Tomorrow, I start a new job. My emotions are a turbulent mix of excitement, hope, fear, confusion, ...

I'm glad good things happen. It's a good thing I am employed, and at an employer with which I have no moral qualms. It was a good thing when I secured my last job, in the final hour before money started to get uncomfortably tight. It was a good thing when I got the job before last. And so on.

Life is full of these boons. But also a seemingly endless supply of bummers. Not just in employment. Relationships. Self-discovery. Motivation.

Making sense of the noise is the latest overarching challenge. It's been my theme of the last three (or four) years. The onslaught of personal achievements, failures, turmoil. And all the while, the world marches on towards... something not-so-good. But that's not in my control; at least not in an immediate and tangible way. I have to focus on myself.

So with the good fortune of a fresh start, the drive to improve, and the conditions (social, physical, and mental) to allow me to flourish, how can I make the most of it? How do I avoid a fluctuation that careens me back to Square 1? More precisely, when the fluctuation does happen (and it will happen), how will I protect myself from self-sabotage?

If I find the secret knowledge that answers that question, I'll be sure to report back. In the meanwhile, the plan is to dive in to work, exercise, socialize when I have the fortitude, and tend to my garden of hobbies inclduing this blog. Make myself the promise to deliver on the fundamentals of well-being, in other words. It was very effective when I first made the move to Denver, and that was a time of severe flux. It's easier said than done. My attitude towards self-love has been...abusive in the past. But that first six months in Colorado in 2024 was such an exceptionally bright moment. I never felt so human and happy. That gives me hope.

Pretty vague post, sorry. This one's for me.

Identifying troublesome patterns

As of today, I've rated 208 games using my previously discussed rating systems. Here are the averages (mean) for each category:

Execution: 15.26 / 20

A game can afford to lose 4.5 points in Execution and still be considered to be 'above average.' Here are the individual category averages:

Controls & Feel: 3.78

Technical Polish: 3.94

Consistency: 4.08

Ambition: 3.45

I'm happy to see Ambition averaging lowest here, my intent was that a game of reasonable scope is an automatic 3, with anything above that being markedly more impressive, 5 being damn-near miraculous.

Technical Polish and Consistency are quite high. But consider that most games I have rated so far are games that I thought to rate, and therefore better than the average game. I also tend to play good games. I have taste, you know.

Controls & Feel looks exactly correct. As I explained in my last blog post, a game with good controls that I take no issue with gets a 4. So most good games will get a 4.

Enjoyment: 14.26 / 20

A game can lose up to 5.5 points in Enjoyment and still be 'above average.' I'm not sure what to make of that, but here are the individual categories:

Fun: 3.64

Audiovisual: 3.47

Value: 3.75

Memorability: 3.40

My takeaway here is that, again, my averages are juiced by not levelling out the bell curve with games I wasn't particularly fond of. But. Also. Value is a redundant and generally useless category. I figured it would act as a leveller of sorts, where indie titles get buffed for having reasonable prices, and AAA releases get judged a little more harshly for a $60, $80, or $100 price tag. What ended up happening is that all games that happen to be good all-around also happen to be a good value. I will have to rework Value into something completely different, I think.

Sauce: 5.60 / 10

Originality: 3.33

'Wow!' Moments: 2.27

Here are the real score killers. I'm happy to report that the average game appears to be mostly unoriginal and emotionally void. Nah jk. 'Wow' Moments actually has a median score of 3, so the majority of games I have rated evoked a significant emotional response, if momentarily. That covers a lot: emotional story beats, triumphant victory, recoiling in horror, and even very special moments with friends in a multiplayer game. There is a massive amount of subjectivity here. My emotions are my own.

As for originality... well we all know nothing is truly original. Hylics is basically Final Fantasy under the hood. Just a really fuckin' weird looking JRPG. So as a matter of degrees, how much has a game iterated on the ideas that inspire it? I get to put my finger on the scale here depending on how I feel, honestly. It's also worth noting that I used the 0 rating in 'Wow!' Moments 32 times and none in Originality, meaning I have not yet rated any games I consider to be shameless ripoffs. Black Mesa got 0.5 for being a remake. I think I'll remove 'cynical' from the wording; that's been discouraging me from deriding a game.

Takeaways

In the pillars of Execution and Enjoyment, a game without any standout good or bad parts defaults to around a 3.5-4 for every category. Sauce is a different story, and intentionally so. It's the special sauce we're talking about here. Plenty of sauceless games out there. Heck, some games don't even have juice smh. The numbers seem about right to me, is what I'm trying to say.

What's next?

Value's gotta go. In its place needs to be something to do with my enjoyment of the game, since that's the pillar it falls under. I dismissed 'replayability' a long time ago as it is intensely biased towards multiplayer games and roguelikes while dismissing games I enjoy playing once like walking simulators and, my beloved, Outer Wilds. Pacing is also a category I tossed around in the past. Unfortunately, pacing is highly reliant on the game's execution. It's also not really particular to the medium of video games, it's kind of universal to all temporal arts. So what, then?

Agency

Key questions: Is the game's decision space sized correctly? Do choices within the game feel meaningful?

Are you semantically satiated on 'decision space' yet? Because I am! In case you don't know and can't infer on what decision space is, let me take a crack at it. A game's 'decision space' are not only the choices the player can make when making decisions for moves in the game, but also the types of choices the player has available. Take chess, for example. The player's decision space is limited to making legal moves, pressing their clock button, offering a draw, accepting a draw, and resigning. While they are capable of slamming their fist on the table and making the pieces fly everywhere, that is not in the decision space of chess.

The usual criticism for a game's decision space is that choices are limited. I want to nip that in the bud. Many games that I enjoy have intentionally limited interactivity, and I want to avoid levying criticism against a game which is limited in scope by design. So when I say 'sized correctly,' I mean for the game's intent and genre. Avoid nuking the scores of story-based games!

That's not to say story-based games can't do it wrong, though! Take The Invincible. It's a walking simulator. I expect little interactivity. I take issue not with the size of the decision space, but how the choices I made felt, which is to say, awful. I was presented with moments to make a choice, and then those choices were taken out back and clobbered with a bat. Railroaded!!!

I suppose this is a way for games with little interactivity and no choices to score free points. This is true. When it comes to a vanilla walking simulator like Dear Esther, sure, it get's a 5 in Agency by default. But hey, having no choice whatsoever in a game is pretty damn boring. Sure enough, Dear Esther suffers in the Fun and Memorability categories. Hell, it only got a 4 in Originality because it was the first to do it.

Unlike most other categories, Agency will default to 4-5 for a typical game rating entry. Will this pad the averages? Time will tell. Give me a minute to update the rubric and scores--everything's kind of in flux at the moment.

- Maddy

The solutions we find to evaluate video games are lacking. I find the five star system antiquated for video games. It was built for film. It makes sense for film because we ideally look at all films through the same lens: * ★☆☆☆☆ = terrible * ★★☆☆☆ = not good * ★★★☆☆ = good * ★★★★☆ = great * ★★★★★ = excellent

At least, that's how I generally use the star system on Letterboxd. And I'll expound on that rating with a written review if something in the film warrants special attention.

What else, the IGN treatment? Rate the game out of 100. More granular sure, but it requires an entire article of explanation to justify. And IGN usually glazes games they review, which dilutes high scores.

Designing the rubric

I like the scoring out of 100 system, but I think there needs to be a strict rubric that grants points for discrete aspects of a game. Because games are innumerable and diverse, this poses a challenge as to what aspects I should evaluate. Length and replayability immediately stand out as issues. A short game should not be punished for being short if it is the best gaming experience I've ever had. A game that is best played 'for the first time' is also worthy of masterpiece status, even if subsequent plays will not feel as good.

So, I tried to develop a system that is indifferent to game length, complexity, budget, price tag, or any other objectively measurable metric. This leaves me with a totally subjective system that suits my purpose, which is for me to rank games according to me.

Rubric Outline

Games are rated by a total score out of 50. This result is multiplied by two to grant a score out of 100. ~Consequentially, game ratings can only be even numbers.~ Actually, I just decided that half-points are allowed.

Overall Rating

Note that even down to 45/100 I could consider recommending the game to the right person. I truly wanted to elevate the 90+ score to games that are very special, not just good examples of one type of game.

The Pillars

Games are judged based on three pillars: * Execution (20 points) - Does the game do what it set out to do? * Enjoyment (20 points) - Do I love to play it? * The Sauce (10 points) - Does the game have something special?

Again, 'The Sauce' reinforces the idea that a game can only be exceptional if it adds a little something-something on top of being actually well-executed and enjoyable. Also note that I am heavily influenced by the DougScore invented by Doug DeMuro. You can see that he's never given a car more than a DougScore of 74, which is even harsher than my rubric. His also differs from mine in that 'Acceleration' and 'Handling' are scored objectively.

Let's get into the individual categories of my rubric.

Execution

Controls & Feel

Key questions: Does interacting with this game feel good? Are the controls sensible and responsive? Consider the UI/UX design, does it feel flowy and intuitive?

Rating a game 5 for Controls & Feel essentially implies that the controls make the game. Buttery-smooth, agreeable, intuitive, complex, and actually key to the game's expereince. A 4 means that it controls excellently. Most good games get a 4. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Near Perfect - Delightful, a joy to feel | | 4 | Excellent - Responsive, intuitive, and satisfying | | 3 | Solid - Feels good with some gripes | | 2 | Inconsistent - Noticeable issues affect play | | 1 | Frustrating - Feels wrong, unresponsive, or fights against you | | 0 | Irredeemable - Debilitating, disgusting to play |

Technical Polish

Key questions: Is the game well-built? Are the sounds and visuals faithful to the author's intent?

Note that I am not judging the audio or video on aesthetic quality here, see Enjoyment - Audiovisual for that. What I mean here is, does the art get transmitted to my eyes and ears as the author intended?

Example: Cyberpunk 2077 circa 2020 was a visual mess even though the art is peak. For Technical Polish, 2077 would've gotten a 0/1 then, and a 3 here in 2026. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Near Perfect - Every detail was thoughtfully considered and tested thoroughly | | 4 | Excellent - Clean, stable, and well presented. No complaints | | 3 | Solid - Runs well, minor bugs that don't derail the experience | | 2 | Rough - Playable with noticeable performance issues. Questionable choices | | 1 | Troubled - Frequent bugs or performance hiccups. Softlocking | | 0 | Unplayable - Crashes and game-breaking bugs |

Consistency

Key questions: Does the game have a clear vision? Do disparate factors of the game work together or against each other? Do the gameplay, story, visuals, sound, and decision space mesh with the game's theme?

Hey game: do you know what you're about, son? I think of the Uncharted series when I say ludo-narrative dissonance. This dude Drake, he's an explorer right? His wife is also an explorer? You climb and look for clues in ruins? Ope, better take a break to murder like 20 goons. Now then, what were we talking about? Oh right, the history of this ancient temple or whatever. Sorry, does this bother anyone else? It bothers me enough that I need to quantify it. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Harmonious - Every facet of the game fits into a complete and coherent vision | | 4 | Excellent - Everything feels intentional and unified, with almost no missteps | | 3 | Cohesive - The game knows what it is, with minor inconsistencies | | 2 | Uneven - Disconnected parts, identity problems | | 1 | Inconsistent - Tone, rules, or systems clash in unhappy ways | | 0 | Contradictory - What were they thinking? Full blown ludo-narrative dissonance |

Ambition

Key questions: Does the game reach for something big? Did it stick the landing and deliver on its promises?

Here's a key thing: trying. You have to try for me to take interest. Even the most well-hewn Skinner box is still just a dopamine vehicle. 2 points for unambitious endeavors. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Moonshot - Reached for the stars and surpassed it's goal | | 4 | Exceeded - Delivered upon and exceeded it's ambition | | 3 | Delivered - Set reasonable goals and met them well | | 2 | Underdelivered - Disappointingly unambitious -or- Falls noticeably short of promises | | 1 | Major Gaps - Tries to achieve it's goals and fails miserably | | 0 | Star Citizen - Wildly overpromised and criminally underdelivered |

Enjoyment

Fun

Key question: Moment-to-moment, is the game enjoyable to play?

Tough deciding the difference between a 4 and a 5. Roguelikes are especially scrutinized here, since there is always a percentage of runs that fail. The question then is: was the effort fun? Very contextual, this. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Euphoric - Every moment exciting and elating | | 4 | A Blast - Consistently enjoyable, maybe a dragging moment | | 3 | Genuinely Fun - Fun on the whole, with a lot of filler time | | 2 | Mixed - Fun at times, frustrating at others | | 1 | Abrasive - Occasional bright spots in an otherwise joyless experience. -or- Forgettable | | 0 | Joyless - More chore than game, actively unpleasant |

Audiovisual

Key questions: Does the game look good? Does the game (and its music, if applicable) sound good?

This scale has an issue with the abject, I recognize. Cruelty Squad intentionally inflicts disgusting images and noises upon you. Does that get a high or low score, since they achieved their goal? Answer: my scale values games that look/sound good higher than games that look/sound bad, regardless of intent. So Cruelty Squad, which embraces offensive visuals as *the point* is unfortunately a 'no' from me, dawg. Totally and utterly my opinion, of course. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Iconic - A landmark presentation. Visual art, sound, and music elevate the game experience | | 4 | Striking - Excellent visual art, sound, and/or music | | 3 | Solid - Good-looking and good-sounding | | 2 | Functional - Unremarkable but serviceable | | 1 | Lacking - Noticeably weak in one or more areas | | 0 | Offensive - Upsetting to look at or listen to |

Value

Key questions: Was my time spent with the game worth it? Is the game reasonably priced for what it offers?

Simultaneously a question of dollars and cents, the worth of my time spent on it, and the game's production value. Say GTA: VI costs $100 on launch, has a budget of $200 billion, and I get 100 good hours out of it, I'd still think that's a great value at $1/hour. But this is not an objective calculation, and $1/hour is not the target. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Priceless - No time feels wasted. Incredible value | | 4 | Rewarding - Time well-spent. A great value | | 3 | Worthwhile - A satisfying play for a fair price | | 2 | Thin - Something made it worthwhile, but time often feels wasted | | 1 | Draining - The experience didn't justify the time spent. Overpriced | | 0 | Robbery - This game stole hours of my life that I will never get back |

Memorability

Key questions: Does the game stick with me? Is the game important to me? Is the game important to the medium or to culture?

The breadth of this category is intended to smooth the transition between games that are important to me and games that are important in general. Usually there is some overlap. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Unforgettable - Timeless. I will think about this game for the rest of my life | | 4 | Lasting - Memorable. Will hold cultural cache for the foreseeable future | | 3 | Lingering - Stuck with me personally, it may grow a permanent, devoted audience. | | 2 | Peripheral - Left a faint impression. It'll come back to me from time to time. | | 1 | Faded - Evaporated quickly, unlikely to be remembered. A footnote at best. | | 0 | Lost - Left nothing behind in me or the medium. |

The Sauce

Originality

Key questions: Does the game bring something new to the table? Does the game have unique identity?

This category, for better or for worse (please be sure to let me know), punishes rote sequels. That's not to say a better executed, more fun sequel title isn't worth a play. Remember that 40 out of 50 points go to execution and enjoyment. | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | One-of-a-kind - Completely original, genre-(re)defining | | 4 | Distinctive - Presents something original or reframes the familiar in a brand new way | | 3 | Flavored - Wears its influence clearly, but iterates on it distinctively | | 2 | Conventional - Leans heavily on what came before, but not trite | | 1 | Formulaic - Follows the formula to a 'T' with a little personality | | 0 | Derivative - A cynical copy with nothing to call its own |

'Wow' Moments

Key questions: Did the game stop me in my tracks? Did the game move me?

I highly value emotionally impact. Note, then, that a failed emotional prod scores lower than an emotionless flow state (the 'wow' moment there would be: "wow, I've been playing for three hours and didn't notice.") | Rating | Description | | :--------: | ----------- | | 5 | Cathartic - Scenes, moments, or revelations changed me as a person | | 4 | Transcendent - Multiple moments of awe. I was immersed (emotionally) | | 3 | Surprising - At least one moment genuinely moved me | | 2 | Resonant - Landed emotionally but to a lesser extent than the above -or- induced an immersive flow state sans emotion | | 1 | Tepid - Almost something, but never quite seizes its moment. -or- A cheap shot. | | 0 | Milquetoast - Exactly what's on the tin. No surprises. |

Bringing it all together: some examples

Let's take the MaddyScore rubric for a spin. Let me think of a good game. Oh! I know...

Outer Wilds (2019)

• Controls & Feel: 4
• Technical Polish: 4
• Consistency: 5
• Ambition: 5

Execution: 18/20

• Fun: 5
• Audiovisual: 4.5
• Value: 5
• Memorability: 5

Enjoyment: 19.5/20

• Originality: 5
• 'Wow' Moments: 5

Sauce: 10/10

Final Score: 95/100

Classic

Based on just the numbers and rubric alone, I would hope that you, dear reader, would be able to interpret the following unwritten review:

(Execution) Outer Wilds is a highly ambitious title that knows exactly what it's about. Game controls are executed well and stay out of the player's way. The game is technically sound.

(Enjoyment) Outer Wilds is the most fun a girl can have. Though visually simplistic, the aesthetics, sound, and music make for a near-perfect audiovisual experience. At $24.99, this game is an absolute steal and is worth every penny. Outer Wilds is considered by me and most critics to be one of the most important games of the 2010s and will remain a cornerstone to the game industry and an example of indie triumph for all time.

(Sauce) Outer Wilds is its own genre. It frames space exploration in a completely unique way, and also sets the bar for detective games and metroid-brainias by introducing a "clue tree" that has been replicated by many games since. Outer Wilds is as emotionally resonant as they come. Themes and story beats are revelatory and cosmic in scale.

(Conclusion) Outer Wilds is a total classic that everybody must play once in their life.

Shall we consider an example from the opposite side of the scale?

The Séance of Blake Manor (2025)

• Controls & Feel: 1
• Technical Polish: 2
• Consistency: 2
• Ambition: 2

Execution: 7/20

• Fun: 1
• Audiovisual: 2
• Value: 0
• Memorability: 1

Enjoyment: 4/20

• Originality: 2
• 'Wow' Moments: 1

Sauce: 3/10

Final Score: 28/100

Terrible

(Execution) The Séance of Blake Manor is an unambitious title with inconsistent vision. The game's controls are noticeably sluggish. The UI is unintuitive. (On Nintendo Switch) The game had very long load times and stuttering which affected the experience.

(Enjoyment) Blake Manor is a bland, annoying experience. The audiovisual design is decent, but not especially good. Nearly all time spent with this game felt like a waste, even with a $19.99 price tag. The premise is intriguing, but the Blake Manor is more-or-less forgettable.

(Sauce) Blake Manor leans heavily on its detective game and visual novel influences. For being so visual novel, I was disappointed at how emotionally bankrupt Blake Manor was. There were potential strings to pull and the game failed to capitalize on that.

(Conclusion) Blake Manor made me aggressively disappointed and is a terrible entry in the genre of detective games. Do not play.

I've been meaning to put a personal site together for a while now. I tried it once before in 2021. The results were...mixed. Full disclosure here that I intend to use generative AI for the formatting, technical bits and bobs. I just want somewhere pretty to write, maybe I'll learn something about making websites for once.

What this is

A blog. It's not a technical diary. I don't really care how this website works, nor do I care to explain why it looks this way or how I made it. I like to write about my opinions. I like to uplift creators that inspire me. I like video games, music, movies, y'know the usual stuff. Okay, maybe I'll write about Linux or current event or thing going on in my life. But mostly it's garbage that you may or may not wish to read.

The Archives

Looks like I haven't written a blog post since June 2022. Heh, whoops! It's all down below. I painstakingly reformatted stuff to markdown, but it might look bad. Sorry about that. Maybe I'll retroactively post some journal entries or something, it's not like I stopped writing after 2022.

Hello friends, and welcome to this year's installment of Maddy's Game Review. This year was a feast of detective mysteries, Balatro-adjacent roguelites, and--of course--French dark fantasy turn-based RPGs with real-time parrying elements. Let me address yonder elephant: no, I did not play Clair Obscur: Expidition 33. Nor did I play (actual) indie darlings Hollow Knight: Silksong or Hades II. Upon reading this, you may be tempted to DM me "casul." If that is the case, congratulations, you are the better gamer and, therefore, a better person. You should celebrate by getting slapped by a bug boss with a name like Narsty Dungbeetle 50 times, or whatever. I don't have anything to say about those games. I bet they're really good. I'll probably get around to playing them one day.

And now, on to the categories. But this post is about games I played this year.

I am the only member of the voting committee.

Honorable Mentions from 2024

• Animal Well - A fully-realized metroidvania, and a fantastic debut game. Delightfully compact at 33.26MB!!!
• Balatro - My personal 2024 GOTY. See below category Best Balatroslop.
• Frostpunk 2 - Cold Sim City: this time, with politics.
• Webfishing - A perfect game to fish and chill with budz. In 2025 it's abandonware, I fear.

Best Balatro-slop

Ahhhh roguelikes/lites. FTL: Faster Than Light made my top five games of the last decade. Things I love about the good roguelites: discovering new builds, catchy music, reasonable price, and "just one more turn"-ability. Last year, Balatro supplemented the roguelite mentality with a second idea: what if number go up? This combination proved to be fatal. I died and went to Number Heaven. There I found...

Runner Up: Clover Pit

Actually, when I passed away from my Jimboverdose, I took a detour to Number Heck. Demon Slot Machine Balatro is a great concept, and Clover Pit executes it well. So well, in fact, that the abysmally dark art and theme of the game had a marked negative effect on my mental state! Now that's what I call emergent storytelling!

WINNER: Nubby's Number Factory

Nubby has managed to combine the aforementioned killer roguelite combo with Peggle gameplay and Snood visuals. The ritual is complete and the millennium gateway has opened. Refugees of the 2025 shitstorm may form a single-file queue and return to the year 2000 where the Internet is unmonetized and Capri Sun turns you into liquid silver.

Honorable Mention: Slots \& Daggers

Cute lil slot game that I fully explored in about 4 hours. Good visuals and kinetic attacks, but shallow.

Best Walking Simulator

Fun Fact: I wrote a review of Dear Esther in my high school newspaper. Now you know two things about me. 1) I'm old. 2) I enjoy games where you press 'W' and then stuff happens around you over which you have very limited control. Is it a game? Legally, I am required to say yes. Will you like it? *Hand on your shoulder* I gotta tell you pal, my gut tells me no. But for those odd ones like me that like a little WASD and mouselook with their movie as a treat, may I suggest...

Runner Up: The Berlin Apartment

I have a soft spot for tear jerker games, and The Berlin Apartment has several moments where I got a bit sniffly. However, there was a notably weak point in the story and the interactivity felt sluggish and unresponsive. I don't expect much gameplay from a walking sim, but whatever's on offer better be crispy af.

WINNER: ENA: Dream BBQ

First of all, this game is fucking free. Chapter 1, at least. Anyone who appreciates the art of animation should give it a spin. There are a staggering amount of hand-drawn frames. Many appearing only once. Bonkers-ass music. Actually good voice acting for all dialogue. I guffawed one scene. This is a gesamtkunstwerk strand type game. The world Joel G has built is a feverish, terrifying projection of... something. I'm not sure what, exactly. Big subjects like employment, bathroom, a night like this, etc. Play it stoned if you must, but Dream BBQ is definitely a memorable experience, and the artistry is absolutely undeniable.

Best CRPG

In 2019, Disco Elysium posed the question: "what if you read a book on the computer, you uneducated fucking garbage person?" Baldur's Gate III replied, "Because I'm busy playing my D\&D softcore porno," whereas Citizen Sleeper said, "I do read books and by books I mean only Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Lemme get uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

WINNER: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

All the bleak, yet inwardly optimistic cyberpunk flavorings of the original, but now with a spaceship! In all seriousness, I do love Citizen Sleeper for all its moody, sci-fi tropey, heartwarming vignettes of humanity clinging to meaning type-shit. Did I mention the strong (imo) trans allegory? This is just another scoop of that. Yum yum, depressed androids a la mode!

Best City Builder

No joke, according to my Letterboxd (friend me, I'm justkos), on June 6, 2025 I watched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (**** absolute anime cinema). Two days later, I watched Megalopolis (2 1/2 stars, I couldn't look away). One could generously describe Megalopolis as a movie about "making a utopian city." So guess which movie they made into a city builder? Well..

WINNER: The Wandering Village

Absolutely ganking Nausicaä's whole schtick--like really, the art has 80's Miyazaki written all over it, and the world concept is...I mean it's just beat-for-beat--with the one unique idea being a village built upon a giant beast. A dinosaur, not a bug. I guess they didn't have the rights to Ohms from Nausicaä. Regardless of the visual and thematic conceits, the game is an interesting concept for a city builder on its own merits. Do you live in balance with your Onbu (it's a typo for Ohm, I just noticed lmao), or do you extract its bile and blood to ensure your people's survival. This is a false choice, obviously I'm a good girl and would never make the black pudding, but it's nice to know you can be evil if you wish.

Biggest Disappointment ☹

I always have a game rotting in the forgotten corner of my Steam wishlist. Games come and go, and one game stays for years and years until my anticipation knows no bounds and a release date is finally announced. Then it comes out. My disappointment? Immeasurable. My day? Ruined. Hotel? Trivago. So this category is about that type of game. This year the unlucky winner is...

DISAPPOINTMENT ☹☹☹: Skin Deep

I anticipated Skin Deep with the same fervor as Blendo Game's previous original concept Quadrilateral Cowboy. QuadCow lived up to its expectations. I love the blocky, warm art style. I love it's ability to show (not tell) a story. It has a beautiful, measured introduction of game mechanics and it constantly (but gently) tests the player to immediately apply what she just learned. It's only shortcoming is the length--the one-man-band developer Brendon Chung could only output so much in a given timeframe. Just when it felt like the game started to pick up steam, it ends.

Abrupt though it was, I sleep soundly knowing that one man's vision crystallized into a game that had a distinct and lasting impression on me. I am so profoundly bummed that I can't say the same for Skin Deep. Immersive simulation stealth is an interesting concept enough. I like Metal Gears served Solid and my Cells Splintered and so on. The worldbuilding established in all Blendo Games is still here, so that's nice. Chung's ever-present diegetic joke panels have me sensibly chuckling, as always. Yet everything has this... Annapurna sheen to it. The artistic vision is blurry...muddled. Skin Deep will not hold the same cache as QuadCow or Atom Zombie Smasher, where the laser-focused theme and gameplay meant the intent of the author was crystal fucking obvious.

Worst Detective Game

This category is reserved for games that are stupid, dumb, and bad (I'm really mad). Here you go:

LOSER: The Séance of Blake Manor

The most regretful purchase I made this year. Unoptimized to hell, loading screens fucking everywhere and they are SLOW. No fast travel and you're constantly backtracking a sprawling, MOSTLY EMPTY manor and grounds. With loading screens between each room. The majority of the details you can investigate are entirely decorative. I guess they figured they wanted to make investigation less rewarding by having most of your clicks lead to dead ends. Horrific.

Visually, it's dull. Like they used a comic book flat style to save money on 3D artists, and then called it a day. It's only partially voice acted, but like an oddly large amount, like 60%? The same goddamn connect–the–dots puzzle everywhere (the voodoo dude from New Orleans uses same magic sigil system as the Irish druid? gimme a fuckin' break bud). Game mechanics are a poorly executed mish–mash of other, much better games. More like the shitass of bland manor, amirite ladies. Play Blue Prince or The Case of the Golden Idol or Shadows of Doubt instead, I beg you!

Best Detective Game

A good mystery game should be challenging, yet make you feel smart. It should not repeat itself. By the end of the game, the mystery should wrap up in a satisfying way. Knowing that your investigation and deduction delivered you to a conclusion, and as a result of your effort, the bad guy got caught/the treasure got found/the insurance report got accurately filed to the East India Company (Obra Dinn is sooooo good). So it should be a massive surprise that this year’s Best Detective Game goes to a game that fails to do any of this...

WINNER: Blue Prince

Yes, this is the least conventional detective game I have ever played. I’m the first to admit I had my doubts about the roguelike RNG aspects of the game. When I saw the announcement trailer in a Nintendo Direct, I scoffed at Herbert S. Sinclair’s voice over and sluggish panning shots of a lifeless, flat-painted mansion. It looked like another Edith Finch clone, which was just a dressed up Gone Home, if you think about it, so why bother? Blue Prince looked to be another walking sim. Going by its marketing, this should not be a good game, I reckoned.

Blue Prince fails every requirement I stated above: * Blue Prince is easy. The puzzles are all simple to solve in a vacuum. Yet… * Blue Prince makes you feel stupid. You solve a puzzle and have more questions than answers. * Blue Prince repeats itself constantly. It’s a defining feature of the game. Open a door to the same room, over and over and over again. Backtracking is a feature.

When you “finish” the game, you haven’t solved the mystery. Not even close. When you reach the 46th room that Herbert so dryly tasks you with finding in the trailer, the credits roll. But it’s most definitely NOT the end.

If you, like me, built up a tolerance for repetition from decades of exposure to roguelikes, and if you, like me, enjoy playing a video game with pen and paper at the ready for note taking, and if you, like me, like games that have you wishing you could wipe your memory to relive playing it for the first time, then Blue Prince is for you.

It’s so chock-full of breadcrumbs and subplots that I never was left wondering what to do or where to go next. Yet, there is no quest marker or mystery map (like in Outer Wilds, my beloved, which keeps a tidy in-universe catalog of all the facts you’ve uncovered). Blue Prince respects your intelligence in that regard, but can leave you adrift if you aren’t taking careful notes.

Blue Prince dances such a fine line.

That I felt stupid, only for me to realize I was being toyed with. The dev had to bank on me getting a kick out of that.

That I had to repeat myself, but I made just enough progress in each run that hope of a breakthrough was always around the corner—I could have, just as easily, grown frustrated by the cruelty of an ill-timed dead end.

That I took copious notes, most proving useful, but some leading to nowhere. There are many ways that Blue Prince could have fell off.

But for me, it didn’t. I find something remarkable about a game that challenges genre and gameplay standards, possibly to its detriment. Made so clearly with passion and love, and also with the willingness to take risk, it is my:

GAME OF THE YEAR: Blue Prince

And that concludes my review of the video games of 2025. See you next year for another thrilling edition of Maddy's Game Review.

Most Anticipated Games of 2026

(in no particular order)

• Slay the Spire II
• PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant
• MINDWAVE
• Pony Island 2: Panda Circus
• Grand Theft Auto VI
• Half-Life 3

...and what's next

I tend to pass judgement on games at least a year after their initial release. Most of the games I played this year are not new in some respect. Inscryption and Echoes of the Eye released last year (the latter is an expansion to the 2019 game Outer Wilds), The Stanley Parable is nearly a decade old, and so on.

Inscryption

It\'s Slay the Spire but horror. It\'s an escape room but it\'s FMV. It\'s metatextual. On the surface, it should not work. There are many different clashing aesthetic and game mechanics choices in Inscryption. Indeed, the second and third acts are...a bit of a slog, unfortunately. You could assert that the increasingly unbalanced card games are a part of the story--an unhinged self-destructive self-awareness that insists upon theorems of player/developer relationships. Tried as I might to connect with these parts, I disengaged with the story after the first act.

Even when parts of this game fall flat, I\'m still in awe of the ambition of this game. It started out as a small idea: a game jam entry, in fact. Daniel Mullins\' inclination towards metafictional stories twists a simple game into a Matryoshka doll that left me wanting to keep diving deeper. Even in the less enjoyable moments, I wanted to see the game to the end.

This year, Mullins released a game mod to add additional challenges to the first act, essentially creating a fully-encapsulated deckbuilding roguelike. I don\'t think I can ask any more of Inscryption--it is so replayable and left a lasting impression on me. It now only serves to excite me for what Mullins will create next.

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

DLC is a hard sell for me. There has to be a substantial addition to make it worth my while. In the old days, a DLC pack could include a set of multiplayer maps in Halo 3 or a different region to explore with a self-contained story like \"The Pitt\" in Fallout 3.

Echoes of the Eye more closely relates to the latter type, but it brings more to the table than a standalone new region. The new story is deeply woven with the original story of the Hearthian explorer. The Stranger--the ship that mysteriously appears in the Echoes of the Eye expansion--is a self-contained world... but it\'s also a metaphor. Whereas the original game was grand in scale and themed to address our roles in the Universe, The Stranger asks us to be introspective. What can we learn from diving deeper into our inner worlds? What lessons can we learn? What mistakes do we make by hiding away from the \'real world?\'

This expansion (and the original title) have some of the most mind-bending mechanics in any modern game. Loops within loops. Cycles within cycles. Worlds within worlds. Just when I thought the \"time loop\" shtick was played out, Mobius Digital wags their finger and says, \"not quite.\" It\'s an incredible story within the already accomplished Outer Wilds--my only regret is I can only play it for the first time once.

Citizen Sleeper

This one\'s a novel, so it may not be for everyone. It\'s mechanically similar (but not identical) to Disco Elysium in that choices and actions are decided through the almighty d6. In that way you could describe it as a cyberpunk CRPG. The story does pull ideas of purpose, soul, and free will from classic cyberpunk stories like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner). It also borrows ideas of a megacorporate future where everyone is an indentured servant. That reminded me of the worlds of Hardspace Shipbreaker and Alien. Despite all the genre tropes, Citizen Sleeper managed to develop a unique world to which I became heavily invested.

The art is fantastic: characters pop out of the screen. I love their comic-style illustrations.

I never felt like I was at risk of \'losing.\' Quickly the struggle to survive was tamed and I just wandered into stories and characters. While the game could use more mechanical difficulty, the philosophical ponderings were difficult enough to swallow that I didn\'t feel like I needed to be challenged to feel like I accomplished something in my playthrough.

If you like reading, play it. If you don\'t, maybe give it a try anyway? Otherwise, just listen to the soundtrack. It\'s also great.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

The Stanley Parable is barely a game. You cannot win it or lose it. It\'s a pure commentary on the bizarre interactions between players, games, and developers. Every idea you could come up with, every strategy of playing the game will be mocked, praised, or criticized. It\'s absurd, surreal, and hilarious. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is essentially that...and then another heaping on top. Get lost in the desert, play Firewatch, reach the bottom of the Mind Control Facility, watch silly birds, \"Jim.\" Fall in love with a bucket, collect figurines, give the game a new title. Inspect the broom closet, find the escape hatch, go to the Memory Zone. As the game unravels around you, the temptation to just \"try everything\" is enormous. I just now realized that this is yet another example of a looping game, although time does not work quite as you expect here.

Landlord\'s Super

From the developer of Jalopy, an adorable ditty about driving a Soviet-era junker through the Eastern Bloc, comes a new title about a trivial task: Landlord\'s Super. The title refers to the ale sold at The Anchor pub in Sheffingham. Of course. The mechanics in Minskworks games are janky as hell. The gameplay is tedious. The visuals are simple and muted. The main reason to play these games is for a t m o s p h e r e. What did it feel like to be a depressed immigrant in Thatcher\'s England circa 1983?

It feels like a pack of darts, a VHS filter, phonebooks, scrapping lead pipe for 35p, and mixing urine in the mortar.

It\'s shabby, weird, and frankly frustrating. But it sets a mood superb. Emitting a vibe so expertly is not a skill that should be ignored.

Card Shark

It wasn\'t until I was about halfway through the winding and conspiratorial story that I realized that Card Shark\'s core gameplay loop revolves around quicktime events. The 18th century France setting, the gorgeous art, the love of the grift is what had me entranced. It\'s nerve-wracking fun to pull off long strings of slight-of-hand confidence tricks and then sweep away with a small mountain of gold coins. Any video game that can send you down a YouTube rabbithole of card magic gets my stamp of recommendation. Another well-packaged and short lived indie game that I will probably never play again but one that I will remember fondly.

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.

or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Valve

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]{.underline} 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]{.underline}. 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]{.underline}...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.

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 1st 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*

Maddy, 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.

*Flashback to January 5th*

Maddy, 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.