can be trusted — the conspiracy is too wide to comprehend.

At the point at which Henry and Delilah decide to explore the caves — convinced something must be down there that will lead to the Truth — they think they are being framed for setting a fire at Wapiti Station, they assume they are being surveiled by sinister forces, and they fear for their lives. The conspiracy has deepened to an incredible degree, and the stakes have risen to levels that, had you asked in Day 1, would seem absurd. The cave, our firewatchers and the player all think as one, is where the solution will be found, the thread that unravels this entire terrible puzzle.

And of course it is. They find the dead body of Brian at the bottom of the cave and all intrigue stops. In quick order, the fire ravaging the Shoshone requires extraction of our protagonists, and we find out that Brian’s death has been the moving factor of the whole campaign of conspiracy. Ned, Brian’s father, has been trying to scare you and Delilah off the trail of his dead child, a child he has left to mummify in a cave while he hung out away from the law in a national park. The girls turn up in a local jail, and the intrigue of the game turns into nothing more than dueling codices — trying to connect all of the dots while Delilah begs you just to leave it all be and get out before the forest burns around you.

But in the end, anything but the true conspiracy underlying the game is a disappointment to Henry and to the player, one that requires concerted effort to re-litigate. In the end, there’s nothing there but a body, but the conspiracy masks this much more tragic banality with the promise of horror and barely speakable governmental darkness. Killers, creatures, aliens, spies — it all comes down to a kid who didn’t keep his balance while his dad forced him to climb.

This let down is natural, and a part of what’s at the core of all comic book, videogame, or otherwise “nerd” culture. There is no cabal of rich, callous murderers in Ciudad Juarez, there are just banal and horrifying killings of women. The loss of a child in a park is not an abduction by an alien or a cryptid; it is a deeply unfortunate and unavoidable moment of tragedy. Pop culture helps us to believe that the banal moments of our life that impact us the most are not base trauma — the things that keep us from owning or engaging with our lives to the fullest — but mobilizing forces to our continued revelation of a more profound world. There is no tragedy here, in other words, that isn’t a door to perception.

But this is also what conspiracies do for us. We use them to convince ourselves that there is some sort of deeper logic to the world around us as opposed to a series of unknowable tragedies. And who would a conspiracy appeal to more than a man who lost his wife to Alzheimer’s and a woman who lost everyone she ever got close to. The protagonists of the game need a conspiracy in the same way many lonely people through time have needed one. As The Last Podcast on the Left has surmised: people need the Hollow Moon to fill some sort of deep hole in their lives.

But what Firewatch shows us is that there is nothing at the end of the narrative other than a dead body and a lack of explanations. Videogames for ages have been teasing massive conspiracies only to provide let-down compromises, the actions of a few crazy men or women read into larger significance in order to justify the machinations of a larger videogame narrative. Firewatch seems to be going that way, and while any seasoned gamer is probably ready to be disappointed, the gut punch full-stop of the actual truth is worse. There’s nothing that can steel us for the actual truth, the fact that there is no darker secret to most of our lives than the fact that none of them ride on a clear narrative.

Firewatch gives us a ton of narratives, too — Henry’s relationship with Delilah; the missing teens; Brian and Ned; the notes found throughout the park; the research center; hell, even the fires themselves — all of which resolve into dust by the end of the game. There’s no ultimate point to anything Henry does in Firewatch, and that’s certainly not for lack of trying on Henry’s part. It’s due to the fact that, despite our best efforts, the banality and everyday randomness of life is more likely to hit us than a true novelistic arc. Far more common in real life, and far rarer in fiction, Firewatch gives us a look at what happens when we turn over all of the rocks and follow every lead to its very end: we feel cheated by the materiality of the real world, that ubiquitous presence that reminds us of the solidity and the unremarkable quality of life.

Conspiracies, in the end, are nothing more than a set of snapshots taken by a stranger.

Everyday Conspiracy was originally published in No Cartridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When twitter power user @tom_J_allen told me to try Firewatch, I was excited to give it a try. Not least of all because I’d been generously gifted it and had it on my list, but because I’d been wanting to play it for a while. People had been gushing about its aesthetics and its approach to adult story-telling, so I was pretty sure I’d enjoy giving it a spin and trying to come up with something new to say about it. And for the most part, I really did enjoy Firewatch! In fact, the only parts I didn’t really enjoy were intentionally un-enjoyable: the slow dissolution of a summer fling; the realization of a wife’s dementia; the anti-climax of an unraveled conspiracy. The natural world of Firewatch was beautiful, though, and there’s a posthumanist take to be written about the peace and calm of pure solitude in the game itself (maybe I’ll be the contrarian and write this about The Long Dark). In any case, developer Campo Santo did a hell of a job creating a lush environment, so much so that he had to add free-roaming capabilities after popular demand.

But what Campo Santo also produced was a sort of relationship simulator, one that follows the appropriate ebbs and flows of relationships inasmuch as it’s messy, ambiguous, and totally unable to be corralled into a clear, linear narrative the way one would want to. And while you play always as Henry, the male character who leaves his prematurely senile wife who he cannot take care of, you’re never quite at home there despite the first person view. The distant time-periodization plus the deeply personalized stories of both protagonists make it difficult to fully empathize with anyone in-game, despite the deep desire to, given the depopulated surroundings. Ultimately, Firewatch is an ethical vacuum though, presenting a tailored vision of narrative linearity that disavows lessons or satisfying conclusions.

Self-fashioning is at the core of Firewatch, at least in its heroic hypotheticals: you, a man distanced from your wife by sickness, is taking some time away after basically failing to take good care of her. The distance of the Wyoming wilderness and the responsibility of watching for forest fires are giving you a chance to clear your head and learn about yourself. Only, well, you don’t really get to do much of that. You spend most of your time hiking, having accidents, and talking to your boss, Deliliah.

Delilah, for her part, is a ribald, jocular, and also romantically damaged figure. And, over time, you grow closer to her until that connection becomes romantic…or well, romantic-esque. The starcrossed lovers in this game are kind of complicated by the fact that they (spoilers I guess) never see each other in person. Delilah is evacuated from the park — due to a fire you two have failed to stop, incidentally — before you reach the evac spot, regardless of what dialogue option you use to try to get her to stay. She joins the list of faceless other characters in the game: Julia (Henry’s wife “pictured” above), Delilah, various juvenile delinquents in the park, a roving ex-lookout, and even the final figure in the game, the masked fireman offering you a way out of the hell your weird journey has taken you.

And what weird journey would be complete without a strange, sinister conspiracy hiding behind the scenes? In Firewatch, the conspiracy takes the form of a bizarre listening station and the disappearance of two campers who Henry has chased off the park grounds for using fireworks early in the game. Firewatch emphasizes this conspiracy for the player by letting them play day-by-day for the first few levels of the game (eg Day 1 is followed by Day 2 and that’s followed by Day 3) before jumping ahead to the bedewed and loving Day 33 phonecall between Henry and Delilah, and then finally to Days 76–79, where everything falls apart. Firewatch, for all of its trappings as a walking simulator, is closer to a visual novel in this way, connecting narrative arcs with deft ease and directing a sort of scope that is impossible to avoid: romantic comedy turned spy thriller turned disappointed return home.

The disappointment comes from the second surprise in the game, after the fairly tame one of “Well you and this Delilah woman are going to hit it off.” The listening station and deep conspiracy that undergirds the game’s final moments and more suspenseful plot-currents is revealed to be a shoddy fraud put together by an ex-lookout who accidentally was responsible for the death of his nerdy, well-meaning son. Delilah, who has been talking about this kid through the entirety of the game, is devastated, and the slow reveal of everything you’ve been trying to figure out as a player is less an ecstatic revelation as much as an impossible picking at a mental wound. Henry, untouched because he did not know the dead child — though he did find his body — continues to uncover clues and details about the vast scam perpetrated on him and Delilah, while Delilah quietly and (clearly to the player’s view) breaks down.

Henry, though, continues to push for the happy ending, for the movie finish. The aforementioned Tom Allen asked me about the readings of this game that give their sympathy primarily to Henry instead of Delilah, and I get where they might come from. As someone who has suffered through a dementia-related loss, I feel for the character. And as a man who has had summer romances before, it’s a little depressing to see this one fall apart so predictably. But I agree with him that there’s a bit of sexism undergirding the anger at Delilah leaving. For Henry, everything in the park is a tool toward getting past his own loss, to the point that he even attempts to get past the full-end-stop of a dead boy’s skeleton at the bottom of a gorge to the promised end of a recuperative fling with Delilah. Henry isn’t evil, of course — he’s grieving — but then at the end, so is Delilah. Both are faced with guilt, shame, and second guessing, and Henry is stuck on what might happen to him. Delilah, wisely, leaves him to figure it out on his own, offering a few words of advice from afar.

In the end, Firewatch is a gutting game for a lot of reasons. The romance doesn’t pan out, no matter what choice you make, for one. The conversational options produce new dialogue trees, but, much like real life, changing one or two words here or there does not radically change the ending you get. Furthermore, all the sexy, exciting intrigue boils down to a cowardly man running away from his own tragedy and the body of a dead kid. That dead body literalizes for Henry his own dead marriage, and for Delilah her own dead memories of the boy when he was alive and vibrant, annoying and committed to his well-meaning but terrible father. The materiality of Firewatch is there in the cave, at the bottom of a cliff, and in many ways the game itself ends there. Henry can’t ever come to terms with it, while Delilah has to. The player is left to decipher their own feelings, part voyeur, part psychiatrist, and part sympathizer.

As Henry says of Brian Goodwin, the boy’s, body — “you poor fucking kid.” The phrase could just as easily be leveled at anyone in the game. I have read interesting analyses of Firewatch that suggest — convincingly — that the game is about adulthood. I think, though, that much of Firewatch is about childhood and the ways in which, especially in moments of trauma, we retreat to less grown-up pleasures in order to cope. Nature, hiking, scary stories, breathless phone calls with someone that makes a little nervous and a little ecstatic: we know these aren’t real coping mechanism for the complexities of our lives. But as Firewatch suggests, escape isn’t always bad. It is never, however, easy to leave and come back to reality. Firewatch lets you have a voyeuristic thrill in enjoying the escape, but insists on the comedown as well, presenting a vision of life that boils down to pure materiality.

Hegel says — as Henry might say as well — that the relics, unearthed, are only bones. So are memories.

Firewatch, Relationships, and Blame was originally published in No Cartridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Patreon: www.patreon.com/hegelbon
Paypal: www.paypal.me/hegelbon
Twitch: www.twitch.tv/hegelbon

Also, this piece assumes some story knowledge. You’ll be fine even if you don’t always follow, but explications are available in the last three posts on Owlboy and DOOM. Check them out!))

In case you aren’t especially into it, American politics and global politics as such have been a bit fraught lately. With the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the US and the near-constant stream of Executive Orders that have followed from that ceremony, the American people have been reorienting themselves and their once-comfortable relationship to their country on the fly. Globally, shows of solidarity and resurgent action against creeping austerity politics (most damagingly in the Global South) and proto- or outright-fascism have picked up. It’s an exciting moment and a terrifying one, and, well, I haven’t been writing about it at all.

This is in large part because I just…don’t write about politics casually. I’ve spent the better part of the last 14 years writing about aesthetics and the ways they relate to politics, particularly with reference to Marxian lines of thought and analysis and contemporary American capitalism. It was and is (still in some small part) my day job and I never really thought of it as something that I wanted to do online. I don’t — as you might think I’m about to say — feel some sort of obligation to speak up now. There are tons of people writing compelling stuff about politics right now; throw a rock, you’ll hit something. No, I just kind of saw a connection and figured I’d stop fighting it.

This post is about history and authenticity, but it’s also about repetition. My past couple of posts have been about repetition in some form or another, specifically my second post on Owlboy, in which I suggested the narrative of the game followed a Deleuzian tangent in its theorizing of repetition and return. Today, I’m turning to something a bit closer to home, particularly Marx and Hegel’s vision of repetition, as a dialectical return based on contradiction and resolution. As Hegel writes in the “Preface” to the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right,

One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy, in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality has completed its process of formation and attained its finished state…When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling of dusk.

This long passage might be more succinctly (but less satisfyingly) shortened to say: Philosophy as a heuristic can only look backward, explaining what has already happened. As Hegel writes elsewhere, we live in the midst of the ruin without knowing our society is already dead. As Walter Benjamin writes, the angel of history flies forward but looks backward. And as Karl Marx, citing this Hegel in part, argues, history occurs first as tragedy, and then as farce. Each of these philosophers holds the same theory of social knowledge, namely that we as thinkers can only ever diagnose what has come before, making small sense of the inchoate and immediate actions people, groups, and nations make to survive and move forward past their own historical contradictions. Philosophy is of course important! But philosophy is not futurity: it is history.

So, I hear you asking, when do we get to the fireworks factory? When do we talk about games? Well, both Owlboy and DOOM take on the same view of knowledge as do Hegel, Marx, and Benjamin. Owlboy in particular brings this lesson into its form, as the secret content of the game (unlockable by finding and placing several secret coins in their secret altars) is a museum of elder owls explaining not exactly the plot of the game (that’s still pretty mysterious), but the history behind it: their motives, methods, and reasoning. And yet, all you can do is look backward at their confessions and view them as a bystander, with no way to fix what they’ve broken. You witness the tragedy of the owls, as it were, in the falling of dusk.

But is the Owl museum an example of tragedy or farce? Certainly the tragedy of the owl world is that the learned attempt to undo the “loop” the owls found ended up in the destruction of their world entirely. But prior to the actual destruction, the obsession over the Loop claimed one of their brightest minds before he was able to finish the formula that would free the owls. Unsurprisingly, his best friend (pictured above) took over, but, far less gifted, was unable to make the machine work. In the moment of farce echoing the tragedy of knowledge unchained, the friend lies to his fellow owls and attempts the experiment anyway, breaking the world in the process.

And perhaps we can find another sort of dialectical resolution — as we see between genius and inadequacy above — between a legendary past (e.g. the Owls represented in their museum) and a banal present (as we see in Otus and Company’s existence). The world of Owlboy is rife with figures — like Otus’ mentor; his friend who takes to the sky to try to stop the Loop; even Otus himself — who don’t quite live up to the avatars they take on. And so the tragedy of the owls is followed by the farce of the gameworld itself, both beginning to look more and more alike as the hopelessness and depth of their crises are revealed.

In DOOM on the other hand, repetition is always a meta-narrative. The tragedy, we might say, is the Doom Prime game, our first entry into the world of DOOM, in which our space marine avatar has a face, a story, and, put simply, humanity. He and his friends are put into unreasonable, unexplained danger, and he has to simply try to stay alive (as his friends have not). DOOM (2016) is a repetition of this as farce, then, as well as a resolution of the human/divine contradiction. The Doom Marine in our 2016 iteration is a figure of legend, brought to life to kill and only to kill until all demons are gone. Removed from any motivation that we might recognize as human, the 2016 Doom Marine is a farcical monster, a shambolic golem who simply exists to destroy in the same way terrified parents and Senators claimed the original Doom Marine was. Blood for the sake of blood.

Or we might understand the tragedy to be the UAC’s decision to dig into the Martian landscape looking for the resources that people had (realistically) squandered on Earth. This is an eco-critical reading that becomes deeply untenable once the UAC finds their energy (Argent Energy) in Hell itself, but it’s not so unreasonable to suggest that the farcical turn is in this all-too-on-the-nose metaphor. As one cheeky hologram says in-game “The road to Hell is paved with Argent Energy.” Again, we’re left with a dialectic resolution once again between material and ideal — the actual material tragedy produces a largely metaphorical irony, and eventually the distinction between the two falls away entirely.

But in both Owlboy and DOOM, I think it’s too pat to say that we’ve seen tragedy into farce. I think Marx himself implies a progression past farce as well, and certainly Hegel’s Owl of Minerva doesn’t stop in the present, nor does Benjamin’s Angelus Novus. Indeed, all three philosophers see something past farce, and if we take these games seriously, the “what’s next” appears to be “resemblance.”

For Owlboy, this is a formal cue as much as a narrative one. The game resembles old platformers, but insists upon a knowing glance, a postmodern analysis that privileges the underlying melancholy of such games over and above their more typical heroism and exploration mechanics. In terms of plot, the game insists that this world you travel through has been abandoned by owls, but throughout you play as a character who is somewhere in-between — not quite boy or owl — and you meet owl-like characters throughout. Similarly, pirates are robots, but not quite automata as they have emotions and drives. Twig, your spider companion, is a stick-bug in disguise, and the dark owl who follows you through the game ends up being someone play-acting the ancient, now-extinct Owls that destroyed the world in the first place. Every turn is another reflected signifier.

Similarly DOOM is a clear repetition of its older Doom Prime forebear, as the game’s throwback speed, violence, and intensity might suggest. But it goes further past the resemblance point, commenting ironically as Owlboy does on the conventions that lead it to its gameplay. The brutal Glory Kills you can do, in which your character rips a demon limb from limb or chops them up with a chainsaw only to get powerups, are almost winking commentaries on the violence that got Doom Prime attention to begin with. In today’s market, you do not need to amp up gore to sell a videogame; but in taking on its ancestor’s ideas, DOOM reproduces them faithfully and then plays with them, twisting them past a farcical hyper-violence, the kind you’d see following the tragedy of the hyper-violent 70s and the bland and dangerous apotheosis of the Reaganite 80s.

Even moreso, the Doom Marine himself repeats, ironically, with a difference, as we go through the game. The absurdity of having to fetch a sword from Hell to defeat the demons when you have been using high powered future guns the entire game is not unintentional. The repetition demands the relic even when, and especially when, it is rendered totally obsolete.

In the end, we might refer our inchoate thoughts on resemblance and history to Jacques Derrida, who, in one of his more salient moments, wrote the following on signatures in his Signature, Event, Context:

By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer…[but] in order function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production.

A signature, in other words, must represent a singular moment of consent and intention — eg writing a bank note or signing a birthday card — but in order to be a signature (that is, recognizable by others and repeatable by its writer), it must also be totally removed from that context by definition. My signature looks no different when I am signing a dull check for heat from when I am signing a confession to a crime. Nor will it look different if a skilled forger does either — that’s literally the point of the signature.

But in each instance, each forgery, each new intention, whatever, there is some mark of the moment. We may repeat things as often as we wish, but our lingering intentions cloud the repetition and make it (as Deleuze would insist) into vulgar resemblance. Following Derrida, though, there is nothing to be disappointed about in resemblance — resemblance represents a pressure point for change. Just as Owlboy produces formally interesting moments by shifting in slight and meaningful ways from the resemblance to older games it produces, the signature shifts its meaning in small but outsized ways based on context. And just as DOOM politicizes its resemblance by its over-enthusiastic attempt at imitation, our current political moment may be entering a crucial moment of resemblance itself.

Much has been said about Donald Trump and his rise as a fascistic ruler, and I don’t wish to contradict any of it. It’s right: Trump is a fascist, fair and square. But, the metaphysical moment, to me, is not a moment of tragedy nor is it exactly farce. It’s tempting to think of the Third Reich as a kind of tragedy and Trump as the farcical repetition, equally dangerous. But the Nazis themselves, outsized and stylized, seem farcical in their own way. And the American experiment, through Vietnam and into Reagan, Clintons, Bushes, and Obama, represents a sort of farcical (because unwitting) repetition of some of the worst sins of fascism. Austerity, forced rule, and immigration control mark the American Century as indelibly as Naziism marks 1939–1945 in our World Memory. In this way, Trump is yet another instance, but a pale shadow, repeated with small differences.

But these small differences — the vulnerability to critique; the unconvincing grandiosity; the insistence upon immigration controls in a world economy that simultaneously insists upon free movement of capital — are cracks in the veneer of the confidence scheme that is late capitalism. As videogames can represent formal incongruities as productive differences, so too can political analysis recognize — even before the Owl of Minerva has arrived! — the ways in which small differences in historical resemblance have the potential to produce massive upheaval and change.

And I’ll leave it vague like this because, as Hegel might say: we’re no good for predictions in this end of the knowledge producing world. But if history goes through tragedy and farce — and, let me say, I believe it does and I believe it is not intentional so much as it is deeply instinctual in these games’ design — then where it comes out after the embarrassment of late capitalist farce should be of our utmost interest. Though, as I’ll say again, we won’t be able to write the story any time soon: that’s what art is for.

Resemblance and Revolt: Owlboy, Doom, Trump, and History was originally published in No Cartridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.