u/SawkyScribe

One of the joys of patient gaming is finding some sensational golden oldies or super niche titles and having a deep and personal relationship with them divorced from popular public discourse. Sometimes you love these games so much, you try and share them with other people, and sometimes that goes really poorly. Far removed from hype, or omnipresent online chatter, your gaming co-pilot may be unfamiliar with, and consequently, very confused by this fan translated 22 year old PS2 JRPG. To ensure you and your gaming partner have the best experience possible, here are some golden rules I follow.

**Inform them about what they're playing**

It sounds simple, but giving a bit of foregrounding about what the game is like and the context it was released into does a lot to lessen the mental load of the person playing. "Dude don't look anything up, just play it" is not the sales pitch you think it is. Do your best to get the person excited and informed about what they're getting into.

**Validate their grievances**

Going backwards in time or playing something avant garde may mean controls, menus, or gameplay loops may not be in line with modern standards which will confuse and frustrate the uninitiated. Telling them the camera handling like ass is actually a metaphor for the character's deteriorating mental state is probably going to annoy rather than placate. Let them know their complaints are valid and try to keep morale up

**Do it in service of the art and not your ego**

There is a silly but real part of ourselves that wants people to think we are cool because we like and understand cool art. Make sure you are putting the game front and center so the new player can have their own relationship with the game. Don't gatekeep information or make yourself the fount of knowledge just to feel smart, empower the other player to learn the game too

**Don't vicariously live through them**

Your first experience with a game was probably not the "optimal" experience of a game. You went into Undertale with some spoilers or had to use a guide to beat some of the bosses in Shadow of the Colossus. Grant your buddy the same grace, and allow them to just have the experience they're having. Do not deny them puzzle hints so they can "feel the satisfaction of solving it themself", let them unoptimize the game the same way you did.

Hopefully some of these tips make it easier to share that one GBA game that only sold a 4 digit number of copies. Be patient, and happy gaming!

Not to feed into negative stereotypes about men, but my first time living alone, my apartment looked more of a drug den than it did a home. Weeks of sleeping on a mattress with no bed frame and walls that were jaundiced yellow and undecorated. I did little more than buy the essentials slowly over time, but the one thing I was missing was a chair for my overly loved desk. That was until one fateful day, I saw a black office chair in our building's garbage room!

She was in pretty rough shape. The cheap pleather cover had as much coverage as a man losing his battle with male pattern baldness, and the wheels were so gunked up with mystery goo that they left a sickly black trail wherever I moved it. It truly did belong in the trash, but it had a tall back, and it was free, so into the apartment it went.

For the following year, she felt my only real friend in that lonely room. I spent many a day and night, hammering out essays on my wobbly desk that was held together with zip ties and a prayer. I would collapse into it after a long day of classes or work, and slither into it to watch cartoons when I couldn't be bothered to do anything else.

In the summer, when I sat on it shirtless, the last little remnants of the pleather would cling to my back like scales, and in the winter, my overhanging blanket would be blackened by the ooze coming from the wheels.

Graduation came and went, and the warm long December days signalled it was time for me to move out. I packed up all 7 items of furniture I owned, but returned the chair to the garbage room where I found it. Rest easy girl, thanks for all of the support, lumbar and more, you gave me that year.

Life has been difficult and unkind for a while now, so at the suggestion of a friend, I played the Outer Wilds. I had heard a lot of incredible things about the game over the years, and I thought that a space faring adventure would be just the thing to lift my spirits during this challenging season I have been facing. I fear that the message of this hopeful game was unfortunately lost on me.

The start of the game is daunting. Before you is an entire solar system where each celestial body houses a dense network of secrets and answers to the grander mystery of what is causing the universe to reset every 22 minutes. That confusion slowly blossoms into a feeling of wonder as your understanding of what’s going on starts to crystalize in your mind. My playthrough began to feature more and more milestone discoveries like conquering the depths of Ash Twin or making my way to the cosmic marvel that was the White Hole Station. One after another, I was lining up achievements and then that all slowed down and I felt more lost than I did at the start of the journey.

The longer things went on, the more the impossibility of the task laid in front of me began to mirror the problems I’d been facing in my own life. I went back retracing my steps hoping to find some overlooked clue the same way I aimlessly amble up and down winding back roads as if I’ll happen upon an opportunity to change my life somewhere on the side of the street. I clung to the safety and familiarity of my ship even when it was an active detriment to my progress the same way I find myself clinging to the warmth of my bed when any hope of tomorrow being different necessitates me going out into the world. Attempts at making some headway went from being measured in minutes to complete orbital periods. I’d click my tongue and defeatedly restart a cycle the way that I promise myself that this was ‘just a bad start to the day, I’ll sleep it off and respond to that text, or send in that job application tomorrow’.

A Short Stay in Hell is a novella I read this year about people trapped in Hell, with their only means of escape being them finding the book that contains the story of their lives in a library of infinite books. It is a sickeningly depressing story about how recursion and the unquantifiable senselessness of life will strip a person of all they are, and each 22 minutes with no progress made began to remind me of this. Cycle after cycle, I would watch every star that galactified the galaxy blink out of existence and watched the numbing blackness of entropy be scorched away by the death of my own sun. Each star was every minute that I had lived, all falling away and bringing me back to this same miserable moment in time where was waking up at home wondering what I could possibly do next

Eventually, with much coaching, I began to put the final pieces of the puzzle together and journeyed to the heart of Dark Bramble to bring the adventure to a close. I watched all the people I met along the way gather round the camp fire and play their little symphony as the end of all they’ve ever known started to dissolve around them. This is the thesis statement of the Outer Wilds, that in a cruel, uncaring, and meaningless universe, life is a miracle. That in the face of an inevitable end that will have made a mockery of everything we ever set out to achieve, we will still choose the ephemeral joys of finding connections and making music. It pains me to say, I found myself unmoved by this idea.

Throughout the entire game, aside from the creaking of your ramshackle spaceship and the ambient noise of alien worlds, the game is silent, save for the music played by the travellers across the solar system. The songs they play are beacons of comfort in a frightening world, and they don’t stop playing till the last star is gone from the sky. It’s a hopeful song, and Emily Dickinson had a poem about songs of hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul,

and sings the tune without the words,

and never stops at all.

What a lovely notion that is. No matter how harrowing life may seem, just remember that the song of hope keeps playing from within and from without. I wish this gave me greater comfort, but to shamelessly steal from John Green to conclude my thoughts.

“The song of hope is always playing, but you can’t always hear it.”

Edit: thank you for all the kind words and spirited discussion! I'd just like to apologize for an erroneous comment about the lack of music in the game. I was playing with friends so there was a lot of chatter and the volume was on low so I didn't notice the music much. Please feel free to share your favorite tracks in the comments!

I know it's a fools errand to complain about word choices on the internet. Someone comes up with a novel way to describe something, and everyone else latches onto it instead of coming up with their own way of explaining it, it spreads, and then it loses all meaning.

Performativity, in my experience was a critique levied at others in social justice spaces who were doing actions that looked meaningful but didn't actually produce results. 'Performative activism' was a call out of this behavior and was usually paired with advice on what to do instead.

Then more recently, there were complaints of performative men, guys who pretend to have certain hobbies and interests just to lure in women. This is predatory and embarrassing behavior, but in the grand scheme of what men do to women, it's not the worst offence. I also felt bad for the folks who just genuinely liked Jane Eyre or like me who use tote bags.

This brings us to the present and I think performativity has lost all meaning. Performativity is now a catch-all diss on people you don't believe to genuine in their words or actions. Someone liking a niche album is performative, someone commenting on a new policy they don't like is performative, telling people to not support controversial figures is performative- everything is artifice!

It feels like a complete non-complaint because it presupposes that someone is saying or doing things inauthentically, but how do you prove that? The social justic roots of complaints of performativity at least came paired with a road to redemption, versus its current iteration which is just telling people to 'quit doing all that'.

The trackpad is really funny to me. In a world where executives were quaking in their boots that mobile games were going to supercede traditional console games, it felt like a bit of a desperate bid to rope angry birds players to the PlayStation. There was a fair bit of buzz when this thing was announced, with people speculating how devs could make the most of the input device but I feel like that never came to fruition.

I can only think of two notable instances of touchpad use in any games I played. InFamous Second Son had a very rudimentary mini game where you dragged your finger on a scanner. The Witcher 3 did something I quite liked where different swipes on the trackpad opened different menus. This should've been a standard feature in every game.

Aside from that... not much hey? I would've loved if you could use it to scrub through the a playbar on YouTube at least.

One of the excuses for all the xenophobia has been that foreigners are 'criminals' damaging the moral fabric of the country. If that's the true, wait till they hear about the criminality happening in their local communities!

The rates of gender based violence in South Africa are sickening. I'm going to leave a link to the government's statistics on the matter but it paints a rather hideous picture. Of the women surveyed, one-tenth experienced some kind of financial abuse, one third of all women deal with some form of sexual or physical violence, and over half gave dealt with controlling partners. The scariest thing of all is the rates of intimate partner violence. You are orders of magnitude more likely to be r*ped or killed by a friend, family member, or a partner than a stranger.

We know who's doing this, but why didn't I see headlines about vigilante justice against the offenders? People will drag a Zambian shop owner into the streets, but the uncle who's wife walks around with a swollen shut eye never gets a talking to. Zimbabwean families are driven from their homes but your friend's ex who sends her death threats on WhatsApp daily is a free man. They complain about Nigerians taking their jobs when the perverted maths teacher gets to keep his.

I'm not saying migrants are incapable of committing these harms, but it's certainly not like they imported the rampant misogyny that is so common place in the country. You can drive out every legal and illegal immigrant in the country, but there is a sickness deep in the minds of men in South Africa that poses a much more imminent danger to the public than people without papers do on average.

Pokemon Black & White are heralded as having the best story in the franchise's history, with Team Plasma objecting to the series status quo of subjecting captured animals to magical dog fights. They advocate that people should release their Pokemon back into the wild to live freely. This is a very compelling premise for a Pokemon story, but many people were let down when at the 11th hour, the game turns around and reveals that none of it was true, all that philosophical navel gazing about the nature of Pokemon trainers was just a front for Ghetsis to claim power over the people. A lot of folks online lament how this makes their stories painfully two-dimensional, but I think I've found a reading that adds a bit more nuance into the game.

Firstly, we need to understand Ghetsis' claims about Pokemon being subjugated by humans has almost no basis in reality. Across all the mainline games, you very rarely see Pokemon being mistreated by people, and the only on-screen example we see of abuse are Team Plasma themselves kicking a Munna. Secondly, Pokemon trainers serve an important guardianship role in this universe. Not only are Pokemon friends and partners to people, but the player character routinely megalomaniacs from ruling the world thanks to their ability to catch and raise Pokemon. So with that preamble out of the way, tell me if this story sounds familiar.

A charismatic American political upstart spreads lies and misinformation to climb to power. They claim that completely normal, healthy, and necessary part's of the country's social makeup are actually deeply immoral. They decry the elites and those who horde power tell the average citizen they should empower his party to enact decisions that directly go against the common people's own interests. Over time, it becomes abundantly obvious they are guilty of the very same crimes they are accusing others of committing, and none of this was based in ideology- it was all a selfish bid for power.

Pokemon Black & White is not a meditation on the core gameplay conceit of the series, it's a rejection of populist thinking. They show the dangers of a group of bad actors using dishonest rhetoric to sow divisions between people, and that the real joy of life is instead bonding with others and creating a more nuanced picture of how the world works. In Japan, the name of the region the game takes place in is Issyu, and I think Bulbapedia captures the beauty of this name beautifully:

>Unova's Japanese name, イッシュ Issyu, is derived from the Japanese word for "one variety", 一種 isshu, or １種類 isshurui. According to the game director Masuda, this is to express that although the region is diverse in species and race, they are all the same as living creatures when seen from a distance.

Anyone who looks at the great diversity of people and ways of living and tries to boil it down to 'Black and White' thinking if you'll pardon the pun, probably isn't capturing the whole picture.

At the end of the game, Team Plasma's evil machinations are brought to a halt when the gym leaders of the region come to aid you in the final battle. These gym leaders are also pillars of their communities, artists, custodians, pilots, people who have made it their life's work to integrate and serve those around them rallying together to prevent lies and half truths from tearing people apart from one another.

It's not shakespearean, you don't need to be familiar with the writings of Samuel P. Huntington to follow along with the story, but looking back, I feel there was a lot more happening in Pokemon Black and White than what people are willing to give it credit for.

I love my gaming consoles, but I can't lie when I say each console generation is less exciting than the last. Rumors abound with when the PS6 and NextBox are releasing, but it's hard to drum up hype when you know it's just going to be the last thing but with extra tera flops? Nah, for me, the real excitement was what was happening in the Handheld scene.

With a handheld, you could never tell what you were getting. While the GameBoy to GameBoy Advance was pretty straightforward, boom, out of nowhere the next console has 2 screens and an input method never before seen in a gaming device. The PSP, which was a miniature PlayStation gets a follow up and this thing is as much a mobile phone as it is a gaming device. There was so much variability in the form factor that just seeing how the console looked was grounds for excitement.

The games were no exception to this rule. With lower power and often less inputs than a console controller had, game devs got really creative with what they could do. Games would use microphones, cameras, and touch controls to make whacky or surprisingly complex games. You could go from the chilled out life simulation of Nintendogs to the crazy combat of The World Ends with You that happened across both DS screens. Seriously, one boss in Phatom Hourglass genuinely has more sauce than 10 shrines in Breath of the Wild put together.

While less drastic these days, what few handhelds we have left are still the ones doing the most interesting things in gaming. The Steam Deck made portable PC gaming possible and the Switch 2's joycon are an interesting closing of the gap between console and PC inputs. It's fun, but I do miss the days where you could get a cheaper handheld and what you traded in power and performance, you more than made up for in unique gameplay experiences.

I was a real busy bee in college, worked 3 jobs, had classes, was very active in student societies and clubs, and I loved going out for a night on the town.There's many a shameful day I woke up with my pants around my ankles, face down in a cold pizza on the floor because I was so tuckered out from the events of the day before. Whether I was fried from the horrors of bartending, or fighting against the tender grasp of sleep trying to finish assignments, my mind often drifted to the sweet days I'd spent slumped in front of my PS4 at my parents' house. I didn't bring it with me to college, so gaming was a distant memory aside from the few games that could run on my shitty Asus Vivobook. One of those games was Slay the Spire, my most loyal companion through undergrad.

I come here to preach the gospel, but those who have played the game extensively know that it's hard to capture the hypnotic experience of starting a new run in this game. Night after sleepless night, I would find myself in my Drawers skirting the line between wakefulness and dream, idly imagining what build I was going to spec for on this attempt.

The real beauty of this game aside from it's great art, intriguing lore, and cavernous gameplay depth is it is incredibly flexible in how you can engage with it. Yes, you can increase the difficulty modifiers to have what is an exhilarating run filled with mental flow charts and RNG management, or more often for me, you can rejoice in playing a game that can be beaten with one hand while the other is flicking a joint into your one good coffee mug that is acting as an ashtray.

I'm not so much saying 'go play StS', I'm more saying if you are also a walking husk in a non-stop relay race between class/work and your home, return to the lethargic bliss that is the world's most flexible and inviting rougelite to relieve your woes for a bit

Coming to terms with your own otherness is a really painful process of elimination. It's a game of constantly throwing your sense of self at a wall and seeing if it finally sticks to something. I have found a lot of joy and solidarity with those who live in the margins of the world, I take comfort in their bravery and lifelong quests to discover themselves, but in a lot of cases, they don't struggle with the basic question that I do- *where are you from?* Had I read *Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds* by David C Pollock and Ruth Hill, I might have not struggled so much to have an answer.

*Third Culture Kids* is a comprehensive study of children who spend their developmental years outside their parent's home culture, but not entirely in the culture of their host country, instead occupying a unique third space between these two worlds. It catalogues everything from the way kids become TCKs, to the struggles they face, to the strengths it equips them with.

Growing up, I traveled a lot with my parents for their work, and my world became this ever-revolving carousel of teachers and friends coming and going from my life, and me also constantly jumping on and off the ride, never quite knowing where I was going to land. By the time I returned to my home country, I could not speak the language, I did not understand the culture, and I did not know how to integrate at all, I was just this incongruent piece in the make-up of my home country. It left me culturally homeless for many years, and I still deal with a lot of angst about it today, but reading this book has really helped giving language to the things I'm feeling.

What felt like a fancy kind of victimhood was reframed by this book as a different kind of lens I see the world through. I felt comforted by the assurance that this patchwork identity doesn't make me defective, it readies me to navigate an increasingly interconnected world. It also has a particularly touching section on how to get ready to move from one place to the next which I would have loved as a kid because truth be told, it felt like getting my umbilical cord ripped out lol.

If you have any confusion about your identity because of where you grew up, or if you are a parent who have children who are going to live outside of their passport country, I feel like this is required reading. You won't regret it.

It's been nearly 11 years since I first played and fell in love with Undertale. Like a lot of people, this game completely infested every cell in my brain for a good long while, but after a failed genocide run, I finally managed to get out of the choke hold the game had on me and set it aside for a very long time. Unfortunately, the itch always comes back, so I fired up the game for another run.

Nested deep in some forgotten crevice of the game is that choosing the player name 'Frisk' had some drastic impact on the game. With this knowledge, I began the hellish gauntlet that was UNDERTALE: hard mode. Tougher enemies attacked you from the jump, healing items were less abundant, and the game took on a slightly harsher edge in dialogue. I was gearing up to re-experience the game like never before, and then Toby Fox's character avatar came in to inform me that there was no more content beyond this opening dungeon. I sat dumbfounded for a moment and then shortly had a little laugh to myself. This is what I loved so much about the game- it really is a very stupid and silly romp.

If you weren't there at the time, it's nearly impossible to describe how this game spread across the internet like a virulent disease. Every social media platform was flooded with memes, fan art, merch, cosplays, fan fictions, covers, remixes, playthroughs, and theories... so many theories. Part of what got me to stop playing the game was somewhere in the chaos, all of this became serious business for some people and a lot of toxicity began to define the fan base. Having replayed the game so recently, it feels so ridiculous to get upset about anything to do with a game where you have to get an aeroplane to confess its feelings for you.

The game is not shy about admonishing the kind of behavior fans engaged in. The game's central antagonist is a character who became nothing but a black pit of hatred and rage because he experienced the world over and over till he squeezed all the joy out of it. Undertale is such a well crafted game. It's got constantly engaging puzzle-like battles with an unforgettably charming cast, and one of the best soundtracks of all time. I love it, but I really love the reminder sometimes that you get to love something, and then you should move on before you sour the experience for yourself.

Hi there folks, terrible time to be a PlayStation fan hey? The news about them canning physical production has been really disheartening to hear. I think the average pundit will make comments about how most people buy digital anyway, and it's a select group of diehards who care about this stuff. I have been living in the global south for about 11 years, so I just wanted to talk about some particular use cases for why physical media is so important.

Onboarding New Players

I've lived in places with horrible mark ups on games, no digital storefront for that region, and e-commerce services like paypal not being usable, so it was prohibitively expensive or incredibly inconvenient. A copy of the Uncharted trilogy would run you $120 three years after launch for example.

The ability to just lend someone a game was not just a major source of community, it was kind of a necessity to play games in the harsh economic climate. Yes, gaming subscriptions like PS Plus and GamePass exist, but with the ever ongoing war on password sharing, lending games remains the easiest way to get new fans of a series.

The internet is forever, until it isn't

A lot of people having been talking about revoking licenses being a huge issue with digital game libraries, which is true, but I also just worry about the internet in general.

I've dealt with weeks or even months long bouts of wifi disconnectivity due to expensive internet fees, lacking internet infrastructure, or the good ol' government internet shutdown during moments of high political tensions.

With many places becoming increasingly authoritarian, and climate change becoming more and more disruptive to public infrastructure, your ability to access your library is going to become less and less of a guarantee. I know that sounds like small potatoes, but art is all that really holds our hearts together when things are looking bleak.

We don't know what's next

I can't look into a crystal ball and tell you what the world will look like in the next 10 years. I won't be so pessimistic as to say the apocalypse is coming nor will I be so naive as to assume everything's gonna be hunky dory. What does give me some peace of mind is knowing that I get to carry the things I care about with me, and this news really eats away at that sense of optimism.

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It's not a hot take to say that Akira Toriyama is one of the greatest mangaka and greatest character designers of all time. You can't find someone with a bad word to say about his art all the way from the 80s through to the 2000s. Around 2013 however, there was a shift in his style that has been increasingly disliked over time and that was his drawing of characters with very lean builds. I've seen dozens of complaints about the slimmed down look of the characters, and I wanted to take some time to try and say why I think it works in the modern context of Dragon Ball.

I believe it is mentioned towards the end of Z and somewhere in the Goku Black arc that Goku and Vegeta had hit the peaks of what their physical bodies could reach, and that anymore power from there would have to come from technique and transformations. Following this, raw musculature and physical strength plays a greatly de-emphasized role in how fights were won in Super and that's reflected in the leaner character designs.

Goku only manages to earn Beerus' respect through power he was granted by others, Hit threw the tournament because of his fondness for Goku, Trunks beat Zamasu through the strength of the remaining survivors, and Jiren says it himself that he lost to U7's power of trust.

I think this shift away from the idea of raw power is found in the transformations that defined the series. SSG is a power granted by ritual by kind hearted saiyans, SSB is a power obtained through complete mastery of one's spiritual energy, and UI is a power gained from a harmonious connection between body and mind. having these powers be represented by the hulking frame Goku had during his first fight with Freiza for example I think would detract from the idea their new strength was coming from greater internal revelations.

I'm probably not going to be changing any hearts and minds with this post but it still means something to me. I think there's something sweet about the idea this man in his 60s who spent his whole life creating heroes and monsters who were sculpted like greek gods saw something different at the end of his career. He might have seen that there's a great power that comes from self-mastery and the good you do for others that has nothing to do with the body you've been given.