What would the original LARPer make of his afterlives literary and metaphorical, and most recently of the propagation of gaming vernacular into the halls of power?
Doing my best Dostoevsky imitation, I take my theme this time straight from the headlines. In The Washington Post Opinion, George F. Will writes, comparing apples to orange one’s lackeys with most infelicitous aplomb:
Not to be outdone, other pundits have turned to ludic rather than literary idioms, drawing their points of reference for the unfolding debacle from video games, and especially from the virulent online parlance surrounding and stemming from them.
Ezra Klein writes in The New York Times Opinion about “The Republicans’ NPC problem — and Ours.” The article from February 16, 2025 is paywalled, but audio and video versions may still be freely available. There, his intro is intercut with a montage of right-wing voices echoing the phrase and ringing the changes on it: “non-player character,” “non-playable character,” used as a “new epithet for liberals.”
Egoistic and a little hurtful to be sure, but in The Atlantic, the stakes are raised even higher. There I find Charlie Warzel, Ian Bogost, and Matteo Wong shouting into the void that “DOGE HAS ‘GOD MODE’ ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT DATA“:
Doge has achieved “god mode.” That’s according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID, who told us that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has full, unrestricted access to the agency’s digital infrastructure—including total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more. (Feb 19, 2025)
That’s… not good. At least, it doesn’t look good from the point of view of us lowly mortals and ostensible NPCs. But maybe that’s our own small-mindedness and blindness to the bigger picture. Maybe we had better just get good.
Obligatory Picasso sketch of Quixote. Is it good? Is he cancelled? I mean, I prefer Velazquez’s Meninas and Cezanne’s Bathers to Picasso’s, respectively, but he’s, well, Picasso (credit: pablopicasso.org)
Dreary sarcasm and ripped-from-context headlines aside, I actually think that going back to the literary exemplar of Don Quixote here might be a valuable way to get at the largest possible context for what is taking place in our time politically and economically as well as culturally, and that the “Poor Knight” of Cervantes and his re-interpreters will help us make sense of this sudden salience of a crude video game idiom in the halls of power and among its commentariat.
To begin working our way backwards: consider the last time that video games and politics intersected, to the glee of the trolls and the chagrin of the social-justice crowd. Well-known to the point of cliché, there was the outsize impact of “Gamergate” in the 2010s. Core to Alt-Right Playbooks and books like Black Pill, by Elle Reeve, still operative in the background of the current discourse, this was when the language of politics (“-gate”) and social justice infiltrated the discords and boards. And the reaction was fiery. “Keep your politics out of my games!” a tribe of neckbeards shouted, spewing doritos locos and dew. Less caricature-prone gamers, on the other hand, welcomed the incursion. Plenty of academics and other cultural elites, as well as people of all backgrounds and identities, play video games, and many of them evidently are not shy about their progressive-to-radical politics and aren’t afraid of breaking the proverbial lance with their normative antagonists.
The Pentagon discord leak; the high profile of gambling on the outcome of the 2024 election (and gambling in every aspect of life, especially professional sports); and still more recent instances like those cited above from the media make clear that just as political discourse has propagated itself into the video game cultural space, games have had their revenge, inserting their discourse into the political arena, cranking up its volume on either extreme of the ideological spectrum.
This is where Don Quixote comes in. By stepping back from the contemporary fray with the aid of a figure who so beautifully links the literary and the playful, perhaps we can trace a longer historical process at work, in which the logic of the market and politics to race to the bottom morally and intellectually nevertheless cast up such imaginative cultural artifacts and enduring personalities as to make their excesses and the ecological devastation that is their byproduct almost worth it. As Spariosu’s work along these lines has shown, there are many illustrative exemplars we might study with profit, but Quixote is certainly among them, and he offers a starting point which has the benefit of a sense of humor, however complex and at times jarring it may be.
Don Quixote in Limbus Company. Image credit: Reddit.
To continue working our way reverse-chronologically to the source of the legend, in the remainder of this by-now-much-belated post we’ll touch on a few of the major instantiations of Don Quixote in media across the centuries. Most recently, as far as I know, he is depicted in video game form as one of the playable ensemble in Limbus Company. Intriguingly, her pronouns are she/her, and like Frog in Chrono Trigger, she speaks in a psuedo-old English, knight-errant register. We await impatiently Professor Kozlowski’s monograph on Limbus Company to unpack what is going on with this one, but unmistakably, given the wild premise of the game, a power fantasy of some kind is at play!
…the drama of Don Quixote isn’t in the text. The drama is in the reading. Quixote as character is one of the most famous literary heroes for a reason. And I think Cervantes wasn’t even sure what to do with him – not really. He’s clearly designed to be the butt of a joke; Cervantes uses Quixote to satirize and condemn the silly medieval romances of his day, pointing out the absurdity of these fantasies in his realistic modern context. But Quixote is too powerful for that. His mad dream of being a knight somehow transcends and transforms the realistic world Cervantes sends to confront him. We want Quixote to be right. His dream is more important than reality.
(Apropos of which, this is why I have such a problem with the comparison of Musk/Ramaswamy to Quixote and Sancho. I don’t see Musk in that light at all. If anything, he is more like the Duke and Duchess of the second volume, powerful figures who try to manipulate Quixote (idealistic voters or public servants, in this analogy) for the lolz.)
And Prof Ben on Don Quixote the character in Limbus Company:
So I wasn’t sure how I felt about Project Moon tackling Don Quixote’s chapter. Of all the characters in Limbus Company, Don Quixote has been, since the beginning, my absolute favorite. As filtered through Project Moon’s distorting lens, she (yes, she; Don Quixote is gender-swapped, like Raskolnikov, Ishmael, and Odysseus) is spunky, excitable, and idealistic. Where Cervantes’ Quixote idolizes knights, Project Moon’s Quixote idolizes fixers – the corporate mercenaries of the city; a surprisingly apt and deft adaptation. But this Quixote, like Cervantes’ Quixote, fails to see the hypocrisy underlying the fantastic tales of their exploits, and insists instead that the fixers are noble, heroic people, always defending and protecting the downtrodden, despite all of the overwhelming evidence that they do not. Where the other characters of Limbus Company are jaded, pessimistic, traumatized, or even unhinged, Don Quixote has remained fiercely, defiantly virtuous. And in a world as grim and miserable as the one Project Moon designed, this – perhaps unintentionally – makes Don Quixote surprisingly close to an audience POV character. The others accept the the wretched state of the city as given, resign themselves to the senseless loss of life and cruel realities of the corporations. But Don Quixote insists on fighting back, righting wrongs, and reforming the city. It may just be my bias, but it is easier for me to identify with the one character who does not countenance or tolerate the widespread destruction and loss of life, and who calls out the others for their callousness.
But in the lead-up to this chapter, it is revealed that Project Moon’s Quixote is, in fact, a vampire.
…But, more importantly, it is revealed that our Quixote is not the original Quixote. Our Quixote is actually Sancho Panza,…
It’s all typically-convoluted Project Moon storytelling, but the emotional throughline is this: faced with the reality of her origins, Sancho-Quixote must choose whether to accept or reject the dream that was offered to her.
Dear Ben, if you are reading this: I must know more! Would you consider publishing your thoughts on your Limbus Company playthrough in regular installments? Your work on Project Moon is far and away the best-performing content on our humble Video Game Academy!
Adaptations of the Quixote seem to have a way of going sideways. See also: Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha. Arguably even stranger, though, is Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, which recounts the tale of a writer who so enters into the soul of the novel that he rewrites it, word for word. Transposing back into literature, then, the process of emulation (of books of chivalry in Quixote’s case, of Quixote itself in Menard’s) that sent the old man on his knight-errantry in the first place, Borges’ story raises profound, slightly silly questions in truly quixotic fashion: What is an author? (Fortunately, Foucault can tell us! Oh, no, wait, this just in from Barthes…) And what is originality? What is it to live out one’s dream?
Forthcoming: Prof Schmid’s article on quixotic and Iliadic elements in Final Fantasy VIII. The windmill atop the hill makes a cameo in our recent Side Quests pod. (LP Archive)
Nor was Project Moon’s Limbus Company the first to transpose Quixote and Sancho Panza. Franz Kafka has a retelling, too, based on this conceit. Of course he does; though it hardly feels right to call it a mere conceit, given the prophetic weight of Kafka’s insight. First translated in a volume called The Great Wall of China, it comes from his collection of “parables and paradoxes,” and is brief enough to be given here in full:
Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a pre-ordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.
Given the serenity of the old man’s death at the end of Cervantes’ book, I suppose I agree: that for all his mad exploits, Don Quixote harmed no one, not even himself, and brought joy, if that is not putting it too strongly, “a great and edifying entertainment,” to many, Sancho included. For all his bruises and lost time, and despite never getting his promised island, Quixote’s squire is indeed immortalized through his adventures. Not for nothing does he crystalize the Spanish language’s rich store of proverbs and quips and unite them with a reenactment of the wise judgments of Solomon. Despite his master’s return to sanity at the close, their knight-errantry does in its small, strange way contribute to the cause of truth, which is to say, in video game parlance, saving the world.
Ultimately, I would have to read the whole book again in light of this parable-paradox of Kafka’s to see what I make of the Quixote-as-Sancho’s-demon theory. Maybe we can make a video essay about it. Imagine the numbers, the comments from the Limbus Company stans! See above: niche content, when politicized, can still break out and seemingly break the world.
We could follow it up with another on the deathbed retraction motif, stretching back to Solon in Aristotle’s Ethics, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Tolstoy’s abjuration of his great novels, and perhaps Shakespeare’s via Prospero in The Tempest, and how many others? Even Aquinas called his philosophical works chaff at the end.
Likewise, this whole quixotic bit about reenacting books: that certainly deserves another, more extensive treatment. Spariosu would direct our attention, rightly, to Tristram Shandy and Uncle Toby’s bowling green, where the good man whiles away his time playing at war. What do we make of the remarkable resemblance to another, historical rather than fictional Quixote figure, St Ignatius Loyola, whose inspiration to found the Order of the Jesuits was born of reading replacements for books of chivalry? “In order to divert the weary hours of convalescence, he asked for the romances of chivalry, his favourite reading, but there were none in the castle, and instead, his beloved sister-in-law, Magdalena de Araoz brought him the lives of Christ and of the saints” (wikipedia). Or the resemblance of Uncle Toby and St Ignatius alike to the mythical Wounded King of The Waste Land? I mean, It can’t be a coincidence that The Fisher King is another Terry Gilliam movie!
To wrap up this deranged little essay, though, we have to mention The Idiot. Dostoevsky, having killed it with Crime and Punishment and yet to reach the tragicomic heights or depths of Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, plays upon references to Don Quixote for its hero’s unconventional social graces and compelling insights into the secret hearts of those around him. Beautiful, earnest, and a little boring at times, The Idiot was reportedly Dostoevsky’s favorite book in some ways: “the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions,” according to Joseph Frank; and those who appreciated it he would have found “kindred souls.” In Prince Myshkin, he “approximates the extremest incarnation of the Christian ideal of love that humanity can reach in its present form, but his is torn apart by the conflict between the contradictory imperatives of his apocalyptic aspirations and his earthly limitations” (577).
Still more, Dostoevsky later prefigured Borges, writing a chapter in imitation of Don Quixote that was only revealed much later to be his own and not translated from Cervantes. I can’t track down the page number in Frank on that, but I know it’s in one of those five volumes somewhere! And as he says, “We tend to take Dostoevsky’s comparison of Don Quixote with Christ more or less for granted, but it was still a novelty at the time he made it. In his highly informative study, Eric Zioikowski singles out Kierkegaard as ‘the first and, aside from Turgenev, the only person before Dostoevsky to compare Christ with Don Quixote’ (94)” (274).
Kierkegaard. Now there’s someone who knew about reduplication, which I take to be something akin to reenactment as we’ve been discussing it. That, however, would really take us pretty far afield.
And then there is Jesus, the son of Mary: the original of Don Quixote and Prince Myshkin alike, reenacting the prophets and fulfilling the scriptures down to every jot and tittle of the law.
To this day, we’re all doing our best to imitate him; though some look like they’re more just trying to cosplay him.
PS: Now that it’s spring break, I sat down to read the rest of Itoi’s conversation with the MOTHER games’ music composition and sound design duo, Hirokazu Tanaka and Keiichi Suzuki, interspersed with what look like email messages from fans, which Tim Summers’ paper put me onto. In section 10, we get the following exchange (per google page translation):
Tanaka: Children don’t just play with parts of their body, they play with their whole body and feel things with their whole body. My child was born when “MOTHER” was released, so he wasn’t around in real time, but he played “MOTHER 2” when he was in elementary school. Around that time, while eating dinner, he would say to me , “Dad, Mr. Saturn… he really is a great guy.”
Itoi: Wahahaha!!
Suzuki: That’s a good story (lol)!
Tanaka: I was really like, “What?!” for a moment. He was completely normal and serious. And, not just once, but “Hmm… he’s really a good guy…” over and over again. And for some reason, it was always around mealtimes.
Itoi: That would make me cry (lol)!
Tanaka: So my wife was like, “What?! Who is that? Where are you friends from?” (laughs)
Itoi: Well, I said in a previous interview that Mr. Saturn is a symbol of innocence, but there’s also another background to it. It’s Dostoevsky.
–Dostoevsky? [I’m unclear on who this fourth interlocutor is]
Itoi: Yes (laughs). It’s Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Idiot.” When I read it, I thought, “Prince Myshkin is a really good guy!” Akira Kurosawa also made a movie out of it, but I tried to include him in Mr. Saturn. However, it’s really hard to portray a “really good guy.” It’s not something you can usually portray. So to express a “really good guy,” I added another character to the background. That’s the penguin from “Passionate Penguin Meal” (a manga written by Shigesato Itoi and illustrated by Teruhiko Yumura). If I don’t do that, I probably won’t be told by Hirokachan’s son that he’s a “really good guy.” He’ll just be “a fun, interesting guy.”
They go on to discuss other references, in the music, especially, and circle back to the idea of borrowing from Dostoevsky:
Itoi: So it’s the same with Dostoevsky! No one will feel anything like Dostoevsky, in the end. Not even Mr. Saturn. But there might be a chance that some Dostoevsky fan out there will think of something. In the same sense, something Dostoevsky-like might be conveyed to children who don’t know anything about it.
Playing fast and loose as usual with the connections, often tenuous but ever-present, between games and literature, this time let’s nevertheless open with a fairly straightforward question: Why are the Genji Gloves a recurring peak item in the Final Fantasy series?
And a little reading and searching provides at least three possible literary references.
Super Mario is perhaps the iconic video game character, full stop. Unquestionably, the success of the flagship series featuring the portly, indomitable plumber has impacted each generation of Nintendo consoles to such an extent that it is comparable in this regard only to Shigeru Miyamoto’s other most iconic creation, Link and the Legend of Zelda series. To understand the history of games in this era, then, given the importance of Nintendo and the home console market, it would not be too much to say that we have to understand Super Mario.
I’ve just been rereading this book and I won’t stop telling everyone how much I love it: it’s as good and better than I remember. Look, I tell them, if you’re at all interested in mythology, theology, philosophy, language, culture, education–practically anything relevant to the inner life, and the possibility of cultivating and expressing it in any way–you should read Devotional Language, by Johannes Sloek. I’ll send you a pdf that I found, since the book is expensive and hard to find, and it’s not even all that long; you can read it in few sittings; you can sit with it a lifetime. Just ask! So far exactly one person has taken me up on this belated enthusiasm for the preeminent 20th-century Kierkegaard scholar’s work, my friend and co-founder of this humble Video Game Academy, Ben, known online and to his students as Professor Kozlowski.
I have yet to choose my 12 games, one for each month, to try to complete this year, but I appreciate the stipulations that make the challenge seem a little more within reach. For example, games one has started but never beaten are allowed, so both my file of Pokemon FireRed, started at the tail end of 2024, and my long-dormant FF8 save, which I’m spurred by Ben’s essay to pick up again, are fair game. The rules also specify that all “beating the game” entails in this case is reaching the end of the main story. The completionist in me is torn, then, between wanting to participate–finally playing through the rest of Planescape: Torment, perchance?–and knowing that to do so is to accept that my runs are likely to be cursory, fragmentary, and rushed, even if I do complete the historic challenge. I recognize from the outset that it isn’t very likely that I will.
Red’s list, shared on social media and discord
A similar spirit of fraught completionism is animating my scholarship this year, such as it is, here at the Video Game Academy, where I’m intending to write up all the unfinished drafts I have lying around. Cleaning the digital shed is how I think of it, looking forward to such light as might come along through the process.
We have been known to favor story-driven games, RPGs as well as visual novels, in our courses, and in our reading and theory-building we tend towards the myths at the roots of those stories. In the occasional writing meant to accompany and record all this playing and reading, it is natural that we should circle around the same themes time and again–innocence and experience, language, wisdom, courage, and friendship–rather than proceeding with an argument straight forward to its end. So often, that end is really to invite readers to contemplate anew what has seemed only a distraction or entertainment. And given that I am a halfhearted completionist at best, it is no wonder that I have so many stray essays only half begun, and that finishing them will mean putting them in the bare minimum of readiness to be read.
As a theme for the year, halfhearted completionism doesn’t really have the ring, however, that The Year of RPGs, or even The Year of Myth in Games properly does. So let’s go with that, understanding between ourselves that what we’re bound to deliver might not quite live up.
Along the way, sooner rather than later, I trust, we’ll get to that brief outline of Sloek’s Devotional Language I’ve been promising and attempt to explicate its bearing on the project of reading games mythologically. It’s not an easy book to find, but it’s one that we revere enough to shell out the textbook-high price for a used copy (or in a pinch, to scour the web for a pdf). Professor Kozlowski has been known to name-drop Sloek in his lectures, too.
Should you choose to review the extant literature rather than awaiting updates from us, however, a myriad of resources await the student of myth in games. Alarmingly, the wily Spariosu, who has been there long before us, tallying up philosophers and fiction writers from Homer to the late 20th century, hasn’t yet managed to transform the academy with respect to its stance towards games. And yet it is thanks to the far from mythically inclined Game Studies Study Buddies that I ever heard of his work. See also their discussion of what might be the first dissertation on storytelling in games, “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Story Game Adventure,” by Mary Ann Buckles, and their proposal for a countervailing archetypal work of game studies to supplant Huizinga and Caillois, Beyond a Boundary, by CLR James.
Contemporary broadly Jungian interpretations which might be of interest include two recent doctoral dissertations from Pacifica Graduate Institute, “Myth in Translation: The Ludic Imagination in Contemporary Video Games,” by Robert William Guyker, Jr, and “The (Virtual) Myth Conservancy: A Framework for Virtual Heritage and Game-Based Learning,” by Ashland Pym. On the assumption that anyone willing to read a blog post about such tomes would also be willing to at least skim the originals, a review of these is probably not forthcoming. But that is the beauty of abstracts, like this one from a conference in 2022, or the endless rollout of hits for a search of “keywords: myth and games” at (the admittedly very spammy) academia.edu. Video essays, likewise, are an endless trove of far more polished content than we’re ever likely to produce.
I wonder what ever became of this project of a “virtual myth conservancy”
To conclude for now: the myth at the heart of this project of ours at the Video Game Academy has always been the myth of the Lewisian light-looker-along and Tolkenian mythopoetic seeker of truth. It’s the Augustinian longing for a paradigm of a story to apply to our own lives, rather than an accumulation of facts, however playful. It’s the myth of creation, of the garden and the fall, of the exile and return to the land and the faith of our homes, where the TV glows with game systems and the local library and school cafeteria shelves are well stocked. It’s a certain blend of the erstwhile American Dream and the perennial search for meaning: the quest for the grail and the fight against the dragon, the legend with a core of literal and metaphorical truth in the midst of extravagant lies and beside-the-point problems, the poetry of the god-shaped absence in a culture where God has been said to be dead for a long time, and yet we act as though he lives. Our party has gone ahead and killed him time and again at the end of the main story of plenty of RPGs, and still there are countless others to play.
Call it cliché, call it poetry if you like, though rhetoric or ideology are also apt. When it comes to quibbling over words for getting at the relationships between games and myth, we have all day, all year, and more.
We’re not exactly known for prompt and timely updates here at the old video game academy. But hey, we’re still here, in our fifth year, give or take, and ringing in this new year with a post and a promise of more to come.
It even snowed yesterday at last
Taking stock, I have about 40 drafts ready to go, starting out from many points over these swiftly elapsing years, mostly along the lines of a games-in-literature connection. So many ideas for the student of games to contemplate, easily a year’s worth, are there in potentia. So that it’s my intention to shovel out this whole backlog little by little over the course of this year, knowing that the articles will be shorter and even looser than what I generally go for, because if not now, when?
Some of the topics I’ve been mulling over: cmrn of the infamous GSSB and his thesis on nonhumanism; the infinitely voyaging Sufjan; the inimitable Sloek; more Dostoevsky, naturally; Homer, Cervantes, Caedmon, Sterne; Monkey and Gargantua; Genji and his ambidextrous gloves; Pullman, of course, whose third Book of Dust should be dropping soon.
Whether there’s anyone out there reading them or not, I’m looking forward to the practice and discipline that will necessarily go along with such an undertaking. Much as I like the outlet for meditations on games and literature, though, my worry is that this site is not much help to anyone else, whether it be people teaching games or people working on their own researches, or some overlap of the two. To try again to connect with a community of people interested in reading and writing of this sort, then, is my main goal for the year, quixotic though it may be. The podcast form is a good one, insofar as anything on the internet is good, for conversations and interviews bringing people together and sharing ideas, and we’ll keep it going.
Understandably, this is already asking a lot. All I can say is, quoting Ben again, “Fires bring people together…In the fire, we were neighbors…We are in the fire now. We are always in the fire, especially when we cannot see the flames.” And this is fine.
Or, Sakura’s Revenge: Danganronpan Mysteries and Truth Bullets
Recently I came across a good refresher on that song. Back in middle school, I distinctly remember a time that there was an assembly in the gym for us to hear about why we shouldn’t do drugs, and they blasted Third Eye Blind on the speakers. I would have done almost anything to escape… But this was my favorite track from the game.
Now that we’ve set the mood: be advised, more spoilers and nostalgic self-indulgence lie ahead.
The ending of Danganronpa reminds me sharply of Little Inferno, the little mobile game that launched us on our quixotic scholarly adventures here at Video Game Academy. I recollect, that is to say, the sun, which I take to be what is represented on the opening of the sealed main doors of Hope’s Peak Academy, and with it Plato’s whole allegory of the cave in the Republic comes flooding in. With that, in Platonic fashion, comes the idea of allegorical reading as such. Where are the limits of likeness and pattern, and how far should a sense of symbolic or thematic structures take us in interpreting their meaning? Where do they shade into free association and playful recurrence to unrelated hobby-horses? When is the sun just the sun, and we look into it too closely at our peril?
I basically agree with Eleanor Duckworth’s memorable turn of phrase, “the having of wonderful ideas is what I consider the essence of intellectual development.” I’m tempted to hear the capital I there on ideas, but either way, the Socratic approach of dialogue, questioning, myth-making and -unraveling together with friends seems entirely right for discussing games, books, or anything else we might want to learn. In Danganronpa, which aside from the standout trial scenes is hardly compelling as gameplay but rich in generating opportunities to wonder and cogitate, a big part of the intrigue of the game resides in theorizing and seeking community through that pursuit of the truth. It’s a game obsessed with the identities of spectacular individuals; naturally, it leads the player to reflect on their own. Know thyself, the ancient wisdom runs.
Then I think about Ben’s story of emailing the folks behind Extra Credits back in the day, and how they replied to his question about depictions of faith in games with a nod to EarthBound’s Pray mechanic. That, too, seems spot on. I believe, for all the baggage of Christian orthodoxy, the great stories behind the development of our allegorical and other habits of reading basically have it right when they say where two or three are gathered, the great I am is there. Chapter 3 I talked about with Steve, and 4 through the end with him and Ben, so we made a quorum. Of course, the Danganronpers are also very interested in status and popularity and, well, feeling some firsthand evidence of the sustaining love that moves the sun and other stars. That we can feel this so palpably and connect with them on it is a big part of their appeal and their convincingness as characters. Sayaka, in particular, is liable to totally take in the unwary player with sympathetic longing with her stories of working hard to become the sort of person she once looked up to on TV. Junko, for all her boredom, sets great store by the emotions of others, both those trapped with her in the school and those watching the broadcast live. The Junko we meet at the start of the game, too, radiates embarrassment in the moment and pathos in hindsight when Makoto mentions she doesn’t look like her picture on the magazine covers.
Much as I’d like to hope there are more friends we haven’t met yet listening in, thinking back on the twin founts of philosophy and the paradox of faith makes it all the more inconsequential to me whether we end up recording our conversations about these games and releasing them or not, so long as we get to have them and all the wonderful ideas that arise. I can well imagine plenty of other people are out there doing something similar with their friends, whether online or in person, about this game or some other resource of shared concern, and the thought gives me solace. While some of it is fresh in my mind, though, I wanted to make some notes about the remaining parts of the first game.
For myself, I don’t set much store by the canon/head-canon distinction the policing of which seems to occupy some people so fully. Good for them, but my interest doesn’t lie in persuading other people of my theories or arguing for or against a certain interpretation as being correct, whether that means in line with the author’s intentions or by some other measure of rightness. Particularly in the game’s more surreal moments, like the nightly Monokuma Theater micro-fictions, Danganronpa seems to take a wryly self-reflective tack against such attempts to pin down its narrative. Still, thinking and talking about it is fun and writing it down meanwhile seems worthwhile.
The final reveal, with Junko monologuing about her plans and motives in pure supervillain fashionista fashion, conspicuously includes her dismissal of any full disclosure of the how, so long as we can sort of wrap our heads around the what and why, of her erasure of the players’ memory before the killing game began. She resents the survivors’ hopeful interruptions and grows bored with straightforward questions about a few final subversions of tropes, such as secret twins, Cain-and-Abel-style fratricide, and amnesiac heroes coming together to overcome evil. The extent of that evil, whether it be godlike in fact or only in appearance, is left obscure. Once the manipulation of our minds on the level of the removal of two years of school memories is on the table, the idea of some sort of global “ideological” mischief, complete with the superposition of mascot heads on the representative monuments of culture and covering the faces of partakers in violent mobs in the streets alike, may as well be either simulation or actuality. The breakdown, whether social or psychological, is fait accompli, and the only question is whether there is some return or conversion possible for the players and the world.
Certainly there can be no turning back for the mastermind(s) behind its apparent destruction. Evidently, despite all the hints to the contrary, dead characters stay dead, and only in bonus content beyond the base story can they all be saved by the opening of the sealed door before the killing begins. When Junko embraces her theatrical multiple-stage suicide reprising each of the executions doled out so far, it includes that rocket-intro movie that we slowly realize accounted for the bones of Kyoko’s father. Like Junko, his face is turned away from us in all other images but this final one. True to the ways of video game villains, Junko provides us everything we needed in order to beat the game, even when she does so more out of determination to lose than due to the actual complete resolution of all the school’s mysteries that she stipulated (after all, we are left with plenty of questions).
There was something playful about the way Junko walked away.
After the credits roll, the seemingly defunct Monokuma once more asserts in his tautological, self-referential way his continued existence as headmaster, and we are left awaiting further illumination/obfuscation of the identity of the Ultimate Despair or Team Rock- er, Fenrir in the sequel. It had already been promised, tongue-in-cheek, as a soulslike game featuring the noble Sakura dual-wielding polygonal lances of some sort against a giant-mech Monokuma during the final dream theater, but that imaginary game’s development was to be contingent on players buying lots of copies and getting everyone they knew to do the same. This whole-hearted if jokey embrace of the actual dominant ideology of neurotic complexes and quiet despair that is so-called late-stage capitalism is perhaps the funniest moment in a game that also regales players with Murakami-level short stories about UFOs and ersatz all-beef patties. The actual follow-ups in the series are appropriately on the same order as the first game: 2-D, just like Hifumi prefers, visual novel affairs that emphasize their superficiality and stylized appropriation of generic tropes.
To pick up with some highlights of the discussion prior to the end of the game, starting back in Chapter 3: Somehow, we come to care about the whole cast of cut-out cliches of characters, as surprising to us as the Ultimate Fanfic Artist’s rush of parasocial feelings for the AI program, Alter Ego, is to him. A friend is another self, as one old formulation has it; but Hifumi cannot hold onto the other saying, assuming its fair to appeal to it, that the things of friends are common. Makoto, at least, instantiates this latter idea in his process of gradually learning from others and gaining skills by getting to be closer friends with them. Meditating on what his status as the “ultimate lucky student” or indeed “ultimate hope” means, in this light, is surprisingly rich, while as gameplay enhancements or rewards these abilities are hardly significant.
But to return to Chapter 3 and Hifumi: his jealousy is what Celeste plays upon for her nonsensically elaborate double-or-nothing-homicide. She pits him against the powered-up Taka, who also confesses his love for Alter Ego for its portrayal of Mondo. Her betrayal of Hifumi is barely reciprocated in his final words, foreshadowing some recovery of memory before the end, along with the disclosure of a secret name. This is precisely one of the items on which Junko “fucking Enoshima” refuses to pontificate at the end of the game: why is her sister’s family name (Ikusaba, ie. “battlefield”) different from her own (lit. “bay island”)? So the mystery of the name and identity of the mastermind is hardly resolved, and that partial resolution points directly to another key theme haunting many of the game’s characters: their family relationships.
Celeste herself seems to represent an attempt to cast off her own cultural heritage and embrace that of another place. Changing her name, unlike the concealment and replacement tactics of Junko and Mukuro, seems to be purely aesthetic preference, in line with a certain self-construction. Her motive for the murder plot, such as it is, consists in her desire to bankroll her dream of buying a castle in Europe and staffing it with suitable servants. This vision of inhabiting an invented version of some distant land seems very clearly to play on the wishes and pretentions of so many fans of Japanese cultural products in the west. That she so despises Hifumi, in particular, is profoundly ironic. To the extent that either native Japanese audiences or foreign ones have reflected on this, they should be moved by curiosity about the history and language of the cultures they are fascinated with, and perhaps gain some new perspective on their own.
Makoto’s motivation to ensure the safety of his family, though we are apt to forget it, is pushed back in his face towards the end of the final trial. Byakuya’s fraught pride and perfectionism as the triumphant scion of a supposedly destroyed family of masters of the universe gives even this aloof figure a touch of humanity by the end. Comic relief clairvoyants and schizophrenic mass murderers drop mentions of watching antenna TV with their grandma and having two moms. Discourse around the game is focused mostly on the second trial, where Mondo’s jealousy of Chihiro’s strength and guilt over his brother’s death lead to his crime of passion, but the whole second half of the game, more or less, is driven by the search for a lost father (on Kyoko’s telling, in order to more formally disown him).
Sakura’s case, the turning point in the story, is almost as developed as Kyoko’s. Like Kyoko’s relationship to Makoto, Sakura’s protectiveness of Hina nearly leads to disaster, but the game suggests that friendships can ultimately prevail over the complex inherited strife of families. Sakura’s devotion to the dojo of her family is what leads her to initially agree to Monokuma’s proposal to get the killing moving, before Sayaka initiates it aided by Makoto’s misplaced tenderness, and Sakura later rebels. Her final act of sacrifice nearly backfires. Hina’s misprision of her motivation as loneliness and despair leads her to try to sink the whole surviving group, led astray as she is by the false suicide note. This is one of the clearest moments of the mastermind’s unreliability, and arguably should have given Kyoko more pause before she ventured to challenge Monokuma directly on the unfairness of the fifth trial, which framed her for a murder before she shifted the suspicion onto Makoto. However, the game does not dwell on either Hina’s or Kyoko’s treachery. This one moment of truly consequential choice in the game, should Makoto speak up and reveal Kyoko’s deception, produces a goofy group/family photo bad ending, but has little effect on their relationship as the true endgame plays itself out, as swiftly forgiven and forgotten as Hina’s jealous wrath.
Monokuma, for all his misdirection, does eventually reveal the true last words of Sakura so as to let the game continue. In this way, her suicide comes into line with a prototypically noble sacrifice, for all the problematic resonance it has with the real world of youthful despair. He also acquiesces to Kyoko’s bluff, again seemingly more on the strength of Junko’s commitment to her popular image and to delivering an entertaining show than on her fairytalesque legalism and observance of the rules she herself has arbitrarily laid down.
Sakura’s suicide is another of those key instances, like Chihiro’s gender identity or Celeste’s cultural one, of Danganronpa putting not just young bodies but young minds and souls under the gaze of the player. It flirts with voyeurism in scenes like the bathhouse “man’s fantasy” and the overt surveillance cameras in the rest of the school, and its treatment of gender nonconformity, school violence, and suicide are at least as problematic on reflection. The developers’ understanding of their audience’s being here for this edgy content presumably accounts for the otherwise inexplicable shots of Hina in bed–a piece of narration our POV character Makoto couldn’t have provided since he wasn’t there, and one that gets repeated as she recounts the events later anyway, and is thus doubly gratuitous–and the up-skirt views of Junko stomping Monokuma and Kyoko climbing the ladder up from the garbage heap. For all the emphasis on bodies, their surfaces and undergarments, Danganronpa is also addressing, albeit more obliquely, some of the psychological and even spiritual aspects of characters and identities. Bodies living and dead, uncomfortably sexualized and then disposed of, become the point of departure for reflections about trust, depression, habits of exercise, eating, and hygiene, discipline, and, most of all, talent. Whatever is ineffable, inexplicable, maybe only imaginary about what makes someone who they are and makes human connection possible, the game celebrates it in its own deranged way.
Sakura’s break-in of the headmaster’s room allows Kyoko access to the entire extant school, including the conspicuous lock on the door of the refuse room, using the key with a Monokuma face on it, though the building sure looks much bigger than five stories in the opening cutscenes. The secret room between the bathrooms and the library archive proves to be an open secret: once Makoto accesses it, he gets bonked on the head by a masked assailant, though never more severely punished, and the AI linked to the network there is part of Junko’s plan all along, just another one of the hints she gives to feed despair with glimmers of hope. Still, somehow Alter Ego manages to save his life, just as Kyoko heard the footsteps of the god of death and fought off a masked Junko before putting him in that predicament of facing execution in her place. She atones, perhaps, by diving into the garbage with him, cup noodles and all, to bring him back into the light, and to help solve the mysteries of their school life together. Perhaps.
Most of all, the player is left wishing for a better understanding or a more convincing portrayal of the inciting Tragedy, the true nature of which remains locked in those stolen memories, however it was they were stolen. It seems to include the presence of at least a handful of killers among the elite students at the nation’s most prestigious school, where a classroom on the fifth floor has been turned into a crime scene. If this was the focus of the Tragedy whose repercussions became truly society-ending in scope, it requires a huge escalation of our suspension of disbelief. Willing as we are to suppose the mastermind has an endless supply of technology for killing and gift-giving at their disposal, along with a degree of mind control and a knack for the spectacular, the possibility of a school-based tragedy spawning a global breakdown stretches all credulity. It would almost be nice to imagine it were possible, that the world’s attention and compassion could be so concentrated on the loss of life and hope in one classroom. But it makes no sense, given the otherwise surprisingly realistic portrayal of human nature in the main characters of the game. For all the absurdity of their circumstances, they do feel understandable, in a way the Monokuma-headed monuments and mobs do not.
What matters to me is not whether the world outside the school gates is irrevocably shattered, or whether we’ve literally travelled on our spaceship ark of a school to the point of opening an airlock on the surface of the sun. The first game by itself doesn’t provide enough evidence, in my view, to prove or disprove that possibility, absurd though it seems. As for the subsequent games in the series, the jury is still out. We’ll be discussing them soon, if all goes according to plan. Metaphorically, though, the ending of Danganronpa, like so many other great games, is certainly about returning us to the world a little wiser and more hopeful. In this regard, it chimes with Tolkien’s notion of escape as much as Plato’s. The one cordially disliked allegory, the other denigrated poetry in favor of philosophy, and yet both reverberate with the same perennial themes, illumined all the more and anew by an encounter with this bizarre visual novel. See for yourself and try reading the Symposium or the Silmarillion in the light of Danganronpa’s vicarious youthful mayhem, jealous love, and joyous truthfinding. That’s what I hope, anyhow.
School’s out, and the summer of Danganronpa begins!
It’s true that we’ve been here before a time or two at the humble and not-quite-derelict Video Game Academy: see the spoiler-laden analysis from Professor Kozlowski on the game’s approach to Serving and Subverting Tropes, our introductory podcast episode, and other materials on our Intro to Visual Novels page. But summer school, after all, is about making up for lost time, in a not un-Proustian way, and so it’s never too late to begin again learning about this weird and discomforting game of mayhem, murder, and angst; through it, about games as such; and through games, about everything, really.
So get pumped with recommended readings such as Susan Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’ and play Danganronpa with us (or watch someone’s playthrough enough to get the gist of it, read the script, etc.)… it’s going to be a beautiful summer’s day.
What else we’re up to:
Professor Ben has been making lectures and videos for his course on the Philosophy of Love and Friendship
For myself, summer-reading Pedro Paramo, The Satanic Verses, The Tale of Genji, and The Beetle Leg with various friends, and playing through Paper Mario games with the fam
What’s new? Find us on discord and drop us a line!
Suddenly here we are. Beyonce’s album dropped a week ago. It’s already the first Saturday in April.
At 10:55 and again at 4:15 Central Time, we’ll be talking video games as part of TexMoot, one of Signum University’s regional gatherings. This year’s theme is Storytelling Through Play: Games and Immersive Narratives. Many thanks to the organizers!
Here’s what I hope to talk about.
First, the morning’s discussion panel on Teaching Video Games.
In recent years, video games have become the subject of critical thought and inquiry, giving rise to engaging works of scholarship and amateur discourse, as well as featuring prominently in other artistic media such as novels, films, and music. My own contribution to this discourse has taken the form of online courses for kids and adult learners, in-person electives in public schools, and long-form podcasts, essays, and interviews. I’ve read and listened to a fair amount of the literature on games, but I know I am still only scratching the surface. Inviting participants to share their own experiences studying and teaching about video games in academic settings, ranging from higher ed to K-12 schools, we’ll discuss the value and meaning of video games as a topic of research bridging STEM fields and the humanities.
A prospectus for an unwritten chapter on the topic.
Slides to look at from SPACE. (Spoilers for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.)
Video games play a significant role in transmitting images of heroism in contemporary culture. This talk concerns allusions to King Arthur in the Final Fantasy video game series, read in the light of mythic narratives present in the role-playing game genre. I focus on representative Arthuriana in Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VII, which I take to be illustrative of the tension between crystalizing and splintering tendencies at work in the series. I draw comparisons between two major examples, the Excalibur weapon and Knights of the Round summon magic. For a tentative framework of theory, I make reference to Tolkien’s imagery of light as refracted by Verlyn Flieger’s analysis in Splintered Light.
Mathematics and politics, ripples in the pond of people; society the surface of human nature, music its denizens, and reading its depth.
Do not disturb my circles.
Archimedes, in Plutarch’s Lives (in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments [in our Reading on the Ground])
With Miyazaki’s Boy and the Heron, Dante on his pilgrimage, and Don Quixote on his knight-errantry, Alex and I have been circling around ideas for another project on myth in video games of late. More on that to come, I hope! For now, there are a number of other pieces I’d like to curate, to constellate around this resonant sigil of the circle.
Plenty of times we’ve heard about the Inklings, particularly the core duo of Tolkien and Lewis, and maybe the erudite Barfield and the weird Williams. Tolkien of course has his Lord of the Rings, Lewis his lecture on the theme of “The Inner Ring.” But there are many other great literary circles out there, too.
A little while ago I read the lively Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf about Schiller, Goethe, and the rest of their Jena Set. Much further back in college it was the English Romantics, including the ghost story-telling contest that led to Frankenstein. Just now I’d add the excellent Journey to the Edge of Reason, by Stephen Budiansky, on Godel and the Vienna Circle (and subsequently the Institute for Advanced Study). No doubt before long I’ll want to cf. these with the New England Transcendentalists and Bloomsbury Set.
For myself, I’ve been connected with a group we might call the Arizona Seminar, though lately I’m more north by northwest. Our intellectual lineage traces through Santa Fe and Annapolis to Chicago and beyond, roughly along the lines of St John’s College and its formative lights. For another sampling of writing and music in this milieu, see the itinerant Brian Brock. Or just ask for the link to join the online Sunday seminar.
From Moses Norton, a delightful foray into–and sendup of–video game lore videos: Gamelogica.
Between all this and the subject of the latest episode in my own podcasting endeavors, Dylan Holmes’ A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, with all that book contains and all we touch on in our conversation, I’m feeling like a sentence crammed too full of ideas, more replete than complete. A fitting way to end this blog post that’s all outgoing links like those snakes in a can, for completionists still reading: you might also want to look up Chris Perry at Hampshire College, Barry Atkins, Tim Rogers, and the Digital Antiquarian, among others we mention.
Video Game Academy 