By some measures, 2025 marks 50 years of computer role-playing games, and the Well-Red Mage Moses Norton suggests a few ways of celebrating accordingly. From playing and replaying RPGs to reading and writing about them, I’ve been preparing for this challenge for a lifetime, it seems, without knowing it.
I have yet to choose my 12 games, one for each month, to try to complete this year, but I appreciate the stipulations that make the challenge seem a little more within reach. For example, games one has started but never beaten are allowed, so both my file of Pokemon FireRed, started at the tail end of 2024, and my long-dormant FF8 save, which I’m spurred by Ben’s essay to pick up again, are fair game. The rules also specify that all “beating the game” entails in this case is reaching the end of the main story. The completionist in me is torn, then, between wanting to participate–finally playing through the rest of Planescape: Torment, perchance?–and knowing that to do so is to accept that my runs are likely to be cursory, fragmentary, and rushed, even if I do complete the historic challenge. I recognize from the outset that it isn’t very likely that I will.
A similar spirit of fraught completionism is animating my scholarship this year, such as it is, here at the Video Game Academy, where I’m intending to write up all the unfinished drafts I have lying around. Cleaning the digital shed is how I think of it, looking forward to such light as might come along through the process.
We have been known to favor story-driven games, RPGs as well as visual novels, in our courses, and in our reading and theory-building we tend towards the myths at the roots of those stories. In the occasional writing meant to accompany and record all this playing and reading, it is natural that we should circle around the same themes time and again–innocence and experience, language, wisdom, courage, and friendship–rather than proceeding with an argument straight forward to its end. So often, that end is really to invite readers to contemplate anew what has seemed only a distraction or entertainment. And given that I am a halfhearted completionist at best, it is no wonder that I have so many stray essays only half begun, and that finishing them will mean putting them in the bare minimum of readiness to be read.
As a theme for the year, halfhearted completionism doesn’t really have the ring, however, that The Year of RPGs, or even The Year of Myth in Games properly does. So let’s go with that, understanding between ourselves that what we’re bound to deliver might not quite live up.
Along the way, sooner rather than later, I trust, we’ll get to that brief outline of Sloek’s Devotional Language I’ve been promising and attempt to explicate its bearing on the project of reading games mythologically. It’s not an easy book to find, but it’s one that we revere enough to shell out the textbook-high price for a used copy (or in a pinch, to scour the web for a pdf). Professor Kozlowski has been known to name-drop Sloek in his lectures, too.
Should you choose to review the extant literature rather than awaiting updates from us, however, a myriad of resources await the student of myth in games. Alarmingly, the wily Spariosu, who has been there long before us, tallying up philosophers and fiction writers from Homer to the late 20th century, hasn’t yet managed to transform the academy with respect to its stance towards games. And yet it is thanks to the far from mythically inclined Game Studies Study Buddies that I ever heard of his work. See also their discussion of what might be the first dissertation on storytelling in games, “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Story Game Adventure,” by Mary Ann Buckles, and their proposal for a countervailing archetypal work of game studies to supplant Huizinga and Caillois, Beyond a Boundary, by CLR James.
Contemporary broadly Jungian interpretations which might be of interest include two recent doctoral dissertations from Pacifica Graduate Institute, “Myth in Translation: The Ludic Imagination in Contemporary Video Games,” by Robert William Guyker, Jr, and “The (Virtual) Myth Conservancy: A Framework for Virtual Heritage and Game-Based Learning,” by Ashland Pym. On the assumption that anyone willing to read a blog post about such tomes would also be willing to at least skim the originals, a review of these is probably not forthcoming. But that is the beauty of abstracts, like this one from a conference in 2022, or the endless rollout of hits for a search of “keywords: myth and games” at (the admittedly very spammy) academia.edu. Video essays, likewise, are an endless trove of far more polished content than we’re ever likely to produce.
To conclude for now: the myth at the heart of this project of ours at the Video Game Academy has always been the myth of the Lewisian light-looker-along and Tolkenian mythopoetic seeker of truth. It’s the Augustinian longing for a paradigm of a story to apply to our own lives, rather than an accumulation of facts, however playful. It’s the myth of creation, of the garden and the fall, of the exile and return to the land and the faith of our homes, where the TV glows with game systems and the local library and school cafeteria shelves are well stocked. It’s a certain blend of the erstwhile American Dream and the perennial search for meaning: the quest for the grail and the fight against the dragon, the legend with a core of literal and metaphorical truth in the midst of extravagant lies and beside-the-point problems, the poetry of the god-shaped absence in a culture where God has been said to be dead for a long time, and yet we act as though he lives. Our party has gone ahead and killed him time and again at the end of the main story of plenty of RPGs, and still there are countless others to play.
Call it cliché, call it poetry if you like, though rhetoric or ideology are also apt. When it comes to quibbling over words for getting at the relationships between games and myth, we have all day, all year, and more.
Video Game Academy 