bookwarmgames Review

Norse Myths That Inspired Final Fantasy VII, by MJ Gallagher – Review and Commentary

For my paper presentation at Manchester Game Centre’s Multiplatform 2025 on the theme of “Rituals of Play,” focusing on the role of Vincent and Chaos in FFVII, I knew I would need to draw on the work of MJ Gallagher. Besides proving itself to be a solid, informative resource, though, his Norse Myths That Inspired Final Fantasy VII is a delight to read. I’m glad I finally took the time to sit down with it, instead of just mining excerpts available online for quotes about Nibelheim and Vincent.

As an introduction to the author, out of the many podcasts and write-ups at the disposal of the curious, I recommend these from Wade Langer, aka Prof Noctis, and Moses Norton, aka Red. I’m biased, but it really seems to me that over and above any objective connections between Final Fantasy and Norse myth, what I’ve sought and been pleased to find in this book is just the sort of human connection, an interaction with kindred spirits, that talking to these two over discord has provided. I’ve had some brief communication with Gallagher, too, messaging back and forth through his facebook page, but not enough to properly introduce him myself.

I’ll note up front that his book on Norse myth has been followed by others on Greek myth in FFVII and themes of Death and Rebirth in FFXVI. It thus fits into a larger project of fanfic-writing and filling out connections between fandom and scholarship which, again, I dig. I’m in awe of Gallagher’s dedication and work rate, and appreciative of the efforts he has made to promote the study of mythology in relation to video games, generally, and to the FF series in particular. I’m supremely aware that he’s had a much bigger impact in this regard with his short self-published books than anything I’ve said so far in posts and podcasts of much longer-windedness and more presumptuous erudition.

Written with clarity and verve for the popular reader, expecting nothing from us but a familiarity with the base game, his work distills down an immense amount of material, citing his sources for the myths and games alike. It also carries a sweet foreword from John E. Bentley, “the voice of Barret Wallace.” It is encouraging and frankly goading for me to see the success Gallagher has had drawing on a single straightforward framework of comparison between FFVII and its allusions to Norse myth, out of all the possible mythological references one might pile up. He brings to bear a copious knowledge of the FF franchise, extending to the Ultimania guides and official novels, to make the most of his insights from this one starting point.

My only real critique for Gallagher as a writer, difficult to square with the great admiration I feel for him personally, so to speak, for this very same reason–is that he is too modest. As popular and respected a figure in the fan community as he evidently is, his work could do so much more in terms of scholarship and analysis than offer the “hope that by the book’s conclusion you will have found something that will enrich your experience of the franchise. Or will at least be entertained. Please enjoy…” (xviii). Taking a leaf from a writer like Alyse Knorr, in her Mario 3, he could have made more than the passing references in the preface to his own experience playing the game shaping his “understanding of capitalism and spiritualism” (xvi), perhaps addressing his father’s incomprehension, leaning on an autoethnographical approach so as to give further narrative and explanatory shape to the welter of information that follows in the book’s fifteen chapters. What does he learn about storytelling, collaboration, or themes of markets or magic, from noticing all these comparisons? We never hear more.

By the end, “entertaining (or at least informative)” as the book is (195), it stops short of giving the reader an idea of why the connections between FFVII and Norse myth (or as I would suggest, mythic language writ large) should matter, well beyond the scope of either playing video games or reading literature. As it stands, the reader is left to supply such a larger meaning to the “passion” or “obsession” that led Gallagher to undertake his project (194). Let me try, at the risk of repeating myself and coming off even more coated in sour grapes…

Both FFVII and the mythological material to which it makes such interesting references can certainly sustain the weight of a meaning bigger than themselves. Beyond providing entertainment or knowledge for their own sake, these poetic works, replete with symbolic significance that resists any simple, one-to-one deciphering of their “meanings,” have opened up vistas onto much deeper questions and experiences than how to progress to the next level or unravel a plot point. Video games and myths, separately, have the power to raise questions of ultimate significance and guide readers to explore them; taken together, they point to a great deal besides their resonances with one another. Knorr’s Mario, again, is an exemplar here; or see AS Byatt’s Ragnarok, in which she recounts and reflects upon her reading of Asgard and the Gods in the course of retelling the myths in incredibly rich, incantatory prose. In Gallagher’s book, he has got ahold of games and myths–or they have got ahold of him–in just as deep a fashion, but by doing so little beyond demonstrating the comparison, his Norse Myths That Inspired Final Fantasy VII becomes something a little less than the sum of its parts. It inspires a reader like me with emulation, to be sure, but fails to inspire in anything like the way its constituent elements do, and as they a fortiori ought to when brought into contact with one another.

In what follows, I’ll touch on a few of the more interesting parts of the one book of Gallagher’s which I’ve actually read, about a game I’ve actually played (and its spin-offs, which I haven’t). My main critique comes very early, but it colors the whole project (see above). Maybe Gallagher is playing the long game, and in other works, written or unwritten, he has the “tricks up [his] sleeve” that will answer this critique (195). Certainly, holding against him what is not in the book is not entirely fair; the lack of Knorr-level sussing out of meaning or Byatt-level reminiscence and retelling does not greatly diminish the worth of all that Gallagher does accomplish here.

I have to say I love the inclusion of William Morris and JRR Tolkien as key figures in the transmission of myth from literature and opera to video games (15-6), but I have to quibble with the lesson Gallagher draws. His contrast between “fairy-tale creature iterations” and “more mythical descriptions…noble, immortal elves or industrious dwarf artisans, for example” is not particularly on target with respect to Tolkien’s legendarium. As a whole, it mistakes the generic successors for the original sub-creator. The invidious adjective “fairy-tale” is the giveaway here; see Tolkien’s On Fairy-stories for his meditations on the deep and abiding links between Faerie (as place more than folk), fantasy (as imaginative faculty more than genre), and myth (as language and reality).

In passing, I should flag the mention of Christianity immediately preceding this at the end of the first chapter, too, as a missed opportunity to bring in “Balder the beautiful” and CS Lewis. Byatt, to be fair, is if anything even more dismissive of the influence of Christianity on the transmission and transformation of these myths, and of its influence on their transformative force, so Gallagher is once again in good company.

The next chapter turns to FF history, where Sakaguchi’s “first RPG for Square” is identified as The Death Trap (18). Here, I feel, is a rabbit hole worth delving into sometime: that both FF and Dragon Quest‘s future producers should have begun their careers with more grim, text-based adventures like this and The Portopia Serial Murder Case. It speaks to a much larger lacuna in Gallagher’s approach (and my own), however: have we sufficiently considered the cultural context in which these mythic references are being tapped, whether in post-war Japan or the contemporary West? What are the autochthonous mythic and linguistic structures underlying more exotic, albeit evocative, references to the likes of Odin and Midgar–to say nothing of the ways they are affected by historical events, economic changes, and social movements in their creators’ and consumers’ milieux? Truly, without a great deal more help with the Japanese language, to begin with, here we intrepid myth-lovers are liable to “fall into the death-trap… Please keep on adventuring!!”

Given these sorts of quibbles, big and little, I was reassured by the care with which Gallagher distinguishes between the Bahamut of RPG lineage, represented in FF following its “draconic” likeness in Dungeons and Dragons, versus the “cosmic fish of Arabian mythology” (20-1).

Along the same lines, I was astounded to hear that well before the final battle of FFVI, already in FFII there are direct refences to “Dante’s Inferno” and Milton’s “Pandemonium” (21). Gallagher is able to drill down into the previous, lesser-known games as well as pulling out the individual creative figures behind distinct storylines within FFVII, identifying the work of Nojima and Kitase on the conflict between Avalanche and Shinra “as well as Cloud’s backstory” within the script—even down to the naming of Nibelheim and Midgar (25). This extends to the departure of Sakaguchi from the company long before work on the Compilation of FFVII was complete. Though Gallagher treats the various games and media products as a kind of unit, helpfully from a lore standpoint but problematically, I would argue, if we are interested in seeing the original game on its own terms, I would have liked more clarity on tensions already developing within the leadership of the creative team as early as FFVIII, to say nothing of how this bears on closely related games such as FF Tactics and Xenogears. Again, for all his focus and admirable conciseness, the context, the creative milieu, is wanting in Gallagher’s account.

Nojima, in particular, emerges as having a “personal interest in myth and legend” (24) and later takes center stage not only as student of myth but author of the official companion novels On the Way to a Smile and The Kids are Alright (37-8). Throw these on the “further reading” list, then, along with Ultimania Omega‘s novella The Maiden Who Travels the Planet, the anime Last Order, and Nojima’s Remake-adjacent novella, Picturing the Past. Rather than raising questions of adaptation and mediation, or simple poetics, ie. how does the form of a work affects what it is able to say, Gallagher seems most concerned with these works’ “canonicity,” which to me seems a much less rich area of inquiry. Nowhere, in fact, does the poetic form of the source material for his Norse myths really get the discussion it deserves from our genial tour guide Gallagher.

Picturing the Past sounds a lot like the memory-finding structuring device used by Zelda: Breath of the Wild (or MOTHER 2/ EarthBound before that)…

What Gallagher does take great pains to discuss, though, are the contributions to the story of FFVII wrought by its bevy of prequels and spin-offs. Before Crisis and Crisis Core (39) give us new characters (such as Genesis) and, per their titles, crises, as well as filling in the backstory of main players from the original game, such as Zack, whose identity Cloud largely adopts along with his Buster sword. Again, the names alone cry out for comment, which, since they are not in the Norse field, Gallagher provides only sparingly; the fact that Gackt (who is apparently a big deal) voices Genesis is passed over, perhaps mercifully, in silence. Still, it might be worthwhile to acknowledge the proximate influence as well as the speculative, albeit interesting, mythological stretch.

Other names in Dirge of Cerberus referring to color symbolism with more than a whiff of alchemical mysticism–Weiss the Immaculate, Nero the Sable, etc.–are given even less commentary than the titular three-headed beast. The problem is that, like with Lucrecia and Omega, to address these would require going into wholly other realms of myth and religion–in short, we’ll have to consult Gallagher’s other books (and perhaps games in the Nier series).

Questions of artistic form and economic realities return with Gallagher’s discussion of the short film Advent Children. How does it bear on, not only FFVII, but Sakaguchi’s feature-length flop Spirits Within? Perhaps more on this is in those Ultimanias, but I was also especially curious about how Sakaguchi’s own personal life found its way into these games and their spin-offs, particularly as he is in the process of leaving the company throughout their production. Well, as we are told about Genesis and Weiss at the end of Dirge, it might be said of the biographers and video-essayists out there that “they still have much work to do” (46).

Just as Genesis, “judged by the Planet to have an important role to play in future events,” does not join the Lifestream (42), so we had better mosey… I am even less inclined to consult these games and FFVII Remake, etc., despite the intriguing retcons Gallagher alludes to, after having read his book than before. I can’t help but come away glad he has played and thought about them so much, so that I don’t have to.

Our Universe, from National Geographic, anyone? Gotta love that Yggdrasil…

I noticed just one typo in the whole book, “Kitasi” (47). I can only assume that the report of FFVII Compilation lore is just as accurate. Besides being reminded of Our Universe and its images of the mythological and sci-fi speculations to which we are heir, another idiosyncratic response that was brought home to me was realizing for the first time just how messed up Shinra’s cover-up of the destruction of Nibelheim is, as Gallagher references Nojima’s novels about how the hegemonic power company “paid settlers” to repopulate it (55). The deaths of Tifa’s mother, and then of Cloud’s later, and of his being blamed… it all connects so powerfully with Sakaguchi’s loss of his own mother, and with games like Secret of Mana and Wild Arms, which take just such scapegoating as their heroes’ point of departure, as well as the MOTHER series, of course…

One of the only times we hear about Japanese mythology, “Shinto and Buddhist beliefs,” comes in Mt Nibel being compared to Mt Horai, with Gallagher referring us to Hearn’s Kwaidan (57). Along with the Greek connections, ie. Cerberus (61), one feels that the Japanese backdrop really warrants its own book. File along with this “the Japanese idiom ‘shinrabansho’…’all things covered by God’ (67-8).

“Yes indeed” – various Chrono Trigger baddies

Another minor quibble: so is Nanaki aka Red XIII “feline” (31) or “canine” (95)? Maybe I’m misreading, but I always thought of him as more of a dog-type, myself; just like about the “yellow fog” in Prufrock, I guess I’ll admit I was wrong! At any rate, I would love to see a book about Native American influences in FFVII while we’re at it. As I go into more detail in my paper, Dia Lacina’s critique of the music in this direction has always stuck with me. I confess I was miffed that Gallagher does not mention Nanaki’s Cosmo Memory limit break in his discussion of the point at which the party acquires “the [Odin] materia as well as the key to Vincent’s basement chamber” (89), despite going on to show some interesting connections between Nanaki and Odin (94-5).

But I love this passage in the Midgard chapter:

“Giants were considered the embodiment of chaos in nature, and the location of their lands was important in a cosmological sense, but also philosophically. As well as meaning ‘wall’ or ‘enclosure’, the Norse term ‘garðr’ was a metaphysical concept whereby everything within garðr was ‘order’ and everything outside garðr was ‘chaos’. Therefore, to the Norsemen, everything within Midgard represented civilisation, while the outlying Jötunheim represented disorder.” (63)

Along with that “civilisation with an s” spelling, redolent of Sir Kenneth Clark, I can’t help but feel the hyperlinks to John Gardner in On Moral Fiction, to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf:

No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard.
Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed
and sings a lament; everything seems too large,
the steadings and the fields. (c. 2460)

And Tolkien’s giants playing football, “hurling rocks at one another for a game” in The Hobbit (Ch 4). Or again Byatt, quoting from Asgard and commenting on a picture (which she includes at the end of her own book):

The legends of the giants and dragons were developed gradually, like all myths. At first natural objects were looked upon as identical with these strange beings, then the rocks and chasms became their dwelling-places, and finally they were regarded as distinct personalities and had their own kingdom of Jotunheim.

The picture gave the child an intense, uncanny pleasure. She knew, but could not have said, that it was the precise degree of formlessness in the nevertheless scrupulously depicted rocks that was so satisfactory. The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended… This way of looking was where the gods and giants came from.

The stone giants made her want to write.

They filled the world with alarming energy and power. (10)

Personally, I would have liked more of this philosophical, metaphysical discussion from Gallagher. In the course of which, there should have been room for some consideration of the “Promised Land” motif, which we first hear about early in the game. It could certainly fit better in a discussion that included more about Abrahamic religions and Greek myths, as comments later in the book on Eden and the Hesperides indicate (152-3). Allowing for the focus on Norse myth, though, some reflections on the peculiar playfulness of scenes like the revels of the warriors in Valhalla and the slaying of Balder, besides more Christian-inflected ones like the apocryphal rejuvenation of the world after Ragnarok, could well fit an adaptation of FFVII‘s “Promised Land”.

The parallels Gallagher draws between Midgar and Gold Saucer are well taken (we might add Junon into the mix), as is the delightful and surprising link between Cait Sith in his capacity as fortune-teller and Odin as knower of hidden knowledge (80). The Odin summon, of course, has its parallels again with a range of mythological figures besides its Norse namesake: Raiden, Gilgamesh, and perhaps even the elusive Genji, besides the in-game associations with Shinra Manor, but also Cosmo Canyon by way of the Cosmo Memory limit break (88).

In the discussion of runes, Gallagher gets wonderfully into the weeds, noting not only the importance of the Rune Blade’s double materia growth mechanic, but also the detail on Tifa’s gloves in the Remake (99).

Looking closely… at the runes… just like people used to talk about reading Playboy for the articles

What does it mean for Heimdall to be the watchman, guardian of the rainbow bridge, and giver of runes to men, and yet for Odin to have blinded himself in one eye receiving the runes originally hanging on a tree, wounded with a spear (98)?

LOVELESS, which features as a stage play in the original game, becomes a poem in the spinoffs and remakes (101). Its all-caps mention defers discussion of the poetry for several chapters, but does lead into more about the materia mechanics. Again, it seems to me that a discussion of poetic form would have fit perfectly here.

As the next chapter explains, Vincent’s berserkr-inspired limit breaks are some of the most intriguing links in Gallagher’s study–but also, he’s sort of a cowboy. What’s up with that? And as ever, the question seems open as to whether the causal direction implied by “inspiration” is actually present, or if its impression is more the effect of keen associative reading on our part to discern shared lineaments of story, regardless of authorial intent. Whatever the case may be, some of Gallagher’s strongest arguments come in the symbolism of wolf and serpent, as we are prompted to reflect on the “enemy within” Cloud (127), much as in Byatt’s retelling she dwells frequently on what she calls “the wolf in the mind.”

For deep lore sticking within the bounds of the original game, the distinction between “sentience” and “instinct” with respect to Jenova’s purposes and Sephiroth’s control should provide further reflection (139), down to the controversy over spoken lines attributable to either agent (146). Once more we skirt an analysis of the power of poetic language with reference to the Skaldskaparmal, in which Loki is both tempter and rescuer. What of the tensions inherent in the different poetic sources; in what sense can we even speak of a singular “Loki” figure, or indeed of “Norsemen” as a class (159)?

To my mind, Gallagher’s discussion of the “triple deity” is particularly loose (164), and when in the next breath he moves lightly back to the theme of the goddess figure Minerva as the “conscious will of planet” (165) I get especially confused as to why he insisted on attempting to separate out the different mythological sources into separate books when these games so gleefully mash them up together. Still, it is delightful to see the parallels between Thor’s cross-dressing and Cloud’s in the Wall Market segment (166). Fascinating to hear that in the Remake Cloud is guaranteed to be chosen (167); one would have imagined (in naive Hamlet on the Holodeck syle) that the newer game would rather have moved in the direction of greater freedom of choice and player agency bearing on the outcome, but instead in this case, at least, it does the opposite.

As we come to the end of the book, elves (via Tolkien) as well as angels and demons (influences by way of Christianity) rub shoulders with Odin’s ravens, named for Thought and Memory, and the “fatalistic society” of the Vikings (170) gives rise to unanswered questions about the “Whispers” of planetary destiny introduced in the Remake (174). While Gallagher’s geological conception of Icelandic volcanoes as a source for the “primordial fire” of Muspell is not wholly convincing (184; cf. Tolkien’s critique of Max Muller and the theories he represents), his association of the Proud Clod with Surt is virtuosic. The connection of SOLDIER Unit 13 with Ragnarok (190) is a fitting mic drop.

To be sure, the book is enjoyable and informative, as its author hoped it would be; but we could say more. Like the introduction of Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger would have it, bringing the mythmaker’s early work on the Finnish Kalevala to a wider audience in her edition of Kullervo, it should also be recognized as “worthwhile and valuable.” As Tolkien himself rhapsodizes at the point where his essay “On ‘The Kalevala'” breaks off, we should strive to find in Gallagher’s appreciative study not only the linkages between Norse myth and FFVII:

But the delight of Earth, the wonder of it; the essential feeling as of the necessity for magic; that juggling with the golden moon and silver sun (such are they) that is man’s universal pastime: these are the things to seek in the Kalevala…

–and, I would argue, in the contribution to poetry, art, and mythology that is Final Fantasy.

bookwarmgames Current Semester

Empty Stadium Summer

Empty stadiums, arcade blues. Writing about games and reveling in learning, play, and art while there is so much else to worry about, and still enjoying the shimmering threshold of summer break–as I always say, still playing EarthBound, I just want to acknowledge nevertheless all the ways this could go sideways, and has already for so many.

Chelsea 2-0 LAFC in Atlanta last week opening the Club World Cup. Alex Grimm/Getty Images via CNN

Can we look at those empty seats and think of anything other than what has been going on across the country in LA, and with the funding of Qatar and the backing of the US a world away in Israel and Gaza?

And can we register sufficiently the juxtaposition of the birthday parade wrapped in assumed glory of the world’s premier military against the popular protests openly threatened with that very force?

Can we agree that it is possible to stand for the country, with all its baggage, and stand against its own overweening power? One would have thought these were settled questions, but then one’s history has been bifurcated and multifarious from the get-go.

Or is it too little to berate the angels of history, without going further and saying that only learning, play, and art, traced back to their very deepest roots have any hope of saving the world?

Among the news and news-like content, most of it bad, as ever, I’ve recently overheard some interesting, hopeful things about games:

‘And I’m now talking as an historian, looking back… big changes are not the creation of old guys like me… we’re not the people who have the ideas that will work to build social capital and to save America… I’m gonna be long gone. So first thing is go young and inspire the young people to come up with the new bowling leagues. It’s not gonna be bowling leagues, it’s gonna be something else. But almost surely will involve something of, of high tech. But it, it will involve real personal relations with other people–‘

‘Before you move on. A perfect example of that for me was Pokemon Go. So I I’m assuming neither of you played it, but I was, I was a huge Pokemon Go fan. Huge. Huge, huge. I think this was the best execution of a video game in the modern age because it was a video game that everyone played. It was on your phones. Yeah. Right. And the goal was to catch Pokemon. You don’t need to know what any of this is, just think of a game where you’re trying to catch little creatures. (Okay.) But what they did that was amazing was you had to catch the creatures in the real world. (Ah.) So they used your camera on your phone and you would literally have to run out into the streets to catch these digital creatures.

‘And so at first it was just like, oh, this is silly and this is fun. But I’ll never forget the joy I experienced when one night I was in New York and I was running with a group of people in Central Park–strangers at 11:30 PM–because someone had tweeted and told us that there was a Snorlax, which is one of the creatures. There was a Snorlax in Central Park. And Bob and Christiana, when I tell you there were, if I was just to estimate, there were like maybe 500 people from like little kids who had dragged their parents out of the house all the way through to like adults who are playing the game running. And I remember at one point one of the kids turned looked at me, well ’cause we’re all running ’cause there’s a time limit. You don’t know how long the creature will be there for. So we’re all running through Central Park together. And one of the kid turns, turns, looks at me, this kid’s like maybe like 14, 15. And he looks at me and he is like, he’s like “Trevor Noah!” He’s like, “you, you play Pokemon Go!” And he’s like, “now I know I’m in the right place,” and we’re running together.

‘But I what I, what I loved about it was it, to what you’re saying, it was the perfect culmination. It wasn’t the either/or. (Yeah.) We were all playing all digital game. It was the alloy. You could play the game at home and we were playing it at home, but you could not help but bump into other people who were playing the game as well in the real world. And it, it was such a beautiful– ’cause once the Snorlax was gone, all everyone could do now is talk. “Where are you from? (Yeah.) Hey, where do you live? (Yeah.) Where did you, what’s the best one you’ve caught?” What have you. And this was like the game won awards, by the way, even for getting people fit and running and moving it. Yeah. But I I, I love that. So like when you say the going young and figuring out the, the hybrid, I think there are ways to do it. ‘Cause some people would be like, oh, I don’t know if you can, I think we actually have seen one of the ways, and I know because I played it, but Yes. Okay, so what’s rule number two?’

‘Rule number two is go local. Go local…

(Trevor Noah in conversation with Robert Putnam, circa 56 minutes in, per the transcription)

And then on The Bible Project, they’re beginning a series on the theme of Redemption:

Jon: But if I’m in an arcade, right? You bring your kids to an arcade, and they get—
Tim: Oh.
Jon: And they get the tickets.
Tim: Redeem the tickets.
Jon: And you redeem the tickets for, like, prizes?
Tim: Mhm.
Jon: I think I would use—maybe use redeem, there.
Tim: Yeah.
Jon: Okay.
Tim: Yep. Okay. So we have, by our house, in southeast Portland—is one of Portland’s
oldest—
Jon: Oh, yeah.
Tim: Classic video arcades.
Jon: The nickel arcade.
Tim: Yeah. It’s called Avalon. The building’s a hundred years old. And it smells and
feels like it when you go inside.
[Laughter]
Tim: And they have accumulated this collection of—it’s, like, three big rooms. It’s—
actually, now, when I go with my kids—which I’ve really limited how often they can
go.
[Laughter]
Jon: They love going?
Tim: They love going. But you go into these dark rooms. It’s like a kid’s version of a
casino.
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: There’s no—
[Laughter]
Tim: Windows.
Jon: Totally.
Tim: There’s no external light.
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: It’s dark.
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: And the only light there is purple, and blue, and green—
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: And red from the games. And it’s just so—a cacophony of noise.
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: And it’s—for me, it’s oppressive.
[Laughter]
Tim: And, uhm—
Jon: And then you spend 20 dollars—
Tim: Yeah.
Jon: And you end up with like 200 tickets.
Tim: Exactly. But many of the games—some of the classic ones like Ski Ball and—
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: The basketball hoop either prints out tickets, or now, it all happens on these
little cards.
Jon: Digital—
Tim: Digital cards.
Jon: Tickets.
Tim: And if you get tickets, then they’ll accumulate on your card. And so then the, the
end of the ritual—it’s like a liturgy—
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: Is—
Jon: How many Tootsie Rolls can I get from these—
Tim: Going to the counter.
[Laughter]
Tim: And then they stand there, and these poor—
Jon: Oh my gosh.
Tim: Workers—
Jon: I know.
Tim: At the arcade—
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: God bless them.
[Laughter]
Tim: Just these indecisive, you know, wishy-washy ten-year-olds being like: “Do I
want the mint Tootsie Roll, or the blueberry, or the chocolate?” You know. And
they’re so patient. So what they’re doing, in that moment—is that my kids have
played these games, and they’ve earned this—
Jon: Tickets.
Tim: This value.
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: They’ve generated value.
[Laughter]
Tim: Right?
Jon: Yeah. Mhm.
Tim: Isn’t that right?
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: In the economy of the arcade—
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: They’ve generated value by winning these games. And then they can take that
value and then go look at a glass case with, like, cheap plastic laser guns or Tootsie
Rolls. And what they do is they lay a claim to that. They’ve accumulated value—
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: And they see something else of value. And they’re like: “I want that to be mine.”
And then you—
Jon: Exchange.
Tim: The exchange.
Jon: I’m exchanging my tickets for the laser gun.
Tim: That’s it. Yeah.
Jon: But you need like 2000 tickets for the laser gun.
Tim: That’s r—
[Laughter]
Jon: You’re not going to get that one.
Tim: Tot—it’s so ridiculous.
[Laughter]
Tim: It’s like somebody actually paid thirty dollars—
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: For a, a cheap—
Jon: Yeah.
Tim: Toy laser gun that breaks in a week. Anyway. So it’s that exchange of value.
Jon: An exchange of value.
Tim: Yeah. There’s something that I’m going to lay claim to, and that will be mine.
And then I do—I go through some process of transferring it into my possession. And
th—that whole process is, I think, what the word redemption, and or redeem
classically, means in English.
Jon: Okay. Is that the main meaning of the word that we’re translating from Hebrew
or Greek? …

(Relying again on the transcript, but give it a listen)

Of course it’s called the Avalon

So anyway. Part of what I’ll be doing this summer is still playing EarthBound and trying to learn Japanese yet, and part of what I’ll be doing, as ever, is singing along and listening for what I can hear of these Redemption Songs through the noise.

bookwarmgames Uncategorized

Rituals of Play: A Side Quest to Manchester

Alex and I will both be on panels at the Manchester Game Centre’s Multiplatform 2025 Conference: Rituals of Play⁠, where we’ll be presenting on FFVII and FFVIII, respectively.

I’ll post the text and recordings here once they’re available. But if you’re reading this in time, it’s free to attend virtually.

In a Side Quests conversation recorded last weekend, we talk through some of our ideas and possible scholarly sources, with shout-outs to ⁠Signum University⁠ and the ⁠Game Studies Study Buddies⁠, among others.

The phrase he can’t remember at first is mono no aware; the artist I’m spacing on, Yoshitaka Amano.

Our abstract proposals:

How Worlds Collide: The Parallax of Psychology and Cosmology in Final Fantasy VIII, or The Interplay of the Mythic and Psychological

Final Fantasy VIII was a genre defining JRPG from the late 20th century which itself followed a groundbreaking installment and innovative masterpiece, FFVII, and was followed by a widely plauded meditation on the ubiquity of death in FFIX. These three JRPG’s constituted the “Playstation One Era” of Square’s iterative Final Fantasy JRPG’s, and are often described by scholars and gamers alike, as part of “the golden age” of the JRPG genre of video games. What made these games, and in particular FFVIII, worthy of a rank also ascribed to 16th century Spanish drama, 1st century Imperial Rome, and even an indefinite mytho-historical time in Don Quixote, Dante’s Inferno, and Hesiod’s Works and Days? In this essay, the heavy and sometimes confused interplay of mythological themes in Square’s Final Fantasy VIII will serve as a map for exploring the development of the protagonist’s consciousness, sense of his self, and understanding of the depth of the world surrounding him in both space and time. In exploring this thread, the paper will examine the ways in which the protagonist’s expanding sense of himself reflects his expanding understanding of the cosmos he inhabits, and that an essential aspect of works from any “golden age” is that they serve to effect similar transformations in those who listen to, read, or play them.

Mansion, Safe, Coffin: Ritual Game Space and Hidden Chaos in Final Fantasy VII

How are secrets in video games, such as side quests, unique items, and hidden characters, potentially generative of powerful real world connections and revelations? Early in course of their playthrough of Final Fantasy VII (Square 1997), players can obtain an item which has no apparent use: the Peacemaker, a handgun that none of the characters currently in the party are able to equip. Hidden in plain sight in one of the treasure chests in Kalm, the first village outside the game’s opening sequence, the grayed out item in the inventory points obliquely through its lack of immediate functionality towards an optional side quest later in the story, while its name hearkens directly to real-world historical and theological references. There follows an important flashback during which the main character, Cloud, and the game’s iconic antagonist, Sephiroth, join forces to investigate reports of a malfunctioning reactor near Cloud’s hometown of Nibelheim. Climbing into the mountains and slaying dragons by the way, they discover evidence of human experimentation that causes Sephiroth to question the source of his own uncanny powers and the circumstances of his birth. Hours of gameplay and many twists and turns of the plot later, upon reaching Nibelheim in the present of the story, players have the option of exploring the Shinra Mansion, where the creators of this monstrous technology secreted their basement laboratory. By following the obscure hints written on a note near the entrance–or more likely, looking up the combination online–they can open a safe containing the Odin summon magic along with the key to a room in the basement, where the hidden gunslinger Vincent can finally be awoken from his rest in a coffin to join the party. Eventually, extending to sequels and paratexts outside the confines of the base game, his backstory reveals the presence of primordial Chaos within the worldbuilding of FFVII. I argue that the trail of secrets conducing to the discovery of Vincent and Chaos illustrates the ways in which gameplay breaks the “magic circle,” only to invite players to reinscribe it beyond the scope of the game so as to call up the sources and interpretations of allusions to history and myth in their own lives.

Ben essentially gave his talk on Project Moon weeks ago. Though his proposal wasn’t deemed occult enough for the occasion by the organizers, I hope he’ll end up writing the paper anyway, perhaps in the course of future posts on Limbus Company. His abstract:

Many multiplayer games (like Fortnite, World of Warcraft, or “gacha” games) incorporate mechanics that reward daily, weekly, or event-related participation to drive up microtransaction sales, encourage habitual play, and enable social communities to form in their game spaces. Limbus Company, the third game by Korean developer Project Moon, makes the odd choice to incorporate many of these mechanics, despite the fact that Limbus Company hosts virtually no multiplayer interactions, and is, instead, a single-player-focused game telling an ongoing story over several years. Furthermore, this story is, in fact, a re-telling of some of world literature’s greatest classics: Don Quixote, Faust, Ulysses, and Yi Sang are all among the characters in the game, and their stories are re-told in each of the game’s chapters, though each of these re-tellings is relocated to the game world Project Moon has built over their career. Many players across the world, inspired by the game, have gone on to read and learn these great works directly, in order to understand and appreciate the thematic adaptations made by Project Moon in this ongoing story. Intentionally or unintentionally, Project Moon has created a game that invites players to ritually re-tell these great stories through play and community, and to engage with a globally-minded cultural identity.

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

Video Games in The Haunted Wood

The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, by Sam Leith, comes highly recommended.

“One of the best surveys of children’s literature I’ve read,” blurbs Philip Pullman. “It takes a particular sort of sensibility to look at children’s literature with all the informed knowledge of a lifetime’s reading of ‘proper’ books, and neither patronise (terribly good for a children’s book) nor solemnly over-praise. Sam Leith hits the right spot again and again. The Haunted Wood is a marvel, and I hope it becomes a standard text for anyone interested in literature of any sort.”

In the run up to the release, Leith appeared on an episode of Backlisted, a wonderful podcast which I first found thanks to their episode with Pullman on The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of those tomes, like Gargantua and Pantagruel, anchoring my own personal backlisted pile.

The main reason I bought Leith’s book new and read it right away is that its final chapter is about Pullman’s work. As far as that goes, I’ll have more to say in another place. But what brings me out of my extended spring break to write about it here is the way video games surface in the text as a point of comparison and contrast with children’s books.

The first reference to video games comes roughly midway through the book in a strangely interpolated chapter, “The Idiot Box,” which does not appear in the table of contents. We are in the transition from the era of Philippa Pearce, CS Lewis, and Tove Jansson (about all of whom Pullman has quite a bit to opine) to that cohort of writers, immediately preceding Pullman himself in publication, that includes Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Madeleine L’Engle.

Here Leith takes up Roald Dahl’s critique of television, memorably sung by the Oompa Loompas against Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in order to set the scene for “the early sixties”: “Dahl’s message…was not just that the then infant technology would make children stupid: it was that it existed in a zero-sum war against children’s literature” (369).

Leith goes on: “The relationship between television and children’s fiction is a complicated one–and not as simply antagonistic as Dahl suggests. What is undoubtedly the case is that the narrative worlds of children were changing, and that television, as the dominant cultural medium, had a huge part in that… But it hasn’t shown any sign of wiping out children’s literature, any more than videogames (the moral panic of our own day) have seen off television.” The only problem with this framing is that “our own day” is already too dated. The moral panics of “our” youth, such as Dungeons and Dragons and video games, have been largely eclipsed by smartphones, social media, and AI.

Citing Jacqueline Wilson’s memoir to support his contention that “Television came to be freighted with the same anxieties as, two centuries before, fairy stories had been,” along with early studies of the effects of television on children in England from Hilde T Himmelweit, Leith comes around to “a crucial point. Children’s stories have always existed, where they get the chance, in more than one medium, and spilled between them. Playground games draw on things that children have read about in books–remember the Bastables playing The Jungle Book on the lawn?–and children’s stories in turn draw on or feature playground games and children’s books. Children’s stories themselves depict children consuming children’s stories and using children’s stories to make more children’s stories. In this respect, these properties have something of the quality I’ve remarked on in myth: a blurriness, an availability to be reinvented, and even an orality, in the way that the spoken performances of the playground remix the mythos each time. The boundaries of children’s writing, of children’s storytelling, are as indistinct as the boundaries of the haunted wood itself” (373).

This is all brilliant. As everywhere in a wide-ranging, mellifluously written book such as this, there leap out opportunities to widen and enrich the field still more: reference to Neil Postman’s far more trenchant critique of television, rather than the strawman Dahl, would have made the same “crucial point” even stronger; acknowledging the ways in which fears about video games have flowed into still more addictive technologies would have kept Leith’s work, at least momentarily, abreast of the present time rather than snug in “our own” childhood at the end of the past century.

Again: “In our own age there are probably more videogames that have become TV series than there are videogames made of TV series… From the top-down point of view, this is no more than the free market doing what it does… but from the bottom-up, child’s-eye perspective, it’s completely natural: stories spill over. When you’re playing with an action figure, you’re writing a story” (374). A world of interpretive, ideological messiness hinges on that “but” distinguishing the “market” from the “natural,” but all we would add, really, is that when you’re playing a video game, particularly from the early era of the medium which Leith seems to be thinking about, your imagination is engaged in filling out the story in much the same way. He would probably agree; it’s implied in the thick bundling of media connections here evoked.

So it is strange that when we come to the end of the book, Leith writes in his Epilogue, “as an unashamed lover of videogames,” that “even in the sort-of-storytelling ones, the story and world-building are secondary to the gameplay… A videogame will always struggle to do what fiction does, which is to allow yourself to envision what it might be like to be somebody else… If you and I play through a videogame, we will have experienced the same world on screen” (552-3). All of which is preposterous, especially given the story-embracing account of play that Leith provided around the midpoint of the book.

Perhaps Leith is carried away by the fear of “more than just figuratively addictive” games like Fortnite, which he singles out and sums up with the footnote: “If you don’t know what this is, count yourself lucky–or ask an eleven-year-old. It’s a hectic videogame in which everyone’s trying to shoot everyone else.” In an attempt to acknowledge and reckon with more recent statistics which paint a much bleaker picture of the reading habits of young people, Leith produces his own Oompa-Loompa-shaped strawman doing a DLC dance. He conflates online games like Fortnite with videogames writ large, setting them in opposition to fiction, as if that, too, were a monolith.

As a history of children’s books, The Haunted Wood is wonderful. As cultural commentary on the interplay between books and video games over the more recent history during which both have figured in our imaginative and social lives, it demands considerable filling out. To be fair, Leith does not even pretend to provide such a commentary, with the exception of these two widely separated passages. But as a lover of video games and reader of books, I will say I remain perplexed and disappointed by the turn from that one passage to the other.

If I ever get around to writing something comparable for the games that have shaped my experience of the world, alongside books by the likes of Tolkien and Pullman, I’ll be sure to credit The Haunted Wood for encouraging me by its example.

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

What Remains: From the Poems of Hannah Arendt to What Remains of Edith Finch

Illuminations and ruminations on what remains at the end of the week, the game, the century.

When I go looking for one thing and come up with another, and another, and… well, after awhile I almost can’t carry it all; I have to call it a day (a week, etc.), throw it together as best I can for the moment (see the present post), and let it go back out into the world, hoping another will find it as well–and will find it interesting, with any luck. Or at the very least, I’ll circle back to it one of these days to contemplate it anew in all its rich associations and, with the benefit of this open-ended time to come, will understand it a little better at last.

For example, the original point of departure here was meant to be a passage in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, placed at the end of Illuminations, a volume of essays and reflections edited by Hannah Arendt:

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. (253)

Of course this passage leapt out at me, as it has for countless readers, for many reasons. Marxists of the Frankfurt school and AI prognosticators, Christian apologists and modern-day techno-charlatans alike, in all their combinations and permutations, will find in Benjamin a provocative thought partner. In my case, the drawing together of the imagery of play and theology makes for an endlessly fascinating analogy. I am a poor chess player and a slovenly scholar, but I do love to “imagine a philosophical counterpart” to games, and particularly love to wax philosophical about the ways in which their mechanics interact with their stories.

As for this particular image of “The Chess-Playing Turk,” its “story is told,” among other places, in a section bearing that name in Philip Pullman’s little-known early novel, Galatea:

In the next room were a number of curious automata, such as the famous Chess-Playing Turk designed by the Baron Von Kempelen, which sat cross-legged at a cabinet too full of intricate machinery to conceal a person, and which had defeated the finest chess-players of its time. There was also a machine called the Temple of the Arts, consisting of an automated view of Gibraltar, with moving warships, a platoon of tiny soldiers marching up and down, and a band of mechanical musicians, playing suitable tunes. There was an orange tree which blossomed and bore perfect painted fruit in less than a minute. There was a duck which quacked, breathed, ate and drank. There was a life-size automaton fluteplayer made by Jacques de Vaucanson which, according to its label, performed so realistically that many learned men had thought that it was human. (211)

Advertising poster for a show of Vaucanson’s automata (wikipedia)

Though written in the ’70s, Pullman’s unsuccessful novel, with its shades of magic realism and its author’s avowed admiration for the mystical quest narrative of A Voyage to Arcturus on full display, remains prescient for its surfacing of the question of the role of “the work of art in the age of mechanical [and electronic] reproduction”.

Add to this the fact that the title of Benjamin’s book is also that of Rimbaud’s, and then of Britten’s song cycle based on Rimbaud’s Illuminations, as I learned when I went looking for the searchable text on archive.org (and the search terms threw up the EarthBound player’s guide, somehow, as well. As ever, EB is in good canonical company–though maybe that’s just based on my own search history).

As the program notes have it:

Britten was deeply affected by the emotional intensity of these prose poems and decided to set them to music as soon as he had read them.  As the soprano Sophie Wyss, the dedicatee of the cycle, recalled:  “He was so full of this poetry he just could not stop talking about it, I suspect he must have seen a copy of Rimbaud’s works while he was recently staying with [W.H.] Auden in Birmingham.”

Britten chose a sentence from one of the poems as the motto for his cycle:  “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (“I alone have the key to this savage parade”).  This sentence also provides the “key” to Britten’s view of Rimbaud’s poetry:  only the artist, observing the world from the outside, can hope to make sense of the “savage parade” that is life.

Having just played through the end of the first disc of Final Fantasy VIII, with its own “savage parade” and botched assassination attempt on the Sorceress, I can well understand the impression produced by being “so full of this poetry [I] just could not stop talking about it”–podcasting about it, in my case, with my friend Alexander Schmid. But I draw the line at this notion of being alone in having the key; for it is only through our dialogues, on the contrary, that I feel like I begin to be able to process the meaning of such a densely woven text.

I certainly don’t have a clue about what Rimbaud might be up to, and lovely as Britten’s songs are, I doubt he is the first or the best interpreter of the poet, either in terms of music or meaning. If, as the program notes say, artists alone think themselves able to interpret the world, so much the worse for them; though we may benefit from the confidence embodied in such art as they are thereby moved to produce, it sounds like a terribly solipsistic and lonely activity. To observe the effect of such a belief in the case of Rimbaud’s life, it appears to be part of what drove him to seek exile and enterprise in the desert, giving up poetry for salesmanship.

Klee’s Angelus Novus, Benjamin’s “angel of history” (wikipedia)

Though you never know. Lost poems may yet come to light. Or like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, perhaps Rimbaud carried the heart of his poetry with him through a superficially ordinary life of infinite resignation. My own opinion, to which I stubbornly cling with a fierce devotion, is that these knights are inside us all, hidden better than the chess-player theologian under the mechanical turk’s table, and opening us like the Silenus of Socrates in The Symposium (and memorably related in Rabelais’ Prologue). When the time is right, we are all “found to contain images of gods”. In that light, the speaker of Rimbaud’s line may well be this precious cargo, and his famous line “I is another” can be brought to bear in this connection as well. In which case I heartily agree: no one else could possibly hold the key to the “savage parade” of life.

In dusting off these reflections years later for a belated spring break post in this year of myth in games, I was actuated by another chance discovery: one of my favorite podcasts, Backlisted, just released an episode discussing What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Give it a listen! Arendt, besides editing the collection of Benjamin’s essays, is the author of more than one of the 20th century’s classic works of philosophy, and has bequeathed us the clearest and most cutting precis of her time: “the banality of evil”–though, as the podcast mentions, its meaning, and the work in which it is formulated, Eichmann in Jerusalem, is contested.

I can’t be the only one to have noticed the resonances of What Remains of Edith Finch in the title chosen by the editors of Arendt’s poetry, and echoes of Osip Mandelshtam, of Reginald Gibbons, of Hölderlin and Heidegger…

Last but not least, in the spirit of Dirt newsletter’s weekly tab round-up, since I was recommending they look at Backlisted, too, here is a bit of what remains in my browser:

The Digital Antiquarian, recommended by Dylan Holmes, is well worth a read. Mixing up What Remains of Edith Finch (which I did watch a full playthrough of) and Dear Esther (which I didn’t yet, though it’s the one Dylan actually wrote about and recommended in our conversations), like “memory and desire” in April, “the cruelest month” to Eliot’s speaker, perhaps, though that title by common consent is given to March here in Spokane, I finally sat down to read what he had to say about JRPGs and was captivated as much by the comments as the articles’ content. Posters suggest links to a number of papers on localization, games as carriers of Japanese culture and values and cuteness, as locus of reflections on design and affect, and in a wonderful bit of synchronicity, to Beyond Role and Play, a book on LARP including a chapter that riffs on Don Quixote. There’s also a FF series retrospective for the completionist.

What else? I still need to submit a proposal to this CFP, and break down and buy MJ Gallagher’s book, and maybe this one on “Deep Games” by Doris Rusch, and actually read some more Arendt, including her poems—

This is the arrival:

Bread is no longer called bread

and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

–and the rest of Kentucky Route Zero, and Dear Esther, and the use of an invented Latin-ish language in FFVIII. I should submit a question for The Bible Project on the Tao and the Exodus Way. I should write more about Philip Pullman, the wheel of fortune as game show and ancient motif, saving as economic and theological image, Christmas subsumed, the spectral in Marx and the invisible hand in Smith…

Or what about this strange constellation of Benjamin’s bon mots on the theme of “backdrops”:

On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. (121)

 In his “Salon of 1859” Baudelaire lets the landscapes pass in review, concluding with this admission: “I long for the return of the dioramas whose enormous, crude magic subjects me to the spell of a useful illusion. I prefer looking at the backdrop paintings of the stage where I find my favorite dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision. Those things, so completely false, are for that very reason much closer to the truth, whereas the majority of our landscape painters are liars, precisely because they fail to lie.” (191)

?

Let it be said of me, as Arendt does of Benjamin in her introductory essay: “Well, he did not succeed in consolidating anything, and success would hardly have been possible.”

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

EarthBound Zero to Kentucky Route Zero: On “Music and the Video Game as Ritual Encounter,” by Tim Summers, and some of Itoi’s Influences

With plenty else to do this weekend, being as it is at once the end of MAR10 week and the day after pi day, the ides of March and the eve of St. Paddy’s, I’m popping in here at the humble video game academy just to direct your attention to a few other wonderful reads.

An imaginary video game, a Kentana Cold Snack.

First, Professor Kozlowski is back with his long-awaited, long-form essay on Library of Ruina, which will be serialized here for the next little while. In this first post, he sets the groundwork for future anthropologists interested in the MAGA, redux era in which we find ourselves, and lays out the stakes for the commentary to follow:

I came to Library of Ruina with more expectations than were reasonable.  I wanted it to be more than a game—I wanted it to be life advice, solace, and wisdom.

As it happened, I was not disappointed.

In a similar vein, I find myself turning to games and their mythological content for solace, but also to getting outside to walk and play in nature now that we are beginning to thaw. I think back to unfinished posts from past summers about then-unfinished games, like Kentucky Route Zero, and how I imagined a mod of it for every state, like Sufjan Stevens’ quixotic project of musical albums.

“Soulful, evocative, and one of the most important games of the last decade” – Elise Favis (Washington Post). That’s the 2010’s, the decade in which I played Undertale, Kentucky, and not much else that was new.

Only I would start not, like Suf, with Michigan, but with Montana, our next-state-but-one neighbor with its “Hiawatha names” (CS Lewis by way of Philip Pullman), its bike route along the repurposed train tracks, its trestles and tunnels and tales of sleeping car porters and frontier towns, like the town of Falcon. Placards along the trail, just as in an RPG or as in liner notes to an album, contribute to the worldbuilding, the sense of depth and history. While the treetops down below exhale their leaves’ water toward the sky, somewhere a driver on the highway is worrying how he’ll pay a medical bill; a trickle of water runs downhill. Call it Montana Exit Zero.

I first encountered the (actual) game at an exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture (MOPOP; then known as the EMP). Similarly, Tim Summers, in a presentation on games and music as ritual space, notes: “the museum sequence of Kentucky Route Zero found an additional parallel when the game featured in the exhibition Design, Play, Disrupt held at London’s V&A Museum, an exhibition intended to illustrate the connections and interplay between video games and other art forms.” While he references work by Dorothea von Hantelmann, who in turn cites other artists and scholars including Chinua Achebe and Pierre Bourdieu, I can’t help but wish there were more substantial engagement with mythic language, which games speak and make space for at least as well as they foster ritual engagement. Thinking of course of Sloek, but also of a classic text like Jenkins’ “Complete Freedom of Movement,” as transmitted via Alyse Knorr’s Mario 3.

Fundamentally, though, I think Summers is on the right track. To quote from the conclusion:

If the theatre is too homogenizing and restrictive, and the museum too isolating, then games occupy a middleground of play. Kentucky Route Zero’s depictions of museums and performances make this middleground particularly telling, but the example merely provides an explicit manifestation of aspects of engaging with games more generally evident in games. It is helpful to recognize the ritual qualities of games, their structural framework, social functions and connectedness to past forms of ritual. These ritual discussions can then help to illuminate how games create a powerful and compelling aesthetic experience, and how music is an important part of this experience.

His “Mother/EarthBound Zero and the Power of the Naïve Aesthetic: No Crying Until the Ending,” (chapter in Music in the Role-Playing Game) was why I became interested in Summers’ work, directed to it by the references in the anthology Nostalgia and Video Game Music. There, too, he makes a point about the effects of diegetic music (drawing on the work of a film critic named Winters, which I find delightfully serendipitous given the EarthBound connection) very similar to the approach I take in my discussions of moments of artistic ekphrasis and self-consciousness in games such as EarthBound, Xenogears, and most recently Final Fantasy VIII.

What’s more, he cites an article in comic form by Keiichi Tanaka: “A Tapestry Woven from the Words of Shigesato Itoi and the ingenuity of Satoru Iwata,” wherein Itoi’s inspiration for the conceit of including the player’s name in the credits, following Tanaka’s line of questioning, reveals itself on Summers’ reading to be a a key point of departure for the use of diegetic music in the MOTHER games. The relevant portion of the manga interview is recounted as follows:

If you could only see the manga-level big emotions on my face, “smiles and tears,” as I’m over here processing this. Maybe I should start twitch streaming myself reading and writing…

The “Climax of The Tigers: The World is Waiting for Us” has been uploaded to youtube, and segments of it are on archive.org. A screenshot of the moment Itoi is remembering (autotranslated):

Part of what makes this such a revelation (to me at least; the top commenter on the video knew 10 months ago and more–

So chalk another one up to the power of the collective internet hive mind over against, say, sensitive scholarly types like your author and Clyde Mandelin, my main resource for Itoi knowledge)–part of what makes this such a revelation that I can’t get a coherent sentence together is that it strikes me as uncannily akin to the experience JRR Tolkien had with the stage version of Peter Pan.

According to Carpenter’s biography: “In April 1910 Tolkien saw Peter Pan at a Birmingham theatre, and wrote in his diary: ‘Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish E. had been with me'” (53). “E” is Tolkien’s muse and future wife, Edith Bratt. Carpenter goes on immediately to another early influence, “Catholic mystic poet Francis Thompson” and especially his Sister Songs, but it is worth dwelling–and no doubt plenty of Tolkien scholars have dwelt–on Tolkien’s connection to Peter Pan and this particular version of it, which he could not describe for all his poetic, sub-creative powers of description, and regarding whose inexpressible contents he had a particular audience or rather companion in mind. Particularly in light of his discussion of “faerian drama” as “Enchantment” in his essay On Fairy-stories, Tolkien’s experience of the audience participation in reviving Tinkerbell by applauding (or not) and Itoi’s of the audience cheering and singing along with the Tigers make for a fascinating comparison.

Tigers also provides an equally illuminating contrast with the film influence that I did know about when I was really studying Itoi’s games, thanks to Mandelin and his Legends of Localization:

The Traumatic Inspiration Behind Giygas’ Dialogue
Shigesato Itoi has stated that the mixture of pain and joy that Giygas speaks about was inspired by a traumatic childhood memory. As a young boy in the 1950s, Itoi visited a movie theater but accidentally went into the wrong screening room. He saw a scene from Kempei to Barabara Shibijin (“The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty”), a mystery film with elements that were considered dark and appalling at the time.

The scene in question involved a woman being murdered while making love to her fiance. The sickening mixture of pain and pleasure greatly disturbed the young Itoi, who ran home and barely spoke a word that night. Itoi wanted players to experience that same feeling during the final battle of Mother 2, so he wrote Giygas’ text to include a combination of pain, pleasure, and more.

Itoi recalls another incident that inspired Giygas’ dialogue:

Gyiyg snaps and loses his mind, as you know. Well, this probably isn’t the nicest topic to bring up, but a long time ago I happened to witness a traffic accident. A young woman was lying on the ground, but instead of saying “I can’t breathe!” or “Help!”, she cried out, “It hurts!” That really disturbed me. I felt that having Gyiyg say this same line would make you reluctant to attack him, even though he’s the enemy. He’s even calling your name the entire time. As for the line “It’s not right”, it means “What you’re doing isn’t right, and what I’m doing isn’t right.” I have to say, a chill went through me when I was coming up with all of these lines.

Whereas, Summers points out in his analysis, with the “Eight Melodies” theme Itoi not only has indelibly marked a generation of players of the original game with a distinctly childlike and “naive” impression of the power of art, but this song has even been included in Japanese elementary school music textbooks for decades, touching a generation that perhaps has never played the original game. Here are Itoi, Suzuki, and Tanaka in conversation about it: “MOTHER’s music was demonic” 😮

With that, I’ll go back to my own reading and writing and touching grass. As Thompson has it:

From its red leash my heart strains tamelessly,
For Spring leaps in the womb of the young year!

Hope you enjoyed your St. Paddersday, and here’s to spring!

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

Powergaming the System: Don Quixote, The Idiot, and the Language of Play in Politics

What would the original LARPer make of his afterlives literary and metaphorical, and most recently of the propagation of gaming vernacular into the halls of power?

Doing my best Dostoevsky imitation, I take my theme this time straight from the headlines. In The Washington Post Opinion, George F. Will writes, comparing apples to orange one’s lackeys with most infelicitous aplomb:

Elon Musk, a Don Quixote with Vivek Ramaswamy tagging along as Sancho Panza, recently ascended Capitol Hill to warn the windmills of tiltings to come. (“Memo to Musk: Overhauling government isn’t rocket science. It’s harder.” Jan 3, 2025)

Not to be outdone, other pundits have turned to ludic rather than literary idioms, drawing their points of reference for the unfolding debacle from video games, and especially from the virulent online parlance surrounding and stemming from them.

Ezra Klein writes in The New York Times Opinion about “The Republicans’ NPC problem — and Ours.” The article from February 16, 2025 is paywalled, but audio and video versions may still be freely available. There, his intro is intercut with a montage of right-wing voices echoing the phrase and ringing the changes on it: “non-player character,” “non-playable character,” used as a “new epithet for liberals.”

Egoistic and a little hurtful to be sure, but in The Atlantic, the stakes are raised even higher. There I find Charlie Warzel, Ian Bogost, and Matteo Wong shouting into the void that “DOGE HAS ‘GOD MODE’ ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT DATA“:

Doge has achieved “god mode.” That’s according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID, who told us that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has full, unrestricted access to the agency’s digital infrastructure—including total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more. (Feb 19, 2025)

That’s… not good. At least, it doesn’t look good from the point of view of us lowly mortals and ostensible NPCs. But maybe that’s our own small-mindedness and blindness to the bigger picture. Maybe we had better just get good.

Obligatory Picasso sketch of Quixote. Is it good? Is he cancelled? I mean, I prefer Velazquez’s Meninas and Cezanne’s Bathers to Picasso’s, respectively, but he’s, well, Picasso (credit: pablopicasso.org)

Dreary sarcasm and ripped-from-context headlines aside, I actually think that going back to the literary exemplar of Don Quixote here might be a valuable way to get at the largest possible context for what is taking place in our time politically and economically as well as culturally, and that the “Poor Knight” of Cervantes and his re-interpreters will help us make sense of this sudden salience of a crude video game idiom in the halls of power and among its commentariat.

To begin working our way backwards: consider the last time that video games and politics intersected, to the glee of the trolls and the chagrin of the social-justice crowd. Well-known to the point of cliché, there was the outsize impact of “Gamergate” in the 2010s. Core to Alt-Right Playbooks and books like Black Pill, by Elle Reeve, still operative in the background of the current discourse, this was when the language of politics (“-gate”) and social justice infiltrated the discords and boards. And the reaction was fiery. “Keep your politics out of my games!” a tribe of neckbeards shouted, spewing doritos locos and dew. Less caricature-prone gamers, on the other hand, welcomed the incursion. Plenty of academics and other cultural elites, as well as people of all backgrounds and identities, play video games, and many of them evidently are not shy about their progressive-to-radical politics and aren’t afraid of breaking the proverbial lance with their normative antagonists.

The Pentagon discord leak; the high profile of gambling on the outcome of the 2024 election (and gambling in every aspect of life, especially professional sports); and still more recent instances like those cited above from the media make clear that just as political discourse has propagated itself into the video game cultural space, games have had their revenge, inserting their discourse into the political arena, cranking up its volume on either extreme of the ideological spectrum.

This is where Don Quixote comes in. By stepping back from the contemporary fray with the aid of a figure who so beautifully links the literary and the playful, perhaps we can trace a longer historical process at work, in which the logic of the market and politics to race to the bottom morally and intellectually nevertheless cast up such imaginative cultural artifacts and enduring personalities as to make their excesses and the ecological devastation that is their byproduct almost worth it. As Spariosu’s work along these lines has shown, there are many illustrative exemplars we might study with profit, but Quixote is certainly among them, and he offers a starting point which has the benefit of a sense of humor, however complex and at times jarring it may be.

Don Quixote in Limbus Company. Image credit: Reddit.

To continue working our way reverse-chronologically to the source of the legend, in the remainder of this by-now-much-belated post we’ll touch on a few of the major instantiations of Don Quixote in media across the centuries. Most recently, as far as I know, he is depicted in video game form as one of the playable ensemble in Limbus Company. Intriguingly, her pronouns are she/her, and like Frog in Chrono Trigger, she speaks in a psuedo-old English, knight-errant register. We await impatiently Professor Kozlowski’s monograph on Limbus Company to unpack what is going on with this one, but unmistakably, given the wild premise of the game, a power fantasy of some kind is at play!

In the meanwhile, from a Diary of a Writer-esque post from October, here’s Prof Ben on Don Quixote, by Cervantes:

…the drama of Don Quixote isn’t in the text. The drama is in the reading. Quixote as character is one of the most famous literary heroes for a reason. And I think Cervantes wasn’t even sure what to do with him – not really. He’s clearly designed to be the butt of a joke; Cervantes uses Quixote to satirize and condemn the silly medieval romances of his day, pointing out the absurdity of these fantasies in his realistic modern context. But Quixote is too powerful for that. His mad dream of being a knight somehow transcends and transforms the realistic world Cervantes sends to confront him. We want Quixote to be right. His dream is more important than reality.

(Apropos of which, this is why I have such a problem with the comparison of Musk/Ramaswamy to Quixote and Sancho. I don’t see Musk in that light at all. If anything, he is more like the Duke and Duchess of the second volume, powerful figures who try to manipulate Quixote (idealistic voters or public servants, in this analogy) for the lolz.)

And Prof Ben on Don Quixote the character in Limbus Company:

So I wasn’t sure how I felt about Project Moon tackling Don Quixote’s chapter. Of all the characters in Limbus Company, Don Quixote has been, since the beginning, my absolute favorite. As filtered through Project Moon’s distorting lens, she (yes, she; Don Quixote is gender-swapped, like Raskolnikov, Ishmael, and Odysseus) is spunky, excitable, and idealistic. Where Cervantes’ Quixote idolizes knights, Project Moon’s Quixote idolizes fixers – the corporate mercenaries of the city; a surprisingly apt and deft adaptation. But this Quixote, like Cervantes’ Quixote, fails to see the hypocrisy underlying the fantastic tales of their exploits, and insists instead that the fixers are noble, heroic people, always defending and protecting the downtrodden, despite all of the overwhelming evidence that they do not. Where the other characters of Limbus Company are jaded, pessimistic, traumatized, or even unhinged, Don Quixote has remained fiercely, defiantly virtuous. And in a world as grim and miserable as the one Project Moon designed, this – perhaps unintentionally – makes Don Quixote surprisingly close to an audience POV character. The others accept the the wretched state of the city as given, resign themselves to the senseless loss of life and cruel realities of the corporations. But Don Quixote insists on fighting back, righting wrongs, and reforming the city. It may just be my bias, but it is easier for me to identify with the one character who does not countenance or tolerate the widespread destruction and loss of life, and who calls out the others for their callousness.

But in the lead-up to this chapter, it is revealed that Project Moon’s Quixote is, in fact, a vampire.

…But, more importantly, it is revealed that our Quixote is not the original Quixote. Our Quixote is actually Sancho Panza,…

It’s all typically-convoluted Project Moon storytelling, but the emotional throughline is this: faced with the reality of her origins, Sancho-Quixote must choose whether to accept or reject the dream that was offered to her.

Dear Ben, if you are reading this: I must know more! Would you consider publishing your thoughts on your Limbus Company playthrough in regular installments? Your work on Project Moon is far and away the best-performing content on our humble Video Game Academy!

Adaptations of the Quixote seem to have a way of going sideways. See also: Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha. Arguably even stranger, though, is Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, which recounts the tale of a writer who so enters into the soul of the novel that he rewrites it, word for word. Transposing back into literature, then, the process of emulation (of books of chivalry in Quixote’s case, of Quixote itself in Menard’s) that sent the old man on his knight-errantry in the first place, Borges’ story raises profound, slightly silly questions in truly quixotic fashion: What is an author? (Fortunately, Foucault can tell us! Oh, no, wait, this just in from Barthes…) And what is originality? What is it to live out one’s dream?

Forthcoming: Prof Schmid’s article on quixotic and Iliadic elements in Final Fantasy VIII. The windmill atop the hill makes a cameo in our recent Side Quests pod. (LP Archive)

Nor was Project Moon’s Limbus Company the first to transpose Quixote and Sancho Panza. Franz Kafka has a retelling, too, based on this conceit. Of course he does; though it hardly feels right to call it a mere conceit, given the prophetic weight of Kafka’s insight. First translated in a volume called The Great Wall of China, it comes from his collection of “parables and paradoxes,” and is brief enough to be given here in full:

Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a pre-ordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.

Illustration by Aimee Pong

Given the serenity of the old man’s death at the end of Cervantes’ book, I suppose I agree: that for all his mad exploits, Don Quixote harmed no one, not even himself, and brought joy, if that is not putting it too strongly, “a great and edifying entertainment,” to many, Sancho included. For all his bruises and lost time, and despite never getting his promised island, Quixote’s squire is indeed immortalized through his adventures. Not for nothing does he crystalize the Spanish language’s rich store of proverbs and quips and unite them with a reenactment of the wise judgments of Solomon. Despite his master’s return to sanity at the close, their knight-errantry does in its small, strange way contribute to the cause of truth, which is to say, in video game parlance, saving the world.

Ultimately, I would have to read the whole book again in light of this parable-paradox of Kafka’s to see what I make of the Quixote-as-Sancho’s-demon theory. Maybe we can make a video essay about it. Imagine the numbers, the comments from the Limbus Company stans! See above: niche content, when politicized, can still break out and seemingly break the world.

We could follow it up with another on the deathbed retraction motif, stretching back to Solon in Aristotle’s Ethics, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Tolstoy’s abjuration of his great novels, and perhaps Shakespeare’s via Prospero in The Tempest, and how many others? Even Aquinas called his philosophical works chaff at the end.

Likewise, this whole quixotic bit about reenacting books: that certainly deserves another, more extensive treatment. Spariosu would direct our attention, rightly, to Tristram Shandy and Uncle Toby’s bowling green, where the good man whiles away his time playing at war. What do we make of the remarkable resemblance to another, historical rather than fictional Quixote figure, St Ignatius Loyola, whose inspiration to found the Order of the Jesuits was born of reading replacements for books of chivalry? “In order to divert the weary hours of convalescence, he asked for the romances of chivalry, his favourite reading, but there were none in the castle, and instead, his beloved sister-in-law, Magdalena de Araoz brought him the lives of Christ and of the saints” (wikipedia). Or the resemblance of Uncle Toby and St Ignatius alike to the mythical Wounded King of The Waste Land? I mean, It can’t be a coincidence that The Fisher King is another Terry Gilliam movie!

To wrap up this deranged little essay, though, we have to mention The Idiot. Dostoevsky, having killed it with Crime and Punishment and yet to reach the tragicomic heights or depths of Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, plays upon references to Don Quixote for its hero’s unconventional social graces and compelling insights into the secret hearts of those around him. Beautiful, earnest, and a little boring at times, The Idiot was reportedly Dostoevsky’s favorite book in some ways: “the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions,” according to Joseph Frank; and those who appreciated it he would have found “kindred souls.” In Prince Myshkin, he “approximates the extremest incarnation of the Christian ideal of love that humanity can reach in its present form, but his is torn apart by the conflict between the contradictory imperatives of his apocalyptic aspirations and his earthly limitations” (577).

Still more, Dostoevsky later prefigured Borges, writing a chapter in imitation of Don Quixote that was only revealed much later to be his own and not translated from Cervantes. I can’t track down the page number in Frank on that, but I know it’s in one of those five volumes somewhere! And as he says, “We tend to take Dostoevsky’s comparison of Don Quixote with Christ more or less for granted, but it was still a novelty at the time he made it. In his highly informative study, Eric Zioikowski singles out Kierkegaard as ‘the first and, aside from Turgenev, the only person before Dostoevsky to compare Christ with Don Quixote’ (94)” (274).

Kierkegaard. Now there’s someone who knew about reduplication, which I take to be something akin to reenactment as we’ve been discussing it. That, however, would really take us pretty far afield.

And then there is Jesus, the son of Mary: the original of Don Quixote and Prince Myshkin alike, reenacting the prophets and fulfilling the scriptures down to every jot and tittle of the law.

To this day, we’re all doing our best to imitate him; though some look like they’re more just trying to cosplay him.

PS: Now that it’s spring break, I sat down to read the rest of Itoi’s conversation with the MOTHER games’ music composition and sound design duo, Hirokazu Tanaka and Keiichi Suzuki, interspersed with what look like email messages from fans, which Tim Summers’ paper put me onto. In section 10, we get the following exchange (per google page translation):

Tanaka: Children don’t just play with parts of their body, they play with their whole body and feel things with their whole body. My child was born when “MOTHER” was released, so he wasn’t around in real time, but he played “MOTHER 2” when he was in elementary school. Around that time, while eating dinner, he would say to me , “Dad, Mr. Saturn… he really is a great guy.”

Itoi: Wahahaha!!

Suzuki: That’s a good story (lol)!

Tanaka: I was really like, “What?!” for a moment. He was completely normal and serious. And, not just once, but “Hmm… he’s really a good guy…” over and over again. And for some reason, it was always around mealtimes.

Itoi: That would make me cry (lol)!

Tanaka: So my wife was like, “What?! Who is that? Where are you friends from?” (laughs)

Itoi: Well, I said in a previous interview that Mr. Saturn is a symbol of innocence, but there’s also another background to it. It’s Dostoevsky.

–Dostoevsky? [I’m unclear on who this fourth interlocutor is]

Itoi: Yes (laughs). It’s Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Idiot.” When I read it, I thought, “Prince Myshkin is a really good guy!” Akira Kurosawa also made a movie out of it, but I tried to include him in Mr. Saturn. However, it’s really hard to portray a “really good guy.” It’s not something you can usually portray. So to express a “really good guy,” I added another character to the background. That’s the penguin from “Passionate Penguin Meal” (a manga written by Shigesato Itoi and illustrated by Teruhiko Yumura). If I don’t do that, I probably won’t be told by Hirokachan’s son that he’s a “really good guy.” He’ll just be “a fun, interesting guy.”

They go on to discuss other references, in the music, especially, and circle back to the idea of borrowing from Dostoevsky:

Itoi: So it’s the same with Dostoevsky! No one will feel anything like Dostoevsky, in the end. Not even Mr. Saturn. But there might be a chance that some Dostoevsky fan out there will think of something. In the same sense, something Dostoevsky-like might be conveyed to children who don’t know anything about it.

Passionate Penguin Meal

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

The Tale of Genji (Gloves): Gilgamesh, Benkei, and Basho in Final Fantasy

Playing fast and loose as usual with the connections, often tenuous but ever-present, between games and literature, this time let’s nevertheless open with a fairly straightforward question: Why are the Genji Gloves a recurring peak item in the Final Fantasy series?

And a little reading and searching provides at least three possible literary references.

Continue reading “The Tale of Genji (Gloves): Gilgamesh, Benkei, and Basho in Final Fantasy” →
bookwarmgames Current Semester

Remaking the RPG: Super Mario RPG and the Paper Mario Series

“Let’s-a go!”

Super Mario is perhaps the iconic video game character, full stop. Unquestionably, the success of the flagship series featuring the portly, indomitable plumber has impacted each generation of Nintendo consoles to such an extent that it is comparable in this regard only to Shigeru Miyamoto’s other most iconic creation, Link and the Legend of Zelda series. To understand the history of games in this era, then, given the importance of Nintendo and the home console market, it would not be too much to say that we have to understand Super Mario.

Continue reading “Remaking the RPG: Super Mario RPG and the Paper Mario Series” →
bookwarmgames Games in Literature

All Myths are Myths of Creation: Devotional Language, by Johannes Sloek

I’ve just been rereading this book and I won’t stop telling everyone how much I love it: it’s as good and better than I remember. Look, I tell them, if you’re at all interested in mythology, theology, philosophy, language, culture, education–practically anything relevant to the inner life, and the possibility of cultivating and expressing it in any way–you should read Devotional Language, by Johannes Sloek. I’ll send you a pdf that I found, since the book is expensive and hard to find, and it’s not even all that long; you can read it in few sittings; you can sit with it a lifetime. Just ask! So far exactly one person has taken me up on this belated enthusiasm for the preeminent 20th-century Kierkegaard scholar’s work, my friend and co-founder of this humble Video Game Academy, Ben, known online and to his students as Professor Kozlowski.

Continue reading “All Myths are Myths of Creation: Devotional Language, by Johannes Sloek” →