Kos Blog

Hello. It's been a while.

Why does the Internet love to hate La Croix*? Any discussion on Reddit that mentions La Croix inevitably invokes this catchphrase (or some derivative): "It tastes like carbonated water but someone is screaming the name of a fruit in the next room over." Just read the comments on this post.

ProZD recently made Let's Try 14 DIFFERENT LACROIX FLAVORS, an addition to his popular Let's Try series, where he spent the entire ten minutes complaining about the lack of flavor and how the experience of drinking La Croix is akin to blue-balling your taste buds. He also compared it to water but worse according to him because it's "weird, bitter, salty water."

Can this stop? Can sparkling water just be what it is? I like soda. I enjoy cola, Sprite, Squirt, even Mountain Dew. Sparkling water is not soda. Sparkling water is not flat water. First things first, if you do not like the idea of sparkling water, do not drink La Croix. If you want strong flavor in what you drink, do not drink La Croix. But never complain about what La Croix is because it does not fit in the categories of "water," "soda," or "flavored water." It does not even claim to be flavored! It is essenced.

I understand there are flavored sparkling waters like Spindrift. I've tried that. Spindrift is not the same product. There is juice in Spindrift, even citrus pulp makes it into the can. There may be some overlap in the market, but I posit that La Croix has comfortably carved out its corner and cannot be toppled.

In addition to filling a market need, La Croix is also the established brand. While the can design is...debatable, the brand is immediately recognizable and evokes an idea of conspicuous consumption. In the next design cycle they have a golden opportunity to make it even "cooler" to drink La Croix (think Voss, Fiji, San Pellegrino). But it's still cheap when you buy it by the pallet!

So, basically, La Croix is my bias. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Also I want to mention Liquid Death as a canned water option because it is so incredibly cool to me. I don't know what made me a brand whore for canned water, but it just feels right.

*pronounced la-CROY, by the way, not la-CROCKS lol

Fandoms, at least the modern Internet definition of fandoms, are weird. Entire online communities are dedicated to discussing, theorizing, and otherwise obsessing over media franchises. Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings. Disney princesses. Broadway musicals. Fandoms produce fan content as a result of their obsessions in the form of fan art, fan fiction, 'ships' (fantasizing over relationships between characters), and other... less savory productions.

Lindsay Ellis is a video essayist and media critic, you can find her here on YouTube. Ellis is a fanatic herself. Of musicals, of Disney, and the Lord of the Rings franchise. But she's also a fan of the creative processes behind these works. The subjects of her videos are almost always a dissection of how the making of a work influences the final product, for better or for worse.

Take her video essay Pocahontas Was a Mistake, and Here's Why! where she says, "Pocahontas is basically peak nineties neoliberalism. It has all of the required merchandisable Disney things [clips from ads for Pocahontas themes ice cream, chocolate bars, Barbie dolls, and a marketably sexy John Smith doll]. We've aged up the historical figure into a sexy Barbie doll. Middle-aged pudge man John Smith has been chiseled into a golden haired Adonis voiced by Mel Gibson, and it plays into basically every Native American stereotype that even by the nineties had reached parody levels [clips from the film showing animal imagery in campfire smoke, Pocahontas' shadow casting into the shape of an eagle]."

After explaining everything Disney did wrong with Pocahontas, she contrasts this with the studio's success with Moana, which has beat-by-beat similarity to Pocahontas in the characters' initial motivations (except the white colonizer love interest, thankfully). Her videos are fun to watch. While some are pure criticism candy like We Need to Talk About Game of Thrones I Guess and Why is Cats?, others are earnest attempts at injecting genuine literary criticism into the Millenial/Gen Z discourse of contemporary media, see Woke Disney and Is Titanic Good, Actually?. And before I go on I should say that the two videos I linked above are more than just roasts of the two most critically panned pieces of media of 2019. They are actually educational about the histories behind the productions of the works.

Ellis does an excellent job of contextualizing media in comparison with the real world: both the production behind the works and social issues. In Death of the Author and Death of the Author 2: Rowling Boogaloo were basically lit class lessons on the interactions between text, the reader, and the author, and how these interactions apply to the Internet Age. After recounting a history of the concept of la mort de l'auteur, she asks the viewer to consider two questions: Should we separate an author from their work? and Can we even separate an author from their work?

The importance of discussing these issues with a modern context is grossly underrated. High school English teachers should take note of Ellis because she engages her audience in a way that truly resonates with the age group that is growing up right now: discussing old ideas of literary criticism through the lens of modern audiovisual media.

Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia is her latest video and I believe it is her strongest essay yet. She gives a rundown of the portrayal of trans people in media from crossdressing in The Iliad and Some Like it Hot, to the deranged killers in Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, to the many, many depictions of 'straight men puking' in the 90s and 00s. All the while, Ellis explains that these depictions are harmful to the real-world image of trans folk--even if Clarice looked straight down the barrel of the camera and said, "transsexuals are very passive." These extra qualifiers are ultimately forgotten by the audience who instead remember, "It puts the lotion in the basket" and "I'd fuck me." Clearly.

We can't work on making the world a more inclusive place without acknowledging past media, especially in 2021 where movies and television are more prominent than ever with streaming.

Lindsay Ellis' video essays are long, usually about 30 minutes to an hour. This format may not be appealing to some, but if you watch YouTube on your lunch break, give one of her videos a try.

After years of working at Telltale Games, Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin decided to leave to create something fresh and exciting. But that wasn't the only reason. Telltale was a once-thriving adventure game developer that was doomed to die in late 2018. In 2013, they increased their staff from 125 to 160. In 2015, 200. In 2017, the employee headcount ballooned to 400. All the while, Telltale was snapping up licensing deals, left and right (ostensibly to recreate the massive success from The Walking Dead series). Borderlands. Game of Thrones. Minecraft. Even some DC and Marvel Comics franchises.

But the success of The Walking Dead by Telltale did not repeat itself. Meanwhile, it became clear there where issues with perpetual "crunch" time for staff at Telltale. Soon after the company restructured in 2017, the shop closed for good (as we know it) in 2018. They got out of Telltale while the gettin' was good.

Let's go back to 2013. Rodkin and Vanaman join with Nels Anderson and Olly Moss to found Campo Santo, a self-described "small but scrappy game developer in San Francisco, CA."

And their first project at Campo Santo, a so-called "walking simulator" called Firewatch, began to take shape. It became a wonderful game, and what I would consider the poster child of "walking sims" with light gameplay elements.

Firewatch was a phenomenal success and it was crafted with a level of competence that is rare among small scale development shops. And their next game was on-track to be even better.

In the Valley of Gods is Campo Santo's sophomore title. Set in Egypt in the 1920s, the game tells a story about a filmmaker and their friend traveling to the desert. Development updates were flowing in right up until March 27 2018. On April 21, 2018, Campo Santo announced they were acquired by Valve Corporation. They also announced that they would continue developing the game while at Valve.

There hasn't been much spoken about In the Valley of Gods since then. The latest I heard, the game was shelved indefinitely while the team was "all hands on deck" for shipping Half-Life: Alyx.

I don't know if In the Valley of Gods will ever resume development. But since they haven't updated the webpage for the game since 2019, I'm not counting on it. I'm disappointed. I bet that Campo Santo is disappointed too.

Full disclosure: I am not rabidly checking the social media accounts of game developers scrounging for insight on this. I may not know the whole story here; however, what seems to have happened here is a consequence of corporate structure.

Valve is somewhat famous for its structure, or lack thereof. Resources (human, that is) pick and choose the projects they want to commit to, and can flow freely based on their interests. It all seems very kumbaya on paper, but what I think it boils down to is this: your project won't take off if another one has more steam (pun intended).

I am afraid that the structure of Valve hinders projects like In the Valley of Gods as a rule. For every finished product, twenty are on the shelf or the cutting room floor. The products are few and far between because Steam and free-to-play revenue from DoTA 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive are money making machines.

I can't help but wonder if Campo Santo would have signed on the dotted line if they knew In the Valley of Gods would die in committee. Is that the vision of the company they envisioned in 2013? To be acquired by Valve? I suppose there is no better outcome, business-wise. Valve prints cash. Like billions. Valve holds a comfortable portion of the digital PC game sales market. As long as they hold their market share and keep overheads low, revenue is pretty much a sure thing.

Despite this cash flow, Valve's output stagnated in the 2010s, the last game they published that wasn't a multiplayer service model was Portal 2 in 2011. It's not for a lack of new ideas, of that I'm sure. Half-Life 2: Episode Three never came. A.R.T.I., SimTrek, and, In the Valley of Gods were shelved and/or cancelled to make way for Alyx. And while I do admit that Half-Life: Alyx is a true masterpiece, must good games be axed so that great ones can be made? It's a rough realization that "units sold" is the greatest motivator, over artistic vision and novelty.

The small but scrappy Campo Santo lost these when it joined Valve. I hope that I can once again look forward to projects from Campo Santo with the same polish and poise as Firewatch. Don't hold your breath, though. They're on Valve Time now.

I write a lot of praise for video game auteurs. That is, a game developer that creates an entire game by themselves (or nearly). Undertale by Toby Fox. Stardew Valley by Eric Barone. Papers, Please by Lucas Pope. Quadrilateral Cowboy by Brendon Cheung. I look to individual creators as a source of inspiration, more so than teams of people or organizations. I admire them for many reasons: their broad range of skills, both artistic and technical, their motivational drive, and their penchant to imprint their personality on their works.

But beyond video game development, there are people that I have been following through the years that are equally driven and dedicated to their creative endeavors. Take Kate Wagner, a critic of architectural design with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of building terminology, aesthetics schools, and American architectural history. She miraculously blended this knowledge with a sardonic, millenial, and meme-y writing style to create McMansion Hell, a blog about architecture. There are many, many examples of Wagner annotating on images from a McMansion Zillow listing and absolutely eviscerating every design 'decision' that went into the house, both architectually speaking and in its interior design. On their own, these roasts would be a superb blog that everyone should read. In her words, "I saw this opportunity to exploit. A lot of people hate McMansions but they have no idea why... they don't know what's so ugly about it or why it seems so big. It's about the greater purpose... the first step to good design is avoiding the bad... and the first step to avoiding the bad is recognizing the bad."

More than that though, she intersperses the snarky McMansion posts with genuinely helpful lessons in architectural history and design, and she posts them earnestly, without irony.

Residential architecture is one of those underrated subjects to me. It's easy to fawn over one-off beauties like the Taj Mahal or stare in awe at a modern classic like the Empire State Building, but the thought and care put into the buildings we interact with daily is so quickly overlooked. Wagner puts a spotlight on exactly that. Bravo to her.

Way back in 2012, a game jam called the 7 Days FPS Challenge was held for the first time. The constraints of the challenge are simple, the perspective must be first-person. That's it. One game that came out of 7DFPS 2012 was Receiver. The game has a tight focus on gun controls (no, not Gun Control but the actual operation of firearms).

For example if you need to reload your revolver, you must do the following: swing out the cylinder, actuate the extractor rod, maybe twice or three times if some shell casings are stuck, then individually load six shots into your .38 Colt Detective Special before closing the cylinder. Now it's ready to fire. This granularity of control gives more freedom to the player on the operation of their weapon, but it also makes firefights more perilous. It's folly to lose track of how many shots you've made, a slow reload can make the difference between surviving or perishing. In Receiver, getting hit even once means death.

The objective of Receiver is straightforward: collect ten audio tapes scattered throughout the randomly generated level and you win. Achieving that goal is much, much more difficult than it sounds. For one, there are usually automatic turrets and flying killer robots between the player and the tapes. They must be disabled with well-placed shots using the firearm. By the way, the starting point, the firearm which you start with, and the condition of the firearm (chambered, safety on, no magazine inserted, etc.) is randomly determined. Ammunition, spare magazines, and flashlights are scattered about, but scarcely.

The technical limitations of the first Receiver made winning extraordinarily difficult, as the strain of spontaneously generating new level geometry ultimately leads to a low framerate, a killer of precision FPS games. But Receiver was a tech demo. Code inefficiency was irrelevant to the purpose of the game which was to present a novel idea for a first-person game.

While the gun mechanics are the star of the show, the visuals and story are lacking. Most scenery is comprised of flat, gray textures and primitive lighting technology. The 'story' is what you can garner from the audio tapes, mostly ramblings about the operation of firearms, how to disable killer robots, and something about the cataclysmic event known as the 'Mindkill.'

Receiver 2 (2020) improves on it's predecessor in nearly every way. There are more guns, more ways to manipulate them, and more ways for them to malfunction. Now you only need to collect five tapes to advance a level. The player character's handling of the firearm depends on what level you are on. At the beginning, aim is shaky, the screen goes black to simulate flinching, and the gun's report will drown out all other noise, even the non-diegetic music. The graphics are great and the sound design is also excellent. The game's story is more concise as well. The 'Mindkill' still happened, and there is also a 'Threat.' The audio logs from the tapes make a strong implication that the 'Threat' causes suicidal ideation exasperated by mental trauma. There is also much more emphasis on the importance of gun safety. Indeed, if you try to draw or holster your weapon too quickly (tapping instead of tapping and holding), a semi-automatic gun will almost always go off, usually into your leg. Some tapes ('Threat echoes') assume control over the weapon, forcing you to aim at yourself and pull the trigger. If you don't know how to make the weapon safe in time, that's game over.

That last new element has proven to be controversial. Frank portrayal of suicide is not something to be taken lightly, and some may consider it 'poor taste' to gamify suicide. But the writing in Receiver 2 is very positive in its ideas of best mental health practices.

For instance, "If your friend makes a 'joke' about hurting themselves, it might just be that, a joke. Or it might be their last cry for help before they are killed by the Threat. Get them alone later, ask about it, and really listen to their answer. It's probably nothing, but in this case it's so much better to have ten false positives that one false negative."

Receiver 2 is chock full of gun safety advice and mental health directives that are applicable in the real world (disclaimer: of course, games are not a substitute for real-world firearm instruction or professional mental health services). Just substitute 'the Threat' with depression and 'the Mindkill' with desensitization from violence. Receiver 2 does not condone violence or glorify firearms. Neither does it vilify them. Guns simply are. Guns can kill, but the reasons why guns kill people have more to do with mental health issues and ignorance of gun safety than the availability of guns.

In my opinion, Receiver 2 is a shooter that is more than meets the eye. It's weird, creepy even. It's extraordinarily difficult. But the gunplay is wonderfully simulated and the narrative is simply, yet cryptic and captivating. I recommend this game.

Let's talk about video game soundtracks. It's dismissed as 'window dressing' or crammed into its own genre (derogatory) or demoted from 'actual music.' I've said it before in my post Best of the Decade: Video Games but I'll reiterate here: video game music is Music with a capital 'M' and has the potential to meet or exceed commercial album music in terms of quality and influence. I highly recommend putting on some headphones and opening links in a new tab as you read in order to fully appreciate the music.

Firstly let's take a look back at ballet and the opera. These stage performances are synonymous with the music which accompanies them. COVID-19 restrictions aside, the music is actually more accessible now than the theatrical productions. Think of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro or Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker; both musical works evolved into something more than the original context. Figaro is quintessential classical style and The Nutcracker is representative of the art of ballet as a whole and of the Christmas season.

In the same way we laud these long-dead legends of music we also celebrate composers in film. It's almost unfair how much John Williams has shaped modern movie soundtracks. He inspires terror in Jaws, epic awe in Star Wars, and swashbuckling glee in Indiana Jones. The orchestral swell at the end of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone zips me straight back to the movie theater where I watched it at the age of eight. Williams made an incredible, unforgettable impression on film soundtracks.

So too in video games have composers created tunes that, in less than half a century, have proven to be timeless. Koji Kondo is responsible for a large chunk of melodies still used by Nintendo in their games today. Classic tunes found in Super Mario Bros. (as well as SMB2, SMB3, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Super Mario 64), and The Legend of Zelda (and sequels Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time). Those are just a few of the entries in the Nintendo canon that were composed solely by Koji Kondo. Kondo is prolific and he single-handedly defined the music behind the Mario and Zelda franchises. And, much like the music of Harry Potter, characters in these games have their own leitmotifs, even further cementing the music as a part of the game. Mario's image immediately conjures up the first seven notes of Super Mario Bros.

There is a great video on YouTube called "What Makes Mario Music So Catchy" by the highly underrated Scruffy. In the video, Scruffy explains some of the musical nuances that add a sense of forward momentum, danceability, and happiness to the Mario Overworld theme made famous in Super Mario Bros., as well as a few modern Mario tracks.

That's even more impressive when considering the technical limitations of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the console on which SMB1, 2, 3, and the original The Legend of Zelda games were published. The NES had five channels with which it could produce sound: two pulse modulators, one triangle wave generator (usually used for bass tones), a noise generator (usually used for percussion). and only one channel for digital audio samples. It's a five piece band of beeps, boops, and buzzes. The tunes were usually programmed using only a handful of kilobytes of storage and in a nearly incomprehensible assembly language.

Even on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, constraints were tight. David Wise composed the soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country for Rare and he was allotted 32 kilobytes. In only a portion of that space, he created one of the most magical ambient tracks I have ever heard: Aquatic Ambience.

As time marches on, developers and game composers have more space and higher fidelity instruments with which they can score their games. The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker utilized MIDI samples samples to closely imitate true-to-life instrumentation, to great effect. Later, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would use studio recordings of pianists and other musicians. This music married excellent composition and seamless transitions between scenes in the game, another subject dissected by Scruffy in this video.

Animal Crossing has consistently delivered 'comfy' music for two decades. Each game in the series has a track for each hour of the day, changing at the top of the hour. 5PM (2001), 11AM (2011), 5PM (2020) are a few excellent places to start.

We don't have to keep talking about the big dogs of video game music to appreciate the potential and breadth of the genre. Lena Raine composed and produced the soundtrack to Celeste, in what I can only describe as a musical backing to emotional triumph in the track Reach for the Summit. It simultaneously crescendos to an ultimate note of victory while also showcasing every theme from the game's previous levels.

I've spoken at-length of Toby Fox's original soundtrack for his masterpiece Undertale, and he continues to write new music for his latest game Deltarune... they're still bops, folks.

Eric Barone, another auteur and creator of Stardew Valley composed a different set of songs for each of the four seasons, here are my favorites from Spring and Winter.

Big, small, old, new, calm, and exciting. When someone disparagingly refers to video game music as a 'genre' or 'less-than,' it's clear they haven't heard the theme from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

Or "Pushing Onwards" from VVVVVV.

Or "Impetus" from BIT.TRIP RUNNER.

Or Thirty Flights of Loving.

Oblivion.

Minecraft.

Uplink.

Red Dead Redemption.

I made the comparison to Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Williams not only because they are timeless classics but also because the accompanying art is better because of them. To feel the emotions of characters: fear, excitement, longing, sorrow. To get goosebumps, to have your hair stand on end. To evoke that kind of response in a patron of a ballet is the same as in a moviegoer is the same as the player. Video game music can do that. Those who ignore it or dismiss it are sorely missing out on some of the greatest musical achievements of the modern era.

When I was in high school, my friend group's game of choice was Street Fighter IV. It was, at the time, the latest installment in the Street Fighter series of fighting games. If you're not familiar, Street Fighter is one of a handful of popular fighting game franchises originating from the late 80s and 90s, other notable franchises include Tekken, Mortal Kombat, and yes, even Super Smash Bros. But none of these carry the consistent branding and pure pedigree of Street Fighter, whose original arcade cabinet debuted in 1987.

Street Fighter had a modest success, but it is overshadowed by its sequel. Street Fighter II (The World Warrior is it's obscurely used subtitle) is an important...no...foundational entry into the fighting game canon. Street Fighter II introduced special attacks with unique button combinations for each fighter, a feature which cascaded into nearly every serious, competitive fighting game since. And don't forget combos, which are even more universal than specials. Suffice to say Street Fighter II is a classic, legendary game that people are still playing in various ways to this day. 'Influential' is an understatement. Street Fighter II informs all fighting games that succeed it.

I am not good at fighting games, but I was engrossed in the culture of the genre when I played casually with friends almost every day. I also appreciate good anime (read: degenerate), so naturally I stumbled upon the greatest film adaptation of a video game of all time: Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994).

Stranger still, there were two film adaptations of Street Fighter II in 1994: The Animated Movie and the live-action Street Fighter starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Guile and Raul Julia playing the villainous Bison. Most critics felt that Street Fighter's saving grace was Julia's final performance (he died two months before the film's release), who by the way you may know as Gomez Addams from The Addams Family films of the early 90s. Aside from Julia's captivating portrayal, the film fails to tell the Street Fighter story in every other way imaginable. The plot is simultaneously predictable and devoid of logic. Dialogue is poorly written and muddled by the audio mix. The martial arts are unconvincing. Ryu is inexplicably an American con-artist.

Video game adaptations have notorious track records of being critically panned. Super Mario Bros. (1993) was such a commercial and critical failure that Nintendo did not license another live-action film based on their intellectual property until Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (2019), in the wake of the unprecedented success of Pokémon Go in 2016.

But The Animated Movie? It did something special. It elevated characters from a video game into believable personalities. These characters, who usually say no more than "Hadouken!" or "Shoryuken!", were simply stand-ins for the players at the arcade cabinet. The film kept the design of the Street Fighter characters, but breathed life into them. Without this film, the cast of characters I met in Street Fighter IV would not have the same soul, the same quirks. It's easy to understate, but the tone of the series was defined in The Animated Movie.

And if Street Fighter wasn't star-studded enough for you, The Animated Film is a who's who of voice actors. Strangely, because of the rules of the Screen Actors Guild, the entire English dub cast were credited with pseudonyms. Let me see here... Phil Williams plays Fei Long. Bryan Cranston?! Hearing his voice in the film for the first time was a hilarious shock, and Cranston does an admirable job.

So what can we take away from watching Street Fighter II: The Animated Film? What makes a good video game adaptation? I do not believe that the same ideas for adapting novels apply here. Books are chock full of character development and subtext that must be truncated or transmogrified in some way for the big screen. Video games from the 80s and 90s are simplistic. A plot can be summarized in a sentence or two. Characters can be drawn with a handful of pixels. There is so much wiggle room for interpretation.

For the future writers and directors of video game movies I offer this advice: capture the tone of the game. Is it optimistic? Is it cartoonish? Serious? Faithfully recreate the designs of characters from the game and have those designs inform the attitudes and dialogue that emerges from those characters. I will praise the production of the recent Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) film as a great example of realizing when a character design is...wrong...and needing to go back to the drawing board. Good video game movies will not supplant the games that inspired them. Good video game movies should embrace their source material and enhance the game's world canon.

Good video game movies should beget better video games. Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie is the only example that does this, and it does it in spades.

You can find Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (English dub) on YouTube if you search hard enough, although there are better quality versions elsewhere.

Video games are an art form whether you like it or not. Let's start with Wikipedia's definition of art and see where that leaves us:

"Art is a diverse range of human activities involving the creation of visual, auditory or performing artifacts (artworks), which express the creator's imagination, conceptual ideas, or technical skill, intended to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."

Let's check the boxes here...

• Visual

• Auditory

• Performing arts (sometimes)

• Expresses the creator(s)' imagination

• Expresses conceptual ideas of creators

• Expresses the technical skill of creators

• Intended to be appreciated for beauty

• And/or intended to be appreciated for emotional power

Looking at a recent release is almost a gimme. Take The Last of Us Part II, released in 2020: it is undeniably gorgeous, both in it's visual presentation and audio design. There are voice- and motion-captured actors playing every character in the story. The fingerprints of the creators are sprinkled throughout every aspect of the game's design. The game is a technical masterpiece: one of the most graphically intensive games of this console generation. It is a testament to the expertise of the creators how they were able to wring every last FLOP for what its worth out of the PS4. Without a doubt, the game is intended to be beautiful, and the story is intended to be heart wrenching.

Ipso facto, games are art.

"But what about old games?" you might ask, "What about Pong, Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial?"

Art. All of them.

Like paintings or music or sculptures there is a wide range of technology and media available to a video game creator. But it was not always so. In the early days of video games, overcoming the limitations of technology was artistic discipline of itself. In 1962, Spacewar! was developed by students at MIT to run with punch-tape on a PDP-1. It was not intended for public play, it was not commercialized. Spacewar! was an endeavor of human creativity.

The element of interactivity inherent to video games is not really a factor in the consideration of the medium as an art form. If anything, player's are more connected to video games as an art medium than any other medium by nature of their choices influencing the moment-to-moment experience.

"Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, wouldn't that mean all games are art? What about toys? Just name a human creation and tell me why can't be art!" you say.

For better or worse, yes. It's all art. We are in the era of postmodernism. I'm stealing some words from Regular Car Reviews here, "Postmodernism rejects the notion that any text, or product, or media--and by text, product, or media I mean anything written, anything photographed...anything you can derive information from...from building blocks, to Go-Pro accessories, to this chair that's on the other side of the room--is inherently more valuable than another...Everything deserves to be viewed as art. Everything deserves an audience to consume it."

In that sense, video games are art. But even under the lens of modernist sensibilities, video games, especially early games, are poster children of modernist thinking. Put in the effort. Make something new. It's audiovisual, so it's similar to film. Sculpture can be interactive, so video games do not break new ground there either. Whether it be a traditional or contemporary take, there is a strong argument to be made for video games as art.

So it goes for board games, pen-and-paper games, a t-shirt, a piece of moss shaped to look like a heart, a fire hydrant. It's all art, baby. For better or worse, I cannot say. I just know that art is not restricted to the canvas, or text, or silver screen. To think otherwise is foolish.

2020 will become a classic example of how our perception of time is malleable. Even within the bounds of 2020, without comparing it to other years, we can see the elasticity in action. January and February flew by with such velocity. So many activities, events, and memories made. In that short span of time, here's what happened:

• I sold my 2010 VW Jetta and purchased a 2020 Honda Accord.

• I went on a weekend trip to Lakeland, Florida.

• I attended a Penguins game as part of a bachelor's party weekend.

• I went to a Pacers game, no occasion necessary.

• I went to an Iron & Wine and Calexico concert, no occasion necessary.

• I saw a live theatre production of Les Misérables, no occasion necessary.

• Australian wildfires reached their apex.

• Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was assassinated via drone strike, quickly escalating tensions in the Middle East. Five days later Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot down by Iran armed forces, killing 176.

• The (first) impeachment trial of Donald Trump began, he was subsequently acquitted.

• The USMCA was signed into North American trade law, replacing NAFTA.

• The UK formally initiated the withdrawal from the European Union.

All of this occurred before the stock market correction of February 27. After that moment, when Wall Street saw COVID-19 for the danger that it truly was, time stopped. Everything revolved around this one, Earth-shaking threat.

Yes, this is a known topic. Traumatic events and depression are common triggers for temporal illusions, or disturbances in ones perception of time; however, repeating the same tasks day in and day out and staying in the same place for extended periods leads to a "compression" of memory. Everything blends together, days are forgotten, therefore there are fewer days in memory. Wouldn't time appear to go by faster to a subject with static stimuli? Odd, that. In the present, time screeches to a halt. But when we look back, it's as if we blinked and missed it all.

So far, 2021 is as relentless as 2020. Every day seems to crawl by, inch-by-inch. In anticipation of novel experiences, my impatience works against my neuropsychology. A watched pot and all that. But it felt like we just celebrated the new year. That was 19 days ago?!

Temporal perception disturbances are only one part of a broader idea of 'brain fog.' Stress, trauma, poor diet, lack of novel stimuli. It accumulates into a general weariness that affects memory, concentration, and motivation.

So what to do?

We must accept that the fog is here (for now). Acknowledge that you are mentally impaired. It's okay! It's not your fault. But you have to acknowledge it. And hey, if you are in a position where you haven't been stricken with brain fog, hats off to you. But you're probably in denial, just so you know.

So Step 1 is admitting you have a problem. Step 2 is not conceding to a higher power. Step 2 is mitigate, mitigate, mitigate. Find the willpower to take a walk, even just around the block. Exercise, fresh air, sunshine, and new experiences are all extremely beneficial to fighting the fog. Eat well...at least sometimes. Look, this is coming from someone who had to establish a 'weekly pizza quota' to stop himself from ordering pizza for dinner every night. Junk food tastes good. I don't know, just eat a vegetable and a multivitamin. B12 deficiency affects concentration.

Exercise and good diet. That makes sense. What else? Good sleep and decrease the chemical buffer. In other words, seven to ten hours of sleep every night. And easy on the sauce. You may struggle with one or all of these guidelines, but you will also notice improvements.

Step 3 is maintaining contact with the outside world. And not just anonymous strangers on the Internet. Friends. Family. Call them.

I (mostly) adhered to this guide for 2020 and I think I managed it fairly well, considering the circumstances. Your mileage may vary. Also your expectations may vary. I don't know who you are. Why am I writing this? Oh, I'm writing this to me. Keep on keeping on! See you on the other side of the inauguration.

Holden Caulfield Alert: This is a stream-of-consciousness, sorry-for-myself type post. Maybe skip this one if that sounds annoying.

I'm not sure exactly what motivates me to do the things I do. What would I do in ideal circumstances where money is no object?

Explore. Sure, if money is no longer an issue, I would travel across the world. See new sights, meet new people, and view the world with a different perspective each day.

Create. I'm no artist, but I do enjoy writing, taking pictures, and making videos.

Play. I have always found comfort in video games, games in general really. Every game experience that was new to me has impacted who I am as a person, even if that impact is ultimately insignificant.

Two issues here. First, I am not living in ideal circumstances. I am not in a position where I can quit my day job and seek to explore, create, and play forever. Unless chance grants it to me, I will be bound to a professional career. My personal time, the time in which I have the freedom to choose, becomes all the more precious.

And let me just nip this platitude in the bud: there is no such thing as a dream job, least of all for me. If I enjoyed an activity so much that I would do it for free or reduced lunch, that would not be my job, it would be my hobby. As soon as a group of tasks is assigned as a job, it is something that has to be done. That's not to say that the imperative and the enjoyable are mutually exclusive. But they are inversely linked, of that I am sure. This goes double for a career where it's expected that you do the same thing forever!

The second issue is this: I do not know what motivates me. When I feel a sudden urge to do a thing, it is not based on a grand operation of my design. It's an unexplained urge. As quickly as it arrives, it dissipates too. One week I will have inspiration to take hundreds of pictures, the next week I take zero. One week I will spend dozens of hours playing video games, but then another day I couldn't muster the will power to turn on the computer.

I have no fundamental, deep-seated motivation. I have whims. Flights of fancy. Self-indulgences. Brief, bright outbursts of energy. I fear to seek greener pastures in a new career path, for the relief of 'escaping' the hell I was in would quickly fade, the honeymoon period would come and go, and then the job which I idealized in my head would crash into the job that I am doing in reality.

As a teenager, I received and accepted the label of "jack of all trades, master of none." A season of cross country running. One year of acting in theatre. Decent grades, a B+ average. I have an affinity for technology, but not one in particular. I never put all of my eggs in one basket. Is there a deeper level of motivation found in mastery? Is that the missing piece of the puzzle?

There is no thesis to today's post. I have no solution for this. I have some ideas where the issue originates.

Implanted at an early age was the idea that I was exceptional. I was not a B+ average student in elementary school, I was an A+ student. Reading and math were easy for me. I was put into a bucket of 'gifted and talented' children. So I was surprised when I entered high school and realized that I was not exceptional when compared against the sample of my schoolmates. So then how did I compare to the U.S.'s average teen? The world's? (I could insert a quip about participation trophies here as well, but honestly I think they made less of an impact on me because I was never interested in athleticism, nor did I ever believe that I had talent for sports)

As a result of the above, I derived a value system that took into account the abilities of others. I wasn't in the top half of the cross country team? Then I mustn't waste my time there. Can't land the lead role in the upcoming play? What's the point if I'm just another extra. I wanted to be pigeonholed because that meant my ability was valued. And more to the point, why couldn't I enjoy playing sports even if I concede that I am not good at them? They are games after all.

Alas, the jack of all trades. I am the only barrier to a limitless buffet of careers, pasttimes, hobbies, and trades. To use a term from the latest Pixar film Soul, I don't have a spark. Passion. Inspiration. Motivation.

As I stated in the original post on this blog, I made this website for a few reasons. One of those reasons was to see if writing is something that inspires me. So far, the results are mixed. No one wants to read 1000 words of some well-off white dude whining about motivation. Or uncontroversial takes on video games. Or philosophical musings about shopping carts that are probably incorrect. It's turning out to be a public diary but with considerable research. So, why continue? (I will, for now)

I want so badly to be handed an epiphany that I am certain will not come. There will be no easy solution to life, otherwise I would be writing a book.

So, after writing this post and pondering it, I think I have come up with a solution after all. I do look back fondly on adventures. I am proud of the pictures I take. I often enjoy video games more when I reflect on them in writing or discourse. I feel good when writing, in spite of writer's block. Be present for the moments of inspiration. Manage expectations about new experiences. Don't fret about questions that don't have answers.

It's not a cure-all, but I think that's a good foundation for those with low motivation. Be aware of your own thoughts. Identify the thoughts that are harmful or self-defeating. Only then can you change. If you struggle with depression as I do, these are the baby steps I am taking to build self-confidence. Until next time!

In 2013, I was in the sophomore year of my enrollment at Indiana University. In the Fall semester of 2013 I took an elective course called "History and Social Impact of Videogames." The course covered the history of video games from Spacewar!, through the video game crash of 1983, the Nintendo revival, the 16-bit console wars, the US congressional lobby for regulating violent video games, and so on and so forth. Despite the course being an elective I picked because it sounded fun, I think it was one of the more important classes that I took while in school. Knowing the history of a medium enhances my interpretation of new entries to the video game market.

Part of the class (20% of the final grade) was submitting a research paper about a historical topic of my choosing. I was 20 years old at the time--it's fun to look back at my writings from back then. Here is my final paper, unedited and in its entirety.

Matthew Koskela

TEL-T160

[Professor's Name redacted]

23 October 2013

Nintendo Wii: The Origin of the Casual Gaming Boom

We live in a world where everyone can play Angry Birds on their iPhone for as little as ninety-nine cents. This casual market has been the obvious trend in the video game industry for the past eight years. The Nintendo Wii along with its bundled game Wii Sports precedes the Apple App Store or the Android Marketplace (now Google Play Store), the two largest markets for modern casual gaming. Although "casual" games have existed for decades in the form of simple arcade games like Pac-Man and computer simulations of traditional games like Solitaire, the onslaught of "casual gaming" was a direct result of the Nintendo Wii. With controls that are as intuitive as body motion and games that have simple premises and a calm atmosphere like Wii Sports or Wii Play, the Nintendo Wii should be considered the inception of the casual gaming era as we know it: mobile phone apps and social media games. The innovative controls, a focus on simple, yet thoughtful gameplay, and the low price of the Nintendo Wii ushered in the era of casual gaming.

First, what is casual gaming? According to Jesper Juul, author of A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players, the stereotypical ‘casual gamer’ is generally defined as “having a preference for positive and pleasant fictions, has played few video games, is willing to commit small amounts of time and resources toward playing video games, and dislikes difficult games” (29). This definition is not completely true because casual game design follows five basic principles, one of which contradicts this stereotypical definition. The five principles are: fiction (almost universally with positive valence), ease of use, interruptibility—being able to put down the game at any moment with no consequence, the ‘right’ level of difficulty, and positive feedback, or reward. Although counterintuitive, a game can be easy-to-use and also be challenging; this is where the stereotype fails. If the rules of the game are easy to pick up on but a certain advanced level is extremely difficult, this can still meet the definition of a casual game. Wii Sports is a good example of this. As the player progresses in defeating more capable AI opponents, the difficulty reaches a point of nigh impossibility for a novice; however, the game is designed to adapt to a player’s skills. A novice will be given little challenge in order to adapt to the rules of the game and the difficulty increases steadily in accordance with the game’s learning curve. Therefore, the difference between casual games and so-called ‘games for gamers’ like Warcraft or Call of Duty is the learning curve: casual games are “easy to learn, but difficult to master” (Juul 41). This is the type of game that will be analyzed in this paper.

The simple, yet intriguing gameplay of Wii games is a reason for the recent success of casual gaming. The pack-in game, Wii Sports, and a follow-up 1^st party title, Wii Play, are definitive examples of this phenomenon. The mini-games in each of these titles are designed to be picked up with no experience necessary: “Each player's learning curve starts at zero. Casual games [are] designed to level the playing field for casual, serious and aspiring-to-be-serious gamers alike” (Conlin). The premises are simple and familiar to people of all backgrounds—the sports in Wii Sports are universally known and games in Wii Play are homages to previous Nintendo titles like Duck Hunt or “a variation of ‘Where's Waldo?’ (‘Find Mii’),” a franchise well-known in the English-speaking hemisphere. With recognizable premises and the fact that, “none of the games are particularly complex, but each are engaging” (Conlin), the Wii gains the advantage of numbers—the games are accessible to a much larger audience. Likewise, modern markets like the Apple App Store and the Android Marketplace have many top-sellers with basic premises.

The Wii is so approachable to casual gamers because of the console’s innovative and intuitive control scheme. Since their inception, home console controls have become increasingly more complicated. The Atari VCS has a humble joystick and one button, the Nintendo Entertainment System has a D-pad and four buttons, and the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 each have eight buttons, two triggers, two joysticks, and a D-pad. The premise of video game controls have not changed since the very beginning, excepting a few arcade cabinets, and the market for gaming remained stagnant as a result of this lack of innovation. The complexity of these controls increased a result of games becoming more complex, but “many people have a casual interest in playing games [and] are put off by the usual buttons and joysticks” (Bray). The Wii does away with the complexities of console controls by introducing a shape familiar to anybody capable of owning a video game console: the television remote. The approachable shape is a selling point alongside the unique controls: “a motion-sensitive wand that allows gamers to control the action onscreen by waving the device about rather than jostling a joystick and pushing buttons” (Bruno). Swinging one’s arms to imitate a tennis match or throwing fists to emulate boxing, the controls make sense to anybody that picks up the Wii Remote. “[The Wii Remote] allows everybody to pick up and play and isn’t focused on the core gamer” (Juul 28), says Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America. For the novice, “no furious button pressing or amazing hand-eye coordination [is] needed” (Acohido). The intuitive controls of the Wii have been mirrored by casual games the world over. The games seen on mobile markets lack complex controls for a myriad of reasons, including technological limitation, but the primary reason is this: simple controls lead to a wider audience. Nintendo led this control crusade, “betting that a simpler, more intuitive control system will win over these non-gamers. ‘We really want to expand the audience for the video game industry,’ said [George] Harrison [senior vice president of marketing at Nintendo of America Inc.]” (Bray).

Nintendo was a forerunner in intuitive controls, and the massive success of these controls led companies like Rovio and King to create games with a similar mindset on controls: simpler is more accessible. Prominent examples of modern casual games with simple controls include the Angry Birds series and Candy Crush Saga which both use intuitive touch-sensitive controls and a minimal user-interface (i.e. few buttons).

One of the reasons for the Wii’s success is the inexpensive processing power under the hood: this broadened Nintendo’s market and added accessibility to the Wii. Nintendo realized that when faced with the high definition resolutions of their competitors, “even a lowly, thoughtful black-and-white sketch can be more pleasing to the eye than a vivid splattering of high-definition color” (Conlin). The race between Sony and Microsoft to have the best graphics and the highest resolutions is only a tell of the market they are aiming for: hardcore gamers. Knowing the Wii would be catering primarily to the casual market, Nintendo designed the Wii around a “comparatively slender $250 price tag…designed to attract millions of buyers put off by the high cost and complexity of Xbox and PS3” (Bray). Nintendo essentially asserts that the most expensive, newest, or technologically superior options are not always the most profitable and will not always attract a wider market. Fils-Aime says this on the lack of attention on graphics: “Prettier pictures will not bring new gamers and casual gamers into this industry. It has to be about the ability to pick up a controller, not be intimidated, and have fun immediately” (Juul 28). Most non-gamers will not be enchanted by gristly-realistic combat from a Call of Duty game, they do not swoon over the technologically superior or the shiniest console—they flock to a good deal. While the Wii lacks technological prowess, it certainly makes up for it with an low price tag that attracts a new market; not one that would necessarily shell out five or six hundred dollars for an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but are interested in gaming just enough to invest in a Nintendo Wii.

Similarly, there are people interested in playing mobile games but are not willing to invest in a dedicated mobile platform. For this market, there is phone and tablet gaming—the user sacrifices the graphics of a game on their phone for ease of use and a small price tag on the game. Dedicated platforms like PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS can run far more complex games with superior graphics (in PS Vita’s case), but the demand for these types of games is smaller than the easy-to-grab phone and tablet games. This market did not explode into the business it is today until after Nintendo introduced the Wii.

Casual games and casual gamers existed before the Nintendo Wii, but the market for it was generally left untapped. Nintendo took video games, a pastime well-known by all parts of the world, and made it accessible to the non-core customers—they redefined the audience of video games. The Wii changed perspectives on what it means to play a video game. From the inception of home video game consoles up until the announcement of the Wii, the purpose and audience of a video game remained stagnant to the public: entertainment for people whose primary hobby is video games. The Wii changed video games into a hobby for everyone. With the stereotype of a gamer loosened, Apple and Android quickly created a brand new mobile market with many of the appeals that Wii games have: easy to pick up, lighthearted, non-committal, challenging, and rewarding. Recent casual games still model the methods pioneered by the Nintendo Wii: intuitive controls and affordability. Although the peak of the Nintendo Wii’s popularity has passed and the Wii U is struggling to its feet, its spiritual successor has seen nothing but prosperity: the casual game.

Works Cited

Acohido, Byron. "Wii Wins Big among Casual Gamers; Group Could Be Huge, Untapped Mass Market." USA Today 4 June 2007, Money sec.: n. pag. LexisNexis Academic. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

Bray, Hiawatha. "With Wii, Nintendo Woos Casual Gamers." The Boston Globe 17 Nov. 2006, Business sec.: n. pag. NewsBank. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

Bruno, Antony. "Wii Are the Champions? Nintendo's New Videogame Console Captures the Casual Gamers." Billboard 7 Apr. 2007: n. pag. Academic OneFile. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

Conlin, Shaun. "Wii Titles Are Not Complex, but Cause Casual Addiction." The Buffalo (NY) News 5 Mar. 2007, Central ed., The Link sec.: n. pag. Access World News. Web. 18 Oct. 2013.

Juul, Jesper. A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2010. Ebrary. Web. 22 Oct. 2013.

*Flashback to January 5th*

Matt, do you have any thoughts you would like to share with the Internet vis-à-vis 2020/COVID-19/politics?

No.
Well... maybe later. For now, no.

***

Now is the time. I don't plan to write on politics frequently, but in cases like this I need to express my thoughts.

I am revolted by last week's terrorist attack on the capitol. Revolted and shocked. On the day it happened, January 6, I was so unable to process the day's events and their implications. I didn't shed tears, I didn't scream. I was straight-faced. Shell shocked. I am so emotionally drained by constant tragedy.

Donald Trump so handily inspires hate and anger in the hearts of people that it scares me. He inspires hate and anger in me too. In the past four years, I have grown a festering hatred of the bigotry, racism, sexism, and anti-intellectualism so thoroughly embedded in the minds and discourse of my country. Day after day my mind is poisoned by anger towards those who talk and act with self-interest, who abuse positions of power to better themselves at the expense of minority groups and those too poor to oppose them. This anger and hatred fostered by Trump and the GOP is harmful. Extremely harmful. And yes, the GOP is equally culpable to the carnage wrought by the insurrectionists, especially those party members who continued to object to the certification of the 2020 presidential election. The storming of the Capitol Building was a terrible climax after years and years of stoking the flames.

January 6, 2021 will live in infamy. The entire year of 2020 will live in infamy. The outrageous inaction of the federal government to mitigate the pandemic. Shifting blame and sowing distrust in local government. The willful acceptance of police brutality. The pardoning of criminally corrupt officials. We've been living in a dark age. For some it took the horrors of the past year to realize this. For others it was the violent deaths of five people, including a Capitol Police officer.

In the months preceding last November's election, I feared, for the first time in my life, for the integrity of our election system. That Trump and his ilk would suppress voters, undermine the public's trust in the democratic process, and stoke more hatred towards those who oppose him. I volunteered as a Marion County poll clerk on Election Day. I have become more outspoken about my views in my small circle of friends and family. I pledge to vote in every election--federal, state, and municipal--for the rest of my days. The fate of the United States depends on my actions. I will no longer stand idly by and watch as insurrectionists defile the monuments of our democracy. I must speak up for those who do not have a voice.

Today, January 13, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump for the second time in his presidency. A first for any American president. We are (and have been for quite some time) in unprecedented territory. Apart from my words and my vote, there is little action that I can take. I can only hope that this historic impeachment is a death knell for the evils that have sprouted in American politics.

Let's take a break from talking about video games. Do you return your shopping cart to the cart corral? Is returning the cart the right thing to do? Is it morally imperative? This is the Shopping Cart Theory, copied verbatim from its original posting:

The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test for whether a person is capable of self-governing.

To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.

A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with a law and the force that stands behind it.

The Shopping Cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.

(Anonymous)

This text originates from a post on 4chan, but it gained notoriety on Twitter in May of 2020. Pandemic boredom is one possible explanation as to why the Shopping Cart Theory garnered discussion among Internet denizens. Most conclusions are trivial--something along the lines of "the post has a pretty good point." I've seen two attempts to analyze the theory through the lens of psychology, one on Bored Panda and another on Medium. But as far as I have seen, no one has yet to dissect the philosophical underpinnings of the theory. Finally, a way to apply my philosophy minor!

Right at the onset, I want to establish the scope of my interpretation--beyond what I write here, I will not address the terms "self-governing," "animal," or "absolute savage." "Self-governing" seems to distract from the main idea of this theory which relates to morality. The other two terms are hyperbolic aggravators which do not add substance to the argument. So they are ignored. Moving on...

The text is a thought experiment which, by design, asserts a position on the nature of morality. I will attempt to break down the theory into a series of statements from which I can derive meaningful conclusions about the theory's root in concepts of philosophy. By inspecting the statements, both individually and in conjunction with each other, we can start to form a picture as to what schools of thought the author was attempting to convey in their thought experiment.

Let us start by assuming the large paragraph is true. It is our premise, so we must trust that it is correct. The theses of the Shopping Cart Theory are the phrases which I bolded. I will simplify and compress those statements to the following: a person who is unwilling to return the shopping cart to the corral is committing an immoral act, and therefore they are a bad member of society.

So to summarize, here is the broken down version of the Shopping Cart Theory:

Premise 1: It is universally recognized that returning the shopping cart is the right thing to do.

Premise 2: There exist no negative repercussions for not returning the shopping cart.

Premise 3: There exist some people who choose not to return the shopping cart.

Conclusion 1: People who choose not to return the shopping cart are committing an immoral act.

Conclusion 2: People who commit this act are bad members of society.

Immediately, I see that Conclusions 1 and 2 refer to the moral status of ones actions; the rightness or wrongness of actions. So the Shopping Cart Theory falls into the normative (prescriptive) branch of ethics--that is to say that the Shopping Cart Theory does not consider the moral beliefs of the parties involved (descriptive ethics), nor does the theory ask what the definition of "right" is (meta-ethics).

We can go deeper than that. What kind of normative ethics are we talking about here? Certainly not Platonic virtue ethics. Virtues are culturally relative, while returning the cart is a universally recognized good according to Premise 1. Nor are we talking about consequentialism because of what we know from Premise 2. In spite of Premise 2, we still conclude that not returning the cart is morally bad. We also know that in cases of "dire emergency," actors are exempt from the moral imperative to return the cart. Therefore we are considering the morality of the action under a series of rules, irrespective of any consequences. This is deontological ethics, or deontology. Let's keep digging.

I am drawn to Immanuel Kant's theory of ethics to describe the Shopping Cart Theory, particularly when focusing on Premise 1. If it is maintained that returning the cart is a universally recognized good, we can attempt to assign the task a status of a 'perfect duty;' however, there are instances--dire emergencies, for example--where circumstances provide a reasonable avenue of escape from the duty. Furthermore, it is unreasonable to be in a constant state of returning carts to the corral. Therefore returning the cart is an imperfect duty under the first formulation of Kant's categorical imperative.

Alternatively, T.M. Scanlon's theory on contractualism may apply here instead. Here is a brief excerpt from Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other:

An act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behaviour that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement.

(Scanlon 1998)

Scanlon goes further than only defining what is right and wrong by also positing that the moral standards implied by a social contract must be reached through justifiable reasoning. Moral standards assert their authority through the mutual agreement of a society. Unjustified actions or reasoning are wrong by virtue of being unjustified. So one who abandons their cart for no mutually agreed upon and justified reason has committed a wrongful act.

The Shopping Cart Theory explicitly considers the reasoning of others in one word: "society." Returning/abandoning a shopping cart is morally determined by the mutually agreed social contract within this society. So long as we appreciate the intrinsic value of other people, we must desire to justify our actions to them. According to contractualism, this moral motivation is what it means to be a moral (good) person.

Following me so far? The Shopping Cart Theory asserts that there is a social contract to return the cart where the consequences of the action are irrelevant; the action itself is moral (and, conversely, the act of abandoning the cart is immoral) because society deemed it so. The ignorance of the actor is also irrelevant. The obligation remains the same whether or not they are aware of the social contract.

If we were to draw a line in the family tree of moral philosophy, it might look something like this:

Normative Ethics → Deontology → Scanlonian Contractualism (Social Contract)

or, if you prefer:

Normative Ethics → Deontology → Kantian Categorical Imperative → First Formulation → Imperfect Duty

I only did cursory reading for this so one probably fits better than the other, but I won't belabor it further. But I do subscribe to the theory. Return the carts!

With little exception, the early VR games I have played are too short, too expensive, and too self-referential.

• Short: Games that can be completed* in less than three hours.

• Expensive: Games that charge $10 per hour of expected gameplay or more.

• Self-Referential: 'Meta humor' games that can't help but remind you that you are playing in VR and/or the phrase "it's a simulation" is uttered.

*When I say completed I mean from title screen to credits. I acknowledge that many of these titles are intended to be replayed, if only for achievement hunting or secret endings.

Here are many many examples of such games:

1. Accounting+ ($11.99) - Completable in about an hour. The entire story revolves around watching a skit, then putting on a VR headset, only to find yourself in a more absurd situation, only to put on another headset. This was the funniest game on this list, but you can only hear jokes for the first time once.

2. Job Simulator ($19.99) - Completable in about two hours. There are four jobs to simulate, after which you can replay with modifiers that change the game, mostly for humorous effect. After playing with each of the jobs to offer, there is not much incentive to play again.

3. Vacation Simulator ($29.99) - Completable in about two hours. There are three vacation resorts to visit, there are various activities to complete in each area. Ultimately this game boils down to collecting objects or delivering objects to NPCs. A completionist may enjoy this game, but after rolling the credits, I have little reason to return. The humor in Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator is weak and doesn't make up for the lack of innovation. Both of these titles feel more like toys rather than games.

4. Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality ($29.99) - Completable in about two hours. Absolutely dripping with self-referential humor, the writing trips over itself reminding the player that they are in VR. It has the same gameplay formula as Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator (all three are developed by Owlchemy Labs) but at least the humor is a cut above. Without Dan Harmon's secret sauce though, most of it boils down to jokes written for 14-year old boys which I still enjoy, admittedly.

5. Virtual Virtual Reality ($14.99) - Completable in about three hours. Possibly the most minor offender on this list as the price matches the quantity of expected content. The hub world is a blank white room with a friendly robot overlord instructing you on the tasks ahead of you. Basically it's a less charming GLaDOS from Portal, and the fictional company of Activitude can't hold a candle to the oppressive white walls of Aperture Laboratories. The 'put on a headset in the game' gimmick wears quickly, which is the entire gameplay loop. Put on a headset, enter a new vignette, ooh aah, laugh-track, etc, take off headset.

For some context (and some forgiveness for these games), all of these titles were released in 2017 when VR was novel. So, okay, let's all laugh at the, "What's the deal with VR?" jokes for a little while. All of these games were made by small teams, so expected runtime may end up on the short end, lest the games be stuck in development forever. The VR audience is small, especially when only counting tethered headsets connected to PCs. So, okay prices may be higher to compensate for fewer players. We also know that early adopters are willing to pay top dollar.

That's not to say all VR games are like the examples above. Escape room games like I Expect You to Die ($24.99) and The Room VR: A Dark Matter ($29.99) are well-executed and fun. Scanner Sombre ($5.99) is a brilliant walking simulator for VR. These are fully-realized, unique experiences that work best in a VR environment.

But to me, even in the case of these great games, I keep circling back to the three issues I outlined at the start. All three of those games, as well-polished as they are, took less than three hours each and have zero replayability. The Room and its two sequels are $5 apiece, I'm insulted that the VR version cost six times as much. Not to mention The Room 4 is slated to release next month, without VR support.

Even more egregious are Bethesda's shameless rereleases of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4 to VR with a $59.99 price tag, even for those who have the games on PC already. I've been playing Skyrim since 2011 and they want me to pay for it again? Forsooth!

Even when franchises dip their toes into VR, franchises like The Elder Scrolls or The Room or even more recently Medal of Honor, developers can't help but treat VR as a fringe case where development mores don't apply. Attribute this to a low player count due to a high barrier of entry. As much as it pains me to say, Oculus (Facebook), have paved the way to affordable VR. The entry point is now $299. This is the only path forward to validating VR as a platform in its own right and not an enthusiast sideshow. More users = more budget for more games.

In the meantime, the damage dealt by Half-Life: Alyx is irreversible. No current VR title comes close to the level of polish, self-assuredness, and cultural impact. Its only hindrance is its limited audience. That's a shame because Half-Life: Alyx is the poster child for what VR is capable of with a triple-A budget and a large, talented development team. Continuing the cycle of releasing short, pricey, gimmicky games will only exacerbate the small userbase issue. It's time to take VR seriously.

Half-Life: Alyx is so good. Like really, really good. So good, in fact, that every other virtual reality title pales in comparison. Bar none.

Visually, HL:A is breathtaking. Particle effects and diffuse lighting are simply stunning. Scantly-lit, yet beautifully forlorn hallways emit this aura of terrified anticipation. Liquid simulation (which is actually achieved through shaders, I recently learned) looks fantastic. Character animation is believable. That's maybe an understatement. All the characters look...feel...alive! Zombies no longer 'snap-to' when locking on to you for an attack. They twist their bodies, turn slowly...menacingly...before shuffling towards you.

The sound design is exceptional. Valve has always been able to put horrifying, visceral monster sounds in their games--the same goes for HL:A. Every physics object (we'll get to physics), has a unique personality. Cardboard boxes have a hollowness to them. Ceramic vases and mugs make that familiar, almost musical scrape across a table. Shattering glass sounds new every time. I found myself constantly picking up bottles as I meandered through creepy subway tunnels and chucking them against the wall, just to hear that satisfying *crash*, glass shattering, shards ricocheting chaotically, the vodka splashing against the surface, eventually pooling on the floor. Combine radio chatter sounds futuristic and menacing. City ambiance fades when passing into an indoor area. Footfalls are unique for each surface. Floorboards creak and groan. Cobblestone emits a crisp *clack*.

The voice acting is superb. The art direction is singular. City 17 is as beautiful as it is morose. Derelict, Eastern European inspired architecture never looked so good! The gunplay is exhilarating: shooting zombies and bad guys is just plain satisfying.

The refreshed physics system of the Source 2 engine cements this realism. Fallen foes don't comically contort or ragdoll, they collapse in a believable way. Explosions send debris flying with respect to mass, a Chinese take-out box screams across the railyard but an old tire will be lobbed a few dozen feet. Use a car door for cover. Shatter the window by rapping it with the pistol. Blind fire over your head. Shell casings flip every which way. Drop a magazine, it falls and clatters on the ground. In Source 1, gravity had a Moon-like quality to it: objects would fall obediently to the ground just a little too slowly. Source 2 has eliminated that feeling. It's a small difference that I only noticed when objects fell, but oh, what good gravity affords to realism!

Moments of intense action were occasionally interrupted when I accidentally swiped a (real life) piece of furniture while scrambling for cover so I could reload my shotgun, shell by shell. In early combat sequences I had moments of panic where I would move Alyx without thinking, disorienting myself. Practicing movement put a stop to that issue. Sometimes the sweat of my palms fooled the controller into thinking I was still grabbing an object. This led to hilarious moments like trying to shake off a live grenade, to no avail.

Only in brief moments like those was I sucked out of the world in which HL:A unapologetically thrusts you. Space and hardware issues are the only limitations to HL:A's vision of a linear VR first-person shooter with a captivating story, both told environmentally and through well-written dialogue.

In summary: the audio-visual experience of HL:A is in a league of its own in the realm of VR. That counts for something. Even though games like Cyberpunk 2077 have categorically better graphical fildelity, VR provides immersion that elevates everything into a new...ahem...reality. And, much to the chagrin of CD Projekt Red, it's not just about the sensory experience.

***

Nearly every part of HL:A's gameplay and story are derivative of previous Half-Life titles, specifically Half-Life 2. It's formulaic, in other words. But it is a very good formula. And this particular formula is not just good, it's cathartic. As a Half-Life fan, I have been waiting since 2007 for the next installment of the series; the previous title was Half-Life 2: Episode Two--admittedly it is a confusing name--which ended with a cliffhanger of monumental proportions and then...nothing. The Half-Life 2 Episodes were originally announced as a trilogy so the third was sure to come, right? Fans waited with bated breath for a year. Two years. Five years. Half-Life 3 reached meme status. People joked that the Valve Corporation, and Gabe Newell by extension, could not count to three.

Then in 2017, ten years after Half-Life 2: Episode Two's release, Marc Laidlaw, writer of the Half-Life series, published this missive which synopsized Episode 3, effectively putting the game to pasture. Hope was lost. The world grew darker. Valve, once known for groundbreaking first-person shooter franchises, had become a cold, faceless corporate cash grab operation. Steam, the infinite money printer, devolved Valve from a game developer to a game peddler; Steam accounts for 75% of the PC games market share. More on my thoughts on the Valve situation in a future post.

Fast forward two more years. Valve has already dipped its toes into VR hardware by partnering with HTC to develop the Vive. Valve goes solo for its next VR initiative, the Valve Index, released on June 28, 2019. That November, Half-Life: Alyx was announced to be released in Spring 2020, prompting the Index to go on back order upwards of twelve weeks. This trend would continue even after HL:A's release. I waited five weeks between placing a hold for my Index and receiving it in December 2020.

So the anticipation of this game in combination with the reputation of Valve as a world-class development team (despite recent stagnation) sets the expectations for HL:A to be astronomical. Folks, it absolutely delivers on those expectations.

Upon completing the game, I walked away with awe, but also with two questions that leave me worried and uncertain for the future of VR:

1. Where the hell are more games like this? Out of the dozen or so VR titles I have played, none have provided an experience this long and, crucially, this confident in its own ability. VR has been around for about five years, so why aren't more studios engaging here? More on this in my next blog post: When are Developers Going to Take VR Seriously?

2. What were Valve's intentions in making this game? The pessimist in me says it was made just to sell the Index and the Source 2 engine. How many good games did Valve shelve in order to release HL:A? How many more games are in limbo because of their business model?

Did they make it only for the money and VR headset market share? Maybe I am being a greedy consumer who is too disillusioned with Valve's market cap. After all, there is no sacred duty to make games. Is there? Perhaps I read too much from the likes of Iwata, Miyamoto, or even Molyneux who present themselves as the commendable knights whose sworn duty is to bring joy to the world through video games. I'd like the true answer to be somewhere between: people want to make great games and want to be paid to do so.

Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, ultimately the game they did make is a masterpiece. Half-Life: Alyx set a new bar for virtual reality. I highly anticipate the next VR title of this caliber, whether from Valve or elsewhere. I hope the critical success of Half-Life: Alyx inspires more VR titles. I can only hope.

Warning: Red links are Not Safe For Work and may contain violence, gore, strong language, or sexual content. Be advised!

On December 31, 2020, Adobe Incorporated officially ended support for the multimedia runtime environment called Flash Player. A good thing they did, too. Flash has existed, in some form or another, since 1996. It's relatively ancient technology by modern Internet standards--for a point of reference, Microsoft Internet Explorer has been around since 1995 and will be euthanized in August 2021. It's a miracle that Flash was barely outlived by the most prolific Internet dinosaur of the modern era.

What did Flash do? It ran games. Games that you could find on sites like Newgrounds.com, Miniclip.com, Addictinggames.com. Just to name a few:

• The Impossible Quiz - A 'quiz' that's more of a test of brain-teaser questions, memorization, and 'gotcha!' moments.

• Stick RPG - Top-down Grand Theft Auto for kids.

• Interactive Buddy - A sandbox where you can punish (or play with) a round little buddy.

• Toss the Turtle - How far can you shoot this turtle out of a cannon?

• Bloons Tower Defense 5 - Genre-defining series of wave defense games.

• MotherLoad - Drill deep to gather precious minerals to upgrade your drill!

You may notice that many of these games no longer run. See above: Flash is no longer updated and poses a security risk. Most web browsers and websites refuse to run it outright. Newgrounds has created a program to run Flash files locally. There is also a Flash preservation effort called BlueMaxima's Flashpoint that archived 70,000+ games and 8,000+ animations. You can access them all safely and for free. Bless their work.

Countless hours spent at home, at friends houses, and especially the school computer lab were dedicated to messing around on these sites.

Social sites for kids primarily used Flash for games and interactive elements. Sites like Whyville.net and Neopets.com (both released in 1999) were elementary school staples for me. These places are years older than Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster. And they're still kicking!

It played animations. Again Newgrounds is where many solo animators got their start.

• Metal Gear Awesome (2006) - This is the animation that put Arin Hanson (aka Egoraptor) on the map. Today he hosts the YouTube channel Game Grumps with Dan Avidan.

• The Madness Series (2002) - Extremely violent (comically so) action sequences that were simply the cat's pajamas to 13-year-old me. Krinkels is still making entries into the series to this day.

• Charlie the Unicorn - Nearly everyone in my generation has seen, or at least heard of, this series. Shun the nonbelievers!

• Tarboy, The Greatest Idea Ever!, The End of the World, the list goes on and on and on.

Some animation series, like Happy Tree Friends (WARNING: extreme gore), published outside of Newgrounds. This wildy offensive and grotesque series was so popular that TV channel G4 actually aired a season on its late night programming block. I fondly recall connecting our old iMac G3 to the Internet via dial-up, waiting minutes to download the gory assets of a Happy Tree Friends animation, and cracking up with my sister at the absurdity of it.

Other animation efforts had entire websites:

• Homestar Runner has been a touchstone of Internet culture since 1996. The Brothers Chaps (Matt and Mike Chapman) created a hilarious, kid-friendly web series that somehow people (read: me) are still talking about. Strong Bad managed to get his song into Guitar Hero II, am I the only one who remembers this?! HSR remains to me one of the most whimsical and positive examples of success in Flash.

• Stickdeath.com (thankfully, this site was lost to time) may be the polar opposite to Homestar Runner. It was a collection of crudely drawn, violent animations and games usually featuring stick figures that murder each other while a poorly compressed Slipknot track is blasting in the background.

It really encapsulates the magnitude of Flash as a medium. On one end, there's benign fun where 'crap' might be the most questionable content you see. On the other end, it's a gore-fest full every curse word and drug reference that parents dread. And the pornography. The amount of porn...is incalculable, much like the rest of the Internet.

In a way, Flash animations and games were a microcosm of the whole Internet experience. The cultural impact is undeniable, yet there are many unsavory parts of it we wish would just be forgotten.

The debate on whether or not older kids and pre-teens should be able to surf the 'net unchecked is not really the subject of this blogpost. Suffice to say that I had unrestrained access from a very early age and I knew when I was getting into something that I shouldn't have. I understood that murder and torture are evil and wrong. I did not repeat the profanity I heard. I hadn't really grasped concepts of sex and drug abuse, but I knew what I was watching was skewed, distorted, and perverse. There is a conversation here that is larger than Flash or even the Internet. How we broach these mature topics with kids is vastly more important than sheltering them from it.

On the whole though, Flash's influence is good. It inspired a generation of animators and game designers. It created communities where kids (those who had unmitigated Internet access) could flock and watch the cartoons that parents not only didn't want them to see, but hadn't even heard of. It was our space. Not influenced by committees of concerned moms or multimedia conglomerates. It was unique.

It was tedious and challenging to make these games and animations--and that made these weird, funny, and sometimes disgusting creations all the more precious. And it was FREE! All of it! The freedom of not waiting for a Christmas or birthday present. The intrigue of exploring the net for the next, big thing. The rush of stumbling upon something truly special.

I still have hope for the future of odd Internet curios. Last month, a small group of artists released Friday Night Funkin': a short and sweet rhythm game that absolutely nails the early 2000s Flash aesthetic. It certainly doesn't hurt that Pico makes a guest appearance. Sites today mostly use HTML5 for interactivity. I don't believe we will ever see another deluge like we did back then, but odd gems like Friday Night Funkin' and animation on YouTube are maybe the next best thing.

Goodbye Flash. You were cool.

Holistic RPG systems are captivating to me. By holistic, I mean a system which simulates nearly every aspect of a player character's (abbreviated PC) experience in that world. Obviously there needs to be a limit to how granular and nitpicky a system can be before getting lost in the minutiae of everyday actions. Take Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. Character movement is so common that there is what I am calling a 'shortcut rule.' Outside of combat, movement is essentially unchallenged by the Dungeon Master unless a specific difficulty or obstacle arises. "I walk across the tavern to the barkeep" is perfectly valid and requires no game mechanics.

This is only one side of a dilemma. With no challenges to PC actions, where is the 'game' in 'role playing game?' As someone with exactly zero experience with designing RPG systems, I feel this is a canonical problem in making interesting and fun RPGs. Striking that balance.

A second problem in designing an RPG system is designing the rules to make sense for the world PCs will inhabit. D&D was designed with the three pillars theory: exploration, social interaction, and combat. The rules are made to enhance these crucial aspects of the game, first and foremost.

Both of these problems speak to a larger question about RPGs, are they a game or a story first? If there was a definitive answer to that question, then we could, theoretically, design a system for all RPGs: the universal system.

But there is no such thing as a good universal RPG system, in my opinion. Systems work best--and even synergize with good storytelling--when they are fine tuned for a specific experience. D&D has its three pillars, base the rules on maximizing them. Then we can start asking questions about rules specific to the world portrayed in D&D. There is magic, how does that work? There are other planes of reality other than the physical, how do we resolve interactions with other planes, mechanically speaking?

It's all window dressing unless the core of the system harmonizes with its world's style. Cyberpunk Red or Powered By The Apocalypse are going for different vibes, so to speak. Maybe where more autonomy is given to the PCs or where number crunching and minmaxing take a backseat to spinning the collective yarn. I'll repeat: one size does not fit all.

The Metric system, the RPG system designed by ZA/UM (the developer of Disco Elysium), is a perfect fit for the game's thesis. In Disco Elysium, the goal is not to change the world, become a hero, or even become a good cop. The goal is to be who you want to be and to change yourself. Every character starts the game in the same way, regardless of the player's stat choices: you wake up in a trashed hostel suite with no memory of who you are and a massive hangover.

The sense of progress in the game comes from evolving the PC's internal monologue. NOT by changing the world around you, as in most RPGs. Rescue this princess, overthrow this villain, gather this gold. None of that. You achieve change through internalizing thoughts, possibly the strangest and most novel RPG mechanic I have ever seen. This could take form in a radical change in persona (rockstar cop, guilty cop...hobocop?), championing a new political ideology (communism, fascism, ultraliberalism, etc.), become a racist, suicidal, or even just remembering where your home is in the city of Revachol. Each internalized thought gives bonuses or banes for skills and may also unlock additional dialogue options.

The 24 skills I mentioned in the last blogpost also play a role in suggesting new tasks for you to complete and thoughts for you to internalize. Electrochemistry would greatly appreciate it if you could light up a smoke and score some speed. Interfacing is just dying to get his mitts on that antique weapon. Rhetoric would like to to strongly consider Mazovian Socio-Economics--and how fitting that Rhetoric has opinions on modern political discourse. It's non-stop. 24 (27 if you include the Ancient Reptilian Brain, Limbic System, and Subconscious) voices constantly vying for their way, each with their own desires and hates.

It's perfectly emblematic of the human condition. All we are, all that we can become, is the sum of our physical, emotional, and intellectual components. How we become a whole human is entirely up to our unique combinations thereof.

When I said in yesterday's post that "gameplay is standard fare for RPGs" I was grossly underselling how sublimely the RPG system feeds into the story. Yes, ultimately the mechanic for deciding how events play out in the game, 2d6, is a time-weathered tool of random number generation. So in that sense, it is standard fare. But everything else is so unique, so fitting, so successful in guiding the player through the unique story for that character with his particular skill scores and the thoughts in his Thought Cabinet.

Disco Elysium is a wonderful, miserable, beautiful, depressing game that you should play if you are willing to read a lot.

For more reading on Disco Elysium and the Metric system. I recommend these devlog posts:

• Meet the Skills: Intellect

• Meet the Skills: Psyche

• Meet the Skills: Physique

• Meet the Skills: Motorics

• The Guts of the Game

The 90s (and late 80s) were the decade(s) of platformers, at first a swath of 2D sidescrollers, then later the 3D collect-a-thon variety. The 2000s were the decade of first-person shooters and rapidly improving 3D computer graphics. In December 2006, Nintendo solidified a market of "casual gamers" from every age group with the release of the Wii (I wrote a paper about this topic for a course on video game history back in 2013). This period, 1990 to 2006, was a golden age of home video game innovation. Perhaps we will never rematch the truly monumental flood of important games that were made then.

Still, video games have grown and evolved more in the past decade than any other medium of entertainment, even if it doesn't quite live up to the golden years. Player counts are constantly growing on every video game platform--Steam reached a peak of 25 million concurrent players for the first time in 2021. That is just one game storefront of many on PC, we aren't even considering the tens of millions of Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo console players.

So, what kind of games represent the 2010s? Indie games.

The word is "Indie," short for independent video game. If you are unsure Every game on my list is an indie game (or at least started out that way). While high-budget corporations like Nintendo, Microsoft, and EA are still making games, no discussion about video games is complete without including independently developed games like what I have listed below. The implications of Indie development are more powerful than innovations in gameplay, or progress in graphical fidelity, even advances in storytelling through games. The success of Indie developers in the 2010s prove that we don't need billion-dollar budgets or teams of thousands to make video games that inspire. That excites me. The Millenials of my cohort and the Generation Z kids that grew up with games like these will be inspired to make the next games, and now they have the knowledge that they can do it if they set their mind to it.

Minecraft, 2011

I purchased Minecraft in 2009 when it was still in its alpha stage. The game wouldn’t hit “1.0 official release” status until 2011, so I’m counting it as a game from the ‘10’s! Even before official, it was a worldwide phenomenon. In 2019, it’s a cultural touchstone for my generation and children of all ages. There’s nothing that hasn’t already been said about Minecraft. The premise is that there is no premise. Do whatever you want. That’s the secret sauce. The widespread appeal that made this the best-selling video game of all time. 112 million people play this game monthly. With or without foes. With or without other players. Creation. Exploration. Adventure. On your your PC, your console, your phone or tablet, in VR—Minecraft will be the next “but can it play DOOM?” Mark my words.

Iconography from the game is equally ubiquitous. Creeper t-shirts and toy diamond pickaxes are to the 2010’s like SpongeBob school supplies were to the 2000’s. The soundtrack composed by C418 is some of the best ambient music ever written, bar none. The creator, Markus Persson, became an overnight billionaire. Microsoft bought the game from Mojang, Persson’s company, for $2.5 billion. Minecraft is the defining game of the decade, not purely by the numbers it boasts, but the influence on the entire video game industry.

Undertale, 2015

Undertale is the first game made by independent game developer Toby Fox. And on his first try, he created a masterpiece. It’s a top-down RPG with turn-based combat deeply inspired by Earthbound (1994). Combat is not particularly difficult—it mostly consists of moving your “heart” with the arrow keys to avoid enemy bullets, like Galaga. Excepting a handful of the art assets, the entire game is his own work. The design, the writing, the music.

The music! The soundtrack is transformative. Fox is a self-taught musician, but you wouldn’t guess it. Featuring a blend of chiptunes, guitar, synthesized instruments, leitmotif, and an absolutely spot-on ear for atmosphere, this is a video game soundtrack for the ages. The general public is either unaware of video game music or writes-off video games music as second-rate to commercial compositions. And that is simply a tragedy. This is capital 'M' Music at its finest.

Undertale is entirely opposite to Minecraft in terms of scope, game mechanics, and art direction. Minecraft is a game you never have to end. You can finish Undertale in three hours. But you won’t. You’ll find yourself savoring every room. Inspecting every sprite, every flower.

The simplistic art direction only serves to make each detail more meaningful. A restrained palette, a simplistic world with bare, yet purposeful detail. Each room serves a purpose, and each object and character in that room was placed with intent.

Undertale uses two methods of self-aware writing: one obvious, one subtle. Jokes and character interactions are frequently referencing our pop culture (not shared in the canon of the game world) and explicitly calling out game mechanics as they happen in the game. Self-aware humor can be hit-or-miss for me. Overdone fourth wall breaks come off as campy. In Undertale, this kind of humor is interspersed between enough good writing that the result is a net positive to the humor overall.

The more subtle and critical half of self-awareness in Undertale is player choice. The branching paths lean into the player’s inclination. Going for peace, love, and understanding? Eat your heart out. The plot develops into a heart wrenching, saccharine hero’s journey. Play “like a gamer” and ignore the struggles of the characters? You’ll get a challenge, for sure. And when you “win,” your actions will not be forgotten. Literally. The game’s save file keeps track of player decisions in future playthroughs.

Fox is an auteur wunderkind. Every component of this game weaves together to make a memorable experience. Love letters to games from a different era. Characters that evoke true empathy and sincerely hilarious writing. The influence of Undertale has rippled through the games industry, Internet culture, and even professional wrestling.

Tragedy. Comedy. Skeletons. Anime. DETERMINATION. Do not miss this game.

Return of the Obra Dinn, 2018

Yet another solo project, Obra Dinn is the product of indie developer Lucas Pope. His previous project, Papers, Please (2013), was a commercial success that presented a novel gameplay loop to the player: process the documents of immigrants entering the Soviet-esque police state Arstotzka. Pope’s fondness for unique premises and paperwork-based gameplay extends to Obra Dinn.

It’s a detective-style game where you, an insurance adjuster for the East India Company, must determine the fates of all sixty crewmembers aboard the Obra Dinn. The mechanic for investigating is a magical pocket watch, Memento Mortem. Upon finding a body, the watch transports you to the brief moment before that person’s demise—there is a bit of radio play before the reveal of the exact instant the person expired. It’s up to the players memory of the characters’ voices and faces as well as a good dash of logical reasoning to make the correct assessment of each fate.

The teaser for Obra Dinn was initially in 2014—since then he would infrequently post development updates on a forum and release an early-development demo in 2016. I fell in love with the art style immediately: 1-bit, monochromatic in the style of 80s Macintosh. Dithered to the max, right on.

Pope’s meticulous craftsmanship is half the appeal of the game. His development blog exemplifies his knowledge of 3D computer graphics systems—a discipline of computer science I studied in school. I scraped by with an undeserved and merciful B-minus. It's hard, folks! Like Fox, Pope is a shining example of someone who pours unbridled creativity and talent into the medium of video games to create truly wonderful experiences.

FTL: Faster Than Light, 2012

For most people, FTL doesn’t have a heart-warming development story or even notable success in cultural memory. It does remain, however, a game that I fall back into year after year even though its initial release was nine years ago. In videogamey terms, FTL is a space-based top-down real-time strategy rogue-lite. Enough hyphens to make your head spin, I’m sure, so let me break it down.

Space-based: the setting is outer space.

Top-down: your perspective is a bird’s eye view of your spaceship, with the roof cut away to see the action inside.

Real-time strategy: you control the crew of your ship and make decisions in concert with your adversaries (you can pause, but the combat is fast-paced and unrelenting).

Rogue-lite: Rogue (1980) is a randomly generated top-down dungeon crawler game for UNIX systems. This game is hard. Like really hard. But that's the point, it's meant to be a) new every time and b) very difficult such that the player fails often so when c) they inevitably start over the game can present a fresh experience. A “roguelike” is a game that follows this template somewhat faithful to the original Rogue. Rogue-lite is like a Roguelike, except it’s more like a Roguelike-like. Get it?

FTL, and similarly The Binding of Isaac, are poster children for short, highly replayable games that can outlast their high-budget competitors by presenting a satisfying gameplay loop and an element of randomness that keeps the player guessing every playthrough.

Disco Elysium, 2019

A last-minute entry to my list. Disco Elysium is an isometric RPG. Though sometimes it feels more like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. What's that? The game's writer, Robert Kurvitz, wrote a novel first and then transplanted the story into this game? Okay let's take a break from gameplay and talk about the game's writing.

The writing found in this game is remarkable on two fronts. First, the sheer volume of text is immense: roughly one million words. Last I checked, War and Peace is 587,287 words. Second, the scope of the worlds portrayed in the game. The fictional city of Revachol is fully realized through the incredibly detailed world-building: historical events, factions, languages, even alternate reality technology. Cars are steered with two levers instead of a wheel. Computers are connected through a network of...radios? Cops have single-shot musket pistols. Military armor is constructed from hyper-futuristic polymer but it looks like a medieval knight's suit of armor. But the world of Elysium, its landmasses, cities, city districts, political bodies, history, and non-player characters are just half of the equation.

The internal world of the player character's (PC) mind make the other half of the story. Each of 24 skills that govern the PC's ability to function have voices of their own, and oh boy do they talk. Encyclopedia informs you of the make and model of firearm you just picked up, or the dates of specific events, or political figures mentioned by other characters. Drama can sniff out a lie or concoct one for you to tell. Authority reminds you of your ability, and sometimes your duty, to dominate others into submission. Electrochemistry wants you to snort all of the drugs. All of these skills chime in constantly as you interact with the world and the people within it, and the points you invest into these skills change how often each of them speak up.

Gameplay is standard fare for RPGs: roll 2d6 for skill checks, add your skill modifier and any bonus modifiers, then compare the result to the check. The true stars of the game are its writing and the gorgeous watercolor artwork which combine to create a beautiful, bizarre, and haunting world. I may have to create a separate blog entry just to rave some more about Disco Elysium's stellar writing.

Last February I began writing a list of the music and video games most informative to my tastes from the 2010s. The past decade was the most important ten years of my life so far; more so, perhaps than any decade to come. Since 2010 I have: graduated high school, met my future wife, gained 25 pounds, graduated college, lost 20 pounds, started a full-time job, got married, moved five times, adopted two cats, bought a house. In between life-changing events, I was entertaining myself with media. I like to take time to reflect on my media habits as it provides a perspective to what I thought and believed--how I explored new genres, marveled at the life stories of artists and the stories they tell.

In no particular ranking except alphabetical, here are my top five musical works of the decade:

Random Access Memories – Daft Punk, 2013

Random Access Memories is Daft Punk’s most ambitious and polished project to-date. Summer hits like “Get Lucky” and “Lose Yourself to Dance” (both, incidentally, featuring Pharrell Williams) proved there was no question that the French duo can pump out jam after jam, decade after decade. The sonic texture varies wildly across the record, but funk and disco are a common string. Surprising features include 70s synth legend Giorgio Moroder, songwriter Paul Williams, and Panda Bear of Animal Collective fame. This pick is not an unpopular opinion; Random Access Memories and its lead single “Get Lucky” won five Grammys, including Album and Record of the Year.

How does it feel to listen to this album? Where does it transport me? When I first heard this record, I was driving around Grand Rapids, picking up odd jobs on Summer break. My first break from study at Indiana University. It felt familiar, yet fresh. Somewhere I’d been before, but still different after being away for a year. Listening to Random Access Memories again, I feel excitement, optimism, and maybe a touch of unease.

Live Sesh and Xtra Songs – Louis Cole, 2019

Far from the worldwide stardom of Daft Punk is the underappreciated and underexposed Louis Cole. Whereas Daft Punk carefully and precisely wove funk influence into their electronica, Cole embodies, even swims in the funk. His frequent collaborators Sam Gendel (sax), Sam Wilkes (bass), and Genevieve Artadi (vocals) assist in his personal project in addition to electronica group KNOWER and the outrageous, masked group Clown Core, although I can only allege the latter.

In spite of the comically cheap production value, I still hear a master in his element pumping out jams way above his paygrade. Or is it jamming out bops? Watch “F it up – Louis Cole (Live Sesh)” on YouTube to see what I’m saying. It’s a shame there aren’t high quality studio recordings of these songs, but to quote Cole’s own lyrics on “Money (short song),” “Money money/Won’t turn me into a bitch/Money money/I need just enough to do this”

“Awaken, My Love!” – Childish Gambino, 2016

I discovered Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) in 2014 as part of the Derrick Comedy sketch comedy group. I listened to his hip-hop album Because the Internet while studying programming in my apartment. Since then, ‘Bino has been a standby for any and all playlists. The rapid-fire, smart lyricism is straightforward, but executed with a professionalism that I didn’t see on Camp, Gambino’s first studio album.

His next full album would not release until 2016. “Awaken, My Love!” signaled a departure from the fast and furious bars of Because the Internet. It’s a tricky proposition to evolve your musical styles while maintaining audience appeal—it’s a whole other challenge to flip genres. Mostly devoid of rap lyrics or hip-hop style, this record squarely hammers another funky nail into my funky coffin.

Currents – Tame Impala, 2015

Tame Impala has the least funkitude of any artist on this list, but their style is indicative of the funk era…or at least psychedelia. In previous projects, Tame Impala drew heavy influence from hazy, psychedelic rock à la Jefferson Airplane. On Currents, they blend the classic rock riffs of yore with crisp production and an increased dose of electronica. Kevin Parker, Tame Impala’s primary musician and vocalist, really leans into his falsetto in a way that is soothing, surprisingly. At the time of this album’s release, I was preparing for graduating from college. I ate up themes from Currents, like self-discovery, change, and acceptance of the world.

ANTI – Rihanna, 2016

If I travelled back in time to 2008 when “Umbrella” and “SOS” were the anthems of the year, I would be unable to convince myself that Rihanna transformed into a critically appreciable artist beyond making head-bobbing R&B corporate pop. At best, it was the music to expect at the homecoming dance. At worst it was annoying “pop music.” Ugh.

ANTI is the biggest surprise choice for my decade list. Other selections on my list would probably find a place on my picks ten years ago, but not here. The effort and creativity that Rihanna poured into this project is incredible to me. I admire the departure from her established pop roots. Lyricism on ANTI is polar opposite to her previous radio-friendly lines: no-holds-barred, instinctual, even carnal. The dancehall inspired beats in “Work,” albeit repetitive and divisive, embrace her Caribbean heritage. Evan Puschak (aka Nerdwriter) said it best in his video essay on the song: "...of all these artists, Rihanna is maybe the best ambassador of this sound for an American audience."

I made a new website. I used Google Sites to "design" and publish the site for free. It's about the content, right? I'm working on that portion. The site's purpose? Professional presence on the Internet is one. LinkedIn pages are as ubiquitous as Facebook pages (I have the former, not the latter). Before LinkedIn, having a personal webpage was more common. Perhaps it can make a comeback in the new decade?

The other purpose is this kind of stuff: personal blog, photography showcase, potpourri, etc. etc. I have amassed a collection of photos over the past 15 years. I enjoy sharing my photos as much as I enjoy creating them. Instagram is the popular choice for this but I am averse to Facebook for reasons I won't explain here but you can probably infer.

The image carousel I am currently using is a temporary showcase. I am still learning how to use Google Sites and I want to plan out my pages before committing more than a handful of pictures to the site. I am also deciding between a few image hosting options, Google Photos being the frontrunner simply because most of my pictures are backed up there anyway.

The same design decision process goes for this Blog: will all entries stay on one page or will I separate years into their own subpages? Time will tell!

***

Matt, do you have any thoughts you would like to share with the Internet vis-à-vis 2020/COVID-19/politics?

No.
Well... maybe later. For now, no.

Matt, what do you do besides take pictures?

I hike with my wife. Mainly for her company and somewhat for photo opportunities. Exercise is a fringe benefit.
I run (sometimes with my wife). I am not a good runner, seeing as I haven't done it in a few months. But I do run sometimes.
I play video games. I have a PC, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4. I recently purchased a Valve Index HMD, so I've been playing quite a bit in VR. Current game: Half Life: Alyx
I play non-video games--board games, table top games, pencil-and-paper RPGs, what have you. Dungeons & Dragons 5E. I am the Dungeon Master for one friend group, and I am a player in another group.
Like everyone else, I consume (absorb? there are only gross words for this) media. TV, film, music, photography, other still art.
Sometimes I write, but up until this blog it is exclusively letters to people or journaling, poetry, or musings published to a dusty folder on my PC.
In summary, not much. But not nothing either.

I meant what do you do for a living?

I am currently employed at Eli Lilly and Company. My title is Senior IT Analyst.

So what do you do there?

IT...analysis? Look, this is a blogpost, not a resume. If you want my resume, contact me.

Matthew, what else do I need to know about you?

Matt, please. I am 27, as of date. Pronouns: he/his. My initials are MMK. The second 'M' is Morgan. Koskela is pronounced koss-KELL-uh. It's Finnish. I was born in Los Angeles, raised in Manhattan Beach, California and Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 2012, I graduated from Forest Hills Eastern High School in Ada, Michigan. In 2016, I graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a Computer Science B.S. degree, minoring in Philosophy. Cat person. But I don't dislike dogs. I just like cats better.

Philosophy?

lol yup

Goals/Themes/Resolutions for 2021?

TBD, mostly. But here are a few goals to start:

1. Get vaccinated.

2. Travel to some State and National Parks.

3. Decide what I am going to do in 2022.