Belated as ever, I know, but the first of our weekly-to-monthly updates of the year is here! Happy New Year and welcome back, Video Game Academy readers. Welcome… to the Year of Worldbuilding.
“We went through some crazy stuff… But as you can see, I’m alright now!” (Let’s Play Archive)
(Whole articles could–and shall!–be written on the use of ellipses in JRPGs… the old oratorical flourish of a dramatic pause is the least of it. The thoughtful facial expression, the pensive self-forgetting, the grim determination, the speechless sorrow–so many ways this little trinity (give or take) of punctuation gets deployed…)
We are never done tinkering with myth in games, of course, but the time has come to turn our attention to a related key theme in the overlapping fields of video game studies and the humanities. Worldbuilding is the task before every would-be author of speculative fiction, which is to say everyone who has ever enjoyed a book or video game set in a (sub)created world and wondered if they could make one someday. Kudos to all those who do make the attempt! And all encouragement to those who, like us, wish that we might!
Laura shared this presentation on the Pixels discord, per the zeitgeist, and I recommended she send it to Resonant Arc, who just made a video interviewing several indie developers, including Pat Holleman!
It’s well worth watching the Gottliebs’ presentation about their experience. The insight that sticks with me is the twofold, bidirectional nature of the worldbuilding impulse which they elaborate together: how we as players are imaginatively involved in evoking the images and story of the game, particularly when it is retro in presentation, much like we do with the text of a written story; and how we are inspired to put ourselves in the place of the developer, to imagine how we might want to go about things if we were to make our own game.
Ever since Tolkien mused on “other minds and hands” in his famous letter to Milton Waldman, the full spectrum of fandom, from fanfiction followers to transparent imitators to anxiety-of-influence-laden latecomers and romantic originators of new classics, has been lured out into the open, though it feels like every day the flywheel of content creation and consumption spins faster, and its deleterious effect on whatever real world we still share becomes more lurid. Worldbuilding is just the sort of preliminary, lore-bearing activity we mostly carve out time for studying here, somewhat to our own chagrin, when all the cool philosophers and game studies kids prefer to say with Marx that after all the goal is not just to interpret the world, but to “change it.” Still, we prefer to stay with Rilke’s speaking image of the great, shattered beauty and listen when it says: “you must change your life.”
Why worldbuilding, though? Shouldn’t we start with building something on a slightly smaller scale, perhaps a school–or school of thought–or a neighborhood, or a home, or a steady devotion to some even smaller upbuilding practice of service or mentorship, reading or writing, meditation or prayer? Preposterously enough, the intuition that drives this whole quixotic project tells me that when we are at work in any of these vital ways, we are always also worldbuilding, and that by zooming out and seeing that largest possible framework, trying to get a glimpse of what sort of world we are in the process of fashioning, we might be able to better grasp all the day-to-day upbuilding efforts that we are about.
So, thank you for being here with us at the Video Game Academy for another year of reading, writing, playing, teaching, learning, working on languages and practicing music, or whatever your resolutions might entail.
While it’s still roughly the right time of year, I’m bound to share, like I seem to do every year, this obscure one from Sufjan Stevens–and wishing you once again all the best this 2026!
I am looking forward to reading–a familiar feeling for me, but with an unusually heightened clarity and specificity at the moment–several things this month. Towards the end of October in this year of our Lord 2025, the third volume in Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust is set to release. About 40 years after we first met Lyra and Pan in The Golden Compass, we might finally be seeing their final adventure. For years (albeit many fewer), I’ve made it my scholarly hobby-horse to commentary-write, read, interview and podcast on Pullman’s work, and I’m eager to pick up where I left off, now that there is a kind of boundedness to his latest project. My pet theory is that this new book, and the series of which it is a part, is closely linked to his earliest published writing, two novels for adult readers of literature which are largely forgotten… but who knows.
This photo from The Bookseller website suggests some of what we might expect The Rose Field to include (or to open onto, if the picture dates from after the book’s composition), to judge based on the stack of books on the desk in front of the author: Baudelaire, Wallace Stevens; Pullman’s own Northern Lights; dictionaries of modern English usage (Oxford, naturally) and of Merleau-Ponty; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air; The Reader Over Your Shoulder; 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition, and a couple of books and loose sheets of paper too small to tell what they are, as well as a big book at the bottom of the pile whose spine is obscured by a tape dispenser. Another reference work? A Bible? And what about all the other books ready to hand over his shoulder? I wonder.
Where do ideas come from? How do we decide which ones to give room in our mind? These are questions which Pullman (and his young readers) and Persona 4 both seem interested in, and to which they give unusually thoughtful responses in the form of their stories. At least part of an answer, though, is suggested by the books we place in front of us, aids and distractions in equal measure as we sit down to write. It’s always tempting to read more instead of writing. In particular, I’m thinking of what Pullman is reading, and yet I’m sure that neither reading that stack of books nor an nth read-through of his own books would prove as effective an apprenticeship as the work of writing three pages a day and telling stories aloud, from memory, to children. Or anyhow this was his practice as a writer and teacher, as he recounts more than once, and it seems to have served him well.
The long-awaited Historiographies of Video Game Studies, while I read it over the summer, insofar as it is possible to read anthologies like this cover to cover, will certainly bear revisiting soon as I set to work on a submission for the zine follow-up to my virtual talk at The Manchester Game Centre. As Jacob Geller recently gave an interview on GSSB, I’m reminded again that both he and Cameron Kunzelman have other essays and books, too, that I’ve been meaning to read.
I still owe Aaron Suduiko a piece on EarthBound in response to the “Comprehensive Theory” series on his website. It’s been a year already since I talked with him and the writer, Max Gorynski. I wonder what they’re up to.
Brian Eno, in conversation with Ezra Klein and evidently in his book, defines art as something like play for grown ups, which must be at least partly true.
Nel Noddings, contrasting the rule-bound and relational in her foundational work on the ethics of care, comes close to refuting Kierkegaard and Sloek alike, with her readings of the binding of Isaac and the myth of Demeter. And Benjamin (Walter, not Kozlowski) might come close to undercutting Tolkien on myth and fairy tales, though I take solace in not quite being able to understand what he is saying towards the end of his essay on Leskov, “The Storyteller.”
Friends and students who I flatter myself I’ve inspired in some way have been sending me things they are writing, and I look forward to reading more and sharing them with other readers, if I can, soon.
Most pressing, though, there is Moses Norton, aka The Well Red Mage or Red for short, who has just released his Definitive Book of SNES RPGs (vol 1). While it has yet to ship, I’ve got the pdf here and am eager to read it and interview the author. Biased as I am, I have to believe the book itself will matter more than what any of us might say online, and I can’t wait to see it take up space on my desk and time in my mind.
The World of Final Fantasy VII: Essays on the Game and Its Legacy, edited by Jason C. Cash and Craig T. Olsen, was published in 2023 as part of McFarland’s Studies in Gaming. It has the heft of an academic textbook in terms of scholarly accoutrements (footnotes, dense argumentation, etc.) but not in terms of cost or page length. The contents can be viewed on the series website or at The Video Game Library entry; I borrowed a paper copy via interlibrary loan, and would certainly recommend that before buying to anyone interested in reading this sort of text.
My guess is that, like me, the main purpose they would have for doing so, if anyone is so inclined after reading my own crabbed persiflage, would be to cite and quote from the authors so as to enter into the scholarly conversation around the game itself or some related field in which FFVII and the literature on it might serve as fodder for discussion, whether as case studies, evidence for a thesis, or counterexamples to array against another interpretation. For playing the game of academia, in short, with Final Fantasy, this volume is an entirely adequate starting point.
If none of the essays are brilliantly written or persuasive, if none looks like the definitive take on FFVII in this early phase of its influence, the book as a whole nevertheless suggests a noteworthy current of thought forming about some of FFVII‘s core themes and, by its very existence, it shows a willingness on the part of the scholarly community to engage with the game’s undeniable impact on the culture. As for what the nature of that impact and its meaning might prove to be, I’ll venture to say a close reading of the game itself, like Alex and I did a few years ago replaying it for our podcast, would come closer to giving the full picture. So give it a replay, give us a listen, and who knows, maybe you’ll be the one to respond with an epochal study truly worthy of the material. For now, in what follows, I’ll briefly sketch what I see as significant takeaways from the various essays here. As the alphabetically primary editor Cash says, quoting our spikey haired hero in the title of his Introduction, “Let’s Mosey.”
Cid is so done with this meme.
First, let’s not, though. Instead of breezing right through to the essays proper, let’s go on a little side quest to ponder the citational repertoire of this opening piece, since it sets the tone and reveals something about the editorial perspective for the book as a whole. Appropriately enough, the game has the first and last word in Cash’s introduction: “All right, everyone, let’s mosey,” he concludes, having set the temporal scene for the game’s release, highlighted some of the more objective ways in which it stands out in the franchise, and given summaries of each of the essays to follow (9). For a short introduction meant to provide context and perhaps a kind of call to action as to the significance of the work we’re about to study, as well as invite the reader into the volume with a bit of an inside joke, however, Cash’s use of this quote is telling. There is no explanation of the point at which Cloud’s iconic line appears, ie. right at the end of the game in the original localization, nor any attempt to understand the original phrase or how it is used in the Japanese version. The question of the language of the game is effectively sidestepped, here and throughout the book. All the authors would have had to say is that plenty of articles and video essays can help fill in the omission (see Caldwell and Rogers, or consult the Shinra Archaeology Dept translation spreadsheet). Cash’s references are limited to appeals to two Statistica articles about the popularity and demographics of “gamers,” a shout-out to Courcier and El Kanafi’s groundbreaking monograph, The Legend of Final Fantasy VII (though Holleman’s Reverse Design entry is ignored), and an allusion to the “hikikomori phenomenon” and “moral panic” surrounding video game play habits in Japan and the US in Addictive Behavioral Reports (1).
Having set the stage in this somewhat brusque and scattershot manner, the editors then make the decision to structure the presentation of essays according to the unfortunate “narratology/ludology” divide of “Disc 1: Narrative,” “Disc 2: Player Experience,” and “Disc 3: Legacy.” For more (than you probably ever imagined people could care) about this distinction, see the recent Historiographies of Game Studies. It’s too bad, because a disc by disc approach could have actually been incredibly fruitful for the sort of close attention to the unified effect of story, gameplay, and cultural impact in FFVII as these unfold over the course of the game.
Disc 1 leads with one of the stronger essays in the collection, “The Bringer of Light Becomes the Fallen Angel: Sephiroth, Lucifer, and Frankenstein’s Creature,” by Ceschino P. Brooks de Vita. Albeit in service to his focus on the villains, he does a better job than Cash in situating the game and what is at stake, referencing FFVI’s Kefka, Jonah Mitropoulos’s essay on the “Japanese-Shinto ‘value-orientation'” and Shusaku Endo’s Silence (14), along with Neon Genesis Evangelion to help ground the discussion (15). The remainder of the essay is a clear and straightforward comparison of Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s Creature with Sephiroth, concluding with an intriguing addendum on the women of FFVII as “a significant departure from the follies of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, in which the men repeatedly disregard the potential of the women in their lives to help them” (30). Arguably, the essay’s inclusion of material from Crisis Core and Advent Children expands its scope, but I would have preferred a deeper investigation of such characters as Hojo, to say nothing of Tifa and Aerith who are mostly relegated to the tail end, as they are portrayed in the original release.
The second essay, “Angelus ex Machina: Economic and Environmental Justice in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII,” by Cash, continues this equivocation about the scope of the artifact under consideration in the volume, at least making it plain from the outset that more media than the original game will be brought to bear for this particular essay. It also seeks to tie the expansion of the story’s ambitions, both within FFVII and across the “compilation” it has spawned, to the diminution of its actual effectiveness at developing the core themes Cash is most interested in. This is a subtle and sophisticated argument, and I think Cash has it almost exactly backwards. I hedge with that “almost” only because there is ample evidence that a kind of decline is at work with each new release, insofar as it makes it more difficult to see the ever-compiling FFVII in its entirety as any sort of coherent experience conveying a discernable theme, other than the proposition that fans will keep paying for more of it. In fact, far from diminishing returns, the expansion of the game beyond Midgar and the revelations of Cloud and Sephiroth’s complex relationship to one another and to the Planet they are respectively out to save and to dominate make clear that the political is always, and not only with in the framework of the game, just one manifestation of the mythic. The importance of such themes as environmentalism and class conflict are not, however, thereby diminished, but can be seen in accordance with a larger perspective. I agree with Cash that in later areas such as Corel and Gold Saucer, “providing an arguably deeper and richer interrogation of class inequality than Midgar, the moral center becomes harder and harder to pin down” (50). I certainly can acknowledge “no narrative media, no matter how developed it may be, can solve all of the problems it touches on” (51). Where he adduces these points in his conclusion as weaknesses generated by the game’s epic narrative, I would simply accept them as proofs of its literary merit, resistant to reductive readings.
Yasheng She’s essay on “The Death of Aerith: Traumatic Femininity and Japan’s Postwar Modernity” goes some way to sketching in the cultural background implicit in this reversal. She gets it: “While FFVII seems to focus on the dangers of nuclear power, the real danger lies with the wartime masculinity that allowed nuclear destruction” (61). Technological, environmental, and social justice concerns are all in play in FFVII, and all contribute to its total effect; She’s essay is mostly concerned with how history and gender inflect and inform the meaning of the game’s concrete referents to real-world wars and ideologies as they carry across in its more metaphorical and open-ended, but no less powerful, moments of individual and collective trauma and recovery. She has an unhelpful tendency, though it’s one I recognize that I’m guilty of when I set myself to write this sort of thing, too, to give only the barest shrift to citations. Of particular interest are references to Igarashi Yoshikuni on Japan’s “positioning wartime and postwar trauma as the onset of Japanese modernity,” Souvik Mukherjee’s “postcolonialism as an intervention to the studies of video games,” Soraya Murray seeking “to address ‘the popular depoliticization on video games'” (all these in successive sentences on 55), and Koichi Iwabuchi’s concepts of “hybridity” and “mukokuseki” or “no nationality” tagged onto a tantalizing description of the game’s use of “English and Japanese signages” right before the end of the paper (65-6).
“Fragile Materials: Memory and Ecology in Final Fantasy VII,” by Nickk Hertzog, along the same lines as Cash in his essay, juxtaposes themes that I’m calling, broadly, mythic and political. While I applaud his brave choice to focus on “the original FFVII” (69) I find Hertzog’s frequent use of secondary sources such as Zizek and Deleuze/Guattari to be profoundly corrosive for his argument. How does the “arborescent” view of memory put forward by the latter (71; allegedly–I haven’t read them, and if I tried to, I doubt I would understand what they’re actually saying) provide any more insight than actually looking at the scenes in the game where Cloud’s memory is represented as text, gameplay, and interior landscape? Why not abide with the Proustian view of recovering lost time, rather than jumping to the Deleuzian “sickness” (71)? Why lean on Zizek to assert that “Cloud’s journey shows that an opposition to the impacts of science is ultimately a pointless one” (80)? Hertzog does engage with Robbie Sykes’ paper on “Earth Jurisprudence” in a sustained way, but he buries what looks like a crucial distinction relating to individual agency in a final footnote (82). By the end, I’m not sure he’s accomplished anything beyond summoning up and wrestling with a handful of all-too-significant predecessors, like the ghosts of the Gii (74)–and reversing Cash’s framing, which is a good start.
The next section, “Disc 2: Player Experience” opens with a still more off-putting entry, “‘A body hast thou prepared me’: Algorithmic Suture, Gamic Memory, and (Co)-creating a Rhetorical Network of Identity-Trauma in Final Fantasy VII.” The author, Samuel Stinson, not content with this howler of a title, doubles down with the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews (10:5) as an epigraph. It’s not so much the ludicrous mouthful of a subtitle as the egregious formatting on the citation of the Bible “(King James Version, Heb. 10.5)” that makes me wonder what, if anything, the editors tried to do to wrangle this piece into presentability. They evidently never asked or couldn’t convince him that it would help to actually engage with the text from Hebrews, aside from this cryptic conclusion:
Within the context of FFVII, Aeris must continually be permitted to die, instead of once and for all, because in her death there is a reminding, a remanding, for the player through each play-through, as a body has been prepared fo the enactment, and the water is ready.
Being dead, the game speaks: Why tarriest thou? (102)
Now, proposing to supply us with a rhetorical “toolkit” and drawing on a dissertation called Writing with Video Games for the purposes of publishing an article about… writing about games… to help students write with/about games–this all seems pretty circular, if well-meaning. The essay is too condescending in tone for me to give Stinson the benefit of the doubt that he might have anything substantive to say amidst all the jargon and posturing, though I appreciate his loyalty to the spelling of Aeris and the original release, his inclusion of an example from FFIV (98; though FFVIII seems like it would offer the better point of comparison for romantic insights), and his boldness in bookending his flimsy essay with KJV English.
If Stinson leaves us wondering “what hath [FFVII] to do with Christ?” the following essay, “Final FantaSi’ VII: Role-Playing the Eco-Ethics of Laudato si‘” by Gregory D. Jones, Jr. provides an answer. A very specific riposte is discernable in the concluding paragraphs to the “dead” game of the prior essay: with the final screen “an ever-unfolding starfield, where FFVII’s ‘Prelude’ plays in the background… the game plays on; it never truly ends” (120). To the believer, and to anyone open to a resolutely sunny application of Catholic encyclicals and virtue ethics to the specter of environmental catastrophe, it is no doubt a satisfying one. For more jaded readers, Jones’ trotting out of psychological research on the benefits of games may register as naive or one-sided. Regardless of one’s disposition, this central essay in the volume makes for a refreshing contrast. Again refreshingly, Jones is not stinting in his quotations from the game’s actual text, with well-chosen passages incorporated throughout.
In “‘Action combat trash’: Final Fantasy VII Remake, Control, and Combat Nostalgia,” Indira Neill Hoch puts her finger on the pulse of fan reception. Drawing on forum comments rather than interviews or other long-form analysis, she predictably finds that both positive and negative views of the remake are “predicated on the existence of a desirable, idealized past” (134). “Very little, if anything emerges in the comments regarding FFVII as a narrative… little commentary on…. themes of capitalist and corporatist systems, environmentalism, resistance, poverty, and war,” she writes, “Instead, what they hoped to protect was a fabricated, nostalgic gaming past, defined through combat mechanics, silly distractions [ie. the “frog” status ailment], and defending their own memories of the experience of playing” (ibid.). Neill Hoch has a clear, ironclad argument, based on a narrowly defined dataset and an unusually copious swathe of citations including both stalwarts of the fields of games, cultural studies, and communications (Huizinga, Aareseth, Consalvo, Wolf, Gray, Jenkins, Jameson) and specific deep dive investigations into nostalgia among gamers (Garda, Heineman, Sloan, Suominen, Wulf, Cruz, Hodson, Payne). Hers is the second essay, after Cash’s, to conclude with an apologetic footnote about how Barret’s racial representation falls “beyond the scope of the current essay.” Aside from nostalgic neckbeards (and in some cases the datasets no doubt overlap), no one is as cognizant of boundaries not-to-be-overstepped than academics writing within their chosen specialization.
Turning to the final section, “Disc 3: Legacy,” we’re again hard-pressed to see the distinction as being all that meaningful, with Craig T. Olsen’s “Very Superstitious Spoilers on the Wall: A Deep Read of Fan Reactions to Tragedy in Final Fantasy VII” picking up much where Neill Hoch left off. Olsen looks at the deaths of playable characters throughout the series and, for the sake of comparison, in Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana, as well as jumping into Remake at the conclusion to revive interest in what one should have thought a thoroughly discussed-to-death topic if ever there was one.
In “‘Because, you are… a puppet’: How Final Fantasy VII Anticipated the ‘Posthuman Turn'” Nicholas Langenberg swerves back into the sort of territory we encountered with Hertzog’s essay, engaging closely with the narrative and themes contested there. He invites us to “embrace the fluid, disjointed, rhizomatic nature of our existence… to reconcile our understanding of ourselves with the discourses that have led to the decline of humanism while also establishing an image of ourselves and others that leads to greater empowerment” (174). To which I can only reply, no thanks. By aligning Sephiroth with the “Humanist Attachment” and Cloud with the “Posthumanist Acceptance” of his conclusion (176), Langenberg seems to have defined his terms in such a way that readers are bullied into agreement, but these definitions are shaky at best. I’m open to the notion that such a “turn” has taken place, if only within the heads of the people he cites, and it certainly seems like a respectable read of the ending scenes of Midgar to suppose that the world of FFVII is literally on a path to posthumanity, but Langenberg confusingly connects this highfalutin’ term with the “inability to find comfort in grand narratives,” as if both “posthumanism” and FFVII itself were anything other than just such grand narratives. Like Hertzog, he winds up a formidable concoction of theory and stares closely into the central conflict Cash shies away from, but I can’t help but disagreeing with his inferences at practically every step.
The second to last essay, by Carlos Cruz, “Square’s Lifestream: Examining the Impact of Final Fantasy VII Characters Across the Gaming World,” goes beyond the Compilation to trace the instances of intertextual references in the form of cameo appearances by Cloud and co. in games such as Dissidia, Super Smash Bros., and of course Kingdom Hearts. This is probably the least presumptuous, if least profound, of the essays included. Essentially trivial, thinly supported by a smattering of psychological research, and nonetheless fascinating for the fan of the games, Cruz disappoints only insofar as he does not take a moment to remark on the simultaneous development of Xenogears alongside FFVII and Cloud’s strange hallucinations about this sister game.
Even the LP Archivist couldn’t be bothered to include this one
Implicit in most of these essays, and more or less explicitly stated in several, is the question Hertzog had formulated: “is continuing to focus on this game an unhealthy exercise in reliving earlier pleasures? Or does FFVII captivate because of its continued, even heightening, contemporary relevance?” (69). It’s worth asking, a fortiori, if continuing to respond to these records of that focus is anything other than nostalgia, trivial gatekeeping, and more bookish sour grapes. As a particular instance of the specter of posthumanism, it is hard to deny that given a little prompting, the currently available large language models, for all their hallucinations, could probably write papers just as interesting and insightful as the ones in The World of Final Fantasy VII, and respond to them with more grace and wisdom than I could manage here.
Which is all to say that when Kathleen Morrissey asks her version of the question–“In other words, how can one understand the timelessness of FFVII? (197)–in the course of her essay closing the book, and she arrives at the answer that we “renounce idolized heroes in favor of flawed teams when managing collective struggles” (200), we can discern a kind of circling around the same territory as many other contributors, as if they were grinding for levels or seeking a particularly rare enemy or item drop, and a recognizable theme from any number of conversations about these games. As the kids say, “It was the friends we made along the way.” And they’re not wrong. What Morrissey has to add is a wider range of video game comparisons and a more nuanced discussion of mental health as it is represented in FFVII. Their reliance on procedural rhetoric and Bogost/Galloway aside, Grimwood on “Heroic Madness” sounds like a keeper.
Awkward.
Less a “Conclusion” than a prose envoi, “Where the Rail Takes Us,” by Craig T. Olsen, briefly recapitulates the preaching-to-the-choir, protest-too-much-methinks claims about the value of games as cultural artifacts, and about the beloved characters of FFVII in particular, that anyone still reading would, it goes without saying, grudgingly concede. And we might gently point out that of the train-themed quotes that have attained meme status over the years, the editor has chosen a real humdinger. Again assuming we actually look at the line in context, we note that it comes in Cloud’s discussion of the slums underneath Midgar’s reactors, and the academic equivalent of a slum, if one is permitted to make the inference… we might call it a peripheral field. Whereas an academic book, even if just a collection of essays by passionate scholars and students, worthy of its subject would position FFVII much closer to the interdisciplinary promised land dreamt of by the new historiographers of games, and by Spariosu before them.
So as to establish some sort of structure by which to embrace the world in all its complexity and learn about it as deeply as possible through the mediation of a shared, relatively safe and replicable experience, for a long time now we’ve been leaning on this lens of play and games here at The Video Game Academy. And yet it cannot have escaped anyone’s notice who might be following along that what we are up to is rather different from, say, the dream of “gamification” in education that various figures of wide-ranging levels of influence might talk about, or even “game studies” in any strictly defined sense. In fact, our courses, such as they are, are remarkably old-fashioned in many ways. Essentially, we play games and talk about them; or we take a larger theme, such as “mythology,” this year’s focus, and explore it through games and other recommended readings.
In the spirit of Pullman’s advice to “read like a butterfly, write like a bee,” we remain open-minded about the selection of readings that would ultimately find inclusion in our course of study. And because all this remains speculative and hobby-horsical, we don’t have to limit ourselves to fixed curricula and syllabi, as interesting as it is to think about these things from time to time (see recent episodes of “Unboxing” and our own Professor Kozlowski for reflections on some of the work that goes into professional academia).
But in the words of Buzz-Buzz, “a bee I am… not.” Much as I strive to keep up with the writing that is meant to accompany and give expression to all this reading (reading in the loose sense of listening and playing and so on), I find that weeks and months go by with little to show for all the ideas I intend to share out again. The occasional post, to say nothing of new courses or published pieces, is only with great effort and continual procrastination ever finished (again, in the loosest possible sense of the word). Still, as another artistic hero said to yet another, “work, always work” (Rodin to Rilke): the work is ongoing, the reading is happening, the notes are jotting, and thoughts thinking. If nothing else, a conversation on FFVIII is forthcoming more or less weekly.
Is it at least somewhat convincing to plead that I’m waiting for Pullman’s new book to release before diving into that podcast project again? Or that I’m collaborating again with Moses aka Red on a follow-up to his Gamelogica project, though what form that might take remains to be decided? Perhaps I’ll talk about the Nobel winners I’ve been reading, or attempt a playthrough of MOTHER 2 in Japanese…
Meanwhile, in brief reviews and commentaries, I’ll keep tracking the connections between games and literature as best I can. From my attempt at putting The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes into dialogue with Deep Work by Cal Newport and Saving Time and How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, I arrived at the conclusion that for all their insights into the critical importance of attention, these contemporary authors seem to me to be completely missing the point. Instead of writing these popular sorts of books, long on citations and case studies and strikingly short on the deep reading they purportedly are calling for, they should have done better to craft a single reflection on the example that was most exemplary in each case. Lacking any demonstrable rootedness in their points of departure–whether Homer and Plato for Hayes, Jung and Montaigne for Newport, or Bergson and Benjamin for Odell–to say nothing of any perceptible religious or otherwise philosophical groundwork for their arguments, their books diffuse themselves into the culture as distractedly as any other media phenomenon, and will likely prove as ephemeral. And so I suggest readers turn instead to those sources in literature from which they are drawing, and abide in the original works for themselves. For a better guide as to how to do this, I could lift up Weil on the use of school studies; Bakhtin on Dostoevsky; and someday, perhaps, my own efforts on video games.
To connect this all to video games, then, can we do better than Jenny Odell’s reasoning behind her structuring of Saving Time? As she explains in this BOMB interview:
… I actually didn’t have the idea to structure the book that way until halfway through writing it. I landed on the idea because I was playing the video game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I was spending a lot of time in a spatially dispersed story in which you understand that certain things can only happen in certain places, and you have some idea of something that’s coming both narratively and geographically down the road. You can see it, it’s in the distance.
At the time, I was thinking about how everyone’s experience of playing that game—even though it obviously suggests some routes to you—is pretty different, and thus, their memory of the story is going to be different. I was just really fascinated by that. So I think it made me look twice at these places that I was spending time in and it got me thinking about how I could string them together.
Odell is extremely close here to digging into the power of place for memory as represented in video games writ large. While she focuses on the differences among players, my mind goes as usual to EarthBound, and to the ultimately unified story it tells. No matter in what order the sanctuaries are visited, or in the case of Zelda, the memory locations, Koroks, shrines, etc., there are certain themes, timeless and universal, such as love, courage, and the joy of adventure, which these games will reliably lead players to consider.
It almost makes me want to go back and read her book again in light of this revelation!
In passing, I’ll note that Hayes and Newport each do make a few interesting references to video games, too. Apropos of Socrates’ critique of writing in the Phaedrus, Hayes remarks, “It seems safe to say in hindsight that writing was a pretty big net positive for human development, even if one of the greatest thinkers of all-time worried about it the same way contemporaries fret over video games” (6). And he later acquaints the reader with Addiction by Design, by Natasha Dow Schull, and the prevalence of loot boxes via this inarguable clickbait from The Washington Post: “Humankind Has Now Spent More Time Playing Call of Duty Than It Has Existed on Earth” (52-3).
Besides becoming bywords for the perennial moral panics accruing to new technologies and for the irresistibility of slot-machine-style addiction, video games, again exemplified in Call of Duty, return one more time towards the end of the book to provide Hayes with fodder for a brief rant: “Online interaction, which is where a growing share (for some the majority) of our human interactions now takes place, becomes, then, almost like a video game version of conversation, a gamified experience of inputs and outputs, so thoroughly mediated and divorced from the full breathing laughing suffering reality of other humans that dunking on someone or insulting someone online feels roughly similar to shooting up a bunch of guys in Call of Duty” (233-4).
A different paradigm shows up in Newport: “In MIT lore, it’s generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades” (129). The absence of a descriptor there, or if you like, the way in which “video” is returned to the role of descriptor of “games” according to the parallelism of Newport’s construction, is extremely interesting. I could gripe all day about the narrowness and specificity of the video games Hayes seems to have in mind; whereas for Newport, video games are a product almost without qualities other than their novelty and mythic origin in “MIT lore” and “haphazard…inventiveness.” Whatever he may think about particular games, Newport’s mention of them at least has a positive valence.
Eeriness,an ink drawing by J. R. R. Tolkien. Photo: Museoteca.com – via New Criterion.
By chance, the one episode of Newport’s podcast that I listened to so far (no. 288, on the recommendation of this article I was considering assigning next school year) includes towards the very end some reflections on Tolkien which might finally get me to segue back to the ostensible premise of this post. Specifically, a curator of medieval manuscripts at one of the libraries of Oxford sent Newport a quote that is found in a letter from Tolkien to Stanley Unwin: “Writing stories in prose or verse has been stolen, often guiltily, from time already mortgaged…”
Before addressing–or indeed quoting–the quote, Newport riffs on “The Consolations of Fantasy” exhibit (reviewed here) and pulls up some of the art for his youtube viewers. He read in a recent biography about Tolkien “being overwhelmed by…the stresses of being in a field–philology–transforming into modern linguistics,” noting that “he was on the old-fashioned side of that.” Repeatedly, he characterizes Tolkien’s art and writing as abounding in “almost childlike, fantastical images” and takes his desire to spend more time in the “fantastical worlds” of his “childlike,” albeit “sophisticated,” imagination, as another explanation of his acute sense of stress–along with his worries about money.
Newport may or may not have ever read Tolkien–it isn’t clear–but he sees his art anyhow as being illustrative of his own recent work on “Slow Productivity.” He argues that Tolkien’s success selling books is what allowed him to spend more time on his writing and worldbuilding and to worry less about his other responsibilities; again, though, Newport seems to completely miss the point. What is it about Tolkien’s books that so captivates readers? It has less to do with a yearning for time in which to daydream and more to do with his insights about myth, drawn straight from his studies of philology and given voice in a much more famous quote from Gandalf: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” In his fiction, both in major works like Lord of the Rings and in small masterpieces like “Leaf By Niggle,” as well as his scholarship (talks on Beowulf and Fairy-stories are essential) Tolkien touches on just those emphatically moral dimensions so absent from Newport’s pursuit of excellence.
Now reading widely and breezily in the literature of attention is as fine a way as any to pass the summertime for a none-too-disciplined teacher like me. But make no mistake: setting aside my personal affection for Pullman, not entirely shared by my colleagues, I should clarify that second to none among our professorial and scholarly lodestars, we at VGA also count JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Both were eminent in their fields of language and literature, and both were theorist-practitioners of the arts of teaching and of fiction alike. And their work is at the heart of the 20C turn to myth-making which continues most vivaciously in the video game medium to the present day, and which is particularly evident in the 90’s JRPGs we never tire of playing and studying.
If it may be objected, quite fairly, that discussions of classic game series like Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda have been done ad nauseum, whether as podcasts, video essays, or even books, so what do we mean by proposing continually to return to them anew; much more so discussions of Tolkien and Lewis, who are the subjects of innumerable books, articles, videos, podcasts, and courses? Even a cursory glance at the literature suggests that the influence of Tolkien, Lewis, and their circle and successors on video game development and reception has been immense, as is well understood. From the very first PhD dissertation on video games by Buckles to more recent work aimed at scholars (Young), hobbyists and serious fans (Peterson), and a popular audience alike (Kohler), it is clear we would be far from surprising anyone with our discoveries about the deep ties between the seemingly dusty “Lang and Lit” debates of the early 20C and the “ludology/narratology” tug of war or “magic circle” duck duck goose of near-contemporary game studies.
To my (admittedly very incomplete) knowledge, however, what remains little noted or discussed is the role of play within the work of the Inklings and Inkling-adjacent, their predecessors (ie. Chesterton and Morris), and their major intellectual heirs (whether imitators, who are legion, or virtual parricides, in Pullman’s case). What happens when we go back to their writing the hindsight afforded by reading them in the light of video games’ subsequent developments of the themes of mythopoesis so powerfully instaurated by the dynamic give-and-take between Tolkien, Lewis, and their fellows and followers?
To illustrate just a few potential starting points:
Tolkien’s thoughts on “faerian drama” in the light of video games (Makai); the impression made on him by the play Peter Pan in his early Cottage of Lost Play writings (Fimi); games as mythopoeic narratives (Fox-Lenz) and the riddle game at the heart of The Hobbit (Olsen).
Lewis’s language of “checkmate” and “poker” to describe his conversion (Dickieson), and the ways in which imagery of play and games functions elsewhere in his apologetic writings, fiction, and scholarship:
“Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children’s games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups—playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits so that the pretense of being grown-up helps them grow up in earnest (Mere Christianity)
The discovery, creation, and defense of Narnia are all couched in terms of play, ie. “I’m going to stand by the play world” (The Silver Chair); and for some reason “The Great Dance” at the end of Perelandra is also called “The Great Game”
In his analogy of Milton asking “What kind of poem do I want to make?” with “a boy debating whether to play hockey or football,” Lewis likens the game rules to the poetic form (Preface to Paradise Lost)
To my mind, there is ample material here for a course and a curriculum. But as I say, this summer I’m spoken for, reading in the backlists of the Nobel Prize laureates from a century and more. But keep an eye out for the follow-up to Moses’ Gamelogica channel, tentatively to be known as Legendaria!
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.
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…
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!
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:
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!
…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.
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.
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.
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.
Video Game Academy 