bookwarmgames Review

RPG Nirvana & JRPGana – The Definitive Book of SNES RPGs by Moses Norton & A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games by Kurt Kalata

The Definitive Book of SNES RPGs (Vol. 1) by Moses Norton and A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games by Kurt Kalata (ed.) are both published by Bitmap Books, new within the past month and last few years, respectively. They are doorstoppers, beautifully produced, quite pricey, and worth every penny. My name appears in the acknowledgements of the former; many of my favorite games–EarthBound/MOTHER 2, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Wild Arms, and so on–appear in the latter, though each game is afforded only a page or two due to the book’s massive scope.

I’ve long dreamt of writing a book like these, a kind of Haunted Wood for video games, but I haven’t actually played all that many of the incredibly rich and diverse body of games that Norton and Kalata cover. Particularly, I’ve wished I could better understand my favorite games of the golden age of console RPGs in their cross-cultural context, having tried, so far with little determination and less success, to learn Japanese for that purpose–so I’ll settle for reading others who can, for now.

A few disclaimers up front: I am aware that Moses and the Bitmap folks have faced a smear campaign and waves of cancel-cultural recrimination over comments he made, but I will step around that. This choice, like the review which follows, is, needless to say, not entirely unbiased by my personal friendship and professional respect for the writer also known online as The Well-Red Mage, nor my admiration, shading into jealousy, of the productions of the Bitmap team and writers of Kalata’s clout who have worked with them. But what’s an amateur Video Game Academy scholar to do? We have to talk about the games themselves, first and foremost, in all humility and giving grace as far as we can, extending the circle of dialogue, lifting up the voices of students, fellow hobbyists, fans, content creators, and industry professionals alike. None of us is perfect, none of us ought to feel we’re in a position to cast stones, in my view; with all deference to the righteous Redditors and other pharisaical denizens of the retro games discourse, I can’t see who is helped by such a pile-on. Or, if that disputed passage in John’s gospel is not to your taste, let’s say it in Dostoevsky’s terms, from Alyosha and Grushenka’s tete-a-tete in The Brothers Karamazov, with a Sakaguchi spin: I’m all for giving an onion (knight), giving a second chance or New Game Plus, once someone has apologized. I can only offer an apology of my own to whoever has been harmed by the exchange and its fallout. Certainly I wish Moses and his family the best after the wringer they’ve been through, and hope that Vol. 2 of his book is not too long in coming, whether from Bitmap or another source if they’re not able to patch things up.

Bitmap Books, via The Video Game Library

But without further ado. Per the title, and in line with its author’s long-time, courageous project of bringing greater objectivity and rigor to the discussion of widely beloved games from ye olde eras past, The Definitive Book of SNES RPGs (not only JRPGs, mind, as I initially thought) takes as one of its points of departure “a new systematic approach to defining an indefinite genre” (31). I found this section powerfully clarifying, as I tend to have a much more intuitive, wishy-washy stance on questions of categories and sub-genres. Norton lays out a practical “Rule of Three: Character, Combat, Narrative” with each of these further breaking down in to three elements: Roles, Progression, and Statistics for Characters; Combat as such, its Turn-Based mechanics, and Variables; and Narrative story arcs characterized by Economy and Exploration. Where two of the three larger headings overlap, or where an RPG is more heavily weighted towards one or the other, we get the sub-genres of “action” or “adventure,” or indeed “action-adventure,” but any game that has at least some significant elements of narrative, combat, and character development can be fairly called an RPG (37).

Ranging over the 22 games this rubric brings under discussion, covering the first half of the SNES RPG library’s alphabet, Norton’s analysis is anchored by these mechanical considerations–and isn’t it refreshing to see how he chooses to cut across the usual distinction between gameplay and story, opting instead for this powerful, flexible Rule of Three? Each chapter opens with a graphic indicating which elements are deemed to be in evidence, alongside the developer and publisher credits, and while plenty of the games have all nine icons, there are a handful of edge cases. “King of Dragons isn’t an RPG! I can hear you yelling” he remarks in the penultimate chapter; to which I have to reply, demurring, “I’ve never even heard of it” (501). And in fact these debatable RPG inclusions, especially ActRaiser and EVO, make for some of the most interesting chapters in the book in terms of defining what an RPG is, and what a particular blend of mechanics, story, and gameplay loops portends for thematic questions about the meaning of a given game as a work of art.

For, as even a cursory reader soon discovers, dipping into chapters here and there rather than plowing through the book cover to cover as I did on my first read (though I heeded Norton’s caveat to go out of ABC order so as to flip-flop Dragon View and Drakkhen,”the first SNES RPG” 302, and one with a fascinating lineage that may or may not intersect with Gary Gygax himself), the close analysis of game elements in line with a wider project of empirically defining the genre is only one of the book’s significant threads, and perhaps not its most important. Just as Narrative and Combat are mediated by Character, Norton’s own voice, experiences, predilections, and indeed his character are present throughout the discussion. Along with the requisite historical context, pertinent information about the games’ development and systems, and more or less entertaining trivia and Easter eggs, we get a personal tour of each game’s world, its challenges and triumphs, and reflections on all of it from a true connoisseur.

For me, the best sections of the book weren’t actually the ones about the best games: the tour de force of Chrono Trigger or the ebulliently playful-yet-earnest EarthBound (which I read and commented on for the author in draft), or the groundbreaking FFII or even the operatic FFIII; nor was it, on the other hand, Norton’s almost impossibly judicial, admirably evenhanded treatment of the execrable Lord of the Rings. Much as I appreciated these for how they provide wonderful, coherent perspectives on games I know and love (or rather hate, in the case of the SNES LotR, as one can only hate a missed opportunity, a fall as profound as that from a Melkor, brightest of the Ainur–Tolkien’s text–to a Morgoth, archfiend and all-around jerk–its SNES adaptation), I find myself thinking most about, and flipping back to most often, the Introduction and the chapters on the Breath of Fire games.

The Foreword by Alex Donaldson, co-Founder of RPG Site, does a solid job setting the tone, and it is probably noteworthy that both he and Moses Norton are mixed race authors writing authoritatively, confidently, and joyfully about an industry where people of color are not always represented. Norton’s Introduction grounds the book in his upbringing in Hawaii, and he makes explicit the connection between his Native background, his longing for home, and a Tolkienian sea-longing most memorably expressed in great art, which combine to convey the importance of nostalgia in his conception of quality video game critique and analysis. This is all very much catnip to me, preaching to the choir if you like, just as much as his wise words about the meaning of an ostensibly silly game like EarthBound call and respond across the distance to concerns I’ve written and thought about for years, here and on sites run by Norton himself. In sharp contrast, really, to the more technical discussion of the Rule of Three, though both the technical considerations and nostalgic themes become integral to the chapters that follow, this is a big swing of an Introduction after my own heart. If I hadn’t known Norton already beforehand, I’d have reached out to him on the strength of the opening few pages, because I recognize here “a friend I’ve never met,” to use the Pauline (EarthBound’s Paula, that is) locution, a fellow aficionado of 199X RPGs.

In the chapters on Breath of Fire and its sequel, the book’s throughlines of biographical experience and nostalgic retrospection come together in what for me were the most illuminating fashion with its other core thread of systematic, definitional concerns with RPGs as games of a particular type. Perhaps this is because I’ve only played later Breath of Fire iterations, and had little in the way of preconceived ideas about the series, but these chapters spoke to experiences I’ve had from a direction I wasn’t expecting, and landed with startling insight. Maybe this is how people who haven’t played Xenogears would feel listening to my interminable podcast commentary on that game; one can hope! I love the idea that within an objectively slightly janky game, “you may be able to spy the inner workings of a mythos in the making” (168). I would even go further and say that not despite but because of the obstacles in the way of such a glimpse of the seed of a mighty idea, old games like Breath of Fire are inseparably fused to this homeless time of ours, when we deal daily with such a dearth of living myths that we will grab onto them anywhere we can. The games’ religious ambiguity and political, race- and class-conflict story beats, in this light, are almost too poignantly prophetic of our current confusions and divisions. And they shed a light, a warmth, a breath, why not, over players who take the time, as Norton does, to connect deeply with their stories and weave them into their own. Witness some snippets:

Upon starting a new game… a voice in the darkness cries about giving yourself to God and becoming God’s strength…

This is none other than Breath of Fire II, the globe-trotting, history-spanning, darkly religious, draconically epic sequel to the original Breath of Fire, though I describe it simply as “formative”… I spend a lot of words in this book regarding themes, analyses and the meaning embedded in these stories told by means of the Super Nintendo, but when it comes to this game… it’s personal.

Breath of Fire II immediately won my heart from the moment I saw its beautifully realised world, a crystallisation of all of Capcom’s 16-bit sensibilities…

What I didn’t realise at the time was the fact that this game would not only win my heart, but also my soul. I know; even to me it still seems odd to describe encountering a video game, a mere sequel, as a religious experience. Yet somehow, I’ve wasted years describing the early Breath of Fire games as staunchly traditional. I’d like to recant…. (177-179, excerpts; British spellings courtesy of Bitmap.)

Over the course of a nuanced discussion of the game’s religious themes, centered on the duplicitous Church of St Eva, tied in with personal reflections about growing up “in the church” of Western missionaries looking at “the monarch chrysalis hanging from a branch outside” as an image of Pauline transformation (yep, that Paul), an image of the winged anime girl Nina above a cartouche of text discussing a goddess joining the player’s party is balanced against a lengthy passage from CS Lewis on “the Numinous” (182-3)–and lo, it hit me like the thunderbolt on Ryu’s sword that the construction of Norton’s book, heartfelt, syncretic, overflowing with connections between games, literature, and life, mirrored almost exactly the message of these games which he sought to express. The content and form, medium and message, like a successful dragon transformation, were one. And to cap it off, on the next page Ryu celebrates catching a fish as Norton explicates what I had perceived: “It was in this realm of fusion and confusion [Hawaii both as place and as touchstone for his studies of myth and religion] that the roots of my interest in spirituality dug deep, and I really have Breath of Fire II to thank for that” (185).

Again, I found the book immensely valuable precisely because it taught me so much about games I only knew the name of, if that, and will likely never play. Thankfully, Norton has trekked through the likes of Brain Lord and Inindo so I don’t have to, and recorded his discoveries. In a few cases, I also may go ahead and track down some of these more obscure titles just out of curiosity, or to show them to my students or my own kids out of a kind of historical whimsy. But I will undoubtedly move the Breath of Fire series right onto the mental shelf with EarthBound and FFII and find time to play them alongside one another someday.

Norton’s chapters each close with brief notes from other players corroborating and qualifying his reasoning, layering onto his experience of the games the texture of their own voices and memories. Of Breath of Fire, Livnat writes “I also loved that fact that for me, who was also just learning English, there was no real need for a lot of dialogue to get the picture; in fact it enabled me to fill the void of plot with my own understanding of the game, and my own ideas and thoughts” (173). This is much the way Toby Fox talks about learning to read from EarthBound, and how I remember learning from JRPGs like Dragon Quest and FFII my own language, reflected back to me across the bridge of terse NES and SNES localizations; or later, learning Spanish from Platero y yo, before I knew most of the vocabulary enchanted with its sound; or how Philip Pullman talks about the prose of Kipling’s Just So Stories, or the poetry of The Journey of the Magi and Paradise Lost. To repeat, these old games, like these great books, encode a universal archetype, that of the learner–of language, or myth, or a game’s rules–facing a mystery and patiently listening, imagining, playing their way towards comprehension.

It bears mentioning once more that the visual style of Norton’s book, too, is almost intoxicatingly good. The layout, the choice of sprites, backgrounds, and other assets, and still more the peculiar CRT-filter quality of the images, all argue as strongly as the words about the need for us a culture to continue re-evaluating the role of nostalgia and the place of games in the artistic canon.

All this is not to say the book is perfect. A line of text from Daniel Greenberg’s testimonial about Mystic Quest gets transposed 20 pages ahead to the top of Mama Terra’s for FFIII (421). Accompanying Norton’s text and his contributors’, exemplary screenshots from the games, many of which he played through while streaming on Twitch, and pull-quotes from developers and players alike carry the reader along. But as befits a book like this, not meant to be caparisoned in scholarly apparatus, these are not specifically cited.

Consider this passage from Yuji Horii: “The most important part of a RPG is the player feeling like they are taking the role of a character in a fully realised fantasy world. They can explore, visit various towns and places, talk to people, customise their character, collect various items, and defeat monsters. The story is not the focus of the experience and is only there to make the atmosphere of the fantasy world more interesting and engaging during the course of the game” (47).

Where did this quote come from? On the one hand, I can see the problem other armchair academics/neckbeard Karens might have with not knowing for sure, not knowing if Norton has done his homework and cited his sources properly. I, for my part, love that I can cite Norton’s book the next time I attempt to elucidate or take to task Horii-san for this seemingly apocryphal quote. It doesn’t matter so much where or even whether he said it, because he’ll a) never know I am writing about him, and b) if somehow my work were to come to his attention, he’d in all likelihood be perfectly secure in his stature as the godfather of the genre, caring not a whit for what I might quibble with in a quote attributed to him by, among many others, fellow scholar-fan-content-creator Moses Norton.

Bitmap Books, via The Video Game Library

To be Frankystein Mark II, I have not nearly so much to say about A Guide to JRPGs by Kalata et al., but I definitely wanted to note its presence in this connection. When I went to buy The Definitive Book from Bitmap, I couldn’t pass up the appeal of A Guide to JRPGs. It’s not that I don’t find the book as interesting or readable as Norton’s (though I don’t mind saying that I don’t); it’s a very different beast, and not as much to my personal taste. Almost devoid of the personal touches and wrestling with deep questions, both of meaning and mechanics, that characterizes Norton’s work, Kalata’s instead aims for breadth of inclusion rather than depth of inquiry. So I allude to it here mostly as a point of reference.

Now, there are definite strengths to A Guide’s approach, and enormous quantities of information to be found there much more pleasantly than by trying to search for it on wikis with the help of google translate. The very unassumingness of its title, A Guide, belies the wealth of arcana in store for the reader. Even I, I’ll confess, have not managed to read this one cover to cover, though I made sure to dip into favorite games, obscure artifacts of the pre-Famicom era, and salient introductory sections like “What is a JRPG?” “A History of RPGs in Japan,” and “Attack and Dethrone God.” For anyone interested in topics like these–that is to say, just about anyone still reading this, AIs excepted–A Guide is a treasure trove. The perfect combination of bedside curio and coffee table conversation piece, its 650-odd pages and painterly cover adorned with a red binding somehow contrive to feel almost weightless. The prose, similarly, though it lacks Norton’s spiky charm and consistency of voice, being written by a large crew of expert contributors, is nevertheless light in tone, more journalistic than essayistic, and manages to remain easily readable despite the necessarily tiny font.

For a more Norton-esque entry in the same encyclopedic vein, see also Aidan Moher’s Fight, Magic, Items (and my review here) or the Boss Fight Books collection (ditto), though those are each about a single book, for the most part, and would have to be grouped together, Power-Ranger-like, to contend on something like the same scale. But do yourself and your RPG-loving loved ones a favor: the holidays are close enough, surely, to warrant a gift, even if it’s a bit pricey. Books like Norton’s and Kalata’s promise, in turn, the gift of conversations, debates, playthroughs and shared memories. To be passionate about old games is all well and good, but these debates are best conducted cordially, just as the books about them will be most profitable if read charitably. If the conversation that is our shared culture is to be sustained at all, we have to carry it on remembering that there is a person on the other side of the screen, someone who’s fortunate to have been bathed in the same sort of CRT glow we remember, maybe, from the sun of a winter’s or summer’s holiday long ago.

Please, read the books for yourselves and comment responsibly.

bookwarmgames Guest Lecture

Untitled Edith Finch Essay – Guest Post by Dylan Mitten

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.

Annapurna Interactive, via WIRED

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!

bookwarmgames Current Semester, Games in Literature

Books on the Writing Desk

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.

bookwarmgames Guest Lecture

The Poetry of Virtual Worlds – Guest Post by Greg Bem

“This was written with Forbidden West in mind”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) emphasized the role of the body in human experience:

Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world.

(Doyle, New Opportunities for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds, 2015, pages 93-94)

*

But what of multiple worlds

and worlds within worlds

Cognition a gray sweater

that illuminates nothingness

when flames (worlds) arrive.

*

You were killed by lava. You were killed by a serpent. You were killed by ______.

The disclaimers will continue. Death becomes a spiral outwards and upwards, a lesson, a reincarnation.

*

Where there is world there is life, and where there is life there is death, and it’s impossible not to know rebirth in this model, this statement that humans have imposed upon themselves.

* 

Who was the first to say “Game Over” is a misnomer?

* 

Who was the first to turn life into lives, to give “extra,” to provide a plurality to our relationship? To keep us hijacked, smiling, blissful, tethered into a “this could always become and become more”?

*

Death as joy.

*

The way we die, or log off, or quit. Exit to the main menu. Exit to desktop. The intrinsic meeting the ecstatic: it is all temporary, we will be back.

*

I begin sitting down. My body disappears. I begin in a place. There is no more weight. There is no more shapes. The ether fills. Eyes take over. Vision.

The screen moves from absence to presence. The ground loads. The sky loads. Shapes begin to populate. And I am breathing. And there is a flicker of breath, a digital soul shifts position, in the movement in front of me. If I stare just long enough, I am in conversation. This entity in front of me is a character. And we are beginning to dance.

Each moment entering into a world is incredibly special, a welcoming in, a beckoning. I can almost feel the waves of air parting between me and a world as the hand slices through in urgency. Come, be with us, come, explore with us.

A sprig of grass bounces back and forth. A small mammal makes a cry as it darts away into the horizon. Clouds silently expand and diminish in algorithmic intelligence.

*

Each moment entering into a world. Each moment entering. This sense of load, save, load, save. The returning, the coming back. There is always a coming back.

*

Under layers of pixels my beating heart is sustained and low for ages. Waiting for the crisis to crack, the heart getting massaged by mouse click and key tap.

*

Shift feet on carpet, plastic foot rest, plastic cover. Easy for wheels to slide. Easy for rotation, getting settled in, getting up and exploding out into the everything that exists beneath the hood.

*

This is not about what I do, it is all about how I am.

Stand up.

More coffee.

Sit down.

And stand up.

Ice cream.

Sit down.

And stand up.

Snacks.

Sit down.

Stand up.

Water.

Sit down.

*

There is something about the stack of beers that used to pile up around his desk as he ground through MOBAs and MMOs for hours every night. I’ll always remember that altar of numbness. Though I called it a glass cathedral. Was it bigger than him? The individual? Was it bigger than us? Was it emblematic of all the followers of the subtle, brutal, intensely ever-present escapism?

*

Who are we when we’re running around arenas together? Fighting complacency, finding the will to live. Is this modeling? Crafting new models? Designing the new approach? Quake leads to parkour. Bunny hopping leads to summiting peaks. There is time travel; dissonance between discovery and translation.

* 

On the verge of turning forty, I know my breath is what I’ve held in place for countless hours. Countless becomes dozens. Becomes hundreds. Becomes thousands.

*

And yearning to imagine more, always yearning to image. I can see you, oh androgynous anonymous, with your thousands of hour in your nook of cyber love, co-existing. You bring the soul shiver just by contributing.

* 

Electrical requirements. Taking so much for granted. And when the device breaks, the power stops, there is great sorrow. And when it all returns, there is great joy.

* 

Why does leaving not have a fading away, a deconstruction, a slow removal of objects until we are left with the faint outlines of a skybox and a giant, ever after void?

* 

Early MMOs, find a place to sit, and sit there. Then, and only then, can you properly log off.

And if you don’t follow the rules, what happens? Will your “progress” go “unsaved”?

* 

K makes a game that involves a pit. One can jump out of it, but they need to learn how to jump. I didn’t learn how to jump. I died in the pit. “You were killed by lava.” Or something. And I feel the vague sense that learning is the next step. There is no need. There is no “necessity.” It is not “You must learn how to jump.” It is simply is the unabashed next step.

*

Or I could never return. I could leave. I could escape the escape. For another option. An alternative method. Excitement is matched and balanced with anxiety: to embrace nuance, to give and to take, to accept and to reject. Humanity continues to impose its limitations, including choice.

*

The future will be permutations upon permutations. The future will be all options at once. The future will be beyond “extra lives” to “infinite lives.” Infinite living will be the next surge, the next spike.

*

Will we then be forced to move into limitation as a future future iteration? To remember that linearity always had its benefits, its quaking benefits, its beginning and end, its sense of level, leveling, finite structure, rigidity as a great exclamation?

*

We may still find ourselves loading into the space, the flow of endorphins twin spirals between screen and body of player, the real of the in real life is equal parts virtual, a concoction, a cocktail, of here and everywhere, of linear and open, of possibility and action. The long form list of dualities that builds pressure and enhances the techno relationship ad infinitum.

*

There’s time to clear our heads with all of this. Beneath the logistics and the observations, there is a literary subtext. There is a reason beneath it all, beneath all the questions, the individuals, the collectives, the objectively disconnected and isolated. Deconstruction bedamned, it needs only be to continue being, the narrative is a tapestry, the story is a web of stories, it is storied, it has happened, and that is enough.

*

Greg Bem is a poet, publisher, and librarian in Spokane, Washington. A lifelong gamer and game enthusiast, one of his current creative writing projects is a book-length lyrical essay on virtual worlds and performance. An additional sequence is available in the 2025 issue of LEGENDS, the Spokane Community College literary magazine. Earlier in his timeline, he published a game studies blog, and many of his other creative projects can be found at gregbem.com.

bookwarmgames Current Semester

Back to Academia

Welcome to our humble Video Game Academy, and welcome back if you’ve been here before. For our part, we sure have. We know it all too well: the familiar feeling of nerves and excitement, the prospect of introducing ourselves all over again, and the challenge of learning everyone’s name. It’s time for the obligatory back to school post once more.

Professor Kozlowski has been busy as anything, consolidating a summer of reading widely in the political, economic, and social sciences into a course which he plans to wrap up shortly, lecture-wise, with the philosophy of language which undergirds any foray into rule-making, though in real time The History of Social Thought, along with the murderer’s row of other classes he’s teaching this semester, has only just begun. Yet he somehow makes time, every week or two, to chat on the Academy discord about games; games also feature prominently in the suggested readings for his students to chose from for their short presentations at the start of every class session. Last week we talked about FFVIII, picking up in Winhill with Laguna, where his long essay on the black sheep of the franchise leaves off.

With a whole series of podcast discussions on FFVII and, some years later now, FFVIII completed at last, the inimitable Alexander Schmid, all-but-dissertation away from his doctorate, and I, your faithful Moogle-like amanuensis, have just launched into a playthrough of FFIX. The course page will be up momentarily in the Current Semester, where you might also notice several more or less unfinished discussion series still lingering. Sooner or later, we’ll get around to them! But we’ve also been reading and talking about books, working on a sort of monograph on literary modernism and the video game medium, in a segment we sometimes record under the moniker Night School.

In a moment here, I’ll finally get around to posting some writing on virtual worlds from a guest speaker and Spokane-area neighbor, Greg Bem, which he has kindly shared. We met through his helping me with a project my students were doing about AI last spring, and he shepherded an anthology of their writing through publication with his very own Carbonation Press.

For all my regular interlocutors, Ben, Alex, and Steve (who’s been on a well-deserved late-summer vacation), guests old and new like Pat and Greg, and all you readers, thanks for your time. I’m in awe that you’d find it worthwhile to visit this digital Video Game Academy, to pause and think for a spell about the possibilities of imagined worlds with us, and feel like that time is well spent upon returning your attention to the wild, inescapable world of natural sunlight and analog continuity. Long may it last!

Jess (photo credits), Ben, and I capitulated to William’s preference for the park over the museum

bookwarmgames Review

According to The World of Final Fantasy VII

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.

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

Tolkien and Lewis: Lang and Lit, Play and Games

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…

Odysseus and the Sirens – The British Museum.

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!

bookwarmgames Guest Lecture

Wholesome Streamer Summer

As an alternative to Empty Stadium Summer, what about some Blitzball and theology? Don’t forget, it’s the Year of Myth in Games!

“So stankin’ good” – Professor Noctis c. 13 min in…

Not that I have the bandwidth to properly join in on the streams and play through FFX this summer, but I so admire that Prof Noctis is up to this right now and wanted to share it.

He also recently presented with Evan DeYoung on “Video Games in Higher Education” at PAX East under the alias Dr T Wade Langer, Jr. Some great insights there on the formation of identity and memory through gameplay!

For his dissertation, he wrote on Teaching Judeo-Christian Kingship Through Final Fantasy XV.

As a research project connected to his course on “Mythos to Logos” in FFXVI, he is engaged in using a bespoke Game Lab at UA to “qualitatively research how using a video game to teach theology impacts a student’s ability to objectively examine religious traditions through comparative study.”

And as a minister, he appeals to games to “speak theologically to nearly any audience.” It is life-affirming and life-saving work.

And somehow he found time to play Kenneth from 30 Rock? Pshaw! Just joshin’ ya.

Prof Noctis makes a great counterpart to The Bible Project, with their “One Story That Leads to Jesus” reading plan on the one hand and to Signum University, with their new Tutorials, on the other. It’s awesome to see the success he’s had and the growth since we first connected when he was Editor-in-Chief over on The Pixels.

Very soon, I promise, I will be sitting down to engage more critically with some of this content–and I’ll say in passing that I like the distinction Wade and Evan make in their PAX presentation between “content-creators” and “-curators”, because I, too, feel more comfortable in the latter designation. In particular, I want to dig into the dissertation, since it’s been a minute since I looked at it, and the video “What is Final Fantasy,” which (along with his sign at the wrestling arena) seems to have really put the FF Prof on the map, social-media-wise. From their conversation about Fantasian as the “Final Fantasy We Never Got,” I’m intrigued to consider the thesis that part of what makes an FF is its seeking to break a historical cycle… But until then…

Roll Tidus!

bookwarmgames Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes indeed” – various Chrono Trigger baddies

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

But I love this passage in the Midgard chapter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stone giants made her want to write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bookwarmgames Games in Literature

Video Games in The Haunted Wood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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