Belated as ever, I know, but the first of our weekly-to-monthly updates of the year is here! Happy New Year and welcome back, Video Game Academy readers. Welcome… to the Year of Worldbuilding.
“We went through some crazy stuff… But as you can see, I’m alright now!” (Let’s Play Archive)
(Whole articles could–and shall!–be written on the use of ellipses in JRPGs… the old oratorical flourish of a dramatic pause is the least of it. The thoughtful facial expression, the pensive self-forgetting, the grim determination, the speechless sorrow–so many ways this little trinity (give or take) of punctuation gets deployed…)
We are never done tinkering with myth in games, of course, but the time has come to turn our attention to a related key theme in the overlapping fields of video game studies and the humanities. Worldbuilding is the task before every would-be author of speculative fiction, which is to say everyone who has ever enjoyed a book or video game set in a (sub)created world and wondered if they could make one someday. Kudos to all those who do make the attempt! And all encouragement to those who, like us, wish that we might!
Laura shared this presentation on the Pixels discord, per the zeitgeist, and I recommended she send it to Resonant Arc, who just made a video interviewing several indie developers, including Pat Holleman!
It’s well worth watching the Gottliebs’ presentation about their experience. The insight that sticks with me is the twofold, bidirectional nature of the worldbuilding impulse which they elaborate together: how we as players are imaginatively involved in evoking the images and story of the game, particularly when it is retro in presentation, much like we do with the text of a written story; and how we are inspired to put ourselves in the place of the developer, to imagine how we might want to go about things if we were to make our own game.
Ever since Tolkien mused on “other minds and hands” in his famous letter to Milton Waldman, the full spectrum of fandom, from fanfiction followers to transparent imitators to anxiety-of-influence-laden latecomers and romantic originators of new classics, has been lured out into the open, though it feels like every day the flywheel of content creation and consumption spins faster, and its deleterious effect on whatever real world we still share becomes more lurid. Worldbuilding is just the sort of preliminary, lore-bearing activity we mostly carve out time for studying here, somewhat to our own chagrin, when all the cool philosophers and game studies kids prefer to say with Marx that after all the goal is not just to interpret the world, but to “change it.” Still, we prefer to stay with Rilke’s speaking image of the great, shattered beauty and listen when it says: “you must change your life.”
Why worldbuilding, though? Shouldn’t we start with building something on a slightly smaller scale, perhaps a school–or school of thought–or a neighborhood, or a home, or a steady devotion to some even smaller upbuilding practice of service or mentorship, reading or writing, meditation or prayer? Preposterously enough, the intuition that drives this whole quixotic project tells me that when we are at work in any of these vital ways, we are always also worldbuilding, and that by zooming out and seeing that largest possible framework, trying to get a glimpse of what sort of world we are in the process of fashioning, we might be able to better grasp all the day-to-day upbuilding efforts that we are about.
So, thank you for being here with us at the Video Game Academy for another year of reading, writing, playing, teaching, learning, working on languages and practicing music, or whatever your resolutions might entail.
While it’s still roughly the right time of year, I’m bound to share, like I seem to do every year, this obscure one from Sufjan Stevens–and wishing you once again all the best this 2026!
Courtesy of the inimitable Dylan, whose work has enriched The Community School Game Jam and Mobius Shark Tank at the Spokane Central Library, and whose Hello Kitty Zen Garden graces the unpublished manuscript of TCS: The Book (working subtitle, albeit cliched, heartfelt: Building the Beloved Community School), here is a deep dive into a game I’ve only watched streams of, and yet can hardly imagine the games landscape without: What remains of Edith Finch. Dylan has also presented this as part of the Games Studies wellness, meeting W/F afternoons at TCS. Drop in when you’re in town, just sign in at the front office.
What remains of Edith Finch is a first-person narrative game where you play as – you guessed it – Edith Finch. Edith is the last living member of her family, and after the death of her mother, we follow her through her childhood home and watch as she uncovers secrets about her family that were buried. Some in walls, others, under beds… you get the idea. Let’s briefly go through the game, and then talk about the pressing issue of the game.
We start the game on a ferry. When we look down, we can see that our character has a cast on their right arm, and that they are holding a journal with “Edith Finch” written on the cover. When we open it, we hear the namesake of the game begin to narrate the writing. She talks about how, at 17, she is the last remaining member of her family. When she gets into the monster of a house that the Finch family home is, we start to learn about all the different members of her family – and moreover, why she is the only one left.
We learn that in 1937, in an attempt to escape the curse that had claimed his wife and newborn son, Edith’s great-great-grandfather Odin Finch emigrates from Norway to the USA, setting sail with his daughter Edith (Edie, or Edith Sr. as she’s referred to by Edith), and her husband Sven, as well as their newborn baby, Molly. He uses his house as the raft, but unfortunately, it seemed as though the curse was coming for him too. The wind picked up and a storm broke out. A wave unfortunately took Odin under, swallowing the house with him. Edie and Sven, along with baby Molly, made it to Orcas island safe. Their first order of business? Building a cemetery.
Of course, this isn’t some happy ending – Edith had to be the last remaining Finch somehow, right? I’ll briefly go over the deaths.
Edith Sr. ended up having five children with Sven, including Molly. She gave birth to Barbra, twins Sam and Calvin, and Walter. Edie initially believes they’ve left the curse behind, but of course, it’s never that simple.
At 10, Molly dies from ingesting fluoride toothpaste and holly berries after going to bed without eating. At 16, Barbra is murdered after an argument with her boyfriend over her long-gone stardom. Walter hears all of this happen, and believes it was a monster. After spending 30 years hiding from this monster in the bunker of the house, the day he decides to leave, he is struck by a train. Calvin dies at 11 after swinging too high and flying off of a cliff. At 49, Sven dies from falling off of the house’s roof whilst building a slide.
Sam lives into adulthood, and marries a woman and has Dawn, Edith’s mother, and Gus. Later, he marries a woman named Kay, and they have Gregory. Dawn is the only one to make it to adulthood.
At 13, Gus is crushed by a totem pole during a storm. Gregory drowns at 22 months after being left unattended by his mother in the bath. Sam, who at this point is divorced, dies at 33 whist on a hunting trip with dawn. Dawn shoots a buck and Sam wants to take a picture with it and her. Whilst posing for the photo, the buck thrashes and pushes Sam off of a cliff.
Traumatized by all of this, Dawn moves to India, where she marries a man named Sanjay. Together, they have three kids. Lewis, Milton, and Edith jr.
Sanjay is killed by an earthquake, so Dawn moves her and her kids back into the Finch family home. At 11, Milton mysteriously disappears seemingly out of nowhere, making Dawn become paranoid. She seals all the doors of the rooms of deceased family members. Edie drills peepholes. Lewis, after battling drug abuse and mental health struggles, commits suicide during work. This is when Dawn decides it’s time to leave. She arranges for a nursing home to pick Edie up, and packs the belongings of her and Edith. They leave that night, with Edie meant to get picked up the next day. She doesn’t make it to the morning. Edie is found dead after ingesting alcohol with her medication. Years later, Dawn succumbs to an unspecified illness, leaving a 17 year old Edith to inherit everything.
In the final scene of the game, we kid out that the character on the ferry with the cast is Edith’s son, and it’s revealed that she died during childbirth shortly after we see her learn of all the secrets of the house. We see her child place flowers on her grave.
That’s the very bare bones of the story. Is there more to explore? More to dig deep on? Yes, of course, but I simply want to talk about my personal opinion with the curse.
I think that during my first playthrough of the game, I did indeed think there was really a curse – a monster, even, as Walter puts it. He’s convinced that a monster killed Molly, since that’s what she talked about in her journal entry not long before her passing. It was also likely the monster that killed Barbra, since Walter heard it himself!
I definitely believed this theory at first – but the more replays I did, the more I understood the real story, which is the one I placed out for you earlier. I don’t think there’s a monster, nor a curse. I think it’s a bunch of wacky coincidences. Let me explain; I think that the “Curse” is simply a self-fullfilling prophecy, a mindset where you, or someone else, believes that something will happen in the future, and because of that, your actions are affected by that hypothetical event, and eventually, that event happens because you influenced it to!
I think, that given the fact that Edie had recently seen not only her mother and young brother pass away, but also her father while trying to escape the “curse” that supposedly followed them, that she made this connection in her brain that she and her kids were living on borrowed time. I think that this belief made her act less rationally when it came to taking care of her kids, and therefore, the only kid she had that made it to adulthood and had their own kids unintentionally instilled that into them, too. Leading to one of those kids growing up and maybe trying to break the “curse”, but only leading to curiosity about it rather than education about what it truly is.
Finally, Edith, deciding to find out about the secrets her family holds, died tragically in childbirth in what I believe to be a sad and cruel coincidence.
So, no. I don’t believe that the Finch family ever had a curse. Instead, I think that the game represents a very straightforward story of generational trauma and how it affects a family. I think that the fear that death was creeping closer resulted in much of the Finch family acting in reckless ways. Some acted as if every day was their last, or didn’t seem too concerned with the danger of it all. Others hid away, or became over protective of themselves and possibly their kids.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a beautifully dark and morbid game. And I know that at least for me, it allowed me to gain a whole new perspective of what it means to be alive. It gave me an appreciation I didn’t even know I had for life. I think also, that its story about death, highlights just how important it is to cherish every moment, but to also not be afraid to express yourself and do the things that might be a little risky. Enjoy yourself! Don’t be afraid of some silly curse.
Thanks again, Dylan. We look forward to your future endeavors, including the follow up on Little Nightmares and a generation of young players impacted by it!
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.
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.
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
So as to establish some sort of structure by which to embrace the world in all its complexity and learn about it as deeply as possible through the mediation of a shared, relatively safe and replicable experience, for a long time now we’ve been leaning on this lens of play and games here at The Video Game Academy. And yet it cannot have escaped anyone’s notice who might be following along that what we are up to is rather different from, say, the dream of “gamification” in education that various figures of wide-ranging levels of influence might talk about, or even “game studies” in any strictly defined sense. In fact, our courses, such as they are, are remarkably old-fashioned in many ways. Essentially, we play games and talk about them; or we take a larger theme, such as “mythology,” this year’s focus, and explore it through games and other recommended readings.
In the spirit of Pullman’s advice to “read like a butterfly, write like a bee,” we remain open-minded about the selection of readings that would ultimately find inclusion in our course of study. And because all this remains speculative and hobby-horsical, we don’t have to limit ourselves to fixed curricula and syllabi, as interesting as it is to think about these things from time to time (see recent episodes of “Unboxing” and our own Professor Kozlowski for reflections on some of the work that goes into professional academia).
But in the words of Buzz-Buzz, “a bee I am… not.” Much as I strive to keep up with the writing that is meant to accompany and give expression to all this reading (reading in the loose sense of listening and playing and so on), I find that weeks and months go by with little to show for all the ideas I intend to share out again. The occasional post, to say nothing of new courses or published pieces, is only with great effort and continual procrastination ever finished (again, in the loosest possible sense of the word). Still, as another artistic hero said to yet another, “work, always work” (Rodin to Rilke): the work is ongoing, the reading is happening, the notes are jotting, and thoughts thinking. If nothing else, a conversation on FFVIII is forthcoming more or less weekly.
Is it at least somewhat convincing to plead that I’m waiting for Pullman’s new book to release before diving into that podcast project again? Or that I’m collaborating again with Moses aka Red on a follow-up to his Gamelogica project, though what form that might take remains to be decided? Perhaps I’ll talk about the Nobel winners I’ve been reading, or attempt a playthrough of MOTHER 2 in Japanese…
Meanwhile, in brief reviews and commentaries, I’ll keep tracking the connections between games and literature as best I can. From my attempt at putting The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes into dialogue with Deep Work by Cal Newport and Saving Time and How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, I arrived at the conclusion that for all their insights into the critical importance of attention, these contemporary authors seem to me to be completely missing the point. Instead of writing these popular sorts of books, long on citations and case studies and strikingly short on the deep reading they purportedly are calling for, they should have done better to craft a single reflection on the example that was most exemplary in each case. Lacking any demonstrable rootedness in their points of departure–whether Homer and Plato for Hayes, Jung and Montaigne for Newport, or Bergson and Benjamin for Odell–to say nothing of any perceptible religious or otherwise philosophical groundwork for their arguments, their books diffuse themselves into the culture as distractedly as any other media phenomenon, and will likely prove as ephemeral. And so I suggest readers turn instead to those sources in literature from which they are drawing, and abide in the original works for themselves. For a better guide as to how to do this, I could lift up Weil on the use of school studies; Bakhtin on Dostoevsky; and someday, perhaps, my own efforts on video games.
To connect this all to video games, then, can we do better than Jenny Odell’s reasoning behind her structuring of Saving Time? As she explains in this BOMB interview:
… I actually didn’t have the idea to structure the book that way until halfway through writing it. I landed on the idea because I was playing the video game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I was spending a lot of time in a spatially dispersed story in which you understand that certain things can only happen in certain places, and you have some idea of something that’s coming both narratively and geographically down the road. You can see it, it’s in the distance.
At the time, I was thinking about how everyone’s experience of playing that game—even though it obviously suggests some routes to you—is pretty different, and thus, their memory of the story is going to be different. I was just really fascinated by that. So I think it made me look twice at these places that I was spending time in and it got me thinking about how I could string them together.
Odell is extremely close here to digging into the power of place for memory as represented in video games writ large. While she focuses on the differences among players, my mind goes as usual to EarthBound, and to the ultimately unified story it tells. No matter in what order the sanctuaries are visited, or in the case of Zelda, the memory locations, Koroks, shrines, etc., there are certain themes, timeless and universal, such as love, courage, and the joy of adventure, which these games will reliably lead players to consider.
It almost makes me want to go back and read her book again in light of this revelation!
In passing, I’ll note that Hayes and Newport each do make a few interesting references to video games, too. Apropos of Socrates’ critique of writing in the Phaedrus, Hayes remarks, “It seems safe to say in hindsight that writing was a pretty big net positive for human development, even if one of the greatest thinkers of all-time worried about it the same way contemporaries fret over video games” (6). And he later acquaints the reader with Addiction by Design, by Natasha Dow Schull, and the prevalence of loot boxes via this inarguable clickbait from The Washington Post: “Humankind Has Now Spent More Time Playing Call of Duty Than It Has Existed on Earth” (52-3).
Besides becoming bywords for the perennial moral panics accruing to new technologies and for the irresistibility of slot-machine-style addiction, video games, again exemplified in Call of Duty, return one more time towards the end of the book to provide Hayes with fodder for a brief rant: “Online interaction, which is where a growing share (for some the majority) of our human interactions now takes place, becomes, then, almost like a video game version of conversation, a gamified experience of inputs and outputs, so thoroughly mediated and divorced from the full breathing laughing suffering reality of other humans that dunking on someone or insulting someone online feels roughly similar to shooting up a bunch of guys in Call of Duty” (233-4).
A different paradigm shows up in Newport: “In MIT lore, it’s generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades” (129). The absence of a descriptor there, or if you like, the way in which “video” is returned to the role of descriptor of “games” according to the parallelism of Newport’s construction, is extremely interesting. I could gripe all day about the narrowness and specificity of the video games Hayes seems to have in mind; whereas for Newport, video games are a product almost without qualities other than their novelty and mythic origin in “MIT lore” and “haphazard…inventiveness.” Whatever he may think about particular games, Newport’s mention of them at least has a positive valence.
Eeriness,an ink drawing by J. R. R. Tolkien. Photo: Museoteca.com – via New Criterion.
By chance, the one episode of Newport’s podcast that I listened to so far (no. 288, on the recommendation of this article I was considering assigning next school year) includes towards the very end some reflections on Tolkien which might finally get me to segue back to the ostensible premise of this post. Specifically, a curator of medieval manuscripts at one of the libraries of Oxford sent Newport a quote that is found in a letter from Tolkien to Stanley Unwin: “Writing stories in prose or verse has been stolen, often guiltily, from time already mortgaged…”
Before addressing–or indeed quoting–the quote, Newport riffs on “The Consolations of Fantasy” exhibit (reviewed here) and pulls up some of the art for his youtube viewers. He read in a recent biography about Tolkien “being overwhelmed by…the stresses of being in a field–philology–transforming into modern linguistics,” noting that “he was on the old-fashioned side of that.” Repeatedly, he characterizes Tolkien’s art and writing as abounding in “almost childlike, fantastical images” and takes his desire to spend more time in the “fantastical worlds” of his “childlike,” albeit “sophisticated,” imagination, as another explanation of his acute sense of stress–along with his worries about money.
Newport may or may not have ever read Tolkien–it isn’t clear–but he sees his art anyhow as being illustrative of his own recent work on “Slow Productivity.” He argues that Tolkien’s success selling books is what allowed him to spend more time on his writing and worldbuilding and to worry less about his other responsibilities; again, though, Newport seems to completely miss the point. What is it about Tolkien’s books that so captivates readers? It has less to do with a yearning for time in which to daydream and more to do with his insights about myth, drawn straight from his studies of philology and given voice in a much more famous quote from Gandalf: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” In his fiction, both in major works like Lord of the Rings and in small masterpieces like “Leaf By Niggle,” as well as his scholarship (talks on Beowulf and Fairy-stories are essential) Tolkien touches on just those emphatically moral dimensions so absent from Newport’s pursuit of excellence.
Now reading widely and breezily in the literature of attention is as fine a way as any to pass the summertime for a none-too-disciplined teacher like me. But make no mistake: setting aside my personal affection for Pullman, not entirely shared by my colleagues, I should clarify that second to none among our professorial and scholarly lodestars, we at VGA also count JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Both were eminent in their fields of language and literature, and both were theorist-practitioners of the arts of teaching and of fiction alike. And their work is at the heart of the 20C turn to myth-making which continues most vivaciously in the video game medium to the present day, and which is particularly evident in the 90’s JRPGs we never tire of playing and studying.
If it may be objected, quite fairly, that discussions of classic game series like Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda have been done ad nauseum, whether as podcasts, video essays, or even books, so what do we mean by proposing continually to return to them anew; much more so discussions of Tolkien and Lewis, who are the subjects of innumerable books, articles, videos, podcasts, and courses? Even a cursory glance at the literature suggests that the influence of Tolkien, Lewis, and their circle and successors on video game development and reception has been immense, as is well understood. From the very first PhD dissertation on video games by Buckles to more recent work aimed at scholars (Young), hobbyists and serious fans (Peterson), and a popular audience alike (Kohler), it is clear we would be far from surprising anyone with our discoveries about the deep ties between the seemingly dusty “Lang and Lit” debates of the early 20C and the “ludology/narratology” tug of war or “magic circle” duck duck goose of near-contemporary game studies.
To my (admittedly very incomplete) knowledge, however, what remains little noted or discussed is the role of play within the work of the Inklings and Inkling-adjacent, their predecessors (ie. Chesterton and Morris), and their major intellectual heirs (whether imitators, who are legion, or virtual parricides, in Pullman’s case). What happens when we go back to their writing the hindsight afforded by reading them in the light of video games’ subsequent developments of the themes of mythopoesis so powerfully instaurated by the dynamic give-and-take between Tolkien, Lewis, and their fellows and followers?
To illustrate just a few potential starting points:
Tolkien’s thoughts on “faerian drama” in the light of video games (Makai); the impression made on him by the play Peter Pan in his early Cottage of Lost Play writings (Fimi); games as mythopoeic narratives (Fox-Lenz) and the riddle game at the heart of The Hobbit (Olsen).
Lewis’s language of “checkmate” and “poker” to describe his conversion (Dickieson), and the ways in which imagery of play and games functions elsewhere in his apologetic writings, fiction, and scholarship:
“Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children’s games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups—playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits so that the pretense of being grown-up helps them grow up in earnest (Mere Christianity)
The discovery, creation, and defense of Narnia are all couched in terms of play, ie. “I’m going to stand by the play world” (The Silver Chair); and for some reason “The Great Dance” at the end of Perelandra is also called “The Great Game”
In his analogy of Milton asking “What kind of poem do I want to make?” with “a boy debating whether to play hockey or football,” Lewis likens the game rules to the poetic form (Preface to Paradise Lost)
To my mind, there is ample material here for a course and a curriculum. But as I say, this summer I’m spoken for, reading in the backlists of the Nobel Prize laureates from a century and more. But keep an eye out for the follow-up to Moses’ Gamelogica channel, tentatively to be known as Legendaria!
Empty stadiums, arcade blues. Writing about games and reveling in learning, play, and art while there is so much else to worry about, and still enjoying the shimmering threshold of summer break–as I always say, still playing EarthBound, I just want to acknowledge nevertheless all the ways this could go sideways, and has already for so many.
Chelsea 2-0 LAFC in Atlanta last week opening the Club World Cup. Alex Grimm/Getty Images via CNN
Can we look at those empty seats and think of anything other than what has been going on across the country in LA, and with the funding of Qatar and the backing of the US a world away in Israel and Gaza?
And can we register sufficiently the juxtaposition of the birthday parade wrapped in assumed glory of the world’s premier military against the popular protests openly threatened with that very force?
Can we agree that it is possible to stand for the country, with all its baggage, and stand against its own overweening power? One would have thought these were settled questions, but then one’s history has been bifurcated and multifarious from the get-go.
Or is it too little to berate the angels of history, without going further and saying that only learning, play, and art, traced back to their very deepest roots have any hope of saving the world?
Among the news and news-like content, most of it bad, as ever, I’ve recently overheard some interesting, hopeful things about games:
‘And I’m now talking as an historian, looking back… big changes are not the creation of old guys like me… we’re not the people who have the ideas that will work to build social capital and to save America… I’m gonna be long gone. So first thing is go young and inspire the young people to come up with the new bowling leagues. It’s not gonna be bowling leagues, it’s gonna be something else. But almost surely will involve something of, of high tech. But it, it will involve real personal relations with other people–‘
‘Before you move on. A perfect example of that for me was Pokemon Go. So I I’m assuming neither of you played it, but I was, I was a huge Pokemon Go fan. Huge. Huge, huge. I think this was the best execution of a video game in the modern age because it was a video game that everyone played. It was on your phones. Yeah. Right. And the goal was to catch Pokemon. You don’t need to know what any of this is, just think of a game where you’re trying to catch little creatures. (Okay.) But what they did that was amazing was you had to catch the creatures in the real world. (Ah.) So they used your camera on your phone and you would literally have to run out into the streets to catch these digital creatures.
‘And so at first it was just like, oh, this is silly and this is fun. But I’ll never forget the joy I experienced when one night I was in New York and I was running with a group of people in Central Park–strangers at 11:30 PM–because someone had tweeted and told us that there was a Snorlax, which is one of the creatures. There was a Snorlax in Central Park. And Bob and Christiana, when I tell you there were, if I was just to estimate, there were like maybe 500 people from like little kids who had dragged their parents out of the house all the way through to like adults who are playing the game running. And I remember at one point one of the kids turned looked at me, well ’cause we’re all running ’cause there’s a time limit. You don’t know how long the creature will be there for. So we’re all running through Central Park together. And one of the kid turns, turns, looks at me, this kid’s like maybe like 14, 15. And he looks at me and he is like, he’s like “Trevor Noah!” He’s like, “you, you play Pokemon Go!” And he’s like, “now I know I’m in the right place,” and we’re running together.
‘But I what I, what I loved about it was it, to what you’re saying, it was the perfect culmination. It wasn’t the either/or. (Yeah.) We were all playing all digital game. It was the alloy. You could play the game at home and we were playing it at home, but you could not help but bump into other people who were playing the game as well in the real world. And it, it was such a beautiful– ’cause once the Snorlax was gone, all everyone could do now is talk. “Where are you from? (Yeah.) Hey, where do you live? (Yeah.) Where did you, what’s the best one you’ve caught?” What have you. And this was like the game won awards, by the way, even for getting people fit and running and moving it. Yeah. But I I, I love that. So like when you say the going young and figuring out the, the hybrid, I think there are ways to do it. ‘Cause some people would be like, oh, I don’t know if you can, I think we actually have seen one of the ways, and I know because I played it, but Yes. Okay, so what’s rule number two?’
‘Rule number two is go local. Go local…
(Trevor Noah in conversation with Robert Putnam, circa 56 minutes in, per the transcription)
And then on The Bible Project, they’re beginning a series on the theme of Redemption:
Jon: But if I’m in an arcade, right? You bring your kids to an arcade, and they get— Tim: Oh. Jon: And they get the tickets. Tim: Redeem the tickets. Jon: And you redeem the tickets for, like, prizes? Tim: Mhm. Jon: I think I would use—maybe use redeem, there. Tim: Yeah. Jon: Okay. Tim: Yep. Okay. So we have, by our house, in southeast Portland—is one of Portland’s oldest— Jon: Oh, yeah. Tim: Classic video arcades. Jon: The nickel arcade. Tim: Yeah. It’s called Avalon. The building’s a hundred years old. And it smells and feels like it when you go inside. [Laughter] Tim: And they have accumulated this collection of—it’s, like, three big rooms. It’s— actually, now, when I go with my kids—which I’ve really limited how often they can go. [Laughter] Jon: They love going? Tim: They love going. But you go into these dark rooms. It’s like a kid’s version of a casino. Jon: Yeah. Tim: There’s no— [Laughter] Tim: Windows. Jon: Totally. Tim: There’s no external light. Jon: Yeah. Tim: It’s dark. Jon: Yeah. Tim: And the only light there is purple, and blue, and green— Jon: Yeah. Tim: And red from the games. And it’s just so—a cacophony of noise. Jon: Yeah. Tim: And it’s—for me, it’s oppressive. [Laughter] Tim: And, uhm— Jon: And then you spend 20 dollars— Tim: Yeah. Jon: And you end up with like 200 tickets. Tim: Exactly. But many of the games—some of the classic ones like Ski Ball and— Jon: Yeah. Tim: The basketball hoop either prints out tickets, or now, it all happens on these little cards. Jon: Digital— Tim: Digital cards. Jon: Tickets. Tim: And if you get tickets, then they’ll accumulate on your card. And so then the, the end of the ritual—it’s like a liturgy— Jon: Yeah. Tim: Is— Jon: How many Tootsie Rolls can I get from these— Tim: Going to the counter. [Laughter] Tim: And then they stand there, and these poor— Jon: Oh my gosh. Tim: Workers— Jon: I know. Tim: At the arcade— Jon: Yeah. Tim: God bless them. [Laughter] Tim: Just these indecisive, you know, wishy-washy ten-year-olds being like: “Do I want the mint Tootsie Roll, or the blueberry, or the chocolate?” You know. And they’re so patient. So what they’re doing, in that moment—is that my kids have played these games, and they’ve earned this— Jon: Tickets. Tim: This value. Jon: Yeah. Tim: They’ve generated value. [Laughter] Tim: Right? Jon: Yeah. Mhm. Tim: Isn’t that right? Jon: Yeah. Tim: In the economy of the arcade— Jon: Yeah. Tim: They’ve generated value by winning these games. And then they can take that value and then go look at a glass case with, like, cheap plastic laser guns or Tootsie Rolls. And what they do is they lay a claim to that. They’ve accumulated value— Jon: Yeah. Tim: And they see something else of value. And they’re like: “I want that to be mine.” And then you— Jon: Exchange. Tim: The exchange. Jon: I’m exchanging my tickets for the laser gun. Tim: That’s it. Yeah. Jon: But you need like 2000 tickets for the laser gun. Tim: That’s r— [Laughter] Jon: You’re not going to get that one. Tim: Tot—it’s so ridiculous. [Laughter] Tim: It’s like somebody actually paid thirty dollars— Jon: Yeah. Tim: For a, a cheap— Jon: Yeah. Tim: Toy laser gun that breaks in a week. Anyway. So it’s that exchange of value. Jon: An exchange of value. Tim: Yeah. There’s something that I’m going to lay claim to, and that will be mine. And then I do—I go through some process of transferring it into my possession. And th—that whole process is, I think, what the word redemption, and or redeem classically, means in English. Jon: Okay. Is that the main meaning of the word that we’re translating from Hebrew or Greek? …
So anyway. Part of what I’ll be doing this summer is still playing EarthBound and trying to learn Japanese yet, and part of what I’ll be doing, as ever, is singing along and listening for what I can hear of these Redemption Songs through the noise.
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.
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.
Video Game Academy 