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…
I have a hard time letting go. Sometimes one gets haunted by the past not because it’s haunting but merely because it is past. Memories cling, like getting a song stuck in your head except it’s just a moment, a…
The past is a dead end. In 1975 the movie Jaws was released. It is now considered one of the greatest films ever made. On the off chance you don’t know about it, the premise is that a great white…
Nostalgia’s not what it used to be. With a small delay, the standardized media practice of selling the same thing over and over again becomes elevated, refreshed, a satisfying throwback, a novel familiarity and a familiar novelty. Every new film…
After last weeks piece I spent a while thinking about the weird aching sensation I described being left with after playing What Remains of Edith Finch. It took me a while to figure out why it seemed so familiar about…
Things don’t happen the way we remember them. We smooth out the rough edges, add new elements in where they seem like they should be. After a certain point, memory stops being history and becomes our story, a narrative with…
In 1995 when Chrono Trigger came out, I would have just turned 12. I stayed up through the Summer nights of Sacramento, playing until 5 in the morning on the cracked naugahyde couch in my dad’s living room. 20 years…
There’s a thought that keeps going through my head. It keeps taking on different phrasings, different applications, different aspects, but its essence is this: What we crave is a part of who we are. Obvious in one sense, but we…
And just like dreams the games we play fall away from us when they are complete, and just like dreams they are easily forgotten and then remembered at random many years later, and just like dreams they slip by in…
A common problem in games, and one which is rarely solved well, is how to get a player who has left the game for a month or more caught back up on whatever’s going on at any given moment. I…
