Dream Castles
You split your brain in two. One half holds what you’re seeing – either through the mind’s eye or through the two normal face eyes – and perceives edge, brightness, darkness, every piece of reality in relation to itself, defined…
Category Essays
Trouble in Paradise
As the world careens towards apocalyptic dystopia, it is only natural that the dedicated escapists of gaming might crave the inverse – a world that at least functions, that isn’t on fire or ridden with disease or rapidly shuffling malicious…
Suspended
Over the last year or so, I’ve become increasingly aware of my dread of completion. This is something that’s been with me a long time and something that is also rather common, I think: How many of us haven’t dawdled…
Threads
I’ve fallen behind on these posts. I took a week or two to take care of some other things and fell out of the writing habit – I’m still working on falling back into it. What’s kept me relatively timely…
Instant Nostalgia
Today I saw a clip floating around from the movie Free Guy, a recent moderately-well-received cinematic pastiche of video game tropes, in which the hero wins the day through, essentially, the power of licensing – retrieving iconic virtual movie props…
Shifting Personae
I don’t know how anything ever gets created. The moment a single creative decision gets made, everything shifts around it. If you’re writing a story and a character has a little two-paragraph flashback, the information contained therein affects every other…
Bloodborne: Traversing the Threshold
...dreaming and waking, known and unknown, and the ever-shifting boundary between these. Even the player's weapon represents this idea of boundaries and thresholds, flicking between two states on command just as the player navigates the boundaries of dreams.
Do Less More
Brevity is the soul of wit. To elaborate: A story is only as good as the best parts the audience remembers. The more extraneous crap is added on top, the less enjoyable that experience might be. Past a certain threshold,…
Everhood: False Endings, Truths, Choices, and Hope
This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although…
Scary Funny
Horror and comedy can be particularly tricky genres to create in. Both rely to some degree on shocking and surprising audiences, and seeking to create shock and surprise tends to lead towards uncomfortable and loaded topics. This can be difficult…