Essays on games and culture
From is a five-season supernatural horror series that s sort of like the streaming response to Lost. First released in 2022, and ongoing to the present day, From is about a bunch of people trapped in a mysterious town where monsters come out at night. Think Lost, but instead of being trapped on an island in [ ]
In the prologue of Borderlands 4, the villainous Timekeeper captures the player and attaches a mind-control bolt to the back of their neck. They can t take it out, and the Timekeeper can access it anywhere, any time. A rogue agent bursts in and frees the player, starting a prison break, and the game begins [ ]
The nice thing about Baldur s Gate 3 is that the computer manages all the math. The video game medium has different affordances to a tabletop game most obvious when you compare digital and physical versions of the same game. As a computer version of D D, Baldur s Gate manages all the math. It automates all [ ]
I ve been thinking lately about the difference between reviews and criticism. I ve always said that I don t write reviews and sometimes I m not able to quantify that. I d maybe say that a review is about recommending (or not recommending) something, while criticism is about how something works. A key symptom of the difference is [ ]
The Windham-Campbell Prizes are a series of literary awards conferred annually by Yale University. The awards are accompanied by a week-long festival with talks and interviews, film screenings, and a keynote lecture from an eminent writer. Collectively, the keynotes are published as the Yale University Press series Why I Write . I started reading this series [ ]
I had a run last year watching Denis Villeneuve films I watched Sicario, which I d not seen before, and then Arrival, Blade Runner, and the two Dune movies. It s not his whole catalogue, but it s enough that certain concerns or fixations start to step out. He s fascinated by bright exteriors and shadowy interiors. He s [ ]
Death Stranding is a 2019 adventure game from Kojima Productions. Starring Norman Reedus in the role of Sam Porter Bridges, Death Stranding is a game about navigating difficult terrain. Typically games have a reasonably frictionless interaction between the player-character and the ground a hill in Call of Duty provides cover and interrupts sightlines, but [ ]
Hozy is a 2026 game developed by Come On Studio and published by tinyBuild. It s a cozy furniture arranging game: you pull stuff out of boxes and set up your house. It s part of the broader genre of cozy games, so-called, where there are no timers or points or strict win/loss conditions. These games are [ ]
Part of the point of the epic is that it’s so much work to get through. The Count of Monte Cristo takes place across twenty-three years and about 1200 pages, and those 1200 pages convey the idea of the years. At base, the epic is an example of how form interacts with content. A truncated [ ]
Over the past couple months I ve been playing Stardew Valley. The game had its ten year anniversary recently, and I saw a concert where they performed music from the game, and I got nostalgic and kinda curious to see what they d put into the game since the last time I played. I have a pattern [ ]