Game & Word Volume 6, Issue 0: Sunday, Oct. 4, 2026

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “The Beholder’s Eye” (~69 minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

Welcome back, dear reader.

We’ve got on quite the tour-de-force over the past few years, haven’t we? We’ve sailed the seven seas with Guybrush Threepwood and Edward Kenway, journeyed to the deepest, darkest chasms of the human psyche (and met G&W’s patron saint, His Luminousness the Prophet Carl Jung, along the way), traveled through time by booting up Outer Wilds and Chrono Trigger, and cast a spell on ourselves as we traced an arcane path from the ceremonial lodge to the game studio and the D&D table, with help from medieval Kabbalists and ceremonial lodge members alike.

And now, five volumes under our belt, we’ve arrived at the theme that’s silently but surely been humming underneath it all: how games look and sound, and why that’s important… not just to the games themselves, but to the entire world.

And with this, I introduce to you Game & Word Volume 6: Pixel Perfect (Beauty, Art, Aesthetics, and Design in Video Games)!

Beauty is one of those things that seems not only in short supply, but increasingly anathema to our modern world. Have you ever noticed, for instance, how nearly every other car is some drab shade of grey (and that’s not even to mention active vehicular assaults on aesthetic decency… cough cough Cybertruck cough cough)? Or how every new skyscraper is yet another undifferentiated spike of glass and steel? Or the fact that “minimalism” and “Millennial grey” were (and still are) such a huge thing?

I first started thinking about that when I was driving with my family to Taco Bell (yes, yes, I know, blame the missus), and she mentioned how back in the day, Taco Bell locations were all basically fake haciendas (I believe the technical term is “mission-style”). I then looked up at the grey hipster box we were driving up to, that we only recognized as Taco Bell because of the logo (it turns out, very much by design), and thought… what the hell happened to the world?! Would a little color hurt? How about lines in configurations other than “straight” and “stark”?

And then, I booted up Tears of the Kingdom, and as I once again immersed myself in the lush verdance and pseudo-cel-shaded charm of Hyrule, it hit me... beauty hasn’t fully left our world! It just lives on in video games — one of humanity’s last unapologetically beautiful mediums. And sure enough, you probably know where I’m going with this... it is through video games that we have the greatest shot of ushering in a true renaissance of beauty.

So now, to explore this most beautiful side of video games, I’ve opened up a brand-new museum, which I’ll now take you on a guided tour of, throughout at least 10 new issues covering everything that makes a game pleasing to experience: art direction, environmental design, photography, fashion, music (after all, sound can be beautiful, too!) and UX/UI — while also making a few detours through wings dedicated to anime and kawaii, cozy gaming, and yes, even deliberately (and not-so-deliberately) ugly games — in an attempt to answer one question that’s been burning in the background since this publication’s inaugural issue:

Does beauty really matter in games? Or is gameplay all that counts?

Anyway, enough talk. I’ve always wanted a museum, and now I have one, so how about a little peek behind the velvet rope? We still have an hour or so before we open to the public… so let me give you an insider’s preview of all of the museum’s various wings. Let’s have a look at what makes a game beautiful, and why it’s more important than you’d think.

~Jay

(PS—As always, be on the lookout for a Bonus Quest installment, exclusive for paid subscribers, hitting your inbox within the coming weeks!)

Subscribe now

Housekeeping

Volume 5 is Going in the Vault!

HEADS UP: Now that Volume 6 is live, all of Volume 5 has now joined Volumes 1–4 behind the paywall. Since January 1, 2022, I’ve written over 500,000 words (more than The Lord of the Rings, A Game of Thrones + A Clash of Kings, and the first four Harry Potter books put together!) examining video games through the lenses of history, philosophy, psychology, theology, and many other myriad “-ologies”…

…And you can access ALL of it by upgrading to a paid subscription! Click the button below, and for a mere $5 each month, you too can level up your knowledge of games and the world around us while also supporting an independent media venture!

Previous Issues

• Volume 1 (The Name of the Game): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4

• Volume 2 (Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 3

• Volume 3 (Game Over Matter): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 4 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 2 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Podcast 3 ● Bonus 2

• Volume 4 (Tempus Ludos): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Video Podcast 2 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Issue 10

• Volume 5 (AbraCODEabra!): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 9 ● Bonus 3 ● Issue 10 ● Bonus 4 ● Issue 11 ● Bonus 5 ● Issue 12 ● Bonus 6 ● Issue 13 ● Bonus 7

Older issues are currently archived and only accessible to paid subscribers. To access the full archive, upgrade to a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

Also, Check Out Our Sister Publication!

If you’re an indie studio head, definitely check out Game & Word’s sister publication, Spawn Point Marketing, where I give you free and actionable game marketing advice and case studies. All of my industry analysis lives there now, so if you’ve enjoyed my industry takes, be sure and subscribe:

Spawn Point Marketing

Easy, practical, and actionable marketing tips, insights, and case studies for indie game developers.

By Jay Rooney

I also, through Spawn Point Marketing, offer fractional marketing leadership to indie and AA game studios. To learn more about the services I provide, or to book a free consultation, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com, or click the button below:

Click to Find Your Players

Feature: The Beholder’s Eye

🚫🚫🚫 DON’T BE A MORAL COSPLAYER 🚫🚫🚫

In case you’re new here, I’d like to fill you in on something important (longtime readers, feel free to skip ahead):

There are few things I abhor more in this world than moral grandstanders who feel the need to signal their purity and virtue with performative outrage to show the world they’re so much better than everyone else. So in that spirit, be aware that this piece uses a few AI images. If you have a problem with that, I REALLY don’t want to hear it; if you start sounding off about it, that’s an instant permaban. Moral grandstanding is NOT welcome here.

Respectful and constructive criticism and debate, on the other hand, is always welcome… and if you can’t tell the difference, you’re too dumb for this newsletter. GTFO.

Oh, and this article uses em dashes, semicolons, Oxford commas, triads, negation-affirmation constructions (and other parallel structures), lists, and fancy Latinate words galore (like I have been since I first srarted writing about games back in 2019; check the archive if you don’t believe me). This used to be called “writing well,” but now it’s apparently “AI.” If you’re of this mind, then you are also not smart enough to read this newsletter (and if you comment as much, that’s also an instant perma).

I’ll spare my actual readers, who are actually smart and have the capacity to grasp the difference, from having to read my thoughts on the whole matter again. If you’re so interested, I’m appending my full rant as a footnote here:1

And for the more reasonable among you, I’ve also appended a proper disclosure as another footnote:2

Confessions of a Reluctant Sticker Collector

Like every OG Paper Mario fan, I have a strained, almost love-hate relationship with the franchise. On one hand, the original Paper Mario (2000) and The Thousand-Year Door (2004) are two of my most formative games, and the latter especially constitutes, in my view, the series’ high-water mark. But every entry since then has, at the very least, failed to clear the bar I expected of it, and in the worst cases, has been so disappointing as to almost completely turn me off of the series, period.

I actually covered this in a two-parter I wrote for Level Up Media way back in the day (archived here and here), but just to quickly summarize, after the utter perfection that was TTYD, every entry since then, starting with Super Paper Mario (2007) (fun, but very much out of left field) and ending with The Origami King (2020) (a partial return to form, but still no TTYD) has failed to live up to the standard set by the first two games... with the series’ nadir without a doubt being either the 3DS’ entry, Sticker Star(2012), or the Wii U’s Color Splash (2016), depending on who you ask.

For me, it’s Sticker Star. Absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt. Color Splash had its own issues as well, don’t get me wrong, but they’re mostly a continuation of everything Sticker Star got wrong, so I hereby declare Sticker Star the actual low point of the franchise.

Most of Sticker Star’s many, MANY issues can be traced back to its atrocious “sticker” system. As you play through the game, you collect a bunch of stickers, which you use for combat (1 sticker = 1 action) and for solving puzzles in the overworld. This made for repetitive and monotonous combat, as well as an ungodly amount of backtracking to find the one sticker you needed to solve a puzzle (and for which the game would give you no hint about either which sticker to use, or where to find it). You, the player, are reduced to nothing more than a glorified (and highly reluctant) sticker collector for the entirety of the game’s ~20-hour duration.

The game world was also broken up into short levels instead of being one big world of interconnected regions you could explore freely. But perhaps most atrociously, the developers not only stripped down and cringe-maxxed Paper Mario‘s famously witty and self-aware dialogue (Bowser didn’t even have a word of dialogue! If you’ve ever played the first two Paper Mario games, you already know why this is an absolute travesty), they also apparently forgot to write a story (any story) at all for this game. The plot was literally... ahem, paper thin. Some sticker star (title drop!) fell from the sky, and Bowser’s involved somehow, so now you have to wander the world peeling stickers off and slinging them at enemies. Why? Bahahahaha… f*% you, player.

I’m not the only one who remembers it this way, by the way. The game’s Metacritic score settled on a 75 (a decidedly mediocre score, especially for a Mario game), and most critics had the same gripes I did.

Now, I did finish the game. But upon completing it, I couldn’t help but reflect to myself: how much did I actually enjoy that? And if I’m being honest with myself, the answer was… not much, really. But I loved looking at and listening to it. The desert and snow worlds were a joy to play through, and the latter especially almost made up for the dredge that was the rest of the game. The soundtrack was also stellar, which was more true to form for this franchise, to the point that some retrospectives even call it the best in the series (I don’t know if I’d quite go that far, but it really is good and catchy!).

And we see echoes of that in The Origami King. Now, that game actually did have much better gameplay, but the combat in particular was not at all enjoyable (most of the time, it was generally easier and more enjoyable to just farm coins and spend them to skip combat altogether), and because Nintendo still insists on moving as far away from the franchise’s roots as possible, this game was ultimately still a far cry from the glory that was TTYD (is it really so much to ask for persistent and controllable party members, Nintendo???).

But TOK had a silver lining: the story was finally back in full force, its dialogue was as sharp and witty as it’s ever been in a Paper Mario game, and the art style and soundtrack similarly carried the game to the point that I truly, genuinely enjoyed it from start to finish (to illustrate, TOK is my actual pick for the best Paper Mario soundtrack). But at the end of the day, TOK represents Nintendo trying to have its cake and eat it too, insofar as invoking the series’ roots juuuust enough to try and satisfy fans while still insiting on doing things completely differently no matter how incongruent they are to what fans expect of the series.

So… did it work? Hard to say! TOK sold well, but the community’s reaction was predictably divided, and the TTYD nostalgia contingent was out in full force. I do think it’s telling that Nintendo then figured it was easier to simply remake TTYD in 2024 than attempt a new Paper Mario game. And the remake was great, by the way — it looks and sounds better than ever, and even includes some extra content! But it’s telling, nonetheless. What was also telling: the crisper visuals and enhanced soundtrack similarly carried the day… just like it did with both Sticker Star and The Origami King.

Hey, do you notice a pattern here? What’s the ONE good thing common to each of these games? As we’ve seen, it’s certainly not the gameplay (only one of the three games had good gameplay). And it’s not even the story — as we’ve seen, Sticker Star literally has no story (And this was by decree! Miyamoto famously asked of Sticker Star, “It’s fine without a story, so do we really need one?”).3

No, the ONE thing that remains constant throughout these three games — and, indeed, throughout the entire Paper Mario franchise — is the series’ trademark, distinctive papercraft charm. Literally there from the very beginning, Nintendo made the deliberate creative decision to make the characters out of paper, so as to give Paper Mario its own identity as a Mario RPG franchise after Square and Nintendo parted ways after the smash hit that was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996) (note: this, in and of itself, is significant, and we’ll explore why as we go through this Volume). It is, quite literally, what makes Paper Mario... um, PAPER Mario.

You do follow, right? The art style gives this series its distinctive charm. It’s what makes it beautiful. And that beauty, as we’ve seen with Sticker Star, can let a game coast really far… much farther than it has any right to.

So… if beauty can do THAT for an objectively mediocre game… what can it do for a truly GREAT game? And even beyond that, what IS beauty, anyway? What does it do and how does it work in games? Is it even important? And if it is, how come nobody seems to take it seriously?

You know, someone should really open a museum about this… oh wait, what’s that?

*door creaks open*

Welcome to The Beaux-Arcade

Ladies and gentlemen, step right in… welcome to The Grand Gallery of Interactive Beauty4 Le Beaux-Arcade, A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of Game & Word Tour Operators, LLC. This expansive museum houses research, exhibits, and even a debate hall, all dedicated to exploring the role and function of art, beauty, design, and aesthetics in video games. I’m Jay Rooney, obviously, and I’ll be your docent for this tour of the museum.

First, I’d like to apologize for that first name… alas, the branding committee messed up, even though we specifically said “NO STUFFINESS ALLOWED.” This is a pretension-free zone. This docent has opinions, as well as this nifty thing... *shines a laser pointer around*. Oh, and there’s no security detail... well, unless you count the Beholder in the corner, over there. Just pay him no mind — and, whatever you do, avoid eye contact at all costs — and you’ll be fine.

Now, first, I want you to follow me over here, to this life-size chess board:

Do you notice anything about the pieces? Tell me… what’s the most important piece in Chess? The king, right? Well, how about the most powerful piece? Could it be the queen?

Ding ding ding! Congratulations! You now understand what I’m trying to get at with this whole museum. So I suppose we can wrap up now, thank you for coming today, the gift shop’s on your way out, and—

Wait, what’s that? You don’t get it? Sigh… oh, very well, I suppose I’ll explain it to you.

You see, this chessboard, and these chess pieces, are what we museum-types call a “metaphor.” When you want to illustrate something, you sometimes use imagery that isn’t meant to be taken literally, but point to a deeper—

Huh? What’s that? You’re not an idiot, you say? You know what a metaphor is, but don’t know what metaphor I’m using? You want me to “get on with it”?

Sigh… ok, fine. Geez, tough crowd today. It’s only my first museum tour, give me a break.

Anyway, the chess pieces are a metaphor for video games. Specifically, they represent all the aspects and elements that go into a video game and make them work.

So, for instance, story and narrative could be a knight, or a bishop. The game engine could be a rook. Not quite sure what the pawn is… but even if I did, I’m not sure I’d want to say because it might ruffle some feathers down in the comments.

Anyway, continuing the metaphor… in video games, gameplay is king. It is THE most important thing in ANY game. Now, it’s not a 1-to-1 comparison, because in Chess, the king is a decidedly average piece, only being able to move one square at a time (albeit in any direction)… but the important bit to keep in mind is that if your king is captured, you lose. Simple as that.

Similarly, if you’re making a game, and the gameplay is terrible, you have utterly failed to make a good game. A game with middling gameplay can still be saved if some of the other pieces pull their weight, but almost nothing can save a game with terrible gameplay.

But what about the queen? In Chess, the queen is the most powerful piece on the board: she can move as many spaces she wants, and in any direction — vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, both forward and backward — making her absolutely essential to actually winning. Now, is it possible to win without your queen? If you’re a good enough player (or if your opponent sucks enough), absolutely. But you’re going to have a much harder go at it if your queen is captured. She’s not strictly required to win a game… but oh man, does she really help!

In video games, beauty is queen. Like in Chess (and in life, for that matter), beauty is the most powerful and versatile tool in the game developer’s arsenal. She can make up for A LOT of a game’s deficiencies, as we saw with Sticker Star earlier. She can make an otherwise bad game more tolerable, an average game enjoyable, and a great game a masterpiece — and, in fact, a game all but has to be beautiful to be considered a masterpiece. While she’s not strictly needed to make a good game, and it’s entirely possible to make one without her... she really, really helps!

Yes, yes, I know what some of you are about to say. No, I’m not just saying “graphics good,” and yes, I know that Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, Undertale, and Cruelty Squad exist. I know that some of the most iconic games ever made also have what some of you would consider “ugly” visuals. Well, don’t you worry…

*points to a roped off wing with what appears to be an under-construction courtroom*

…We’ll deal with you lot at the end of the tour. Anyway, I might as well go ahead and answer some more of your questions:

• “Is beauty objective?” Yes.

• “Is beauty subjective?” Yes.

• “Does it even matter?” Yes, profoundly so.

• “Can a Toad be beautiful?” More than you’d think!

Ok, is that it? Good. Then, let’s get started with the tour! For, you see…

*glances out the museum’s front window, at the gray street outside*

…There’s something very wrong going on out there…

Ah, sorry. Got lost in thought for a second there. Anyway, every museum tour starts in its oldest wing, and we’re no different. In fact, ours goes back 73,000 years ago! So come with me now, and I’ll show you… oh, and by the way, please don’t touch the exhibits.

From Cave Walls to Firewalls

Anyway, I’ve been going on for quite a bit about how important beauty is, but I don’t think I’ve answered what beauty is. Well, the truth is, it’s... complicated. People can’t seem to agree on what it is! To show you what I mean, I’ll now take you on a little crash course on what “beauty” has meant throughout the ages, and how it ties into everything from art to philosophy and even biology.

Ready?

*brandishes laser pointer*

See this, right here? This is the oldest drawing known to man, discovered in South Africa’s Blombos Cave and dating back to roughly 73,000 years old! This means that tens of thousands of years before we invented writing, agriculture, or the wheel, some rando hunter-gatherer dipped his (her?) finger in ochre and drew on a rock… for no discernible survival reason! As you can see, these cross-hatched, incised drawings are far more abstract than the more famous animal cave drawings in France (which we’ll cover momentarily… but isn’t it funny how even before the age of recorded history, the French still take all the credit for inventing art? The more things change, right?), so it’s not like they were recording herd movements or hunting techniques or anything… at least, as far as we know.

And we didn’t stop there!

Let’s fast forward a dozen handfuls of millennia later, to those famous cave paintings of Chauvet (dated ~36,000 BP) and Lascaux (~17,000–21,000 BP) that I literally just mentioned:

Here, we see something far more sophisticated than the primitive scribbles we usually picture as cave art — these were fully-formed artistic traditions! And this, along with the fact that art literally predates everything else we associate with civilization, clues us into a fundamental truth of beauty and our relationship to it:

Namely, that beauty isn’t a “luxury” or “social construct” that we tacked on later, once we’d developed complex societies… we’ve had a sense of beauty since literally the very beginning of our species.

In fact, if you wanted to use a game dev analogy, you could call the Blombos rock drawings the very first patch notes for beauty, and the Chauvet/Lascaux paintings the next update (by the way, longtime Game & Word readers will already be long familiar with the concept of patch notes as archaology!).

So, we’ve always had some idea or notion of “beauty” carved into our noggins… but humans being humans, we couldn’t really further deepen or expound upon our conception of it until philosophers came around to overthink and overexplain the concept into the next millennium (or five). So let me introduce you to the OG philosophers: the Ancient Greeks.

Or, more specifically, Plato. By the time we’d graduated from painting on cave walls to painting on frescoes, we’d had plenty of time to think about things like art, truth, and beauty, and plenty of time to subsequently intermix and intertwine them so tightly we’re still struggly to unravel them thousands of years later. And it’s from this era, the intellectual apogee of the ancient world, that spawns the classical conception of beauty: namely, that beauty is objective.

According to Plato and his contemporaries like Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Euclid, beauty was truth (or, at least, closely related to truth), and beauty was order (in this case, much more literally so). They were, if not deeply intertwined, then literally one and the same. Think, for instance, of the Golden Ratio, and how much it recurs in nature…

…And you’ll start to get the idea. Disparate, yet integral parts, coming together to form a concordant whole, the whole thing perfect in its proportion, harmony, and symmetry… that is beauty. This is a deeply ingrained and primordial notion of beauty, and it shows up literally everywhere in classical antiquity — it’s all over the era’s architecture, sculpture, poetry, and music. Yes, even those frescoes I mentioned earlier. Same with the Greeks’ celebration of the human body in its peak physical form, embodied in a culture of athleticism that found its ultimate expression in games like the OG Olympics. Hell, just look at the Parthenon, and you’ll see how seriously they took beauty:

Or consider Diotoma’s ladder, an almost sort of Ancient Greek tier list or skill tree for beauty. Here, I’ll let Plato himself explain it, in his own words. Just read this plaque, right here:

“Starting from individual beauties, the quest for universal beauty must find him mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung—that is, from one to two, and from two to every lovely body, and from bodily beauty to the beauty of institutions, from institutions to learning, and from learning in general to the special lore that pertains to nothing but the beautiful itself—until at last he comes to know what beauty is.

And if, my dear Socrates, Diotima went on, man’s life is ever worth living, it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty.”

~Plato, 561–63 [Symposium 210a–211d]

In case you want a TL;DR, Plato’s saying that only stopping at beautiful bodies is literal NPC behavior. The true philosophical GigaChad climbs the skill tree until s/he communes with the ineffable essence of beauty itself.

Anyway, that sounds nice and lovely, doesn’t it? So I suppose we’re all done here, and can move onto the next wing, right?

“Not so fast!”, says a hologram of David Hume, projecting from a device on the other side of the gallery. “Now, dare I say, I do have some thoughts on this matter, and I’d very much like to lodge an objection, thank you very much!”

Ah, yes. How could I forget? At this point in the story, we skip ahead a few more thousand years, from the fresco to the oil canvas, and from the balmy Mediterranean to the cold and damp realm of Albion.

*points at an oil portrait of David Hume*

Now, Hume was a Scottish philosopher whose treatise on aesthetics, “Of the Standard of Taste,” was first published in 1759 but received surprisingly scant notice until the latter half of the 20th Century. According to Hume, beauty is subjective. But here, I’ll let him explain:

“Right, thank you very much, old chap!”

…Old?! Why I oughta—

“Anyway, I posit that beauty exists in what I call the contemplating mind. Or, to put it another way, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ as you kids these days love to put it. No, not that ghastly creature running security out there... I mean each and every subjective mind, like yours and mine.

You see, the Greeks got it all backwards, dear chaps! You don’t reason your way to a conception of beauty, you FEEL it. I now ask you: do you ever THINK an object or a person as beautiful or ugly? No! We FEEL it, and that VERY feeling is what constitutes our praise or admiration. Any words we use to express that praise come after the fact. It is, indeed, that SENTIMENT, in and of itself, that forms the beauty of the object in question!”

Thank you, David. Well, my friends, you can probably see why Hume became so popular over the last six decades or so, right? I mean, it jives very well with the post—

“Now, hold up, you charlatan! Zat is NOT ze whole picture, and you know it”, shouts another hologram, the one of Immanuel Kant, shouting from another projector right next to Hume’s.

…Oh boy. I probably shouldn’t have placed those two so close together. You do know who Kant is, right? Or did you fall asleep during your philosophy elective? German philosopher? Only, you know, one of the most important philosophers of the modern era, if not of all time? You know... a priori, inductive reasoning, all that stuff? No? Well, no matter... let’s hear them duke this one out.

“Ah, I was wondering why the air felt so dry in here. What can I do for you, Immanuel CAN’T?”

“Ha ha ha, very funny. And I thought ze docent vas the only one around here who made lame puns!”

Uh…

“Anyvay, vhy ze hostility, David? You know I basically agree vith you on ze fundamentals… beauty is indeed subjective! I never vent against you on zat. But nevarzheless, here’s vere you are wrong, David. Ze judgment of taste, even if fully subjective, is not — indeed cannot — be as atomized as you proclaim.”

“Why, I never! If you ever bothered to even try and grasp at what I’m saying, you’d know that—“

*clicks the mute button as the two holograms shout at each other in silence*

Hoo boy. Maybe I shouldn’t have put those two right next to each other. Anyway, maybe I’d better explain this to you myself.

As you saw, both Hume and Kant rejected the Ancient Greeks’ idea of beauty as objective. This far into the Enlightenment, such notions had come to be seen as quaint, if not crude or even vulgar. An object, according to this view, does not “have” beauty in the same way it has mass, or color.

So if beauty isn’t intrinsic to an object, then it must exist only as a subjective response… this is what Hume was getting at in his famous treatise. Different minds respond differently to the same object, and therefore beauty is subjective. And Kant agrees with him on this!

However, as you can see, they did have their… differences. So, where did they diverge?

Basically, if you accept that beauty is grounded in subjective feeling, you then have to confront a rather thorny philosophical dilemma:

Why aren’t all aesthetic judgments equally valid?

And before you try and “But Jay!” me here, let me ask you this… if I said your grandma was ugly, would you consider that valid? After all, beauty is subjective, right? So why would my judgment be any less right than yours?

This is where Kant’s notion of disinterest enters that. But what does he even mean by that? Well, consider the following question: why should we find something beautiful?

To answer this, consider the perennial internet debate about pineapples on pizza. Say you enjoy pineapples on pizza… maybe not your favorite topping, but you enjoy it, and you certainly wouldn’t turn down a slice. But then, imagine I say to you, “Yuck, I HATE pineapples on pizza! They make me wretch!”

How would you react? You’d probably shrug, right? Fair enough, you’d say. To each their own, I’m not going to yuck your yum (or is it yum your yuck?).

Now, look up at the ceiling, to the replica of the Sistine Chapel mural I had commissioned in here for an ungodly amount of V-Bucks:

Beautiful, is it not? You probably looked at that just now and thought “Wow, that’s a beautiful mural!” Even if you’re not that hot on Renaissance frescoes, you’re probably still struck by the sheer scale and elegance of the whole thing.

Now, imagine I come up to you and say, “Nah, bro. It’s ugly AF.”

How would you react to that? Did you feel that knot in your stomach just now? Did you feel oddly compelled to argue with me about it?

Kant would say the way you reacted is of supreme philosophical importance. According to him, for a judgment of beauty to be valid, it has to at least plausibly have what he called universal validity. Namely, that everyone ought to find this beautiful. Hume never quite went this far in his philosophy!

So, now that I’ve set it up… what is disinterest, then?

Let’s go back to your grandma. Imagine you tell me: “My grandma is beautiful! In fact, she’s so beautiful, I’m going to commission a portrait of her!”

But then, imagine I look at that and say, “No, your grandma is ugly. And so is that painting!” How would you react? You’d probably want to punch me in my stupid face, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s because you’re interested in your grandma’s beauty. You have an ulterior motive for finding her beautiful. And no, calm down, I don’t mean that you’re physically attracted to your grandma — I mean you have a compelling reason for finding her beautiful that goes beyond her mere aesthetic qualities and the subjective feelings they’d otherwise invoke in you. Namely, you have a strong familial bond that colors your judgment of her. You have an interest in her beauty (again, calm down... not in a sexual way).

Ok, fine. I’ll lay off your grandma. Say a woman walks down the street, and I say to you, “Oh, she’s pretty! Wouldn’t you agree?” How would you react?

Well, if you’re not attracted to her yourself, you’d probably shrug again. My aesthetic judgment of her is tied to my desires, connected to my interests. If you don’t find her attractive (whether because you’re not attracted to that particular type, or to women in general — don’t worry, I don’t judge!), then you have no reason to share my response. She’s not your type. You don’t share my taste in women.

Similarly, say we walk outside and see a house that you really like. You then say to me, “Oh, that house is beautiful! I’d love to live there.”

But say, I don’t agree… I’m more of an apartment person, or a log-cabin-in-the-woods type of guy. So I say “lol… wut.” But again, you don’t care. Your reaction to that house is connected to your interests, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect me to agree with you here.

And that’s the crux of the matter: the more my pleasure depends on something particular to me, the less entitled I am to expect you to share it. And vice-versa.

But then, what happens when we strip those interests away? What if we’re no longer responding to something because of who we are, what we want, what we have, or what we aspire to? Well, then we’re merely contemplating its form. And at that point, we are fully disinterested… and it’s only in this state of disinterest that an aesthetic judgment can be said to be universally valid.5

At that point, we’re able to “judge for all men,” as if beauty really WERE an intrinsic part of the thing, even though we’re rendering our own subjective judgments. That sort of “subjective universality” lies at the heart of every debate over how subjective beauty really is, even to this very day.

Speaking of this very day… I see our two philosopher friends are still arguing, so let’s fast-forward a bit to the modern age, where we no longer make art on canvas (well, not as much as we used to, anyway), but in Photoshop… and also in game engines, and with neural networks.

Picasso was famously reputed to have said, after visiting the cave paintings at Lascaux, either “We have invented nothing” or “We have learned nothing in 12,000 years.”6 But I beg to differ… I think we’ve learned A LOT since we first started painting on rocks with ochre! I mean, just look at this:

Sublime, isn’t it? Yes, I intentionally chose that word… I’d pull up Edmund Burke’s hologram right now, but I’m a little nervous while Hume and Kant are still having words with each other. But don’t worry, you’ll tour his very own wing soon! And you’ll feel quite… small in it. But for now, let’s move on.

Now, before we do, I should point out… we’ve come quite a long way throughout 78 millennia of art and 2.5 millennia of aesthetic philosophy, and indeed both have changed a lot along the way (and I’ve necessarily heavily compressed it here… apologies, but in the interest of time, I had to give you the TL;DR. Yes, that was the TL;DR!), but in a very fundamental way, they really haven’t changed at all. Yes, the TOOLS we use to parse and depict beauty have changed a lot since the cave painting era… but the COMPULSION that drives it all — that inestinguishable human drive to seek AND create beautiful things — hasn’t changed one iota in over 78,000 years.

Anyway, there you have it! And that concludes our tour of this museum’s oldest wing, where we’ve brushed up on all the different ways philosophers have argued about what beauty is for thousands of years.

Now, let’s move onto the next wing, where a bunch of biologists will try to answer a much cruder (but no less important) question: what the hell is beauty for?

This Is Your Brain on Beauty

Once science started peeling away the layers from literally everything into the universe (from the ground under our feet and the bottomless oceans to the synapses in our brains to the very fabric of the universe itself), it should come as no surprise that they eventually put beauty itself under a microscope. And what they found was… well, shall we say, quite beautiful, in and of itself.

That’s what this wing of the museum is dedicated to: why do we find certain things beautiful? Indeed, why do we find things beautiful at all?

For a great primer on this topic, I highly recommend checking out Denis Dutton’s excellent book The Art Instinct (2009) (available in the museum gift shop!), as well as his accompanying TED Talk if you want the… er, the TED Talk version. The quick, high-level version. You know what I mean.

The cancel crowd and their Boomer forbears have been harping about beauty being a “social construct” (along with literally everything else, including quarks and atoms, no I’m not kidding) for the better part of a century now. But according to Dutton, as well as the research he cites, this is emphatically not the case (or, at the very least, not entirely): we find certain things beautiful because of evolution. Our sense of aesthetics and beauty is adaptive; we are hard-wired to find certain things beautiful, that’s literally how we evolved!

Consider landscapes. Next time you go to an art gallery or peruse the calendar rack at Barnes and Noble (or, if you’re on vacation, go to a post office or souvenir shop and browse through the postcards that don’t involve iconic landmarks), and take a look at any landscape paintings or photographs you see. Do you notice a type of landscape that seems to pop up more than others?

What do you notice that these vistas have in common? Just off the top of my head, I can tell you these landscapes all feature:

• Water features of some sort

• Open space with scattered trees (or a balance of open and wooded space)

• The trees themselves appear climbable

• Either visible game, or evidence of game (tracks, etc.)

• A visible path that bends out of sight, almost beckoning you to follow it

• Shot/painted from a high vantage point

And this recurs everywhere! Denis Dutton colloquially refers to it as the “Hudson River school” of artistry; you could even consider it a sort of “rugged pastoralist” subgenre of landscape painting and photography. Now, why do all of those features I just listed seem so familiar to you, and to me, and to all of us?

No! No, no, NO! *whacks you with pointing rod* Bad visitor! Don’t skip ahead in the tour! Relax, we’ll get there in due time. But I need to build up to it, first!

Anyway, I’ll tell you why we seem so drawn to these types of vistas in our art: it’s because they evoke the African savannas that we evolved in! They provoke such a strong reaction (and we keep being drawn to recreate them… pun intended) because each of those features pushes a specific button deep within our lizard brains:

• We need water to survive, obviously

• If there’s game nearby, that means food we can hunt

• Climbable trees mean safety from any roaming sabretooth tigers prowling about

• The pathway could lead us to more such goodies

• Both the vantage point and the open space allow us to survey the land for food, water, shelter, and other necessities, as well as spot potential threats like the aforementioned sabretooth tiger.

Anyway, let’s take a look at some iconic video game vistas, particularly those from open worlds. Notice anything familiar?

If you said “vantage point, water feature, scattered trees, and path bending out of sight,” congratulations! Give yourself a cookie. Video game artists, like their forbears in film and canvas, keep recreating the same landscapes thatevolution wired our brains to find beautiful, all on their own, without any cultural conditioning! When a level designer plops a mountain in front of you and entices you to climb it, she’s tapping into the deepest recesses of your Pleistocene brain.

And before you tell me “But Jay, that’s all well and good for landscapes, but what about art? Art is a product of culture, so wouldn’t artistic tastes be culturally engendered?”, let me just tell you that a) you clearly haven’t been paying attention, because art predates what we know as “culture”, hell it even predates language itself, and b) how do you explain that Beethoven is as beloved in Japan as he is in Austria, or that Shakespeare has been translated into literally every major language?

Not everything is a cultural construct, you know. Some things really are universal!

Anyway, now that we’ve established that we’re literally hard-coded to find certain things beautiful, let’s take a look at how we find those things beautiful — as in, what exactly goes on in our brains that makes us lose our minds at the sight of a baby’s face, the sound of a rousing orchestral overture, or even a display of athletic prowess like scoring a goal from halfway across the field?

Well, neuroscientists have actually looked into this very question, and quite deeply at that, to the point there’s actually an entire sub-discipline with its own appropriately jargony name: neuroaesthetics. And wouldn’t you know it, neuroaestheticians (phew, ain’t that a mouthful?) have actually identified the culprit within the big blob of grey matter bobbing about in our skulls: the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC for short), also known as our internal beauty bookie (or, alternately, the brain’s Department of “Ooooh, Pretty!”).

These very smart beauty brainiacs have done some very interesting research where they ran fMRI scans on people and tracked the activity in their mOFC as they got exposed to things like art, faces, and music. And they found that beauty activates the same neural reward circuits as food and sex. Do you know what this means? It means that, as far as our brains are concerned, we NEED beauty in our lives as much as we need to eat and to fu... er, flirt.7

But how do our brains know what is beautiful, to begin with? How those millions of neural pathways parse a cute kitten or a stunning vista as beautiful in a way that they don’t for a concrete Brutalist abomination?

Well, as science would have it, researchers Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian (the former being a sort of founding pioneer in neuroaesthetics) have dedicated quite a bit of brainpower towards answering this very question, and they came up with a framework called the aesthetic triad.

According to their research, the aesthetic triad consists of three systems, working in tandem, to create an “aesthetic experience” (which is simply a very sciencey way of saying “someone finds something beautiful”). These three systems are:

• Sensory: the parts of your brain that parse sensory input like color, form, line, composition, and motion,

• Emotional: the parts that govern affective and emotional responses to the aforementioned sensory input, usually pleasure and reward systems, but can also throw in other emotional processes into the mix (the mOFC itself is a big part of this)

• Meaning: all the things that make your mind uniquely your own — including, among other things, your memories, background, and culture — then step in to imbue an aesthetic experience with meaning.

This is why beautiful things often feel deeply significant and meaningful, far more than something that’s just “pretty” should ever even claim to.

Now, to be fair, it wouldn’t be science if it wasn’t fiercely contested (what, you thought “scientific” meant “settled fact”? Oh, you sweet summer child), and sure enough, the field of evolutionary aesthetics has drawn some quite pointed criticism indeed. If you ever want to make a lifeloong enemy out of an evolutionary neuroaesthetician, just plunk this in her lab:

What’s this, you ask? Why is there a urinal in my art gallery? Did I mistake this wing for the bathroom? Well, no. The bathrooms are down the hall, over there. And I’ll have you know, that’s not just any urinal, that is an artistic masterpiece (you uncultured philistine). It’s also, according to many an art and cultural critic that bristles at the idea you could reduce something as ineffably meaningful (and even spiritual) as art and beauty to a series of neural pathways and biological adaptations, the single biggest rebuttal to the entire field of evolutionary aesthetics.

You see, back in 1917, an ornery Frenchman8 named Marcel Duchamp, frustrated at the stuffiness and pretentiousness of the art world (Where’ve you been, pal? LOL… I suppose the more things change, the more they stay the same), took it upon himself to knock it all down a peg. To this end, he plunked a literal urinal in a hoighty-toughty art exhibition, signed it with the nom-de-plume “R. Mutt,” and sardonically declared “This is ART!”

Much to (what I imagine to be) his dismay, the art world agreed. Considered the founding piece of the iconoclastic Dadaist movement, Duchamp’s urinal would eventually become as revered in the annals of modern art as Monet is in the impressionist world, and was even voted as THE most influential artwork of the 20th Century by a panel of over 500 British art critics.

You can probably guess how this fits into the argument against us evolving to like art: what the hell does a toilet have to do with evolutionary survival? Even if you grant that people admire Thomas Kinkade landscapes because of some ancient evolutionary itch, how does that explain the long-lasting admiration of artworks like Duchamp’s urinal or that duct-taped banana that sold for over seven figures?

Fortunately, Dutton has thought about this, and so he proposed a set of “cluster criteria” to help us bridge this gap. Whether or not something qualifies as “art” can depend on how someone responds to it, the artist’s skill or creativity, or the context in which the art was created (certainly, by the time Duchamp pulled his little stunt, we were about a dozen millennia removed from scoping vistas in search of food and water).

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t much matter. As neuroaesthetics demonstrates, beauty has deep biological roots, which in and of itself makes it significant and meaningful. This doesn’t mean that all art is an evolutionary adaptation (though there are second-order layers to all of this that still make sense from an evolutionary perspective: namely, that artistic skill can serve as a useful proxy for creative thinking, and can also be a status marker, both of which signal genetic fitness). But it does mean that seeing something beautiful is an experience our brains literally need to survive.

So, don’t ever let anyone dismiss your annoyance if you ever feel cheated because a video game’s actual graphics look worse than they did in the trailer!

Speaking of which, I do find it interesting that so many people in the gaming community would dismiss such an ancient and deeply-wired need as beauty, and even stranger still that they dismiss it with only three words…

It’s NOT “Just Graphics”

*sighs exasperatedly*

Ok. Deep breaths. I’m calm… I’m a professional docent… let’s take this seriously for a moment… the people who say this aren’t (all) trolls, they’re just using the wrong word. And to be fair to them, it’s the games industry’s fault they keep using that word! They’ve been drilling it into our noggins for decades now.

So, in order to fix this annoying gamer habit, I’ve created this plaque to spell it out a little more clearly. Here, if you’ll please direct your eyes to it, over here:

“But… what’s the difference?”, you may ask. Well, it’s really quite simple:

Graphics (or, more precisely, fidelity) is a measure of something. When you say “graphics,” you’re talking about things like polygon counts, resolution, or framerate. You’re literally counting how many individually-rendered nose hairs the game engine renders on the protagonist. It’s a measuring tape, really, or a scale. It quantifies what your game console can spit out onto your screen, but it doesn’t go any further than that.

Aesthetics, on the other hand, is all about vision. It encompasses a game’s art direction, color, composition, and its overall visual coherence… in other words, the sum total of every creative choice the developers made while building it, which make the game look, sound, and FEEL like itself, and only itself, like no other game could. It’s what goes into the game console (whether by cartridge, disk, or download) that then gets rendered as graphics.

They’re two different things, yet far too many gamers conflate the two, mixing them up, and using them interchangeably. I can’t treat this as anything other than the fundamental categorical error that it is. It’s like if you judged a painting by counting how many threads are in the canvas. If graphics are the measuring tape, then aesthetics are what it’s measuring — indeed, they’re the thing that’s worth measuring in the first place!

And nothing (and I really do mean nothing) proves this better than a very dark chapter in gaming history when fidelity was all the rage but beauty was at its very nadir. I call it The Brown Ages.

You see, back in the ancient, bygone, nigh-prehistoric era known as the mid-to-late-2000s, gamers and developers alike were absolutely obsessed with “next-gen” “graphics.” It may be hard to believe looking back from our current age of fancy ray-tracing and DLSS5s, but at the time, the PS3 and Xbox 360 were the pinnacle of graphical power in video games. And how did studios decide to present the most technically dazzling games (ie, its HIGHEST-fidelity games, mind you) of this era? As ugly AF, that’s how.

Put down your pitchforks, fanboys. You know this to be true. Your modal 2008-2009 “next gen” game looked ugly AF: gritty, desaturated, and utterly slathered in 50 shades of brown and gray (pun absolutely intended, as always), with a generous dollop of bloom lighting to top it off. They looked like they’d been marinated in dishwater. Here was video game hardware at its most capable, able to achieve a level of graphical detail that would’ve been unfathomable back in the NES/SNES era, and the games themselves looked as depressingly drab as a Soviet-era concrete apartment block.

It got so bad, even the developers themselves noticed.

Please walk over to this display case, right over here:

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Jay, this such a lush and vibrant game! What the hell are you talking about?!” Well, you know what they say about the exception making the rule, right? Well, now I present to you the exception: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves(2009). Practically alone amongst all its peers, Uncharted 2 was almost riotously colorful. So it should come as no surprise that its developers at Naughty Dog threw some shade at its greyer and drabber contemporaries. Naturally, they did this in the form of an unlockable: the “Next-Gen Filter.”

After you unlocked the “Next-Gen Filter” (fortunately, with in-game currency and not through a microtransaction), you could flip it on to smear a muddy brown-gray “bland blanket” (with extra bloom!) over the game’s gorgeous vistas, so you too could experience Uncharted 2 the way a “serious” next-gen title was supposed to look like.9

So even back then, at the bleeding edge of graphical fidelity, this trend was so ridiculously pronounced enough that a studio built an entire joke setting to make a point that fidelity ain’t the same as beauty — if they were the same thing, the Next-Gen Filter would’ve been an upgrade. But it was decidedly not.

Also, keep in mind that absolutely nobody mods a game to make it uglier… unless it’s a joke. And the joke only works in the first place because everyone understands the punchline: beauty, not graphics, is the point. Always has been.

But hey, since I see all you photorealism fans in the back sharpening your pitchforks again, let me put your minds at ease: no, fidelity isn’t “bad.” Photorealism can be a legitimate aesthetic in its own right, as long as its pursued with actual artistic vision. Indeed, some of the most beautiful games ever made have photorealistic graphics:

But we’ll go over this in more depth when we tour the next wing, which is all about art direction (opening next issue!), so we’ll table the topic for now.

Point is: games became quite drab for a while, but then they noticed it, and even proceeded to laugh about it in-game. And since laughter really is the best medicine, they got better. Video games emerged from the darkness of the Brown Ages into a veritable aesthetic renaissance. Indeed, games are now living in what might be the most stylistically diverse era any visual medium has ever experienced. Go ahead and open up Steam, and marvel at how a photorealistic epic, watercolored indie, PS1-throwback horror game, and cel-shaded cartoon game can all come out within the same year, without anyone so much as batting an eye.

Which is more than I can say for the world outside this museum…

Run for the Border (of Beige and Boring)

Remember how I glanced out the front window earlier, when we were starting this little tour, and muttered under my breath that there was something very wrong going on out there?

Well… come. Stand here at the window with me for a minute.

*gestures at the street outside*

You’ll recall from the intro to this piece that I got the idea for this entire Volume during a family run to Taco Bell. To quickly recap: my wife reminisced to me about the fake haciendas of yesteryear’s Taco Bells, which stood in stark contrast to the anonymous gray box we were pulling into, as the realization dawned on me that I could only tell it was a Taco Bell because of the logo. You’ll recall I said that was “very much by design.”

Well, I wasn’t being rhetorical there. I mean it in the most literal sense of the word. And furthermore, I can prove it to you.

I looked it up, and those faux-haciendas my wife was telling me about were not only real, they were glorious. When Glen Bell opened up the first Taco Bell in Downey, California in 1962, he hired architect Robert McKay to design it as a sort of loving pastiche of California’s famed Franciscan missions: he painted arched white stucco painted look like adobe, tiled the roof with red clay, including an arched outdoor corridor, and (naturally) set an actual bell into the facade. His design philosophy was, and I quote, “you let the building be the sign.”

And it worked so well, that one little mission-style taco stand spawned nearly 6,000 Taco Bell locations across America.10

So… what happened? Did people’s tastes did change? Or did America collectively decide it’d rather have its tacos served from a minimalist shipping container instead of a charming Potemkin mission building?

Nope! The industry’s design consultants will tell you why, straight up: that sleek gray cube is actually the most efficient building design. It’s cheap to build, easy to maintain, effortlessly reconfigured around drive-thrus, DoorDash drivers, and mobile-order pickup shelves, and (perhaps most importantly), generic enough to quickly, cheaply, and easily flip to another chain if the current location goes belly-up. After all, an hacienda can only ever be a Taco Bell (or perhaps another Mexican chain), but a gray box can be anything... which is just another way of saying it’s nothing.

And no, put the tinfoil away, this isn’t a conspiracy. A group of rogue freemasons in a smoke-filled backroom didn’t suddenly decree that the world shall be beige, brown, and gray... at least, I don’t think they did. Something much dumber (and, if I’m being honest, a tad scarier) actually happened: thousands of independent actors trying to cut costs in ways that would look better in the next quarterly review. One contractor tries to minimize construction costs, another designs to make a building easier to resell, yet another looks for ways to cut maintenance budgets, yet another still optimizes throughput, and yet another other still convenes a focus group that tells it to “modernize” its locations… and then, thousands of such decisions later, we now all live in a world that’s grayer, flatter, duller, and more outright depressing than any one of them (or us) ever chose.

I call this phenomenon The Great Uglification: the slow and systematic draining of color, adornment, and basic delight from the world, all in the pursuit of optimizing efficiency. Because beauty, you see, is quite inefficient. It doesn’t flip. And so, beauty gets cut from the world.

And mind you, this is all just tacos. We haven’t even talked about cars, skyscrapers, movies, or those wretched “Millennial grey” living rooms yet!

Ok, I know what you’re thinking right now, so you might as well just spit it out… “But every generation thinks the world got uglier! Aren’t you just feeling nostalgic as you get older?”

And you know what? That’s fair. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, after all. And I’ll concede that the eye of the beholder can sometimes need contact lenses to see things as they really are. But I’m not asking you to take my word for it. As I mentioned… I have proof. But it’s getting late, so just know that I’ll finish off this Volume with a full smorgasbord of data on cars, buildings, movies, and more. Trust me, you won’t want to miss it (so be sure and subscribe, if you haven’t already!).

But I will say this now: we know that we’ve carried a sense and a longing for beauty for at least 78,000 years. We know that our brain’s reward circuits treat beauty like food. Beauty, far from an indulgent luxury, is a literal human need. And if the world outside is intentionally shedding its beauty, one ugly gray box at a time… well, that’s a bit of a problem, wouldn’t you say? And even if it’s not as existentially precarious as I posit it to be, I still have to ask... why?! Why remove beauty from the world?! Isn’t life hard and depressing enough as it is already, without having nice things taken away?

But there’s hope… and that hope comes from the one medium that’s successfully kept beauty alive.

Yes, the ONE medium. I’m sorry to break it to you, but every other art form has already been subsumed by the gray tide. Those cave painters from Lascaux must be spinning in their graves at what the arts have become! And if you think I’m being dramatic or exaggerating for rhetorical or comedic effect (fair, but not this time), I implore you to consider what all these different art forms, which were once reliable founts of joy and beauty, now puke out:

• Art has long succumbed to the Great Uglification, and is now so far up its own asshole that it can’t see the ridiculousness of paying seven figures for a banana duct-taped to a wall.

• Architecture, when its not giving us the same interchangeable fast-food grey boxes, keeps throwing up the same interchangeable glass skyscrapers.

• Furniture and interior design can’t seem to throw off the yoke of straight, sharp lines and “modern” minimalism, even though it’s now well over a decade past its expiration date (that said, designers finally seem to be moving past gray. Still, don’t hold your breath… to see what I mean, just look at what the “color of the year” for 2026 is: the most hideous shade of puke-brown you’ve ever seen!).

  • Industrial design hasn’t fared much better; after Apple took over the design world, everyone’s been trying to follow in their footsteps. Apple itself seems incapable of anything other than minimalist design now, even though it’s clearly played out and they partly rose to power by being boldly colorful. What the hell happened, Apple?!

  • Graphic design? Click on any random website and tell me they don’t all look like the same Squarespace template. Hell, even corporate logos all look the same now: sleek, streamlined, and utterly soulless.

• Fashion, for its part, keeps pushing “earthy” (read: boring) colors and modest, unassuming looks, season after season.

  • The current “Y2K”-era fashion revival gives some cause for hope, but even back at the turn of the century we were well on our way to sartorial sameness.

  • Really, there hasn’t been a truly bold fashion zeitgeist since at least the 80s, and arguably the 60s.

• Literature hasn’t produced a Great Novel on the level of Joyce, Steinbeck, Tolkien, or Hemingway for several decades now.

• Music keeps converging on the same sameness, to the point that genres as disparate as hip-hop, EDM, and even country all sound like every other Top 40 pop song that will be forgotten about in six months.

• Even movies never left their own Brown Ages — look at the box office hits from the past few years and count how many films have even a tinge of saturation or are actually color-graded properly.

But video games? They’re a different story. Yes, they went through the Brown Ages… but they also walked back out. Today, the medium releases over 20,000 instances of unapologetic technicolor joy to hundreds of millions of people every single year. And so maybe — just maybe — this is the medium that could well save us from drowning in a tide of gray, that could finally reverse the Great Uglification and usher in a brand new age of color, curves, and visually delightful joy.

Far from being “just video games,” our medium could very well serve as the vanguard that finally brings beauty back into our aesthetically-starved world. I’m staking this entire Volume on that claim, it’s the very reason I built this museum. And I hope that by the end of our time here, you’ll not only agree with me, but be ready to do YOUR part in helping our medium show the world what it really means to be beautiful again.

Anyway, enough doomscrolling out the window. We have a museum to tour! …It’s still under construction, though. Nevertheless, I owe you that insider’s preview of the rest of the wings. So, come on, follow me.

Mind the Wet Paint

Right this way, folks. And mind the wet paint… as I mentioned, we’re still putting the finishing touches on some of the wings here. Thank you for understanding; it’s hard to build a museum when your construction budget only allows for one guy and his Substack.

Anyhoo, here’s a quick preview of what’s in store for you as you continue the tour.

First up, right through here: the Art Direction Wing, which we’re opening to the public in this newsletter’s very next issue. And here’s our unofficial mascot, ready welcome you to the exhibits:

This is Ōkami (2006), Clover Studio’s magnum opus, and as you marvel at its ink-washed brilliance, I want you to take a moment to marvel at just how on the nose this game is for this museum and its mission. It’s rendered in a simply gorgeous style, ripped right out of a Japanese sumi-e brush painting. In it, you play as the sun goddess Amaterasu (in wolf form, because video games, amirite?), who has returned to a Japan that’s been cursed by the demon Orochi to become a blighted and gray wasteland. You cleanse the curse with the Celestial Brush, a literal paintbrush with which you quite literally paint life and color back into the world: if you swirl it over a withered field, the blight transforms into green grass and majestic cherry blossoms as color floods back into the world, like dawn breaking after the longest, darkest winter night.

Now, why does this feel so familiar, you ask? I wonder… where else have you heard about a world drained of its color by an utterly banal, creeping grayness, only to be restored back to beauty by an artist’s brushstroke?

Oh, that’s right. We literally just talked about this. Turns out, Ōkami already speedran my entire theory of beauty two decades ago! Should the Great Uglification ever get its own cinematic universe, then mark my words, this game will serve as the prophecy foretold to the hero in the first installment (before the trilogy and Netflix spinoff). Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a quick moment with my mascot.

*scratches Amaterasu behind the ears* Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good doggo? You are! *Amaterasu grunts contentedly*

Ok, I’m back. Now, direct your eyes over to this wall over here, which gives us a cautionary tale about Hume’s famous eye of the beholder. Ahem… behold:

This, right here, is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002). Today, gamers rightfully celebrate this game’s distinctive cel-shaded look as one of the most timeless art styles our medium has ever seen. But this was not always the case!

Here, I’ll demonstrate. Put this VR headset on.

The year is 2001, when Nintendo first revealed the game at Space World, about a year after it showed a tech demo of a gritty and realistic Link battling an equally gritty and realistic Ganondorf to show off the GameCube’s graphical capabilities. Fans, naturally, expected more of this Grimdark Zelda when they heard a trailer for the new GameCube Zelda game was being revealed. So, tell me... how do you think they reacted when they got this Saturday morning cartoon Link instead?

If you know anything about gamers (or were simply alive at the time), you already know what happened. The fandom EXPLODED with rage, hurling all sorts of invective at Nintendo and naturally coining all sorts of mocking epithets for the game (most infamously, “Celda”). The backlash got so intense that even Miyamoto himself started to have second thoughts, and he even told Wind Waker director (now the Zelda top honcho) Eiji Aonuma at one point that it wasn’t too late to back off of the cel-shaded art style.

But Aunuma stood his ground. And now, two decades later, the fandom’s consensus is unanimous: what they’d once derided as a “kiddy” cartoon aged like a fine Merlot, while the hyper-“realistic” visuals of its 2002-era contemporaries congealed into ugly, brown, “of their era” period pieces (this includes the follow-up Zelda game, Twilight Princess (2006), which featured a more “realistic” art style specifically to appease the fandom, which is now a bit of a black sheep of the series (albeit one with its fair share of defenders, some of whom will probably get at me in the comments)... a fact that the fandom itself still gets sheepish about if you ask them about it, to this very day).

So, to sum that debacle all up… the beholders of 2001 turned their eye towards one of the most objectively beautiful games ever made, and pelted it with rotten tomatoes.

Hold onto that lesson, by the way… Maybe keep it next to your ticket stub. It’s another thing that will become very important by the time we’re done with the tour.

Now, let’s go through this archway, to the Environmental Design Wing, where we—

*a hologram flickers to life*

“Ah, visitors! Edmund Burke, at your service.”

Oh, no...

“Might I interest you in a spot of terror, commingled with sheer delight? You see, whereas the beautiful is merely small, smooth, and lovely, the SUBLIME is vast, obscure, and pow—“

NOT YET, ED! You’re not scheduled for another two issues!

*unplugs projector*

…Sorry about that. He’s been practicing that bit for months, now. Still, I understand why he’s so excited! In this wing, we’ll explore games that make you feel small in a way that’s both glorious and terrifying. We’ll cross Journey (2012)’s majestic sand dunes and traverse the forbidden lands of Shadow of the Colossus (2005), and of course recreate our very first step off the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild (2017), when your thumb just... hovers over your Joy-Con for an instant as all of Hyrule unfolds before your very eyes.

Games, as it turns out, are the rightful heirs and spiritual successors of Romantic landscape painting. You’ll see why.

As for the rest of the museum, well, we’ll just have to speedrun it for now, but here’s what you can expect as we continue our tour:

• Over there is the Photography Gallery. Once games got beautiful enough, of course we started bringing cameras into them! If you fiddle around with a game’s Photo Mode more than you do with the actual core game itself, you’ll really enjoy this one!

• Down that hall lies the Music Conservatory. After all, sound can be beautiful, too! In fact, a beautiful score can be just as indispensable to a game’s “masterpiece” status as a beautiful art style, and in an age where video game symphonies routinely sell out concert halls around the world, I think it’s about high time we gave gaming’s virtuoso composers their due, wouldn’t you say?

• There’s also the UI/UX Gallery, right over here. Yes, menus can also be beautiful. If you don’t believe me, open any game with a clunky, cluttered, or unintuitive menu interface. Or, you know, just take the tour here.

• We’ve also got the Kawaii Annex and the Cozy Parlor. The neuroscientists from the biology wing insisted we build these out into permanent exhibits, and to be honest, I’m kind of happy they were so pushy about it. If you’re a Stardew or Animal Crossing fanatic, so will you.11

• Over there, past the plastic sheeting and the “HARD HATS REQUIRED” sign, lies the Character Design & Fashion Wing. It is very much under construction, and I’m scrambling to open it in time for about halfway through this Volume, and when it does... hoo boy. *laser pointer battery dies* …You know what? That’s probably a sign. Anyway, moving on!

• And finally, that roped-off courtroom we passed by at the start of the tour. In there, we’ll hear Minecraft (2011), Dwarf Fortress (2006), Undertale (2015), and (against my better judgment) Cruelty Squad (2021) make their case: these were all iconic and era-defining games that huge swaths of the gaming community (and probably humanity at large) would call ugly as sin. And yet, they’re no less beloved by their fandoms and no less deserving of their iconic status. Hell, Minecraftbasically founded an entire visual movement, for crying out loud. So, if you’re one of those rude hecklers who rolled your eyes at me when I said that “beauty is queen” back at the top, you’ll probably enjoy hearing these games tell me how wrongI am (even though I’m still highly confident I’ll ultimately get proven right, so don’t get your hopes up too much).

But for now, we’ve only one more stop left before I open the museum up to the public. Follow me right here, over to this plaque with the museum’s name on it. Now, take a look at what’s written underneath it.

An Eye for an Eye(ball)

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

You’ve heard this a thousand times. Hell, you’ve probably said it a thousand times, often to end an argument. It’s the ultimate conversation-stopper: if taste is subjective and everyone’s entitled to theirs, then we’re done here, there’s nothing left to discuss. Drive home safely.

But remember when I asked you earlier whether it was just as valid for me to gall your grandma ugly as it was for you to call her beautiful?

*David Hume’s hologram flickers back to life, looking insufferably pleased*

“Ah, at last! Now pray, I do have some thoughts about this!”

What the… hey, how the HELL did you escape your projector?!

“Now, dear visitors, I suspect you’ve spent this entire here tour thinking I’m some patron saint of ‘oh, it’s all subjective, mate!’ And indeed, beauty does indeed live in the contemplating mind, I did indeed say that and stilll fully believe that. But do pray tell, did any of you codgers actually read the REST of my essay?! It’s called ‘Of the Standard of Taste,’ not ‘Of the ABSENCE of One!’ The whole point of the bloody thing is that even though beauty is indeed a sentiment, some people are simply BETTER at judging it than others! To wit: those with good strong sense, and delicate sentiment, or those who’ve been at it for a long time, or have the judgment to adequately compare across many different works, and those free from prejudice and other such cognitive fogs. Where such judges agree, THERE is your standard! Subjective, yes. But arbitrary?! Perish the thought, old chap!”

Well… uh… okay, then. Thank you, David. Anyway, there you have it, folks. Now you know that the most misquoted sentence in all of aesthetics was actually getting at. The very man who put beauty in the beholder’s eye was actually arguing that not all eyes are created equal. But that just begs the question... what’s the difference between an eye that sees clearly, and one that’s blind?

Maybe some people are born with a clearer eye? Perhaps, some. But certainly not all. It’s not a matter of credentials, either. I mean, just look at what passes for “fine” art nowadays. How about intuition? Nah… then we’re right back to saying it’s all subjective. So... what is it?

I really do have to spell it out for you, then? Even though Hume himself just said it in the middle of his screed?

Very well, then. It’s practice. The eye of the beholder, much like an ordinary eye, is a muscle. And like any muscle, the more your train it, the stronger it gets. It’s that simple.

That’s ultimately what I want to end our preview with and leave you mulling over today: you can train the beholder’s eye. That’s just what happens when you practice anything. It’s what art criticism is; it’s the natural endpoint of comparing different works and intentionally dissecting and analyzing untold thousands of different pieces (assuming it’s done with love instead of a grudge). Hell, this very thing happened to an entire fandom in the years between 2001 and today: the millions of beholders who booed at The Wind Waker still played it, kept looking at it, and also compared it to everything else they were looking at... and their eyes cleared up. The game itself never changed (no, an HD remaster doesn’t count for this purpose), but it never had to. Only the beholders had to change... and change, they most certainly did.

And that, dear reader, is why I opened this museum. Over the next dozen or so issues (as well as the accompanying Bonus Quest segments for paid subscribers), we’re going to train our eyes together, on dozens of video game brushstrokes, vistas, menus, and melodies, bringing masterpieces and ugly ducklings alike under our beholder’s gaze until we reach the point we can look at a game (or a car, or a Taco Bell) and truly see what’s really there.

So with that in mind, I’d like to ask you the question I asked at the very beginning of this tour: is beauty really that important in games? Or is gameplay the only thing that counts?

You already know what I think. Gameplay is king; if he’s removed from the board, you lose, full stop. But beauty is queen: she’s the most powerful and versatile piece in the board, indeed so powerful she can make a mediocre game tolerable, turn a good game into a great game, and without her, no game has ever quite ascended into the pantheon of gaming masterpieces. The king may be what the game is about, but the queen makes the game powerful.

Am I right? Well, we’ll find out in due time.

And speaking of time… would you look at the clock? We’re about to open to the public, and I still haven’t dusted off the Parthenon replica!

*the Beholder in the corner begins shutting its eyes, one by one, like a chandelier*

Oh, and one last thing before you go. All throughout this tour, I’ve been telling you not to touch the exhibits. You probably didn’t even notice me saying it, did you? Every museum tells you this, after all.

Well, I’d like you to forget that. In this museum, you’re not only allowed to touch the exhibits, you’re expected to. Because games — unlike paintings, symphonies, cathedrals — games are unique amongst art forms in that they don’t even exist until YOU pick up the controller. You don’t complete a game just by beholding it, after all... you have to play it for yourself.

So go on, play with the exhibits. And join me next issue for an in-depth tour of the Art Direction Wing — we’ll sharpen that eye of yours together.

Cheers,

~Jay

The Museum Café + Gift Shop

Oh, leaving so soon? Why not stick around after the tour and check out some of our excellent amenities? We have a café where you can discuss what you learned with one another (or with me!), and a gift shop where you can pick up the source texts and the games we’ve featured! More than enough to hold you over until your next visit.

Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

Alright, you made it through the whole thing! Now it’s your turn. While you wait for the next issue, I invite you to mull over the following discussion prompts. Please reply to this email with your answers, or post them in the comments. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

1. What’s YOUR Sticker Star (ie, a game you know is mid, but you love looking at anyway)? Go on, confess.

2. What about the reverse: a game you enjoy playing but whose look actively disgusts you? Does one even exist, or does the queen always show up for the king?

3. Gameplay is king, aesthetics is queen: agree, or did I just hamfist a bad chess metaphor into this piece?

4. Which game would you hang in this museum first, and in which room?

5. Wind Waker‘s untrained beholders were embarrassingly wrong when they pilloried the game’s art style back in 2001. What’s a game YOU initially judged as ugly, only to ashamedly recant your criticism of?

6. Is there a game you’d defend as beautiful that everyone else says is ugly?

7. When did you last notice the world outside games getting grayer and uglier? Was it a building, a car lot, a renovated restaurant, or even just your own living room? What was lost in the transformation?

8. Do you buy the evolutionary theory of beauty (that our lizard brains prefer savanna landscapes) when you stand on an open-world vista? Or does it explain too much (or too little, or the wrong thing)?

9. Can a trained eye be wrong? Or is it just practiced differently? (Hume would probably have some thoughts for you.)

10. What should the museum be called? Truly, let me know — it’s just me and my laser pointer on the branding committee now.

Leave a comment

Further Reading

• The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton — a complete primer on evolutionary aesthetics, and it’s actually quite witty and readable despite it repeating the word “Pleistocene” in literally every chapter — Amazon

• Of the Standard of Taste by David Hume — Hume’s 1757 essay that forms the philosophical basis of this whole issue. A short read, it’s also free, and much sharper than its 269 years — SEP overview + text pointers

• Critique of the Power of Judgment by Immanuel Kant — For the masochistically-inclined amongst you, this will give you the full treatment of the whole idea of “subjective universality” — SEP: Aesthetic Judgment (so you don’t have to dive into the deep end without kiddie floaties)

• Beauty (SEP entry) by Crispin Sartwell — The best one-stop survey of this entire debate, from Plato to today — link (Freeeee!!)

Games Featured

• Paper Mario: Sticker Star, developed by Intelligent Systems, published by Nintendo — Amazon (physical) | GameStop (pre-owned)

• Ōkami, developed by Clover Studio, published by Capcom — Steam | PlayStation | Xbox | Nintendo Switch

• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, developed by Nintendo EAD, published by Nintendo — Nintendo Switch Online (GameCube Collection)

• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, developed by Naughty Dog, published by Sony Computer Entertainment — PlayStation (as part of The Nathan Drake Collection) | Amazon (physical)

• Grim Fandango, developed and published by LucasArts (Remastered by Double Fine Productions) — Steam | GOG | PlayStation | Xbox | Nintendo Switch

Game & Word-of-Mouth: How to Support My Work

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this content and would like to read more of it, hit the heart button at the top or bottom of the post—it really helps with my discoverability! You can also show your support by sharing this issue with your social networks and subscribing to Game & Word (if you haven’t already).

See you next time!

Subscribe now

Tags

#Philosophy #Aesthetics #EvolutionaryPsychology #Neuroaesthetics #Neuroscience #ArtHistory

#PixelPerfect

#PaperMario #StickerStar #Okami #Zelda #WindWaker #Uncharted #GrimFandango

Footnotes

Just to recap, in that piece I conclusively demonstrated with facts and logic that code is the closest thing our civilization has come to creating a true magical language. The humble compiler, as it turns out, contains an entire grimoire: invisible, literally magic words (incantations, true names, etc.) that reshape reality according to our will.

But I was mostly dealing in metaphor for that piece, and as usual I left it up to you whether you wanted to take that metaphor further. In this piece, I’ll introduce you to the people who actually did — all those delightfully kooky lads and ladies who saw the metaphor and thought “Challenge Accepted!”

Today, we’ll learn about technomancy: actual, IRL occult practice via information technology.

I’ve been looking forward to this one for quite a while, ever since I first teased it back at the very beginning of this Volume. If you want to tag along, go ahead and upgrade your subscription here:

Click to Pierce the Veil

Done? Ok, strap yourselves in, folks… it’s gonna be a wild ride!

BONUS QUEST: Spiritus Ex Machina

The fortunes, daemons, and egregores your fandom, your chatbot, and your Minecraft server are conjuring as we speak

Read more

Game & Word Volume 5, Issue 16: Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “The SOURCErer’s Apprentice” (~104 minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

Welcome back, dear reader.

Wow, it’s been quite a ride, hasn’t it? After nearly three years, we’re finally at the grand finale of Volume 5. We started with a simple question: “Do you believe in magic?”, and then embarked on a veritable tour-de-force through the arcane and mystical side of video games, starting with the long spell that the fantasy genre (and J.R.R. Tolkien specifically) cast on video games, then ascending the Tree of Life with Cloud Strife & Friends, untangling religious orthodoxy and magical heresy in the Lands Between, descending into Hell itself to confront Diablo, and staring down the eldritch face of divinity itself with Zeus, The One Who Waits, and our eternally-tortured Sims by our side. And now, we’ve come full-circle, about to embark on one last magical quest before I give this Volume license to depart and close the ritual.

But before we start, I feel compelled to apologize to you, dear reader... for last time, I callously left you hanging off a cliff.

I’m sure you remember what I’m referring to, but just in case you need a refresher: last time, we’d spent an entire 10,000 word feature dissecting and autopsying the dark arts in video games, covering everything from blood magic and forbidden knowledge to curses and demonic pacts (we basically speedran gaming’s entire cursed catalog!), and we established that the games that properly depict infernal transactions basically always make you pay for them in some way. After all, UNLIMITED POWAHHH should cost blood, or your sanity, or your very selfhood, and quite possibly for all eternity… and so any game that simply hands you necromancy for free (ie, the proverbial and delightfully punny “free lich”) has fundamentally missed the point, entirely.

And then, right at the end, I asked you a question… before I, like some hack TV showrunner ending the season on a cliffhanger, straight-up refused to answer it:

If the game is handing you cost-free power... what does that make the people who built it?

“A question for another day,” I said, twirling my dastardly (but totally dashing) mustache and fiendishly cackling as I vanished in a puff of smoke.

Well, seeker… today is that day.

And don’t worry, I’m not going to make you wait for the answer, either, because you’ve more than earned it at this point. Thirteen main issues and a handful of bonus issues into this volume, over the span of nearly three years, I’ve taken you through the Tarot and Kabbalah alike, putting all the angels and the demons and the demiurges in the gaming canon under the same microscope, dissecting the metaphysics of liches and deities alike while meticulously deconstructing their lore, and all throughout this time you’ve been dutifully tagging along, patiently waiting to see where this was all going, and I teased the payoff so cruelly by asking that question and then leaving you hanging once more, you’ve been tenaciously holding your breath for the big reveal.

Well, my friend, here it is… the answer to that aching question, as big and bright as a full health bar:

Game developers are wizards.

Yup, that’s right. The people who make video games are wizards.

No, don’t you roll your eyes at me. I don’t mean it in that trite and cutesy way that people on LinkedIn say, where you’re apparently a “code wizard” if you know how to center a div, nor do I mean it like your aunt does whenever you fix her Wi-Fi. I mean it quite literally.

Well… sort of. After all, I’m not claiming game devs can shoot actual fireballs from their fingertips; but what I am saying is that if you wrote down the way humanity has described the work that magicians have done for the last ~5,000 years, across every grimoire, mystery cult, and nervously-whispered tradition that would’ve gotten you exiled, excommunicated, or burned at the stake for dabbling in, and then held it up next to any modern game developer’s job description… the two documents would match almost line for line.

The magi of old merely promised to speak worlds into being… whereas the magi of today have built and optimized an entire build pipeline for doing so, repeatedly and at scale.

So, there you have it! The answer you’ve been waiting for, and the heart and soul of this entire Volume. Everything else in this (admittedly massive) issue is basically me proving it to you, in four different senses of the word “magic,” until the only way out would be to argue that magic never meant anything at all.

(Oh, and someone will argue that, by the way. His name is Max Weber; he’s been dead for over a century, and I’ve saved him a seat near the end.)

Anyway, grab your robe and your wizard hat,1 because we’re finally taking this Volume past the finish line!

~Jay

Subscribe now

Housekeeping

This issue wraps up Game & Word Volume 5! Once this issue and its accompanying Bonus Quest drop, I’ll take a bit of a break to recoup (save for maybe a few extra Bonus Quests with odds and ends I couldn’t fit into Volume 5, along with some more topical takes if the need arises… but this is far from a given, so don’t hold me to it!) before coming back with the inaugural issue of Volume 6: Pixel Perfect. This upcoming volume will explore beauty, aesthetics, art, and design in video games!

More details to come soon… but in the meantime, per Game & Word tradition, here’s a sneak preview of Volume 6’s header image:

Hopefully, that’s enough to get you excited and curious and what’s coming your way. Again, more details soon. But for now, I must ask you to read on… because it’s time to, at long last, finish off Volume 5 with a blast!

—

Also, ICYMI, I recently launched a sister publication, Spawn Point Marketing, that serves as a companion newsletter to my brand-new games marketing consultancy of the same name.

Subscribe for weekly game marketing tips, analysis, and case studies for indie and AA game developers who need to successfully market and their game in an increasingly crowded marketplace, but lack the expertise to do so or the budget for a full marketing team (oh, and all my industry analysis will live there going forward, so if you enjoy those pieces, subscribe to SPM for those as well; going forward, Game & Word will exclusively be about the games themselves):

Spawn Point Marketing

Easy, practical, and actionable marketing tips, insights, and case studies for indie game developers.

By Jay Rooney

I also, through Spawn Point Marketing, offer fractional marketing leadership services to indie and AA game studios. To learn more about the services I offer, or to book a free consultation, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com or click the button below:

Click to Find Your Players

Previous Issues

Game & Word’s most recent issues (currently, all of Volume 5) are available to all, free of charge.

Older issues are currently archived and only accessible to paid subscribers. To access the full archive, upgrade to a paid subscription:

• Volume 1 (The Name of the Game): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4

• Volume 2 (Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 3

• Volume 3 (Game Over Matter): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 4 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 2 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Podcast 3 ● Bonus 2

• Volume 4 (Tempus Ludos): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Video Podcast 2 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Issue 10

• Volume 5 (AbraCODEabra!): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Issue 10 ● Issue 11

Subscribe now

Read more

ED. NOTE: This is a follow-up to my previous piece, I Hope Divinity Uses Even More AI. If you haven’t read that one, go ahead and read it first, because I really don’t feel like re-litigating its arguments here (and therefore I won’t, at least not for the most part). And yes, the comment rules from that piece still apply here.

Papers, please!

If you’ve played Papers, Please (2013), then you already know the drill. You play as a border inspector in the glorious communist dystopia of Arstotzka, and your job is to check the documents of migrants, travelers, guest workers, and other passers-by.

Passport? Check.

Entry permit? Check.

Work pass? Check.

The rules change daily, while edge cases become… erm, edgier? (sorry) as the game progresses. And if you get it wrong? Well, that’s coming out of your family’s food budget, comrade.

And every so often, the game hands you a person whose papers are almost in order. So close, and yet so far… like a woman fleeing violence, whose permit expired yesterday. Or a man who weighs 2 kilos off from what his passport says, whether because the scale is broken, or because he’s literally starving, or simply because the state just keeps garbage records.

In each case, the stamp hovers in your hand:

APPROVED or DENIED.

Papers, Please is so evocative because it makes you feel, in that brilliant way that only a video game can pull off, what being the machine feels like. In case after case, you’ll reduce a living, breathing human being (not literally, I know… but really, your brain doesn’t know that! Mirror neurons, and all… remember those?) to a checklist of surface features, and in each case you’ll render a passionless verdict that could well radically alter their life. The tools you’ll use to pass these judgments are flawed… and you know they’re flawed. The rules that guide you and bind you while making these decisions are arbitrary… and oh yes, you damn well know they’re arbitrary… because you see, the regime that instituted those rules simply doesn’t care — AH! SORRY!! I meant to say, “the glorious regime cares for and protects us all!”

Ok, phew… that was close. Remember, comrade… cause no trouble.

Anyway! On July 21st, Substack announced that it has integrated Pangram, an AI detection tool, directly into the platform. Now, any reader can scan any post, Note, reply, or comment over 100 words long and get an official-looking verdict on how much of it was “written by a human” versus “with AI assistance.”

This means, in plain English, that Substack has now decreed every reader a border inspector… and every writer now stands waiting at the checkpoint.

So… What Did Substack Really Ship?

Let’s start by getting our facts in order, shall we? Before I flambé them to a crisp, that is. Because, you see, accuracy still matters (even when I’m furious), and believe it or not, I actually care about verifying claims before I weaponize them… unlike the people I’m about to spend several thousand words eviscerating.

So, what did Substack actually launch this week? Well, per their own announcement and help docs:

• Readers can now scan posts, Notes, replies, and comments (as long as they’re over 100 words, and published on or after July 21, 2026) and get a Pangram-generated estimate of how much of it was written by a human vs. AI-assisted.

• It’s live on web and iOS as we speak, with Android coming soon.

• Writers get to make an optional “How I make this” statement to disclose their writing process and if/how AI fits into it.

• Writers can pre-scan their own drafts, report detection errors, and even disable detection on their posts... in which case, readers simply see a message saying “AI detection unavailable” (more on this shortly).

CEO laid out his case for the whole thing in a post titled “Against Claudefishing”,1 framing it as a simple matter of reader expectations: basically, people should know what they’re getting when they click into an article. He acknowledged that no AI detector works perfectly, that not all AI writing constitutes “slop,” and that Substack itself uses AI internally for things like software and research. According to Best, the stated spirit of this tool is transparency, not prohibition.

The Substack Post

Against Claudefishing

It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet…

Read more

3 months ago · 6534 likes · 1517 comments · Chris Best

And fair enough, it’s not like the entire thing is unreasonable (and don’t worry, I’ll circle back to the reasonable parts in a bit). After all, Substack didn’t ban anything. And it’s also not an auto-flagging system; it only scans an article when a reader requests it.

But.

BUT!

Nothing exists in a vacuum, and Substack sure as hell didn’t launch this feature into a vacuum! They launched it into a noxious and corrosive Discourse™️ that has spent the past year using Pangram screenshots as digital stocks with which to punish writers. In launching this integration, Substack has handed a loaded rhetorical rifle (and one that demonstrably fires sideways, no less) to the absolute worst people on this site, who’ve been relentlessly begging the institution for ammunition. Well, they got their wish, and now the institution has provided them ammo… and even stamped the company logo on the bullet casings! How thoughtful.

You say: “Oh, but you can opt out of it!” Uh huh… so tell me, genius: in the current climate on Substack (to say nothing of social media at large), what do you suppose the mob will conclude about a writer who opts out of the scan? What do you think will run through the accusers’ minds when they see that little “AI detection unavailable” message? That the writer values their privacy? That they’re objecting out of principle?

No! Where the hell have you been all year?! In the midst of this hellish moral panic that’s currently firing on all cylinders, opting out is a confession. I can already see the dunking screenshots writing themselves. If you can’t see them as well, you haven’t been paying attention. Seriously, can we please just be real for just a second?!

Substack built an inescapable scarlet letter: one that any reader can brand any creator with, and one in which its opt-out clause is also a scarlet letter. Somewhere, Kafka’s looking down with a sense of befuddled admiration.

Seriously… did NOBODY in that product meeting read The Crucible (1953)? Did we learn nothing from the last 15 years of living under the cancel mobs’ Reign of Terror across social media? Do they not know that accusation machines inevitably eat their builders in the end?

Apparently not… so, we might as well go through it all here. Yes, all of it… and I don’t think you’re gonna like it.

The Math Just Doesn’t Math Properly, Sarge

Now… Pangram, to its credit, IS the best AI detector currently on the market. Independent evaluations, for the most part, back this up; a University of Chicago Booth analysis found it was the only tool that could operate under a strict false-positive cap without sacrificing accuracy, which is kind of a big deal. The company claims a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000.

Oh my! One in ten thousand?! That sounds fantastic. It must be practically infallible!

Aaaaand stop right there. Because people these days are so embarrassingly innumerate, and this is the exact point where everyone’s intuition tends to break. So, let me show you why that number is still highly problematic… even if we take it completely at face value.2

TL;DR — Even a false positive rate that low still guarantees a steady supply of innocent casualties.

Princeton computer scientist (the co-author of AI Snake Oil) ran the numbers in an education context: basically, if you take that 1-in-10,000 rate at face value, have every instructor scan every submission, and keep in mind that the average student submits roughly 500 to 1,000 written works across four years of college, what result would you get?

I’ll tell you: 5–10 percent of the entire student body would get falsely accused of cheating at some point in their college career.

That’s not a ding specific to Pangram, by the way. That’s simply what happens when you run any test, even an impressively accurate one, enough times. Statisticians call it the base rate problem. And gamers, actually, already understand it on an intuitie level; we just call it something else.

And that’s just when you run the math charitably, using the vendor’s own highly-polished and lab-controlled numbers. Once you get into the real world, the scan’s performance gets far messier. When Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto tested Pangram on articles that a Pangram-affiliated study had flagged as AI-generated, the scan rendered a different verdict than the study did on two out of three articles, and the researchers’ own database disagreed with both results! So the same tool analyzed the same text, but rendered a different verdict. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.

Taranto was even helpful enough to put his conclusion right there in the headline: Pangram is a “defamation machine.”

Independent research further confirms this instability: the same detector, analyzing the same text on different days, can classify it wildly differently. Furthermore, detector accuracy collapses by 25–50% when analyzing paraphrased, hybrid, or lightly edited text… in other words, the kind of text that most people produce when they use AI to supplement their writing process rather than replace it.

This is why NYU disabled Turnitin’s AI detection feature, by the way (as an instructor myself, I can personally attest that it’s uniquely terrible). Similarly, the University of Texas has prohibited all third-party AI detection software for evaluating student work, even warning faculty that they could be personally liable for damages if they bought their own. The list goes on, with Berkeley, Yale, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, and MIT having all reached similar conclusions.

Gee, this sure seems like quite a challenge to these AI detectors’ claims of reliability. Maybe even enough to call into question Substack’s decision to partner with them! So surely the AI detectors’ vendors have something to say in their defense, right?

WRONG!

As it turns out, the vendors fully agree with the universities that actively discourage their use! Turnitin’s own documentation says that educators shouldn’t use its tool as the sole basis for initiating adverse action against a student, while Originality.ai’s terms of service flat-out forbids using its output for anything with “a legal or material impact” on a person.

But perhaps most tellingly, even Pangram’s own technical report (co-authored by CEO Max Spero in February 2024) includes an “ethics” section that “strongly discourage[s]” using the classifier as a sole arbiter of academic integrity, on the grounds that ALL detection tools have a non-zero false positive rate and therefore should be used alongside other evidence.

Well, well, well… would ya look at that? It turns out that the institutions that employ actual adjudication processes, with actual appeals mechanisms, that would face actual legal exposure if things went sideways, took one look at these tools and said NOPE, these aren’t reliable enough to discipline a freshman over a term paper.

Substack, meanwhile, looked at these same tools and said Perfect! Let’s hand them to absolutely everyone with an axe to grind and a functional screenshot button!

Who Gets Stamped DENIED?

So, coming back to our border checkpoint… do you know who really walks through it? Because I’ll tell you right now, it is emphatically not a random or balanced sample of humanity.

To start us off with: research published in Patterns back in 2023 found that AI detectors were systematically biased against non-native English speakers. In that study, widely-used AI detectors flagged the majority of essays written by real human TOEFL test-takers as having been machine-generated.

Now, detection tech has improved since then (and Pangram claims to have specifically addressed this), but the bias finding has since been replicated several times in multiple later studies. And when the American Association for Cancer Research screened its journal submissions with Pangram, one of its headline findings was that authors at non-English-speaking institutions were flagged for LLM use more than twice as often as everyone else!

Why? Because non-native speakers, quite reasonably, learn English from textbooks and other similarly more formal sources. As such, their prose tends to read as highly structured, grammatically careful, and decidedly… erm, regular (for lack of a better word). You know what else produces regular, structured, and grammatically careful prose?

Exactly.

And that same statistical shadow falls particularly hard on neurodivergent writers. Many of these writers have spent their entire lives being told their writing is “too formal,” or “too structured,” or too “oddly precise” (iykyk), and now they’re discovering that their prose patterns, the exact same ones they were once penalized for in school, are now being read as the fingerprints of a machine.

The shadow also falls on anyone who simply learned to write well, because (as I ranted about in Part 1) the “AI tells” that all the armchair detectives love to cite are just... what used to be the features and hallmarks of skilled prose! Things like em dashes and triads, or parallel structure, or even just vocabulary above a 6th-grade level. The models write that way because they were trained on good writing; ergo, when you punish those patterns, you punish craft itself.

So, let’s take stock of who’s really standing at the checkpoint:

• An ESL immigrant pouring her heart into her first English-language newsletter, which she would not have had the courage to even write, much less put out into the world, in the pre-LLM era;

• An autistic essayist, whose syntax people have always told him is “suspiciously” precise, who writes and publishes as a way to make sense of the world as he sees it;

• A veteran stylist who’s been deploying em dashes, semicolons, and Oxford commas3 for decades before Sam Altman even had a LinkedIn profile.

These travelers’ papers will read as forged. DENIED.

(Also, isn’t it funny how much the anti-AI crusaders claim to champion minorities? Remember back in the 2010s era (and for some of them, even today!), how often they’d proclaim their “allyship” with immigrants, non-English speakers, and the disabled? Where’s their allyship now, I wonder? Gee, what a goddamned mystery! It’s almost as if it was all bullshit, and they were just using these people as props to inflate their own sense of moral superiority! But hold that thought for now, we’ll get to it soon enough.)

Meanwhile, who sails through the checkpoint? The actual bad actors. What, did you really think the content farm operators running a hundred sloppy newsletters through a Claude Max account just passively submit to scans? Oh, you sweet summer child… no. Not at all. My brother in Christ, they relentlessly iterate against the detector! They run “humanizer” tools on their slop and A/B test their way to a green “human-made” checkmark. Detection is an arms race, after all, and who wins arms races? The people who care the most about winning them: the cynics. The writer most likely to get flagged by a Pangram scan (and subsequently pilloried) is the casual and honest essayist who used Claude to tighten a paragraph and didn’t even think to launder the evidence afterwards.

So, congratulations, activists! You’ve built a machine that stamps DENIED on the refugee’s papers, while waving the smuggler through.

Furthermore, this creates a horrible incentive structure for everyone else. As I detailed last time, writers are already mutilating their own prose to dodge the accusations. I’m saddened to say that I’ve done this, too… I’ve all but abandoned em dashes, one of my favorite forms of punctuation (if you don’t believe me, go through the archive and see how many more em dashes you see in my pre-2022 articles than in any I’ve published this year). Other writers have flattened their vocabularies, or even gone so far as to deliberately insert typos into their published work! We’ve done everything from breaking up our triads to roughing up our transitions, deliberately sanding the polish off our work as if we were medieval villagers uglifying our daughters so the raiders pass them by.

I said it in Part 1, and it’s only gotten truer since then: the scolds have become the slop makers. These anti-AI crusaders are actively degrading the median quality of human writing, all in the name of defending it.

These people make me sick.

Oh, and I’m not done yet. For there’s one particular design detail I still haven’t touched on. It’s so insidious, it deserves its very own paragraph of contempt: this entire apparatus puts the burden of proof on the accused.

Here’s how that looks like in practice: it only takes one click to scan an article… but the process of rebutting the scan is a nightmarish labyrinth that the author has to navigate in a moment of acutely stressful career crisis. A reader spends just four seconds to generate an official-looking verdict… meanwhile, the writer spends days drafting statements, publishing version histories, and screenshotting their Google Docs edit logs, all to futilely attempt to prove a negative to an audience that has already made up its mind and already moved on. Just ask novelist Mia Ballard, whose publisher pulled her book Shy Girl this past March after a Pangram flag, precisely how fair and symmetrical that process really feels.

“Innocent until proven guilty” was, historically speaking, kind of a big deal. It used to be practically unheard of, and even today is very much the exception instead of the norm. We even fought some wars about it, back in the day! But now, it’s been quietly patched out… and the patch notes just say “transparency, yay!”

The Moral Cosplayers (ie, Substack’s Worst People) 2: Electric Boogaloo

When I published Part 1, I braced myself for impact. I knew it would cause a stink and ruffle some feathers. And I do want to report on what happened afterwards. Let’s just say that the results were... clarifying, to say the least.

My readers were, almost uniformly, quite lovely and wonderful. Yes, including the ones who firmly disagreed with me! They gave thoughtful pushback and detailed the personal lines they’d drawn, all while displaying truly admirable levels of honesty, decorum, and self-awareness. There were many people who told me, in effect, “I hear your argument, but here’s where I land differently, and why.” It was a wonderful conversaion! I’ll certainly take that conversation every day of the week, and twice on patch day, over literally any other AI-related conversation I’ve had online. If that was you: thank you, truly. You’re quite literally why I write.

Also, if that was you, please understand: from this point forward, I’m NOT talking about you.

Because now, I want to talk about the interlopers. Those wretched drive-by discoursers and Notes-spamming moral entrepreneurs who either never read past the headline, or did but instead of presenting a proper rebuttal, resorted to name-calling and baseless ad hominems because they didn’t have a proper rebuttal and they knew it. Those folks are a different story altogether.

I watched, over the following weeks after publication, a small parade of nasty comments (which I had to ban people over) and thinly-veiled subtweets (sorry, sub-Notes) about my essay… and as recently as last week, I even saw one about my AI gamer tarot card project! I ignored most of them, but whenever I did engage, I did so directly, politely pointing out specific inconsistencies in these people’s arguments without letting them move the goalposts. And do you know what happened, almost every time, the moment it became clear I was not going to let the goalposts wander?

Blocked!

There were no rebuttals, nor concessions. Hell, I didn’t even get a good old-fashioned “lol ur full of shit bro.” All I got was the rhetorical equivalent of my opponent flipping the chessboard and storming out of the room. Which told me everything, really: it was never actually a debate with me, but a performance for their audience. I was merely a prop in someone else’s morality play… and when the prop started talking back, the scene got cut.

And good God almighty, the monologues in these morality plays are something to behold, just in and of themselves! Go ahead and read the anti-AI discourse on Notes right now (as always, I’ll wait), and be sure to count the pronouns. No, not the gendered pronouns (don’t you worry, that’s a debate I very gladly stay far away from), but the personal pronouns:

• I don’t want to see this.

• It’s important that I take a stand.

• I will be blocking anyone who [X].

• My feed.

• My truth.

• My boundaries.

• My moral hygiene.

• I…

• My…

• Me…

• I Me Me My I My I Me Me My I Me Me I…

Notice what’s missing in all of that? Anyone else. Throughout literally hundreds of these declarations, I’ve almost never seen these people express a moment’s worth of genuine concern for the English learner or disabled writer trying to put her thoughts into the world using the tools available to her, or for the lifelong stylist who now has to strip-mine her own voice just to appease a faceless classifier. As always, the Discourse’s aperture never widens past the speaker’s own reflection. Narcissus would be very proud indeed.

As I argued back in Part 1: it’s all ego, and it’s all optics. It was always nothing but optics.

And now these same people (ie, the ones who were already posting screenshots of their personal Pangram dashboards, like a shitty Temu Van Helsing brandishing vials of Aquafina and calling it holy water) get to do it with a Substack logo in the corner of their frame. This platform has recklessly upgraded their moral cosplay to canon.

Also, I cannot be the only one who’s noticed this most exquisite contradiction:

They are detecting AI... with AI.

Pangram is a machine learning classifier… in other words, a neural network. It was trained on the same scraped text that these people constantly screech about being “stolen” from artists, and it runs on the same GPUs in the same data centers that burn the same watts and sip the same water and belch the same carbon into the atmosphere as every other model in the Great Satanic Server Farm of their worst nightmares.

That’s right: every gleeful “GOTCHA, 97% AI!!1!” screenshot is a product of the exact same technology that the screenshotter claims to be morally opposed to on a fundamental level. Aw geez, gang… how many gallons of water did that scan guzzle? Should we hold a vigil?4

If the moral cosplayers’ objection to AI was actually about energy, or labor, or uncompensated scraping, this would be an unbearable hypocrisy. But it isn’t unbearable to them, because their objection was never really about those things. Their objection is about purity; about whose hands touched the text. And fortunately for the crusaders, purity systems have never once in human history minded using the profane to hunt the profane. After all, the Inquisition employed torturers, and the drug war employs informants, so why wouldn’t the slop war employ a slop-detection model? The tools are always exempt from the purity laws whenever they’re wielded by the righteous. It’s practically a law of human nature!

And there’s an even deeper contradiction buried underneath all of this… and in fact, it’s so deep, I don’t even think the crusaders have noticed it at all!

Go ahead and read through the anti-AI canon again, all the insufferable essays and cringey manifestos and insipid Notes threads pulling 4k restacks… and tell me, what’s the single most repeated claim in the whole corpus?

Nope, it’s not the one about energy or water (that one probably doesn’t even register in the Top 5, to be honest… which once again proves that the whole argument was highly selective, to be wielded only when convenient). And no, it’s not even the one about training data, either. So… which is it?

I’ll tell you: it’s the one about atrophy, the warning that if you let the machine think for you, you will eventually forget how to think. You see, judgment is a muscle! And if you keep outsourcing your discernment to a statistical model, you’ll slowly stop being a person and start becoming a terminal shell.

And I agree with that, by the way! I mean it, sincerely. I think it’s the best argument the crusaders have, and if it were anybody else making it, I’d defend that argument without hesitation or equivocation.

So, in that spirit… can somebody please explain to me what a Pangram scan is?

Because from where I’m standing, a reader who scans a post instead of reading it has just performed what might be the purest act of cognitive outsourcing ever done on the internet today. They took the one question that actually, completely, and genuinely requires a human being (“Is there a mind on the other end of this sentence?”) and straight-up handed it to a neural network for adjudication. They didn’t read the article for voice. They didn’t sit with the thing and notice whether it moved them, bored them, changed them, or even just triggered their disgust reflex once they registered “SLOP! SLOP! SLOP!”

Instead, they asked an AI classifier to have that experience on their behalf, and even file a report so they’d have the receipts afterwards.

Notice how that’s the exact same muscle they’re admonishing everyone else to preserve. And look at how quickly they themselves let it go slack, all in the name of preserving it.

Oh, and it runs in both directions, too… which is how you truly know how bad the rot has gotten:

• Scan comes back RED: Instant dopaminergic outrage, followed by a screenshot and ensuing condemnation. Actually consuming a single word of the actual post not required.

• Scan comes back GREEN: Oh, sweet relief! Permission to enjoy it. Machine-certified authenticity… issued to a person who apparently could not determine, on their own, using their God-given cognitive faculties, whether the thing they’d already read was actually any good.

That last sentence, right there, might be the saddest one I’ve ever written. These people read something... they liked it... and then they needed an algorithm’s blessing to be allowed to have liked it.

Every critic worthy of the title, from Johnson and Hazlitt to Ebert and Kael, could tell you why a piece of writing failed. Whether it’s because a piece’s structure was flabby, or it borrowed its opinions, or simply had nothing at all to say, the point is that rendering that kind of verdict takes a certain cognitive skill set. You have to be able to read and to think, and have the nerve to be wrong in public, under your own name. By contrast, “97% AI” takes four seconds and never requires you to actually engage with the text!

The moral cosplayers spent the last two years warning writers that if you let the model draft, you’ll lose your voice.

But nobody thought to warn them that if you let the classifier judge, you’ll lose your taste.

Papers, please. Don’t tell me your story, just show me the stamp.

Against Virtue Signaling

Somewhere along the way, I crossed a Rubicon on all this: I have come to believe that broadcasting one’s virtue is, in and of itself, an inherently unvirtuous act. As in, it’s not merely a neutral or harmless act, and it’s certainly more than just “cringe” — I’m now fully convinced that virtue signaling is actively corrosive to our collective moral landscape.

After all, real virtue is quiet, habitual, mostly invisible, and speaks for itself; it’s done because it’s right, not because it’s seen. Think about it: why is any performatively moral action called “virtue signaling,” rather than just “virtue”? Because the moment that performance becomes the point, virtue leaves the building, and it leaves behind a status ritual merely cosplaying as virtue. Real virtue is done for its own sake, not performed for the masses!

Every ethical and spiritual tradition worth its salt already figured this out millennia ago, by the way; it’s why almsgiving in secret always outranks almsgiving with trumpets, at least according to every religion that has opinions about alms (namely, all of them).

If any AI use genuinely violates your conscience, then oh boy do I have some good news for you today! Did you know that you ALREADY have a complete, dignified, and (most of all) highly effective remedy available to you RIGHT NOW, today, and for FREE? It’s simply: don’t subscribe to writers who use it! Hell, unsubscribe from me! Genuinely! The button’s right there; no hard feelings, may your feed be everything you want it to be (and I do mean that sincerely).

But what you DON’T get to do, and what no serious moral tradition has ever endorsed, is deputize yourself as an inquisitor over everyone else’s reading habits and then justify the ensuing struggle session by saying you’re just “protecting art.”

No. That’s not going to fly here, so don’t even try it. GTFO.

Just Drop the “AI.” It’s Cleaner.

Oh, and while we’re on the topic of crossing Rubicons, here’s another one I’ve recently crossed: I’ve decided the phrase “AI slop” needs to die, and I intend to help euthanize it.

Not because slop isn’t real, mind you. Slop is extremely real, and I agree that it’s a big problem! I hate it as much as you do. Rather, I object to the “AI” modifier; the phrase “AI slop” basically Trojan Horses a subtle and insidious assumption: namely, that the slop comes from the AI, that the machine is the one authoring the badness. And that assumption is actually a huge part of why this discourse is so bent.

So, let’s ask a painfully obvious question that (somehow, incredibly) never seems to get asked these days: who the hell PROMPTS the AI? After all, slop does not autogenerate, and there is no server rack spontaneously emitting shitty listicles into the void; AI agents are not that capable yet.

No… behind every soulless AI-generated newsletter is a human being who decided the world needed another soulless newsletter. In other words, a person who consciously chose volume over craft; a living, breathing human with a name and face who looked at the sacred act of writing for another person, and saw only an arbitrage opportunity to exploit for clicks and profit. The model may be the shovel that got us into this hole, but a human is always the one who digs with it.

And we know slop is fundamentally a human product, because humans have been producing it, at industrial scale, for decades before the first transformer was ever even a footnote in some Google paper.

Tell me, dear reader… do you remember the pre-AI internet?

Like, do you truly remember it? The way it really was, without your nostalgia goggles on? Because I remember… oh, do I remember! I work in marketing, I’ll remind you —I have been in the field for 15 years. And I very clearly remember all the SEO sludge farms. I remember all the endless “10 Reasons You Won’t BELIEVE [X]” headlines plastered all over my feed by Macedonian content mills. I remember those insufferable recipe pages with 4,000 words of “memoir” (written for Google’s algorithm, not for any actual reader) before you got to the ingredients list. And last, but not least… I remember BuzzFeed at its imperial peak, a veritable slop empire, built entirely on human-authored slop, and fully staffed by human sloppers… all of them slopping by hand, the old way, so you could read your artisanal slop in your Facebook feed on your way to work each morning.5

So in the spirit of consistency (and surely the moral cosplayers love consistency!), I’d like to propose our next campaign:

If slop is the actual enemy, then let us be thorough! Let us launch the Great Crusade against human slop. Scan the archives! Flag the listicles! Demand disclosure statements from everyone who has ever written a “Top 10 Anime Betrayals” headline for a content farm! Retroactive scarlet letters for all BuzzFeed alumni! No amnesty for the SEO bloggers of 2014! GIVE NO QUARTER! Nothing less than the epistemic integrity of our information ecosystem is at stake here!

I’m being hyperbolic, obviously. (Obviously?) But let’s also be real here: you would never support that crusade. And you wanna know why? Because the moment we start judging human writing purely by whether or not it’s slop, we’d have to admit a most horrible and uncomfortable truth to ourselves: that a well-prompted Claude essay is, by any honest measure of both information and readability (may I suggest “insight per paragraph” as a suitably appropriate metric?), a much better read than the median content mill listicle ever was.

We’d have to admit that an essay’s provenance and its quality are two totally different axes! And deep down (way down, beneath the annoying performative layer, in that dark and quiet place where people are actually honest with themselves at 2 AM), even the moral cosplayers know they’d rather read Claude than BuzzFeed.

Oh, they know. You can tell they know by how furiously they avoid the comparison. I reckon a textbook example will pop up in the comments soon enough!

No… they’re not ready for it. We’re not ready for it. Jack Nicholson was right… we can’t handle the truth. So I’ll settle for simply restating the following truism:

Slop is, and has always been, a human sin. The machine just made it faster for us to sin. So judge the work, yes… and sure, judge the person who chose to make it so badly. Go right ahead. Just leave the shovel out of it.

The Cosplayers’ One Real Grievance

Ok, I’m going to take off the flamethrower for a bit, because I’m nothing if not fair, and I fully recognize that there are legitimate concerns buried under all this performance. I covered some of them back in Part 1, but others, I didn’t have room for. So I might as well address them here!

One of the strongest anti-AI arguments, by a country mile, is the one involving training data. The frontier labs initially trained their models on oceans of scraped text and images: much of it copyrighted, some of it outright pirated, and essentially none of it compensated. So if you object to AI because your work was taken without your permission and without payment in order to build the machine that’s now competing with you? That is a real, material, and adjudicable grievance. You have every right to be pissed about it!

The state of play here is obviously in flux. The courts are actively working this out, and the best I can make of the early results is that… they’re kinda mixed, honestly. In 2025, a federal judge ruled that training on lawfully acquired books qualifies as fair use (even calling it “quintessentially transformative”… which I fully agree with! After all, if a kid learns to write by reading your novels, and then that kid becomes a bestselling novelist who sells more books than you, can you then sue him for copyright infringement?), while drawing a hard line at piracy; this distinction ended with Anthropic agreeing to a settlement reported at $1.5 billion over pirating training books. But other cases (against Meta, OpenAI, and others) are still ongoing, and the emerging licensing deal economy between publishers and labs continues to quickly grow and evolve every single day.

It’s all so dizzyingly hard to keep track of, and I have no idea where the legal doctrine will land; and by the way, nobody does, at least not yet. So anyone confidently referring to the whole thing as “theft” is either prematurely calling it, has insider information and can thus be sued for breaking some NDA, or is simply performing moral cosplay.

In any case, which venue is that whole fight taking place in? That’s right, the one it actually belongs in: the courts. Also: in legislatures, in licensing negotiations, and through collective bargaining agreements... in other words, in places with little things like… *checks notes* oh, right: discovery, evidence, damages, and appeals. These places are literally designed to transmute grievance into real remedy and actual relief.

And all that aside, the question about training data use (and compensation thereof) is ultimately a dispute between creators and billion-dollar AI labs, and believe it or not, I fully support pressuring those labs through things like law and policy! That is legitimate and necessary work. It has my full blessing.

But you wanna know what does absolutely nothing for that cause? Pangram-scanning a mid-tier Substack essayist and posting the glaring red percentage number for all the internet to see. Just… what the hell do you think you’re accomplishing with that?! The writer you just flagged didn’t scrape your novel! She doesn’t even have a licensing budget! Ruining her Tuesday transfers exactly $0 from Sam Altman’s bank account to any single, solitary starving artist.

What you’re doing, and all you’re doing, is just weaponizing the streetlight fallacy: the real dispute is hard and far away, meanwhile the essayist is soft and right there, so you direct the mob to swing at whatever it can reach and then have the cojones to call it “justice.”

And hey, while I’m in the process of conceding things in good faith…

• Yes, wanting disclosure for AI use is eminently reasonable; in fact, some of my own (and always highly thoughtful) readers have expressed to me that they simply want to know what they’re engaging with so they can choose accordingly. And I respect that; certainly, if the choice is between a food label and a food ban, I’d pick the label any day of the week!

  • (That said, disclosure can only work in an environment where said disclosure doesn’t result in immediate social immolation… which the cosplayers have made clear as day that they do not actually want. Make no mistake, the cosplayers are pushing for a food label and a food ban, with all the warped incentives that materialize from pursuing both, and I believe this is entirely by design. Anyway, go ahead and read Part 1 for more on that.)

• And yes, game developers’ anxiety is real too: the industry has shed tens of thousands of jobs over the past few years, and when GDC’s 2026 survey found that 52% of developers now think generative AI is harming the industry (up from just 18% two years prior), I can see where that’s coming from; namely, from people nervously watching executives eyeing their salaries (even though the real reason for these layoffs, in most cases, has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with AAA leadership’s major strategic misfires finally coming home to roost… but that said, I do understand where the fear is coming from).

• And finally, Pangram itself, at the population level (ie, studying aggregate trends across things like ~250k news articles, or screening tens of thousands of journal submissions), really does do useful work. Aggregate inference is a legitimate science! It’s just that the math can’t support an individual accusation from the same tool.6

Anyway, all of that is real… but regardless, none of it justifies propping up the checkpoint.

Meanwhile, In the Real World: AI-“Tainted” Games Keep Selling

Since this is nominally a gaming publication (o hai, welcome! we usually do video games through the lens of Jung and Kabbalah here), why don’t we check in real quick on how the crusade is faring in its original theater? Because wouldn’t you know, gaming (bless it) has been running the crusaders’ natural experiment for over a year now… and what good timing, the results are in!

Arc Raiders (2025) launched on October 30th to perhaps the most sustained AI controversy of any major release: Embark Studios openly used text-to-speech AI (trained on paid and consenting actors… not that it mattered one whit to the cosplayers) for ancillary voice lines, so of course the discourse ignited, right on schedule. Eurogamer gave it a 2/5 almost entirely over its AI voices, conspicuously alone against an 84 Metacritic spread, and as they always do, the crusaders started piling on and quote-tweeting each other’s quote-tweets, hoping to astroturf a consensus (or at least the appearance of one) against the game.

But it ultimately didn’t matter. Arc Raiders went on to sell 14 million copies by February, with analysts now estimating over 15 million copies sold and half a billion dollars in revenue, peaking at near a million concurrent players. It became publisher Nexon’s biggest launch in their entire history. So, to recap: the cosplayers kept up their crusade against this game for several months… only for the market to respond by shrugging so seismically hard it registered on the Richter scale.

(And before anyone tries to gotcha me here: yes, I know Embark then went back and re-recorded many of its AI lines with human actors, and yes, I know that CEO Patrick Söderlund even said, on the record, that “a real professional actor is better than AI.” But notice how that happened through normal product feedback, not through any moralist’s crusading ministry via quote-tweet. The studio used AI as scaffolding, then it shipped, listened to players, and upgraded to humans in the places where it most mattered… which you might recognize is the exact same outcomes-based framework that I suggested in Part 1, working exactly as designed.

There’s also the curious case of Neverness to Everness (2026), or NTE for short, which is actually the gaming AI kerfuffle where the crusaders had their BEST case… and still lost.

Hotta Studio launched its ambitious open-world anime gacha game (think GTA by way of Persona, with more gooner-coded character designs and an otter cheering you on) on April 29th to the tune of 35 million pre-registrations. Within days, players started circling billboards, posters, and background textures with that telltale “AI shimmer,” including a cutscene backdrop that looked an awful lot like Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering With You (2019). In response, Hotta confirmed that they only used AI tools on “only a small number” of background and environmental assets, not on the characters or stories, and named two specific pieces they were already in the process of reworking.7

But something quite curious happened next… instead of uniting behind the pitchforks, NTE’s community split, and then a sizeable chunk of said community turned their pitchforks back on the pitchfork brigade! The game’s defenders pointed out what should’ve been painfully obvious: that this game is the culmination of years of labor by hundreds of programmers, composers, writers, animators, and voice actors… and that flattening it all into “AI slop” because of some background billboards that accidentally slipped through the cracks is… kind of a slap in the face to everyone who made it! Others noted (quite dryly) that a truly soulless cash grab does not, typically, claw its way to the top of a market as cutthroat and brutal as the gaming scene in 2026.

An interesting cultural dimension also surfaced amidst this kerfuffle. Initially, the controversy had simply simmered quietly in Chinese and Japanese player forums; these players, by and large, treated the whole thing as a minor issue relating to poor asset quality. But then Western audiences got a hold of it, and sure enough it detonated. Asian players then grabbed their popcorn and watched the Western meltdown with palpable bemusement, as if they were observing the weather on another planet for the first time.

So, add that to my list of arguments against this whole stupid crusade: this crusade that you claim is some universal moral awakening is actually, as it turns out, region-locked. The anti-AI panic has a Western passport, and a Western demographic profile.8 It is NOT the collective conscience of gaming; it is merely a localized conscience, specifically that of one VERY loud slice of the anglophone internet, which (as it is wont to do) has mistaken its own deafening volume as a verdict on behalf of all of humanity (as I detailed in Part 1, this is far from the first time the moralizers have done this, and in fact it’s a highly recurring and predictable pattern of theirs).

So, what’s the verdict that actually came in? Well, despite this “controversy” and its attendant noise, NTE cleared $207 million in its first two months, (per publisher Perfect World’s July earnings disclosure), $14.8 million of that from Day One alone! The game made repeat appearances in the Top 5 of iOS’s highest-grossing apps, and even hit #1 on the Japanese PlayStation Store. The “boycott” achieved less than a blip… hell, it wasn’t even a rounding error, the equivalent of a fraction of a fraction of a drop of water against the big, vast ocean.

Now, it’s true that the developers reworked and re-shipped the assets in question anyway… but that’s because they listened to a legitimate player complaint, which they would’ve addressed anyway, regardless of whether any anime furry profile pictures had quote-tweeted invectives at them.9

I could go on... Remember Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025)? The indie darling that swept last year’s Game Awards, winning nine trophies (including Game of the Year) despite the retroactive inquisition that was being conducted over some leftover placeholder texture? Yeah, turns out people didn’t care all that much about that, after all! Oh, and speaking of the Game Awards… how’s Divinity‘s hype train chugging along? I’ll tell you: it’s still going at full steam, Larian’s “cancellation” notwithstanding. We’re also at a point now where roughly 1 in 5 games released on Steam now disclose generative AI use (a ~700% increase in disclosures, all within a single year!)… and still, the sky stubbornly refuses to fall.

“But Jay,” you huff and puff at me as you blow the house down, “the surveys show that gamers hate AI!” And yeah, sure… some of them do show that. But what’s that quote again? The one about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”? Because yeah, it turns out the survey landscape you’re referring to actually constitutes a textbook example of how you can manufacture your own reality by playing fast and loose with statistical methodology!

Take, for instance, Quantic Foundry’s December 2025 survey, which found an absolutely brutal 85% negative sentiment towards GenAI... oh but wait, what’s this? Oh, right… in an opt-in survey, and one whose respondents skewed 90% PC and 74% “core” gamers, to boot. In other words, a poll that’s most likely to survey the extremely engaged and terminally online population that’s singlehandedly keeping this cursed Discourse alive.

Meanwhile, Circana’s PlayerPulse panel, built to actually represent US players more broadly, found in the same month that only 25% of players said they’d be less likely to buy a game over the developers’ AI use… while the majority were either “neutral” or “unsure.” And just in case the implications weren’t clear enough, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella went on to helpfully sum up this entire culture war, in just one sentence:

Similarly, a recent GameDiscoverCo survey of Steam users landed in the same place: roughly 69% either don’t mind AI disclosures, or are neutral about them. And then there’s BCG's late-2025 gaming report, which found that only 10% of adult gamers viewed AI-generated art/animation negatively, and just 5% felt that way about AI-generated NPC dialogue.

If you poll the mob, don’t be surprised when the mob renders a unanimous verdict. But if you poll the world, something remarkable happens: the mob turns out to be at most a quarter of it, furiously and loudly trying to psy-op a consensus into existence, one Twitter pile-on at a time.

So with that, I’ll take the opportunity to reiterate my main prediction from Part 1, only now with far more confidence and conviction:10

And I mean, fully evaporate into thin air. It will go out not with a bang, but with a whimper, as uneventfully as one switches the lights off before going to bed.

If you look at the history of moral panics, you’ll recognize that this is the same arc that every technologically-driven moral panic has followed. Remember when CDs were going to kill music? ‘Member how confident everyone was that Photoshop would kill photography? Or that photography would kill portraiture (not that any of us were alive back then, but we can imagine)? Hey, wasn’t sampling supposed to have been the death knell of musicianship? Remember when computer animation was just a soulless and inferior imitation of hand-drawn animation… right up until Toy Story came out? Remember how quickly the “debate” died down after that?

And that’s the pattern, right there! Every single time, these moral-panicky arguments were defeated not by counter-arguments, but by hits. After all, the crowd always gravitates towards wherever the joy is (duh), and so eventually, but quite inevitably, the scolds are always left holding their picket signs outside an empty building, with nothing and nobody to wag their fingers at except the cold, empty void in front of them.

Unless, of course, the crusade ends the other way first… which brings us, at long last, to Salem and its (in)famous witch trials (I’m surprised it took me this long!).

Ding, Dong, The Witch Hunt Is Dead

So, here’s what they don’t teach you in the Sunday-school retelling of Salem: the trials didn’t end because the ignorant and superstitious villagers gradually discovered the Scientific Method. They ended fast, and for reasons that should make you very uncomfortable if you’re one of these crusading moral cosplayers salivating over the prospect of Pangramming all the Substackers that are more successful than you on your shit list.

At the end of the day, three things killed the Salem witch trials. I’ll now present them all to you, in escalating order:

First: the “evidence” collapsed under closer examination. The panic’s witchcraft convictions ran on “spectral evidence” — testimony that the accused’s spirit had somehow tormented the accuser. Now, if you’re smart, you’ll notice that this was quite intentionally unfalsifiable; after all, you cannot cross-examine a specter! When Increase Mather and other ministers finally pressed the point that the Devil could impersonate an innocent person’s shape, and in doing so rendered all this “evidence” worthless, the panic’s entire evidentiary engine seized up.

Mather’s formulation survives to this day as one of the greatest sentences ever uttered in the English language: better that ten suspected witches escape than one innocent person be condemned.

And all of this applies even if no witches are involved, because every moral panic runs on some flavor of spectral evidence: proof that the accused cannot examine, confront, or replicate. So, considering that definition… what is an AI-generation probability percentage, that changes depending on which day you run the scan, if not spectral evidence?

Second: people simply got sick of it. Panics are exhausting to sustain. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s ground itself to death in the McMartin preschool case, which (at the time) was the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history. And yet, even after seven arduous years, said trial produced ZERO convictions. Why? Because there was nothing to convict anyone for. It’s that simple! The public watched the machinery of accusation churn and churn, year after year, chewing up innocent bystanders and ruining their lives while producing absolutely nothing in return, and the nation’s collective stomach finally turned.

People may not realize it, but fatigue is a highly underrated historical force and catalyst for change. It’s arguably what ended the wretched 2010s cancel era, as well! And I’d even bet real money that when a similar vibe shift finally hits the AI culture war, we’ll be showing receipts that we’re already accumulating right here and now; nobody likes being scolded, and every “97% AI” screenshot leveled at a beloved human writer will become a future exhibit in the backlash against the backlash.11

Third: the accusers flew too close to the sun. [If you’re a crusader, pay real close attention to this one, if you care at all about actually winning!] In Salem, accusations kept gradually climbing the social ladder until, by most historical accounts, they reached the wife of Governor William Phips himself. And Governor Phips, who up until that point had tolerated the unjust deaths of his powerless subjects with remarkable equanimity, suddenly rediscovered his skepticism (and rather impressively quickly!) once the mob’s finger pointed at his own household. Within weeks, he’d dissolved the special court and gutted all of its “spectral evidence.” The trials, at long last, were over.

But alas, it would not be the last such trial in our nation’s history. In 1954, we re-enacted the same script, practically beat-for-beat: Sen. Joseph McCarthy had spent years baselessly accusing people of communist espionage and subterfuge, gleefully and self-righteously destroying the lives and reputations of countless people he knew couldn’t fight back.12 And for a while, it worked great… right up until he accused the United States Army, that is.

You already know what happened next: you might remember seeing the televised hearings in your 8th-grade history class. You know… the ones that lay bare the rotten core of his moralized and weaponized cruelty to the entire nation, capped by Joseph Welch’s delightfully cutting admonishment (“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”), followed by a formal Senate censure by December of that year.

That panic had finally died down… and McCarthy himself died in disgrace only three years later, his name forever immortalized as a pejorative.

Whether it’s Salem or McCarthy, there’s a grimly consistent lesson in here for any would-be witch hunters: witch hunts end when the witch hunters accuse someone with the power and the will to bite back. And in our current AI-related panic, the mechanism for said biting back already has a name… courtesy of the Wall Street Journal‘s coverage of the Pangram wars, which I cited earlier in this piece: the defamation machine.

Somewhere out there, right now, exists a wealthy, well-lawyered, and highly-litigious author (or a publisher, or a studio, or a blogger, or a Substacker!) who is going to get publicly branded with one of Pangram’s inevitable false positives, and who will respond to the accusation… not with a sad and mealy-mouthed clarification thread, but with legal discovery.

And when a court of law makes some spiteful accuser produce, under oath, the scientific basis for their public claim that a specific human being’s specific words were actually made by a robot (or, to put it more clearly: when the accuser’s “receipts” turn out to be nothing more than probabilistic guesses from a tool whose own maker’s terms expressly discourage this exact type of use), that will be this panic’s “spectral evidence” moment. Whether in 1697, 1954, 1987, or 2026, the Court of Oyer and Terminer will adjourn very, very quickly.

So… there you have it. Those are the only two ways in which all of this can end. So go ahead and pick one of the two deaths available for your crusade: do you want a masterpiece to render it moot, or do you want it gutted by a lawsuit? Again, those are the only two options: it can end either by joy, or by consequences.

Which one is it gonna be? Because it’s ultimately up to you and your fellow crusaders. Personally, I’m rooting for joy… frankly, it’s a much better story, and nobody’s life has to get ruined in the third act. But make no mistake… I’d gladly settle for consequences.

Right Side of History, You Say?

Ok… I’ve spilled enough digital ink on this topic today, so let’s bring all of this home so we can finally get back to our regularly scheduled programming (speaking of which… new feature coming your way soon! If you haven’t subscribed yet, and I haven’t scared you off by now, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it.)

Subscribe now

To the (assuming anyone over there actually reads the little publications over in the small but vibrant gaming neighborhood that you still refuse to acknowledge): you do know you had options, right? Here are a few, just off the top of my head:

1. You could have fixed the Notes algorithm that constantly surfaces engagement-bait sludge and other foul varieties of slop (of both the human- and machine-authored varieties).

2. You could have invested in the anti-spam systems that your own announcement vaguely gestures at.

3. Hell, you could have even promoted the mute and block buttons… you know, those individual, quiet, dignified, and (most of all) effective curation tools that let every reader shape their own feed without deputizing them over anyone else’s.

But no… because that would’ve made too much sense, wouldn’t it?

Instead, you built a border checkpoint and handed out inspector badges to the most rabidly vindictive cohort stalking these pages. You may not have created the mob, granted… but you absolutely uniformed it. And I should point out that history has never once been kind to the people who did the uniforming.

And finally… to the moral cosplayers themselves (assuming you’re even still here), I have but one last, final question to ask you.

Your entire project is built on the concept of you being on “the right side of history.” It’s the phrase that powers your whole vindictive apparatus: be on the right side, shame the wrong side, and let the future vindicate your shaming.

Fine. Let’s take history seriously, then… and I mean actual history, like the kind with physical archives and the like.

So, what does history tell us about what happens after the witch hunt? Simple: where there once was a hunt, there now becomes a reckoning. And it’s not at all fun for the former hunters.

In 1697, Samuel Sewall, the only Salem judge to publicly repent for his role in the trials, stood humbled before his congregation while a minister read his confession of guilt aloud. The jurors, meanwhile, had signed a declaration begging for forgiveness, admitting that they’d convicted innocent people on evidence that they now understood was worthless. This would all mark the beginning of a long and arduous process of atonement; Massachusetts would spend the next three centuries formally exonerating the trials’ victims, one by one. The last of them, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was finally cleared in 2022 (a crisp 329 years after her conviction) and that’s only because a local 8th-grade civics class took up her case.13

Again… 329 years later, and we are still apologizing for Salem. Nobody remembers the accusers’ righteousness. Nobody remembers how certain they felt in their righteousness, how good that certainty must have tasted, how completely their community validated their finger-wagging in the moment. We remember one thing, and only one thing, about them: that they were wrong, and that people burned for it.

Remember, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. Nobody thinks that what they’re doing is ever wrong in the moment. Some of history’s worst atrocities were carried out by people who thought they were the good guys, fully confident in their conviction that inflicting such horror was the moral and righteous thing to do. And even on a less grand scale… when two neighbors beef with each other, does either of them ever stop to think that maybe they’re the one in the wrong?

So yes, I know you think you’re being moral and righteous by pushing for and siccing these scans on writers. And that’s exactly all the more reason to pay attention so what I’m about to say, and really reflect on what you’re doing.

Anyway, I’ve rambled and danced around it long enough, so at long last, here is my question for you… and I’ll even do you the courtesy of asking it straight. Because believe it or not, and in spite of everything you’ve just read… underneath everything, I think some of you actually do care (and caring is the one thing I refuse to give up on):

If being on the right side of history matters to you as much as you say it does... doesn’t it worry you, even a little bit, that history has NEVER once sided with the accusers?

Just some food for thought. Anyway, the stamp is in your hand, comrade: APPROVED or DENIED.

Which will it be? Choose like someone’s watching from three centuries out.

Because they are.

~Jay

This is a bonus article, exclusively available to paid subscribers of Game & Word. To receive more bonus articles like this, and gain access to the full archive, upgrade your subscription here:

Subscribe now

🚫🫠☠️ SUPER ULTRA MEGA WARNING 🚫🫠☠️

This is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek, somewhat parodic imagining of what a gamer’s spellbook might actually look like. While nothing is stopping you from trying these out for real, this is NOT intended to be a practical guide or actual magical spellbook.

To the extent these could be considered magical workings, they are entirely experimental—if they work (and most likely, they won’t), their effects are likely unpredictable and not guaranteed to work as described in the grimoire.

The following spells, incantations, sigils, and recipes are meant for entertainment purposes only. They are not meant to be actually attempted, and should you attempt to cast or brew any of them, you do so at your own risk.

Neither I nor Game & Word are responsible for any spiritual ailments, mental illness, karmic blowback, legal issues, health complications, or dashed hopes—whether direct or indirect—that arise from the use of this grimoire. Invoke and cast at your peril.

👉👉👉 COPYRIGHT NOTICE 👈👈👈

In order to avoid pesky copyright issues, all sigils used in this grimoire are original creations. But since I’m not a stingy AAA game publisher, please know that you are free to download, print, and share them as you please… as long as you don’t try to sell or otherwise make money off of them.

Of course, if you do share, a link back to this post or to Game & Word more generally, while not required, is always appreciated!

Share Game & Word

The Gamer’s Grimoire of Digital Divination and Pixelated Prestidigitation

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Preparation

3. General Spells & Sigils

4. Hexes & Curses

5. Summoning Spells

6. Potions

7. Enchantments

Read more

Game & Word, Volume 5, Issue 12: Sunday, July 5^th, 2026

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “No Such Thing as a Free Lich” (~47 minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

Picture the following scene, dear reader.

It’s 11:47 PM on a Thursday evening. You’re hunched over your controller in front of your TV’s blue glow, and you’ve just (very casually, in between sips of an off-brand energy drink) raised an army of the dead. Skeletal warriors claw their way out of the frozen dirt at your command, ready to do thy bidding. Somewhere, an ancient seal has been broken... somewhere, a horror that predates language itself has learned your name.

You then pause the game and go make a sandwich.

But no candles gutter out in your kitchen, nor do any whispers coil up through the floorboards. Your reflection stays put in the microwave door, obediently mimicking your movements, clearly uninterested in actually becoming you. You have committed the gravest transgression in the entire occult canon, the unspeakable sin that got actual, real, flesh-and-blood people shunned, burned, banished, flayed, and buried at unmarked crossroads for the better part of recorded history… and the universe’s grand cosmic response to your profane meddling with the sacred forces of life and death is…

Nothing.

Anyway, mustard or mayo?

Now, compare your evening to that of an actual historical practitioner of the ominously-named “dark arts.” Before so much as even addressing a spirit, the medieval necromancer would fast, purify himself, and draw elaborate protective circles, because he knew the entities he was calling would absolutely eat him and his soul for breakfast if given a quarter of a chance. Similarly, the classical Greek petitioner who etched a curse into a lead tablet did so in the dead of night in the middle of a graveyard, fully understanding that he was going into debt with the gods of the dead… who weren’t the most understanding of lenders, the kind who always collect and who had an eternity to do so. Just like how thousands of years later, the Renaissance magus triple-checked his sigils in much the same way you triple-check a parachute before leaping out of a skydiving plane.

You get the idea. They had to draw protective circles... but you get a respawn.

And in today’s issue, we’ll be exploring that difference between the real thing’s ritual terror and its digital fascimile’s breezy convenience. Because it turns out, ye olde necromancy of olde differs from the Dead Thrall spell in Skyrim in ways that go deeper than mere belief. No, it’s not a question graphics, nor whether the necromancer or the game developer had better taste in ambient lighting.

Believe it or not, the difference is actually about money! Or, more specifically: it’s about who pays, what they pay, and whether the bill ever arrives at all.

So finish drawing those magical circles and perform your banishing incantations, folks. It’s going to be a wild ride!

~Jay

Subscribe now

Housekeeping

ICYMI, I recently launched a sister publication, Spawn Point Marketing, that serves as a companion newsletter to my brand-new games marketing consultancy of the same name.

Subscribe for weekly game marketing tips, analysis, and case studies for indie and AA game developers who need to successfully market and their game in an increasingly crowded marketplace, but lack the expertise to do so or the budget for a full marketing team (oh, and all my industry analysis will live there going forward, so if you enjoy those pieces, subscribe to SPM for those as well; going forward, Game & Word will exclusively be about the games themselves):

Spawn Point Marketing

Easy, practical, and actionable marketing tips, insights, and case studies for indie game developers.

By Jay Rooney

I also, through Spawn Point Marketing, offer fractional marketing leadership services to indie and AA game studios. To learn more about the services I offer, or to book a free consultation, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com or click the button below:

Click to Find Your Players

Previous Issues

Game & Word’s most recent issues (currently, all of Volume 5) are available to all, free of charge.

Older issues are currently archived and only accessible to paid subscribers. To access the full archive, upgrade to a paid subscription:

• Volume 1 (The Name of the Game): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4

• Volume 2 (Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 3

• Volume 3 (Game Over Matter): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 4 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 2 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Podcast 3 ● Bonus 2

• Volume 4 (Tempus Ludos): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Video Podcast 2 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Issue 10

• Volume 5 (AbraCODEabra!): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Issue 10 ● Issue 11

Subscribe now

Read more

Game & Word

Issue 5.11: Gods, Mods, and Sacred Fraud

Game & Word Volume 5, Issue 11: Sunday, Apr. 26, 2026…

Read more

6 months ago · 5 likes

Oh, and you need to be a paid subscriber to read it in its entirety. If you haven’t already, you can upgrade your subscription here:

Subscribe now

BONUS QUEST: Squid Pro Quo

(Or: The Eldritch Economy of Worshipping Things That Hate You)

Picture, if you will, a Yharnam back alley at 3 AM. You’re crouched behind an overturned cart, your trick weapon soaked in blood that (probably) isn’t yours. It’s been quite a night; you’ve just killed a werewolf that used to be a doctor, and before that, you witnessed a child being dragged screaming into a sewer. Earlier, you watched the moon turn blood red, and you’ve been hearing whispers from things that aren’t quite there (or are they?).

And then you check your stats, because obviously you check your stats, and your heart skips a beat as you realize what’s gone quietly but undeniably and catastrophically wrong.

Your Insight is at 43.

The game never warned you this was happening (and why the hell would it? It’s a goddamned FromSoftware title!). You’ve just been picking up those veiny eyeball items, popping Madman’s Knowledge like Tic Tacs, and fighting bosses to unlock more lore. Each time, nudging that counter up just a little higher. Each time, it seemed just fine… in isolation.

But 43 is past the threshold. The Lesser Amygdala are now visible — enormous spider-like things clinging to the cathedrals, which have apparently been there the whole time. The eerie Winter Lanterns are singing their disquieting tune. The children you saved earlier? They might not have been children, after all! And the dress-up doll in your safe room, the Plain Doll, the one you thought was just set dressing? She’s been watching you… intently.

Welcome, dear reader, to what might be the single most honest depiction of religious experience ever rendered in a video game. Not so much the worship part, or even all the rituals… but the knowing that comes with it.

Read more

Game & Word Volume 5, Issue 11: Sunday, Apr. 26, 2026

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “Gods, Mods, and Sacred Fraud” (~50 minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

Well, dear reader, we’ve reached the part of Volume 5 where I finally stop middling with the little leagues and tackle the big kahunas: gods. And wouldn’t you know it, video games are obsessed with them.

Video game gods can be characters, systems, bosses, bureaucracies, or aspirations (sometimes, all of the above!). We’ll examine games where you worship them, games where you kill them, games where you become them, and games where you simply are them (from the comfort of your couch, as you munch through a bag of Cheez-Its with one hand while holding a DualSense in the other).

In today’s installment of Game & Word, we’re going to look at all of it, and fair warning, it’s going to get proper weird. Seriously, buckle up because this one’s a monster.

So join me this week as wel tackle the god-shaped hole in the human psyche and the strange, beautiful, and occasionally horrifying ways video games have learned to fill it. We’ll talk about why JRPGs love killing God (spoiler: Nietzsche will enter the chat), interrogate why Bloodborne portrays transcendence as a wet grub, dissect the awkward truth about how religious economies actually work according to Cult of the Lamb… and you’d better believe we’ll talk about The Sims, because let’s face it, one can’t analyze video game-enabled godhood without at mentioning the pool ladder thing at least once.

(Oh, and paid subscribers can, as always, look forward to an additional bonus segment. Should be hitting your inboxes in about a week or so!)

Ready? Good. Now let’s go kill some gods.

~Jay

Subscribe now

Housekeeping

ICYMI, I launched a sister publication, Spawn Point Marketing, that serves as a companion newsletter to my brand-new games marketing consultancy of the same name.

Subscribe for weekly game marketing tips, analysis, and case studies for indie and AA game developers who need to successfully market and their game in an increasingly crowded marketplace, but lack the expertise to do so or the budget for a full marketing team (oh, and all my industry analysis will live there going forward, so if you enjoy those pieces, subscribe to SPM for those as well; going forward, Game & Word will exclusively be about the games themselves):

Spawn Point Marketing

Easy, practical, and actionable marketing tips, insights, and case studies for indie game developers.

By Jay Rooney

I also, through Spawn Point Marketing, offer fractional marketing leadership services to indie and AA game studios. To learn more about the services I offer, or to book a free consultation, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com or click the button below:

Click to Find Your Players

Previous Issues

Game & Word’s most recent issues (currently, all of Volume 5) are available to all, free of charge.

Older issues are currently archived and only accessible to paid subscribers. To access the full archive, upgrade to a paid subscription:

• Volume 1 (The Name of the Game): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4

• Volume 2 (Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 3

• Volume 3 (Game Over Matter): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 4 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 2 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Podcast 3 ● Bonus 2

• Volume 4 (Tempus Ludos): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Video Podcast 2 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Issue 10

• Volume 5 (AbraCODEabra!): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Issue 10

Subscribe now

Read more

Hey everyone,

First off, I owe you all an apology. It’s been a minute since the last longform Game & Word piece, and I truly appreciate your patience more than you know. But why has it taken so long? Well, the short version is that I’ve been heads-down getting Spawn Point Marketing (my fractional CMO consultancy for game studios) off the ground, and it’s been eating most of my writing bandwidth.

But the good news is that through this work, I’m still creating content you’ll find interesting… just in a slightly different venue.

Case in point: my latest article just went live on the Spawn Point Marketing Substack, and I wanted to share it here because it sits right at the intersection of both publications.

Crimson Desert Mogged the Gaming Press is a deep dive into what Crimson Desert’s launch (+4 million copies sold, 276K concurrent players on Steam, 82% positive rating) tells us about the widening gulf between the mainstream gaming press and the players they’re supposed to serve.

In the article, I break down the double standards in how critics scored Crimson Desert versus games with identical issues, lay out the case for and against the press as a meaningful driver of game sales in 2026, and close with actionable marketing lessons for indie and AA studios trying to figure out where to invest their limited resources.

If that kind of analysis sounds like your thing, consider subscribing to the Spawn Point Marketing Substack for more game marketing strategy, case studies, and industry breakdowns like this one. It’s a sister publication to Game & Word — the same voice and the same rigor you’ve come to love, just aimed at the business side of making games.

Read the full piece here:

Spawn Point Marketing

Crimson Desert Just Mogged the Video Game Press

I’ve been playing the absolute hell out of Crimson Desert since it launched on March 19, so I have some… thoughts on all the hullabaloo going on about it. Quite a lot of them, actually! So now, I’m going to regale you with them all. Don’t worry, it all ties into game marketing…

Read more

6 months ago · 1 like · Jay Rooney

As for Game & Word proper, my next piece will be on divinity and apotheosis in video games, and it’s in the final stretch. I’m applying some finishing touches as we speak. It’ll be worth the wait! (…I hope)

Thank you, sincerely, for sticking around. This newsletter’s readership means a lot to me, and I don’t take your patience for granted.

More soon!

GG,

~Jay

What’s in a name? That question’s been on my mind (and, I’m sure, the minds of many others) since October 2025, when the organizers of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), announced a rebrand. Going forward, they said, GDC would be known as the “GDC Festival of Gaming,” a bold new name that promised expansion, celebration, and a new chapter for an industry institution — the industry marquee event, considered so essential to developers that they’d often refer to it as “the pilgrimage” — as it approached its 40th year. A name is a message, a brand is a message, and the message here was nothing short of lofty and aspirational: broader perspectives, new interactive formats, more opportunities to learn and collaborate.

It also evoked in me images of E3’s final years, as it clumsily attempted to court consumers in a futile bid to retain relevance before COVID finally dealt the death blow we all knew was coming. Hold that thought for now.

Like I’ve done for quite a few years now, I just spent five days at GDC, making the daily pilgrimage from my home in the ‘burbs to San Francisco’s Moscone Center. And what I experienced was… decidedly not a festival.

I experienced a wake — albeit one where the grieving attendees haven’t entirely given up hope that the patient might still, against all odds, pull through.

I want to be honest with you about what I saw, because I think our industry deserves honesty more than it deserves cheerleading. Especially during challenging times like right now. But I also want to be honest about what gave me hope, because there was plenty of that too… perhaps just not where the organizers intended.

The Case of the Contracting Conference

Let’s start with the physical reality, because it tells the cautionary fable of GDC far more efficiently and effectively than any keynote could.

The expo floor, rebranded as the “Festival Hall,” has historically stretched across both the South and North Halls of the Moscone Center. This year, it occupied only the South Hall… and not even all of it. The space felt noticeably less crowded, both in terms of booths and the people milling about them. Major names that have been fixtures of the show floor for many years were nowhere to be seen. No Valve, for instance. No Epic, either (though they did sponsor the event, and I heard reports of Tim Sweeney ambling about, but no booth). Sony’s entire presence was reduced to a small PlayStation Indies section tucked into a corner. AWS moved offsite entirely, setting up shop in the Metreon across the street.

And that’s not even getting into what happened to the indie showcase. In past years, the indie arcade and demo stations occupied rows upon rows of floor space — a sprawling playground of experimental games and scrappy studios betting everything on a single pitch. In other words, absolute heaven for gamers and games writers like me. But this year? It was relegated to a corner of the hallway leading into the South Hall, like a literal kiddie corner. If you blinked, you missed it.

It was sad, and it was bleak. It may not be what you wanted to hear, but I’m not gonna sugarcoat this. It was quite grim.

I don’t have official attendance figures yet, but after walking the floor, my rough estimate is that this year’s conference was maybe a third the size of previous years. It’s kind of a GDC meme that the conference feels smaller each year, but this year, the difference was stark, and it was palpable. This didn’t feel at all like a festival. It felt more like a farewell tour.

The Times, They Are a-Changing

At this point, you’re probably wondering what happened, asking yourself how the mighty could have fallen so hard. And like with E3 before it, the reasons for GDC’s contraction are manyfold and multilayered, but they’re also not rocket science. In fact, you could even say they were staring us in the face all along. Hindsight, after all, is Insight +20.

Let’s start with the macro picture: the gaming industry is going through its worst stretch since the 2008 financial crisis. That’s not just my opinion, by the way — that was the consensus from multiple panelists throughout the week. And GDC’s own 2026 State of the Game Industry survey, based on responses from over 2,300 industry professionals, corroborates the metaphor. It paints a brutal picture. To start, 28% percent of respondents reported being laid off in the past two years. In the United States specifically, that number climbs to 33% — that’s one in three US gaming jobs, slashed. Half of all respondents said their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs in the last 12 months, and among AAA studios, two-thirds had experienced layoffs. Among those who lost their jobs, nearly half still haven’t found new employment in the industry.

It’s one thing to gape at those numbers, but it’s quite another to see them manifested in the real world, in the form of all the people walking around GDC with a very particular look in their eyes — a mix of resilience and exhaustion that anyone who’s been through a layoff cycle will immediately recognize. The mood on the floor was correspondingly subdued. People were happy to see each other, sure, but the same undercurrent seeped through every conversation:

Is it getting better?

When does it get better?

I don’t want to be too much of a doomer here, as I did detect faint traces of optimism that perhaps the worst is finally over, and a slow recovery is either underway or about to begin. But “faint” is the key word there; the overwhelming mood was one of layoff-induced and -adjacent PTSD.

There was a noticeable drop in international attendance. In the months before the conference, a wave of developers from Europe, Canada, and elsewhere publicly announced they would be skipping GDC this year, for reasons both practical and political. San Francisco’s not the cheapest place to visit, after all (how the hell does a grilled cheese sandwich cost $15?! I’ll never understand that no matter how long I live in the area), and the conference’s own pricing doesn’t help (even with a restructured Festival Pass that was 45% cheaper than last year’s All-Access option). The homelessness crisis continues to be a blight on many visitors’ experience in the city. Many international developers also cited growing concerns about being able to enter (or leave) the United States, and we can argue all day long as to whether those concerns reflect reality, but the fact of the matter is that the perception is real, and in the realm of marketing and communications (which includes events like GDC), perception is reality.

But regardless of the reason(s), the fact remains that multiple well-known studios either reduced their headcounts or pulled out entirely. The international contingent, which has always been one of GDC’s defining strengths, was visibly thinner, though still more robust than one would’ve expected given everything I just mentioned. In its place, I noticed two demographic shifts: a substantially larger Chinese presence (Tencent alone ran over twenty sessions and had one of the biggest booths on the floor), and noticeably more students. Neither shift is inherently bad — Tencent is doing truly impressive work, and students are the industry’s future — but together, they signal a conference in transition, and not necessarily one of its own volition.

There were also some logistical hiccups that, while small, felt symptomatic. I couldn’t sign into the conference app until after I physically picked up my badge, which made pre-event networking nearly impossible. And my media/press per diem wasn’t accepted at first. Ultimately minor frustrations, but in a year where the organizers were selling a vision of expanded connection and community, every stumble landed that much harder.

It’s such a shocking shift that one prominent industry figure even told the press that GDC 2026 could be “the last GDC of its kind.” I’m inclined to agree, because that fully tracks with everything I saw.

AI, Robot

If there was one thematic thread running through GDC 2026, it was the industry’s deeply complicated relationship with AI.

The aforementioned State of the Industry survey not only captures this tension, it shines a floodlight on it: 36% of game industry professionals are already using generative AI tools at work, primarily for research, brainstorming, and administrative tasks. But 52% also say generative AI is having a negative effect on the industry, a figure that’s nearly tripled from 18% in just two years. Meanwhile, only 7% of responders view the technology positively. Artists, writers, and programmers are all increasingly hostile to it.

On the ground, the vibe was not quite as hostile, and instead more... ambivalent. Specifically, “survival-mode ambivalent.” And it makes sense! After all, when you’re worried about whether your studio will even exist in six months, questions like “what should we do about AI?” get filed under “problems I’d love to have the bandwidth to think about.” This precarity is, of course, upstream of the AI anxiety. But nevertheless, the anxiety is real, and people are feeling it more and more each day.

This actually made me appreciate one session I attended all the more: “GenAI at Studios: Leadership, Tools, and Trust,” featuring Mitu Khandaker, Phil Stuart, and Irena Pereira. They posited a refreshingly grounded approach for building AI workflows that teams can actually be comfortable with, don’t compromise the product’s quality, or atrophy the team’s creative muscles. Their framework was simple and smart: use AI for exploration, vision, and scaffolding, but never in the final product.

It’s a wonderfully nuanced, trust-first approach, of the kind that the industry desperately needs, and it stood in stark contrast to both the “AI will fix everything, print money, and reveal the secret of immortality” rhetoric that executives tend to default to, and the “AI is never acceptable and we will doxx you, run you out of the industry, and review-bomb your game into oblivion if you ever so much as generate an ideation image” invective from many gamers themselves.

I’ll be continuing the conversation with Phil next week. I have no doubt it will be as illuminating a chat as his presentation was.

Diamond Pickaxes in the Rough

For all of this year’s bleakness, GDC hasn’t completely lost its ability to surface a-ha moments and ideas worth paying attention to.

Sessions

The sessions, on the whole, were solid — and a few were truly excellent.

“The Global Multi-Platform Publishing Strategy of Delta Force” was a masterclass in what a deep-pocketed and well-organized publisher looks like in action. Say what you will about Tencent, and yes their scale confers many advantages denied to smaller teams, but studios and publishers of any size can learn from the operational discipline that Tencent brings to multi-platform launches, even if they’ll never replicate the Chinese behemoth’s budget and manpower.

“Publishing Realities: Funding, Discoverability, and What Success Really Looks Like” is the one I’ll be mulling over the most in the weeks to come. It was a candid, no BS discussion about what publishers actually look for, and what developers should look for in a publisher. The panel confirmed what I’ve long believed: marketing should start in pre-production, not after the trailer drops. Magic Potion Games’ Stephen MacDonald said it out loud during the session, and I even thanked him for it during Q&A. All three panelists agreed that wishlist velocity and conversion are a game’s most critical marketing metrics (because the algorithms will bury you if your wishlists don’t convert), but that revenue is ultimately the only metric that leads to sustainability. They also confirmed what everyone in the room (and the conference at large) suspected: this is the toughest funding environment since the Great Recession. VCs are still out there, and they’re still writing checks... but the bar to earn one has never been higher.

“Inside Indie (Self) Publishing” featured Finji’s Rebekah Saltsman, who clearly knows her stuff… and she endeared herself to the room by admitting she’s not even a gamer. Coming from someone with her track record in indie publishing (having brought indie darlings including Tunic and Chicory to market), that admission reinforced rather than undermined her credibility. The subtext was that you don’t necessarily have to be a player to understand players.1 But you DO have to be curious, disciplined, and willing to let the data — and your developers — guide you.

Games

The games themselves were a mixed bag, but I did get hands-on time with several indies that I’ll be watching closely: Arcane Eats, Beat, Heart, Beat, Nocternum, and Zero Parades: For Dead Spies all showed true creative ambition and craft. Each one felt like a statement — their teams saying “we believe this is worth building” in an environment that’s giving them every reason to stop.

alt.ctrl.GDC

Finally, the alt.ctrl.GDC showcase (always a personal highlight each year) delivered its usual dose of delightful absurdity: oversized scissors you had to operate with both hands, a toothbrush paired with a mouthful of fake teeth that served as the game controller, and my personal favorite, a literal human-sized hamster ball that you climbed inside to navigate the game world.

In a year defined by contraction and industry-wide belt-tightening, alt.ctrl remains proof that game developers will never, ever stop finding bizarre and wonderful new ways to play. It’s the purest expression of what makes this industry special: the stubborn insistence on finding fun in places nobody thought to look.

Is GDC Over?

A lot of people were thinking but only whispering this at the conference, and now that it’s wrapped up, I’m seeing it increasingly spoken aloud. So I’ll add my voice to the chorus, even if it ultimately costs me my press credentials for future years: I’m not convinced that GDC survives this trajectory.

An expo that consistently filled two halls to the brim, year after year, but now barely fills one.

Major platform holders that have reduced their presence to token gestures, or moved offsite entirely.

A significant portion of the community that has decided the trip isn’t worth the risk or the cost.

Considering all these indicators, the whole “Festival of Gaming” rebrand doesn’t quite feel like the “evolution” the organizers say it is. It feels more like a Hail Mary, a hope that new branding and cheaper passes can paper over the conference’s structural and possibly terminal decline.

I wouldn’t be surprised if next year’s conference looks substantially different from years past. In fact, I wouldn’t even be entirely shocked if this year turns out to be the last one that resembles the GDC we’ve known. Discord, not GDC, may turn out to be the future of game industry networking… if it isn’t already. And Gamescom (held each summer in Cologne) is increasingly the event that international developers point to as the global industry’s new and actual hub for networking and dealmaking.

If I’d have made this prediction in 2022, when I first started covering GDC as Game & Word, I would’ve been laughed out of the gaming industry. What a difference just a few years makes.

Remember, E3 eventually died, as impossible as that might have seemed back in 2006 or even 2016. Is it really so impossible that GDC might follow in its wake? I sure hope that’s not the case, but if our worst fears come to pass, then the industry will need to figure out what replaces it — and not just for the networking, but mainly for the sense of shared purpose it provided. My first GDC, which I covered as part of Level Up Media, was nothing short of inspiring, and even motivated me to ship my own first game a few years later. I still talk to and work with the connections I made back then, who were indispensable for getting me started.

Even in its diminished state, GDC still puts thousands of game developers in the same building at the same time. That matters. Losing it would leave a huge hole that a thousand Discord servers and Zoom calls can’t quite fill.

GDC Is Dead, Long Live Gaming

But look, I don’t want to be too much of a doomer. And believe it or not, despite all of the doom and gloom — the contraction, layoffs, funding drought, and AI anxiety — I actually left GDC more committed to this industry than I was when I arrived.

Because over and over, in every corner of that downsized expo hall, I kept seeing the same thing: people who refuse to quit.

Indie developers with teams of two or three, pouring everything they have into a game they believe in, fully aware of the long odds they face and the many decks mercilessly stacked against them. Solo devs working evenings and weekends, showing up to GDC with a demo and a dream and absolutely no safety net. Studios staring down the worst funding environment in nearly two decades and still pitching publishers, still chasing wishlists, still iterating on builds.

In other words, passionate and hardworking people who are still doing the work.

Faced with crushing economics, a worsening discoverability crisis, and an imminent technological reckoning, these people still put everything on the line and dare to push their vision out into the world, purely for the love of the game — pun, as always, very much intended — and their players.

I spoke to a husband and wife team who were laid off last year, and still paid the airfare, hotel, and exhibitor fee to show off the beta they’ve been working on diligently since then. Just one game out of 20,000 that will release this year (if they’re lucky enough to release on schedule), with dwindling savings, no safety net or backup plan if they don’t beat the odds and end up like the 95% of new games that die in obscurity. And they’re still showing up, taking their shot, and (in their own little way), moving the industry ever so slightly forward.

You may think these people are crazy. You might say that about all the indie developers proudly exhibiting their games in their little neglected corner of the expo hallway, while so many of their colleagues exit the industry for bigger paychecks and greater job security.

But I beg to differ. These people are fucking heroes. If you’ve been reading this publication for any length of time, you know I don’t use either of those two words casually.

And these people give me hope, because these people are the games industry. If these are the people creating the future of gaming, then the industry’s long-term fundamentals are very strong indeed. Hell, you only have to look at this year’s release calendar to see it. Crimson Desert is shaping up to show the world that open-world action-adventure RPGs may not be so played out, after all. And GTA VI (provided it actually drops this year) is going to be nothing short of a zeitgeist-defining cultural event. The Future Games Show Spring Showcase — which, it turns out, had a live component at GDC this year (how did I miss that?) — just revealed over 40 titles spanning every genre imaginable, from co-op psychological horror to pixel-art metroidvanias set in Mexico to a musical Lovecraftian hotel renovation game (yes, really!).

While the AAA space struggles to find its footing amidst a brutal post-COVID correction, the indie pipeline (as always) is bursting with creativity, and promises to surprise and delight players with a much-needed marquee year after the fiascos that were Concord and Highguard. I’d even reckon 2026 will be as good for gamers as 2017 was. Mark my words.

No matter what growing (or shrinking) pains the industry goes through, people will always want to play a good game. The market for joy, wonder, escape, and connection will never go away.

The gaming industry is going through what might be its roughest stretch in recent history. But the people who make games — the stubborn, creative, and slightly unhinged people who keep building things despite every rational reason not to — are still here, still showing up, and still making things that matter.

My job now is to find the ones with the most promise and help them find their players. Because good games, made by good people, deserve to be played. To that end, I’m very excited to announce the founding of Spawn Point Marketing, my new marketing consultancy. Through SPM, I’ll provide affordable, fractional marketing leadership to indie and AA game studios, powered by my 15-year-long career in marketing and communications, experience building and shipping games, deep knowledge of the industry, product, and players, and deep love for the medium.

SPM will also offer easy, practical, and actionable marketing tips and data-driven case studies for FREE through its very own Substack, which you can subscribe to here (going forward, I will also publish all my industry analysis under Spawn Point Marketing, and keep Game & Word solely focused on my usual interdisciplinary academic analysis of the games themselves; so if you like the more industry-focused pieces, go ahead and subscribe to SPM while you’re here):

Spawn Point Marketing

Easy, practical, and actionable marketing tips, insights, and case studies for indie game developers.

By Jay Rooney

And if you’re an indie developer who’d like to book me for an extended engagement or half-day marketing strategy speedrun, you can do so at https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is my contribution to the industry in these challenging times, and my way of giving back to the medium that’s given me so much throughout my entire life.

And so that concludes this year’s GDC. The conference itself may be shrinking, but the spirit of the people in it? That’s shining brighter than ever.

See you at the next one… wherever it is.

Were you at GDC this year? Did your experience match mine, or did you see something different? I want to hear from you — drop a comment below!

~Jay

This bonus content is available exclusively to paid subscribers of Game & Word. If you’re reading this, thanks for supporting independent games criticism… and for trusting me to take you into some genuinely weird territory.

If you don’t have a paid subscription, now’s a good time to upgrade! You’ll receive bonus pieces like this one, gain access to the full archive, and get to feel good for being the type of person who supports indie publishers. It’s a much better way to feel better about yourself than doomscrolling and yelling at bots on Reddit or X! Just click/tap the button below to upgrade your subscription:

Subscribe now

Oh, and if you haven’t read this supplement’s Main Piece, I’d highly encourage you to do so first, though it’s not strictly necessary if you’re already at least somewhat well-versed in Diablo lore:

Game & Word

Issue 5.10: Sympathy for the Diablo

Game & Word Volume 5, Issue 10: Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026…

Read more

9 months ago

BONUS QUEST: The Banned Bible Book That “They” Don’t Want You to Play

The Book of Enoch, Heaven’s System Failure, and the Video Games That Keep Repeating the Crime

I want to open with a moment, towards the end of Diablo III (2012), that really should have felt triumphant but is more likely to instead register as a personal affront.

By now, you’ve clawed your way through the Burning Hells, slaughtered entire legions of demons, and stormed the High Heavens themselves to confront Diablo—now a fully-formed Prime Evil, wearing your former ally’s skin, who deftly exploited a cosmic loophole to launch a full-on assault on the heavenly host, breaching the pearly gates with his infernal hordes who then proceeded to ransack Heaven’s tall marble spires and glistening golden streets like a cohort of demonic frat bros tearing through Bourbon Street on Spring Break.

You’ve just repelled the invasion, saving the celestial realm itself from almost certain annihilation. Imperius, the Archangel of Valor, then turns his big shiny spear toward you and snarls:

“You! Your kind does not belong here, Nephalem. If I see you again, you will die.”

You’ve just saved his entire plane of existence. And he’s pissed that you even bothered!

You’d expect the angels to be grateful. Not least because… well, they’re angels. Things like gratitude implicitly come with their job description. But nope! They’re irritated. And even worse, they’re scared. You stand before the Angiris Council (Heaven’s supreme governing body) as humanity’s greatest champion, but they don’t see you that way at all. Instead, they view you as a walking violation of cosmic protocol. You’re a variable their system was never designed to accommodate.

It’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it? You spend 60 hours clicking through demons to reach Paradise, and Paradise looks at you like you’re a bug it hasn’t yet decided to squash.

If you’ve played enough video games, you might recognize this moment as part of a pattern: Heaven, when it shows up in games, almost never feels heavenly. It feels more like a courthouse, or a boardroom staffed by a schoolmarmish HR department that only exists to say “no” to things. Divine order, in game after game, functions like a bureaucracy: brittle, procedural, and utterly hostile to exceptions. Not exactly the image of moral perfection you’ve come to expect from church/shul/Michaelangelo, is it?

Diablo is far from unique in this, by the way. From Shin Megami Tensei‘s tyrannical YHVH to Elden Ring‘s calcified Golden Order and Dark Souls‘ divine gerontocracy, video games across disparate cultures, decades, and genres espouse a surprisingly consistent theology:

1. Heaven is a system,

2. Systems eventually fail,

3. When divine systems fail, they fail catastrophically.

This raises an obvious question: where did games learn to think this way?

The answer, I’d argue, is buried in one of Western spirituality’s most controversial texts, a book removed from nearly every biblical canon because it was considered too dangerous for mass consumption, and yet is quoted directly in the New Testament. A book that locates the origin of evil not in demonic temptation or human weakness, but in Heaven’s own agents’ authorized actions.

I’m talking about the Book of Enoch.

And I think games have been playing it for decades.

Read more

Game & Word Volume 5, Issue 10: Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “Sympathy for the Diablo” (~73 minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

There’s a moment in the original Diablo (the 1996 original, the one that ate so much of my middle school years) when you realize that the music’s changed.

You’ve clicked through skeletons and fallen demons for hours, to the point that the Tristram guitar theme is now forever burned into your auditory cortex. Somewhere around level 12 or 13 (I forget exactly where… it’s been a long time, forgive me), the ambient sounds shift, with chanting and distant baby screams overlaid on dissonant drones. It’s damned unsettling... you get the feeling that you’ve gone somewhere you weren’t supposed to. And worse still, you sense that the game itself not only knows this, but it’s also not going to help you return.

I was… 10 years old? Maybe 11? Either way, I was playing on a Pentium that wheezed harder than an asthmatic lung whenever more than three enemies appeared on screen. I didn’t know anything about Zoroastrianism, or Gnostic cosmology, or the infamous Ars Goetia back down. I just knew I was scared out of my mind, yet I couldn’t stop playing. Somewhere, deep in my lizard brain, a question started bubbling, and now, several decades later, I can finally fully articulate it:

Why does this feel like it means something?

In this issue, I will attempt to answer this. Or at least provide an answer.

As usual, we’re diving real deep here. We’ll pull on the threads that connect Blizzard’s demon-infested corridors to millennia of philosophical and metaphysical attempts to map the territories of good and evil, and to categorize, contact, and even command the angels on our shoulders and the devils at our heels. We’ll look at ancient celestial taxonomies, how Greek daimones turned into Christian demons, why Satan is everyone’s favorite character in Paradise Lost, and what that says about us. We’ll also look at the Satanic Panic (that wacky time in the wacky 80s when America decided that devil worshippers were using D&D as to recruit kids), and how the games industry is still navigating the cultural fallout, over four decades later.

And yes, we’ll also talk about what actual Satanists might make of all this. (TL;DR: it’s not quite what you’d expect.)

But beyond all the theology, I’ll also try and get at a simpler question:

Why do we keep telling stories about the war between Heaven and Hell? And why does each culture seem to conjure up some version of angels and demons to represent higher selves and our shadow selves? How and why do we personify both the light we aspire to, and the darkness we fear we already are?

Diablo doesn’t (directly) tell us, unfortunately. I doubt any game could. But it does set things up to let us ask why, as we descend beneath a corrupted cathedral and discover what’s waiting at the bottom. Sometimes, it’s a Lord of Terror. But sometimes, it’s just our own reflection, holding a mouse and wondering why we can’t stop clicking.

Anyway, grab your health potions. It’s a long way down.

~Jay

PS—Oh, and paid subscribers: be on the lookout for a supplemental Bonus Quest segment, hitting your inbox sometime within the next week or two, where I’ll take you on a journey to the theologically spicy and contentuous Book of Enoch, and its influence on games like Diablo! If this sounds up your alley, be sure to upgrade your subscription today:

Subscribe now

Housekeeping

On New Year’s Eve, I posed a question to all you wonderful people: what theme should Game & Word tackle for Volume 6? I proposed no less than ten topics, and had my subscribers vote for their favorites:

Game & Word

Player Select: Volume 6 Topic Finalists (Pick One!)

Happy almost-New Year, everyone! As we count down to 2026, I’m looking ahead at what comes next for Game & Word. Volume 5 (Abra-CODE-abra!) has been an absolute trip. I hope you’ve enjoyed combing through all of gaming’s mystical, esoteric, and downright arcane aspects (and all the delightfully weird little academic tangents we’ve explored in the process) as much as I have…

Read more

9 months ago · 9 likes · 6 comments · Jay Rooney

It was a fairly close vote, but there was, indeed, a clear winner:

Pixel Perfect: Beauty, Aesthetics, Art, and Design in Video Games

In this upcoming Volume, we’ll be examining everything what, exactly, makes games beautiful. Graphics, yes. But also everything from art direction, architecture, fashion, and design. We’ll examine the shared and evolving visual language of video games (including visual trends and “movements” in gaming, such as pixel art and cel shading), the psychology of character creation, the fundamentals of environmental storytelling, and more! Oh, and you’d better believe we’ll be looking at kawaii culture as well.

We’ve still got quite a bit left on the docket for Volume 5, so all of this is still a ways away. But hopefully, it’ll give you something to look forward to as we start wrapping up our mystical journey through gaming’s arcane side. More details to come as everything congeals!

(Oh, and if your preferred topic didn’t win, don’t fret! Again, it was a close vote, and all these topics are ripe for exploration. There’s a good chance I’ll get to your preferred topic, in due time.)

Previous Issues

Game & Word’s most recent issues (currently, all of Volume 5) are available to all, free of charge.

Older issues are currently archived and only accessible to paid subscribers. To access the full archive, upgrade to a paid subscription:

• Volume 1 (The Name of the Game): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4

• Volume 2 (Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 3

• Volume 3 (Game Over Matter): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 4 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 2 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Podcast 3 ● Bonus 2

• Volume 4 (Tempus Ludos): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Video Podcast 2 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Issue 10

• Volume 5 (AbraCODEabra!): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9

Subscribe now

Read more

First: A Necessary Disclaimer (and Apology)

If you’ve been reading Game & Word for pretty much any length of time, you know we don’t do reviews here. We are absolutely, resolutely, positively, 100%, emphatically not a review site.1 This is, as I’ve proudly declared on multiple occasions, a Substack that examines and dissects video games through several different interdisciplinary academic lenses: history, psychology, philosophy, theology, and whatever other “-ology” happens to strike my fancy that week (or month, or whatever).

Reviews are the domain of other, perfectly fine publications. IGN can tell you whether a game is a 5.6 or a 9.2 (though more likely than not, it’ll be a 6 or a 72). Kotaku can tell you whether a game “reads the room” enough for the Reddit/Bluesky cancel crowd. Gamespot can… wait, is Gamespot still around? Is it even still a thing?

Ok, bad examples… but guess what? Your favorite gaming podcaster or YouTube essayist or video game Substacker (may I suggest , , or ?) can easily spend hours on end telling you why some game you’ve never heard of is actually a misunderstood masterpiece (or secretly a steaming pile of dog crap).

Point is: I have no interest in competing with any of that. I’d rather spend my time telling you how Elden Ring draws inspiration from medieval death cults, or breaking down the centuries of mystical symbolism encoded in Balatro’s Jokers. That’s my jam. That’s why I started this entire venture, the whole point of this little slice of online real estate I call a newsletter.

So why am I writing a conventional review, then?

Because, dear reader, I have been driven to it. Pushed to the brink. Forced (FORCED, I tell you!) by circumstances beyond my control to break my own rules and do something I swore I’d never do in these pages:

I must speak the truth about Kentucky Route Zero.

🚨🚨🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨🚨🚨

Common courtesy compels me to warn you that this review contains SPOILERS for Kentucky Route Zero. Now, if you haven’t played it, I still encourage you to read ahead anyway, because:

1. I’m doing you a favor, and

2. This game has no coherent plot (so to speak) to spoil, anyway.

You can thank me later for the 8-10 hours of your life I’m about to save.

Extraordinary Times, Extraordinary Measures

You see, dear reader, we live in an age of misinformation and disinformation. Of fake news and alternative facts. Of infohazards, echo chambers, and data poison. In this era, in the year of our lord 2026, people readily, enthusiastically, and uncritically believe things that are demonstrably and provably false, simply because enough other people also believe them. And while I usually leave debunking these falsities to the professionals, there is one particular lie that has persisted (and indeed strengthened) for over a decade now… a lie so pervasive, and so universally accepted, that I can no longer sit idly by as it continues to metastasize into a bigger cancer of consensus-slop than it’s already become.

That lie is this: Kentucky Route Zero is a good video game.

The truth: It is not.

It is, in fact, a bad video game. A very bad video game. A terrible video game. A video game so bad that if you told me aliens uploaded it to Steam in the hopes of sowing decadence, discord, and the seeds of societal decay itself into the fertile soil of humanity’s collective unconscious back in 2013, I’d entirely believe you because there’s no way an actual person would be so nefarious as to do such a thing intentionally.3 A game so thoroughly, comprehensively, and almost impressively bad that its near universal critical acclaim constitutes either the biggest mass delusion this side of NFTs, or a conspiracy so vast it would make the CIA blush in begrudging admiration.

“But Jay,” I hear you protesting through your screen, “KRZ won literally dozens of awards! It was named Game of the Year by multiple publications! It has a 92 87 on Metacritic!”4

Yes. I know. And that’s precisely the problem.

Look, I understand the impulse. I really do. For decades, us gamers have yearned for mainstream acceptance, longing for society to view our hobby as more than a pointless and addictive time sink for emotionally stunted manchildren (or, alternately, a mass shooter factory). And ever since Roger Ebert so cruelly poured a rhetorical bucket of ice water on us by authoritatively declaring that games were not and could never be art, we’ve desperately pleaded with the world to finally take our medium seriously, to at long last recognize that games can be art just like film and literature and music.

So when other critics (more gaming-friendly critics, sure, but nevertheless “real” critics, from ostensibly “serious” publications) started lavishing praise on this game—which ran the gamut from merely “profound,” “revolutionary” and “visionary,” all the way to “a milestone in the history of the medium” and even “the most important game of all time” (!!!)—of course we wanted to believe them. Of course we wanted this to be the moment everything changed. Believe me, I feel your pain, and I feel your longing. I was there. I wanted to believe, too!

But wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true. And no matter how many awards committees gave this game their seal of approval, no matter how many thinkpieces declared it a watershed moment for the medium, and no matter how many lotus-eating Millennial Redditors tirelessly continue to declare otherwise, Kentucky Route Zero remains what it always was:

A boring, pretentious, and narratively incoherent slog that mistakes inscrutability for depth and insufferability for artistry.5

There. I said it. And now, because I am nothing if not thorough, I’m going to explain exactly why.

Let Me Count the Ways (that You Suck)

Part I: The “Game” Part

Let’s start with the most fundamental question anyone can ask about a video game: Is it, in fact, a game?

I’ve written before about the tension between ludology and narratology in game studies: the fierce and painfully nerdy debate between those who believe games should be primarily (or exclusively) defined by their mechanics and systems, and those who believe narrative and experience constitute equally valid focuses. I’ve generally positioned myself as a moderate straddling this schism’s middle path, arguing that one can (and should) evaluate games on multiple axes, though perhaps weighing gameplay at least somewhat more heavily than the rest (owing mostly to gaming’s unique nature as an interactive medium).

But even by the most generous, narratology-friendly standards and assessments, Kentucky Route Zero barely qualifies as a game.

What do you actually do in KRZ? You walk. Slowly. So incredibly SLOWLY. You walk (again, slooooowly) from one end of a room to the other, at a pace that’d make a sedated sloth start impatiently tapping its foot at you. You also click on things. Sometimes the things you click on do something. Sometimes they don’t. The game, to its credit, does tell you in advance which things are more likely to do something… but (to return to that most fundamental question above) does this make it more, or less, “game-like?”

And then there’s the driving (pictured above).

Grrrr, the driving... aka Kentucky Route Zero’s signature mechanic, the one gameplay element that sets it apart from its walking simulator brethren. So, what does it entail? You get a little truck, you get a little map, and you drive around looking for locations.

I mean, in theory this sounds fine. Maybe even atmospheric! A chance to soak in rural Kentucky’s famed scenic ambiance as you navigate the mysterious, eponymous “Route Zero.”

But in practice, this is nothing but an exercise in how frustrated you can get before finally punching your screen in an exasperated and desperately futile grasp at catharsis.

The sparse map is deliberately obtuse, giving you cryptic directions like “turn at the old barn” (or whatever) when there are approximately seven hundred old barn icons visible on screen (or, just as likely, none at all). Your truck moves at approximately three miles per hour. And the worst part of it all, the salt in the wound, the real slap in the face? Many of these locations only appear after you’ve driven around aimlessly for long enough that the game decides you’ve suffered enough and finally deigns to reveal them.

Is this the developers’ idea of a challenge? Or even, god forbid, of gameplay?! Because this isn’t “challenge,” and it certainly isn’t gameplay! This is shitty RNG grafted onto a barebones navigation system, all designed by some dolt who believes that creating a “deep” experience means confusing the living hell out of the player.

Now, I can already hear the game’s defenders: “But the driving is supposed to feel disorienting! It’s a metaphor for the characters’ own sense of being lost! You’re not supposed to know where you’re going, because they don’t know where they’re going!”

To which I say: fine. I accept that interpretation. But a metaphor that makes me want to throw my controller out the window is still a bad metaphor. You can make me feel lost without making me want to get lost (specifically, lost in literally any other activity).

Part II: The Story (Such As It Is)

Okay, so we’ve established the gameplay is minimal at best, and actually closer to nonexistent. Big whoop, you might say. Many great games have minimal gameplay. The Stanley Parable is basically just walking around an office getting gaslit by a sardonic Brit, and it tells one of the most mind-bendingly hilarious stories in gaming. What Remains of Edith Finch asks you to do little more than open doors and trigger vignettes, and it’s a masterpiece that holds the rare distinction of being equally beloved by both chuds and wokies. Hell, graphic adventures (such as the Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion series) are an entire goddamned genre where you do nothing but point and click your cursor for hours on end, and they practically defined gaming for gamers of a certain generation.6

So, considering this, maybe Kentucky Route Zero justifies its utter mechanical emptiness with a stellar narrative?

My brother in Christ, it does not.

I’ve played all five acts of Kentucky Route Zero, plus the interstitial episodes, plus whatever bonus content I stumbled across. This represents, conservatively, somewhere between 8 and 12 hours of my life (it felt like 8 to 12 years, but let’s be charitable). And even after all of that, I still could not tell you what Kentucky Route Zero’s story actually is.

I know there’s a guy called Conway. He works for an antique shop and needs to deliver something. He has a dog. At some point he injures his leg, and then it gets replaced with a glowing skeletal leg because sure, why not. There’s also a woman named Shannon who fixes TVs, I think? And some other people who show up and get in your truck for reasons that never became entirely clear to me.

They’re all looking for an address—5 Dogwood Drive—which sounds straightforward until you realize that Dogwood Drive exists on the mysterious Route Zero, a secret underground highway system beneath Kentucky that you access by driving into caves and lakes and other places that definitely should not have highway onramps.

Along the way, you encounter… things. A tugboat ferry shaped like a trumpeting woolly mammoth. A boy named Ezra, whose “brother” is a 30-foot-tall bald eagle that flies you across the countryside. An abandoned mine haunted by the flickering apparitions of drowned workers. A whiskey distillery staffed by glowing skeletons who appear to be working off debts they can never repay. A psychological research facility testing whether walking through doorways makes you forget things. A storage facility that’s been reclaimed as a church, complete with a looping recorded sermon playing to an empty room. (Did I miss anything?)

Are these things connected? Do they form a coherent narrative? Does any of it mean anything?

I honestly don’t know. And I’ve tried to know; I’ve read interviews with the developers, I’ve seen YouTube analyses, I’ve consulted the wiki… and I’ve come to the conclusion that either:

1. There is a coherent story here and I’m simply too stupid to understand it, or…

2. There isn’t a coherent story, and everyone who claims to understand it is lying.

I’m willing to entertain the first possibility. I know I talk a big game—what with all the big fancy words and assorted “-ologies” I like to invoke in this newsletter—but believe it or not, I wouldn’t consider myself (generally speaking) the sharpest knife in the drawer. I’m certainly no Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman, in any case. In fact, there are plenty of things I don’t understand:

• Calculus

• Cricket

• Love is Blind’s enduring popularity

• The fact that James Corden still has a career

• …among many other things.

But despite all of this, I’ve also (somehow) managed to follow some fairly complex stories over the years. I’ve parsed Metal Gear Solid’s labyrinthine conspiracy, for one. I’ve also tracked The Legend of Zelda’s multiple branching timelines and endless cycles. And get this, I even managed to piece together Elden Ring’s scattered lore from cryptic item descriptions and subtle environmental cues. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not incapable of engaging with difficult narratives.

So considering all of this, when I say that Kentucky Route Zero’s story left me completely confused, totally baffled, and utterly unsure of who I even was as a person or what this thing we call “reality” even is, I don’t think the problem is me. Rather, I think the problem is that this story is told with such an aggressive disregard for coherence that understanding it becomes essentially impossible.

All the characters speak in riddles. The developers constantly dangle plot points in your face and then just leave them dangling, loose and untied as they recede in your truck’s rearview mirrors, stranded in want of a resolution that will never come. Entire chapters take place in locations that may or may not exist within the game’s established reality. And by the time you reach the end (if you can even call it an “end”), Conway himself—you know, the protagonist!—has vanished from your party.

The delivery does technically get made, I think? Shannon and the others haul Conway’s cargo to 5 Dogwood Drive (which turns out to be a pristine house in the middle of a flood-ravaged town, because fuck your suspension of disbelief). But by then Conway is gone,7 and the game ends with a funeral for two horses named “The Neighbors.” I sat there, dead eyed, staring blankly at the credits like Elon Musk on day five of a ketamine bender, wondering if I’d simply missed something.

Turns out, what I missed was the entire plot (because there wasn’t any to speak of, see).

🤰🏻🏚️🪦 SIDE QUEST: What Remains of What We Could’ve Had

I want to take a brief detour here to talk about What Remains of Edith Finch.

Edith Finch came out in 2017, four years after Kentucky Route Zero began its protracted, episodic release schedule and three years before it finally (and mercifully) concluded. Like KRZ, it’s also a walking simulator that aspires to artistry and is interested in exploring themes of death, memory, and the passage of time.

But unlike KRZ, I’m happy to say that Edith Finch actually works.

You play as Edith Finch, the last surviving member of a family seemingly cursed by tragedy, returning to her childhood home to learn the truth about her relatives’ deaths. Each room in the house triggers a vignette depicting a different family member’s final moments, each rendered in a unique visual style and following a different gameplay format.

It’s haunting, melancholically beautiful, and genuinely moving. But crucially, it makes sense. You can actually summarize the plot! You can explain what happened! And get this—are you sitting down? Cuz you’re not gonna believe this—you can point to specific moments and say “this meant something,” and actually articulate what that “something” was!

Kentucky Route Zero offers NONE of this. It’s all vibes and no substance, all mystery and no revelation, all setup and no payoff. Edith Finch, meanwhile, proves that you can make a bold, artistically ambitious, and narratively experimental walking simulator that actually respects its players’ time and intelligence.

Kentucky Route Zero, on the other hand, proves that you can also not do that, and critics will eat out of your a**hole anyway.

Part III: The Art of Looking Artsy

Let’s talk about the visuals.

Kentucky Route Zero has a distinctive greyscale-heavy art style, featuring a muted color palette rendered with harsh angles and dramatic silhouettes. It looks undeniably striking. The first time I booted up the game, I was actually fairly impressed. “You know, this looks like nothing else out there,” I thought. “This must be what art looks like!”

And then I played for eight hours and realized that “looks like art” is not the same as “is art.”

The greyscale-lite palette feels atmospheric for about the first 30 minutes. After that, it just becomes monotonous. It doesn’t take long before locations start blending into each other, and characters become hard to tell apart. That harsh, angular aesthetic that looks so bold in screenshots becomes actively fatiguing over extended play.

But more than that, this visual style feels calculated. It feels like the developers sat down and asked themselves, “What would make a video game look like an arthouse film?” and then just… did that, without ever asking whether it served the story, the gameplay, or the player’s experience.

This is the visual analogue of a 2014-era hipster wearing thick-rimmed glasses with non-prescription lenses. It signals “artistic” without actually demonstrating artistry; it’s the appearance of depth masquerading as the real thing.

Compare this to something like Limbo or Inside, both of which also use a limited color palette and a similarly stark visual style. In those games, the aesthetic choices serve a purpose: they create tension, guide the player’s eye, and convey information about the game’s world and mood. Their simplicity is functional, rather than merely decorative.

In Kentucky Route Zero, meanwhile, the art style says: “Look at me! I’m different. I’m serious. I’m not like those other video games!” But it doesn’t actually do anything beyond that. It’s more a costume than a real artistic choice.

Part IV: The Purple Prose Problem

And then there’s the writing.

Ooooh boy… the god... damned... writing. Easily the worst part of this game, and the bane of my existence while writing this review. Hold on, gimme a second to steel myself for this section…

*inhales deeply*

Ok, I’m ready.

Kentucky Route Zero is written in a style I can only describe as “MFA Graduate Student Who Just Discovered the Vocabulary of Postmodern Theory.”8 Every line of dialogue drips with self-conscious and faux “literariness,” each description strains to be poetic, and every single exchange goes on for three times longer than it needs to.

Here’s a rough reconstruction of an average conversation in Kentucky Route Zero:

CONWAY: “I’m looking for Dogwood Drive.”

MYSTERIOUS STRANGER: “Ah, Dogwood Drive. The name resonates, doesn’t it? Like an echo reverberating through an empty hall. Or perhaps more like the memory of an echo… the way sound lingers in the mind long after it has ceased to exist in the physical world. Do you know the feeling? Of course you do. Everyone does. It’s the feeling of searching for something you’re not sure you’ve ever actually seen.”

CONWAY: “So… do you know where it is?”

MYSTERIOUS STRANGER: “Where is anything, really? We speak of places as if they have fixed coordinates, as if latitude and longitude could capture the essence of a location. But a place is also a feeling, a memory, a collection of experiences accumulated like sediment at the bottom of a river. Dogwood Drive exists. But where it exists… that depends on what you mean by ‘where.’”

This goes on for approximately 45 minutes, at the end of which you are no closer to finding Dogwood Drive and also you want to lie down with a stiff gin & tonic to bleach the bitter aftertaste of pure, unadulterated pomposity from your battered synapses.

And hey, I’m actually quite fond of literary prose. No, seriously! I love big words (look through the archive if you don’t believe me). Hell, I even enjoy magical realism!9 I very much enjoyed the late nights I spent in high school and undergrad, lattes and stickies and highlighters and Red Bulls in hand, plowing through García Márquez and Borges and Murakami, thank you very much.10 I’m not at all opposed to elevated language in games, and in fact I think there should be much more of it than there currently is!11

But there’s a Grand Canyon of a difference between prose that elevates and prose that suffocates. And while Kentucky Route Zero’s writing tries to be evocative (like all good prose should aspire to be), it’s actually just exhausting. Where it should illuminate, it instead obscures. Each line that should take five words takes 50, and each conversation that should take two minutes takes 20.

Also, none of these characters talk like actual people. And no, I’m not expecting hyper-realistic dialogue (this is a game about a magical underground highway, after all), but Kentucky Route Zero is set in rural Kentucky, populated by truck drivers and antique dealers and whiskey distillers and TV repair technicians. These are working class people living in remote and economically underserved communities.

And yet every single one of them speaks like a sophomore philosophy major workshopping his first experimental short story.

“The resonances and reverberations of an old mining tipple… it’s tragic even to think.”

“Regrettably, I must be extremely selective in my fellowship applications so as to leave enough time in which to eat my lunch, and in the successive years I will no longer be contributing to your illustrious submission count.”

“Many of us have found ourselves in his position, arrogantly grasping at personal sovereignty when our lives had become unmanageable — there’s no shame in it, only condolence.”

Do you really think, do you honestly believe, that rural Kentuckians talk like this? That anyone talks like this? There’s character voice, and then there’s this—pure authorial pretension. And it bleeds through every line of dialogue. The writers are clearly using these characters as mouthpieces for their own purple prose, regardless of whether that prose fits the character, the setting, or the scene.

Meanwhile, Disco Elysium also features sophisticated and literary dialogue, but it works because the writing’s calibrated to each character. The hardboiled detective’s internal monologue sounds different from the corporate board member’s diplomatic shiftiness, which in turn sounds different from the dockworkers’ rough banter, which itself sounds different from the street urchin’s brusque and foul-mouthed (yet oddly endearing) brattiness.12 The style serves the substance.

In Kentucky Route Zero, everyone sounds exactly the same: insufferable.

Part V: The Pace of Molasses in January

I’ve already touched on this, but it deserves its own section: Kentucky Route Zero is slooooow.

And not “contemplatively slow” in the way that Shadow of the Colossus is slow, using emptiness and distance to create a sense of scale and melancholy. Nor is it “narratively slow” in the way that Firewatch is slow, letting you soak in the game’s gorgeous scenery and peaceful yet vaguely menacing atmosphere while it builds narrative tension. It’s not even “mechanically slow” in the way that survival games are slow, limiting your movement to create challenge and force you to get smart about resource management.

Kentucky Route Zero is just… slow. Pointlessly, interminably, agonizingly, and maddeningly SLOOOOOOW.

Walking takes forever. Driving takes forever. Dialogue takes forever. Transitions between scenes take forever. Everything takes forever.

And not “forever” in a productive way, in the way a show like Mad Men does. The slowness doesn’t build any tension, nor does it establish any atmosphere or characterization that the game couldn’t have established in half the time. There’s also no gameplay reason for KRZ’s deliberately glacial pace.

It’s just slow because… well, because the developers decided it should be slow. Because slow means serious, you see! Because if you’re not groaning and checking your phone every three minutes, the game must be doing something wrong.

I’ve heard defenders argue that the pacing is meant to be “meditative.” That it’s supposed to force you to slow down and appreciate the experience, and that rushing through would be missing the point.

I don’t think these defenders have ever actually meditated, or possess even a rudimentary understanding of what meditation actually entails. Because meditation isn’t doing nothing slowly. Meditation is doing nothing with intention; there’s a purpose to the stillness you create, a presence in the emptiness you sit in. When Journey asks you to just walk across an empty desert, there’s a point: you’re experiencing the pilgrimage’s loneliness, so adeptly portrayed visually and experientially in the character’s figure’s smallness against the vast landscape.

When Kentucky Route Zero asks you to spend four minutes walking from one side of a cave to another while nothing happens, there’s no point. Only waiting (for even more waiting afterwards).

The Gallery Incident

I also need to talk about the first interstitial episode: Limits & Demonstrations.

For those who haven’t played it (congratulations on your better life choices btw), this is a short standalone piece that takes place between Acts I and II. In this utter insult to your time and intelligence, you explore an art installation called (what else?) “Limits & Demonstrations.” The introductory plaque states that “the works on display here also trace the extremes of our capabilities and the frontiers of our patience as both viewers and exhibitors.”

Well, that’s certainly one way to put it!

The installation consists of various… art things. Floating words. Tape recordings. Abstract shapes. Random objects. You know, the type of stuff you’d see at a gallery opening where everyone’s drinking bad wine and pretending to understand what they’re looking at.

And you, the player, wander through this space, clicking on exhibits, reading descriptions that say things like “comprises a diagonal slice through time, place, and form,” and presumably nodding thoughtfully while secretly wondering if you’re being punk’d.

And sure, I’ll concede that I don’t particularly like modern art. I’ve done my time in the SF MoMA, trying (truly trying) to get it, but I guess I just don’t. That said, I do think modern art serves a purpose. I don’t wish it didn’t exist. I’m not reflexively anti- abstract, conceptual, or experimental art.

But (and I really hate to break it to the developers… actually, wait a minute, no I don’t!) Limits & Demonstrations isn’t a straightforward portrayal of, or engagement with, modern art—it’s a parody of it, except the parody is completely sincere. It’s an entirely self-serious recreation of everything people find insufferable about the contemporary art world, presented without even the tiniest, most nanoscopic shred of irony or self-awareness.

This sequence is the gaming equivalent of someone at a party who won’t shut up about their trip to Berlin and all the amazing underground galleries they discovered. You know the type. They’ve somehow turned their own cultural consumption into a core personality trait, and they want you to know that their tastes are so much more sophisticated than yours, you filthy plebeian.

That’s Kentucky Route Zero in microcosm, really. That’s what the entire game feels like! It’s not actually deep, no matter how ardently the developers wish that it were; it’s just signaling depth. It’s so desperate to be perceived as artistic, but it only wears the costume of artistry while forgetting to, you know, actually be artistic.

And the gallery sequence is where the mask completely slips. This is where the game stops even pretending to be a game, and becomes nothing more than a pure delivery mechanism, an IV for mainlining uncut pretension into your withered veins.

I played through Limits & Demonstrations with my jaw on the floor, unable to believe that the developers had actually made this, actually released it, and that critics had actually praised it. Did nobody see what was happening here? Did nobody recognize this for what it was?!

Apparently not. The reviews were as glowing as ever. “A bold experiment.” “A meditation on art and perception.” “Proof that games can be more than just games.”

No. It’s proof that if you act pretentious enough, people will be too embarrassed to admit they don’t get it.

The Emperor’s New Art Form (of Boring)

And that at long last brings me to the actual problem. The crux of the matter, and the root of my nightmares for the past five years—the thing that elevates Kentucky Route Zero from “bad game I don’t like” to “cultural phenomenon I feel compelled to publicly denounce.”

Kentucky Route Zero has become, in certain circles, a symbol. It’s not just a game; it’s THE game. The one that proves video games can be art, the game that transcends the medium, the one game to rule them all that elevates gaming from mere entertainment to legitimate cultural expression.

This is infuriating, because it actually gives ammunition to everyone who thinks games can’t be art!

Think about it. If you wanted to convince a skeptic that video games deserve to be taken seriously as an art form, what would you show them? Would you show them Kentucky Route Zero, a plodding, incomprehensible mess that’s boring to play and impossible to understand? A game that even its fans can’t coherently summarize?

Or would you show them The Last of Us, and its devastating examination of love and loss? Maybe The Stanley Parable’s incisive and bitingly recursive meta-commentary on agency and the nature of the medium itself? Or perhaps Outer Wilds, with its meditations on mortality and celebration of curiosity? Still not enough? Then how about Disco Elysium’s brilliant political satire and actual psychological depth?

These are games that actually work as games and as art. They tell compelling stories through engaging gameplay, and they brilliantly bend, mold, and otherwise creatively wield their interactive medium to conjure up truly magical experiences that would be impossible in any other format. They are also, for the most part, accessible enough for a newcomer to appreciate while being deep enough for scholars to analyze.

Kentucky Route Zero is none of these things. It’s inaccessible, incoherent, and painfully insufferable. If this is the best argument for games as art, then we’ve already lost.

And yet, somehow, this is the game that got the accolades. This is the game that won the awards. This is the game that critics pointed to when they wanted to prove their medium could hang with the greats.

Why??? Why, oh dear God almighty in heaven, WHY did it have to be THIS particular game?!

*falls to my knees wailing in despair*

🧐💯🤷‍♂️ SIDE QUEST: The Pretension Industrial Complex

I have a theory: nobody actually likes Kentucky Route Zero. They just think they’re supposed to.

This is a phenomenon I call the “Pretension Industrial Complex” (I’m only half joking). It works like this:

1. An opaque piece of media emerges that’s unconventional enough to resist easy interpretation.

2. Certain critics, eager to demonstrate and prove how sophisticated they are, praise it lavishly; not because they actually liked it, but because praising it signals that they “get it.”

3. Other critics, not wanting to appear less sophisticated, follow suit. Negative reviews become social risks; nobody wants to be the philistine who didn’t understand the masterpiece.

4. Regular consumers, trusting the critical consensus, purchase the media. Many of them don’t enjoy it, but they assume the problem lies with them, not the work. “I must not be smart enough to appreciate it.”

5. A small percentage do genuinely love it (there’s no accounting for taste, after all), and they become vocal defenders, reinforcing the critical narrative.

6. The work achieves “classic” status, at which point criticizing it becomes heresy.

This is how The Favourite became an Oscar darling despite being a deliberately off-putting mess, and this is also how Ulysses became “the greatest novel ever written” despite being essentially unreadable. But most relevantly for our discussion: this is how Kentucky Route Zero became gaming’s artistic standard bearer despite being an absolute chore to experience.

The emperor has no clothes, but everyone’s too polite (or too insecure) to say so. Eat your heart out, Hans Christian Andersen.

A Grudging Concession

In the interest of fairness, I should acknowledge that Kentucky Route Zero does one thing well: its music.

Ben Babbit’s original soundtrack is truly delightful, and a joy to listen to. There’s a sequence in Act III where a group of musicians performs a song called “Too Late to Love You,” and it’s simply beautiful. Sublime. Maybe even (gasp… dare I say!) almost moving. And all throughout the game, KRZ serenades you with atmospheric and evocative music that’s actually very well-suited to the tone the game is trying to establish.13

I would happily listen to the Kentucky Route Zero soundtrack as background music. Divorced from the game itself, it’s really quite good!

That said, even this praise comes with an asterisk. The musical sequence in Act III, while lovely, takes approximately 15–20 minutes to resolve. Twenty minutes during which you are doing nothing but watching a concert. And while I didn’t mind the music, I did find myself wondering why I’d purchased a video game to watch a concert instead of, you know, playing a video game.14

Once again, it’s the game in microcosm. Something that could have been moving and affecting becomes painful and tedious through nothing more than its sheer, unforgiving length. In Kentucky Route Zero, even the good parts are way too long.

Final Thoughts (And An Olive Branch)

Listen, I’m not saying you’re wrong if you liked Kentucky Route Zero. Tastes vary, after all. Some people think cilantro tastes like soap, and some people don’t; neither group is objectively correct.15

If the game’s languid pacing truly appealed to you, if its fragmented narrative felt mysterious rather than incoherent, or if its prose struck you as poetic rather than pretentious? That’s fine! Your experience is valid. I’m not going to tell you your feelings are wrong.

But I would encourage you to ask yourself a question: do you actually like Kentucky Route Zero, or do you like the idea of liking it?

Do you honestly enjoy the experience of playing this game (the hours of slow walking, the eye-rollingly stuffy and opaque conversations, the pointlessly endless driving)? Or do you enjoy being someone who appreciates a game like this? Could it be that what you really enjoy is feeling culturally sophisticated (perhaps even, dare I say, superior) because you champion something that other people don’t understand?

Because if I’m being honest, I think a lot (maybe even most) of the praise for this game comes from the latter place, rather than the former.

Kentucky Route Zero is the modern art of video games, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. Like many strains of modern art, it has utterly and hopelessly confused obscurity with profundity, misconstrued difficulty as depth, and equated insufferability with excellence.

The best art (regardless of medium) rewards your engagement. It might be challenging, but the challenge serves a higher purpose. And it might be unconventional, but its unconventionality says something that it couldn’t have said conventionally.

Kentucky Route Zero does neither, and if anything it punishes your engagement. It’s challenging for the sake of being challenging (and not in a good way, a la Dark Souls),16 and it’s unconventional for the sake of being unconventional. It’s a game that, above all else, exists to be discussed rather than played, and is meant to be admired rather than enjoyed.

And that, ultimately, is why I wrote this review. Not to yuck anyone’s yum, but to provide a counterweight (however small) to the overwhelming tide of uncritical praise heaped upon this dreck. To say to my fellow doubters, loudly, clearly, and publicly:

You’re not crazy if you didn’t like this game. You’re not a philistine, and you didn’t miss anything.

The game is just bad.

Postscript: Actually Good Artistic Games

Since I’ve spent several thousand words tearing down a false idol like Moses torching the golden calf, let me close by highlighting some workable alternatives. If you want to play artistically ambitious games that are actually good, start with these:

What Remains of Edith Finch: This is gaming’s real Mona Lisa, as far as I’m concerned. Visually stunning, emotionally devastating, and (gasp!) actually narratively coherent. Each segment works as both gameplay and storytelling. If you only play one walking simulator (even if the very concept of walking simulators sends you flying into a nerd rage), make it this one. – Steam | iOS | PlayStation | Xbox | Nintendo Switch

Disco Elysium: A detective RPG that boasts some of the best writing in games.17 It serves up dense and literary prose without becoming impenetrable, and pulls off a legitimately weighty examination of politics, interiority, and failure. Also, it’s actually fun to play. – Steam | PlayStation | Xbox | Nintendo Switch

Outer Wilds: A time loop game about exploration, curiosity, and coming to terms with mortality. The narrative unfolds organically through entirely player-directed discovery, and its final moments are deep and evocative to the point of transcendence. I recently published an analysis of this game, and I stand by every word I wrote. – Steam | PlayStation | Xbox | Nintendo Switch

Journey: Yes, it’s another walking simulator. And yes, it also aims to be artsy, such that it’s often mentioned in the same breath as KRZ. But unlike KRZ, it’s tightly designed, emotionally resonant, and highly respectful of your time. Its wordless multiplayer component is also a masterwork of game design. – Steam | iOS

The Stanley Parable: A game that’s just as meta and self-aware as Kentucky Route Zero thinks it is, except this one’s unironically funny and actually has something to say. The narrative examines choice, free will, and the nature of games themselves, delivered through a cheeky British narrator who’s more entertaining in five minutes than KRZ’s entire cast is in five acts. It proves that a game can be experimental and cerebral without disappearing up its own backside (and while also being, you know, enjoyable). – Steam | PlayStation | Xbox | Nintendo Switch

These games all succeed where Kentucky Route Zero failed, by making a case for games as art while actually being good. They reward your engagement rather than punish it, and they respect your time while commanding your attention.

Play any of these instead of this horse slop (or feel free to suggest your own in the comments). You’ll thank me later.

At A Glance

Final verdict: 1/1018

Would I recommend it? Only as an endurance test.

Did it advance games as an art form? Absolutely not, no matter what the pompous critics and clueless awards committees say.

Would I play it again? I would rather manually defrag a hard drive with a spoon.

This has been the first (and, God willing, last) official Game & Word review. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming, starting with my Diablo angelology/demonology deep dive, hitting your inboxes soon! Thanks for indulging me.

But now, it’s just about that time of the year in each volume’s lifecycle that I start looking ahead to what I should cover next.

Wrapping Up Volume 5

Before we leap into the future, here’s what’s still on deck for our current journey through gaming’s magical and occult side:

• Angels and Demons - An examination of celestial and infernal beings in video games, primarily through the Diablo series also but touching on how other games (DOOM, Bayonetta, Devil May Cry) handle the divine bureaucracy of heaven and hell.

• Deities and Their Worshippers - Using Hades and Hades II as starting points to explore gods, Elder Beings, and mortal devotion (Lovecraftian cultists, anyone???), as well as the meta-concept of “playing God” when you boot up a game, particularly simulation games.

• Dark Magic and the Forbidden Arts - The spooooky stuff: necromancy, blood magic, curses, and all the taboo Left-Hand Path practices that games so generously let us gleefully experiment with (and without the attendant risk of spectral or demonic possession!).

• Apotheosis - How mortals ascend to godhood in video games, how it parallels similar ascensions in myth and magic (Hercules, Enoch, Jesus), and what that transformation means narratively and mechanically

• The Meta-Magic of Game Creation - Game development and other creative endeavors as inherently magical acts that bring entire worlds into existence, while transforming the creator and audience alike

• Technomancy - The wacky intersection of magic and computers, tracing a through-line from video games to the internet to generative AI

• The Gamers’ Grimoire - That fun little bonus gaming spellbook I still owe my paid subscribers (it’s about 3/4 done, I promise!)

FAIR WARNING: I may or may not get to all of these, and some might get bumped to Side Quests or become bonus pieces for paid subscribers, depending on how the writing flows and where the rabbit holes take me.

Volume 6: The People Have Spoken (Will Speak)

Just like I did before Volume 5, I’m putting the next theme up to a vote. I’ve brainstormed 10 possible directions, and will give YOU a say in what we explore next!

Here’s what I’m considering:

• Option 1: Press F to Feast [Food + Drink]

• Option 2: Pixel Perfect [Aesthetics + Design]

• Option 3: State of Play [Politics + Governance]

• Option 4: The Long Game [Anthropology + Cultural Evolution]

• Option 5: Friendly Fire [War + Peace]

• Option 6: Working as Intended [Labor + Productivity]

• Option 7: New Game Plus [Memory + Self]

• Option 8: Open World [Nature + Environment]

• Option 9: One Last Score [Cops + Mobsters]

• Option 10: Gears of the Empire [Steam + Punk]

If you like the idea, just vote for it using the handy poll thingy underneath each theme. If you hate the idea, you can also vote “no,” or just leave it blank if you don’t care either way. You can vote on as many as you want!

But you gotta subscribe (whether free or paid) to be able to vote, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, now’s your chance:

Option 1: Press F to Feast

Food, Drink, and Culinary Culture in Video Games

From cooking mechanics to farming sims, whether it’s Monster Hunter’s canteen or Breath of the Wild’s groundbreaking recipe crafting system, food and libations in games serve a deeper function than mere HP recovery or stat boosts! In this volume, we’ll explore the anthropology of the feast, the economics of sustenance, food as cultural memory, and why we find virtual cooking so damn satisfying.

Games To Cover:

• Cooking Mama series

• Yakuza series

• Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom

• Stardew Valley

• VA-11 Hall-A

• Coffee Talk

• Overcooked!

• Monster Hunter

• Chef Life

• Hundred Days

• Final Fantasy XV

• Animal Crossing

Academic Lenses:

• Anthropology

• Economics

• History of cuisine

• Cuisine as cultural vector/framework

• Psychology of comfort food

• Philosophy of consumption and sustenance

• The culinary arts themselves

Option 2: Pixel Perfect

Beauty, Aesthetics, Art, and Design in Video Games

What makes a game beautiful? And no, the answer isn’t just “good graphics.” This volume is all about everything that makes games pleasing to the eye, focusing on art direction, architecture, fashion, and design.

We’ll also take some detours along the way, exploring the psychology of cute, kawaii culture, environmental storytelling through space, the psychology of character creation, and how visual language creates meaning (including visual trends in games as a whole, such as pixel art, cel shading, and low-poly minimalism). So get ready to take a microscope to Journey’s sublime vistas, Animal Crossing’s cozy charm, Control’s brutalist architecture, Hollow Knight’s hand-drawn perfection, and more!

Games To Cover:

• Journey

• Okami

• Gris

• Final Fantasy XIV

• Monument Valley

• ABZÛ

• Sayonara Wild Hearts

• Hollow Knight/Silksong

• Unpacking

• Various character creators and fashion systems

Academic Lenses:

• Philosophy of aesthetics

• Art history

• Architecture

• Psychology and sociology of beauty

• Anthropology of kawaii culture

• Design theory

Option 3: State of Play

How Video Games Mirror Politics, Society, and Culture

Gaming is chock full of deep political commentary that’s just begging for scholarly analysis, but so much of its richest commentary often flies under the radar. This volume will tackle how games explore political philosophy, satirize contemporary society, simulate governance systems, and grapple with dissent, subversion, revolution, surveillance, and control. We’ll examine failed utopias, revolutionary movements, corporate dystopias, and what happens when ideology becomes gameplay.

Games To Cover:

• Disco Elysium

• Bioshock series

• Metal Gear Solid series

• Papers Please

• Frostpunk

• The Outer Worlds

• Fallout series

• Tropico series

• Civilization

• Grand Theft Auto series

• Far Cry series

• EVE Online

• Cyberpunk 2077

Academic Lenses:

• Political philosophy

• Sociology

• Economics

• Ethics

• Criminology

• History of revolutionary movements

• Mass media theory

Option 4: The Long Game

Video Games and the March of Human History

What can a campaign of Civilization or Humankind teach us about ourselves? This volume will take a more experimental approach, using campaigns in grand strategy and 4X games as lenses to examine human development, technological progress, cultural evolution, and the eternal tension between individual agency and historical forces. From hunter-gatherers to space explorers, we’ll explore what games reveal about our journey as a species.

Games To Cover:

• Humankind

• Crusader Kings III

• Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

• Spore

• Civilization VI

• Stellaris

• Alpha Centauri

• Age of Empires series

• Europa Universalis IV

• The Longing

• Frostpunk

• Rimworld

Academic Lenses:

• Anthropology

• Philosophy of history

• Sociology of civilization

• Technology studies

• Comparative history

• Evolutionary theory

Option 5: Friendly Fire

Violence, War, and Conflict in Video Games

Gaming’s relationship with violence is its most examined yet perhaps least understood aspect. No, we won’t be asking that tired and trite “do games cause violence?” question.1 Instead, we’ll explore things like just war theory, the aestheticization of combat, ludonarrative dissonance, mechanical and narrative depictions of pacifism, historical war simulation, and the military-entertainment complex. When is violence justified? What does it mean to enjoy simulated combat? Why do some games question violence, while others glorify it? And how does this fit into a world that teeters ever so precariously to the edge of renewed global conflict?

Games To Cover:

• Spec Ops: The Line

• Metal Gear Solid series

• Undertale

• Hotline Miami

• This War of Mine

• Valkyria Chronicles

• Dishonored

• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

• Devil May Cry

Academic Lenses:

• Ethics and just war theory

• Military history

• Psychology of aggression

• Mass media theory

• Philosophy of violence

• Game studies

Option 6: Working As Intended

Video Games’ Depictions of Work, Labor, and Productivity

Ironically and paradoxically, we work constantly in games (be it by farming, crafting, managing, or building), and often find it more satisfying than our actual jobs. What does this reveal about labor, value creation, resource allocation, and our relationship to productivity? This volume dives into the ever-increasing gamification of labor, the enduring popularity of tycoon simulators, automation philosophy, “the grind,” and when games feel like second jobs.

Games We’d Cover:

• Factorio

• Stardew Valley

• Papers Please

• Overcooked!

• Death Stranding

• Animal Crossing

• Satisfactory

• Deep Rock Galactic

• EVE Online

• Various tycoon/management sims

• MMO daily grinds

Academic Lenses:

• Economics

• Labor theory

• Philosophy of work

• Sociology of capitalism

• Industrial psychology

• Game design theory

Option 7: New Game Plus

Video Games as Mirrors to the Self

Games uniquely explore memory, identity, and selfhood through amnesia narratives, save systems, character creation, and how we remember play experiences. Why do so many protagonists forget? What does it mean when we can be literally anyone? And how do save systems function as memory? (It’s not as simple as you’d think!) So strap in and get ready to explore the reconstruction of self, unreliable narrators, collective gaming memory, and false nostalgia.

Games To Cover:

• Disco Elysium

• Nier: Automata

• Outer Wilds

• Return of the Obra Dinn

• What Remains of Edith Finch

• The Stanley Parable

• Planescape: Torment

• Various RPG character creators

Academic Lenses:

• Philosophy of the self

• Psychology of memory

• Narrative theory

• Phenomenology

• Cognitive science

• Digital humanities

Option 8: Open World

Nature and Environment in Video Games

Video games have always offered us unique ways to explore our relationship with the natural world, whether through simulation, utilization, or restoration. We’ll examine ecology as system, conservation ethics, natural disasters, rewilding, pastoral fantasies, and climate fiction in gaming.

Games To Cover:

• Rain World

• Eco

• Terra Nil

• Death Stranding

• Horizon Zero Dawn

• ABZÛ

• Subnautica

• Ecco the Dolphin

• Stardew Valley

• Frostpunk

• Minecraft

• Various survival games

• City builders with environmental mechanics

Academic Lenses:

• Ecology

• Economics

• Environmental philosophy

• Natural science

• Geography

• Environmental ethics

• Malthusian theory

Option 9: One Last Score

Crime, the Mob, and Gangster Narratives in Video Games

From the tragic arcs of Mafia’s made men and Yakuza’s honorable thugs, to Grand Theft Auto’s satirical crime sprees and Disco Elysium’s profoundly broken detective, games (like the societies that spawn them) have long been fascinated with cops, criminals, and the codes that govern both. Join us as we figure out why we love playing outlaws, how different cultures romanticize organized crime, the economics of black markets, heist planning as game design, and whether it’s possible to depict crime without glamorizing it (and whether or not we should be worried about it).

Games To Cover:

• Yakuza/Like a Dragon series

• Mafia series

• Grand Theft Auto series

• Disco Elysium

• Payday 2

• Saints Row series

• Sleeping Dogs

• LA Noire

• Thief series

• Hotline Miami

• Hitman series

Academic Lenses:

• Sociology of organized crime

• Criminal justice philosophy

• History of crime families

• Economics of black markets

• Psychology of criminality

• Anthropology of honor codes

• Urban studies

Option 10: Gears of the Empire

Steampunk, Victorian Futurism, and Industrial Fantasy in Video Games

Brass, steam, and clockwork dreams… Steampunk games give us retro-futuristic visions of an Industrial Revolution that never quite was. In this volume, we’ll explore why we find Victorian machinery so visually compelling, how games navigate the tension between magic and technology, what alternate technological paths look like in practice, and how different games approach (or ignore) the era’s historical complexities. We’ll explore Dishonored’s plague-ridden Dunwall, Frostpunk’s frozen survivalism, and Arcanum’s philosophical explorations of magic-versus-machine, examining what steampunk reveals about progress, nostalgia, and our relationship with both history and technology.

Games To Cover:

• Dishonored series

• Frostpunk

• Bioshock Infinite

• Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

• Fallen London/Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies

• Final Fantasy VI

• SteamWorld series

• Syberia series

• Machinarium

Academic Lenses:

• History of Victorian Britain

• History of the Industrial Revolution

• Technology studies

• History of organized labor

• Literature (Verne, Wells, Shelley)

• Political economy

• Environmental studies

• Class analysis

• Art and design history

• Narrativology of Science Fiction

Your Turn!

Did you vote yet? Don’t forget to go back up and vote for your top choice, top three choices, or top 10 choices (for the truly indecisive and/or inquisitive). Feel free to leave a comment explaining why you picked what you did, or suggest further angles and games I should explore!

Voting closes a week from today, and I’ll reveal the winner shortly thereafter.

Thanks for another incredible year of Game & Word! Whether you’ve been here since the very beginning or just stumbled across us recently, I’m grateful for every read, comment, share, and debate (yes, even the AI comments!). Looking forward to 2026 and whatever weird academic rabbit holes it beckons us to dive into together.

Happy New Year, everyone! Wishing you high framerates and fast load times to you and yours in 2026.

~Jay

(ED. NOTE: Forgive the clickbaity title.)

It’s been less than a week since Larian Studios announced Divinity at The Game Awards, and already the studio that gave us Baldur’s Gate 3 is being pilloried on social media as though Swen Vincke personally shocked kicked a puppy on stream.1

It seemed like just yesterday that Larian could do no wrong. After all, Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed RPGs ever made, still going strong after it swept the Game Awards in 2023, where it won six awards (including Game of The Year).

Oh, and Larian’s also been long beloved by gamers for treating its employees well and actively resisting industry trends towards anti-consumer design and monetization, crunch, and layoffs. Now, Larian’s been revealed to be working on Divinity, the most hyped and anticipated game revealed at the 2025 Game Awards (Seriously, did you see that trailer???):

So, what was the studio’s crime, then? What could they have possibly done to so quickly transmute their mountains of goodwill into pure, sustained Gamer Rage™️?

Well, let’s see…

*checks notes* Larian’s getting cancelled for…

*checks archive* …um, for using generative AI for early ideation work.

…Wait, surely that can’t be it! Surely there’s more to it than that?

*checks Google* Yeah, no… that’s really it.

*sighs*

Again: using AI for early ideation work. Not in the final game. Not to replace artists. For reference exploration and rough composition outlines, aka the same way artists use Google Image searches and art books!

Vincke then took to X, exasperated:

“Holy fuck guys, we’re not ‘pushing hard’ for or replacing concept artists with AI. We have a team of 72 artists of which 23 are concept artists and we are hiring more.”

[Emphasis Mine]

But it doesn’t matter. The Arbiters of Morality™️ have spoken, the discourse has already calcified, and the internet has rendered a verdict: Larian is now “pro-AI.” This, according to the current moral framework that a certain extremely online subset of gamers is trying its hardest to push on everyone else, makes the studio GUILTY. *bangs gavel*

Guilty of… what, exactly? Killing art? Or is it killing labor? I’m not entirely clear on what specific harm they’re supposedly causing… but the vibes are definitely bad, folks!

My take? I’m actually glad this is happening, because by the time this stupid incident resolves, it will have fully exposed the hollow performativity with which anti-AI activists have poisoned The Discourse, which will hopefully render them completely impotent and irrelevant so that actual creators can finally leverage these tools without fear of getting harassed, doxxed, and cancelled.

Because I’m tired. Sick and tired.

I’m tired of watching people—armchair critics who’ve never shipped a game, never managed a creative team, and never had to balance their artistic vision against the brutal economic realities of game development—drag conscientious and good faith developers through the mud.2

I’m tired of all this pointless online moral posturing that accomplishes nothing except making the posturers feel good about themselves.

And I’m especially tired of a Discourse™️ that’s become so unmoored from the real world that it can’t (or won’t) tell the difference between a AAA publisher using AI to gut entire departments and an indie studio using it to explore ideas during pre-production.

So I’m going to state my position, loud and clear. I’m going to be unusually forceful and direct in this piece, and I’m going to say a lot of things that will probably make a lot of people very upset.

I realize this will likely cost me subscribers, and position me as a “bad guy” amongst my fellow gamers and game writers. I know what happened to Cassandra. But I just can’t hold it in any longer. I can’t take it anymore.

So, if you have any capacity whatsoever to understand nuance and hold multiple conflicting thoughts in your head without melting your dopamine-fried synapses, I invite you to continue reading and engage me constructively in the comments. Because I’m going to tell you what’s actually happening here, why the anti-AI crusade will end up sabotaging its own goals, why the people screaming loudest about “slop” are often the ones actually making it, and suggest a better way forward that doesn’t involve doxxing, review bombing, or Twitter pile-ons.

But if you’re unable to handle that, if you just want to yell at me in the comments for the headline, if I’ve made you so mad you can’t handle yourself maturely and civilly, if you can’t separate an argument from the person making them, or if you’re constitutionally unable to have an actually productive conversation with people you disagree and try to meet them somewhere in the middle, then don’t even bother. Close this tab and go about your day (if you comment and it’s clear you haven’t read the rest of this article, that’s an instant ban). In fact, just go ahead and unsubscribe right now:

Subscribe now

Still here? Ok, let’s get started. I have a lot to get off my chest.

When 72 Artists Isn’t Enough

Before we go any further, let’s be crystal clear about what Larian actually did. In a Bloomberg interview, Vincke explained that the studio uses AI tools for:

• Exploring references (again, similar to how they [and other artists] already use Google and art books)

• Rough composition outlines in early ideation, which they then replace with original concept art made by actual humans

• Placeholder text for internal use

• PowerPoint presentations

• Automating tedious tasks like emotion retargeting for different species animations

• Whiteboxing during rapid iteration, before real implementation

Meanwhile, here’s what Larian explicitly stated would not be in Divinity:

• Any AI-generated content.

In Vincke’s own words: “Everything is human actors; we’re writing everything ourselves.”

Oh, and just for good measure, here’s what Larian has also been doing while adopting these tools:

• Hiring more artists.

Yes, you read that right. Their concept art team has grown. Their total headcount is now 530 people, larger than Insomniac or Naughty Dog! The studio’s director of publishing, Michael Douse, noted that any machine learning tool “used well is additive to a creative team or individual’s workflow, not a replacement for their skill or craft.” [Emphasis Mine]

This is, by any reasonable metric, an instance of responsible AI adoption. Larian is using AI to accelerate parts of development that don’t need a human touch, and in doing so, freeing up skilled artists to focus on work that actually matters. The final product will still be entirely made by human beings. And again, they’re creating jobs, not eliminating them!

And yet, anti-AI zealots reacted as if Vincke announced he was replacing Larian’s entire art department with Midjourney prompts. Former employees posted dramatic condemnations.3 The gaming press did what the press has always done: run headlines designed to maximize outrage. Twitter/X has likewise done what Twitter/X does, which is to amplify the most unhinged voices and dumbest takes possible.

Jeff Gerstmann (formerly of Giant Bomb) spoke for this aggrieved cohort when he lamented that Larian was “throwing all that goodwill away.” But goodwill with whom, exactly? The handful of Very Online accounts who’ve made opposing AI their entire personality? Or the millions of players who bought Baldur’s Gate 3 and will absolutely buy Divinity because (this part seems to always escape the critics, for some reason) it will almost certainly be a very good game?

Who do you think Larian should listen to? Who do you think they will listen to?

We’ve Fought This Boss Before

I see a familiar pattern at work here. Do you see it? I sure hope so, because it should give pause to any anti-AI crusader who genuinely cares about the issues they claim to care about.

Remember when the progressive left had genuine, material concerns about diversity in media, representation, and inclusive storytelling (and the deeper issues and grievances those pointed to)? I disagree with the scope, salience and urgency of some of those concerns, but I’ll grant that as a whole, they were perfectly valid. Certainly worth discussing, at least! And I wouldn’t have begrudged anyone for advocating for them.

But somewhere along the way, a certain strain of activist captured the discourse and turned every creative decision into a referendum on the artist’s moral character. Eventually, this metastasized and escaped containment into business, politics, and even interpersonal and family relationships. Practically no aspect of society was left untouched.

These activists wielded the threat of cancellation, ostracization, and reputational (and even financial) ruin to force studios, politicians, celebrities, and even each other to perform their virtue in increasingly elaborate ways. Any deviation from the new orthodoxy (no matter how minor, or how long ago it happened) became grounds for having your reputation destroyed and your life ruined.

Meanwhile, actual material gains for the groups they claimed to fight for remained elusive. But that was fine, because the scolds and hall monitors (certainly not the people doing any actual work) had found a new way to feel morally superior to everyone else!

Inevitably, a backlash started to brew. And when The Great Vibe Shift of 2024-2025 finally boiled over, it caught the activist class by surprise. Even the ones who had an inkling that the 2024 election would not go their way were still shocked by how swiftly and brutally the pendulum had undeniably swung back on them.

But it’s not like folks suddenly stopped caring about representation or fairness. The “vibes shifted” so forcefully because ordinary people (many of whom initially supported those causes) grew exhausted of being constantly moralized, purity tested, and talked down to (not to mention sometimes falsely accused) by activists who constantly treated them as acting in bad faith, and whose rhetoric was increasingly disconnected from material reality.4

These people did more damage to progressive causes than any right wing pundit or influencer ever could, because they handed their opponents crate after crate of military-grade rhetorical ammunition:

Look at how unreasonable these people are, how unmoored from reality, how quick to destroy innocent people over perceived slights.

Yet these folks continue to hand their opponents said ammunition, refusing to shift tactics even after they’ve clearly proven fatally counterproductive; support for almost every major left-wing cause (BLM, #MeToo, trans rights, climate change, and Gaza) is markedly down from their early 2020s peak, and the GOP gained control of all three branches of government after explicitly campaigning against everything the activists stood for.

Now that these same people have made AI their new pet project, we’re now watching the same playbook unfold here. And just as it did with all those other causes, we’re going to watch it fail in exactly the same ways.

There Is No Winning This Game

The anti-AI position, as articulated by its loudest proponents, has become functionally unfalsifiable. According to these people, no use of AI is ever acceptable. No matter how limited its use, no matter how divorced from the final product, and no matter how many human artists you employ and feed, if you use AI in any way, shape, form, or capacity, you are an evil person who deserves to be fired, shunned, blacklisted, and ostracized from polite society.

Larian uses AI for reference exploration during ideation, but then has human artists create all the final work? UNACCEPTABLE!

Sandfall Interactive uses AI for some placeholder textures in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and patches them out before most players ever see them? BZZT! That studio is now tainted, FOREVER! Never mind that Expedition 33 absolutely crushed The Game Awards this year, winning nine awards including Game of the Year and Best Art Direction.5

These critics aren’t operating by any limiting principles. They don’t have standards that, if met, would ever satisfy them, because their objection isn’t really about specific practices, nor is it about material harms. Instead, they’re maintaining an ideological position that AI is inherently corrupting. In their view, AI constitutes a sort of spiritual pollution that taints everything it touches.

In other words, they’re operating out of a religious conviction that they’ve dressed up as labor or environmental advocacy.

And like many religious convictions, it demands increasingly elaborate demonstrations of faith. We’ve even now reached the point where writers are being accused of using AI because they employ em dashes, multisyllabic words, or (God forbid!) the Oxford comma.6

📝⛔️🙅‍♀️ SIDE QUEST: The Em Dash Inquisition

Sadly, the type of insanity being directed at Larian is not limited to games; the discourse on writing has become similarly unhinged in the Age of AI. People have convinced themselves they can detect AI-generated text by spotting surface-level stylistic markers, and they’re using this supposed superpower to harass and accuse not the frontier AI labs (not that it would make it ok), but actual human writers.

Among the “AI tells” they cite: em dashes, triads (three item lists), negation-affirmation constructions (”It’s not X, it’s Y”), even marginally more elevated vocabulary than average, varied sentence structure, and now the Oxford comma (how dare they… the sheer audacity!). In other words: the hallmarks of skilled and educated writing.

Every single one of these “AI tells” used to be a feature of good prose, long before GPT-1 was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye. Strunk and White, every writer’s foundational handbook on written style, recommends many of them. In fact, AI models produce these patterns in the first place because they were trained on good writing, and all of these “tells” are simply patterns that good writing often employs.

Now, as a result of this paranoia, actual writers (ie, people who’ve spent years developing their craft, who genuinely do use em dashes and sophisticated vocabulary because that’s what good writing looks like) are being harassed for having actually mastered the fundamentals.

Meanwhile, the actual AI “slop” that should concern us (the content farms churning out SEO garbage, fake Amazon reviews, bot-generated social media posts) often carefully avoids these patterns to fly under the radar.

So we’ve created a system that punishes craft and rewards mediocrity. The scolds have thus become the slop makers. Great job, everyone! I hope you’re happy.

And then there’s .

Gioia, a music critic and cultural commentator who occupies a lauded position amongst the Substack intelligentsia, publishes an annual “Best Online Articles” list. It’s well worth reading, and an example of the genuinely valuable service that Gioia provides by curating excellent writing across the internet.

The Honest Broker

The Best Online Articles of 2025

Every December, I showcase the work of other writers. They are total strangers to me, but have written some article or essay of exceptional merit during the previous 12 months…

Read more

10 months ago · 234 likes · 22 comments · Ted Gioia

Anyway, this year’s list included an essay called “Meditations for Phone Addicts,” written by an anonymous author going by “Fyodor” (as in Dostoevsky). It was, by all accounts, a thoughtful, well-written piece that resonated with readers… Gioia included.

Then, someone pointed out in the comments that it was AI-generated.

Gioia’s response: “I’m removing it from the list. Even if it was trained on Dostoevsky (one of my five favorite novelists), I don’t want it here.”

Now, think about this for a moment.

Gioia read hundreds, possibly thousands of essays this year. This one was good enough to make his “best of” list. He liked it. Other people liked it. It accomplished what good essays are supposed to accomplish (which is to make readers think, offer a perspective, resonate emotionally, or some combination of the three).

None of that changed when that commenter revealed the essay’s origin. The words on the page didn’t suddenly rearrange themselves, and neither did the arguments magically become less coherent. The prose itself didn’t instantly become worse; only the label changed.

If an essay is genuinely good enough to fool an experienced cultural critic into featuring it alongside the best human-written work of the year, then in what meaningful sense is it “bad”? The content is the content. Either it has value or it doesn’t. Gioia’s initial judgment was that it had value. His revised judgment is that it doesn’t, not because anything about the essay changed, but because he learned something about how it was made.

This is pure essentialism: the belief that there’s something metaphysically different about AI-generated text that renders it valueless, regardless of its actual quality. You might as well argue that a painting becomes less beautiful if you discover the artist used a particular brand of brush.7

If experts can’t tell the difference, and the work produces genuine value for readers, what exactly are you protecting by enforcing a purity standard?

Meanwhile, writers throughout the internet are suffering, even to the point of deliberately worsening their prose so as to not be lumped in with AI, and it’s taken much of the joy out of writing while also hurting the writers’ final product:

I’m guilty of this, too. I’ve found myself constantly revising my own writing, purely to pre-empt such accusations. Well, no more. You can pry my em dashes, triads, fancy words, and negation-affirmation constructions from my cold, dead hands (the Oxford comma was definitely a line too far). If you’re too stupid or too dogmatic to evaluate my content based on the essence of what it’s saying instead of through flawed and superficial heuristics, then maybe this newsletter isn’t for you. Perhaps Keeping Up with the Kardashians is more your speed.

And no, I’m not blaming AI for this state of affairs (at least, not exclusively). It’s not AI’s fault that people don’t read, have become culturally illiterate, are addicted to shouting from their high horses, and are too lazy to engage with content on its own terms.

Besides, do you even remember what the internet was like before AI? Slop wasn’t an AI invention. Remember SEO? Remember clickbait? Remember BuzzFeed? If that’s not slop, I don’t know what is—and it was entirely and exclusively human-generated slop until about three years ago. Furthermore, even in this post-ChatGPT era, AI still needs a human to prompt it to create slop at all.

Blaming AI is easy, yes. And I won’t deny it’s an enabler and multiplier of “enshittification.” But pointing the finger at AI only lets shitty humans, the ones who ultimately direct the AIs, off the hook. Don’t fall into that trap.

Honesty Is the Worst Policy

Also, the anti-AI crusaders don’t seem to realize that their scorched earth tactics are actively undermining one of their stated goals.

The same people demanding AI purity also advocate for AI transparency measures: labels on AI-generated content, disclosure requirements, and otherwise clearly communicating how and when creators use AI tools in production. These are entirely reasonable things to ask for! I do think transparency is genuinely valuable; consumers and workers alike benefit from knowing how things are made, and thus being able to make informed decisions about what they partake in.

But transparency requires a climate where disclosure doesn’t result in immediate social immolation.

Larian told the truth. They explained exactly how they use AI, what safeguards they have in place, and what will and won’t appear in the final product. They were, by any measure, transparent.

And what did they get in return for their honesty? They got dragged through the mud. Anime furry profile pics on Twitter accused them of betraying their fans, and subjected them to a sustained harassment campaign. Even former employees joined in and even led some of the pile-ons (never mind what any future potential employers might make of this magnanimous display of grace and loyalty).

Tell me: what lesson do you think other studios are learning from this?

Because many major studios are almost certainly using AI in similar ways (or even more extensively), but they’re simply not talking about it. And why the hell would they? The incentive structure is clear: say nothing, and avoid the mob. The only studios actually suffering any consequences from using AI are the ones honest enough to openly discuss their practices.

When you treat all AI disclosure as a confession of sin, this is the entirely predictable result. Or, to put it more clearly: when you punish transparency and reward silence, you get less transparency. DUH. If you treat good faith actors identically to bad faith ones, the good faith actors then stop engaging. And if the only winning move is to keep your mouth shut, then everyone will keep their mouth shut. OBVIOUSLY.

So, congratulations to the AI purity movement! You’ve created an environment where the studios most likely to use AI responsibly are also the most likely to hide it, while the ones most likely to use it maliciously were never going to tell you anyway. The discourse now fully selects for opacity and rewards dishonesty.

Honestly, what the hell did you think was going to happen?!

If you actually wanted transparency—if you actually wanted to know which studios are using AI, how they’re using it, and what safeguards exist—you’d create conditions where the public met disclosure with good faith engagement instead of reflexive outrage. You’d reward companies that are honest about their practices and distinguish between responsible and irresponsible use.

Instead, we have a climate where Swen Vincke has to tweet “Holy fuck guys” at people who’ve decided he’s now the enemy for doing nothing more than using AI the same way artists use Pinterest mood boards, all while continuing to employ and hire human artists.

The activists have optimized for feeling righteous, not for achieving outcomes. And the outcomes show it.

Your iPhone Called, It Wants Its Selective Outrage Back

The environmental case against AI is one of the more believable and seemingly coherent arguments deployed by the AI critics. After all, training large language models uses enormous amounts of energy, and the data centers themselves consume tons of resources… won’t someone think of the planet?

They’re not wrong that AI has an environmental footprint. Literally everything on Earth does! But this environmental concern is staggeringly selective, and conveniently targets a technology the speaker already dislikes on other grounds.

A 2024 study published in Communications of the ACM compared the carbon footprint of machine learning with broader technology infrastructure. And guess what? The embodied carbon footprint from manufacturing IT equipment, particularly smartphones, is approximately 70 times larger than operational emissions from machine learning. We’ve discarded 7.5 billion smartphones in the past five years alone. The embodied carbon footprint of those short-lived phones was nearly three times that of all data center servers worldwide.

Hell, charger inefficiency alone accounts for 70% of the energy use associated with phones, while machine learning accounts for less than 3% of smartphone energy consumption. One study found that generating an AI image uses about as much energy as fully charging a smartphone once (something most of us do, without any moral hesitation, every single day).

If you genuinely care about the environmental impact of technology, the smartphone in your pocket—manufactured using rare earth minerals extracted through highly environmentally destructive processes, assembled in factories with significant carbon footprints, and discarded every two years to upgrade to a new model—is a far more significant concern than asking Claude for help editing your document.

But nobody’s organizing social media campaigns to shame people for upgrading their iPhones, because that would require scrutinizing the activists’ own consumption rather than someone else’s.

NOTE: There’s more I could say here, but actually summed up the actual environmental cost of using generative AI much better and far more comprehensively than I ever could. Read his post if you want to dive deeper:

Andy Masley

Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment - a cheat sheet

This post will be a cheat sheet for answering every environmental objection to using ChatGPT. I’ve broken it up so you can skip around and only read sections relevant or interesting to you. If you think I’m getting anything wrong I’d be excited to update this with the most accurate numbers. Please let me know in the comments or at…

Read more

a year ago · 687 likes · 99 comments · Andy Masley

Luxury Beliefs and The Art That Never Gets Made

Also, isn’t it curious how the loudest voices demanding total AI abstention are almost never the people who would actually bear the costs of abstaining?

It’s one thing for a AAA publisher to use AI to justify laying off entire departments. That’s a legitimate concern, and studios that do this deserve pushback (even if for no other reason than the product will almost certainly suffer as a result). But that’s not what Larian is doing with Divinity, nor is it what Sandfall Interactive did with Expedition 33. And it’s certainly not what most small studios and independent creators are doing.

The writer who uses Midjourney to create art for his articles isn’t doing so to screw over artists. He’s doing it because he literally cannot afford to hire an artist. And the solo game dev who uses AI voice synthesis isn’t stealing work from voice actors, she’s making a game that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

I know this firsthand. I co-founded an AI game studio that was developing a live-service gacha dating sim called AI Sweetheart Royale.8 We had a simple concept: a romance game with functionally infinite dialogue, where every conversation with your love interest was unique. Obviously, we used AI tools, including LLMs to generate dialogue and text-to-speech for character voices, and yes, Midjourney for concept referencing. But we also hired a concept artist (as well as several technical artists), and we paid our voice actors fairly for their reference performances. I also wrote all the character sheets and reference/training dialogue myself. It wasn’t “slop” by any stretch of the imagination; it had a thoroughly human touch, through and through.

Ultimately, we tabled the game.9

But my point (and what I keep coming back to) is that the version of that game that exists without AI is not “the same game, but with more human writers and voice actors.”

The version without AI is simply “doesn’t exist, and never will.”

Our entire premise—truly dynamic, responsive romantic dialogue that never repeats—is impossible to hand-craft. Even if it were possible, you’d need to write and record thousands of hours of dialogue for a game that maybe sells a few thousand copies to a niche audience. No studio would greenlight that. No investor would fund it.

Hopefully, some day, AI Sweetheart Royale can finally see the light of day. But that’s just not going to happen for as long as these zealots dominate the discourse.

The anti-AI crowd never honestly engages with that part. They act like every use of AI is a direct substitution; in their view, one AI image equals one artist who didn’t get hired. But for a lot of projects (especially weird, experimental, or niche ones), that simply isn’t true. When people like me use AI tools, the counterfactual isn’t “hire a human artist/writer/voice actor instead.” The counterfactual is “this thing doesn’t get made.”

This applies even outside of game development. For example, I generate gamer Tarot cards for my articles using DALL-E and Midjourney, because I can’t afford to hire an illustrator for every piece I write (I did, however, commission a human artist for my logo). And good luck finding bespoke gamer Tarot pics on Unsplash, too.10 So if I don’t use Midjourney, those cards simply don’t get made. No artist loses a job, because no job was ever on offer! Once again: in so many cases, the choice isn’t “AI art vs. human art”, it’s “AI art vs. no art.”

This is the reality for countless creators. But instead of understanding, the anti-AI position offers them nothing but contempt.

This insane demand for total AI abstinence is, ultimately, a luxury belief. It’s easy to hold (and demand others do the same) when you’re not the one facing the tradeoffs. “Just don’t ever use AI!” is the position of someone who can afford to be “moral” about tools, because they’re not the ones who need those tools to compete.

Small business owners can’t afford this morality when they’re being outcompeted by businesses with no such qualms. Solo developers can’t afford it when AI tools are the only way to realize their vision. And the people most loudly demanding purity are, overwhelmingly, not the people whose livelihoods depend on the outcome.

Speedrunning Your Own Defeat

But let’s say you’ve read this far, and don’t buy anything I’ve just argued. You believe that AI is categorically bad, and that it is your duty, as a good and moral person, to fight back against its development and deployment by any means necessary, which renders the tactics I’ve just argued against entirely justified and defensible.

And let’s also say, just for the sake of argument, that you genuinely care about artists’ well-being, the responsible adoption of new technology, or any of the other values the anti-AI movement claims to champion, and aren’t just looking for a way to feel better about yourself and your lot in life.

Well, then, maybe this will convince you (at the very least, it should concern you): if you and your fellow travelers continue down this path, then your crusade is going to fail, and its failure will completely discredit all the concerns it purports to represent. Even the legitimate ones.

Expedition 33 won Game of the Year. It used AI. Players loved it anyway.

Divinity is going to sell millions of copies. It also used AI. Players will love that too.

The crusading scolds will screech as loud as they can, and nobody who matters will care, because the games will be good.

This is the same trajectory we saw with the culture war insanity of the 2010s and early 2020s. The more the loudest voices demanded everyone else conform to and exceed their increasingly unreasonable standards of ideological purity, the more ordinary people tuned them out. When the backlash finally hit, people weren’t pushing back against the underlying causes (at least not at first… though that is changing, and will continue to change if the activists don’t change tack!), but rather against the crusaders’ tactics, tone, constant presumption of bad faith, and the increasingly obvious disconnect between their rhetoric and reality.

Every time someone gets pilloried for using AI responsibly and in good faith (or falsely accused of using AI when they didn’t), the entire movement loses credibility in the public eye. And when you’ve lost credibility, you’ve lost power. You can’t advocate effectively for artists after people have stopped listening to you because you’ve been crying wolf every time a studio uses AI for reference images.

The AI maximalists are going to lose, because reality always wins in the end. And the reality is: this technology is useful! It makes things possible that weren’t possible before. People like making things, and they’re going to use tools that help them make things. Fighting this is like fighting the tide—you’re only going to get swept away in the current.

And the worst part is that there really are genuine issues we should all address. Training data practices, for one; artists and writers whose work was scraped for training AI should be credited and compensated fairly. That’s perfectly reasonable! And then there’s the issue of what we as a society owe, or how we should help, all the workers whose jobs will soon be entirely automated away. These are real concerns that deserve real conversation, negotiation, and yes, even advocacy.

But that’s not what’s happening. You think you’re advocating, but all you’re doing is purity testing and moral grandstanding. And what is that actually accomplishing? You’re completely erasing anyone’s ability to meaningfully distinguish between “AI used to automate tedious tasks while hiring more artists” and “AI used to gut creative departments.”

When you treat Larian the same as you’d treat Activision yanking the rug from under its artists, you’ve lost the ability to make meaningful distinctions—and meaningful distinctions are the very foundation of persuasive advocacy.

Outcomes Over Ontology (OR: How to Actually Win)

In the interest of being productive, why don’t we all arrive at a framework that actually makes sense? Here, I’ll propose one: what matters is outcomes.

Does a studio’s use of AI lead to less jobs and lower quality? That’s bad.

Does it lead to more jobs, better tools for existing workers, and equal or higher quality? That’s good.

Does it enable creative projects that couldn’t exist otherwise? That’s interesting and probably good.

Now, let’s apply this framework to some real-world examples:

Larian: hiring more artists, using AI for tedious tasks and ideation, final product still made by humans. Good outcome.

Indie developer using Midjourney because they can’t afford an artist: enables creation that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Good outcome.

AAA publisher using AI to justify firing half the writing staff while shipping worse games: bad outcome.

Notice how this framework allows for moral reasoning without requiring purity tests? See how it focuses on material consequences rather than metaphysical “pollution”? Understand how it doesn’t demand that everyone agree with you about the essential nature of AI-generated content?

This is how adults approach complex technological and ethical questions. With attention to context, consequences, and material reality—not with blanket prohibitions.

Git Gud

I want to end with something that will probably make me very unpopular with my fellow creatives on Subtack, but it needs to be said.

Some jobs will be affected by AI. That’s undeniable. This has been true of every significant technological change throughout our history. I feel for all the scribes the printing press put out of work, as I do for the portrait painters disrupted by the advent of photography and the audio producers who had to contend with digital audio workstations. Each time, some people adapted and thrived, and some people didn’t.

The creatives who will thrive in our AI-augmented future will use the technology to enhance their capabilities rather than substitute for them. They’ll have a genuine creative vision that AI can help them realize. And I know this is a total cliché at this point, but they’ll understand that AI is a tool (like Photoshop, synthesizers, cameras, and computers), and tools are only as good as the people wielding them.

The “slop” everyone (correctly) complains about is made by people with no taste, no vision, and no craft, who think that prompting a model is the same as creating. These people have always produced garbage, and they always will, with or without AI. The technology just makes their garbage easier to make.

But in the hands of a skilled creator, using AI well? That’s a different story. One we’re only now starting to see the fruits of. Talented writers, artists, and musicians who struggle with coding will soon be able to realize their lifelong visions for their perfect game (and vice-versa for engineers with grand artistic visions but limited artistic skill). Entire new concepts that wouldn’t have even been possible three years ago will soon become not only possible, but economically feasible to develop. And just imagine what John Romero or Peter Molyneux could have done had they had access to these tools when they were first starting out!

Enterprising indie studios are already starting to experiment with using AI in novel and creative ways (you just don’t hear about it, because they’re understandably in stealth mode so as to not provoke the wrath of the zealots). It’s only a matter of time before some pioneering developer creates the first best-selling, award-winning AI-generated game. It could be you!

The future is exciting… if you can overcome your fears, hesitation, or irrational anti-AI essentialism.

Now, if you’re a creative whose entire value proposition is “I can execute tasks that an AI can now do,” then yes, you have a problem. But if you’re a creative with actual vision, actual taste, and actual craft, then AI is probably going to make you more powerful, and more relevant, provided you can get over yourself and make peace with the new reality we live in—in a sea of generic slop, actual artistry is going to command a much higher premium.

Ultimately, AI is only an actual threat to mediocrity. If you’re not mediocre, you have nothing to worry about. There may be some growing pains along the way, but if you’re smart, brave, and nimble enough to adapt to change and to strategically and effectively augment your skills with these tools, you’ll end up in a far better position than everyone screaming into the void about AI.

I’ve always been a writer by trade, which means I’ve been in the position of having my livelihood threatened by technological change. Hell, that’s the reason I co-founded the AI game studio—to adapt to that change while also trying to do something cool and new. So I understand the fear. But I also understand that demanding that the world stop changing isn’t going to do jack. The forces and incentives hard at work bringing about this new age are far greater and far more powerful than we can contend with. So shouting about AI on X and Bluesky isn’t the answer. Instead, the answer is to adapt. Find the parts of your value that can’t be automated, and use these exciting new tools to make those irreplaceable parts even more powerful.

Also, the former Larian employees throwing fits about AI should look at the aftermath of the recent Genshin Impact voice actor drama and related SAG-AFTRA strike and ask themselves some hard questions. In some cases, studios aren’t in a rush to find alternatives to human creators because AI is magically better, but because human creators have become, in many cases, extremely difficult to work with. That’s not an excuse for steamrolling them (artists should always be compensated fairly and treated with dignity), but it is a reality check.

In the brutal calculus of competitive markets, “we’d rather not deal with you at all” is always an option on the table. In a capitalist economy, making yourself indispensable requires more than demanding indispensability.11

At the end of the day, all of this will be moot anyway. Fact of the matter is, Divinity is going to be great. I’m going to play it, and so will millions of other people. Some of those people might even have been vaguely aware of the “AI controversy,” and exactly none of them will care once they’re 40 hours into an incredible RPG crafted by ~500 skilled humans, some of whom happened to use some AI tools during development.

The zealots will still screech, of course. But nobody will listen.

So think about what you actually want for artists, for games, and for our wider culture. Then think about whether the tactics you’re supporting actually advance those goals, or whether they’re just making you feel better about your life while actually accomplishing nothing (or worse, accomplishing the exact opposite of what you claim to want).

The adults are in the room, and they have games to make.

~Jay

Game & Word Volume 4, Issue 10: Friday, December 12, 2025

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

  Your name can be on the masthead, too! Simply upgrade your subscription to become a Founding Member.

Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “22 Minutes to Midnight” (~45-minute read)1

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Letter from the Publisher:

Well. This is awkward.

Two years ago, I wrapped up Game & Word Volume 4—our deep dive into time in video games—and moved on to other things. The volume felt complete. We’d dissected Chrono Trigger’s time-traveling shenanigans, explored game preservation, dug into archaeology and temporal narrative… after nine issues, it felt like a nice, tidy package. Case closed. Tempus Ludos, indeed.

And then I played Outer Wilds.

I spent ~40 hours dying repeatedly, getting hopelessly lost and then devoured in the cursed fog of Dark Bramble (damn that place and its anglerfish), and forgetting which planets I’d already explored, to the point I’d sometimes just sitting on Timber Hearth to watch the stars blink out one by one as the supernova approached. Somewhere around my ~100th loop, staring at the husk of a dying universe while that haunting synth loop echoed softly in the background, I realized I simply had to write about this.

The problem was that I’d already closed the book on Volume 4. You know, the volume about time, that would have been the perfect home for a piece about a game about temporal loops, cosmic cycles, and the slow heat death of the universe (I’d even scrapped an entire “Side Quest” sidebar on that latter subject, though I still made it available to paid subscribers).

But I started writing anyway. Piece by piece, one loop at a time, over the course of about a year and change. Now, as the year 2025 draws to a close, it’s finally ready. And where else could it possibly go?

So consider this the proper conclusion to Volume 4; the ending that Tempus Ludos deserves, which I finally found while floating in the wreckage of a dying solar system, strangely at peace with watching everything I’d explored get swallowed by fire.

Indeed, Volume 4 was about time, and sometimes time has a way of circling back on itself, revealing what you thought was an ending you was really just a new beginning (or at least a midpoint) and the loop continues on. The story is never over until you find what you didn’t know you were looking for.

Hence, this article.

So in today’s thrilling and long overdue finale to Volume 4, we’ll explore how Outer Wilds uses time (as mechanically as narratively and philosophically) to craft one of gaming’s most profound meditations on mortality, meaning, and cosmic renewal. Along the way, we’ll dig into archaeology as gameplay (or is it the other way around?), learn how the devs designed a puzzle around quantum mechanics, grapple with the existential despair of watching stars die, and examine how two very different alien civilizations responded very differently to learning the universe is about to switch the lights off forever. There’s a lot to dive into, so I’ll stop yapping here.

Thank you all for your patience, and for sticking with Game & Word through all its detours and evolutions. And if you haven’t played Outer Wilds yet, I’m imploring you… close this tab, go play it, and come back when you’re ready. Some experiences are best discovered firsthand, and this game is very much one of them.

For the rest of you: grab a marshmallow, find a comfortable spot by the campfire, and let’s talk about the end of everything.

It’s about time.

Cheers,

~Jay

Housekeeping:

Let’s go!

Previous Issues

Game & Word’s most recent issues (currently, all of Volume 5) are available to all, free of charge.

Older issues are currently archived and only accessible to paid subscribers. To access the full archive, upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscriptions are currently 95% off, through the end of the year!

Subscribe now

• Volume 1 (The Name of the Game): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4

• Volume 2 (Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 3

• Volume 3 (Game Over Matter): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 4 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 2 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Podcast 3 ● Bonus 2

• Volume 4 (Tempus Ludos): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Video Podcast 2 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9

• Volume 5 (AbraCODEabra!): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9

Read more

Meanwhile, if you haven’t read the main article that this piece supplements, be sure to catch up here:

Read more

Game & Word Volume 5, Issue 4: Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “Wild Cards and Wilder Magic” (~135 minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃🍽️🍁

After chowing down, instead of arguing about politics with your MAGA uncle/woke aunt for the 1,000th time, why not plop out on the couch with my massive, mega, +2 hour-long Balatro analysis as you digest all that turkey? I’ve been cooking this one in the oven for about as long as it takes to cook an actual Thanksgiving turkey (which is to say, the better part of a year), and now, just in time for this most unironically wholesome of American holidays, it’s fresh out the oven, baked through with layers upon layers of historical, gameplay, and archetypal/metaspiritual analysis. Bon appetit!

Anyway, I suppose I should explain what’s on the menu today.

LocalThunk’s indie darling Balatro is a poker roguelike that lets you cheat with Jokers. It also happens to show us how magical cards have always been, starting with their origins in 9th-Century China, all the way through to today’s Skyrim Tarot readings. So today, we’re going to explore the mystical DNA woven into the game’s myriad Jokers and consumables.

For today’s appetizer, we’ll examine how playing cards evolved from Ancient Chinese gambling tools into instruments of divination, then we’ll explore how the Tarot’s journey from Renaissance parlor game to occult cipher echoes the way we look for meaning in chaos, and learn what’s going on in our brains when we convince ourselves that our deck is “hot” or that we needed that one particular Joker we just happened to get at the exact moment we needed it.

Then, for the main course, we’ll examine Balatro’s three mystical card systems:

• Planet cards (astrology meets poker),

• Spectral cards (high-risk occult power), and

• Tarot cards (the Fool’s Journey)

Alongside a deep dive into the game’s most iconic Jokers themselves!

We’ll examine everything, from the Trickster archetype at the heart of every single one of Balatro’s 150 Jokers to the Ceremonial Dagger’s blood magic economics. Along the way, we’ll discover that probability and prophecy are the same thing, and that Magic: The Gathering and actual card magic (the technical term is “cartomancy”) share more DNA than you’d think. Every time you play Balatro at 2 AM, you’re participating in a millennia-old mystical tradition, and by the time you’re finished, you’ll understand why.

Finally, we’ll end with a light dessert of fun discussion prompts and a robust reading list for you to dive deeper into all the themes we’ve explored today.

Oh, and paid subscribers will also get an extra side dish (hitting your inbox later today): a side quest exploring the incredible story behind the iconic illustrations of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck!

So whether you’re a practicing magician or just someone who really loves big numbers and broken Joker combos, you’ll discover why Balatro works on such a deeply archetypal level. Short answer: a simple deck of 52 cards is a pocket universe you can hold in your hands, and Balatro’s deck shines a light on what cards have always done, which is to make randomness meaningful and transform chaos into order.

Long answer? You’ll just have to read ahead :D

Enjoy, and have a bountiful and satiating Thanksgiving Day!

~Jay

Housekeeping:

Let’s go!

Previous Issues

Game & Word’s most recent issues (currently, all of Volume 5) are available to all, free of charge.

Older issues are currently archived and only accessible to paid subscribers. To access the full archive, upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscriptions are currently 95% off, through the end of the year!

• Volume 1 (The Name of the Game): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4

• Volume 2 (Yo Ho Ho, It’s a Gamer’s Life for Me): Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Bonus 2 ● Issue 8 ● Bonus 3

• Volume 3 (Game Over Matter): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 4 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 2 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9 ● Podcast 3 ● Bonus 2

• Volume 4 (Tempus Ludos): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Video Podcast 1 ● Video Podcast 2 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Podcast 1 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8 ● Issue 9

• Volume 5 (AbraCODEabra!): Intro ● Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8

Subscribe now

Read more

This, obviously, includes my paid subscribers, who—despite a recent dearth of exclusive bonus content—nevertheless continue to fork over their hard-earned cash just to support this endeavor. So to show my appreciation, I’m giving you this bonus piece, expanding on the themes of agency, possibility, and split characteristics we explored in the Tarnished, but applied to some of the major NPCs in Elden Ring.

And to encourage more paid subscriptions (and maybe get one of those fancy orange checkmarks?), I’m offering a deep discount on annual subscriptions until the end of the year!

So, with all that out of the way, let’s dive in! Free subs will get a preview, while paid subs get the whole piece, plus access to the full archive, and any future bonus posts!

Oh, but first, if you haven’t read the main article that this piece expands on, catch up here:

Game & Word

Issue 5.8: Elden Lore, Part 4

Game & Word Volume 5, Issue 8: Monday, Oct. 20th, 2025…

Read more

a year ago · 3 likes · 1 comment

The Fractured Pantheon

🚨🚨🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨🚨🚨

This post is basically one huge walking SPOILER for Elden Ring, and will be discussing some big lore twists that are quite easy to miss if you haven’t finished the game (or weren’t reasonably thorough in your explorations). If you’d rather find any of this out for yourself, turn back while you’ve still a chance. Complaining about it in the comments is maidenless behavior.

She says it like a mantra, a prayer, or an affirmation, desperately trying to assert who she is before facing off against the Tarnished. After hearing it for the fiftieth time (right before she murders you again), you start to wonder: who, exactly, is she trying to convince? You? Or herself?

Malenia’s compulsive self-identification hints at how weird and wonky one’s sense of self—a core and fundamental aspect of a person’s very being—can become in the Lands Between. She needs to constantly assert who she is, because your sense of self isn’t stable here. It fractures, it multiplies, it exists in multiple states simultaneously as it recursively splits off and subsumes back into itself ad infinitum. We’ve already explored this with the Tarnished, but the Tarnished isn’t the only entity experiencing quantum superposition of self in the Lands Between. He’s just the only one who’s even somewhat comfortable with this fact.

But what about the rest of the lot, you ask? Well, noble Tarnished, I say we go ahead and find out!

The God Who Argued With Itself

Marika/Radagon is the obvious starting point, the cosmic precedent for all of the game’s other fractured personalities. To quickly bring you (somewhat) up to speed: Marika, the Lands Between’s One True God and vassal of the Greater Will, at one point took her champion Radagon as her consort.

But Radagon has a secret, one so realm-shattering that none other than Goldmask himself starts questioning the Golden Order’s very infallibility upon learning it: Radagon is Marika, and Marika is Radagon. They are one and the same.

One body, two souls, all existing simultaneously as both one being and two. Oh, and before you forget: they’re married to each other. They also had children together. And to top it all off, they fundamentally disagree about reality’s largest questions and everything that flows downstream from them:

• Marika loses faith in the order she created and the deity she serves, while Radagon remains loyal to the end.

• Marika shatters the Elden Ring, and Radagon tries to repair it.

• Marika absconds from the Lands Between, while Radagon stays behind to serve what’s left of the Greater Will’s… em, will.

• Marika calls the Tarnished back to the realm so one of them may slay the Elden Beast and become Elden Lord, while Radagon tries to murder any Tarnished who steps inside the Erdtree to do so.

Forget being misaligned on family, career, or life goals… imagine you and your spouse being so violently opposed on such a consequential matter as how to rule an entire realm. But I digress.

Anyway, the game never fully explains how this works, and I’d bet my last rune that’s absolutely intentional because any explanation would severely blunt the sheer existential horror of it all. Imagine sharing your body with someone who despises everything you stand for and actively works against your goals, but to whom you’re nevertheless cosmically bound, forever and ever, for all eternity. Now imagine that person is also you.

Even though they share a body, Marika speaks to Radagon in the second person. This means that she recognizes him as separate from her, while also acknowledging they’re fundamentally united at the soul level.

Marika and Radagon experience what physicists call quantum entanglement: two particles that remain connected regardless of distance, affecting each other instantaneously even if they’re billions of light-years apart. Except here, the distance is zero; they’re entangled with themselves.

The shattered Elden Ring actually becomes a surprisingly beautiful metaphor for their similarly shattered being. When Marika broke the ring, did Radagon try to stop her with their shared hands? Did they wrestle for control of their own body? The opening image of Radagon attempting to repair what Marika destroyed, using the same body that did the destroying, vividly illustrates the madness of opposing one’s very self (with that same self).

You’ve probably already sussed out their similarities to the Tarnished, though there are some key distinctions. For one, whereas the Tarnished switches between Great Runes like he’s changing clothes, Marika/Radagon switches between entire worldviews (and does so involuntarily).

Also, the Tarnished’s multiplicity is sequential; you can be one thing, then another, then another, and back again, then again and again, however many times you want. Marika/Radagon’s multiplicity, on the other hand, is simultaneous: they’re everything at once. A walking contradiction that should’ve long since collapsed under its own impossibility, but somehow hasn’t.

The children they produced together reflect this, throwing into stark relief some uncomfortable implications about divine being (not to mention divine inbreeding) in the process. When Marika and Radagon had children, who was the mother? Who was the father? Both? Neither?

The game suggests their offspring inherited the fundamental instability that springs from this spiritual schizophrenia: Malenia and Miquella are cursed with eternal rot and eternal youth (respectively), which are both states of permanent incompletion. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree—the parents’ fractured nature expressed itself as temporal dysfunction in their children, in a kind of fantastical allegory of the genetic degradation of the Habsburgs (among many other royal lineages).

The Omen Who Loved His Jailer

Read more

Game & Word Volume 5, Issue 8: Monday, Oct. 20th, 2025

• Publisher: Jay Rooney

• Author, Graphics, Research: Jay Rooney

• Logo: Jarnest Media

Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “Elden Lore, Part 4” (~60 minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

Once you finish your first playthrough of Elden Ring, you might be asking yourself: how the hell does some nobody with a club end up becoming the ultimate arbiter of divine succession?

It’s not just a gameplay contrivance, though FromSoftware could certainly be forgiven for that. No, it’s far deeper than that! The more you dig into the Tarnished's peculiar position in the cosmology of the Lands Between, the less sense this unlikely hero’s very existence makes. The Tarnished is a theological paradox; a metaphysical riddle nobody can parse, or a veritable cosmic joke that nobody's laughing at… until the very end, when the Tarnished gets the last laugh.

The Tarnished shouldn't work as a messianic figure, considering he was stripped of grace and exiled, does not come from a noble lineage, is famously maidenless, and lacks even just basic respect from almost everyone he meets. And yet, this maidenless wretch becomes the only person alive that can rewrite reality’s most fundamental laws.