Several years ago, a small number people on internet message boards started bonding around a shared experience: how the sound of whispering, crinkling or tapping produced a relaxing, even euphoric tingling sensation in their bodies. Dubbed ASMR—autonomous sensory meridian response—the phenomenon has sparked a thriving subculture of whispery video creators on Youtube, and now, the first ASMR experience created specifically for virtual reality.

The K3ys is a collaboration between three of the most popular ASMR creators: Ally Maque of ASMRrequests, Heather Feather and Maria of Gentle Whispering. Although the 17-minute video is best experienced is best viewed through a VR headset like the Oculus Rift, you can watch a two-dimensional version of The K3ys in your browser, and navigate using keyboard or mouse.

The K3ys transports you to a dark clearing in the middle of the woods late at night; you find yourself surrounded by the sounds of crickets and cicadas as a full moon lingers overhead. Three women dressed in dark, hooded robes walk in a circle around you, pausing to provide poetic, soft-spoken musings words of encouragement.

Played by Maque and her co-creators, they identify themselves Time, Courage and Wisdom, metaphysical beings who have come to offer you heroic talismans, pep talks—and ASMR triggers, of course. The result is both soothing and relentlessly optimistic, somewhere between a self-help litany and a lullaby.

Offworld recently profiled Maque for her ASMR series focusing on science fiction and futurism, but she describes The K3ys as more of a mystical or fantasy-themed experience set at a crucial point in the monomythical Hero's Journey: the moment when the hero begins to doubt their abilities, and becomes unsure whether or not they can press on.

"We wanted to create a fictional narrative that could hold up and be applicable to real life," says Maque. "We're all on our own 'journey' in a way, and we all experience times of difficulty and hardship, and times of self-doubt. We wrote the story with the hope that, as well as being entertained and relaxed, any viewer who's going through a hard time could put him or herself in the place of this hero and find some comfort."

"I can help you find courage," whispers one of the hooded women in The K3ys. "You are not born brave, you become it. Because courage exists in the face of fear, and fear is often learned... Courage will help you find your truth, and bravery will help you accept it."

Even if you aren't one of the people who experiences ASMR's characteristic "brain tingle," there's a more universal appeal that shines through in videos like The K3ys: the need to feel safe, cared for and comforted. It's no wonder that so many people use ASMR for anxiety and sleep problems; who doesn't want to hear a golden-voiced woman whispering over and over that everything is going to be all right? It's an experience that doesn't lend itself well to irony, and doesn't need to.

The concept for K3ys took shape after Maque and her partner Josh Dekotora formed a fledging VR business called Pixelwhipt, and connected with the New York-based 360 degree video Littlstar. "The idea just kind of came together after that: What if we could pioneer the first virtual reality ASMR video, where the viewer could actually enter the scene for the very first time?" says Maque.

While there are still plenty of skeptics who don't buy into the world-changing hype about virtual reality headsets, ASMR seems particularly well-suited for the technology. It's always been an experience rooted in sensory immersion; many ASMR creators already make their videos with binaural audio to creates a roving sense of 3D sound. For Maque, the move to VR was just the next logical step: "There's such an obvious harmony between the two."

Moving forward, Maque wants to create as much of her content in VR as possible, especially around ASMR. She believes that it will offer her fans—who currently crowdfund her videos to the tune of $2,500 a month—experiences that she simply can't give them with traditional 2D videos.

"People crave the visceral. If you have the choice between watching a two-dimensional story unfold on a flat rectangle in front of your face, versus stepping inside of that story and living it yourself, which would you choose? To me, it's a no-brainer... It's just obvious to me that VR will be the way we bring people even closer to the stories they want and love."

In 2008, the year I took my first Cinema class, a 16mm full cut of the film Metropolis was found in Museo del Cine in Argentina. It felt like a miracle. We’d all stop each other—have you heard? Some of the scenes were too damaged to repair, but it was genuine, and in 2010 Metropolis was re-premiered, as close to the original print as is possible. Undeniably influential and utterly, catastrophically lost, Metropolis had always fascinated me. And I would be able to see it, at last.

P.T. was a “playable teaser” of Konami’s upcoming Silent Hills horror game, an unusual endeavor in an industry that mostly markets on heavily-edited video trailers. It was exciting as much in its own right as for the promises it made. On April 26th, 2015, Konami announced that it would be pulling P.T., from the PlayStation store, after less than a year. No miracle will bring it back, and it’s no special tragedy: This happens all the time in games. Losing great works is the norm, practically expected.

No one will actually forget P.T., right? Won’t its cult appeal last forever? Won’t this article I’m writing about it always be live, always keep P.T. in our minds? I’d like to assume so. No one really forgot about Earthbound or its sequel Mother 3, either, or SystemShock or its successors. But will people ever be able to play P.T. again?

My cinema classes offered me a very clearly delineated set of films I could watch in order to understand the history, technical advancements and artistic developments of American cinema. Workers Leaving the Factory, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and so on and so on, until we reach the present day. Games, an art form only about 30 years old, has no such canon of great works. Maybe that’s due to the youth of the medium. But let’s say we had such a list: Would we still have easy access to them all? Would they be archived in such a way that we could still play them, or might their platforms, their technology, have aged out of relevance, lost to the winds?

One of the greatest hurdles in archiving games is that there is no surefire way to archive digital media across the board. Cinema is having its own crisis on how to properly archive video. Tape degrades quickly, and colors and sound wear out as the years go by. DVDs eventually stop playing from use. Hard drives, thought to be infallible, can dry up and spin their last, become aging, enormous bricks left in the wake of technological progress’ march.

Writer Shamus Young details how games face these issues and more: how companies that make graphics cards don’t often document the changes to drivers they make for popular games, how the licensing for music gets very complicated as time moves on, how both consoles and operating systems are locked down to prevent backwards compatibility. But most importantly there is a harsh enforcement of copyright, even for games that are functionally unpurchasable. And now we see that the forces that hold those copyrights are often happy to will a game to disappear entirely.

My friend Nico, who once worked for the Internet Archive, told me that she only ever dealt with works that had entered the public domain or had an established estate. The works she was archiving were, on average, over a hundred years old. She also told me that archived works are usually offered at a highly discounted price, or even free. Maybe we’ll see P.T. again in 2115, if Konami decides that milking the Silent Hill franchise isn’t worth it anymore.

Konami’s commitment to whisk P.T. away behind a vanishing curtain is really the same old story of these corporations aggressively protecting their intellectual property. It’s because these companies see games not as an art form, but as a piece of technology. If archiving a work means that it may become free, or that some theoretical profits might be lost, why do it?

Cinema can be traced the same way in history. Star Wars can be considered important because George Lucas invented cameras to film the scenes he wanted in the way he wanted them to be seen. But a reduction of art to a story of technology doesn’t account for the societal and cultural importance of the works produced. Star Wars isn’t just a story of technology, but a Kurosawa-inspired epic of the journey out of bondage. Can you explain Rothko in just an examination of his painting techniques? Or is he important because of what it feels like to stand in front of his work?

Museums spend an extraordinary amount of money to preserve artwork in an optimal condition. You can’t touch anything, or get close enough to have the carbon dioxide on your breath change the colors in the paint. Each room is climate-controlled in order to slow down the aging process of pigment on canvas. They do this because it is understood in the Fine Arts that seeing something in person can help explain how we got to where we are now. You can trace a line, like in Cinema, from cave paintings to the renaissance to abstract expressionism to now.

Metropolis was technologically advanced, sure. But it was also produced at a time when science fiction was new, when the kind of story it was telling, about gender and the terrifying power of the Industrial Revolution, was still uncharted territory. That the Maschinenmensch is a woman is no accident: this was the Weimar Republic, the 1920s, where women internationally and specifically in Germany were rebelling against the hand they’d been dealt in life.

Finding a full print of Metropolis wasn’t simply about understanding how that film was made, or even just about seeing it in full—seeing Metropolis can help us understand how those people lived, how we live, how we tell stories. Konami doesn’t care how P.T. will help us understand ourselves and our stories—and P.T. wants to tell a story, about masculinity, about fatherhood, about what scares us, about how men treat women. Konami cares about profit, and P.T. will not make them a profit.

Our failure to cultivate a full appreciation of history within games extends beyond just the games themselves and into our collective database of knowledge, criticism and practices within our field. “Collectively, we have a short memory, mostly back to the childhoods of whatever generation is currently not yet fed up with games enough to romanticize it,” says author and professor Ian Bogost.

“It makes our belief in our current novelty innocent on the one hand, but it ensures we build on a very limited version of the past on the other,” he continues. “Yes, there’s always some truly new novelty in games. But the bigger trends always seem to start from scratch, unaware of what came before, unable to incorporate and build upon it.”

Games critics seem to have the same arguments, the same discussions every five years or so; maybe we, all of us, think like Konami. What will get us the most hits? What is the freshest, hottest take on the topic du jour? What Op-Ed will get the readers that make sure that these sites stay open? My friend Max asked me why there’s no annual publication of the best games journalism. This is why: none of us care about our history.

“Gaming’s old-timers grow weary and quit (or get driven out), and everyone forgets and starts over, patting themselves on the back for being young and clever and confident,” Bogost continues. “I’d say ‘all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again,’ but even that’s a reference that will likely be missed by many. ‘Yeah, but that was like, five years ago. Everything’s different now. It’s a golden age.’”

To make our history a priority, and in particular to prioritize the work of archiving, means that we have to take a huge cultural shift, and in the time it takes to shift perception we will lose things. There were PC games that came out in 1998 that we’ve already forgotten: technology, criticism has already marched on. This is our loss. When the games our children play are retreading the same ground design-wise as the ones we remember, we should know who to blame. When that print of Metropolis was found in the Museo Del Cine, it was a miracle. I wonder how I will feel if we see P.T. ever again.

Over the past week, I found myself at times so stricken by depression that I could barely move, only lie face down as if there were some great force pressing me there, leaden and slowly leaking tears. It was as rough as you might expect on the one hand, but on the other I wasn't particularly worried: I felt I was having a reasonable response to a series of unreasonable events.

There had been a stubborn and pernicious chest infection keeping me away from my work, the daily rhythms of which are often the benchmark against which I set my sense of myself. And I had very secretly tried a new sort of project recently, one I had thought I was going to be good at and that it turned out I wasn't so much, the sort of surprise I think it's fair to find a little destabilizing. And some other small things, years and years of small things, the sum result of which was me feeling sealed in an unhappy tunnel, away from every accustomed metric of validation.

Validation is a strange concept when you work in video games, a young field with a short memory, whose ideas about what is valid are constantly mutating, always outside of your reach. There are lots of people who suddenly seem to get lucky, either at game-making or at writing the conversation around it, and while this sort of fortune is wildly unpredictable, comprised of mysterious moving parts and elemental alchemy, we're a people who likes to pretend there is a spine of logic around every action and every interaction. We believe in a right way, a best path, a win condition. It's in our nature.

Video games are validating. They are systems we turn to wherein we touch something and there is a response immediately; where mastery is possible, where we evolve in logical order. We can "see the ending". One of the last decade's most significant pioneers of the "watching someone else play video games" genre, well before YouTubers, was the Japanese program Game Center CX, where the endearing Shinya Arino persistently plays through obtuse and fricative old games. His goal is usually "see the ending."

I'm virtually awed by Arino even still: Particularly his resilience. Sometimes it takes him long hours or even days to fulfill his stated commitment to a game, some kind of Japanese soothing pad glued to his forehead. One of the show's warm conceits is when the program assistants deferentially bring him snacks, meals, clues from viewers, always a little apologetically, because everyone in the room knows Arino mustn't quit. He is often frustrated, forehead-slapping, comic groans, but just as often he laughs, quips. He would never hurl the pad across the room with violence, like I did as a child. My family's old Super Nintendo pad is engraved with teeth marks. I don't know how he manages it.

Every woman I know in games right now is really tired. Careful: That is "every woman I know," not "every woman." You must be very careful. It's the kind of fatigue that isn't so easily explained by our fist-shaking male colleagues who earnestly empathize across their social media platforms with how "we get harassed a lot". Some of us get harassed a lot and some of us don't. Sometimes it upsets me when people bring up the harassment: comments like I have no idea how you put up with all the shit you put up with or gee, you sure have a lot of haters, because honestly I am usually trying to ignore that part and, well, a lot of people like and support my work too, thank you.

There is a lot of attention paid to the "climate of harassment" for women in games (and a lot of uppity debate about whether it exists or we're just imagining it, exaggerating, because for arbitrary reasons we must want to "make the industry look bad"). But actually, this stricken pity and bewilderment was worse when I was starting out almost a decade ago, before any of the myriad and diverse and excellent women I now know and work with. Back then there was just a persistant dissonance between the way people reacted to me and my work and what everybody else got, and since I couldn't yet understand it, I pressed on.

I had a difficult time. There is a Joanna Newsom lyric that goes: "I was tired of being drunk/My face cracked like a joke/So I swung through here like a brace of jackrabbits with their necks all broke." It reminds me of the person I was at that time, a raw nerve collapsing slowly under mass scrutiny and inscrutable socioprofessional rules. In hindsight I know I was having a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable circumstance. It helps just a little bit to know that, from time to time.

At that time there was no Twitter. There was no "the community." We had no forum for conversations about the supposed injustice of a labor economy whereby people write blogs and others benefit from them without paying money. The sphere of games criticism I was part of when younger -- the "Brainysphere", we often called it, after web ringleader Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer -- was imbued with a gentle awe. There was a brightness and a newness to what we were doing, it felt like, and while of course none of us invented games criticism it's fair to say we were all part of the invention of a kind of conversation in our field, where we were exploring with and investing in one another. I never wrote good articles then, but I must have had good ideas, like the others who participated in this exchange with me.

Outside of this sphere it often came as a shock at how unsafe it was for me to speak or to be visible, how strange the status quo would find me when I would appear at games conventions with my reporter's notebook and my too-bright theatre kid eyes. I tried all sorts of roleplaying. I was invited to some "women in games" groups, which I declined because I didn't want to make a Thing out of It. Now I don't remember much about those times, because the real me was not really present.

Even still, I did not get tired until now. Since that time, other women and I slowly became part of a hopeful wave of people for whom things were going to change, or were changing, or at least we existed together in a system where our collective discomfort felt like a useful tax on the outcome we were at last going to achieve together. We hoped we would See The Ending, and perhaps we are now so many of us tired because it is clear there is not going to be one. Or it's like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, where you think you've got there but in fact you're only halfway done, and you must re-map the castle all over again, this time with everything turned upside down and twice as dangerous.

For the most part, I still have the same job that I have always had (not that I'm not proud of the growth I've had within it over the years). For my friends, the Twine revolutionaries and the vocal Tweeters and the other writers, a great act of deception has occurred: We've been in the New York Times and been invited to conferences and told that we are Important Voices, doing Important Work, we've been on the news at night and in magazines. We are awash in social capital. But none of it translates to real capital.

It is a mean shock. I think about Arino, and how so often the reward for his entertaining labour in these ancient video games is just a screen that says THANK YOU FOR PLAYING, and a list of names.

I'm not sure what we expected to get. Like the hollow feeling in my chest after that secret project lately that laid me low, what other result did I want than to complete it and have it be mine? I'm not sure, but that ambiguity depletes me of something, as it depletes all of us.

I am still getting emails from people who want to know if I will help with a panel or a documentary or a thesis or whatever about "women in games", or, heaven forbid, about GamerGate (stop sending me these). My colleagues are still being told that their work on altgames or gender or games as personal expression or on personal writing is Important Work, quintessential, don't-miss, but that unfortunately there is no job available for them, no speaker's fee, no professional advancement.

One of my colleagues just wrote me she's frustrated about all the conversations we're not having. We all are, I think, migrated against our will to interminable residencies in a politicized minefield, where even talk amongst ourselves is scrutinized. The unremarkable news that I like the game Bayonetta, for example, provoked an unsolicited Twitter flurry of users tagging in my friend and collegue Anita Sarkeesian, who was critical of the game Bayonetta, as if the fact of our two opinions could not stand. We are not free to debate and to disagree lest we be set against one another. Sometimes, we admit darkly in private and in bars and at "women's meetups" that some of us are against each other. Every smiling colleague, loathe to conflict with another woman, might hate me. She'll never say so, because many of us women are hated unfairly by enough of our enemies already.

Then there are the ones who have had only good experiences. Who believe in Positive Energy. We're in the business of fun, they declare. A lot of them are older than me and I see them frown gingerly at me as if they were the mothers of teenagers, wounded by our turbulent age, shaking their heads at the destruction they think we're causing in our course to find ourselves. Of course I respect them, their work, their years of service, the truth of their experience which is so different from mine. I have no choice, and we will never discuss the issue otherwise. We have no freedom to speak or to move. Our own stories, the narratives of our work, are so often taken gently out of our hands while we watch, mutely; while we watch, hitting block and mute.

Another friend and colleague noticed that I seemed frustrated, that I too appeared to be another throbbing nerve in this living knot of frustration. To comfort me she told me that she's seriously thinking about what else she might be able to do besides games. "I might be depressed," I wrote her. "But I really hesitate to write off a culmination of structural concerns and long-running systematic disrespect by both my enemies and my 'allies' as an involuntary chemical downer."

"Totally," she replied.

Recently on a whim I ordered an old book off of Amazon called "Surfing on the Internet," mostly because the title was funny. As it turned out, it was a brilliant memoir of the wild west days of early Usenet groups and mIRC channels, written by a woman called JC Herz. The politics of being a woman online had been part of her experience even in the 1990s. I also had written a memoir, called Breathing Machine, of the internet in the 1990s and my girlish adolescence there.

I turned over Herz' book and was startled to see her portrait on the back: A shock of wild, dark curly hair, like mine, a mischievous smile that felt familiar. I googled her and found that she wrote games criticism for the New York Times (we are constantly complaining about how traditional outlets like the New York Times never give us an opportunity) at the turn of the millennium, years before I became a writer. We were so alike, her course of life and work so like mine, and yet I had never even known of her until then.

Our ongoing memory crisis -- this field maintains little permanent record of either projects or conversations, reinvents the wheel every five years -- means we are all afraid to stop lest we be swept away and forgotten. If I were ever to stop, then five years from now, someone quite like me will not have known of me. Women, especially marginalized women, who had so much more to lose than I ever had and who risked it all to make their contributions, to do their important work, fear this too, probably far more. So we endure the interviews about The Harassment. But The Harassment is not our biggest problem at all.

It's that we haven't learned a way to be valid, yet. Our controllers are full of teeth marks. We cannot See The Ending. We are in the business of playing, but we've lost our innocence. I have been here long enough to know that this article about Being A Woman will be more widely read than nearly any heartfelt work of pure games criticism I could do. That knowing is a low and constant ache.

My partner is in games, and his friends, and my guy friends, and they run like founts of tireless enthusiasm and dry humor. I know sometimes my ready temper and my cynicism and the stupid social media rants I can't always manage to stuff down are tiring for them. I want to tell them: It will never be for me like it is for you. This will only ever be joy, for you.

For me there is nothing else I can do. I know the madness of spending insomniac hours all through high school score-chasing, precisely reciting the same litany of platform leaps, flinging myself against the same boss for years until I was violently bored. I would shut the game off, go downstairs. Twenty minutes later, upstairs again, as if compelled, back to it, all but invoking superstitious techniques for this time, this time. All of us remember a parent or partner, sighing in the background after we wail and strangled-growl at the screen for the hundredth time: "You've been playing for hours. If it frustrates you so much, why don't you stop? Why don't you do something else?"

I just can't. Somewhere in all of this is love, and the need to make games bigger than their strange little space and all the deterrents in which it's clad. It's love that powers Offworld, that led our friends at Boing Boing to offer us a chance at a platform, that makes Laura and I want to play some small role at adding something else to the conversation. I wouldn't do anything else. We must decide this is valid. We cannot wait to be accorded validity. We must run at it, repeatedly, patiently, like we always have.

It's just video games. It's supposed to be fun. It sounds fun, people say when I tell them about what I do. And sometimes I laugh and I wince or I pull my lip, but I always say It is.

Then they often say is it tough being a woman in games. Sometimes I say yes and other times no but from now on I think the answer is yeah, but not in the way that you think.

I followed a whim and clicked upon seeing the advertisement below, promising me "the hottest game 2015". The focus of my experience, stressed the ad, would be "beautiful females", but I was just as attracted to the clear trajectory outlined in its upper right corner: "Game Starts. Choose Story. Game Setting. Game Ends." That sounds like a logical sequence of steps. I like to know what to expect from my experience, and I certainly expect that it will end.

I was presented with this sensual image, again promising me hotness. I was asked to choose my fraction—that kind of thing gets me really excited—and slay my enermy. After some consideration I chose to be "Lion: From the Fertile West", because lions are hot and no cardinal direction is more fertile than West, that's for sure.

However, after a brief loading screen, I for some reason ended up at a completely different selection screen. Now I have to pick between Albion, Gorm and Nords Alliance? What happened to the Polar Bears? Well, I went ahead and picked Gorm, because when I play games about maps I like to thirstily extend my realm and it looks like this guy in the picture is all about that. I'd be okay with being this guy. Plus, there's some kind of reward indicated: I'll get 50 diamonds. Don't know yet what diamonds are good for, but 50 sounds like a lot!

A loading screen with a blooded logo lets me know I'm playing a game called SIEGE LORD. That's so arousing, right? The loading screen shows me tips and tactics in frequently-incomplete sentences, like "Defend beats Attack, Attack beats Assault, and Assault" "Send your generals around the World View for bonuses from special events" and "Draketon is the center of the world."

Then the game starts. A hovering arrow urges me to upgrade a Dwelling. I click it and then I am supposed to upgrade the Dwelling again. Then there are two Dwellings, and I upgrade them. Time lapse banners crawl to completion as an animation of a hammer pumps slowly up and down to generally-medieval sounding music. If this game gets any hotter, I'm going to get a nosebleed. It says I'm earning 65 Gold an hour, baby.

Oh, here we go. A beautiful lady called Lianna. She is really grateful that I upgraded the Dwellings and she wants to know my name. I am her lord. This must be when the conventionally hot things are going to happen.

But then suddenly I'm asked to choose my character. Wait, I thought I was going to be that thirsty Gorm lord guy! Yet again I must adjust. I'm not sure who or where I am any more, but I choose to be the beautiful lady in the red dress, you know, just to be faithful to my real life. I look exactly like this. Also I want to see if this game progressively allows the "My Lord" who is having the "hottest" experiences with "beautiful females" to be a lady.

All right! Here we go. Wait who is this guy where did he come from

Great. It's Njal. I didn't sign up for Supreme Honor, bro, I wanted to have the hottest possible experience. Suddenly Njal and I are on a completely new map with completely new places. It's some kind of frozen mountain. This isn't The Fertile West OR Gorm at all.

The game tells me to "attack Bullen", and I'm not sure whether Bullen is a place or a guy, but suddenly there are battle units on screen, apparently led by Njal, that automatically fight each other. My guys win. After Bullen I have to click on Tathmore and attack it and my guys win again. Nobody does anything hot.

Beautiful Lianna returns. She says we have to pray for gold. I pray for gold. "Resources earned from prayer are worth two hours of basic output," the game announces. Two hours sounds like a lot of time to spend on this game, and "output" makes it sound even more like factory labor than it already feels.

The maker of this game, judging by the logo stamped on it, is 37Games, an Asian web gaming company that apparently employs 1700 people. Siege Lord is only one of many barely-functioning products in its suite, and the illicit-looking web ads are nothing more than a lure to get you dumped into one of them at random. Well, what a fun time we've had!

Take a moment to think about the things in your home. What story do they tell about you? About your relationships, your family or your life?

In a dusty vase I have some roses, dried. Four months ago I got them for Valentine’s Day, and then I had to travel for a few months, so they stayed here. I remember my sweetheart writing me while I was gone: Your roses are almost black. Neither of us will throw them away, now. We have a ginseng called Felicity and a pot of violets called Vicar Amelia; both of them once boasted their hardiness on their tags. Plants that don’t need a lot of care, that even we couldn’t forget.

“Is it okay if I write about our plants,” I asked him.

“Nobody wants to read about that,” he demurred.

Except I’m not writing about the plants. I’m writing about us, and everything you know about us only from our plants. And the other things: The vintage maps of each Earthly pole that hang over our bed, distant and uncharted white whorls in the center of robin’s egg seas. A box made out of cloves I got when we went to Bali, and the many tiny things I hid inside. An edition of Stories of the Arabian Nights from 1955. It had been my mother’s and now it’s mine. We have so many stories and games and cards and gifts and books. And piecemeal dishes, and an ever-present thin film of dust on my vanity, which has a mirror taped with photobooth strips and a recent ticket stub to Surrey cricket, of all things. Where’d I get this, why’d I keep that—you could learn, probably, everything there is to know about me if you could answer those questions.

Of course you could probably just open my computer and read everything on it, too, but that’d be no fun. There’d be no game in that.

The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home launched in 2013 and became an instant classic among video game fans. The atmospheric game cast you as a girl exploring her family’s new home, half-unpacked, in search of clues about your missing sister. The story told through that exploration—the pillow fort and stained pizza boxes in the VHS-littered living room, the printed zines and childhood scribblings spilling out of storage areas—is so delicate that to talk too much about it collapses it. But the game, along with other rebelliously observation-oriented, "action"-averse games like Dear Esther, helped prototype an entire genre: Telling the stories of people, of a place, through gentle exploration.

It was no happy accident for the four-person Gone Home team, which had experience working with environmental storytelling in more traditional video games, like the BioShock series. Those games are about clobbering aggressors, but they’re also often atmospheric works about grand social decay and weaponized morality. You can imagine wanting to hone in just a bit more on the latter part, to tell the human stories, to remove the “fire plasmids” and rusty wrenches entirely and just draw the lived-in world.

And in many ways, Gone Home wasn’t a self-conscious stab toward “games as art”, but probably the natural result of practical design constraints: A single house is a manageable development space for a small team; an empty, half-packed house is a sensible conservation of assets, and telling a story about vanished people through notes and objects deftly avoids the need for gawping 3D-modeled humans, uncanny and generally far out of even successful veterans’ indie budgets.

Gone Home owes much to its nostalgic 1995 setting—the tone and themes of that age elegantly endorse the game’s plot. But the era is not only evocative, it’s pragmatic: Before the internet, we had complex folding patterns of classroom notes, cassettes hand-recorded and labeled. The game’s setting underlines how much of ourselves it’s possible to invest into places and things. It'd be a different experience in the digital age.

The “home”, the places we live and the objects we put there, continues to be an increasingly-popular and important setting for independent games. The Elsewhere Company just finished a successful crowdfunding round for a game called Apartment: A Separated Place, a game about navigating the wreckage of a relationship—you play as Nick, floating through the space he once shared with his girlfriend of four years, Madison. The remembered silhouettes of her things are still present (try a demo of the game here).

“When you live with another person you share that space and it transforms into something new, not quite the same — it becomes both of yours,” the team writes to me over email. “The absence of that other person is blatant. You still see the semblance of your home but mostly you see the absence of that person. It's the absence of Madison in Nick's day-to-day life that we focus on in Apartment. His thoughts reside in his environment just like she once did, and they all revolve around the fact that she's absent and isn't coming back. Everything feels wrong.”

“The details in his environment are objects that were significant to both of them: some in major ways, some in small. The salt and pepper shakers they bought together when she first moved in. The shoes she always nagged him to put away. It's the mundane things strewn about that stand out most to Nick, after she’s gone.”

“Setting our game in a lived-in space lets us show an inordinate amount about Nick and Madison and the way they felt about each other,” the team adds. “The simple display of Nick's sweater draped over a couch inspires him to tell players that Madison always hated it when he left clothing lying around. It only appears after a particular part of the game, making it new and worthy of investigation. It's a plain sweater — no logos, not a hoodie, which tells you a little about the man who owns it.”

“Lived-in spaces give us the ability to let our players investigate these details and offer us ways to design mechanics around a populated area. On the other side of the coin, they let us develop a character's personality, create a space players want to be in, and adding details that give realism to the story we're selling.”

There’s also something intimate about being in homes and living spaces that are distinctly not yours. There are a lot of things I enjoy about Life is Strange, Dontnod Entertainment’s ongoing episodic series about teen girlhood and time rewinds, but among my favorite moments happens in the first episode: You revisit a former best friend you haven’t seen since younger days, and are left to wander their family home alone, taking note of what’s changed about the people, the place, since you were last there. The mother who once made you snacks has remarried. The swings you shared as a child are still in the backyard. You’ve been out of your friend’s life for a while, and there’s a lot about her you no longer recognize. You feel at once a sense of belonging and a sense of alienation that only the game's rendition of this place could create, far more effective than any explanation action or dialogue could provide.

Developer Quinn Stephens made Lantern, a short, poetic vignette game where you play an elderly woman carrying a light, gliding through the home at night like an interloper. “I set my game in a house because I wanted to take advantage of a space that consistently felt to the player like it belonged to someone else,” he says.

“It's a home, but it's not our home; the player character is a former servant in the vast mansion and would have felt much this way herself even when she lived there. I tried to convey through visuals and sound that the house provides shelter from the wind and chill outside, but not comfort or safety. It's quiet and dark and unnervingly empty--at least until the player character arrives in her old room, which is the closest she had to a true home. It was easy to tell a story with very little dialog or explanation by setting it in a house, because the player expects the house to tell the story and actively looks for it there.”

With upcoming adventure game The Guest, set in a mysterious hotel room, Madrid-based Team Gotham actively aims to subvert the player’s sense of comfort with lived-in spaces. The team’s Juan de la Torre says the familiar, warm and intimate iconography of a “home” is fertile ground for a designer to play with expectations. “Here’s where it becomes really interesting for game design: We have the ability to turn this space into a place we don’t want to be in,” he says. “It’s thrilling to watch someone play your game and observe them feeling secure at the beginning, but as things start to go wrong, that comfort area is gone forever.”

“We can definitely break norms with something that feels so close to our lives,” de la Torre suggests.

Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch, launching sometime next year, also seems unsettling and darkly subversive, setting players in an eccentric family home across years. Why is Edith the last Finch left alive? Only the Washington State home, sprawling and eerie, has the answers. It seems the player will get to investigate many different eras of this place, letting them see the effect of time, deriving the story by filling in the spaces.

”The home” has always been a fertile setting for horror—part of what made beloved and now-vanished P.T. so instantaneously-beloved was the believability of the single hall and foyer to which it was contained, the distinct grotesque feeling of being the one to gouge away the eye of a portrait of an unfamiliar woman. Its so-called “spiritual successor”, Allison Road, will also use the normalcy of a high-fidelity home space as the backdrop of more fearsome things. I still think fondly about the often-underrated Silent Hill 4, the main conceit of which is locking the player in an (initially) ordinary apartment that has a giant, sobbing concrete hole in the bathroom wall.

Gone Home has what you might call elements of the horror genre, too: You may not trust the darkness, the flickering lights, the presence of something that has the heft of years to it. But it’s about bigger things than that, and so is this wave of new games: our houses, our apartments, our rooms, our lived-in spaces, are becoming favored spaces for independent developers to tell stories about life—with humor, melancholy, romance and intimacy, elements video games could always use a little more of.

Sometimes I write things down in notebooks, just because, even though we hardly ever use notebooks. I’m thinking about my story. Like if something happens to me, I want people to know how much I loved them. In a way we are all made visible by how we use space and what we leave behind. I still think a lot about that Kurt Cobain quote, from his journals of the days before he became a rock star, when he was living with a girl who looked after him, his first girlfriend.

“Please read my diary,” he wrote, “look through my things, and figure me out.”

I grew up playing a lot of classic shooting games, like Doom, Quake, Half-Life and Counterstrike. But somewhere along the way I grew weary of the repetition, the point-and-kill gameplay and the hostile online cultures that surrounded them. Call of Duty, Modern Combat, Warface—all of them started to blend together into one forbidding, beige-gray murderscape.

Enter Splatoon: the Wizard of Oz moment where a shooting game finally burst into glorious technicolor, and suddenly everything looked different.

The premise is as simple as it is weird: You're a kid, but you're also a squid, sometimes known as an Inkling. You can play as a girl or a boy, but trust me—the girl looks way cooler. Instead of bullets, your weapon of choice is colored ink; while you can "splat" your foes and send them back to their home bases, your goal isn't actually killing people. Instead, you're trying to paint as much of the level as possible with your team's color, using a wide array of paint guns and projectiles. Of course, the opposing team is trying to do the exact same thing, and that's where things get messy and fun.

When you transform into a squid, the level opens up in a totally different way; you can surf across the level at high speeds anywhere that your team has spilled its particular shade of ink, turning your brushstrokes into a cephalopod fast lane that can shoot you up walls and off ramps. It's a game that feels like a cross between a paintball fight and a waterslide, and is exactly as fun as that sounds.

A retro '80s and '90s vibe reverberates through the game, evoking both the bright, slime-time fun of Double Dare and the bizarro cool of Toejam and Earl. Splatoon seems oddly determined to single-handedly resurrect the word "fresh" from the neon grave of the Nickelodeon era. Rather than just anachronistic jargon, "freshness" is an actual indicator of your level, and the stores where you buy your weapons (and your legitimately stylish clothing) won't hesitate to toss you on the street for not being "fresh enough."

In any other game, this sort of dad-hipness might doom it to condescension, but Splatoon's earnestness and absurdity takes it so far it almost comes back around to being cool again. It's kind of amazing how quickly you can buy into something when it aims so earnestly for wide-eyed silliness; it didn't take long before I found myself yelling things like, "I think I made it to the next level of freshness!" without a hint of irony.

After all, in a game where you buy sneakers from a potentially self-immolated shrimp tempura named Crusty Sean and everyone speaks in an Animal Crossing mumble, why shouldn't your squid kids call things fresh?

At their core, shooting games are about something very simple: making lines intersect with objects. This act takes on a different tenor when every line is a bullet, and every object is a human body. Given enough time, the idea of shooting games as entertainment—and particularly the militaristic and most popular ones—inevitably spirals towards the gravity of an uncomfortable question: should killing people really be fun?

The last shooter I truly loved was Goldeneye 007, which incidentally had a paintball mode. In retrospect, it was an oddly dissonant experience: the weapon you carried still looked like a machine gun, and the nameless enemy agents you mowed down still looked like they were being shot to death, but when your bullets went astray, they speckled the walls like candy-colored bloodspatter.

For the most part, shooting games have grappled with their moral weight either by embracing the thrill of mindless abandon or adopting an awkward self-awareness, attempting to wrap more "sophisticated" stories around the mechanic of killing sprees, and draping the unwieldy mannequin of mass murder with a more flattering (or 'meaningful') silhouette. These trappings tend to result in the narrative version of Goldeneye's paintball mode: a superficial gloss at best.

Although the last decade and a half has produced some novel takes on the genre like Half-Life and Bioshock, by and large the modern shooting game remains locked in a Live, Die, Repeat purgatory where heavily armed, square-jawed white men and indistinct armored figures circle each other in endless, contrived death spirals that always claim to be different, but are always the same.

Shooters make billions of dollars every year; they are very popular. And isn't that always the catch-22 of popular entertainment: the desire to claim that you are delivering something risky and wholly new, while delivering the safeness and sameness you know everyone already likes—the sequel with all the characters you love that will be like nothing you have ever seen before.

It's pretty much always a lie. But Splatoon is the truth.

There's a lack of viciousness in Splatoon that feels especially refreshing, a conscious effort not only to encourage fun, but to discourage animosity. It's a value reflected both in the look and feel of the game, and in its most basic interactions: success is ultimately measured in your color's total surface area, not "kills."

If you're playing online with strangers, you're automatically sorted into two groups of four on four, but after each match the players who continue are sorted again into completely new teams. It's kind of hard to develop a vendetta against anyone when the guy who was kicking your ass suddenly becomes your teammate. And when you do get "splatted," the message that pops on screen doesn't focus on the name of the person who killed you but rather weapon they used to wipe you out. Especially in the early going, my first reaction wasn't "screw you!" but "hey, I want one of those!"

For women interested in online gaming, the horrific abuse that often greets the mere sound of a female voice is its own separate gauntlet, but since Nintendo's Miiverse mercifully forbids voice chat, this is blissfully absent.

Instead, the primary way to interact with your fellow players is by drawing and sharing heavily moderated art and messages in communal spaces, which can range from Spongebob Squarepants and 50 Shades of Grey jokes to to surprisingly poignant messages in a bottle.

Despite all its hyperkinetic, free-for-all action, there's also something unexpectedly soothing about Splatoon, and the coloring-book pleasure you get from filling in its spaces with slick strokes of hot pink and blue and green. The Splat Roller is a special (if controversial) treat, cutting a blunt swath of paint across your path—and leveling anyone in your way like a steam roller.

Each time the opposing team painted their way across our side of the board, I found a quiet delight in following behind them, mopping up their colors with a fresh coat of my own. It felt like wiping dirty footprints off a clean floor. It's the same feeling provoked by those Buzzfeed lists of "oddly satisfying images," where objects combine, divide and unravel in smooth, symmetrical and color-coded ways.

There's a strange pleasure to arranging items in row, to filling a shape with a color, to making an object intersect with a line. There is something inside many of us that loves a perfectly bisected piece of fruit, a perfect headshot. Splatoon zeros in on the satisfaction common to them all: the zen thrill of the moment where order and completion emerges from chaos.

Initially, I focused far more on painting than I did on shooting; I didn't like shooters, after all. Maybe I could play more of a supportive role, I thought—you know, really focus on my art. My pacifism lasted exactly as long as it took me to round a certain corner while holding a semiautomatic paint dispenser, and mow down two of my opponents with quick, surgical strikes. As I saw their little squidly spirits rising from their bodies, I felt a very different sort of satisfaction coursing in my veins.

"I killed them!" I shouted, doing a brief but enthusiastic victory dance on the couch. "They died because of me!"

Like most people, I have a lot of competing or even opposing impulses and interests; there's clearly a part of me that enjoys the competitive side of shooters. It's just that those pleasures are typically buried inside a visually, narratively, aesthetically and personally hostile carapace, and I'm not usually interested in digging quite that deep to extract them.

Splatoon stripped that ugliness away, laid the best parts of shooting games bare, and covered them in a thick coat of strange, brilliant color. In a way, it reminds me a little of Left Behind, a companion piece to the zombie survival game The Last of Us. You spend most of the original game protecting a young girl named Ellie, but in this prequel tale you become her. She hasn't learned how to fight yet, so the skills you developed over the course of The Last of Us take on very different forms.

Before, you threw bricks in order to distract the undead; now, you and your friend walk around an empty, post-apocalyptic mall together and invent a game where you lob bricks at the windows of abandoned cars. Before, you learned how to stealthily sneak up behind your foes and shoot them in the head before they ate your face; now, you use the same skills—and button combinations—to have a water gun fight. It takes the mechanics of brutality, and transforms them into play.

That's how I felt, in Splatoon—like I was genuinely playing inside a shooter, in a way that I never had before.

Nintendo has taken a lot of hits over the last several years for its stubborn insistence on going its own way, especially when it comes to the Wii U platform. But with Splatoon at least, their iconoclasm has given us something truly special: a joyful, undeniably fun shooting game that upends the most alienating aspects of the genre while retaining its core pleasures—a game that looks and feels like a quintessential Nintendo experience, while still offering something original, exciting, and yes, totally fresh.

Being the DJ's son has its perks. My dad always spun old and new school classics for my brother and I, so our music vocabulary was more advanced than our ages. I could recite verses from songs that came out shortly after my birth year of 1980. During times of weakness, I would often seek refuge in the massive boxes of vinyl that my dad had in our unfinished basement.

One thing I love about early hip hop is that while the artists may change, the structure stays the same. There's always a beat, some verses, and a chorus. There are variations on this, of course, but the structure of a hip hop song is something I internalized from childhood. It gave me a sense of comfort whenever I heard a new song, and added to the element of surprise when an artist could still be creative within the confines of that structure.

During the late 80s to the early 90s, my favorite period of hip hop, there were plenty of artists innovating against traditional strutures. Rakim helped transition hip hop from the Run-DMC era, and established the sound of a modern MC. But there were other, weirder acts—Kool Keith and Ced Gee of Ultramagnetic MCs introduced an off-beat rap style that didn’t seem like it should work, but it did! Public Enemy combined Chuck D’s forceful delivery with Flavor Flav’s nonsense. Das EFX threw in all kinds of stutters and -iggity’s to the end of their rhymes. And the Kool Genius of Rap stuffed multiple instances of rhyming words in places that no one else could, a tactic that was later picked up by Big Pun and Eminem.

Despite all of that, the template stays the same: beats, verses, and choruses. The only thing that changed was how the beats were produced, the delivery and rhyme schemes within the verses, and the catchiness of the chorus. I used to write my favorite rhymes in a notebook so I could memorize them. Pretty soon, I started writing my own rhymes in my black and white composition book. I would take a blank sheet of paper and write out a template. I’d split the page into four sections, and title each section as below:

Verse 1

Chorus

Verse 2

Verse 3

I only had one section for the chorus, because I knew it would be repeated after verse 2 and 3. “Why put three different sections for the chorus if it’s the same each time?” I thought. “I can just place it once, and then reference it at the end of the second and third verse”. Most importantly, I thought “If I ever need to change the chorus, I only need to change it in one place”.

This is when I was a pre-teen. I didn’t own a computer until I got to college, but I was already learning the basic structure behind putting together a program.

When I became a code monkey in my college programming courses, I was able to use this to my advantage: The artist may change, by the structure stays the same. I would write out my programs the same way I wrote out my rhymes—start with the template,then fill in the details. Here is my old notebook, but written in terms of programming functions, which ends in parentheses():

Verse(1);

Chorus();

Verse(2);

Chorus();

Verse(3);

Chorus();

There are only a few small differences between this code and my notebook from the early 90s. There is a section for each verse—Verse(1), Verse(2), Verse(3)—and a section for the chorus. The actual contents of each verse and chorus are defined later in the program.

For example, le's look at the Chorus function.

Chorus() {

“ ………… Chorus text ………… “

}

Pretty simple, right? Every time I call the Chorus() function, it returns the text for the chorus. Just like in my old notebook, the actual text of the chorus is only stored in one place: this function. Even though I call the Chorus() function three times in the main song template, I only have to make changes in one place if I want to update the text. Go programming!

The Verse function is a little more complicated, because this function is used to represent all three verses. Remember that number inside of parentheses - Verse(1), Verse(2), Verse(3)? That number determines which verse is returned. Let’s look inside of the function:

Verse (int VerseNumber) {

if VerseNumber = 1, “ ………… Verse 1 text ………… “

if VerseNumber = 2, “ ………… Verse 2 text ………… “

if VerseNumber = 3, “ ………… Verse 3 text ………… “

}

If I pass a 1 into the Verses function, I get the text for the first verse. Same with 2 and 3. I can add as many verses as I want or change them around—this is the only place that I have to update. The main song template hides these details.

The beauty of this setup is that I can rearrange the order of the verses and hooks without rewriting any of the actual text. For example, if a song begins within a chorus, has a verse, and then an ending chorus, the main song template would look like this:

Chorus();

Verse(1);

Chorus();

After I graduated college, I dabbled in some independent video game development work, and my pre-teen rhyme-writing lessons came into play. The artists may change, but the template stays the same. There are many elements that are common to all games.

GameInitialize(); → Load game into memory, set the frame rate

GameStart(); → Set initial game settings

GamePaint(); → Paint the game’s graphics onto the screen

GameCycle(); → Manage the gameplay logic during one cycle (defined by the frame rate). This can be everything from changing the direction of a Tetris piece to updating the damage or health of enemies on a screen.

GamePause(); → Pause the game

GameUnPause(); → Unpause the game

GameEnd(); → Show game ending screen, clean game from memory

Each game that I worked on defined the specifics of each function different, but they all shared this general structure. And it goes back to the notebook.

To all my hip hop heads, keep studying songs and writing your own rhymes. You never know where it can lead. The world is yours!

One of the most playful design choices I've ever encountered is in a book called The Z Was Zapped by Chris Van Allsburg. It's an alphabet book—or, as the subtitle has it, A Play in Twenty-Six Acts.

Every other page of The Z Was Zapped features a gorgeous charcoal drawing, almost photographic in attention to lighting and texture, of something terrible happening to one of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. The first depicts a chunky Letter A standing on a curtained stage, sporting its serifs quite handsomely as a hail of fat stones cascade down on it from above. The scene will not end well for our Letter A.

Turn the page and you'll find the caption that goes with the illustration: "The A was in an Avalanche." Small black letters on an otherwise blank white page, like some stiff-nosed butler reporting the death of another heir to your great-aunt's fortune. And on the next page, an illustration of a letter B being eviscerated by a toothy dog-mouth.

It's this placement of the text accompanying each illustration that makes the book playful. Because you have to turn the page in order to read the caption, you can't help looking at each picture and trying to guess which letter-appropriate act of violence is being depicted. I showed the book to my partner and they started guessing without even being prompted. "The B was Bitten." "The D was... Drowned?" "The N... Oh my god." (The letter N has about a hundred metal nails sticking out of it.)

Van Allsburg is known best for the book Jumanji, which is about a board game that takes over the house of the two children who play it.That's really very typical of games these days— games are obsessed with control. A digital version of The Z Was Zapped wouldn't let you turn the page until you'd entered the correct word. When you got it wrong, it would blarrrt at you and make you do it over again. Maybe there'd be an "in-app purchase" that would let you see the total number of letters in the word.

What I like about The Z Was Zapped is that, as a humble picture book, it doesn't provide any explicit rules, nor does it make any effort to enforce a guessing game. And yet the reader can't help but engage with the book in a playful way. The trick of The Z is Zapped, and most good children's books, is to invite play, not to try and enforce or legislate it.

Okay, but what do I mean when I use "play" as a noun? My friend Miguel Sicart wrote an entire book on this subject: In Play Matters, he makes statements like "Play is...an activity in tension between creation and destruction." Play is carnivalesque, in that it up-ends the accepted social order. Play is disruptive because it changes the contexts of things. I wouldn't argue with any of these statements, but my definition is a little simpler: Above all else, play is transformative.

Nick Bantock's The Egyptian Jukebox, via Pamela Velner

A necessary part of transformation is collaboration. When my partner spontaneously transformed The Z Was Zapped into a series of visual riddles, they were working in collaboration with Van Allsburg's book, rather than just consuming a piece of media. Like the stages on which Van Allsburg's letters are splattered by rocks, any piece of media—a children's book or digital game or painstakingly detailed tabletop train simulation - is only a theater in which play is performed. The media does not provide the play itself.

This is the fundamental thing most game designers get wrong. Between tabletop gaming's celebritizing of designers and digital games' ability to function as increasingly perfect score-keepers, we're becoming obsessed with rules. Game designers have become pedant legislators, trying to make sure players are playing our games the right way. We've become obsessed with controlling play.

I can usually gauge whether I'll like a game by how thick the rulebook is. It's an indicator of whether I should expect to be playing with my friends or just playing out the rules. We've started thinking of players not as collaborators but as just a kind of lubrication for the systems we design—essentially passive, even though they may be hitting buttons and pushing joysticks.

The formalist approach to design reveres the game as a kind of mathematical artifact, pure in form and precise in function: A neat matrix of abstract systems in which comfortingly quantifiable values bounce off one another in rational ways. Only in numbers are there truth, formalism tell us. All else lies.

As a marginalized person in a field where I am constantly reminded of my difference, forced to be aware of how my body and identity shape the ways I interact with my peers and with games, I can't think of anything more alienating to me than an e-sport in which depersonalized squares shunt balls at each other.

Games do not exist in a vacuum, as much as we might like to find beauty in the perfection of pure design. It has become clear to me that the lumpy, messy thing we try to smooth out in our iterative design is often our humanity. I recently updated my witch fashion design game, Be Witching, to remove a system I'd implemented in the original release. In the beginning, the aesthetics the players were designing for were randomly-generated. Flip over a couple of cards and you'd have an earthy, animal-themed aesthetic. The cards would even generate a cute name! House Treecat. It was like the civilizations in Small World! How clever! I felt so proud of it.

These "House cards" (representing different ancestral Houses of magic players represented at the Witch Ball) ended up being a source of confusion and cognitive dissonance for players. You picked a House, but you weren't supposed to design for that House's aesthetic—everyone else was. Somehow everyone else was supposed to design an outfit that was simultaneously earthy and animal-themed as well as curvy and fiery and monochromatic and regal.

At every step of designing this game, I've started with something needlessly overdesigned, and simplified it to something that worked much better. The first prototype of the game that I playtested had a complicated simultaneous bidding system. It was terrible. But the temptation is always of falling so in love with the cleverness of your own design that you're unable to see it doesn't inspire meaningful play.

I replaced the House system with index cards. Players write their own awards on them: "Most likely to succeed," "Most fabulous additional appendage," or (in the last playtest session) "Puppies!!!!!!" Later, each player gives out her award to the player most deserving. It worked way better: Players are interacting with each other by creating prompts for other players to design around rather than fiddling with a self-important system.

I've been slowly unlearning design, restraining my instincts to shout at players, "Look! Look how clever this is! No, do it this way!" And I get why the instinct to control the player's experience, to make sure they're playing the right way, is a powerful one, especially in (for example) a super-competitive mobile market.

But I quit Simogo's acclaimed, puzzlebook-inspired Device 6 after two days when I couldn't be bothered to figure out the password to pass level three. Yet I owned Nick Bantock's physical puzzlebook, The Egyptian Jukebox for at least six months before I finally solved its central riddle. And it was amazing: I reread its stories, pored over its pictures many times before discovering the secrets hidden in them, solving the book in a single long evening of note-taking and creative breakthroughs.

(Not to pick on Simogo, though, I really liked their more open-ended The Sailor's Dream, which never requires you to stop and deduce a password from diagrams of flowers.)

Guess which of the above kinds of play made me feel like my time was being wasted? It's the one where the game was hovering over me, saying "Look at this. Okay, now solve this puzzle. Good, now read this. Solve this puzzle. Wrong, do it over." Meanwhile, I can play Offworld favorite Metamorphabet for hours, endlessly setting that robot R on its back and watching as it rights itself and starts running again, and feel like i'm spending my time meaningfully.

If there's something for game designers to take away from less rules-obsessed media like The Z Was Zapped or The Egyptian Jukebox—or even more recent children's books like Ella Bailey's No Such Thing, where a little girl tries to disprove the existence of ghosts while all along the reader spots ghosts hidden on every single page—it's this: stop getting in the way of play. And let players play, already.

Small games can be vital tools to capture public attention, highlight issues in accessible ways, and even help motivate people to act. Real Baku 2015, by designer and academic Pippin Barr, is a new, timely and beautifully-simple addition to this canon.

The first European Games kicks off today in Baku, Azerbaijan. But according to the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), the games are a public relations maneuver designed to help the country's president, Ilham Aliyev, manage his image and smooth over human rights abuses in the country.

FIDH aims to protest the unlawful detention of activists, journalists and other political dissidents in Azerbaijan by the government under Aliyev. In a recent joint statement, members of the European Parliament have already called for the release of these political prisoners, and urged people not to participate in or support the European Games while the unlawful detentions stand.

Azerbaijanis protest the European Games in March 2015. Image via Index on Censorship.

According to the Human Rights Watch World Report 2015, the recent year has seen a "dramatic deterioration in [an] already poor rights record" for Azerbaijan:

The Azerbaijani government escalated repression against its critics, marking a dramatic deterioration in its already poor rights record. The authorities convicted or imprisoned at least 33 human rights defenders, political and civil activists, journalists, and bloggers on politically motivated charges, prompting others to flee the country or go into hiding. Authorities froze the bank accounts of independent civic groups and their leaders, impeded their work by refusing to register foreign grants, and imposed foreign travel bans on some. Many of those detained complained of ill-treatment in police custody. Many organizations, including several leading rights groups, were forced to cease activities.

FIDH partnered with Paris-based PR firm Agence Babel—which worked for free—to develop and commission a simple game concept the orgs hoped would spread awareness about the troubled environment around the European Games and the situation for political prisoners. These types of games, sometimes called newsgames, rely on the idea that inviting people to play with systems has the potential to offer them a better understanding of events than simple reading. It's also thought that games can invite or encourage attention from people who wouldn't normally tune in to world news or social issues.

Pippin Barr, whose minimalist works often use simple structures to examine attitudes about art and pop culture, was chosen to develop Real Baku 2015. You can play the game for free in a web browser, and it takes just a few seconds to try once.

You decide whether you're playing as a lawyer, a journalist or an activist, and against the bleak and simple palette, you select a competitive sporting event you'd like to perform. You must then attempt it inside a jail cell. The message is instantaneous and clear: to a political prisoner, these games are an insult.

The mode of input is delightfully efficient, and requires no special skills: You're given 10 seconds to click your mouse as rapidly as you can, or sometimes, like when doing a "high jump" on your prison bed, to click and hold. The game interfaces, timing you and counting your meager "points", highlights the inevitable futility of your performance. For example, if you choose to compete in "swimming" you'll be splashing in your jail cell sink, the game always chortling DISTANCE: 0.0 at you no matter how frantically you click. Choose to compete in "boxing", and watch the game count up all your punches that never land.

As it often is, Barr's work here is an example of how much games can do with quite little, offering effective communication tools and rich existential frameworks with just a tiny web window and a button press. When finished, the game also acts as a portal to social media sharing on the issue, or to FIDH's digital appeal.

Play the game and share it with someone you know. As the game industry turns the majority of its attention toward the next week's E3 consumer announcements festival, it's nice to remember the full breadth of what our medium is good for. And if you're interested in newsgames, definitely read this in-depth piece by Simon Parkin at the Guardian about 1000 Days of Syria, an interactive fiction game about the Syrian Uprising.

I grew up in an American Indian household. Almost every weekend, my mom would take me out to see an elder. A fidgety, impatient child, I would ask when we were leaving. "Mom, I want to play Smash Bros. with my friends," I'd say, but the response was always the same.

"We're on Indian time out here. Everything happens when it needs to. We'll leave when it's time."

As an adult, I've had a lot of trouble explaining the concept of Indian time to others. It's not hard to understand why. Modern society would crumble if it treated airline schedules or surgeries with the same nonchalant attitude as a traditional Native ceremony. But those values are also an important part of the Native perspective. They're also why I've seen so many attempts to incorporate Native influences into games fail.

Ehdrigohr is nothing like those haphazard fumblings. Designed over the course of several years by black, American Indian game designer Allen Turner, Ehdrigohr filters Dungeons and Dragons-style roleplaying experiences through a distinctly Native cultural lens rather than a European one.

"Ultimately it came down to wanting [a game] that spoke to me, where I could see myself and my friends as characters or heroes, and feel like they belong," says Turner. Although he's a big fan of table-top roleplaying games, he made Ehdrigohr precisely because he couldn’t find anything that integrated Native culture into its play and treated Natives as equals.Dungeons and Dragons may have some Indian-inspired tribes in its expansions, but they are always treated as different or inferior. Indigenous weapons do less inherently damage than an equivalent weapon wielded by a dwarf or elf, not to mention the gross depiction of Natives using primitive clubs. In all cases, we're treated as intrinsically lesser.

If a game made by non-Natives—however well-meaning—attempted to broach the topic of Indian time, it’s very likely that they’d end up with something that leaned on demeaning or offensive stereotypes. There’s a deftness and depth of context needed to discuss the idea without also inadvertently suggesting that Natives are lazy or irresponsible.

To an outsider, Indian time might sound like an excuse for laziness, but it's the furthest thing from it. A more accurate description would be that it represents a different set of priorities. When you're preparing for a ceremony, for example, you'll often need to gather certain herbs or cut down a specific tree. If you can't find them, you can't find them. Try again tomorrow. Clearly the creator and the spirits weren't with you. It's not a bad thing, it's just a collective understanding that things happen when they need to. People still work just as hard, just on unusual and unpredictable schedules.

Ehdrigohr is the first game I’ve ever played that felt like it understood that, just like it understands so many things about Native culture.

Ehdrigohr starts from the base assumption that there are no colonizers. There are also no dwarves, orcs, elves, or gnomes. It's a world populated by nine nations of humans, inspired primarily by Native cultures and mythologies. They've learned to coexist with spirits and natural forces around them, but must also contend with monstrous creatures called "Shivers" that emerge at night from dark places inside the Earth. It's a black-and-white mythos that reflects many of the values inherent in Native culture—at least as I’ve experienced it.

It’s an incredibly broad and flexible game, one where you can create almost any character imaginable, or even choose to play without any combat at all. You won't need a vast array of multifaceted dice in order to play, and where Dungeons and Dragons has very exact and specific rules about how far you can move each turn or how many items your character can carry, Ehdrigohr lets you do whatever seems reasonable. Like Indian time, it sounds like a shortcut or a recipe for disaster, but in practice it allows people get deeper into playing their roles—to focus on the experiences in front of them, rather than externally imposed systems.

A few nights ago, I played Ehdrigohr with some non-Native friends. I created a simple challenge, where their characters needed to leave the safety of their village and gather materials to perform a ritual that herald the birth of a special child, one with a strong connection to the creator. The village had been struggling to survive for some time, and it was believed that this child could help ward off bad fortune for years to come. The story I gave them was partly inspired by real events; the herbs I told them to gather were the same plants that my elders gave me as medicine when I was a child.

My friends created their own characters, and infused them with rich, interesting back stories. They included a cook whose stories entertained the tribe during long, cold winter nights, a two-spirit sex worker, and a bird-keeper who tended to the massive crows that carried messages and supplies to neighboring villages. They used no weapons—no bows or swords, no axes or staves. Instead, they were valued for their ability to connect with others and build emotional and spiritual bridges. They could use empathy and prayer to connect to ease the suffering of others, spreading peace and serenity. These weren't heroes, they were just ordinary people who played important roles in their community.

Rather than defining power exclusively in physical terms, Ehdrigohr treats emotional and spiritual strength as an equally important skillset. On top of the standard measurements of physical health, players have mental and social "health bars." So if you’re trying to help someone through their emotional pain and you’re not in a good place yourself, you risk taking on too much and sending your own character spiraling into depression. Community bonds are important as well; if you alienated part of the tribe during the previous session, you'll take social damage—which hinders your ability to maintain relationships—and you'll probably have to sacrifice any traits that relied on those connections.

Robert Altbauer

Where Dungeons and Dragons lends itself to big, bombastic moments of intense combat, Ehdrigohr is far more subtle. At one point in the game, my players encountered a river they wanted to cross, which was chest-deep with a rapid current. Instead of looking for a bridge—the kneejerk but frankly boring solution in a typical roleplaying campaign—one of the players sat down to pray. He learned that the land had been cursed by a man that died at the hand of his friend. The player was able to reach out to the spirit, connect with it, and ease its suffering, all without ever rolling a die.

There is violence and conflict in Ehdrigohr, but only in the sense that human beings are victims of a violent world. The game as a whole is far more focused on finding exciting challenges and hashing out interesting solutions, and there’s an inherent beauty in how people persevere peacefully in spite of the struggles they face.

Later, the players in faced off against a "Shiver," a shadowy monster that can't be killed by a sword. Instead of attacking their bodies, it attacked their minds, trying to capitalize on their insecurities and manipulate them into giving up. The mental strain took its toll, but they were able to repel and destroy it through sheer strength of will. In over a decade of playing roleplaying games, I've never had an experience quite like that.

Most fantasy worlds like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings have obvious villains, but the tension and conflict in Ehdrigohr stems from interactions with the natural world, and why it’s important to be mindful of its many dangers. The gods are benevolent but their power is limited, and monsters and evil spirits abound. It’s rare to see the world itself as the sole threat, and it’s one of many features that gives Ehdrigohr its unique feel.

The game uses a roleplaying system—known as "Fate Core"—that inextricably links roleplaying and combat; you're awarded "fate points" based on how you interact with your character's personality and backstory, and solve problems in ways that make sense for them individually. For example, I awarded one point to the bird keeper in my campaign when she let the other characters ride the giant crows that were already trained, while risked her life to tame a wild one.

You can spend those points to change small things about your environment, like lighting a desperately needed fire if you don't have a match. It's not all-powerful or a panacea to every problem, but it's enough to give you a nudge right when you need it. Like Indian time, it allows players succeed when they need to, and not a moment before.

One of the more disconcerting and pernicious aspects of being Native in the 21st century is the tacit understanding that your culture is dying, and dying quickly. It's no secret that Native culture has been fading, or that Indigenous people throughout the world have had their culture beaten out of them and endured centuries of genocide.

Because of that history, the parallels between the latter day Native experience and the refreshing brand of personal storytelling in Ehdrigohr feels particularly vital and valuable. Ehdrigohr empowers Natives, or at least it empowered me. I can’t help but see Indigenous influences seeping out of every page of the game’s rule book, from the way you interact with the world to the values and experiences it reflects.

Unlike most Dungeons and Dragons games, your experience isn't controlled as tightly or exclusively by the dungeon master who crafts the world around you. Instead, players and the dungeon master work cooperatively, all of them taking turns as storyteller and audience. Playing it with friends reminded me of the many nights I spent as a child listening to my elders tell stories by firelight. Often they'd ask for my input about what would happen next in the story. If they liked my suggestion, they'd even include it in to future retellings.

Western storytelling is dominated by the tyranny of the narrator, but the oral traditions of Native culture work very differently. They're designed to tell you something about the world that you may need to survive, and so the central message is the most important piece of the tale. Ancillary details can be added or dropped based on how entertaining and memorable it makes the tale as a whole. Ehdrigohr poignantly facilitates that by blending gaming and Native storytelling traditions in powerful ways.

As an adult, I’ve come to understand the importance of sharing those traditions and values, not only with other Natives but with my non-Native friends. Ehdrigohr gave me a way to teach those friends more about my culture in a way that mirrored its traditions, and allowed us to engage with a story that we'd all woven together.

Ehdrigohr is already more to me than just a fun game; it's a chance to use a game in the same way that storytellers used the fables that inspired it—to teach, to connect, and to love.

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert once wrote that he would rather take up knitting than review video games—as though the two were mutually exclusive. Lately, it seems like that couldn't be further from the truth.

At E3 this week, Electronic Arts unveiled a lovely game called Unravel, where you play as a tiny yarn character that slowly unravels as it moves through the level. Although that sounds a little like a metaphor for the slow but inexorable march that we are all taking towards death, in Unravel this thread is a versatile tool you can be use as a climbing rope, grappling hook, trampoline, fishing line, and whatever else the game can imagine. Enjoy the earnest trailer that produced many wistful sighs and misty eyes:

There have been more than a few yarn-based video games over the last several years, from the Little Big Planet series (which stars a knit doll called Sackboy) to the recent rash of Nintendo games like Kirby's Epic Yarn and the upcoming Yoshi's Wooly World. And while this uptick in might be partly attributable to the more recent popularity of amigurumi, yarn and knitting has made their way into video games since the very beginning. Let's take a look back.

The Nintendo Knitting Machine

This is surely one of the greatest gaming artifacts of the 1980s: a magazine advertisement for a device that would allow you to knit sweaters with your Nintendo Entertainment System. In it, Nintendo claims that video game knitting is "just one more example of the innovative thinking that keeps Nintendo on the cutting edge of video technology," noting that no other game systems—not one!—have knitting peripherals. This is indeed true. Ultimately, the Nintendo Knitting machine was so unique that it was never actually manufactured.

Super Mario Sweater

The Nintendo Knitting Machine should not be confused with I Am a Teacher: Super Mario Sweater, a game designed for a Japan-only '80s console called the Famicom Disk System. It allowed players to create pixel art patterns for sweaters, although you still had to knit them by hand.

Loom

Created by LucasFilm Games and Brian Moriarty back in 1990, Loom was one of the great works of the early adventure game era—and it revolved entirely around weaving. Rather than a text parser or a traditional inventory system, you solved puzzles by playing magical four-note tunes that weave "subtle patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality." There's a giant and all-powerful loom at the heart of it all, and at one point it tears apart the world and everyone turns into swans and flies into space. It's weird as hell, and I love it.

Bubsy

If you're under the age of 20 you may or may not remember Bubsy, but he was a relentlessly hip '90s bobcat with an attitude, and he fucking loved yarn. It was a pretty obvious ripoff of Sonic the Hedgehog, and while none of the Bubsy games make what I would call "sense," the first one is by far the weirdest. Titled Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, its story revolved around aliens called "Woolies" invading Earth to steal all of our yarn. You spend the entire game killing aliens and taking their yarn. This is the game.

Harvest Moon

There are a lot of Harvest Moon titles, but in most of these farm simulation games, you eventually learn to spin wool into yarn balls. You can use these balls to make cloth, sell them or give them as gifts. It's honestly not that exciting [Ed's note: WTF LAURA YES IT IS], although it did once lead to this thread on a message board:

Knitting Mania

Imagine Guitar Hero, but without any music, and with knitting. This 2009 Canadian iPhone game was pretty terrible by all accounts, but the backstory behind it is so strange that it almost makes me want to play it. Somehow, it was part of a promotional campaign for milk that inexplicably culminated in a knitting rhythm game where you try to become a superhero:

The game is part of a promotional website called Reconfortant.com (‘comforting’), which opens with the shot of an older lady drinking milk while knitting. As the shot widens, you see a knitted cape on a dressmaking dummy. The woman pauses to try on the fingerless gloves she is knitting, and then strikes a superhero pose. The game continues the theme by challenging viewers to ‘knit’ – Guitar Hero-style – a mysterious object that reveals itself to be a purple superhero mask. The creative theme, said Duffar, is that while milk is comforting (like knitting) it also has the ability to power a secret superhero lifestyle.

The initial press release described Knitting Mania as a "thrilling game."

KNiiTTiiNG

Back in the days of the original Wii, artist Rachel Beth Egenhoefer and engineer Kyle E. Jennings created KNiiTTiiNG, an unofficial game that used the movements of the Wiimote and nunchuck to simulate—and learn—how to knit. Although it seems like a fun experiment, it's hard not to wonder: wouldn't it be easier to just learn how to knit?

Broken Age

In this Double Fine adventure game, you find yourself aboard the Bossa Nostra, a spaceship not only populated by sentient Yarn Pals, but guided by the Space Weaver, a robot that uses knitting patterns to navigate through space. At one point, you acquire a crochet hook and use it to hack the weave so that you end up at an incredibly dangerous place. This is so traumatizing for the Space Weaver that you break his mind.

Yarn Amiibo

I can just barely handle how adorable these yarn-themed Amiibo are; they come very close indeed to that threshold where something is so cute that your brain freaks out and makes you want to bite it. The figurines tie in with the upcoming Yoshi's Wooly World, in which the company that almost gave the world a knitting peripheral finally takes the Mario franchise full amigurumi. It seems like yet another charming, utterly inoffensive game from Nintendo, which means of course that somewhere someone is yelling about it on a message board for hundreds of posts.

Although knitting is often treated as the exclusive province of girls and grannies, it's a hands-on hobby that requires patience, the ability to understand patterns, and a willingness to engage in highly repetitive tasks—skills that should be intimately familiar to most gamers. If you'd like to learn how to knit there are plenty of tutorials on the web, as well as blogs that sit squarely at the intersection of yarn and games.

The annual video game onslaught of E3 is finally over, and as expected, it served up plenty of big-budget sequels, like Halo 5, Fallout 4, Dishonored 2, Uncharted 4, and of course, the Final Fantasy VII remake that made everyone lose their collective minds.

But a lot of other cool things happened at E3, like yarn, robot dinosaurs, and a giant, awesome dog, not to mention a comparatively remarkable number of titles with female protagonists. Join me now on a whirlwind tour of all the exciting new games that weren't popular franchise names followed by numbers!

The moment I saw the beginning of The Last Guardian trailer I said aloud, "oh man, please let this entire game be about this giant dog." Great news: it is. People have been waiting for The Last Guardian since 2007, largely because it's the newest title from Fumito Ueda, the guy who made super beloved puzzle-ish action games like Ico and Shadow of Colossus. You play as a young boy who befriends a giant dog-bird and has to help guide him across a lot of precarious platforms, and if the trailer is any indication it will simultaneously trigger both your "oh god, don't kill the dog!" and "oh god, don't kill the kid!" anxieties near constantly.

Where: PlayStation 4

When: 2016

The surprise delight of E3 was surely Unravel, where you play as a tiny red yarn character named Yarny who soars, swing and climbs through charming landscapes, all the while warming your heart like a delicious Hot Pocket. His adventures will surely be a momentous entry in the yarn history of video games.

Where: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

When: TBA

The team that brought you Gone Home heads into orbit next year with their sophomore game. This time instead of exploring a mysteriously empty family home, you're exploring a mysteriously empty lunar transfer station named Tacoma, suspended in space 200,000 miles from Earth. I also hear that the latest newsletter from the Fullbright team about discusses the benefits of injecting astronauts with bear DNA, which earned it an immediate sign-up.

Where: PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One

When: 2016

Superhypercube

If you've ever seen the Japanese game show Hole in the Wall, Superhypercube is like that, but in virtual reality and with blocks. The video game collective Kokoromi has been working on this puzzle game for a long time—so long, in fact, that virtual reality became plausible and they were able to abandon their red/blue 3D glasses effects for the immerse VR of the upcoming Project Morpheus headset. The developers say its aesthetics are inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and Xanadu; they have my attention.

Where: Project Morpheus

When: Whenever Project Morpheus launches in 2016

Dystopian futures are a dime a dozen these days, but what about a dystopian future where you fight robot dinosaurs? In this post-apocalyptic world, humans have lost all of the technology we take for granted, and are hunting once again with bows and arrows. The people of yesteryear (read: us) are known as "the Old Ones," an advanced civilization lost to a mysterious darkness... and then overtaken by robot dinosaurs. Listen, it's not important why. It's important that robot dinosaurs. Watch the trailer, and see if you don't want to keep playing when it finishes. Bonus points to Sony for going the extra mile and using a female protagonist, even though it seemed risky to them.

Where: PlayStation 4

When: 2016

This is a game about building your dreams, "whether they’re games, art, films, music or anything in-between and beyond." According to the trailer, your dreams can include: the polar bears from those Coca-Cola commercials, hover bike battles, teddy bears who kill zombies, and polar bears who play piano. That's... most of what we know at this point. Despite the scant details, it's worth keeping an eye on if only because it's coming from Media Molecule, the developer that brought us the weird and wonderful Tearaway and Littlebigplanet.

Where: PlayStation 4

When: TBA

The idea behind No Man's Sky is hard to resist: a procedurally-generated universe, full of 18 quintillion possible planets, all for you to explore. You can descend to the surface of the the worlds you find, learn about their diverse flora and fauna, engage in space battles, and gather resources to trade for better ships. While the trailer above is the best first look at the game, the E3 presentation really drove home just how mind-blowingly large this game is going to be.

Where: PlayStation 4, and eventually PC

When: TBA

The trailer for ReCore opens on a woman wandering through a desert and fighting with her mechanical dog pal. While that's a game I'd totally play, it's a little more complicated because spoiler alert: the dog dies. But also it doesn't; the energy core in the robodog remains intact, and when the woman inserts it into a humanoid robot body, it immediately comes to life, ready to fight alongside her again.

We're told that our protagonist—one of the last humans on Earth—will "forge friendships with a courageous group of robot companions, each with unique abilities and powers," I'm guessing by transferring the core from body to body. The big name attached to this one is Keiji Inafune, best known for his work on another series that often featured a helpful robot dog: Mega Man.

Where: Xbox One

When: 2016

Continuing the pet theme, Beyond Eyes is about a 10-year-old girl named Rae who sets out to find her lost cat, Nani. The twist is that Rae is blind, and the game asks you to move through the world in a very unusual way, using memories, touch, sound and smell as your primary means of navigation.

Where: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Windows, Mac and Linux

When: Summer 2015

Big ups to Cuphead for daring to look like absolutely nothing else in games right now; partly inspired by both the work of legendary animator Max Fleischer (and a pre-WWII Japanese animated propaganda film), this run-and-gun game about a cupheaded man repaying a debt to the devil looks every bit like a cartoon ripped out of the 1930s.

Where: Xbox One and PC

When: 2016

While this might be a debatable entry on this list, I don't think you can really count Fallout Shelter as a sequel; that would be Fallout 4, which also got announced at E3. Rather than the roleplaying action games we're accustomed to from the Fallout franchise, however, Fallout Shelter is a mobile game where you manage the lives of all the little people crammed into an underground vault after the apocalypse. It is available for download right now and also sort of hilarious, although if you're the sort of person who used to feel bad killing Sims, some guilt may be unavoidable. Android users can expect their own version of the game in a couple of months.

Where: iOS

When: NOW!

Edit: I forgot Firewatch, an omission so unfortunate that I had to come back and add it in. This first-person mystery game is set during 1989 in the isolated wilderness of Wyoming, and you're a volunteer fire lookout whose job is to make sure the woods don't go up in smoke. Your lifeline to the rest of the world is a woman on the other end of a walkie-talkie, a connection that grows more and more important when several women go missing, the communication lines get cut, and everything starts to get very, very weird. If the taste you get from the trailer makes you want more, you can see 17 minutes of gameplay here.

Where: PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, and Linux

When: TBA

Are non-white characters in fantasy games less "realistic" than dragons? Plenty of video game fans seem to think so.

In a recent opinion piece at Polygon, Tauriq Moosa reignited the discussion of diversity in video games with an opinion piece that questioned both the absence of non-white characters in the fantasy roleplaying game Witcher 3, and the objections of white players whose characters were randomly assigned a race in the survival game Rust.

'You see the problem. When white gamers are forced to play people not of their race, it's "forced politics"; when I'm forced into the same scenario, it's business as usual. When you complain, you're making a fuss and being political. The argument is a bit scary when you break it down: The only way games can avoid politics in this situation is to pretend that people of color don't exist.

The response from detractors was swift and vocal. They argued that adding non-white people to games in which they “don’t belong” (a common refrain for period fantasy) is pandering or illogical and would somehow taint, misrepresent or destroy these worlds. Beneath the auspices of concern for accuracy, they’re arguing that these are white worlds and can only function as long as they remain that way. And white worlds demand white heroes.

The real magic power of white heroes is that they can be anything without scrutiny—kings, detectives, space marines, assassins, witchers—while non-white heroes alone must pass the test of “historical accuracy.” Are they believably representative of the time period that influences the game’s setting? Do they need to be, seven centuries later? Are black nobles and paladins really too fantastical to exist, even in worlds of sorcery, wizards and unicorns?

Realism

A bit of white history: In the United States, literacy tests were tests administered to prospective voters, usually African Americans and poor whites. These tests feigned measuring “literacy" but had the true purpose of disenfranchising Blacks and poor whites by preventing them from voting. They were filtering mechanisms created to prevent representation.

In games and other media, “historical accuracy” allows opponents of diversified period fantasy to maintain an edifice of neutrality (“that’s just the way it was”) and ignore the fact that all representation is political. It uses the veneer of objectivity to mask its true function of filtering out non-white participants. In effect, "historical accuracy" is the literacy test of fiction.

Witcher 3 defenders argue that dismissing the game as merely “white” ignores others cultural influences crucial to the game’s development. At Gamasutra, Dave Bleja writes that Moosa and writers with similar criticisms “missed the cultural uniqueness of The Witcher 3,” as its mythos is uniquely Polish, setting it apart from the countless Ye Olde RPG games set in a more homogenized “Europe." Bleja is right on one point: assuming a ‘macro’ view of whiteness elides the already overlooked) differences within and between varying ethnicities that read as “white,” be they Polish, Austrian, or Norwegian.

But in an industry that commodifies whiteness, that itself erases cultures as it invents a white monolith, even exploring minoritized whiteness contributes to its overrepresentation in gaming. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be explored, just that it should be explored critically.

Players demanding white heroes under the guise of “historical accuracy” seems especially odd for video game series like Witcher and Dragon Age, which tackle issues of bigotry, albeit metaphorically, through oppressed classes of fantasy beings like elves, witches and dwarves.

Witcher 3, for example, features an exceptionally sharp moment of reflection on race, prejudice and power. As your protagonist Geralt explores the fictional province of Novigrad, you learn that witch hunters from a cult called the Eternal Fire are persecuting mages and driving them underground. Geralt helps them to escape, but when he returns later in the game, he learns that the Eternal Fire has begun to burn non-humans at the stake in place of mages, leaving their charred remains outside the city’s gates.

As Geralt narrates, “Hatred and prejudice will never be eradicated. And witch hunts will never be about witches. To have a scapegoat—that’s the key. Humans always fear the alien, the odd. Once the mages had left Novigrad, folk turned their anger against the other races and as they have for ages, branded their neighbors their greatest foes.”

Geralt’s observation sounds like a nod to the 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics” authored by Pulitzer-winning scholar Richard Hofstadetr. Analyzing the rightwing Goldwater movement of the 1960’s, Hofstadter remarked on “how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority,” arguing that governmental and religious organizations eternally invent villains—gays, immigrants, feminists, Muslims (counterparts to the metaphorical mages and elves)—to maintain a climate of paranoia that they capitalize on for political leverage and control of the populace.

So how is it that a game fully aware of how ethnic and religious prejudices are inventions used to control us can produce such myopic and prejudiced arguments? Why are the metaphors lost on players? Because it positions the protagonist and thus the player as a "neutral observer," a perspective that falsifies the dynamics of oppression.

From the outset, Geralt has no specific allegiance to either humans or non-humans and remains an observer until finally forced to act. So while there are many clear real-world parallels for both oppressors and the oppressed, Geralt (and thus the player) spends most of the game engaging with prejudice from a position of comfortable neutrality.

Nor is Witcher 3 the only game to engage in this sort of convenient remove. In Bioshock Infinite, a shooting game set in a deeply racist floating city called Columbia, the two main characters always remain isolated from the game's racial atrocities—Booker by his stoicism, and Elizabeth by her naiveté. They observe the horrible things that occur, and occasionally react to them, but neither they nor the player are required to engage with racism in any meaningful way.

And this neutrality is rewarded, as the game ultimately equates rebellion against an oppressive system with oppression itself, in order to make a tepid point about the corruptive nature of power. Here, as ever, neutrality is not neutral, but rather a façade that allows us to ignore the political and human consequences of systems of disenfranchisement.

Bioshock Infinite

The myth of neutrality remains devastatingly pervasive in games culture. It’s the lens through which game developers often ask players to understand their work. It’s why people still believe you can “objectively” review a game. It’s why calling for diversity is seen as unnecessary, even radical—no matter how reasoned or moderate the call is. It’s why we only see the politics of people who are different from us.

Honestly, how is asking for more diversity in Witcher 3 political, but arguing against it is not? It’s why critics like Moosa readily admit their arguments are political, but non-critical detractors believe theirs are not. Because the neutral observer fallacy, the entire noxious concept of “objectivity” teaches that we can engage politics without being political. It’s impossible.

The neutral observer fallacy arises from the default notion of whiteness that gaming has yet to free itself from. Which isn’t to place the blame at anyone’s feet specifically, or even generally, but to say that the anti-intellectual climate of gaming feeds is fed by the myth that some people have politics and other people don’t. Privilege is blinding and allows us to ignore the many systems that keep certain groups of people isolated; “historical accuracy” is just one example. When we speak of “adding diversity” we must speak not just of characters but their consumers and creators. In order to unravel the myths of neutrality, colorblindness we must reveal our own involvement in maintaining them.

I applaud those who can look into this often stifling and restrictive community and see change—who strive to create a bustling, diverse, pro-social community that exchanges politics instead of ignoring them. I admire these people and want to see more of them. The future is for the people who don’t perceive diversity—be it for women, for people of color, for the disabled, for queer people and transfolk—as "unrealistic" or as the “death” of their world, but rather the beginning of better one.

Games are a powerful force in the lives of many. They helped me socialize with others and become a more optimistic person. They encouraged me to be creative and experiment with technology.

But games can also reinforce stereotypes about people who don't fit cultural norms. As I grew older, I began to think about ways I could help erase racism and sexism from games. I wanted to stop consuming regurgitated fantasies and instead tell my own stories, and so over the past two years or so, I began learning to make my own games. Along the way, I've learned that even small efforts in unexpected areas can make an enormous difference.

Although my goal as a game-maker is to create works that help people understand one another and feel less alone, I’ve actually learned the most about making a difference through the development of Prism Shell, a sci-fi action game about shooting alien hordes.

In 2013 my friends Chris Algoo, Dennis Liaw and I committed to participate in as many game jams as we could, to learn more about game development. In October, we joined over 100 other participants to attend my fourth hackathon-style event backed by Samsung and Tizen, hosted at a famous design agency. We had 24 hours to make a game, and Chris had come up with an innovative mobile game mechanic.

His idea was to place points on the screen that attracted the player's character, forcing it to move and stick to each node. By constraining player movements and by creating enemies that chase them, exciting interactions could occur.

From this exciting focus on minimal movement, we began to throw around ideas, and I began to think about the character that would represent our project. As a woman who grew up playing video games, I was used to seeing mostly white women characters in skimpy outfits that had little to do with the jobs they had. The few women of African and Indigenous American ancestries I remember were scantily clad in “tribal wear”. I knew this was a chance to make a change.

Could our character be a woman? Could she be a woman of color, could she wear sensible clothes?

Our game was going to be called Prism Shell, and it would be set in space. So I took inspiration from Alien, a movie that, famously, was going to star a male actor before Sigourney Weaver took the role. Our main character would be a Major General in the Earth Navy, and we named her Beretta. She had blue hair and tan skin; she wore black lipstick, a bullet-proof vest over a military jumpsuit, and shoes fit for running while in combat.

I proudly shared Beretta's design with my friends and family on Facebook. Once a fully-colored version of her design was done, I tweeted about her. I was excited to have her represent a game I was working on.

With only 24 hours to finish the game, we had to prioritize the art and mechanics. We all agreed that a story could wait -- but where would Beretta fit in? With our tiny budget, we had to accept we might only see her on the title, win and lose screens. I hoped those brief appearances would be enough to engage players with the person inside the tank.

When Prism Shell took second place at the hackathon, we were elated: We split the prize money amongst ourselves, incorporated together as the Brooklyn Gamery, and prepared to continue working on the game, planned for a launch on Tizen’s operating system. When Samsung ultimately delayed the launch of its first phone running Tizen, we were devastated, but continued working on the game anyway. If we couldn't release on Tizen, we would be able to aim elsewhere. We refocused our attention on releasing the game for Android and iOS.

We brought the Android version of Prism Shell to local industry events including IndieCade East and Playcrafting NYC. Both times, we prominently displayed the game's title screen with Beretta's portrait and prepared playable versions of the game on our phones. People of all ages and genders were attracted to the game. An older woman remarked that the game was easy to play, even for someone like her. We knew part of the game's attractiveness was due to our unusual character, as well as the fact that Prism Shell was designed speifically to be mobile-friendly.

A year passed since that initial version of Prism Shell, and in that time, I matured as an artist and became aware of many biases within myself. I decided to re-examine Beretta, and implement some re-designs.

The original Beretta was olive-skinned with yellow-green eyes and a sharp nose—she was racially ambiguous. The new Beretta was clearly Black, with brown skin and a rounder, more defined nose. We kept the old eye color, though, because we thought it was more visually striking and futuristic-looking. I tweeted a comparison image in the hopes that people would notice.

Positive feedback flooded in: people loved the new Beretta! But we hardly had any place to show her in the game. Over the course of a year, the game’s concept ballooned to include a story mode, multiple tanks, and in-app purchases—then shrank because development was taking too long, and one member departed the company. We had refocused our efforts on turning Prism Shell into an endless survival game.

There was no longer space for a story, and Beretta was again relegated to the title screen. We hoped that even if she was only on one screen in the game, people would still assume she was piloting the ship. As we learned from showing the game at local events, even a small appearance can make a difference.

We recently launched Prism Shell for Android, iOS, and Windows. We will also launch the game on other platforms very soon. As always, Beretta is featured on the game’s home screen, and in all of our marketing materials. Our efforts have been positively received by people at recent events and in the media.

Overall, Brooklyn Gamery is proud to have created Beretta. Over the past two years, we learned a lot about our own biases as well as how to embrace diversity and use our own experiences to make positive change. We plan to continue creating diverse characters for future games.

We think our experience can serve as an example of how, even when your game isn’t story or character-driven, attention to the way you draw and imagine your worlds and the people in them can make an enormous difference. Creating characters from diverse backgrounds can invite, include and intrigue people who don’t often see themselves represented, and can make your work stand out to people who are used to the industry’s misleading “defaults”. Even if you don't see color, others do, and we all have a hand in making games more inclusive.

If code is poetry, then gaming is a poetry contest—which was in itself a game, in medieval Japan.

Imagine yourself in a noble court, having to show off your skill with language, puns and coded messages, where all your turns of phrase, all your politics, gossip and flirting had to fit in strict structures. The structure never changes, but different poets have their own specialties, styles and sets of knowledge they bring to the show.

In medieval Japan—particularly in the Heian period (794 to 1185 AD)— this is what people did with poetry. A poem about the sunrise could really mean you missed your lover. A poem about pine trees could mean longing for a past crush, or memories of your childhood home. Poetry was popular then among the elite, partly because it showed how sophisticated you were—and how skilled you were in creating coded messages and puns. It was a way to show off your knowledge and impress your peers, and it was a game in its own right.

One of these games was called renga, which basically means "linked verse". A group of people would gather in the evening when it was cooler; one person would start off the poem with the first three lines, in strict 5-7-5 syllable format, and another person would use those three lines to come up with another set (this time of two lines of 7 syllables each). They used syllable counts instead of rhyming as it was more challenging, because of the way the Japanese language works.

In this way, linked chains of poems could be made, with the challenge coming out of “jumping” from one set of images to the next and making it all seem coherent in some way. This emphasis on strict format is a bit like computer programming, in which commands and their permutations can be arranged to make the computer calculate something you want. In the end, manipulating the form is what causes art to emerge from what would otherwise just be bunches of calculations.

Like computer programming, renga can be difficult to translate into ordinary English, however; it has its own codes, its own practices, its own language. In fact, code poems have been a project of developers and programmers for a while (see this article about code poetry in Wired).

Renga, however, adds another layer of complexity to the idea of code as poetry. Since renga is linked verse, and by nature requires collaboration, it can be similar to working on a game, especially with regard to larger games that require a team: you have a team of people working within strict formats to come up with a wonderful piece of entertainment.

Multiply the teams, and you get people in perpetual conversation with each other; games not only being inspired from other games in their genre, but crossovers, mashups, references, easter eggs, and more, all going back and forth. People being inspired by one another, and moving the genre forward: people using, bending, playing with a formal structure to create something new and entertaining.

Considering music evolved from poetry—we've talked about the connection between hip hop and programming before here on Offworld— it's easy to see how code as poetry evolved as a type of conversation, artists (programmers) evolving the genre of their works based on conversations and exposure to others. One artist would influence other artists, and so on down the line.

One-person development teams joined this conversation too, in their own way. Over time, the first three lines of renga became its own poetry form. You may know it as haiku: the three lines of 5-7-5 syllables each.

Remember the haiku contest in Avatar: the Last Airbender? Haiku – and haiku contests – were like soloing in music. While haiku were shorter than the linked chains of poetry, they were an essential part and unit of poetry and many haiku poets were renga poets as well: since haiku could be done by one person, it was a chance to highlight one's own specialty and style. Haiku could be on anything, too; love, hate, the moon, relationships, the kitchen, a frog. Haiku could act as a diary of personal memories, or to preserve scenes you saw when traveling: Bashō was famous for this.

Using the game analogy, one-person developers are the haiku poets of the games industry, something spun off into their own genre and not requiring as much collaboration, if any at all. Indie games that require teams? AAA games? Definitely renga. One-person shows? Haiku. Whether conversation, collaboration or solo projects, the art of game making is poetic, and open to all.

To get an idea of what English-language haiku and renga sound like, check out the #haiku and #renga hashtags on Twitter and try your hand at them. Or you can try to create your own game using tools like Twine, or check out games and developers exploring travel, memory, and many other subjects in the #altgames tag.

Anyone who grew up around Sailor Moon is probably familiar with the concept of magical girls: a team of young women—often in junior high or high school—who transform into superheroines with fantastical powers to fight evil. But what happens to a magical girl team after they defeat the bad guy, go back to their normal lives in high school, and start growing apart?

That's the premise of Zodiac Starforce, an upcoming comic created by artist Paulina Ganucheau and writer Kevin Panetta. All of the heroines are 16-year-old girls, each with her own astrological codename: Emma (Gemini), Savanna (Pisces), Kim (Taurus) and Molly (Aries). Rather than telling the story about how the team got together or introducing the great evil they have to defeat, Zodiac Starforce begins after they've already won.

It's been two years since the girls received their power from an goddess named Astra and destroyed the villain Cimmeria; the team has since disbanded, and like a lot of friends do over the course of high school, they're starting to find themselves drawn to different interests and heading in different directions. "All my best friends now are people I've met in the last five years. And I think it's that way for a lot of people, so it's great to show it in a story you usually don't see it in," says Ganucheau. "It's based in a more real reality than, say, the 'friends forever' mentality that is all of Sailor Moon.

Although they cite inspirations like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Legend of Korra and Sailor Moon, Ganucheau and Panetta say Zodiac Starforce started out as something very different: a science fiction tale called Cadets about young adults training to fight aliens at a military school in space. The duo originally imagined Zodiac Starforce as the anime series that the characters in Cadets liked to watch, and while Cadets never ultimately went anywhere, the idea for the magical girl meta-show endured.

Chat interview with Kevin Panetta and Paulina Ganucheau

We learn about the girls not through traditional origin stories, but through how they react when a monster appears for the first time in years. Kim can't wait to get Zodiac Starforce back together—and rekindle their close-knit friendship—while Molly is convinced that she's just clinging desperately to the past. Emma, the team's former leader, has her own uncertainties about returning to a life of astral battles, especially since she's still reeling from the death of her mother.

In the grand tradition of so many high school stories, everything comes to a head at a house party. "It's the most high school thing in the world to me," says Panetta. "So much happens when you get a bunch of people together at a house. It seemed like the perfect location for our first issue. And of course your mortal enemy is always going to be at the party too.

And magical metaphors for the trials of the teenage years abound. Their mortal enemies are, of course, the mean girls, lead by queen bee Diana who arrives wearing a halter top and what I assume are evil ombre highlights. And she's got an unexpected new recruit in tow: Alice, the girl who went missing a day earlier. Turns out she's not missing at all; she's just joined another more popular (and more evil) clique, and left her old friends in the dust.

The first issue also teases several romances for the girls, including a charming guy named Luke who Emma meets at the house party. Not all the girls are that lucky, however; there's also Savanna's side-eye provoking boyfriend Darren, who can't even be bothered to look up from his smartphone while demanding that his girlfriend bring him a drink. When the other girls suggest that maybe Darren is a jerk, Savanna explains that you know, he just acts like that sometimes.

"I've dated that asshole," notes Gancheau. "It's not a good time. Savanna, run!"

Chat interview with Kevin Panetta and Paulina Ganucheau

The debut issue of Zodiac Starforce debuts on August 26th in both digital and print, although you can preorder it now. For a sample of the magic girldom to come, check out the six-page preview below, including the Books-A-Million exclusive variant cover from Lumberjanes creator Noelle Stevenson:

Cover by Noelle Stevenson

While Cadets may never become a comic book itself, Ganucheau also says we haven't heard the last of it, and that perhaps the roles may reverse, and it might find some sort of cameo role in Zodiac Starforce.

Chat interview with Kevin Panetta and Paulina Ganucheau

Final Fantasy VII, the wildly (and weirdly) beloved Japanese roleplaying game from 1997, is getting a high-tech remake. How do you explain why even the most cynical video game fans have a genuine emotional response to the news?

Offworld, I’m proud to say, exists to dismantle conventions of “fandom”: the insular vocabulary, the obsession with advancing hardware, the masculine hypercapitalist power fantasies, the constant grasping of our adult fingers toward favorite brands of childhood.

Read that last paragraph out loud. Then have a little laugh at my expense! I am the most cynical of video game fans. People on Twitter are asking me all the time: if you hate video games so much, why don’t you quit? The real answer is that I love games. I love them so much that I keep on championing games I love no matter how hard the usual suspects—marketers, advertisers, rutted internet hordes, the sea of plaid and Zelda T-shirts, the complicated and heartbreaking circuitry of the development business—would like them to disappear. And I want more people to love them, even if it costs me.

But here’s another answer. Imagine it’s 2 a.m., because I’m in London and I stayed up to watch Sony PlayStation’s E3 press conference, because this is my work. And they begin to show this… this video-thing, a kind of trailer, and they’re not really showing us anything at all.

Yet I immediately recognize certain things about it. A slow pan over the abstract suggestion of a wheel-like, gunmetal dystopia, washed in pale green. People line up to mount an inter-city train.

“No,” I bleat, pathetically.

I’m that person, watching an E3 press conference and hoping for “Final Fantasy VII remake”, like every other old easily-bought, backward-facing onanistic f-f-fan.

We glimpse a node-based transit system, then a tiny little slumland park, bug-eyed plastic animals with lolling tongues for kids’ slides…

“No. No,” I plead. I’m about to cry in front of a marketing video.

Then it gets bad. They do that horrible thing where they pipe in just a little bit of a familiar tune, and you can recognize classic heroes from the camera angle over their shoulder. Distinctive, iconic weaponry falls into view. A sword with two deep rivet slots, slung across the character’s back like on the front of an old, inch-thick jewel case…

“Oh, noooo,” I am crying on my partner, my hands in despicable infant fists.

“Sweetheart,” he laughs a little, placating but gentle, and this is the thing that makes me lose it.

How do I explain this? Do I go right to describing myself at 17 years old, standing at a train station in the winter, freezing in a summer dress, the only dress that looked good on me, hoping to meet my first boyfriend in person, a guy I’d met making up our own Final Fantasy VII characters on America Online? Something something quest for identity and the self, et cetera, safe place, blah blah?

This is a little bit too treacly, I think, for this early in the piece. Instead, let’s come out swinging against all the people who don’t think FFVII was a “good game”.

It’s real good.

Look, if you don’t think it was a “good game,” you either hate Japanese roleplaying games or you weren’t there when it came out, because it was perfectly assembled. It rewarded the adventurous player but modulated itself gently against the less systems-oriented one. The land makes itself available to you slowly and with a sense of wonder and design logic that only early Zelda games truly match.

You can fiddle constantly with equipment and feel amazing for what that experimentation yields—or you can march along the game’s learning curve not much more the wiser. You can do the side quests or not. The world is full of mysteries that make every new encounter feel like a potential rarity. As a child, I reset my first game nearly two thirds of the way through upon learning, through the grapevine, that I had missed out on meeting two entire party members with story arcs of their own.

FFVII's battles unfolded well, timed meters unspooling gently but readably at the corner of your eye 'til you learn an orderly reflex that feels like patient puppetry—all paced by perfectly-tuned audio cues. Unlike other games broadly in its genre, it rarely screws you in the natural course of play. It’s balanced in a way that deeply embarrasses later Final Fantasy games.

Some twenty years later, the game world remains gorgeous. Invented logos flicker on failing monitors, propped up among shopfronts and lodgings quilted together from urban junk. Light glitters on seawater where it hugs coastlines of jutting pylons. A patchwork of little flowers swell up from the broken floorboards of an abandoned church. The backgrounds are always gently lit with dusty sunbeams, sulfurous haloes, or the weird light of the decaying planet's breath—the light of someplace that really exists, someplace that you’ve absolutely just got to escape to.

But it doesn’t matter whether FFVII was “good” or not.

Chrono Trigger is a “great RPG”, perhaps the greatest, but I don’t feel much towards it. In 1997, I was in high school, and it absolutely did not matter whether FFVII was “good” or not. It was the place I had been waiting forever to escape to.

FFVII had a television commercial, and I can’t recall having seen such a thing for a video game before, a sweeping trailer that teased at an intriguing idea: the tiny, child-like character sprites we always played in games of that sort would be rendered, at least sometimes, as long-limbed adults. It was going to be a dark, grown-up game.

Yes, that was what mattered. That it felt adult, setting us not in a whimsical kingdom full of magical dimensions as was the norm, but in a desperate, light-starved urban slum, under the thumb of a corporation that was heedlessly sucking magical-nuclear energy from the veins of a dying planet. The villains were corporate fat cats and cool, occasionally-nuanced enforcers. The villain was a rogue hero, hungry to become a god, which is usual. But he was once your beloved idol, which for the time was not so usual.

FFVII's hero was not your normal phenotype, either: Cloud, who wore a coif of sculpted hair spikes right when enthusiasm for anime imports to the USA was beginning to get properly feverish, was neither a spirited local boy with a brave heart, nor a wisecracking action whiz, but an opaque and sullen weirdo on the run from his own history, mistrusting his own memories.

It’s common for Japanese roleplaying games to have warning narratives about the environment, or even about corrupt systems of power, but teens hadn’t had it presented to them in such relatively-mature, almost-salacious terms before in video games.

You could choose one of three of your party members to go on a date with! You could have a tragic love story with a doomed priestess or a nurturing and inspiring one with your robust childhood friend (Psst: Looking at it as an adult now, Tifa is the only real choice)! You could even date another man, a Mr. T clone with a gun arm, although of course that was a “comedy” option.

FFVII also had an occasionally tone-deaf cross-dressing mini-game, a section where you have to jump with a dolphin, an enormously tedious archaelogy mini-game, a barely-functional submarine mini-game, a barely-functional RTS about protecting a phoenix, a section where you are dragged up to star in a play at a holiday resort, a minor villain obsessed with eating lard (because he’s fat, get it?!), an absurd mechanical foe called the “Proud Clod”, and very significant item rewards to be won by breeding and racing giant long-legged birds, among others.

Do you remember the stairs of the ShinRa building, the ones that went on forever? Do you remember being a man in a dress, swarmed by zombie-like, slavering gangsters with outstretched arms? Do you remember resetting again and again and again until you got the correct gender of Blue Chocobo? Do you remember mashing the “O” button in a “bitchslap” fight between two women, one of whom is actually a competent martial artist, on the barrel of a giant cannon?

Remember Nibelheim Mansion? Oh, remember, remember the chilly green, briny undersea when you were piloting the submarine, and how you’d see the terrifying marine trails of Emerald Weapon drifting in the slick, dark distance? Remember when you’d come out of the sunken Gelnika and he’d be, like, right there?

Do you remember when Aeris died?

Of course you do. It was sudden. You had followed her through a primeval forest to an old village of bone and stone, its architecture reminiscent of seashells and the spines of fish, preserved amberlight and old memories flickering through. In the center of a temple Aeris prayed, and from a high place Sephiroth plummeted down—

This jointed sprite comes flying out of nowhere with a long, stupid toothpick sword which he inserts bloodlessly into Aeris, who just sort of goes limp, and we’re supposed to care. Then, like, a piece of Materia we did not previously know she was keeping in her hair bow (Aeris, why was it in your hair?), a radiant-lit orb, pings musically down the steps of the temple, a slow, sad knell, before its light is swallowed by the lake—

And then we lay Aeris herself upon the water. It’s not until you see her body float down with gentleness, surrounded by graceful beams of light filtering through the impossible deep, that you begin to grasp that she really has died and will not come back. In three musical notes ascending, three descending—hum along, you know them—you understand that sometimes faith is not rewarded in obvious ways.

You were a lonely kid in a small town running around inside a video game world, hoping to know what adulthood and purpose is really like, and you understand, then, that sometimes you can pray and pray and no one will answer. That all kinds of things are going to be taken from you.

And then were like, well, shit, why did I spend so much time leveling her up?

Guess we’d better sell her equipment now.

Then you go on the internet and make SPOILER ALERT jokes for the next fifteen years, about Aeris dying, because it’s easier than admitting that you were at all affected.

Then now, suddenly, concern about spoilers is new and real again, because there will be children playing this game who were not even born yet when you were a teenager waiting in the cold to meet your very first boyfriend whom you got to know by pretending about FFVII on the primordial internet.

How do you explain what this game is about, two decades on? You can't, because if you recall the particulars of Cloud’s story, you will remember the most important thing: Final Fantasy VII is fundamentally a game about how you cannot trust your memories. That’s what it’s about. The glory of your younger days might only be in your imagination.

This is perfect. I can’t wait for this goddamn cash-in fanservice remake of a completely outmoded and likely wildly-overrated Japanese RPG from 1997. I honestly, seriously can’t wait. I get emotional just thinking about it.

You could argue that Google has ruined a lot of life's mysteries. In days gone by, we could debate endlessly in bars over what celebrity starred in which movie, or what the lyrics were to a song—but no more. Thanks to the instantaneous recall of smartphones, our uncertainties now last only as long as it takes to type the right string of letters into a long, white bar.

The idea that nearly all human knowledge can be retrieved by entering words into a search field is increasingly hardwired into our brains; this is the way we have grown accustomed to solving the uncertainties of our lives. In Her Story, that's exactly how you investigate a murder: by following a trail of keyword clues through a database of interrogation videos to unravel the secrets of a 1994 killing.

Her Story is brilliantly made; it feels both intuitively familiar and like nothing I've played before. The design is clever. The acting is excellent. And the story is both well-crafted and, well, a big problem. Let's dig in.

It would be wrong to say that the game begins with a murder, since it's hard to say where it begins at all. The first thing you see is a Windows computer desktop ripped from the '90s, littered with README text files. A database search program is open, with one keyword already entered: "murder."

Push return, and the database retrieves several short video clips from police interviews, all featuring the same British woman, presumably during different interrogations. You never hear the questions, only her answers. In the third clip, she insists, "I didn't murder Simon. You've got it wrong. You've got the wrong person."

After you finish watching, the database sits blankly, like an open mouth waiting for food. It would like another word. What will you give it? You know the name "Simon" now; the woman also mentions an event that happened in "February," and also something about a missing "murder weapon."

Think of every sentence she says as a series of corridors, and every word as a potential door. Keywords are your leads, and searching is how you investigate. Most digital natives will understand this instinctively; after all, this is how we have been finding our news, our recipes, our advice about breakups and job interviews and medical problems for all of our lives.

Although the first few searches feel obvious—of course, you're going to search "Simon"—it quickly becomes a much more free-form experience, where you can direct your queries in any direction you like. Scrap paper is recommended so you can scribble down notes, listening for the words in each interview that feel more buoyant, that glow in your mind like hyperlinks. You can go rogue as well, and enter any goddamn word you like. What happens when you search for "knife," or "cats," or "sex"? Sometimes nothing; sometimes a revelation.

The openness is both surprising and exciting; it's the sort of freedom that so many games end up simulating rather than actually offering. Nothing is gated or limited here, except by your imagination and ability to ask the right questions. Much like in Google—and in the text parser games of yore—all of the answers are there waiting for you, if only you can discover the magic words that summon them to the screen.

You can track your progress on a "database checker," where each video you unearth fills in a little green square on a grid that looks a bit like a disk defragmentation map. There are over a hundred different clips—some only a few seconds—taken from seven different interviews unfolding over the course of several weeks.

Since you're accessing them by keyword, however, your experience of them is entirely out of order. There is no single video clip that will reveal the ultimate answer and allow you to "win," only the gradual process of piecing together the story from all the non-linear fragments you collect, holding them next to each other in your mind, and trying to figure out what they mean.

The story of this game isn't a single, linear street with occasional cul-de-sacs branching off the sides; it's a river covered in countless stepping stones, where the path you choose across it, hopping from word to word, is entirely your own. The way I experience the game will not be the same way you experience the game, and even after we've both finished we might not agree on exactly what happened.

There's something in the way that Her Story unfolds, however it unfolds, that feels not only like the way we access memories but way we tell stories, the way we piece together the scraps of what has happened after the fact. We begin at one moment, and it illuminates the next. Or we find ourselves walking in circles, missing steps, or doubling back; we say, "wait, let me start again." We wander.

Major spoilers follow. If you haven't played the game yet—and want to—stop now, and come back for the deep dive on the game's narrative issues when you're done.

As is often the case, the roving squads of self-appointed authenticity monitors who patrol the imaginary borders of games have deemed Her Story "not a real game" for the usual reasons: because it's cerebral, it stars a woman, and anyone can play it. To make a game like that in the current climate is something of a refreshing, rebellious act; those "criticisms" are the precise reason the game feels so fresh and enjoyable, and are best read as unintended compliments.

But there are relevant criticisms worth raising about Her Story, especially around that way it depicts mental illness, a theme that becomes apparent only after you've collected enough video fragments to see the larger picture emerge. Perhaps the biggest red herring of the game is its name; Her Story sounds singular, and implies that we're looking at one woman, the same woman, in all of the videos. As we learn over time, this is almost certainly not true.

She's initially introduced to us as Hannah, the wife of the murder victim, Simon. In her initial interrogations, she seems quiet and cooperative. Other times, she's defensive, outgoing, even aggressive. That's because at least some of the time the person we see on screen is not Hannah at all, but an identical woman named Eve who was having an affair with Simon.

There are two theories you can arrive at to explain this: Either Hannah and Eve are twin sisters separated at birth through what I would describe as a highly unlikely series of events, or Hannah has Dissociative Identity Disorder—what is more popularly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, and Eve is not a separate person but another facet of her self.

Although the game remains intentionally ambiguous on the subject, the most persuasive evidence points to Dissociative Identity Disorder, and at the very least raises the specter of mental illness as the explanation for the killing. It's a conceit that transforms Her Story into a whodunit mystery where the real question isn't who committed the murder, but who she thought she was when it happened. When Hannah's carefully constructed alibi starts to fall apart and it looks like she's facing arrest, she looks at the interrogator and smiles: "Can you arrest someone who doesn't exist?"

I can't pretend that I played Her Story with no preconceptions, or that I've always fully understood the things I'm about to criticize the game for not understanding. My reaction was deeply colored and illuminated by a conversation I had about Her Story with former game developer and producer Courtney Stanton before I even picked it up. "Basically every media depiction I've ever seen of someone with a dissociative disorder—including Hannah and Eve—are wrong," Stanton told me. "And I know this, because I have the mental illness she's portrayed as having."

It's unclear whether Hannah is supposed to have dissociative identity disorder (DID)—where the barriers between different states of the mind are more developed—or dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS), the more broadly defined diagnosis that Stanton can speak to personally. Both disorders exist beneath the same umbrella of dissociation disorders, at varying levels of severity. All are widely misunderstood, both by Her Story and society at large.

On the surface, Stanton says some details about Hannah and Eve do ring true. "When we hear that Eve wears a wig—it's not uncommon for different parts to present differently. And she slips between the pronouns 'we' and 'I' really well. But when you get into the game's depiction of how they they supposedly work as a system, it feels very wrong."

Indeed, one of the primary reasons why "multiple personality disorder" was reclassified as "dissociative identity disorder" was to avoid the misconception that Her Story vigorously promotes: that alternative personalities, alters, or parts, as they are variously called, are entirely separate individuals, rather than just different manifestations of the same person. "Parts aren't fully separate people, nor are there usually only two of them, and they don't interact with each other that way," says Stanton. "It's certainly not two women trapped in one body, jealously competing over the affections of one man."

Most troublingly, Her Story is ultimately a game where an impliedly mentally ill person is portrayed as a murderer. Nor is Simon her only victim; it's also suggested that Eve poisoned and killed Hannah's parents in order to regain more control over their shared life. And it is Hannah as a whole—the woman with a dissociative disorder—who is responsible for bringing death and harm to so many of the people around her, primarily because of her mental illness.

Therein lies the biggest and most unexamined problem with what is otherwise an exceptional game. Mental illness has long been equated with violence and criminality in media and entertainment, where the "insane murderer" trope remains hugely popular. Too often, people with mental illness are the bogeymen we summon into horror stories, murder mysteries or anywhere else we need a one-dimensional bad guy wielding a knife.

The impact of these stereotypes on people with mental illness are significant. The strong social stigma means that those who disclose their diagnosis are often treated with fear, suspicion and disgust, in ways that can affect their employment, health care, relationships and safety. In a 2008 study by the Canadian Medical Association, 42 percent of respondents said they would stop socializing with a friend who was diagnosed with mental illness; 55 percent said they would not marry someone with mental illness, and 25 percent said they would be afraid simply to be around them.

The reality of mental illness is far more dangerous—not for those who happen to be around it, but those who suffer from it. Not only are people with mental illness unlikely to be perpetrators of violence; they're actually more likely to be on the receiving end. According to one government study, someone with severe mental illness is eleven times more likely to be a victim of violent crime than someone without it.

Yet again and again, mentally ill people appear in our entertainment as axe-wielding psychos whose primary reason for committing violence is quite simply that they're craaaazy. Their mental illness is designed to provoke fear or fascination; other times, as in the case of Her Story, it's the prop or device that sets up the M. Night Shyamalan-esque surprise twist ending. "The game felt like it was using Hannah's mental health to execute a pre-existing plot, instead of thinking about what a character with DID or DDNOS would actually be like and building a story from there," says Stanton.

Her Story spends a lot of time exploring what happens when two separate but inextricably connected parts of a whole come into conflict. This ends up being a far better description of the game itself, where the clever mechanics and the troubling narrative coexist inside the same creative body, and neither can truly escape the pull of the other. The reasons I loved the game—the reasons I kind of want to finish this review right now and go play it again—are tied inextricably to the reasons it left me feeling deeply uncomfortable, and the unexamined stereotypes at its core.

In all honesty, I'm not actually sure I would have noticed these failings in the game before talking to Stanton about it. It's easy not to notice problems when they're so familiar that they blend into the background, especially when they don't affect you directly. It's easy, too, to hear the small, selfish voice in your head that wonders if it wouldn't be easier not to know these things at all, to just let the pleasurable aspects of your entertainment wash over you unanalyzed.

And of course, it is easier. But this is how we get better, both as people who consume media and people who make it: We listen, we allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable, and we learn. We look the flaws of the things we enjoy directly in the eye, and know them for what they are. When I look at Her Story, I see one of the most compelling games I've played this year, and a game predicated on an idea that I find harmful, all wrapped up in one complicated package. It's still a package I'm glad I opened. But I know it for what it is: the sum of all its parts.

I remember the moment I realized what the Wall Market section of Final Fantasy VII would actually entail. I was thirteen, and I nervously checked to see if anyone else was home.

Being trans brought with it this odd sense of obligation to protect a secret that at the time I wasn’t even aware I had. Looking back, it seems a little ridiculous, but I really was afraid someone could glean something like that about me, just from playing a game where the main character is forced to crossdress.

There is no single, universal trans narrative, but for most trans people, it takes quite a bit of our life before we’re able to conceptualize our experiences in the same way we do once we’ve come out to ourselves. I didn’t conceive of myself as “being a girl” as a child; I didn’t know that was possible. I knew, at the time, that I deeply wanted to be a girl, but I had no idea what that meant, and I had a vague but persistent notion that whatever this feeling was, I shouldn’t acknowledge or discuss it. I know now that I was a girl, but that understanding and framing only came much later.

Crossdressing is most certainly not the same experience as being trans, but strict expectations about gender conformity and "acceptable" expression absolutely do affect trans people. Many of us live a significant portion of our lives believing the lie society tells us, that our assigned sex is “who we are”, and as such may mistakenly interpret our own choices as “crossdressing”, only later able to realize what was truly going on.

Positive portrayals of both crossdressing and trans characters in games are becoming more and more common, even just within the past year or so. A recent Guild Wars 2 patch added a trans woman character. At E3, footage of The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes showed hero Link wearing a “Zelda dress”.

This wasn’t presented in a judgemental way, far from it—a fundamental mechanic of the game is acquiring new outfits to use new abilities. Link’s wearing a dress isn’t played for laughs; it’s just another outfit he can use to progress. It’s heartening seeing an explosion of art from fans not just accepting of this, but excited and ecstatic about it.

There have, unfortunately, been a good number of missteps along the way as well. Many players were excited that clothing wouldn’t be restricted by sex in Fallout 4, but the trailer played “man in a dress” for laughs.

The trailer starts with the man asking his dog if he’s “ready to fuck some shit up.” We then see brief footage of the character in a dress, played against the apocalyptic landscape and inserted between rugged, expectedly masculine outfits. The joke pretty clear: a man in a dress is being impractical, frivolous and certainly not the sort man one would expect to be able to “fuck shit up.” Thankfully, this was just in the trailer, and without quite the same framing, the crossdressing should be able to exist as more than just the butt of a joke.

Worse examples than just this have popped up, however: earlier this year a trans woman discovered a clearly transphobic joke written by a Kickstarter backer that made it into Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity game.

It felt appropriate to petition the company to remove the content, which had no real redeeming value other than punching down at a marginalized group for the sake of cheap laughs. It wasn’t part of an ongoing plot, it had nothing to do with the development of the characters, it was just a contextless epitaph about how shameful it is to be “tricked” into sleeping with someone who is “really a man.” Thankfully, Obsidian agreed, and worked with the backer to replace the epitaph.

Our attitudes and our ability to have conversations about gender expression have evolved quite a lot since the original launch of Final Fantasy VII, and since the announcement of the remake, there’s been a lot of discussion about the crossdressing and how it should be handled. Trans people’s reservations about the scene are not spurious or unwarranted, but given the context of the scene, I believe petitioning the developer to just remove it wouldn’t be the right answer. It’s not the same situation as Pillars of Eternity, and I’m worried about people desiring too blunt a solution to a problem that may not warrant it.

The scene in Final Fantasy VII starts after a mission goes awry and Cloud is separated from some members of his party. While he’s with his new friend Aeris in the slums of Sector 6, they spot Tifa, one of the missing party members, riding a carriage to the mansion of famous brothel manager Don Corneo. Though you’re meant to try to rescue Tifa, you quickly learn no men are allowed in the Don’s mansion—but Aeris presents Cloud with a solution.

At first Cloud is resistant to the idea of dressing like a girl, but as the player you undergo a series of quests to acquire the right accessories to be a convincing one. At the very least, you're required to collect a dress and a wig; additional items include a cologne, tiara, and undergarments. The specific combinations can result in Don Corneo picking either Tifa, Aeris or Cloud to come with him to his bedroom. Getting the Don to choose Cloud is actually the most difficult, requiring you to win the mini-games and make the most optimal choices as you navigate Wall Market looking for precisely the right items. “Winning" the entire ordeal means, functionally, making Cloud play the best woman you can, and this is rewarded with an extra scene.

To get the dress, you have to locate the father of a clothing store in a bar. You learn he's become disillusioned with "making regular clothes" after Aeris explains that Cloud's "always said that just once, he'd like to dress up as a girl." He's surprised initially ("What?! A tough lookin’ guy like that?") but quickly agrees to the challenge. You're allowed to pick from a dress that's “clean” or “soft”, and one that's “shiny” or “that shimmers” (you want a Silk Dress, the soft one that shimmers).

After getting the the dress made, Cloud tries it on in a dressing room but Aeris thinks something is missing, and agrees he needs to find a wig. The shop owner explains that at the gym, you'll find "a lot of people there like you" who can help you out. You compete with one of the gym-goers at "Big ‘Beautiful’ Bro’s" insistence by attempting to do the most squats in 30 seconds: depending on if you win, tie or lose you'll acquire a different tier of wig (you’ll want a Blonde Wig—a ‘dyed wig’ if you tie, or a ‘wig’ if you lose, won’t be ideal).

A few smaller tasks are completed for the cologne and tiara. The ordeal for the undergarments is probably the strangest of the bunch, however: the "Honey Bee Inn" brothel that supplies Don Corneo with the three women he chooses from every day has a series of rooms you can choose from. Cloud can get suitable underwear from either the “&$#% Room” or the "Group Room,” both of which are implied to be rooms where women are hired to spend time with men. But surprisingly to the player, although different events happen in each room, it’s always muscular men that join.

In the &$#% Room, Cloud hears a voice in his head asking him what he’s doing in this kind of a place, and he passes out. He wakes to muscled men (presumably) massaging him back to consciousness, acknowledging that he must have been uncomfortable with the “adult things” that are going on in the Inn. In the Group Room, the men invite Cloud to "wash off our sweat and dirt together." All of the men strip, and the camera shifts up so you can only see their heads as they all get in the hot tub. Mukki, one of the men, asks, "How is it, bubby?! Feels good, huh?" but Cloud is only able to respond with silence or "It hurts."

This has been read by various people as either referring to the hot tub itself perhaps being too hot, a too-intense massage or sexual assault. Regardless of your choice of dialogue, Cloud responds by saying, "I don't feel good. Let me out..." Mukki just insists Cloud will get used to it, and asks him to count down from ten slowly.

It's the most unfortunate part of all of Wall Market; the recurring joke throughout the crossdressing ordeal is Cloud's (and, presumably, the player's) discomfort—that the challenge, in a sense, is to endure that discomfort for the sake of others. These rooms stage the first instances where Cloud expresses his discomfort and it’s paved over; in the Group Room, he explicitly vocalizes his refusal and it isn't really respected. For a lot of people, this optional scene is what shifted the tenor of the Wall Market sequence from goofy humor at Cloud's unfortunate circumstances to the game portraying the gay men as predatory and creepy.

It partially taints not only one of the few representations of a group of queer characters in a game that old, but also paints crossdressers similarly by association as well; these men, after all, are where Cloud acquires the bikini briefs for his mission to infiltrate Don Corneo's mansion.

Cloud goes back to the dress shop and changes, becoming "Miss Cloud." Aeris continues to flirt with him, and the shop owner thanks both of them for giving them a challenge that renewed his interest in making clothes; his initial surprise at learning Cloud wanted to dress as a woman has long since worn off, replaced by unguarded enthusiasm.

After gaining access to the mansion, you’re reunited with Tifa and quickly catch up before all three are called up for Don to choose from; assuming you acquired the right items, “Miss Cloud” is selected and you join Don in his room. He acts as lecherously as you were led to expect, and you’re given the choice of either flirting back or acting indifferent. After he asks Miss Cloud for a kiss, Aeris and Tifa break in and Cloud reveals himself as a man before all three take turns threatening to do various things to his genitals to extract information from him about ShinRa.

As imperfect as the entire thing was, Final Fantasy VII’s crossdressing does not fall into the same trap as Fallout 4’s trailer: the joke is not simply that there’s a man in a dress. Throughout the entire ordeal, Aeris follows you and is excited, flirty and encouraging. People in the town are occasionally surprised, but never overtly bigoted or hostile. Other people in the area crossdress, it isn’t a secret, and they’re accepted among their friends.

The joke, in the case of VII, was Cloud’s (and, by extension, the player’s) sense of discomfort despite there not being any real reason to be uncomfortable in the first place. Discussions about the negative aspects of VII’s portrayal of crossdressing—the stigmatization of other queer characters, the way Cloud’s boundaries become a joke inside the brothel—are important and necessary. Nontheless, even two decades later, there are things about Cloud’s crossdressing sequence in Wall Market that I think Final Fantasy VII got right—and that modern games are still getting wrong.

“Do you want to see The Great Secret?” Halil asked.

It was January 2006, and I was sitting in his disheveled bedroom in a Christian Maronite corner of the Bourj Hammound suburb of Beirut. His walls were covered in ripped out pages from skateboarding magazines and UK issues of PC Gamer. He was 16 years old.

He started up the desktop computer he had built himself, and opened up the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike. The military-style video game had been updated many times since its initial release in 1999, but this was the same version that had infested my middle school computer lab back then—or some pirated incarnation. Halil connected to a server by manually entering a memorized IP address.

He did not join either of the in-game teams, instead becoming a “spectator”. The familiar contours of Dust, the game’s most famous map, lit the screen. Unbound by gravity or physical form, Halil flew to a point overlooking one of the main thoroughfares, where first contact between the two teams often takes place. Dust is a bomb-defusal encounter set in the market center of a Middle Eastern town. I watched as the “terrorists” cautiously moved forward, taking positions to protect the bomb they had set. The clock ticked down in the corner of the monitor.

“Who is playing?” I asked him.

“Israel and Lebanon” he said.

“Like some sort of video game Olympics?”

“No no no,” and he smiled, “that wouldn’t be a ‘The Great Secret.’” The team of “counterterrorists” threw a couple grenades and started firing, peering around corners and strafing.

“Then who is playing as Israel and Lebanon?”

“IDF,” Halil pitched his screen to the rushing counterterrorist team, “and Hezbollah,” he tilted in the direction of the virtual AK fire. “This is my ‘Middle East Peace Plan.’” He said the phrase derisively, putting on his best American accent.

I didn’t believe him, at first. The teams in the game were made up of the same avatars that always populated it. But Halil then showed me a series of taunting pictures the two teams had posted online. Among the match reports and running commentaries, the Israelis in uniform threw up imitations of American gang signs learned from rap videos, while young men of Hezbollah held real life rifles next to computer monitors, all with their faces blurred or blacked out in Photoshop. My favorite was a succession of shots of real guns, superimposed on computer monitors displaying virtual ones.

I was afraid to ask Halil how he had found these participants, especially the Hezbollah “kids,” as he called them, and he refused to say how the game had started. But he disclosed that he and his cousin, an Arab Christian citizen of Israel (they were two of the best Counter-Strike and FPS players in the entire Middle East… according to him), were its unofficial diplomats and referees.

“We are hosts,” he said. “Because we are almost neutrals to them.”

The counterterrorists won first. Then again. Halil changed the settings of the spectator mode so we could hear the teams speaking internally.

“We don’t let them talk to each other in the game,” he said. “Not even in chat.”

I watched a match hearing moves and bullets and curses in Hebrew. And then in Arabic. The terrorists finally won one. And then another.

Seven months later, Hezbollah launched a series of rocket attacks, border raids, and soldier abductions across the Israeli border. Israel responded with a full scale invasion. And the two teams were fighting for real. After the ceasefire, I asked Halil via email if “The Great Secret” game had started back up again.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I am no longer involved.”

Halil had told me in person, even in 2006 (seven years before the revelations of Edward Snowden), that he felt cagey about digital communication. “It is easy to watch,” he said. So sometimes I wonder if he was lying. I wonder if the game continued.

“The Great Secret” may have just been a teenage thrill, “something cool just to see if I could do it”, instead of a grand statement on the absurd nature of war and peace, or a serious attempt to take groups of people tasked with shooting each other and channel their roles into a simulation where no one actually gets hurt. But Halil was also onto something. He could see that the surging business of video games was beginning to collide and intertwine with the geopolitical realities raging around him.

The year after I found out about Halil’s “The Great Secret,” Activision's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released. The market trend favored a shift for the shooter genre from World War II settings toward the present day, and the Call of Duty series began alluding to, even directly depicting, present-day American wars in the Middle East. First-person shooters had become the world's most popular genre of video game.

The timing was particularly remarkable in the United States. While less than one percent of the American population was serving in our longest-ever foreign military engagements, tens of millions of people were engaged in this mock combat. There are currently 2.2 million US military personnel, and an estimated 2.5 million Americans served in Iraq or Afghanistan over the past 14 years. Games from Activison’s Call of Duty series sold over 18 million copies in the United States over the same period. Electronic Arts sold almost 20 million copies of its Battlefield series.

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, there are an estimated 20 million active members of armed forces in the world, 26 million reservists, and 7 million paramilitaries. In 2013 Activision announced that over 100 million people had played a game of Call of Duty. And that’s just one single games franchise in one single genre. There are tens of thousands of video games that simulate war and conflict in one way or another. We play an awful lot of video games predicated on shooting something or someone in the face, and this isn’t just a cultural preference, but built into the nature of the medium.

"Shooting stuff is just really easy to do in code and easy to model," developer Tom Francis has said. "There are other non-violent interactions that are easy to model, but they’re not that much fun to play around with.”

This leaves us in an interesting place. More people are pretending to fight wars than actually fighting them. What does this mean?

“Since 9/11, the American military has become a sort of voyeuristic cipher for the society it serves,” my friend Matt Gallagher, a veteran of the War in Iraq and a writer, tells me. "It's something to channel a whole bunch of preconceived notions into, but never to actually know. American soldiers used to be everyone’s sons, daughters, the neighbor’s kids. Now they're the nameless, chiseled commandoes represented in Call of Duty. The real guys that game is modeled on might as well be video game characters to the rest of us.”

There are many explanations for the military-civilian divide, the lack of a draft, a political system that allows the funding of wars through deficit spending, an endemic civilian culture of disinterest and apathy towards foreign policy decision making. But in addition to these larger constructs, in some small cultural way, video games must have played at least some role in pushing the actual experience of warfighting further from the public mind.

The popularity of first-person shooters (which remain unwieldy and unrealistic depictions of actual combat) is the ultimate manifestation of a society where access and knowledge of violent content and events is so high, but actual exposure and experience is so low. Young people, particularly young men, can now fulfil that cultural and psychological obligation towards the experience of organized violence—without actually joining the military. The “go to war to become a man” construction of meaning can now be simulated from the safety of a sofa in front of a flat-screen TV.

Video games enjoy a close relationship with the US military, particularly as drivers of simulator and training technologies. In the age of the blockbuster video game, that closeness has shifted, become external. Even with the success of movies like American Sniper and books like Phil Klay’s Redeployment, the most consumed artistic images of the past 14 years of American conflict lie in video games.

There are sequences in Medal of Honor, Battlefield, and Call of Duty which are clearly modeled from footage of actual fighting, and development teams frequently employ and consult military advisors. Beyond products of civilian cultural expression, video games now serve (both officially and unofficially) as propaganda, marketing, and even proxies in cultural and psychological warfare,

At the same time, video games present a stark example of a civilian population increasingly disengaged from war and the military, a distraction from the violence which they portray.

“A large part of the first-world is completely disconnected from armed conflict and the violence it begets,” Gallagher says. “I don’t know if that disconnect itself is a bad thing. I mean, part of video games' appeal is the escape and fantastical projection it allows gamers. It's not like it's a concern that young people won't empathize with zombies after playing Resident Evil. But Call of Duty basks in a sort of hyper-realism, markets itself as the real deal, even through the veneer of video game unrealness.”

And it is unreal. For all the fretting about video games normalizing violence, or "training children to be killers", video games could hardly be less realistic depictions of the wartime experience they alluding to. Even the most realistic first person shooters—niche games like the Arma series, which sometimes double as military simulators and are often played by veterans—the experience is inherently inaccurate.

“They’re never close to realistic,” Marine Elliot Ackerman told me. Ackerman is author of the novel Green On Blue, a veteran of five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a recipient of the Silver Star for his actions in the November 2004 Battle of Fallujah.

“When you’re in a firefight, you’re spending most of the time trying to figure out where the person you’re fighting is firing from. It can be hours waiting. And you’d be dead in two seconds if you were in a Call of Duty-esque firefight. It’s not like you would get someone. Over the course of a really hard deployment, like the most action you could possibly see, you’re talking about 30-40 engagements over seven months. Not constant combat. Your deployment wouldn’t last two weeks if it was anything like the volume in a video game.”

Ackerman told me the story of how in 2006, while he and his fellow marines deployed to a Marine Expeditionary Unit on the USS Iwo Jima, they repurposed the ship’s internal LAN so they could play marathon games of Halo 3. Between evacuating refugees from the same Israeli-Lebanon war that may have ended Halil’s game of Counterstrike, “we had a massive Halo rivalry, me and my buddy would play one on one to 300 kills.” Eventually the ship’s COMMS officer discovered the misappropriation of the network and shut it down.

“I wonder if it fulfills at least some sense of purpose, regardless of what kind of game it is,” Ackerman said. He often talks publicly about the “tremendous high” war can bring in terms of purpose. How being in the military is “like mainlining purpose as if it’s crystal meth.” Games are different. Like having a job or a family or a vocation, though, they enthrall many, particularly young men.

Much dialogue and writing about video games concerns whether or not games are desensitizing people to war and death. But the further you zoom out, it seems the opposite is occurring. According to scientist Steven Pinker (as best outlined in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature), human violence, both organized and disorganized, is in a precipitous and continuous decline. Even supposing video games were somehow making us more violent, massive countervailing social, economic, and psychological forces are making us far less violent.

It is worth speculating what contribution, if any, video games have made to the global species-level violence decline. There is an oft-reported anecdotal belief that violent games act as a pillow to be punched, a “safe” anger release. But it's more because of the raw number of people (specifically young men who might otherwise be soldiers) spending formative years playing games, and the sheer hours that games take out of life. According to game designer Jane McGonigal, that’s three billion hours a week, every week, that are sucked out of all other pursuits, including organized (and disorganized) violence.

It’s a strange contradiction. Militaries, governments, and armed groups recognize the power of the medium, and throw money into it, when the very medium could be limiting their ability to mobilize force and attract willing participants.

The US Army has a video game (America’s Army). Hezbollah has a video game (Special Force). Even ISIS has a video game—two actually, a mod of Grand Theft Auto called Grand Theft Auto: Salil al-Sawarem that may not actually exist as a playable product outside of a YouTube video for social media purposes, and more recently a mod of Arma III originally created to model the fight against ISIS, then hijacked and repurposed to simulate killing Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and chasing down Western hostages.

The NSA, CIA, and FBI spent hundreds of thousands of hours in MMOs like WoW and Second Life looking for evidence they were being used for terrorist communications. By all accounts, they found nothing. But if you spend enough time in a Counter-Strike or Insurgency, or even in the bigger budget AAA FPSs, you will occasionally come across a handle like “ISISWINS” or “Baqiya”, with that familiar black flag profile picture to match. And it’s unclear if they are western wannabes, role playing military hobbyists, trolling kids, or the real thing.

We know of at least one small-scale instance of the CIA funding the development of video games in an attempt to influence global public opinion of the United States. In his book The Way of the Knife, journalist Mark Mazzetti detailed the saga of U-Turn Media, a Czech-based digital media company that developed mobile media products, including video games, designed to enhance the perception of the US military abroad. U-Turn’s releases included a Call of Duty-type mobile game called Iraqi Hero. While this is the only reported instance of direct involvement with video game development, the CIA has a long history of funding and supporting creative and artistic ventures to enhance global impressions of the US. This history includes everything from mass-media products like the 1954 cartoon adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, to high culture institutions like The Paris Review and The Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Even without direct involvement from the military or the intelligence community, military first-person shooters are tremendously influential advertisements for a certain version of American power. Whether or not this vision succeeds, the games that carry them are successful, even in unlikely places. As a young Iraqi woman named Noor Alousi (who now lives in Turkey) explained to me: “In Iraq we loved CoD. We want to play games about where we are from.”

In December 2011, when Noor and her younger brother played Battlefield 3 for the first time, a bomb went off about half a mile from their Baghdad home. She said they waited for the window to stop rattling, looked at each other, and then resumed playing. I asked her if she thought her love of Battlefield and Call of Duty had any impact on how she perceived the American military and American foreign policy. “I am not sure,” she said, “but Americans make these games. I like these games. I like the people who make them.”

In 2011, I was hired by a private sector risk consultancy to be part of a group investigating and researching “the effect of pop culture on the wars of Bush and Obama.” We analyzed social media streams and pored over movie box office data. One of the more interesting results from that study was just how popular Call of Duty and Battlefield were in Iraq. That regardless of politics, and even with the horrors of real war easily present around them, there was apparently some universal appeal to shooting terrorists in an American uniform. Iraqi teenagers were tumbling and streaming and trash talking about their exploits.

But of course, culture does not work along perfect linear lines of propaganda-bred assimilation. It was as true during that project as it has been true throughout my travels: the most popular video game anywhere was never Call of Duty, nor any of its cousins, but entries from the Grand Theft Auto series, which always seem to appear, so often pirated, in the most unlikely and impoverished corners of the world. The American Military in all its technological glory may be extraordinarily successful subject matter for big budget video games (and movies), but it is no match for the sheer cultural power of The American Gangster.

Despite the fact that GTA has so often been a punching bag at various points for both Democrats and Republicans, it may be the most successful and influential American cultural export of the 21st Century (this is even more remarkable considering it was [and is] made not by Americans at all, but by two British brothers). GTA holds up a perfect mirror to the real ideals and dreams of the American experience, that we are a popular culture enthralled by money, guns, cars, mobsters, gangsters, thugs, and outlaws, that despite our public exclamations that we “support the troops’, we care more about an antiestablishment drive to the top than we care about our soldiers. Grand Theft Auto is the perfect embodiment of this mythology: massacres, prostitutes and a thumping soundtrack to run under the entire experience.

Once, at a London video game event (Eurogamer Expo in 2011), I met a half-Kuwaiti half-Saudi teenager named Fahad, who liked to repeatedly insist to Americans that his family was not all that different from the Bin Laden family and then joke “But I couldn’t find 19 friends to crash planes into New York if you paid me. Because Rockstar’s offices are there, no?”

Rockstar’s main offices are in fact exactly 1.2 miles from Ground Zero. Grand Theft Auto III, the first modern 3-D GTA game and the first mega blockbuster, was released exactly one month and eleven days after 9/11.

“You know how I know the CIA’s not controlling games development?” he said. “Because if they were, all they’d need to do is make GTA: DUBAI, make it as offensive and messed up as possible, and then just parachute free Xboxes and flatscreen TVs across the entire middle east.”

He said that, and together we demoed yet another game that was centered around shooting your opponent in the face where no one actually gets hurt, where flying pieces of metal don’t actually rip flesh and smash organs. And I thought once again of Halil’s “The Great Secret”, and wondered if his game was still going. If in some dark corner of the internet, Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah fighters were still shooting at each other with fake bullets, muttered curses, and laughter.

And hiding it from their superiors.