#474

Sometimes I want to make a post, but not necessarily write one; days when scanning in a comic seems more the thing to do, though I've yet to produce a comic I woud consider complete, or, basically, either relying on the gross lever of a writing exercise or even transplanting in outside work--today some of the material I generated for my recent classes at the community college seems ripe for the plucking to me, for some reason. I don't really know why. All I know is sometimes I want to repurpose old work just as badly as I wish to generate new stuff.

Aw, let's why not take a try at it.

*

Born the 26th of April, 121 CE, Marcus Annius Catilius Severus would live fifty-nine years, and die Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, the fourteenth Emperor of the Romans, while on a campaign of the Marcomannic Wars, March 17th, 180 CE. Suspended outside of space and time, I have the opportunity to conduct a short interview with the man whose diary is one of the more widely read works of ancient philosophy in history.

J: You never saw yourself as a particularly gifted thinker, true?

M: When it came to mental prowess, nature did not endow me favorably. I was never mentally swift, my memory never prodigious, my gifts in understanding wisdom and applying it never considerable. If I found success in letters, in thought and deed, it was through diligence, and a love for knowledge greater than my natural ability to wield it. And to say so is probably to over-credit my account. 

J: Well, maybe. You’re saying you were never precocious, or what we might call gifted, but no one can say you’re not accomplished. Tell me about your early education.

M: I was singled out for potential Imperial ascendance in early life by Emperor Hadrian, who adopted two different men by way of singling me out; first, my intended adoptive father, then the husband of my aunt Faustina, who became my adoptive father and married me to his daughter, my cousin. This was not unusual; though sons technically automatically inherit from Imperial fathers, my son will be only the second in Imperial history to do so. Adoption is far more common, preferred as a way to make succession a matter of personal volition rather than the whim of nature. It is against my nature to offer severe personal criticisms, but Emperor Hadrian was a complex man and difficult to understand*, and I cannot say what made him pick me out of the crowd. It is not something my personal acumen distinguished me for. Hadrian made me an Equestrian at the age of six, and it was not long after that he secured for me entry into the ranks of the Salii—priests of Mars. I applied myself with vigor to the role, though, and did my best to serve as an example of piety and correctness. It was not long before I rose through the ranks and even took on the role of dismissing veterans and confirming initiates. 

J: This earned you a certain amount of censure.

M: Yes. The kinds of gossipers and hangers-on that would continue to try my patience for the rest of my life—such as the social circles around my stepmother—made mock of me, and called me prig, fastidious, prudish, over-serious. Foolishness along those lines. Small-minded people, who I should know better than to heed, but whose opinions have always plagued me nevertheless. All that I tried to do out of humility, for the common good, in the name of justice—a target for mockery and ribaldry. Being made a quaestor well before the requisite age of twenty-four only exacerbated the trend, for I will insist on taking my duties seriously, even if the rabble insists on calling me humorless.

J: In your diary—speaking with you now, my familiarity with it feels a little too personal—but, in your diary, you often admonish yourself for paying too much heed to your critics. But your biographer and contemporaries praise you for your steadfastness and unswerving nature. What I mean is that this kind of criticism bothered you, but you did not let it affect your labors or change your personality. Tell me more about your education, and how that might have set that kind of steady course for your life.

M: My grandfather, Catilius Severus, elected not to send me into public schooling, but took upon himself the expense of hiring and keeping private tutors. For this I am indebted to him, as I feel that this education suited my temperament and enabled me to adopt forms of discipline which would help me master myself and retain the outward appearance of that mastery throughout my life. Public education had suffered terribly at the hands of the decadent effects of those who saw education as a means to an end, and the teaching of philosophy and rhetoric had fallen by the wayside. My education was concentrated on these things; my tutors were Greeks and they—my painting master, Diognetus, in particular—influenced me early on to avoid taking sides in the chariot-races, cockfighting, spurious wordplay—distractions and vices, in short—and to sleep on the ground or a camp-bed with a cloak as my only covering.

J: A far cry from the habit of the average Roman of your age and class.

M: My mother even persuaded me to put a stop to it, yes. Things like this—giving in to her like that, though she was an admirable, compelling woman—bother me to no end about myself. I feel always short of the mark, always too affected by my surroundings, by the words of those who set themselves in opposition to me, by my own physical ailments. I will say that it is not enough either to earn the admiration of others, of those who would praise me for what they see as my steadfastness or any other fine quality. It would be equally unfit of me to let their praise affect me and take pleasure in their high opinion of me and of my works. I know that I can do better, that emotion holds too much sway over my character. 

J: Could it be that you take your failures—real and perceived—too much to heart?

M: If anything, not enough.

J: I think it’s commendable to aim for a discipline that aims to improve on the tendency to be “too human”, but do you ever think that the standard you set for yourself might verge on the inhuman? 

M: I like that, “too human”. No. Perhaps if I had the opportunity, as I would have wished, to live a life of pure philosophy, but as Emperor, I could be superhuman twice over and still, it would not suffice. I had to be superhuman, or at least better than I was, and failed. Rome is too human as well, and for all my efforts, she did not prosper under my reign. Wars, corruption, self-serving men—I could not stem their deleterious effects. For all that I tried to apply judiciousness in my administration, for all that I personally did in the application of justice—

J: You spent an astonishing amount of time and effort on the practice of law and in dispensing judgment, and contemporary legal thinkers commend you widely for your efforts.

M: It served its purpose per each individual instance, but it did not make Rome better. It did not make the Senate nobler or more disposed to prudence, less self-serving and given to backbiting and conspicuous flaunting of wealth; perhaps I even coddled them, for want of distancing myself from the ways of tyrant, which I abhor. But neither could I make the changes in the law that I would have liked to, and my setting of precedence did not carry the necessary weight.   

J: Maybe no man, not even the emperor, had the power to do that, or ever could. We’ll talk about it again in a little bit. Returning to your youth: you had some health problems even then, but you loved wrestling, boxing, hunting.

M: Yes, I did. Much as in pursuits of the mind, I was able, even, through strenuous effort and discipline, able to make the most of my limited gifts, but my body and the physical temper with which I have lived tend to pain and paucity, and I shamefully had to give way to my natural frailties. Perhaps the stresses of high office exacerbated the problem. My physician, Galen, whose skills and wisdom have rightly become legendary, made prescriptions for me over the years, but he could not change the essentialities: I am a night owl, where most of my countrymen are early birds; I tend to problems of the stomach, which releases blood that I must spit, and my poor appetite prevents me from attending sufficiently to my diet; and I suffer from pains in the joints and throughout the body which it is difficult to find relief from. 

J: Yet it doesn’t seem to have dulled your mind or prevented you from doing your duty.

M: Indeed, the mind must master the body. Pain is part of living, part of having a body. Suffering is to be expected and accepted. It should not serve as an excuse to shirk one’s duty, to hold back from what is best in us and allow ourselves to be prevented from reaching our fullest potential. If we think of pain as natural, and do not shrink from it, and of suffering as well, we are able to take it in our stride.

J: So, pain and suffering don’t prevent us from living our best lives.

M: On the contrary, they are part of our best lives. Their place in our lives is like our place in the universe: what seems evil or outrageous or misallocated only seems so from a narrow perspective, blinkered and fettered by too much closeness. When seen from above, when granted perspective, good and evil vanishes, the more so a good and evil based on shrinking from pain and pursuing pleasure. A person that seems evil is part of a greater design, which integrates that person into a larger perfection. Nothing is wasted in nature.

J: Elaborate on that point. 

M: You can see it in flesh, in stone, in dust, in all that is and all that perishes. Everything disintegrates only to come together again in a new form. Everything that makes us up, our bones and organs, will pass away and become something else. Something to remember, if one is needled by impatience with passing time or annoying people—that all passes in an instant, and change is the great constant in nature. 

J: Circling back around to your talent as a thinker. I know you wrote your thoughts to yourself, without the intention of publishing them widely. Tell me a little about the actual purpose.

M: My papers were an exercise. A way to work out my feelings and translate the work of the writers and thinkers that came before me, and the lessons of my tutors, into a simple reflection or admonition that I could use in that moment. The process was helpful.

J: I think that element of them, their simplicity, the aim of condensing received wisdom, and the sense of processing, is something the reader can undergo with you. You regretted not being able to practice philosophy, yet your Meditations have influenced philosophy and the works and lives of thinkers and doers for centuries. You don’t have to say anything about it, I know there’s not much to say that wouldn’t ring badly in our ears.

M: Thank you.

J: Now, I’m going to say some things about the Roman Empire, and I’d like to have your thoughts and feelings about my statements and their implications. So: The Roman Empire can be understood as an empire of conquest, and its economy largely definable as a command economy; that is, weak in market and trade, focused overwhelmingly on land, and dependent on slave labor. This dependence hinders technological development; despite Roman advances in engineering and municipal construction and planning, farming technology remained largely unchanged for essentially the duration of the republic and empire. From my perspective and that of my contemporaries, it is a weak economy, and there is much to mark it as an “underdeveloped” state. A huge population—maybe as much as one million, two hundred thousand people, and almost all of them poor, many slaves. Yet, the senatorial class, which of course you were born to, are some of the wealthiest individuals in the history of the world, possessing almost all the wealth in Rome and many properties each—and there were roughly six hundred of you. The scale of this kind of fiscal and social stratification is almost unique in world history. Does this strike you as just or right?

M: I have said already that nature is what determines the fitness of things and their place in the world. I may resent my class for their personal qualities, I may wish that their extravagance and consumption could be corralled, and I certainly rue any cruelty from master to slave—but nature determines birth, and we must operate in the station we were born to. To refuse is to defy nature and to defy your own nature. But I worked towards manumission, wherever I could, whenever the cases presented themselves, and I tried to select upstanding men as city councilors. As for the economy, I wish I could have done more. I tried to ameliorate certain things where I could…revaluing the currency, adding silver weight to the sesterce…But to change everything, the dependence on slaves, the agrarian values of the people, the culture…and of course, the wars had to be paid for, if they were to be fought, and because of all the rest, they had to be fought. I had to lighten the sesterce again. To be the emperor was not to rule a household or master oneself. It was to ride on the back of a beast so vast that your efforts to steer could only ever be suggestions, a beast which needed you atop its back, needed the reins, but was in truth ruled by its appetites. It did not know what was best for it. Worse emperors than I went mad trying to have the power their names indicated, or used to fear to try to get it, but it amounted to the same—sometimes the empire prospered in certain ways under the madmen. They called me a philosopher, but the plagues, the dissolution of our borders, the gap between the wealthy and the poor, the corruption, the wars, the cacophony; it all corroded away at our world, and I could not put a stop to it. All I could do was rule as I saw fit and try to be as virtuous and judicious as my role allowed. I would rather it had gone to other men. Antoninus Pius, who ruled before me for many years, was a better man than I, a model I always remembered in reverence, could not help but hand me an empire beset with difficulties which fell to me, and my son—who I ruled with for three years, trying to prepare him—was not the man I hoped he would be. But such is life, and it falls to us to bear its pains and disappointments with equanimity. Rome was not what you and I, bound by our limitations and frustrations, might have wished it to be, but it was as the universe intended. Some people exist as examples, or stories, that others might learn from them what happens when one is rash, or a brute, or suffers from some other form of intemperance or evil. And it is they who suffer most from it. So it may be for nations as well. Perhaps we all live as stepping-stones.

J: Thank you. That was illuminating. I think that’s all the time I have. And I want to thank you again for talking with me.

M: It is always good to have an opportunity to speak honestly and plainly. 

*

So, that was what I generated for a term paper in a humanities class. I reread The Meditations and played around in a bunch of biographies of Marcus Aurelius--Frank McLynn's Marcus Aurelius: A Life and a textbook-style affair titled A Companion to Marcus Aurelius--and Mary Beard's SPQR. Drank deep of these droughts, let them ferment awhile, and wrote the above all in one wallop--much in the matter of a post. So it works as post that way; it falls within "the rules". Honestly not bad as thought experiment. Obviously I put as much of myself into my rendition of Marcus Aurelius as I could, while trying my absolute damnedest to express him as I felt him through his work, his echo in this world.

Would have written it differently if I had performed the exercise right into this text field. Obviously this whole playacting is a vehicle for specific information that had to be in there. But I remember it being pleasurable to write, and share with a class and a teacher who enjoyed it. 

That kind of stuff if the most alright part of school. I can admit this.

Anyway, whatever, hitting post now, no reread, raw doggin balls out for dirt cheep FUX

--JL

McLynn, Frank. Marcus Aurelius : A Life, Da Capo Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washtenaw-ebooks/detail.action?docID=625138.

A Companion to Marcus Aurelius, edited by Ackeren, Marcel van, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/washtenaw-ebooks/detail.action?docID=877204.

Beard, Mary.  SPQR : a history of ancient Rome,  Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W.W. Norton & Company New York , 2015

#473

It is not meet for a man to sing his own praises or elaborate overmuch on what and how he performed when called to do what is only his duty. Indeed, there are many things one can't really say to anyone, even though they aren't secrets, and it wouldn't be the first time I chose to say just such a thing here, because this place is, while not mine, at least the place where I have testified about myself for a chunk of my life. 

Anyhow.

Some days, one is tested. Will a dude do what he said he would do? Is a dude who he says he is, and when the challenge comes, does he prove it? Today I had the opportunity to do that. It was not easy, but I did it. I did not back down or flinch, and was a bulwark.

*

There is something to be said, in a corollary fashion, about symbols. Wore the symbol of a hero that matters to me. Honored that symbol today.

--JL 

#472

To round of Factually Game Theory 2024, I thought it might be interesting to explore some of the negative space on the subject, i.e. what I don't play, even actively avoid. Also it's probably best practices to stress that I know what game theory is and that none of what I have said resembles it. I possess this awareness.

Jokes. They happen sometimes, in your vicinity, whether you appreciate this truth or just drool onto yourself a bunch while you wait for someone to wipe the drool off.

*

One must exercise caution, because the exploration of negative space too quickly becomes "I don't play these games because they are the byproducts of rot and the minds they issued from are morasses of putrefaction aqnd disease". That would be a moribund and sterile effort, noise without meaning, and if you disagree, I have excellent news: there is more of this kind of writing being generated about games per second than there is any other kind of writing on the planet, except pornography involving characters not generated by the author. You can be reading fresh ideas from brave new voices with only a nominal amount of clicks and keystrokes.

*

In my fecklessness and lack of self-regard, only Fallout 3 ever made any purchase on me among all the houses of its throbbing, radioactive lineage. I don't know, it's just true. Never played the ones that came out before 3; think there's two, seems reasonable to guess two, but I have been burned before. Never played any of the ones that came out afterwards.

It is as though I am trapped in my own chronoshard, where 3 condensed from total intangibles and never reproduced.

Anyhow. It is clear, no matter the internal particulars, that this Fallout thing makes me a heretic in the ways that I think are actually suboptimal, instead of making me smile. If I weren't me, I would respect me less--the objective facts of the case speak to me of a person of low character.

Because the person is me though, I give myself a pass. Maybe it's you who might consider that 3 is in fact enough Fallout, an island of sufficiency.

Skyrim is pretty much the only Elder Scrolls game I play, also. This sweeping away of the cape reveals that I merely like Bethesda games developed and released within a particular span of time and at a particular scale and resolution.

Still play Fallout 3 sometimes, and my blatantly unhealthy relationship with Skyrim is something I have had to face quitting the way one quits drinking. I should throw both the 360 disc and the Switch cart in the fucking garbage, today. But I know I won't. Might make the disc into art, though. 

*

Man, this has been like pulling a struggling wombat from the living earth. Well, I can't physically do that and would be surprised if it could be done without a tractor hitch, but I digress.

Long story short: I don't tend to play a lot of shooters or hyperrealistic games, with Halo* being a strong exception, plus the occaisonal spy thriller. Pure puzzlers are not a big one for me, I become completely obsessed, but only with a very few. However, puzzles should be everywhere in all games. If you could do a puzzle every time a chess piece moved in order to secure the move or gain bonus effects, for example, that by itself would be a great game. I don't play games that stress live disembowelment or active rape mechanics or whatever the fuck it is that breeds at the bottom of the barrel of human endeavor. I don't play games where you do nothing but kill without context, or engage in power fantasies for the sake of power fantasies, or engage in the extermination of the Other; I am not opposed to violence in media, but beyond a certain threshold it just makes me sick. Games which are not specifically fighting games that are purely competitive, dating sims, granular-type sims, gem-matching, cookie-clicking-type things are no, and games which do nothing but PvP until the very earth cracks with age are out for me; Overwatch and Unreal Tournament for example, feel to me like just big balloons of nothing. No MMO's. Bounced off WoW instantly and failed to engage with The Old Republic. Whatever Fortnite is, I don't care about it, to the point that I can't even pay the kind of attention it takes to define it, even though I've read a lot about it. 

Anyway. Enough of that negative bullshit.

Let's just wrap this with a story instead. Stories are better.

*

My parents were reticent to provide me with video games, and thus, a large part of my memories of childhood is the waging of a relentless campaign of propagandistic attitition in the pursuit of digital entertainment. My case, almost from the get-go, of course, was that it was digital literature I was after, just like books and movies, which in fairness and praise to my parents, they provided in spades. I grew up reading and watching literally whatever the fuck I pleased basically on my own recognizance. Encyclopedias, young adult literature, and the shorter classics were all part of my repertoire before I turned seven, shortly before I would start on philosophy. Also Quentin Tarantino and Mel Gibson movies, and stuff like The Ghost and the Darkness, Congo, Predator, and of course--of course--Jurassic Park were all included my video diet, along with more regular, defensible stuff like Willow and Star Wars and The Dark Crystal. I had seen Blue Velvet and Silence of the Lambs before I turned six, though. Lmao!

No video games of my own, though. No Mario, no Zelda, no Donkey Kong. Perhaps you knew someone like me in your own game-filled childhood--pathetic wretches, rain running down their faces as they pressed their hands against the glass of your window. The only games they got to play were at your house, man. You'll never know the pain.

Not that I was truly suffering under any real deprivation. Toys--yes. Everything else a kid could have or want? Yes. Only games were dangled out of reach. Well, console games--the PC as a platform was tolerated, and edutainment software was played into the ground, as well as some early browser games, and, for some odd reason, Command & Conquer: Red Alert. So, really, it was primarily console games I didn't have access to.

I have no bitterness about this anymore; my childhood was totally rad, even if bitterness about games was a big part of it. It's not like I sat around pining. You know me: into many things at once. Plus, DK3D and C&C:RA? Pretty sweet groundings in gameplay and design. Disney Interactive games also slap harder than they need to, specifically, The Hunchback of Notre Dame Interactive and Ready to Read with Pooh. Math Blaster is also cool, but Reader Rabbit...I dunno anymore.

Eventually, of course, faced with the twin suns of my long-fought campaign and the birth of my feverish Pokémania, my parents finally cracked and got me a yellow Game Boy Color and a Pokémon Blue cartridge. 

Man, I can still smell those objects new out of their boxes. What a memory.

Of course, human beings are what they are, and this taste meant I needed more--the very outcome my parents had bulwarked themselves (and me) against for so long. I needed an N64. I needed Pokémon Stadium, duh, but I needed Starfox too, so badly. I needed Goldeneye and Super Smash Bros. I wanted Ocarina of Time so bad it almost scared me. Being given Gameboy carts of Tetris and Super Mario Bros Deluxe only stoked my ardor, as well as refining me in the classic senses as a player of games. 

My education about games was piecemeal and patchy. I didn't have access to or even knowledge about many of the periodicals and news sources that would have informed me more broadly about the space and its history. It was mostly commercial and hearsay, sources in their human forms--a buddy who had a lot of games showing me Civ II, the overhwelming presentation of arcades, knowing Sonic was a thing but never really playing the games, etc. Bingo balls rolling in a basket. So it was that it was years and years of life and games and all that stuff and somehow, at the age of eleven, I had not yet heard of Final Fantasy.

Knew about Cloud, sure. Had seen pictures of Cloud and Sephiroth. But I didn't know what game they were from. Incidentally, at this time in my life, all I knew about Samus Aran was a story invented mostly out of whole cloth by an Italian friend. Basically, he said her name was Metroid, and the bakstory he created for her was, shall we say, graphic. The armor, in my mind, did not encase a blonde beauty with all her fingers and toes. There were scars, missing pieces everywhere, in my mind. A cheek that was just teeth.

Our neighbor heard me and my little brothers were into games and she gifted us her son's old collection of game stuff he'd left behind. At last, we had a Super Nintendo and library for it, as well as a Sega Genesis (ah, so you're Sonic! Gotta go fast, you say? I see) as well as bolstering our library for the N64 we'd gotten for Christmas that year.

One of the Super Nintendo games had fancy golden script over the hilt of a sword on a red field, declaring itself to be Final Fantasy II. I didn't try it out for a while, because, well, abrogations of logic tend to confound me, and I know you can't have a second final. Little did I know that this was in fact the fourth final, but that hardly would have improved matters.

Teaching myself to play this game all the way through to the end, exploring every pixel all by myself, securing every weapon and extra boss, all the summons and secret places, ranks as one of the greatest things I have ever done. Pokémon built itself enough out of its bones (the D&D/Ultima bones) to render the source stock instantly legible to me, and so I was able to enter through that little archway into a world I had theorized was possible, a world I had confidently assured my parents existed and was worth exploring, and which blew my mind wide open with its living, breathing actuality.

Digital literature. Yes. I took it up on its promise, and was blessed; now I bear its rod and staff, and its holy word is ever upon my lips.

*

Literature, that is, art, is the Prime Good of All Existence, as is well understood. Video games are a part of it, so, you know, they make life better, a lot better. So, I think they're all right.

I like 'em.

--JL

*Halo's setting--in scale and magnitude--is too powerful. There was a point when I had seen lots of stuff from the game and thought it was merely ok, like, yeah, cool jeep and shit. Nice energy bolt you made there. But seeing the ring, Halo itself, from space shifted something deep inside me and lit my brain up in brand new places. A top-tier game memory.

#471

Oh! Oh-ho! As is well-known, I am a derelict crawling on his belly when it comes to playing the bulk of new and potentially interesting games as they drop. Stray is just one such game. Only now that it graces the Switch can I at last plunge into its manifold, exquisite oils--appropriate timing for Factually Game Theory 2024.

I love cats. Really had to put my head in my hands and think when I was looking at the settings and saw that one could have cat death shown or not shown by this game. Eventually I decided my enjoyment would be most complete with the stakes turned up to maximum. So now I play this game as though this cat were the actual earthly vessel of my consciousness, which is how I'm philosophically inclined to play it anyway--to a certain person, a me kind of person, a game like this is one of the most delicious and complete roleplaying opportunities there is. My method basically instantly became to marry the design with my own playstyle to approximate the decisions and expressions of my cat-self moving through the world-as-it-is. This has lent it an intensity which exposes me to the beauty and terror on display that represents the entire case for digital entertainment. Absolutely, undeniably transcendental experiences.

Looks like I would have to revise my Game of the Fuckin Year 2022 selections--if things worked like that around here. Think they don't. Think if I didn't play a game before I made the list, it didn't make the cutoff, arbitrary though it may be. Perhaps some other list, some other time,

Damn, though. Just a couple hours in, but I know the feeling of something immense hanging over me, distributed payload at the ready, my absolute destruction the only possibly outcome. Nature is truly wonderful: my lachrymose reserves are plump, my glands and ducts primed. For every action, equal and appropriate reaction and all that.

*

It's become a problem ever since I opened the gates for myself grabbing the next Final Fantasy game after the next Final Fantasy game I needed to clamber into in order to survive, like a lacerated, battered soldier, internal landscapes creatively rearranged, dragging themselves from mechsuit to mechsuit in unending combat, gasping as each round of fresh hypos drive home the enzymes and nerve blockers and blinking rapidly as cortical arrays sync to flood a dying brain with clarity.

Uh, Anyway, been purchasing games like a maniac, games I can't afford, except they are so on sale as to be unmissable. Caught in an evil machinery, I writhe with pleasure even as my flesh is torn from my bones by the action of the intermeshed gears.

Haha! Where is this imagery coming from? I might be stressed out. I dunno. That's another good reason to go into debt getting video games to play and play.

*

Got Final Fantasy: Lightning Returns. Now I have to replay and finally finish XIII so I can finally play the copy of XIII-2 I got like ten years ago so I can at long last let that particular file finish downloding in my brain for one and all. A trilogy works on my mind in certain ways; this should accomplish my goal.

Also got LiveALive, or however it might be cool to spell that--as far as I am concerned, that title is untranslated Japanese, the kind of thing I might see as grafitti in any major city on the planet. The game itself is something that looks very interesting indeed.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is the only other Vanillaware title I can secure on the Switch, and it was an act of supreme restraint to not have bought it already. The smallest sale and I crumbled. Ordinarily you can miss me with the intricacies of these high-school style dramas, but mystery, giant mechs, and Vanillaware art and writing. I would pay any amount--I don't want to say it o baldly but it it is true--to play old Vanillaware games on my Switch, especially Odin Sphere, which I never got a chance to hardly even look at the art of.

Other games whose sale price skewered my abilty to reason include Hades, which I have resisted for actual years. Finally seeing that magic 50% off, plus a recent reccomendation bolstering its desirability, clinched me in absolute terms.

Damn near bought Octopath Traveler II when I was getting the first two games I mentioned. Absolutely loving Octopath Traveler, which I had coveted since its release.

Frankly? Honestly? Kind of regretting not snatching it up. I mean, why bother even stopping myself? Well, after that and the guitars I should have accumulated roughly enough value to make only the most necessary purchases until I must needs secure the next console in my life.

Oh, these golden fetters. It is a kind of madness, but, what can one do, acknowledging that? 

A couple of weeks ago? I bought books and I didn't even tell you. I will list them, eventually. But these lapses in discipline, these splurges into the nether-realm of credit card bills, which I know is indefensible, are as delicious and sensual to me right now as I imagine adultery is to the monogamous. My mind reels and my throat tightens as things draw to their fumbling climax, and the languorous, stupid-grinning comedown must surely be why so much straight people shit is obsessed with this kind of behavior. In this state, the mind breeds justifications like cockroaches.

--JL

edit: yeah, I went back and got Octopath 2. What can I say? This swordfighter on the fucking cover--art like this paralyzes my faculties. 

Obviously, I can hold off buying the majority of personally desired games that come out for years and years. But when the stars are right, or whatever the fuck is happening during times like these, I just have no defenses. All that shit flies straight out the window.

#470

One of the problems with doing a thing--in this case, Factually Game Theory 2024, which shall continue apace--is that if I come up with any number of other concepts to twiddle with it troubles my vector of approach and I tend to write nothing instead of dealing with both or synthesizing the concepts. I can sometimes do these things, but not always. Shortly, solutions to these problems, or at least, changes of some magnitude will manifest which will modify my process, if not streamline it.

Well, that was obscure and in no way utile. Onwards!

*

Apropos, then, a synthesis. We can do it today, though I may not like it. 

Politics. I know. Well, allegedly, we are that sort of animal.

*

Rage when pundits and other mechanisms of the profit-mandated media use game jargon to describe the decorative contours of the mechanism they truck with, drawing attention away from the nightmarish, suppurating underbelly, is something I experience and express at will. There is no denying, though, that like all phenomena, political contests can be expressed as games, played with rules which change over time.

*

A thought experiment, then, in which as is so often profitable, we begin with Sun Tzu: when in contest, if your opponent wishes to direct you, the way is to do otherwise than your opponent wishes.

For example, if your opponent aims to divide your forces, you have options--to withstand or overcome the divisive force/terrain, maneuver around same, feint the desired division as you deliver a lateral complication or draw the opponent into your own trap, etc. Always the overarching aim is to resist your opponent's will, always to do and be otherwise than your opponent would have you do and be.

As is so often true, in life as in combat, the best way to do this is to be as water--natural and irresistible in one's flow, always water despite undergoing state changes. On a long enough timeline, despite any attempt to control or channel it, water always finds its own way to where it is going.

* 

If your oppoenent wants you to hate and mistrust and cast out the stranger, do not do these things. Actually, if someone wants you to do these things, they are in fact revealing themselves as your true opponent.

They want you to do these things because they want you to be afraid and to be alone so that you are easy to defeat, to pick off one by one. It is a tactic. It can hardly be called a strategy, since it is employed so that no strategy will be necessary in order to secure a win condition.

It's like convincing you to get rid of a big chunk of your chess pieces before you play, but they get to keep all of theirs. It dissipates entirely the morality of  this particular play, which is a level playing field symmetrically arrayed where identically apportioned armies engage in maneuvers to manipulate the asymmetrical complexity that arises from the first turn to a win condition. Why would someone need an advantage under these conditions? 

They know they cannot play with enough skill to win. However, winning is more important than playing to them.

That is why they fail, and fail perennially, even if their star is ascendant for a season or ten. And when you fail with them, or play by their rules, it's not like you get a mulligan. They might, but you went out and died for them, which is what I was talking about before. And if you played by their rules, you were never really playing. You were just meat.

We must be brave and we must hang together. We must not believe that we are enemies. What is evident is that we are pieces, arrayed on opposing sides--but that does not make us enemies. Perhaps, on someone else's playing field, there are enemies, and these divisions are then imposed on us. But that is no reason to play their game.

We must play our own games. We must make a game of being as different as possible from our opponents, going as far as to state radically that we have no opponents, that there is only, in this life, free play. Fuck that winner/loser bullshit--let's just play some more, play will we're tired, and play again tomorrow.  

God! We have to remember to play. If it's not a game, there is no fucking point. 

*

An opponent is not the same as an enemy. But the core strategy remains the same: don't do as they wish you to do, which is another way of saying don't be what they are, which is another way of saying when you stare into the abyss the abyss stares into you and in the process of defeating dragons one must take care to not become a dragon oneself, all of which is to say that one ought to play one's own game, not someone else's.

Opposition is, itself, a game. There are no opponents, only the game itself. Only the information and the interaction on the field. Only the flow of energy, directed harmoniously, unleashed chaotically.

*

Descending a bit from the lofty peaks of our abstractions, we are, all of us living on this planet today, staring down some consequential choices and conditions. Soon things will be asked and demanded of us at the superorganism and individual level that will determine the fate of our species and the shape and outcome of not only every human life but the life of the planet itself. Many things are about to happen all at once and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Very nearly on some Final Fantasy nonsense, eh--and how many parties, even now, might exist a suspension of molecules, waiting to bond and coalesce and crystallize and save the world by defeating the forces of death and destruction in the name of love and freedom?

Again, Sun Tzu. If your opponent is choleric, aggravate their temperament. If they are phlegmatic, take advantage of their stillness and outmaneuver them. If your opponent wishes to engage, ensure to engage on different ground. 

Seriously, find and read that little book.

How many ways can we Splatoon some of these situations out? Fact: thick jets of paint will almost certainly jam most firearms, as would sufficient quantities of grease, many kinds of oil, oatmeal, fecal slurry (which deals several kinds of devastating bonus damage), maple syrup, marinara sauce, you name it. I dunno how well marinara sauce would work, actually, but you never know and you might have to make do and laugh about it. Covering someone head to foot in warm corn syrup or whatever has an inevitable and inescapable sting to it, after all, and sometimes all we can do is sting.

Maybe the last and only win is to laugh in someone's teeth before they write an end to it, and maybe it's time to make peace with that.

And yet, maybe it's time to survive so craftily and cleverly they'll tell Robin Hood level lies about you someday.

It is as important to take a page out the books laid out by the greats as it is to be creative. I suggest both, whenever possible, and so does Sun Tzu.

*

Peace, then! Peace, and one thousand times peace again, till peace is all we remember! More game thoughts soon.

--JL

#469

One would think that engaging in discussions regarding crass, rank digital entrancements would generate some kind of action, but apparently writing about games has hurt pageviews! Forget about it, though--I'm choosing to take this as a sign of progress overall. 

Why does Bravely Default want me to put it to sleep for eight hours at a time, like a human child, in order to gain battle currencies? Because it wants me to pay actual money (an impossible ask at this late date) in order to break out of the turns, a delicious, universe-breaking power. Well, I happen to love taking turns. I may hate laws, but I am a maniacal devotee of rules. Any player of games must be, even if your aim is to subvert those rules--they remain your entire focus, since the delicious thrill of freedom is only from them, and the thrill of cracking them is impossible if they are not there to be broken. 

For my part, it is my game to kick ass just fine within the rules, unstimulated by the arts of the glitcher and the breaker. No offense to that meta, but as an assertion of the advantages of my own philosophies of play, I invite you to sit down to some chess. You will find I do not require extra turns, asymmetrical buffing, or adjustments of any kind to the underlying systems in order to execute my strategic aims.

*

Before we get into the fun stuff I have thought to maybe do for Factually Game Theory 2024, I would like to interject a bit of book news. Read the first chapter of Byung-Chul Han's book The Disappearance of Rituals a little while ago, read most of the rest of them yesterday and the spare change on top of the final one this morning. I spoke about this philosopher I think around when or a year after the book came out, and this, my first chance to hold a physical book of his in my hands, has been balm on a fevered brow. The genius of this text cannot be overstated. Whether we agree or disagree, his illustrations and ideas are uniformly useful and diverting, incisive and complexifying. Indeed, every page of this extremely spare and clever book strives and succeeds in a particular tranformative aim--but to say more would spoil the game. 

Indeed, believe it or not, this book is on topic. 

Incidentally, he would perhaps be highly critical of much of this blog's content--but as always I gesture towards the masthead, our shared reminder that all of this is not serious, not productive in any sense; it is done for the fun of it. It is indeed a pity we must engage with production and its proxies when we type into blogs, or print books, very much when we play video games, but so it goes.

*

That, and beginning Jacques Derrida's Literature in Secret, is all I've been reading lately, basically. Some comics I forgot to talk about but I should relate Megahex by Simon Hanselmann as a strip of particular power and chuckles before I forget again. Shall have to try to remember to generate a list of unrecorded acquisitions and interpretations. But anyway! Back to games. More specifically, video games. 

*

Of course, since I've brought chess into things in this very specific way, it seems clear to me that there is a riposte embedded in my position, which is simply to ask if chess, played by the rules, is fun, or a better question, fun enough to justify not breaking it to make it more fun. 

This is a fair question, and exciting in that it merits a broadening of our scope, because my question in answer to that question is whether that is the foremost concern in play at every level. 

Of course, games ought to be fun and if they are not fun, at least in the abstract, they are not games, though optimally a game ought to deliver any number of things besides fun in its suspension. A game might not necessarily be "played" by all who might interact with its payloads, and it might be designed specifically to make the player feel unmoored mechanically and uncomfortable narratively and aesthetically, but this should, under optimal circumstances--specifically, having found its player--result in a kind of extremely narrow but no less potent or legitimate variety of fun. 

Learning is a game, and games by their nature must be learned. This principle lies at the center of our experience of consciousness, of thought--beginning with the memetic interchange between mother and infant, we learn for and through fun and it is essential that we learn to play or else we cannot learn at all.

*

It's why motherfuckers will tell you to grow up and stop playing video games. It is because they want to castrate your brain. Broadly speaking, it's why people tell you to grow up and "get serious", "knuckle down", "do something productive with your life". 

Man, fuck that shit. 

*

Similarly, it is why the imperative "learn to play" carries such sting. When one is told one has not learned assiduously enough, in the context of a game, the clear and indelible implication is that you are too slow at thinking to survive. In short, brutal, and honest terms, too fucking stupid to live. 

So that simple law of nature is writ large at the zenith of civilization as inescapably as at its most primordial roots: get good or die.

*

Again, I think there is much more to games and to life than that, but that is an undeniable part of their base code, and acknowledging it as a vector for potent truth reveals many rich bands of information, many opportunities to translate and refine one's learning. 

As games teach us to play, they teach us to think, and as we think more and in different ways, we--hopefully--also get better at learning, which is to say, we retain our suppleness of approach and our spirit of play in thought, sinking our roots deeper and spreading our branches ever higher and further in our quest for clear light and clean air.

*

In short, it is valid to break chess and valid to try and improve it, but it is valid also to simply devote yourself to playing it, even if it seems more boring than the other two. As I have endeavored to indicate, all three elements are in fact one process.

*

More game thoughts forthcoming in an unseemly gush--soon!

--JL

#468

There are certain things about you, dear reader--and not even you as an entity, let alone you personally, I should be clear--there are certain things about potential readers that I know with perfect clarity and have known for a long time that I refuse to take advantage of purposefully with an aim to manipulating this blog's numbers (they are, and have always been, terrible--even worse since I stopped using other social media to link it like five years ago). On occasion I might employ a rehetorical device or stress certain elements of my position to enhance the viability of a post, but by and large I don't think about shit, jack, fuck, or Larry when I write. Just pursuing the bright, clear thread in front of me.

For instance. Just for instance, it is my nature to criticize, vivisect, excoriate, and scour--all in the service of a theoretical, bright, and shining Truth. This is the element in me that operates under and embodies the sigil of the hierophant--it is my spiritual inclination to reveal, specifically, to illuminate with sacred flame. This means it is also in my nature to drive away shadows, to banish darkness--and in this holy task, it is easy to let one's fire burn overzealously. 

I received this wisdom about myself when a dear friend performed my Saturn Return at the age of 27. I have had lots of cards pulled and values assigned to those cards, but these stand out indelibly. A powerful witch performed the magic, which is significant, but also, she and I are gifted with an ability to understand each other that is damn near preternatural. The reason I am not an actual priest is that I operate under the reverse hierophant, which is to say, I am more on the order of a heretic; my freedom to think and feel as I please being just as important as any Truth. Voltaire and I share a birthday, by the way.

All this to say that it is easy for me to skew negative, and negativity drives about twice the engagement that positivity does. People investigate and engage with each other over negative assertions, whereas they will nod sagely in response to a positive assertion and move on with their lives--and thank the lord, honestly. But I always try, always make a certain effort--though often I may fail--to be positive, and even when very negative, I try to leaven the experience with reminders of the universe's impassivity regading moral positions and exhortations towards mercy in all things, which do not sell well. 

Rest assured--the posts in which I am an unmitigated asshole do quite well in comparison to many. But I do not celebrate, encourage, or pursue this. I am much prouder of any other type of post that manages to break ten actual readers.

*

What does this have to do with video games, Joseph, you ask--since of course, all comers are chomping at the bit for the next piece of FACTUALLY GAME THEORY 2024--and who could be blamed?! 

A lot, though, since whether or not and how people choose to skew positive or negative about games, from just people hanging out in their basements to developers and critics to the people arrayed around the gleaming oak boardroom tables has always had and will continue to have a huge impact on whether people are transformed or passed over by interactive events of absolutely vital importance. Because games maybe change people more completely than other art forms, a truth which is both touted as a reason to destroy all video games and a reason to abandon our physical bodies in pursuit of the Infinite Ludic, and if so, then our attitudes towards and faith in the medium--and as such, our interactions with its apparatus that are able to influence its trajectory--are loaded with significance, and therefore, a type of responsibility.

Naturally, this is true to an extent for all media. But in games, young and powerful as they are, the question is particularly vital and bound up in the shifting sands of the present moment.

Another direct relation is simply that this post is all about things I love a lot, and it is important to think about why such material matters and resonates--this joyful relation of interactive experiences, digital adventures, and potent revelations regarding the nature of the universe. It is important also to establish for you, dear reader, where I am coming from. This list, being a list, is an exercise in exclusion. By highlighting these 25 experiences I am in essence cutting infinite experiences out of the purview, and in a sense this is an act of violence inescapable. But I am in no way prizing material I have selected over material I have not in any kind of subjective or critically exhaustive manner.

As I take great pains to enunciate often, I am interested in many things at once--this blog overall is mainly about books I read, in the end, as they are my primary source of life, but everything else that I am is bound up in the reader that I am, and the reader that I am informs everything about how I see and understand the world. Also, as a phenomenon in a contiunuum, I have physical and chronomatic limits. Believe me when I say that if I could read every book, be they novels or nonfiction or fairy tales or comic strips or operator's manuals or pamphlets or zines or companion booklets or plays or experimental linguistic "dhecontructions", and look at every painting and sculpture and piece of design and architecture, and play every game of every kind, and listen to every scrap of music every composed, and then, say something definitive, and also learn to work and fight and fuck and be a person, I would--but I can't. I am just a point in spacetime, with a beginning and end, and demands on the whole process. So it goes.

These are my games. Some may be your games as well--that is a blessing. If none are, or I have omitted a game that seems to you better than any I have included, let that be a blessing also, and don't fuck with me or anyone about it. Make your own list; you are free, and if you are somehow suffering under my perceived lash, know that the hand holding the whip is your own.

Now, if you take issue with the concept that their order is not precisely linear, that I have placed a hard limit one sentence of commentary per entry, or any example of that sentence's content--well, there is always that point at which one must accept responsibilities for one's feelings and actions with a smile. It is our shared obligation to meditate on this relation.

*

hon. mentions: Unicorn Overlord--the love, titanic and impossibly passionate, is simply too fresh to assess for a place on the list. 3D Mario games, especially Sunshine and Odyssey, Fable Series, Divinity 2: Original Sin, Ico+Shadow of the Colossus, Guitar Hero III, Sonic, Contra, Mario Kart, a bunch of Star Wars games, I could go on forever though, let's gooooo

• 25: Ninja Gaiden (2004): Sometimes, apropos of either nothing at all or the texture of basement carpet, flashbulb memories of moments within this game overtake me--moments which assured me beyond doubt that I am capable of incredible, adult feats with a controller in my hands, which is an important moment in a young person's maturation.
• 24: Duke Nukem 3D: The Compaq tower my uncle gifted us, his younger brother's family, in 1997 had been largely wiped of programs he had installed on it--but this remained, a winking gift, and as it has been with uncles and nephews since time immemorial, I was shaped by this program's illicit thrills thereby.
• 23: F-Zero GX: I don't know that any racer even really matters to me except this one--others are games, or sims, or Mario Kart, only one of which interests me at all (ok, ok, Star Wars Racer)--but F-Zero represents something else to me, and of all the F-Zero games this F-Zero is my F-Zero, and this is the geometry I personally require from racetracks, and you cannot fucking beat me at these races, so it's my favorite.
• 22: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones: Possibly I am the only person for whom Sands of Time was not a relentless joy attack--indeed, despite it being actively stupid, I was fifteen enough to enjoy Warrior Within and preferred it overall--but Two Thrones made mincemeat of both its predecessors and represents redemption on every conceivable axis, which I am a sucker for.
• 21: Banjo-Tooie: For scale, humor, persistence, writing, variety, color, and sheer joy, this gargantuan adventure represents a high, smooth wall for games that try to operate in this space--rare in and of themselves.
• 20:  The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past+Oracle of Seasons/Ages+Minish Cap+Echoes of Wisdom: Isometric Zelda has that OG piquancy that never gets old; here is my slice of the greatest in that category.
• 19: Street Fighter II: This game is Street Fighter II.
• 18: Tomb Raider (2013): I didn't give a fuck about Lara Croft, since raiding a single tomb in 1994 at age 5 and finding it about as distasteful a virtual experience as I had ever endured, but when SquareEnix does anything, I pay attention, and presented with this platter, I devoured even the bones and feathers with abandon and great satisfaction.
• 17: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Maybe it's better just to keep my ideas to myself--though I will say this: teasing me with the concept of bardic abilities and not delivering is something I still bash my skull against in this game.
• 16: Eastward: Fuck man, all I can say is you should play this game, at least to try.
• 15: Resident Evil 4: God bless the Gamestop guy was willing to break the law in order that I might be able to play this, my first M-rated purchase--going to Gamestop was second only to going to the library or the bookstore as a leisure destination, and I like to imagine he'd seen me play the demo ten times and figured the damage was done, though it wasn't--this game expanded my notions of the possible with real psychic violence, which I appreciate wholeheartedly.
• 14: Soul Calibur II: The traditional fighter I have sunk the most hours into, the only one in which I have true combos* for most characted locked properly into the muscle memory.
• 13: Donkey Kong Country 2: In games, unlike in other sequential works, a sequel often represents the glorious culmination rather than the bastard scramble derided as the sophomore effort; DKC is great, but the sequel just slaps harder, and if you disagree, I refer you to the fact that 2 is the one with the pirates.
• 12: Kingdom Hearts II: Another example of the sequel principle; I literally cannot get through the first KH despite honest, bare-knuckle effort, but II is a blessing from heaven. 
• 11: Pokémon RGBYSV Versions: Those who sneer at this franchise really are missing out on amazing mechanics and incredibly rich strategy--but as it is known and proven that I am an actual crazy person when it comes to these little guys, I'm just going to stop myself here.
• 10: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time+Majora's Mask+The Wind Waker+Twilight Princess+Skyward Sword: These 3D Zeldas speak for themselves; their currency across the culture is as near to absolute as we get, maybe, except for Mario and Sonic and Cloud.
• 9: Halo 4: And this guy, maybe.
• 8: Starfox 64: Still waiting for any game of this type to materialize that can equal its polish and verve.
• 7: Super Smash Bros.: Yes, the original--even with everything that follows, perhaps because everything that has followed actually somehow informs the progenitor as the progenitor sets their template, this game is still as exciting and hilarious and awesome as it was when it came out, and it even remains interesting--the only shortcoming is the short roster and the few stages.
• 6: Metroid Prime: It would belong here because it is perfect in and of itself and because I love so much a game that allows you to literally read as much of your environment as this one does--but it is also a game which takes its subject matter on a massive conceptual leap and lands, as its protagonist tends to, on both feet and with incredible heft.
• 5: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance+Radiant Dawn: The great epic, the beginning of 3D in FE, the fully orchstrated soundtrack--games not without their problems, but which stand unequaled in scope and are in fairly high standing in terms of difficulty--clearing the last chapters of Radiant Dawn took me four tries and the winning try took like two hours and change.
• 4: Final Fantasy IV, VII, VIII, IX, X, & Tactics Advance: The temptation to write "The Final Fantasy Fractal" after entering zero on the list--implying a position unattainable by numbers which are not imaginary or undefinable, which is more correct--was powerful but I took the more quotidian route in order to expose myself to attempts at incineration.
• 3: Tetris: I dunno, do I have to explain what is perfect, elemental, and eternal about Tetris?
• 2: Super Mario World: After playing it for my entire life, having never been without a copy for twenty years, I can still talk about this game for indeterminate periods of time, periods which indeed might extend with no limit if not interrupted.
• 1: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild+Tears of the Kingdom: Perfect video games, maybe one big perfect video game, perfect works of art, perfect in every way and the more so because the key to this perfection was assembling development teams composed of gamers who live and breathe many other things besides games--certainly an elegant explanation for its sheer insurmountable glory, from my perspective.

*

Hm. I don't know how happy I can be with that, in fact; I seem to be leveraging many unusual statements. Suppose also one could honestly accuse me of cheating and copping out in many ways, but I make the rules here, and I shall leverage whatever tricks I please in order to craft the necessary implications. The Final Fantasy problem strikes me as the thorniest, but this is the compromise I have struck. When so many competing realities can realistically vie for the number-one spot, actually parsing and splitting them can be incrediblly difficult. 

Maybe it would help overall, interpretatively speaking and as a reminder of ineluctable reality if I created a sort of shadow list, here on the spot, of games and series which I haven't gotten the chance to play (for myriad potential reasons, but usually lack of hardware or somehow stymied access can be blamed) but I suspected had every chance of making the list.

Xenosaga

Odin Sphere

Valkyria Chronicles

LittleBigPlanet

The Last of Us

Ratchet & Clank

Killer7

Heavy Rain

and probably a bunch more I'm forgetting, but seeing them listed like this is filling me with a longing so profound that it begins to claw at my breast. Enough! Enough.

*

The overarching problem remains, though: quantifying and ranking experiences is a fool's errand. Diverting as it may be, any truth such an endeavor is able to communicate is adjacent to the thing itself.

--JL

*Smash  has combos, but I do not think of these as "true" combos and at any rate Smash is certainly no traditional figher, with some exceptions present in very specific matchups at very specific percentages which are essentially immaterial. SSM did have true combos which could take a stock from zero percent, but these represent a fluke in overall design and honestly, as fun as Melee is these combos are, I think, a flaw.

#467

This blog has been updating, interrupted by the occasional hiatus, since 2018, and I do quite like the idea of making a Factual Game of the Fucking Year Retrospective, so that is the program for the day--with a Factually Top 25 All-Time Games appended for good measure. Ah, the madcap hedonism of writing lists, and the devil-may-care yet earnestly delicious thrill of commenting on the lists! A dense sandwich cookie of joy and satisfaction.

Indeed, there may be no better way to kick off the criminally titled

FACTUALLY GAME THEORY 2024

*

The Factual Game of the Fucking Year Restrospective

Well, here's the deal though. I don't really play new games all the time, particularly not all year long--I am not that kind of hobbyist, or, gamer, as the wicked parlance of the vagrant youth would have it.

The Factual Game of the Fuckin Year, then, is not a list intended to assay or compass the industry or the form in any way--no, like all the factually pointless lists featured here on Factually Pointless, it is about me and what I am up to and my reasons for it and my feelings about it. Indeed, of little use to anyone--simply an amusement for myself and a record of my deeds. Therefore, a game released in 2016 might be my game of the year 2020--simply because that is when I got around to it. 

However! If, belatedly, I played a game that came out, or some other special modifier on the framework, I shall nest the retroactivity and award it the same award in a different tier or category. I may use several such disparate labels as context demands. You'll see what I mean with the first entry and as we go along. Plus, honorable mentions! That should populate this space with some notable videos game.

There are many reasons I might miss a game, finances and the limitations of time itself and competing demands for a share of my supply presenting the main hurdles. Also I might simply not care, or live fated to miss a game I might have loved through apathy or inattention or other sad chance. It's the same with books or movies, and there is no point in allowing this absurd breed of the fear of missing out to taint one's life. Global cultural production is overhwelmingly valid, and there was more culture produced in the last decade alone than a person could reasonably hope to take in during their whole lifetime even if they devoted eight hours a day seven days a week to it for eighty years. And you couldn't even do it, because how would you play every MMO ever produced at the same time as having the experience of taking your game to the professional level in first-person shooters and also reading the length and breadth of Western and Eastern literature and also becoming conversant with all the podcasts and reading every new book that comes out? It should be clear that one cannot, however delicious the fantasy of being the kind of extradimensional entity that could take it all in and suspend the completeness in the intellect like a perfect crystal.

Look, man. You have one span in which to exist. Get used to the idea, relax, and set your own agendas at your own pace designed to maximize your own pleasure by your own standards. That is all. Thanks for enduring my ted talk (me, talking to my younger self in actual paroxysms because absorbing all extant human knowledge is a tragic impossibility). Now, the list!

*

TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTEEEN

Played In The Moment: Fucking Nothing!: The year of the blog's inception was, it is safe to say, one of the lowest points in my life and a time when I didn't even have the spiritual energy to listen to music, a long illness chronicled in some detail through the course of the blog. If I was playing games, it could only really have been on my handhelds--I didn't have a Switch yet, I pawned my Xbox 360 and a bunch of other shit at one point, and I wasn't plugging my N64 or my PS2 into jack shit--woulda sold those too, probably, if anyone had offered any money for them at the time. 

Came Out, Played Later: Chasm: As a rule, I don't need to explore metroidvania-style dungeon descenders outside of the definitive series entries in themselves, but I do love it when a game exaggerates a genre to the extent that it becomes its avatar--see the 2024 winner, the impeccable Unicorn Overlord. Chasm excels as homage and gold standard in one, loved every little second of playing it (2021). It really just does every last aspect of itself to exacting perfection, and it has infinite replayability, which I value highly. It's on the "'vania" side of things; if the same team made a twin game called, say, hypothetically, "Station", to honor the Metroid side, I would also love that. I see myself tucking both games into bed at night, laying a loving, gentle kiss upon each brow.

Honorable Mentions: Celeste (amazing music, great writing, awesome raw platforming for which it has deservedly attained great fame) Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (it is fucking Smash Bros Ultimate, motherfucker, it is BEYOND REPROACH IN EVERY WAY. It is just always silly to make it game of the year, since Smash made the bulk of its potent and evergreen statement in 1998. It's kind of like how Final Fantasy is, to this day, Game of the Year. Anyway I have all the spirits and I have played over a thousand multiplayer matches on just my own cartridge. What has Super Smash Bros. as a series asked of me in return for its thousands of hours of peerless entrtainment? Only a valuable chunk of my own soul.)

TWO THOUSAND AND NINETEEN

Played In The Moment: Pokemon Shield (and Sword): People bitched so much about this game before it came out that I thought to determine whether it was an organically originating strife or, as is the way of all things in time, the seedy tentacles of underhanded corporate mechanisms had been at play in the neighborhood. My findings indicated to me very clearly that the brouhaha was evidently the same breed of malfeasance we are accustomed to seeing in the way of discourse manipulation but whose payload is assured, playing as it does on our basest emotions and leveraging raw capital and for the research and the bandwidth to occupy the precise real estate and rhetorical space needed to muddy discourse, just enough to posit that your company was able to hurt Nintendo this much of a percentage or whatever this quarter. Again, this is accomplished by pretending you are a regular consumer in order to aggravate reasoned thought and plant outright fabrications. There was never any goddamn Chinese knockoff that could do a million things Sword and Shield were not allegedly willing to do because the companies are supposedly too greedy to pay enough programmers to make a decent game. I mean it was the kind of baseless rhetoric and straight-up whole-cloth fabrication that I was used to seeing xbox and playstation people level at each other back in the days when the console wars raged white-hot.

Never has such cock and bull raged unchecked. I mean it probably has, but never has such devious goblin-work taken place around something I cared about so deeply.  The Pokemon fanbase has proven highly resistant to these assaults in the past, and I guess I'm not sure what changed.There's always assholes talking shit, they're like weak gravitational force. The universe seems to require them in order to achieve base cohesion at various field levels. It behooves one to learn to merely tune them out and get on with the business of one's work and leisure. But damn. I didn't like seeing that. I am talking as much about the Sword and Shield Conspiracy as I am talking about Console War 3.0, which was only one installment in a conflict that has been fought over uneven ground with many participants staying constant and many fading in and out, known currently as the Forty Years of Periodic Conflagration.

Anyway, I played this game too fucking much. Too many times through. Christ help me, I love it still. If I won't be playing it much anymore, it's only because I acquired Sword Version much later, and will naturally favor that instead next time I wish to return to Galar.

Came Out, Played Later:  Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Have I talked enough lately about Fire Emblem itself, and games like it, on this post in general and especially lately, with the Unicorn Overlord hyperfixation? Hey, guess what I did the other day: instead of anything reasonable or improving, I went out and purchased Fire Emblem Engage. Do you get it yet? Another reason I don't game constantly, or do any one thing constantly: if I really stopped giving a fuck and let myself, I am a person who could spend every cent they possess and even go into bankrutpcy just buying every new thing I think I desperately need. It's everything I can do stagger things and force myself into fast periods so I can have some semblance of a healthy life. To that end, I actually avoided Three Houses till 2022. About the same span I made it on Engage, I see. Good. The wards and charms hold, for now.

Honorable Mentions: Feudal Alloy (charming, amusing, haven't beaten it yet but the Czechs make a great game--I love the premise and the art and the feel of jumping around and swinging a sword, and to do so as a robot is a sheer good I need not explain, like a piece of hard candy when you haven't had anything sweet for a long time) The Eternal Castle Remastered (this game fucked me up so bad the first time I played it I almost hyperventilated. It is fucking too much to look at. If you are a person who didn't think we were done exploring the pixel stylings of the video games of the eighties, and you don't know this game, I reccomend it passionately--and not in a classy, top-flight style like Hyper Light Drifter or No Place for Bravery or something like that. I mean fat, thick lines of choppy pixel in two colors over a black background that sometimes uses a shade of one of the colors as a texture. Someday my mind will be ready to come back to it, maybe. It was also pretty high-difficulty, as these feral, frontier games knew no other way, and this is a high-fidelity project [it is not actually a remaster])

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is the Game of the Fuckin Year 2020. As the only new video game I really purchased that year, it sort of automatically slides into this tier. Not that I didn't love it, because I did, very much. Ever since I lost my cherry ro the series with Soul Calibur Warriors*, though, I've needed a little something more, personally, from the Warriors games if they should decide to go futzing around with a property I am invested in. I have even managed to resist the Fire Emblem ones! Being able to say this makes me want to write and subsequently sing a new and joyful song. But the way this one ties into Breath of the Wild (I mean, in a way), the incredible drama of the setting (yes, the Age of Calamity, or to be more [sort of] precise, some type of interdimentional rift that exists in a "compressed" moment in the spacetime of the actual canon) and the period they describe in the canon, and the way they just crammed the thing as full as it would go with the stuff--it simply stated itself as necessary, and I never looked back. Super fun, super beautiful, deep and satisfying, and again, simply full of stuff.

Is it too much fucking stuff? Damn, I mean, maybe. I love Zelda, and specifically Breath of the Wild, with such a burning intensity--it blazes like thermite, vaporizing plates of steel a foot thick--that I bought the Hero's Edition of the Breath of the Wild: Creating a Champion book with the special cloth binding and the clothbound case and the special picture of the champions from the Champion's Ballad expasion and the cloth fucking map of BotW Hyrule and the fricking laser-etched glass model Spirit Orb. Even to consider that I possess such a thing gives me a thrill like no illicit sex could possibly replicate, and my hand tingles, remembering the perfect shape and weight of that flawless glass sphere.

So, you might not feel the way I feel about this game. There are times when even I find it merely tolerable, so. I mean, IP Prefix: Warriors games. They require a certain mood and mindset, is part of it. I would, of course, love to hear from a person for whom playing this style of game is always choice number one, which naturally I have mad respect for.

Also, I guess you know what to expect near, or, y'know, at the top of the next list. Ha!

Honorable Mentions: I sure kept playing a lot of Pokémon! This is common for me, this thing of going nuts on Pokemon a few times a year. Longtime readers may know this. I also played a lot of Smash Ultimate.

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-ONE

Eastward & Disco Elysium: The Final Cut tie for Games of the Fuckin Year 2021. Everyone knows everything about Disco by now, even invertebrates with no possible way of playing or even sensing the game, so I won't spend too much time on that except to restate that it opened up my brain, walked inside of me, and drove me like a meat gundam, and in doing so, allowed me to operate it it with fully-loaded S-tier triple-overcharged maniacal-ass drive, leaving nothing of the game but a rind and some stringy remainders. I'm thinking of something on the order of a mango here. Indeed, once I had finished, I felt distinctly sated, a feeling of having feasted on succulence till the juice ran down my chin and my eyes rolled up into the back of my head. Man, I built the crazy fucker just the way I'm built and went fuckin crazy on those mysteries. Felt good, man. Felt god damn beautiful.

Anyway. 

Eastward is a game that hit me so right from the moment I laid eyes on its artwork in a thumbnail that I feel because it did not shatter the very foundations of this corrupt earth and burst from its shattering crust in a torrent of white light, redeeming all of our sins, that it was criminally slept on. The truth is it might really not be for all comers, and that makes sense. Not to me, not at all, but intellectually, it makes sense. In many other contexts, I can see how things just like this make sense, so I get that it makes sense, but it makes no sense to me. Eastward is damn near the perfect story in damn near the perfect video game. I have never felt things like I have felt playing this game and receiving its visual, aural, textual, and mechanical payload. I can't believe something like this even exists, and that I can just play it, if I want to or need to. My breathing has grown shallow. Know simply that if you are lucky, and open, here is a piece of art that can fucking destroy you in a way utterly its own. 

Honorable Mentions: Metroid Dread (as with Disco Elysium, it is not certain how much I need to elaborate on how much ass this game kicked. I shall be plain: this game kicks enough ass that we here at Factually Pointless had to fetch more ass for it to kick, and could not secure sufficient supply to meet demand) Pikmin 3 (this game is special in my heart because it was the first Pikmin I really played, because it is wonderful in every way, and because it is the one game Ezra and I have played together and beaten from start to finish, and we had a blast) Death's Door (If I haven't beaten it, it is simply because it is one of those meals so tasty you wanna save about forty percent for later. I love being a little dead crow, and music is so good, and to look at it and move through its world is to know a special, mineral-rich pleasure) Inscryption (didn't play it myself, but when a video game truly seizes Ezra, I take note. Usually it's not something I'd write about on its own merits, but Inscryption looks so much like itself and is so unabashedly cruel and with such good sounds that I have thought about it a great deal. Don't really feel like playing it, but very glad I've gotten to spend time around it) Resident Evil Village (the last thing that happened to me in a Resident Evil, after not liking 5 as much as 4 and not playing very much 6 because indeed they made them impossible to play alone, was I was finally playing some 6 with a buddy and we were in this boss fight where this giant guy charges at you in this huge room. We've tried this thing like twenty times: the room's full of guys and stuff, there's ways to hurt the big guy with the stuff in the room. fighting the rgular guys it's full of is a whole thing. We try a bunch of different strats, we do a bunch of different clever shit, new ideas, regroup, retry, whatever. Kept dying. Finally, exasperated and experiencing a growing feeling of dread as I realized the one thing all of our plans had in common, I told my buddy to grab his magnum and we would both concentrate fire on the big guy's head and face instead of getting out of his way. It worked, but, it didn't just work. It was fucking pathetic. We dropped him like you drop a cow in a slaughterhouse chute, the door opened, and the regular enemies never even spawned. We moved on to the next cutscene. So, yes, as I say, it worked, but guess what?

We really didn't feel like playing any more. So we didn't. And for my part, I kept right on not doing that for four years solid.

Look. It's one thing to force a co-op focus. I like playing games by myself over anything, but I also love co-op and one-on-one stuff, even the occasional free-for-all. I couldn't beat RE5 for a long time because I had no one dependable to do it with, but when I did, the game revealed delicious flavors and textures. That it was no longer really scary is a separate matter. It is another thing entirely to make a puzzle whose solution is not to solve it, but instead, to shoot it in the head until it dies. On that day, they told me in no uncertain terms they wanted nothing to do with me, or "my sort". So, it worked, but it didn't work, unless it was a clear message from the designers: this is no place for the faithful. Something bad has happened here. Go, and be free. So I did. Left the franchise to toil under the sigil of the beer bong and the Greek letters, or whatever the fuck it is that makes a series literally lobotomize itself. It was also even less frightening than 5, to the point that it wasn't, not at all. I guess in one of the sections I fought a zombie all alone in a dark, empty parking structure, which is something I'm afraid of in real life just because of the aesthetics and the echo of the sound and the prevailing quality of the light. So that wasn't complete bullshit, like the whole fucking university after that, after which I quit from sheer not giving a fuck anymore. Games rarely drive me to this point because I rarely pick or toil through games that aren't any fucking good. That's what happens when goodwill built is counteracted by incrementally enshittified product. My natural defenses for my own time and quality of leisure experience a critical delay.

Well. I guess after that, they felt that way too, maybe, because while I was either actively turning my nose up or merely not paying attention, they released a completely terrifying new RE that took place in some hideous goddamn Louisiana backwater fen. It looked good, people said it was a returm to form, but I wasn't ready to open my heart yet. "Swamp people, huh?" I sneered, well after it was out. "What, they have a sleepover, binge True Detective season 1 and get really into the Deliverance soundtrack?" 

However! However! When I saw that Village [and I did write about this, I think] took place in or near a castle, and would feature some kind of [potential] lycanthrope, my whole body shook. The shaking was the thud of a harpoon sinking into my blubber. Fuckers had me again. I know now that I was quite wrong about 7 and playing Village was indeed a return to form and perhaps even the foundation for new heights)

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-TWO

Games of the Fuckin Year: Pokemon Violet/Scarlet/Pokemon Legends Arceus: Perhaps the most flasgship year for the series that I can think of as it related to releases which affected me personally, but also, it can be objectively stated. This is the year Pokemon HOME functionality really came into its own, as the depth and breadth of games it serves reached comfortable operating mass. The Pearl/Diamond remakes also dropped! Crazy. I had fun, but they weren't like, FPGotFY level. 

People complained about how Arceus looked but I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not saying that to be iconocalstic or deliberately obtuse, though I would completely understand if you didn't believe me about that because it pretty much sounds like I am, and also because it is known that I enjoy being iconoclastic. I don't even mean that as a person who came up straight up RBY graphics is all the Pokemon there is to see, so everything ever since has been a stairway to a constantly rising heaven. I am sure that this effect I am describing has a piece to do with what I actually mean, but it is not central to the point. 

Here it is: like Skyward Sword before it, Arceus is not attempting to astonish with the kinds of HD fidelity other games and indeed trends in gaming seem to take for granted as a sign of baseline functionality, rather than aesthetic aim. I mean, if you want me to be the one to say that there are literally PlayStation 2 games that look better than Arceus, I'll say it. What? It happens to even be true! The people that make games like Gran Turismo or Metal Gear Solid or Mass Effect--series which jump out in my mind as really accomplishing high fidelity in significant, full-spectrum ways that serve the piece as a whole--deliver the kind of polish and fidelity to realspace that they do because that is the one of the pillars of their mission, because it is critical to the presentation and feel of the game. That pillar does not exist in the House of the Electric Mouse, so the cars in Forza 2 still look better, in a way, than anything in Arceus, or Violet/Scarlet. That can matter to you or not matter; it does not matter to me. 

I love looking at the new Pokemon games. They are a feast for the eyes. They make my eyes happy. I love inhabiting the worlds they've created, they way time passes and light changes, the way things glitter and flash and reflect, the waterfalls, the woods, the paint, the color balance, the movement and life all around you as you traverse this amazing topography in varied and interesting ways and interact with vibrancy at every turn, at every level, and around every corner. The original cartidges, holding the very first Pokemon games, through some form of alchemy, marshalled their pixels in order to look interesting--every frame, every place, every 'mon interesting. All these places and people endure in the mind. Gran Turismo, by contrast, is showing me a real-life transcription of something I don't give a fuck about. In essence, they are saving me a trip I was never going to take to do something I was never going to do. In their defense, I would, at least, take them up on their offer before I took the actual trips.

I guess cars and guns should look perfect in racing and shooty games, but this is an adventure game ensconcing a strategy RPG rooted in little pictures of creatures a person drew. 

Just ask yourself, as a perceiver: when I look, when I look to see what is there, do I see what is not there? And then, do I blame what I see for not being what I see?

Let us meditate on this, re: games, re: culture, and re: all aspects of life. Amen.

These Pokemon games give me hope for the future. They are some of the only things that do! Amen, amen, amen.

Runner-Up: Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Most fun I've had looking at Kirby and playing Kirby since The Crystal Shards! This game is funmax to the limit.

Honorable Mentions: Sonic Origins (3d Sonic--well. Much ink has been spilled upon the bosom of internet detailing exactly what is and has always been wrong with Sonic games. I don't play the sport myself, I just love Sonic when I can, when they let me. So the GBA Sonics, those were all awesome and I played and loved them, but Sonic Adventure 2: Battle was the only half-decent 3D one, and I think this position is buoyed by various subjective criteria that don't even really hold water. Frontiers, though, brought me only joy, joy complete and condensed and entire--until it proved it was still a fucking Sonic game by making me play pinball so shitty I walked away from the game. Why the fuck didn't anyone stop that shit from happening? Maybe someday I'll come back and finish it) Tunic (wow) Dying Light Platium Edition (all I ever wanted was a zombie game where you could jump around and do parkour shit like a person actually might, instead of running and stopping in any one of four exciting directions--but first, you must turn, hestiatingly, on the spot. When I was playing it, I had a lot of Game of the Fuckin Year thoughts, but it's really just that it did something I have needed video games of this kind to do for more than decade. Fucking awesome, great game, everyone should play it)

TWO THOUSAND ND TWENTY-THREE

Game of the Fuckin Year: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Presented without comment. What comment could be necessary?

Runner-Ups: Super Mario Bros Wonder & Cocoon. As should be common knowledge out there by now, Super Mario World was the first video game I ever played. The second or third video game I ever owned, however, along with a copy of Tetris, was a copy of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe for the Game Boy Color. So, the basic Super Mario formula is of enormous significance to me. This, the latest entry in that hallowed lineage, delivered such potent, delicious play in this vein that I don't think I was ever unsmiling as I played it. I cannot verify for certain, but it is possible that I may even have been grinning like a loon the whole time. Did I giggle? Did I sing little tunes, in between short gasps of delight? Maybe.

Cocoon was as short and deliciously sweet a time as I have ever delighted in. Pennies Arcade Guys talked perfectly about it and it is why I checked it out, so I refer you to said write-up. 

Honorable Mentions: Pizza Tower (while I have not personally played it--yet--even watching a buddy play this game for thirty seconds tells you how fucking great it is, period, no disambiguation. Any player that spent time in their torrid, prurient youth with Warioland 4 will know what I mean when I say that I don't need to play it to know that it is like a crack rock of pure, hilarious, white-hot fun) 

TWWENNYYYYY TWENNYYYYYYY FOOOOOOOOOOOOORE

Game of the Fuckin Year: As you know, Unicorn Overlord snags the top notch this year. It's okay to just get it out of the way, as nothing else is coming out this year that would register on its axis. This was a flagship year for me personally playing tons and tons and tons of video games. I wonder why I felt such a pressing, urgent need to be a fully transported into a simulated reality as possible.

Special Case: The Final Fantasy games I played, VII through XII, probably saved my life, as things do sometimes. They are each unqualified masterpieces of the highest order. I guess I really didn't feel like going though XIII again, or listening to it again is really the issue, because I sure love looking at it and playing it. But I really want to play XIII-2 and Lightning Returns. So we will see what the future holds. Also I need to go back and play I though VI soon. Maybe sometime after 2028 I can buy the system I'll need to play XV and XVI, or get a real computer or something.

Balatro gets an honorable mention on the same order as Inscryption--have not played it, probably won't, but the aesthetics, design factors and the enjoyment and fascination I have seen it bring to Ezra and to others secures it a place. Violet/Scarlet (the bulk of the hours I put into these games actually clocked in after the expansions dropped, so beginning roughly January 2024 I ran them into the fucking ground. They were already world-class in my estimation, but know this: the full and complete editions of these games is like the erection of a Pokémon Babylon. This is the pinnacle of a civilzation, and tales may one day be told of riches and wonders that the world no longer holds.)

*

Ok! Next thing next time here on Factually Game Theory 2024! My little comments, having turned into several lengthy treatises and digressions, have made today beyond unwieldy as it is and may have finally crossed into the territory that even I, and not in jest as usual, might say uses too many words.

Ok peace, think about how I have maybe played over one thousand five hundred hours of video games this year, I know I will

--JL

*Having managed to bring Soul Calibur into this, I may as well admit to you that I bought Soul Calibur IV as well. All right, all right. Also Bravely Default for the 3DS and Guitar Hero III. Might have to return GHIII, though. Apparently any random fucker is entitled to a pound of my flesh as entry to the exhange for one of those fucking plastic guitars for the 360. Think not upon the true, actual asking price.