On recent podcast conversations and sundry correspondence(s).
My mother-in-law pointed out the other night, quite astutely, that if I did a little more with marketing and Substack and YouTube, I should be able to get donations, maybe through Squarespace, subscriptions, or even sponsorships. She suggested I should work on getting a bed in this way. I must have looked tired, I guess.
But I’ve been staying up late reading Philip Pullman again, as I say, and making notes and podcasts, and corresponding with other readers for the benefit of their perspectives on it all. It’s an incredible privilege to connect with people all around the world through this project. The generosity of strangers never ceases to astonish me, and my gratitude for them sharing their time and ideas in this way–and, grudgingly, for the technology that facilitates our conversations, even as it eats away at the baseline of public discourse–only grows.
If someday I do turn some portion of all these recordings and researches into a salable publication, I’ll also be able to properly remunerate all my guests for their time with honoraria and grants, as I’ve dreamt of doing for a long time. For now, on all our parts, it’s unpaid labor, or in politer parlance, a labor of love.
To judge from the numbers, the internet wants to convince me that this love’s labor’s lost; but my strong hunch is that quality matters more than quantity, or at least, for my purposes of long-form commentary and analysis it does. If I can imagine that each one of those handful of listeners is someone like me–which I have to believe, or forfeit all the humility I pretend to own, as bedrock as anything about me and more important by far than fame or recognition of intellectual bona fides–then the data show that we’re doing just fine. I think I’m up to 50 subscribers!
On a recent episode of the podcast, David Nixon joined me to share his thoughts on The Book of Dust, and in the weeks since he’s followed up with a further recommendation: Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. When I hear about exciting leads like these in the orbit of my eccentric foci, Pullman’s books and those other great portrayals of religious thought in popular culture, golden age JRPGs such as EarthBound and Xenogears, I tend to perk up my ears. I found Philip Goff’s argument in Galileo’s Error persuasive as far as it goes, though I still have to read his more recent foray into Why? The Purpose of the Universe, no less. Iain McGilchrist, as far as I’m concerned, is a savant on the order of NT Wright, and their new books, The Matter with Things and The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God, respectively, similarly outrun my grasp as yet. And naturally, the Kingsnorth book is on hold at the library. I still haven’t finished my review of Kristin Poole’s Philip Pullman and the Historical Imagination, though that’s one I did manage to read and re-read, finding it excellent.
So for now I listen to their podcasts and videos. Once again, the internet comes to my rescue with its ambiguous riches. Search them up and see for yourself! (Or unexpectedly encounter them via another route entirely, like the Ephesians class in The Bible Project’s app…)
On the video game side of things, my eyes are bigger than my memory card and my appetite likewise exceeds all reasonable bounds, so more and more I’ve been following along with let’s plays rather than playing new games myself. The spirit is willing, the flesh is weak–and paternity leave is fleeting!
Prof Noctis has been my resource for the new Final Fantasy VII: Remake Intergrade release on Switch 2. While he takes advantage of “God mode” affordances included in the game to speed things up, he’s also made time thereby to share the work of other creators, commenting on video essays and discussing “homework assignments” in the form of essays written by the audience, among them a couple by yours truly. Supposedly these will be published eventually in some form as well. Most importantly, though, he’s simultaneously playing through the intriguing mod of the original FFVII dubbed the Shinra Archaeology cut, a translation and adaptation with additional content based on that project’s painstaking study of the original release. It is fantastic.
Maybe because I’ve been watching videos where people say “God mode,” and Alex has been uploading videos where he and I discuss the tropes of JRPGs, among the best-known of which is that “you kill God,” the almighty algorithm, with all the astuteness of a mother-in-law, deemed the following video likely to be of interest. While it takes a while to get going, once it does, it does not disappoint.
Note the subtitles:
Do you hear the voice of life…
Do you hear the voice of the earth…
We were once human…
Then just remember: you’re not a god. – Hitsujibungaku
Which pretty much sums up the many, many hours of discussions we’ve been having of those golden age FF games on the PlayStation.
Meanwhile, my other streaming mainstay, Moses Norton, The Well-Red Mage, has nearly completed his years-long project of playing every RPG released on the SNES in English localization, on original hardware. Having written one volume of a book about the experience and currently working on the second, he took some time to talk with me about it. I loved the book, difficult as the circumstances of its release proved, and I can’t wait to see the full version when it is ready.
Of all my serial interlocutors, there are few more devoted to their craft and more deserving of wider recognition than Moses; then to see that recognition come all too suddenly in the form of undeserved notoriety, followed by a slow and deliberate recovery of confidence and reputation, with steadily accumulating acknowledgment of the extent of the harms on all sides and the possibility of forgiveness at least broached if not realized–I’m fairly in awe of his willingness to stick with these old games, playing them on air for all us sinners, when the internet is just as complex as the people who attempt to use it, and our interactions there are liable to be just as fraught, with all the potential for misuse we are heir to, only magnified by its reach.
And I’m very excited to hear that he’s considering playing next that much lengthier list (however you slice it) of RPGs that were never released officially outside Japan, but for which the resources now exist to allow many more of us to experience them on hardware that is as close to the original as possible, and with the aid of fan-translations and other study aids, whether collaborators helping out on the stream or coding agents of one sort or another facilitating a quick trot or interpretation of the text onscreen.
I’m imagining a version of Tolkien Professor Corey Olsen’s Students of the Word or my friend Brian’s Quran study program for video games like MOTHER 2, which I’ve always wanted to play in the Japanese original, as well as all those games I don’t even know about beyond perhaps the names. Because we are only human, let’s hope our electronic critters will be faithful to the good intentions of those of us attempting to use them for such harmless, educational purposes, but wiser than we always are about going wherever they lead.
We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
To try to answer these questions we adopt some “world picture.”
I’ve been reading Philip Pullman again, and reading as much as I can find of what he alludes to in the course of his stories. Among the books Dr Hannah Relf lends to young Malcolm Polstead, our protagonist in La Belle Sauvage, is A Brief History of Time, which exists in our universe as well. While I enjoyed The Body in the Library by a parallel Agatha Christie, presumably, which is the first book he chooses to borrow from her library, it’s the world picture conjured up by Hawking–and not the specific account of space-time so much as the idea of a “world picture” as such, as a way to answer fundamental questions–that has led me to think about Pullman’s project anew. After all, one of the first, unforgettable images from The Golden Compass is literally the picture of a world, another world visible in the aurora, projected from a lantern slide; and some of the final images in The Rose Field… well, we’ll get there when we get there.
Pullman’s illustration for Chapter 2: The Idea of North
Sometimes it becomes possible for an author to revisit a story and play with it, not to adapt it to another medium (it’s not always a good idea for the original author to do that), nor to revise or “improve” it (tempting though that is, it’s too late: you should have done that before it was published, and your business now is with new books, not old ones). But simply to play. And in every narrative there are gaps: places where, although things happened and the characters spoke and acted and lived their lives, the story says nothing about them. It was fun to visit a few of these gaps and speculate a little on what I might see there. As for why I call these little pieces lantern slides, it’s because I remember the wooden boxes my grandfather used to have, each one packed neatly with painted glass slides showing scenes from Bible stories or fairy tales or ghost stories or comic little plays with absurd-looking figures. From time to time he would get out the heavy old magic lantern and project some of these pictures on to a screen as we sat in the darkened room with the smell of hot metal and watched one scene succeed another, trying to make sense of the narrative and wondering what St. Paul was doing in the story of Little Red Riding Hood—because they never came out of the box in quite the right order. I think it was my grandfather’s magic lantern that Lord Asriel used in the second chapter of The Golden Compass. Here are some lantern slides, and it doesn’t matter what order they come in. – Philip Pullman, the “lantern slides” edition of His Dark Materials
While most people I’ve talked to have expressed disappointment with the ending of The Book of Dust, and that was my own initial reaction, I’ve found it is growing on me with rereadings, particularly as I’ve been listening to the audio versions read by Michael Sheen. It doesn’t hurt that his interview with Pullman, accompanying the final volume, is the best of its kind that I’ve found so far. Particularly resonant are their discussions of the procession and the story, commenting on a little demonstration or rhetorical flourish of Pullman’s in another interview, a video for the Bodleian Library; and of the alethiometer contrasted with the myriorama as images of reading and writing or telling stories.
So it strikes me that the first requirement of a compelling world picture–speaking only for myself–is that it should partake of that commingling of beauty and truth which Keats’ Grecian Urn attests. If in time irradiating its truth-beauty some contradiction should arise in our perception of that dear picture between the sense of its truth and its felt beauty, then we have to either discard it–Lewis has written powerfully about that in The Discarded Image–or, recurring again to Keats, we can abide with it at the limits of our “negative capability.”
This is where I strive to engage with Pullman, rather than rejecting him, believing us “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” as he himself has pointed the way, having these very lines quoted by another one of his scholars, Dr Mary Malone, in The Subtle Knife. When I think of his work as a kind of invitation to think and feel in this way, its challenges, while no less agonistic and at times agonizing, take on a beautiful, sporting quality. And like few other authors, Pullman conduces to the “having of wonderful ideas,” in Duckworth’s model for learning, and to “the realization that prayer consists of attention,” in Weil’s formulation, which I take to be an end beyond the end of learning for its own sake.
“The poem was the authority here, not the teacher.”
One thought I’ve been noodling on along the way, which I’ll just lay down as best I can for now, is that language–language learning at the most basic and most advanced levels alike, literacy and reading of all degrees of interpretive complexity, and literature at its furthest avant garde edge–seems to live and move and leap ahead by way of play.
To adduce a handful of instances representing the movement between world-pictures and worlds:
Homeric games and the bow-stringing challenge
David dancing before the Lord; dance for Huizinga “the purest and most perfect form of play that exists”
Caedmon’s Hymn, considered the first English poem, and the story of its composition given in Bede
Chaucer’s pilgrims, making of their tales “ernest” and “game”
Shakespeare’s wandering players and kings and the “invention of the human” (Bloom)
Joyce’s “shout in the street” in Ulysses, and its echoes back in Araby
If these are the leaps that come to mind, still there are immense degrees of nuance in between each of them. Between Shakespeare and Joyce, a fair amount of literature survives. Or to zoom in further: between Keats’ vision of (his Bright star‘s vision of)
The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores
and Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach with its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” and the near-contemporary Oxford Movement; or between Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron pushing at the boundary of reason with no little energy, with Mary Shelley producing Frankenstein as a byproduct of their play; or to jump ahead, within the work of a single writer, from Nabokov’s “link-and-bobolink,” “the correlated pattern in the game,” in Pale Fire to his Terra and Antiterra in Ada, where the “game of worlds” becomes almost literal; so much of any writer’s work which we still read seems to consist in the give and take between modeling and effacing world pictures.
And it seems like this is always including, if not in fact by way of, metaphors of play.
Where they get especially ambitious–or playful–writers absorb scientific and religious worldviews alike into their imaginations. Spariosu has given a much fuller treatment, and Sloek a much richer theory, but there is Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Don Giovanni; Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais; Dostoevsky’s incorporations of scripture, and Bulgakov’s rewritings of it; Vonnegut’s invention of Kilgore Trout, or Milosz’s Bruno; John Crowley’s other worlds; Pullman’s, and his sprite-like narrators…
I’ve tried to stick to the English language, but translations have crept into my magic circle, as literature itself wouldn’t mean much in any language without the likes of Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky connecting ideas to images, but also helping their readers with the task of making connections between ideas and action, and thus knitting together the inner world or life to the outer, even up to and including that “consummation devoutly to be wished,” though Benjamin asserts that the storyteller is as much generated by as generating death, “death of the author” be darned.
Still, the question arises–the one Hawking asked back at the start–of what world picture or model best facilitates such summing up of the incommensurables, the infinitesimals, or which anyhow values it as an endeavor worth attempting, whether we have the language to express it or no. And it is a question to which in these posts I am continually responding, and trying to understand others’ responses.
For me, this has to include the roots of the language, religious and scientific and poetic alike. Caedmon has to be there, as well as Hawking, and Christie to help us solve the mystery. Then, perhaps with a little help from our friends, we can also better parse the world-pictures that assail us on the screens that surround us, like this one:
Just now hearing about this eruption of PlayStation iconography at last year’s Super Bowl halftime show by Kendrick Lamar, for example, and about shadow boxing from Babcock, so we’ll see if we can collaborate to write something about that. Or the great chess scenes in Nabokov or The Wire:
And I still haven’t read the large claims of the likes of McGonigal and Combs for the ameliorative power of games, nor Bogost on their rhetoric and persuasiveness, nor Miller on the theology of the same.
Looking next time, though, at Kendrick Lamar’s design patterns, with some serendipitous discoveries in Ortega y Gasset, starting with “The Sportive Origin of the State” (Translated into English; original Spanish) via Postman’s Technopoly (and footnoted in good old Homo Ludens to boot).
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!
Courtesy of the inimitable Dylan, whose work has enriched The Community School Game Jam and Mobius Shark Tank at the Spokane Central Library, and whose Hello Kitty Zen Garden graces the unpublished manuscript of TCS: The Book (working subtitle, albeit cliched, heartfelt: Building the Beloved Community School), here is a deep dive into a game I’ve only watched streams of, and yet can hardly imagine the games landscape without: What remains of Edith Finch. Dylan has also presented this as part of the Games Studies wellness, meeting W/F afternoons at TCS. Drop in when you’re in town, just sign in at the front office.
What remains of Edith Finch is a first-person narrative game where you play as – you guessed it – Edith Finch. Edith is the last living member of her family, and after the death of her mother, we follow her through her childhood home and watch as she uncovers secrets about her family that were buried. Some in walls, others, under beds… you get the idea. Let’s briefly go through the game, and then talk about the pressing issue of the game.
We start the game on a ferry. When we look down, we can see that our character has a cast on their right arm, and that they are holding a journal with “Edith Finch” written on the cover. When we open it, we hear the namesake of the game begin to narrate the writing. She talks about how, at 17, she is the last remaining member of her family. When she gets into the monster of a house that the Finch family home is, we start to learn about all the different members of her family – and moreover, why she is the only one left.
We learn that in 1937, in an attempt to escape the curse that had claimed his wife and newborn son, Edith’s great-great-grandfather Odin Finch emigrates from Norway to the USA, setting sail with his daughter Edith (Edie, or Edith Sr. as she’s referred to by Edith), and her husband Sven, as well as their newborn baby, Molly. He uses his house as the raft, but unfortunately, it seemed as though the curse was coming for him too. The wind picked up and a storm broke out. A wave unfortunately took Odin under, swallowing the house with him. Edie and Sven, along with baby Molly, made it to Orcas island safe. Their first order of business? Building a cemetery.
Of course, this isn’t some happy ending – Edith had to be the last remaining Finch somehow, right? I’ll briefly go over the deaths.
Edith Sr. ended up having five children with Sven, including Molly. She gave birth to Barbra, twins Sam and Calvin, and Walter. Edie initially believes they’ve left the curse behind, but of course, it’s never that simple.
At 10, Molly dies from ingesting fluoride toothpaste and holly berries after going to bed without eating. At 16, Barbra is murdered after an argument with her boyfriend over her long-gone stardom. Walter hears all of this happen, and believes it was a monster. After spending 30 years hiding from this monster in the bunker of the house, the day he decides to leave, he is struck by a train. Calvin dies at 11 after swinging too high and flying off of a cliff. At 49, Sven dies from falling off of the house’s roof whilst building a slide.
Sam lives into adulthood, and marries a woman and has Dawn, Edith’s mother, and Gus. Later, he marries a woman named Kay, and they have Gregory. Dawn is the only one to make it to adulthood.
At 13, Gus is crushed by a totem pole during a storm. Gregory drowns at 22 months after being left unattended by his mother in the bath. Sam, who at this point is divorced, dies at 33 whist on a hunting trip with dawn. Dawn shoots a buck and Sam wants to take a picture with it and her. Whilst posing for the photo, the buck thrashes and pushes Sam off of a cliff.
Traumatized by all of this, Dawn moves to India, where she marries a man named Sanjay. Together, they have three kids. Lewis, Milton, and Edith jr.
Sanjay is killed by an earthquake, so Dawn moves her and her kids back into the Finch family home. At 11, Milton mysteriously disappears seemingly out of nowhere, making Dawn become paranoid. She seals all the doors of the rooms of deceased family members. Edie drills peepholes. Lewis, after battling drug abuse and mental health struggles, commits suicide during work. This is when Dawn decides it’s time to leave. She arranges for a nursing home to pick Edie up, and packs the belongings of her and Edith. They leave that night, with Edie meant to get picked up the next day. She doesn’t make it to the morning. Edie is found dead after ingesting alcohol with her medication. Years later, Dawn succumbs to an unspecified illness, leaving a 17 year old Edith to inherit everything.
In the final scene of the game, we kid out that the character on the ferry with the cast is Edith’s son, and it’s revealed that she died during childbirth shortly after we see her learn of all the secrets of the house. We see her child place flowers on her grave.
That’s the very bare bones of the story. Is there more to explore? More to dig deep on? Yes, of course, but I simply want to talk about my personal opinion with the curse.
I think that during my first playthrough of the game, I did indeed think there was really a curse – a monster, even, as Walter puts it. He’s convinced that a monster killed Molly, since that’s what she talked about in her journal entry not long before her passing. It was also likely the monster that killed Barbra, since Walter heard it himself!
I definitely believed this theory at first – but the more replays I did, the more I understood the real story, which is the one I placed out for you earlier. I don’t think there’s a monster, nor a curse. I think it’s a bunch of wacky coincidences. Let me explain; I think that the “Curse” is simply a self-fullfilling prophecy, a mindset where you, or someone else, believes that something will happen in the future, and because of that, your actions are affected by that hypothetical event, and eventually, that event happens because you influenced it to!
I think, that given the fact that Edie had recently seen not only her mother and young brother pass away, but also her father while trying to escape the “curse” that supposedly followed them, that she made this connection in her brain that she and her kids were living on borrowed time. I think that this belief made her act less rationally when it came to taking care of her kids, and therefore, the only kid she had that made it to adulthood and had their own kids unintentionally instilled that into them, too. Leading to one of those kids growing up and maybe trying to break the “curse”, but only leading to curiosity about it rather than education about what it truly is.
Finally, Edith, deciding to find out about the secrets her family holds, died tragically in childbirth in what I believe to be a sad and cruel coincidence.
So, no. I don’t believe that the Finch family ever had a curse. Instead, I think that the game represents a very straightforward story of generational trauma and how it affects a family. I think that the fear that death was creeping closer resulted in much of the Finch family acting in reckless ways. Some acted as if every day was their last, or didn’t seem too concerned with the danger of it all. Others hid away, or became over protective of themselves and possibly their kids.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a beautifully dark and morbid game. And I know that at least for me, it allowed me to gain a whole new perspective of what it means to be alive. It gave me an appreciation I didn’t even know I had for life. I think also, that its story about death, highlights just how important it is to cherish every moment, but to also not be afraid to express yourself and do the things that might be a little risky. Enjoy yourself! Don’t be afraid of some silly curse.
Thanks again, Dylan. We look forward to your future endeavors, including the follow up on Little Nightmares and a generation of young players impacted by it!
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!
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!
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.
Suddenly here we are. Beyonce’s album dropped a week ago. It’s already the first Saturday in April.
At 10:55 and again at 4:15 Central Time, we’ll be talking video games as part of TexMoot, one of Signum University’s regional gatherings. This year’s theme is Storytelling Through Play: Games and Immersive Narratives. Many thanks to the organizers!
Here’s what I hope to talk about.
First, the morning’s discussion panel on Teaching Video Games.
In recent years, video games have become the subject of critical thought and inquiry, giving rise to engaging works of scholarship and amateur discourse, as well as featuring prominently in other artistic media such as novels, films, and music. My own contribution to this discourse has taken the form of online courses for kids and adult learners, in-person electives in public schools, and long-form podcasts, essays, and interviews. I’ve read and listened to a fair amount of the literature on games, but I know I am still only scratching the surface. Inviting participants to share their own experiences studying and teaching about video games in academic settings, ranging from higher ed to K-12 schools, we’ll discuss the value and meaning of video games as a topic of research bridging STEM fields and the humanities.
A prospectus for an unwritten chapter on the topic.
Slides to look at from SPACE. (Spoilers for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.)
Video games play a significant role in transmitting images of heroism in contemporary culture. This talk concerns allusions to King Arthur in the Final Fantasy video game series, read in the light of mythic narratives present in the role-playing game genre. I focus on representative Arthuriana in Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VII, which I take to be illustrative of the tension between crystalizing and splintering tendencies at work in the series. I draw comparisons between two major examples, the Excalibur weapon and Knights of the Round summon magic. For a tentative framework of theory, I make reference to Tolkien’s imagery of light as refracted by Verlyn Flieger’s analysis in Splintered Light.
After a year of social distancing, I suspect we need to increase the number of words we have for being alone. I think of the old cliché about Eskimoes having many different words for snow – a phenomenon they are especially familiar with. Why, then, are we restricted to only a few words for spending time without other people?
Video Game Academy 