Hieron and its Consequences

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I should also note that there are things that might be considered spoilers for Twilight Mirage and aspects of Hieron and Marielda. I’m a bad judge of what people think of as spoilers, though. It’s mostly in broad terms. Skip the sections that begin "Much later in the show we'll find out," "One example of consequences," and "An example: there is a moment in" (and the 3 following paragraphs) if you don't want later-season specifics; in general if you're very sensitive to that kind of thing, maybe come back to this.

Ignorance and Consequences

In episode 12 of Autumn in Hieron, the first season of Friends at the Table, a player does something I’m still in love with. In the decade and a half I’ve been playing tabletop roleplaying games it stands out as my favorite moment of tabletop roleplay of all time.

There are plenty of contenders. It’s hard not to give that to the time a Bard in the game I was running performed a song (in real life) for a potlatch festival for her character’s Sweet 16. Or when a player incapacitated another and then died falling off a building (three times) while trying to break back into the room to add their ear to a necklace. It’s hard to place it above inventing a gym bro to date a football bro in the middle of the tragic horror apocalypse game Ten Candles, or another Ten Candles game where Cathy (like, Ack! Cathy) rolled a half-dozen successes (and kept narrative control) on the last roll, or any moment when a player I’m GMing for lights up for the first time, suddenly understanding the appeal of what we’re doing.

There are even moments in other Actual Play podcasts, like Adventure.exe or The Adventure Zone or The Film Reroll or Interstitial, when character and world meet to bring about a decision that is inspired, surprising, and inevitable.

None of those, though, had the same impact on me as the decision to feed a Word Eater "ignorance."

*****

Friends at the Table is an Actual Play podcast about critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interactions between good friends (at least that's what they say at the top of most episodes). It started in September of 2014, with episode 12 happening in December of that year.

At this point they've run three seasons (plus one mini-season) of Hieron, a post-post-apocalyptic, post-Fantasy world where orcs are archivists obsessed with patterns, the world is a palimpsest of the gods' failed experiments, and the cancerous nothing known as the Heat and the Dark looms.

Between those seasons they've also explored a science fiction universe inspired by cyberpunk, mecha anime, and labor called the Divine Universe. They create all of this fiction by playing tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, Follow, and a number of other systems where they "play to find out what happens" live in front of microphones, then edit and release it on a weekly basis.

I started listening sometime late in 2014 and have continued to since. Just as they are approaching their fifth anniversary, they are also wrapping up the world of Hieron. For both sentimental and topical reasons, then, I'm focusing on the Hieron seasons of the show for this essay. To that end, I've relistened to all of those seasons in the last month or so. It's all still incredibly compelling.

*****

So: Word Eaters turn out to be what made goblins into what they are. You know goblins, probably. Little green humanoids, barely capable of language, fodder for adventurers, obsessed with trinkets. Loose anti-Semitic stereotypes, in the case of most Fantasy fiction. In Hieron, they howl in the distance. They also invite the players into a cozy home and let them read books, drink tea, and rest. They are people, some more dispossessed than others.

While resting with one of the friendlier goblins, the adventurers find out about Kindrali (also known as "He Who Remembers the Day," which becomes relevant two years later). They seek out Kindrali. They find him. He is a little off. Quick to resort to sarcasm and smirks. They find him again. Kindrali is a decayed corpse, who happens to be in the same room as the false Kindrali they are talking to. They put two and two together.

In a typical session of a tabletop roleplaying game, this is a very well put together fight. The GM has established an NPC that can give some color to the world while remaining unreliable. The players find him on good information, and then have something to go on after. A battle is had and won despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

Instead of that action, a single word is said.

*****

My latest relisten helped me realize that there are two things that Friends at the Table does particularly well, especially when it comes to Seasons of Hieron. One of those I won't get into until after I finish the story of the Word Eater. The other, which I'll develop alongside that story, is what I think the GM and the players do best. They build critical worlds with aplomb, characterize themselves impeccably, and have genuinely funny social banter. One of the other things they focus on, though, is dramatic irony.

Regularly, the players will know things their characters don't. They play through this. The characters make choices that are against their own best interests, because the characters don't know any better (even though the players do).

Based on what they've produced, this seems to be an internal guideline - play into dramatic irony. But I appreciate it mostly as one aspect of a broader commitment. The stories they tell are deeply committed to consequences.

*****

Much later in the show we'll find out that Word Eaters are something like incipient gods. Or, at least, that the gods were made in the same fashion. "Nothing flinched" and then there was Samol, or Hieron, the world and its avatar, one and the same. Samol’s desire to see the world full of life birthed Severea, and his desire to provide for people birthed Samothes.

The pantheon of five are rounded out by Galenica, who was birthed of the desires of people, and Samot, husband to Samothes, who stole Severea’s name when he was a Word Eater (emissaries or avatars of that same Nothing that flinched) and then apologized. Samothes and Samot then had a son, Maelgwyn, who became Samothes by murdering his father in attempt to birth a new god out of the experience of regret.

Whether Word Eater, desire, or absence of nothing, each of these gods are the speech act made material. Instead of simply doing by saying – as in an officiator declaring "I now pronounce you man and wife" effecting matrimony on two individuals – they are by saying. At the beginning of Spring in Hieron, the final season in this world, one of the players spends a few (in game) years hanging out with Samol. They develop an inside joke about how boring it was to be the first thing in the world. The refrain of that joke is simple: "There was no one to talk to."

Samol never says, to the best of my recollection, that he spoke Severea and Samothes into existence. But this is a podcast, where nothing happens unless it is said aloud. And it’s a tabletop roleplaying game, where the Lumpley Principle rules: "nothing happens, in the fiction of role-playing, unless someone says it and it's heard by others," to quote the gloss from The Big Model wiki. Hieron can’t be anything other than a speech act, because it’s a recorded conversation. And Samol is Hieron, and Samol made gods of his desires and of a Word Eater.

Whether a Word Eater or a God birthed of another’s desire, speech acts (“speech ontos” seems a little pretentious even for me) are fickle. They eat "regret" and become tyrants, obsessed only with reshaping a world-eating cancer into a productive force. They focus on the concept of a storm and blanket the world in ice. They steal the names of cities, causing civil war.

This Kindrali that the adventurers encounter is in some ways the most fickle of all. He stole the city’s name and was unsatisfied, consuming more and more words. Which is another reason it is poetic that he ends up being dispatched by just one word.

*****

I wrote a very long version of the following argument about a half-decade ago. I present it in a truncated form here for two reasons. The first is that I want to make it clear what my convictions are when it comes to these sorts of games. The second comes at the end of this minor section.

Tabletop roleplaying games are at their best when there is a dialectical tension between the GM and the players. The GM rules the world. She sets up situations, guides the players through them, plays the people they encounter, and enforces the rules. The players take control of one person within the world, embodying them to the best of their abilities. When they press hard enough, the world breaks.

When they push even harder, though, there is a synthesis. The players take over the vestigial roles of the GM. This is a relic of the history of these games that I don't need to get into. But they become, rather than co-authors in the creation of a story, its cooperative owners. The person who runs the game - usually the one with access to the books (the capital, so to speak) - is dispossessed of their control, becoming nothing more than someone who can adapt to the new norm, get reeducated according to it, or wither away. The stakes are a little lower than real life, so the players probably don’t have to literally take The Coup’s advice.

These games start in social interactions: friends come together to hang out and have an activity to participate in while doing so. They become commodified by way of rulebooks, social capital, and the simple fact of organizing time outside of wage labor. When they really work, though, the commodity is overthrown. People go from loose hangouts to structured, commodified hangouts, to hangouts they are truly equal in. And they hopefully learn to better relate to each other because of the game played.

That second thing? It’s the thing that Friends at the Table does so well – focusing on, embracing, and exploring consequences. That’s the way to play games into their own little revolutions.

*****

Here's the story: after visiting the friendly goblin Mee Kosh, The Great Fantasmo (the Wizard, played by Nick Scratch), Throndir (the Ranger, played by Andrew Lee Swan), and Hadrian (the Paladin, played by Art Martinez-Tebbel) scout out some caves to find Kindrali. They do. He talks to them. They discover the corpse of Kindrali in the same room. The impostor Kindrali, a Word Eater, prepares to devour them. The Great Fantasmo leans into this false Kindrali and summons up his memories. He says one word.

In play and as a podcast, this involves Nick Scratch describing things his character is feeling, remembering, and projecting. Things like being a young academic, full of fear at his new surroundings and the impostor syndrome that develops from it. Worry at how people think of him. Misery at the prospect of failure. Horror at how he used to feel all these things.

In this same moment, Nick Scratch is actively characterizing The Great Fantasmo. The Wizard is cocky and self-assured to the point of absurdity, a miserable traveling partner. He is bookish in the most infuriating way possible, obsessed with learning what is right without doing anything. He is a small-minded man operating with all the tools to pretend he is as open-minded as they come. He is insufferable, and his player knows this. So his player calls upon all his small-mindedness, his pettiness, his jealousy, his insecurity, and banishes a potential god from existence.

*****

An example of consequences being a driving principle of play in Friends at the Table is the situation being described. The GM set up an encounter. It’s a big fight that caps off a portion of the adventure. The GM almost certainly spent time drawing up a sheet full of hit points, moves, character motivations, and an imagined scenario in which the players eke out victory. This disappears once it becomes clear what The Great Fantasmo is doing.

The play is too compelling, the fiction too interesting, to revert to what was prepared. It is to Austin’s credit that he recognizes this; many GMs would not. The consequences are entirely too cool to dissolve back into a discussion of how much damage one person does, regardless of the lost hours spent preparing those hit points.

Other examples abound throughout the show. In the first season of the Divine Universe, COUNTER/Weight, a player gets a girlfriend by failing a bunch of rolls in a row, only to succeed at the one that matters. It’s important because she flirts through it. Autumn in Hieron also has a moment where a character dies in combat and can only come back to life if she promises to kill Death’s son, one of her only friends. She does. Three times – he is, after all, Death’s son.

There is also the way that Austin sometimes handles failed rolls, like the one Keith (who plays Fero, the Druid, and the character who hangs out with Samol during Spring) managed in Winter in Hieron when trying to convince Uklan Tel, an orc who might be the most accomplished academic in Hieron, to make a difference. The failure leads to Uklan Tel agreeing and throwing himself into field research. Two (real life) years down the line, that field research (in Spring, which is set over ten years later) ends up with him semi-inadvertently providing materials to help an apocalyptic cult give body to an undead god-dragon in order to hasten the end of the world.

Twilight Mirage, the second season in the Divine Universe, has as many examples as the rest (though I’m boiling each down to one apiece). One that might not seem like a consequence is the last fifteen (or so) minutes of the final episode of the season. The player characters check in with Gig Kephart (also played by Keith), a livestreamer in the post-Utopian titular universe. They answer a handful of canned interview questions in ways that are wholesome, humorous, and tear-inducing.

It’s not like the consequence of mechanical failure that lead to Uklan Tel, or the strength of roleplaying(/flirting) in mechanical failure that lead to a girlfriend, or the consequence of figuring out character alignment that lead to the death of Death’s Son. It’s more about how roleplaying can lead to a compelling world with fascinating people in it and how, left alone to do their thing, they can become consequential.

*****

The moment The Great Fantasmo banishes the Word Eater comes out of two specific moves in Dungeon World. The first is Art Tebbel's. He asks "what here is Evil?" He has a quest, established in a much earlier episode; he cannot suffer an evil thing to live. The GM confirms that this Word Eater is evil. Because of that, he can't leave. His fellow adventurers must make a choice: split the party and leave, or support him. This move is used effectively throughout much of the rest of the Hieron seasons, especially in developing a complicated and beautiful relationship with another player's character.

The second is a Spout Lore roll by Nick Scratch, where he attempts to learn about the Word Eater. Scratch rolls a "mixed success," which means he learns something "interesting but not useful." The interesting fact is that the Word Eater is very old, the eater of the word that lead to the goblins becoming what they are. Before they became "goblins" they were citizens, co-creators of the city that Throndir is from. They were people, not monsters. And this Word Eater was one who ate that knowledge and continued to eat more and more.

Nick Scratch, the player of The Great Fantasmo, takes this "interesting but not useful" knowledge and runs with it. This specific Word Eater isn't content to consume regret and live forever instrumentalizing cancer. It wants more. So he gives it a new word, wrapped up in the context of himself, the character. In so doing, he establishes The Great Fantasmo. He turns subtext into text; the insufferable academic turns into a rounded-out human being (elf), with all the pettiness that involves. And he wins a fight in a tabletop roleplaying game without having to indulge in hours of rolling to hit, rolling damage, rolling to avoid damage, rolling to figure out how to do damage, and on and on.

*****

If you’ve never played in or run a tabletop roleplaying game, the importance of establishing consequences might sound like a truism. Even if you have, it probably does. What I appreciate about Friends at the Table – among many other things – is how it clarifies that it isn’t something that just happens automatically. Like gender, it’s a choice you regularly make and perform.

Consequences are hard. They can be about rewarding good play, thinking beyond what the players are doing, punishing failure in interesting ways, or making the stakes of the world clear. All of these things help shape an interesting fiction. They can also be about how we relate to each other.

Because the most regular consequence, when playing roleplaying games, is alienating your friends. Things go great until they don’t, and then the group dissolves.

It might be in a moment that upsets or triggers another player and doesn’t get worked through, and so ends up contributing to a toxic environment. Or it might be the consequence of failing to properly organize the game in the first place, leading to its slow and (seemingly) inevitable dissolution. Which leads to lost friendships, which leads to lost opportunities to think through things or to collaborate on projects. Or, at a basic level, to enjoy the company of others.

Turning the reality of consequences into themes, as Friends at the Table does, is a helpful way of imagining (or remembering) what consequences actually are. They’re failed rolls, in the sense of fucking up a social situation. They’re roleplaying too well, in the sense of being who you are at that particular moment too insistently, for good or ill. They’re moments of social beauty, when you’ve set up social situations to include people who make you want to cry because they are so good at making and doing things in this terrible world.

Fictionalizing the broad reality of consequences won’t suddenly make a listener understand something that they refuse to. Especially if they have material reasons not to, which are too easy to imagine under white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. But sometimes fiction pushes you in new directions, whether you want it to or not.

*****

The resolution to The Great Fantasmo whispering "ignorance" into the Word Eater's ear is both immediate and long-term. Immediately, the players and the GM have a moment of shock and appreciation. Long-term, Kindrali becomes a character in the mini-season of Marielda, the Word Eaters are recast as potential gods, and the whole religious structure is changed.

Around the same time as this is happening, the other group of players is on a boat. One jokes about undead pirates. A whole ontology is birthed out of that joke. Play is respected, whether it is in character (like Fantasmo's) or out of character (like the joke about zombie pirates). The whole point of an Actual Play podcast is that it isn't a story. It's a storytelling exercise that gets modified by randomization.

Which brings us to the end of this story and this analysis. Which means it’s time to talk about the other thing Friends at the Table does especially well.

**********

Fiction, Produced by Deconstruction

Here are two questions: why should you listen to people playing tabletop roleplaying games, week by week? What is it about this method of telling stories that works?

For the first, I can’t exactly say that I do. I tend to take long breaks and then catch up. Following an Actual Play podcast week to week ends up being a chore for me, as I try to remember things over the play. I end up listening in big chunks – whole seasons or arcs, ideally – sporadically. I’m also not spoiler-averse and don’t have a tendency (or material requirement) to keep up with the conversation, which helps. (Thus this behemoth of an essay, primarily about something that happened on Friends at the Table five years ago.) The release schedule has more to do with the "podcast" element than it does the "actual play," given that podcasts are business as well as art.

To the question of why do it at all, there’s a fairly obvious answer. It’s fiction. Friends at the Table is very good fiction. Themes of labor and organization co-exist with a deep sadness and frustration with the world, are shot through with joy in victory and play, and shine through in a genuinely felt world full to brimming with people. Most of whom have very good names. Perhaps you enjoy fiction? This is one way to do so.

But then, despite a number of attempts, I’ve never been able to stick with fiction podcasts. I’ve listened to a hundred or so episodes of Welcome to Night Vale (it was a weird week), a dozen or two of Strange Horizons, a handful of episodes from various Escape Artists properties, and even some of The Writer's Voice from The New Yorker. Each had their merits (some more than others), but they ultimately ended up reminding me that my brain simply doesn’t work in that way. In a very specific environment I can enjoy audiobooks. There’s something about listening to someone clearly read something off a page that immediately blanks my mind.

It even happens in Actual Play podcasts, if I’m being honest. Friends at the Table will occasionally have intro speeches – generally by Austin, playing one of the NPCs – for instance. Or The Adventure Zone will have extended descriptive sequences that are pre-written. I have to struggle to pay attention when that happens, which is very unlike the rest of the listening experience for those podcasts.

Which leads us to the second question. What works, here? There are the specific answers we’ve already addressed: strong play that leads to compelling situations with interesting resonance; structural choices that emphasize the strengths of the genre. There are also the things we’ve touched lightly on, like critical worldbuilding that uses existing tropes in new ways that undermine their racist origins, enjoyable banter among friends, and more.

All of these are procedural. They’re points about the process of the fiction, rather than the content or its themes. This is important, because what Actual Play does – and what Friends at the Table does particularly well – is to collapse form into process. It is deconstructive, even deconstructionist. The creation is the act of creating.

So what works about this method of telling stories? It’s that they don’t just tell. They show. And not like the CIA-approved maxim. They show how the decisions are come to, what is left to chance or whim, what is painstakingly crafted ahead of time or after the fact. They tell a compelling story while showing how it is made compelling.

An example: there is a moment in Spring in Hieron when Hella Varal, Lem King, and Adaire Ducarte fight a bone dragon. It’s a bravura sequence. Adaire, the Thief (played by Janine Hawkins), comes with a plan to hogtie this animated dragon corpse. Lem, the Bard (played by Jack de Quidt), makes a beautiful mess of everything while still being helpful. Hella, the Dark Knight (fka the Fighter, played by Alicia Acampora), carries the combat. Until she dies. Almost.

Near the end of combat, there is another moment. The players have succeeded so many times, only to fail. They’re fighting a dragon. That failure has to mean something. Hella is given a choice: keep a ring and get killed, or let it go and live. The dragon has been fighting for this ring the whole sequence. It’s clearly important. Plus, Hella’s girlfriend is literally the god of Death. She’s come a long way since she killed the previous god of death’s son. And the rules say you roll when you get killed. You have, roughly, a 15% chance of being totally fine; a 40% chance of getting a bargain to stay alive; and a 40% chance that your character truly, irrevocably dies. There have been a handful of these rolls across the years, and no one has failed.

The act of listening to how that gets decided is very constructive. Alicia acts in seven different ways, despite only having two options – to roll or not to, to grab the ring or not to. She works through narrative framing (obviously the hero grabs the ring to spite the dragon), character framing (Hella has been carrying this ring on her person for over a decade without thinking about it), social framing (if the GM declares this ring important, the player should obviously protect it), fictional framing (Hella’s dating Death, getting stomped on can’t possibly be that bad!), more fictional framing (the cancerous nothing they know as the Heat and the Dark is almost certainly at play and far more powerful than the Queen of Death), and more. The rest of the people on the podcast talk her through these moments, offering their opinions, providing context where they can. It’s fraught.

As I recall, Austin Walker suggests the possibility of a break, Jack de Quidt reinforces it, and Austin ultimately enforces it. They break (for five minutes, according to the published audio; who knows what that means) and come back. Alicia makes the decision she makes, and it helps clarify who Hella is at this moment, what her priorities are, what the world will continue to look like, and what the endgame of this final season in Hieron is going to look like.

I feel like it is important to reiterate here: this is all part of the text. I’m not recounting what I think must have happened based on the fictional events that transpired. I’m recounting what I’ve listened to a couple of times now. This is the fiction.

The fiction is also the history of Samol, Samot, Samothese, Severea, and Galenica, and the adventures of The Great Fantasmo and Throndir and Hadrian and Hella and Adaire and Lem and Ephrim and Fero, and the lives of Red Jack and The Lardwulf and Uklan Tel and Lenny Lenova and the Sage of the Sands and Emmanuel and Walligan Upchurch and Hedy Braum and many more. It’s the reconfiguring of Marielda and the updating maps of the world as the apocalypses come and go, and it’s the story of the development of community in the Last University and Velas and Rosemerrow and The New Archives.

It’s a Fantasy world (post-Fantasy, post-post-apocalyptic), in other words. There are a profusion of proper nouns that gain resonance only once you’ve experienced the world in which they’re set. But unlike Tolkien or Martin or Brooks or Kingdom Hearts, the way this world is told isn’t as set in stone. Or more accurately, the way the world is told includes all the deliberation, the consequences, the ignorance of people figuring it out in real time.

There are things that are supposed to grab you in a narrative. The flow, the pacing, the excitement. Crafted things. Big fights. Consequential moments. And there are the things that tend to grab me: strange choices, awkward characterizations, moments of resistance. Actual Play podcasts at their best manage a synthesis of these two kinds of taste.

What happens at the end of that (alleged) five minute break is incidental. No matter how Alicia chooses, the fact of getting to hear the choice being proposed and then made is fascinating.

What’s important is how the discussion around that break, the break itself, and the consequences of it are all part of the recording. It’s all part of the text. Remember: playing into dramatic irony – things the players know that the characters don’t – is, as far as I (a fairly avid listener) can tell, a principle of the show. The actors are alienated from their characters. The listener is alienated, because of that, from the fiction. It’s all very Brechtian. Except that it ends up producing tear-jerking, laugh-inducing, cathartic moments, just like the best bourgeois fiction.

This is what it comes down to. Friends at the Table manages to straddle that line between being deeply critical of the stories we tell because they make us feel good under the particular, deeply immiserating, iteration of capitalism we currently live under, and telling those same stories very well. It does this by actively deconstructing the stories as it tells them. Other Actual Play podcasts engage in the same deconstruction, by the fact of their form, but don’t engage with consequence the same way.

So, to ask again: why should you listen to people playing tabletop roleplaying games, week by week? What is it about this method of telling stories that works?

For the first: you shouldn’t; as a recent Variety article makes clear, the podcasting business is currently being gentrified. A platform-capitalist takeover is happening, the same way it did the web a decade and change ago. Unless you’re committed to engaging with the fringes and opposing that gentrification.

And for the second: if you’re interested in good fiction, and you’re interested in one process by which it’s made at the same time, you have something to look forward to. If you have a familiarity with tabletop roleplaying games, even better. Hearing a story be actively deconstructed as it is produced continues to be a thrill. Even five years after I started listening.





PS: Lord Ephrim, the Baron (fka the Immolator, played by Sylvi) is also an incredible character and I regret not having space for him in this. So I just want to shout out Sylvi: like everyone else on this podcast she is an inspiring roleplayer, and if there’s one episode of Friends at the Table to listen to it’s episode 9 of COUNTER/Weight, where she drives some incredible scenes.

Top 10 Games of 2018

#10 Lucah: Born of a Dream

Lucah: Born of a Dream is a top-down, 2D character action game with (I believe) fully hand-drawn art. It plays similarly to something like Hyper Light Drifter, albeit in a way I enjoy way more. I also was considering not including it on this list, because it was shown at the Playdate Pop-up, which I organize and helped curate. Then I realized that was really silly. If you want to hear me (& my co-host Bela (who also put out a great game this year that you should buy imo; I did recuse myself from that one)) talk to the lead designer and the sound designer, you're welcome to check out this episode of our old podcast.

I'm not entirely sure I'm the best equipped to talk about the themes of the game, though I would say that central to the story are questions of faith and identity. Central moments involve parishioners self-flagellating, Cardinals hosting bloodsports, and major enemies named things like Christian and Messiah. The main character, who you name at the beginning, is occasionally pointed at as a savior or as a harbinger of doom, and it is revealed late on (unless I misread something) that you have a previous name, though the character who uses it immediately reverts to the one you chose after letting it slip. I should also say that the game probably needs a content warning for ideation; it's not a happy world that you're wading through. It is a beautiful one, though, and one that is always compelling to interact with.

#9 Celeste

Celeste is absolutely not my kind of thing. I hate masocore games, and barely tolerate most platformers. It has a story barely more subtle than Braid's. Playing it on a Switch with finicky Joycons wasn't necessarily frustrating, but it definitely lead to a lot of deaths where my intent didn't match up with the execution.

I also didn't just beat the whole game, but beat every B-Side except for The Core. I think I ended up only missing three strawberries, themselves in the A-Side of The Core. I did not touch any C-Sides or go for any of the secret golden strawberries or whatever, but given that I was fully expecting to barely play past the tutorial - and that I'm not at all someone who cares about challenges, especially ones that come after I've beat a game - that feels like a kind of wild amount to have played.

#8 Rhythmcremental

A rhythm-based idle game with no real endgame. I played it long enough to get all six of the sound stings on each of the available surfaces, which is difficult because there's a bug when you hit one of the items that brings you down to something like a negative billion points.

No, there's not really anything here. I made a bad song out of this game. It's no Tap my Katamari. It's just a cool thing.

#7 Ni No Kuni 2

What an uneven game in so many ways. An incredible opening - Roland, the President, rolls into town and it gets nuked. He appears in a fantasy land lead by King Evan, a child whose father has been slowly assassinated with poison by his chief advisor. He helps the kid escape and set off to create a new nation whose primary aim is to end war, which turns into a game where you wander the world having folks sign a "Declaration of Interdependence" in order to unify, ending war.

The combat is a solid update of Quest 64, and is simple enough as is with room for complexity. The world is pleasantly variegated, and has a ton of charm. Each item has a cutesy twist for a name, and the descriptions are often used in fetch quests. It's full of siloed off systems; a city builder with freemium aspects that is weirdly fulfilling on its own terms, a procedural dungeon crawl with its own difficulty timer and economy, a (kind of bad) top-down real time strategy game with powers and gauges that don't exist elsewhere. The way those things don't interlock is interesting, in terms of how we value games and especially in the wake of things like Breath of the Wild.

Alongside the map's variety, there's a good hook in each of the kingdoms. The first place you convert is a casino town that lays all decisions down to the whim of fate, in the form of a massive statue that rolls a die. The conflict comes down to the fact that the king is (being manipulated to) fudging the numbers; rolls are fixed by a mechanism in each of the dice that weight them according to what the roller needs. Even Lady Luck is being manipulated by remote control, which is why the monthly roll to raise taxes has happened to be as high as possible for the last three months. You expose this corruption and disgrace the ruler. There's an interesting conservatism in the town, though. Disgrace is a hard thing to sustain in a town that is often ruled by superstition, where change is looked at with suspicion at best. The people who are making it are convinced that correlation is causation, and so of course they would be reticent to overthrow someone, especially when it seems he is both repentant and was being manipulated.

The second town is full of merfolk and run in an authoritarian fashion. Certain staircases are off limits, love is outlawed, and no one is allowed to emigrate. Investigating this, you find that the town was actually destroyed a few hundred years ago. The only thing that has kept it going was the queen's magic. Any new arrivals or exits would upset the balance she has upheld, explaining the laws. In the end, she agrees that the time may have come to pass, and so signs the Declaration of Interdependence and relaxes the laws.

The third city, Broadleaf, is closest to my heart. The president and CEO of this nation/corporation has become a petty tyrant, working his people past the point of exhaustion. Protests are sprouting up demanding better working conditions. You travel with one of the three people who were part of the original startup that ended up as this nation. With her, you see this president go from tech idealist to small business owner to tyrannical CEO. It's an arc that is easy to identify the truth in, even if it too ends in his being manipulated and ultimately offering to sacrifice his own life for his workers/subjects in a redemption arc. At that point, the protests sort of just melt away.

Each of these things are well drawn, poignant stories in their own right. And I even appreciate the motivations in them, often. It's the way they are all brought together that makes me more and more suspicious that this game might, in fact, have an incredibly fascist message.

I wrote too much here and some of this was already covered but okay here are some bullet points:

• Ding Dong Dell's coup is an oppressed class rising up to … impose an ethnostate. The possibility of that oppression being real is basically denied by Roland during his turn as an infiltrator.
• Broadleaf's redemption rests on 1) outside interference, despite the clear throughline from startup CEO to tyrant 2) idealism in the form of "jogging memories" and, relatedly, 3) the benevolence of the tyrant.
• Goldpaw is more or less explicit, really. After the corruption scandal brings down the Grand High Roller, the citizens are basically all about keeping him around. They're wildly disempowered & atomized, and caught up in turns of superstition.
• Hydropolis is a weird one. The queen has been holding this kingdom together for three centuries without sleep because of an apocalyptic event. She finally lets it go because the outside manipulator has been vanquished and she is finally willing to admit her love. But when she relinquishes the laws and people begin coming and going, the kingdom goes nowhere. The only thing that makes sense is that she just needed to hold the kingdom in stasis long enough for the apocalypse to pass, and has spent the last - let's be generous and say - two and a half centuries holding her citizens hostage in a loopy Groundhog's Day for no reason.
• The big thing: all of this works well if it's self-directed. The building of friendships, abolishing of war, increasing diversities of place and opinion, are all excellent on their own terms. Even Evan's building a kingdom of low key technocrats is interesting because at no point is it framed that way. People aren't recruited because they offer a specific service to Evermore; they find themselves there for various reasons and end up contributing in the best way they can. The microscopic view of this game is all about comradeship and from each according to their abilities.
• Which is why the "outside manipulator" thing is so consistently troubling. Presumably it is meant to give this game an end boss. But what it really does is recast all of that in a fashy light. These kingdoms aren't joining together to eliminate war; they're doing so in preparation to fight an outside scourge. And not only that, the scourge is in their midst. The people are being corrupted by it. Nazi shit, my guy.

#6 Into the Breach

Based on my Steam library, and I have no reason to think it's wrong or missing anything, Into the Breach is the first game I've ever unlocked every achievement in. The second, which I also got this year, was Heaven Will be Mine. I think the only game that might have qualified for that would have been getting all the Notices in Super Smash Bros. Melee, which I'm fairly confident I did. I'm not good at videogames. Sometimes I play them for a long time though.

The rough rundown: Into the Breach is a tactics game from the makers of FTL. You pilot three mechs on a series of 8x8 grids, fighting giant bugs that are threatening human cities. Your health bar is the amount of buildings that have been destroyed; your mechs also have their own health. You progress through a handful of levels over the course of two, three, or four islands (your choice) and then do a two-part final stage. I've heard a lot of people say it is very hard. I think I got my first win on my second attempt, on Normal difficulty. I'm not sure how that happened, as I am not particularly good at videogames.

The way you play Into the Breach is basically how I play chess. I'm pretty good at getting a lay of the board, and if I take a minute or so I can get a sense of how a good number of possibilities might play out over the next two turns. I can't think more than two moves ahead, because (I suspect) I have no sense of what someone else will actually go for (unless it's really, really clear, like a guaranteed checkmate; and even then I'm never sure if they'll see it), which means I hold too many possibilities in my head.

You might be better at Into the Breach than I am if you can keep more information in mind, but it rarely seems to make a difference. You just need a good lay of the land, a sense of what everything on the board is doing, how shifting that around will affect things, and the willingness to sit there and walk through the possibilities before you make the move, for this move and the next. I'm not even great at that, but sometimes I'm in the mood to spend the time to do it. I spent most of my time playing Isaac Jones, the pilot who gives you an extra reset. I rarely needed to use it, but I needed it for mindset reasons. It's that kind of thing.

Before and after this, you'll see me end these little write-ups in ambiguous ways. I'll say something positive, or that I don't have anything deep to say. It's been that kind of year with videogames, for me. Partially because I was so invested in Kingdom Hearts, and partially because I'm trying to use this as a way to recognize games that affected me at the time but haven't stuck with me beyond my playing them, or inspired big, sweeping thoughts. So that's another one of those things this paragraph is describing.

#5 Zones

This collection of five games by Connor Sherlock, the creator of one of the standout early walking simulators, The Rapture is Here and You Will Be Forcibly Removed From Your Homes, is gorgeous. From the moment you boot up Void Traversal (or Witch of Agnesi; both are in the ACT ONE folder) this is clear. I happened to boot up Void Traversal first, and stood stock still while I took in the beautiful mottling of the world, it's messy pinks and aqua swallowed digitally into black. There's a good chance I would have stood there for a long time, but that the soundtrack made me feel compelled to move.

I was deeply into walking simulators back about five years ago. I've fallen off them, in a variety of ways, in the intervening half-decade. Which is one of the reasons why I'm a little anxious about Zones, despite how much I immediately fell in love with it. Five years of iteration, especially from someone like Connor Sherlock, means I'm almost certainly missing a lot. There have been developments in walking simulators that I don't know, and that bothers me.

Specifically, at least with Act One of Zones, I have no idea if I was intended to just wander or if there were points of interest that I missed; specifically ones that would have progressed my understanding of the whole, or ones that would bring me to an end point. That psychological distress ended up being productive, though. Because Zones, for me, has become an object lesson in ateological level design.

If there are points of interest that I missed, this might be a lie. But that's fine.

So: in Zones you wander around landscapes. I have no idea how they're generated - other than by Connor Sherlock, for his patreon subscribers, I believe on a monthly basis. This collection drops you in them and then you walk around while some synths play cool, propulsive shit and they look incredible. And usually there's something, a landmark like a freestanding structure or a mountain range or a floating crystal or the sun, that you point yourself at and just fucking book it towards. And then, in most of them, you hit the jump button and zoom way too high up, like your character lists sideways high up, and that's super sweet also.

I spent a couple hours just poking at these worlds and I'm so glad I did. Here are some screenshots. Thanks.

#4 Heaven Will Be Mine

Heaven Will Be Mine is a visual novel about mecha pilots flirting over the future of non-humans, and the follow up to Worst Girls Games' We Know the Devil, a game I loved a whole fucking bunch. I'll be upfront about this: Heaven Will Be Mine doesn't live up to my feelings on that, for reasons that I think are a terrible intermingling of personal, aesthetic, and thematic. I also don't think it needed to live up to those feelings to be an exceptional thing in its own right, which I absolutely believe it to be.

Roughly, you can play through three routes, each with its own main pilot and faction. I went with Pluto first, whose faction ending I found to be the most compelling and rich; I then played through as Luna-Terra and Saturn. Each route has at least a few interesting things; some to do with mech size, some to do with personal histories and relationships outside the triad, some to do with the possibility of a future. The structural aspect of We Know the Devil that so enamored me to think of collectivity, where you functionally always play all three, is dissimulated here into your choices being between who wins and who loses in any particular conflict. It's also a very neat mechanic, but one that didn't hit me quite as hard.

I'm so glad this game exists, and I am fully in for whatever Worst Girls does next. And maybe at some point in 2019 I'll poke back into this and see if I don't get more out of it. I suspect it has that in it, at least.

#3 Dead Cells

Dead Cells definitely has that thing. The thing that roguelites do. It's a run-based action platformer, where drops and levels are procedurally generated. It has persistent progression; you unlock things that show up in later runs. Deaths feel like your own fault, most of the time, whether that's because you managed your build poorly, rolled or attacked at the wrong time, or dove deeper than your current state could reasonably handle. That thing, though, is that you - I - feel like run-to-run, you're - I'm - improving. Not because of those unlocks (though they help), but because you have a slightly better understanding of the game, its mechanics, its flow.

This is not, generally, a thing I'm interested in. I like roguelikes - Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is probably in my top five or ten games of all time at this point - but I'm mostly interested in playing games on easy. I prefer Kingdom Hearts' combat to Kingdom Hearts 2's, and am probably the only person who would rate Snowblind Studios' action higher than, say, Platinum's. Being as honest as I can be, execution is probably my least favorite aspect of videogames. That, or smuggled-in libertarian/fascist propaganda (This War of Mine (and probably Frostpunk (I haven't played it))), I guess.

That last bit isn't totally irrelevant, I promise. The tone of Dead Cells kind of sucks. The character gives the bras d'honneur (that thing where you flex one arm forward and slap your bicep that's like giving the finger; they are a French studio, I guess), there's a hidden room with a bonfire and the text "GIT GUD," and it's replete with jokes about how prisoners are stupid (you shouldn't look for missing books in the prison, lol) and "magic mushrooms" and shit.

All of which might have turned me off had I not known that they self-describe as an "anarcho syndical workers cooperative," according to this Kotaku article. That bit of knowledge - plus the fact that I didn't have to buy the game myself, and that I needed something to play while listening to podcasts for a big chunk of this year and didn't have anything else great - ended up leading to me putting something like a hundred hours into Dead Cells. And beating it on every difficulty up to Expert.

As with many of these things, I don't have a big thesis statement. Getting that feeling of genuinely improving over time was nice, and the game feels good. They're about to nerf the strategy that got me those wins, so I'm almost certainly never going to play the game again. Which feels good too. Dead Cells, hey, congratulations. I'm probably going to forget about you very soon but you were kinda important to my year.

#2 Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

I fucking really like Smash, okay. I dumped what probably amounted to thousands (plural) of hours into Melee when I was in high school. I was not going to tournaments; I never learned how to wavedash or shield drop or edge cancel. I was largely not even playing it with anyone else. Sometimes I'd force my little brother to play with me, because I was a dickhead. I played a lot of the single player modes, and I played a lot of me vs. level 9 computers. I did this over and over and for so long that I've since been pretty passable at every subsequent game. I didn't play a lot of Brawl; my heart wasn't in it, my life wasn't in the same place, and the one thing I did want to try - playing online against my friend Wingus, who lives in Australia - was so laggy that it happened only once or twice. I ended up playing a lot of Sm4sh, because that game was really fun, and I even managed to go to one local. Mostly I played alone again, or with one friend who picked up the series with that game and actually put in the mental work (instead of just the time, like me) to go from much, much worse than I was to - well, let's say somewhere between "a little" and "much" better.

Said friend (who is responsible for every game on this list that isn't a PC game, due to their having consoles for which they get games; thanks) also keeps me up on the competitive scene, from the petty dramas (sorry about Ganondorf or whatever, reddit) to the discovery of tech, what's forthcoming, and just about everything else. I am not particularly invested in this, but it is nice. I love Smash Bros, you know? Knowing where it's healthy and where it isn't is nice.

I genuinely don't have much to say. World of Light is really cool, even though I give zero fucks about Nintendo's history. The Squad Smash variant, where you choose 3v3 or 5v5 and run through that number of characters against your opponent, is a lot of fun. I think I main Peach now on accident? That's weird as hell.

And the game feels fucking good. I imagine I'll go back to Sm4sh at some point and wonder how I ever played it, even though this game feels so familiar to that. Movement is crisp, and it feels like getting more familiar with it will make me better. It's just a good nice videogame.

#1 Extreme Meatpunks Forever: Powered By Blood

Extreme Meatpunks Forever is, well, kind of excellent. It's a hybrid visual novel and arena beat 'em up based around ring outs and movement skills, set in a world where the sun is gone, everyone has mechs made of meat, and you play as a group of antifascist queer folks who regularly beat the fuck out of (and even kill!) neonazis. The game follows four meatpunks - antifa, more or less - as they get run out of their rural town, trek across the desert for a week, and meet up with another group. They eat gas station food and chill with a sun cultist along the way, fight fash, and develop crushes and explore their own traumas, past and present.

I've been aware of Heather Flowers' work for a little while now - 10,000 Years was showcased at the Playdate Pop-up in 2017 - though I haven't engaged with nearly as much of it as I have wanted to. Her work, at least to me, continues the tradition of the extremely personal, political, revolutionary games that got me back into the medium back around 2012-13. It rages against the world as it is, the forces of reaction, and it is equally comfortably embodying that raging as it is transmogrifying it into abstract aesthetic spaces that draw the player in and force them into reflection.

Extreme Meatpunks Forever might be the crystallization of her work so far in this particular way. It also might not - again, I really need to explore her work more - but either way it is excellent. Its characters blossom out of sketches to become messy coincidences of allegory and people; the explosion of worldbuilding coheres as much in aesthetic fury and incendiary joy as it does in suggesting a world. Flowers explains all this better in her Meatpunk Manifesto.

The biggest surprise was when this game got hard. The mechanics are fairly straightforward; in the visual novel side, you click to advance and occasionally make a choice. In the brawler side, you use the WASD keys to move, left click to punch, and right click to use a special action (dependent on who you are playing as). It isn't the deepest, and the first two episodes were about what I expected from the tutorial; play whoever, barely use the specials, just be aware of your positioning and you'll be able to mash it out. That's true for everything but maybe two or three fights. In the last two episodes, there are pieces that ended up taking me a half-dozen tries or more, and forced me to really learn the right-click mechanics and whose I was best at using (or cheesing. I relied on Sam a lot at the end). It was frustrating. Which felt right. The same way dying repeatedly in Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus kind of felt right, even if it was largely because the game made poor decisions if you were looking at it solely from the perspective of gameplay flow.

Those brief difficulty spikes ended up producing the kind of friction that, up to that point, had only ever partially existed in the narrative, through the forcing of choice. Going in, I was honestly expecting not to have this game end up on this list. Not because I thought it would be bad - as I've said, I've liked everything I've seen of Heather Flowers' work before - but because I expected it, I think, to be somewhat slight. That expectation lead to me wanting to be able to see everything in one playthrough. Forcing me to only see one or two people's interactions, then, made me feel like I was going to be forced to replay through to see the rest when it might not really be worth it. That all turned out to be bullshit on my part. But having those pain points crystallized into having to replay specific fights - which, I should also state, are totally skippable from the moment you fail one, indicating that I was probably more bought-in than I even thought myself to be from early on - made me understand on a conscious level what I was experience subconsciously.

And hey, counterpoint to a lot of those others: this game fucking stuck with me. It's still itching at my brain on the regular. Good shit.

Top 10 Podcasts of 2018

When putting together this list initially, I was a little worried I would end up recapitulating a lot of what I said about the ten best podcasts of 2017. A few of them stopped being produced, and a few new ones came into my rotation, but a list that was over half retreads seemed boring. So I gave myself a stipulation: no retreads. Go read that list; most of what was written there still stands for this last year (Friends at the Table is slightly different; they're back in Hieron for its final season, and holy shit is it good so far). And then read this one and get ten new feeds to subscribe to, maybe.

#10 Black Banner Magic

I'll note at the top that I'm internet friends with one person involved (although I'm not entirely sure how) in this show, and I probably wouldn't have given it a shot without that connection. I almost certainly would have heard about it, since they are affiliated with Revolutionary Left Radio. But the early Dr. Bones guest spot (before he was outed as a predator and a sex pest; at that point I simply actively disliked his politics) and the tagline - a leftist podcast for occultists, an occult podcast for leftists - would likely have left me uninterested.

I dabbled in occult signification in late high school, wearing a pentacle and Libra necklace around, investigating numerology, and engaging with conspiracy theory (without necessarily believing in any of it, per se). It was co-incidental with my transition from a sort of libertarianism to the left, and probably had some influence - though I expect it was more in spite of than due to. The residual hangover of that period is likely part of my own relative distaste for the prevalence of things like astrology and tarot in the left & queer circles that have made up the bulk of my social life for the past six or so years. It's a distaste I try to keep to myself, and one that has attenuated with my understanding of its use as personal narrativization and interpersonal care. The lingering annoyance has more to do with the way it externalizes fault, primarily, but that's not entirely here nor there.

All of which is to say: this is not a podcast for me, necessarily, and I still think it's a pretty interesting one. Dr. Bones(' pirate utopia ass) aside, the guests have largely been very interesting. Hearing them describe the various ways they practice gives me a sense of the way the occult community can function as genuine community, and the host is good enough at both maintaining the flow of conversation and dropping in historical information to keep me paying attention.

It's worth a listen.

#9 Notes from the Back Row

Even more compromising: I'm IRL friends with one of the hosts of this podcast, and have written for the site. That second part isn't the compromising bit, I just wanted to plug my piece about M. Night Shyamalan. I even suggested to my friend that Back Row needed a podcast before they did and offered to help; they went ahead and found a competent professional instead. End of disclosures.

If 2017 was the year I explicitly went out to find left podcasts, 2018 was the year I finally found a groove with film podcasts after years of fits and starts. You'll read about a couple more later, but an honorable mention to The Projection Booth, a podcast that would probably be at the top of this list if I was able to commit more time to following it regularly.

Notes From the Back Row is still finding its identity; episodes come out biweekly and are sometimes roundtable discussions, sometimes three or four segments where each host talks to themself for ten or twenty minutes. I personally prefer the former, but that's my taste across the board with podcasts. Back Row distinguishes itself - like the website - by focusing on the interests of the hosts, which is to say it doesn't keep up with the discourse (in the "not being structured around release schedules" way; they all seem like dope people who care).

Episodes about Heist films, SNL comedies, what constitutes hype and how it affects you, and even a defense of the criminally underwhelming Truth or Dare all give genuine consideration to topics that I might not care deeply about, but am happy to be convinced of. More than anything I'm looking forward to the show developing, and seeing what it turns into.

#8 Spectology

Spectology is a science fiction book club podcast, and it's also the last one on this list that has a co-host with whom I have a passing internet familiarity. I'm not particularly up on literature podcasts (maybe next year?), but I was pleasantly surprised when I gave this one a listen; the co-hosts, Matt and Adrian, do pre-read episodes on Science Fiction novels that are spoiler-free, and post-read episodes that dive deep into the novel. Both tend to feature animated conversations about books I've never read, along with personal anecdotes and serious consideration of the political and generic content of the book. They've consistently surprised me with how on point I find their analysis (based on their summaries at least).

The episode that sold me was on The Sparrow, a book I had never heard of and, based on the pre-read episode, I have zero interest in seeking out. The discussion, though, was excellent. In the pre-read, they talk a lot about religion in science fiction, and both had nuanced, interesting takes that were grounded in reading. And in the post-read episode, they went in on the novel's colonialist underpinnings and how poorly it handled the loss of faith aspects. I'm super into celebrating a shared love of things, but being able to turn that critical edge is what sold me.

As the year went on, they ended up doing a good job of bringing in guests and picking interesting books. I'm not a huge fan of it ideologically, but the episodes with Ellie Bartels on the Ninefox Gambit (the only book I have read from their 2018 run) touches on so much interesting content about the military and gaming's relationship to it. The Gnomon episodes with Max Gladstone were fun conversations between people who were just really excited. And the Binti episodes were compelling enough to convince me to suggest that trilogy as a book for my own book club, which is always nice.

#7 The Next Picture Show

A part of the Filmspotting family of podcasts (the only part other than the flagship now, I believe; RIP to Filmspotting: SVU, which is what dragged me into the whole thing), The Next Picture Show is a group of former-Dissolve critics who talk about an old movie in conjunction with a new release. It's a little headier in construction than in practice; basically one week you get a discussion of an older film and some feedback, then the next you get a brief review of a new film, a comparison between the two, and some other recommendations. Rinse and repeat.

I love the idea of this format, and often love it in practice. It can lead to some weirdness though, where I end up not listening for a month or more at a time.

If you're interested in a 2018 pairing, I think the discussion of Putney Swope and Sorry to Bother You is probably the most interesting. They also paired Isle of Dogs (a movie I have negative interest in seeing) with Chicken Run for an interesting conversation about animation. The hosts have a pretty set dynamic which, like almost all podcasts, they talk about as much as they enact, so if you don't get along with their banter it can be a bit difficult, as I sometimes don't. Mostly, though, it's a genuinely interesting premise executed on successfully.

#6 All Systems Goku

I finally have some idea of what happens in the Buu saga. And the Cell saga. I think I dropped off before that was really airing on Cartoon Network back in the day. And that's kind of nice.

All Systems Goku is Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann and Dan Ryckert's first foray into anime, done by recapping five or so episodes of Dragon Ball Z Kai at a time. There's really very little to say; they are total amateurs in knowledge, but they're very professional at hosting podcasts. The content is an enjoyable thing with no real value. It's a pleasure to listen to.

#5 Filmspotting

The most annoying thing about Filmspotting is that the co-host I most agree with, in terms of both arguments and general taste, is an old Christian dad who loves the films of Wes Anderson. I couldn't identify less, and yet. He's often right, and even when he's very wrong, it's usually for compelling reasons. It's so frustrating.

Filmspotting is a weekly film podcast, of the discussion variety, that usually talks about a new movie and then does some sort of top 5 list about a related topic. They play games and talk about local Chicago stuff. It's a pleasant thing, and though the public radio format makes the conversations often feel rushed, both Adam and (the afore described) Josh have a good sense of how to quickly make their points clearly and, if not convincingly then at least coherently.

My favorite thing from this year was probably the Vincente Minnelli marathon they did; I've only seen Meet Me in St. Louis and that was quite some time ago. I doubt I'll end up seeing most of the films they discussed, but I'm glad to have some basic knowledge about that director.

#4 Game Studies Study Buddies

I guess I kind of lied. If I'm counting Adrian from Spectology as an internet acquaintance, then I should say that I've had brief interactions with both Cameron Kunzelman and Michael Lutz on Twitter over the last handful of years. Mostly, though, that's why I know about this, not why I listened or loved it. Because I'm woefully underexposed to what Game Studies actually looks like, having only seen it from blowups around Bogost and a handful of other critics. And hey, this is a podcast that seeks to remedy that, in some way, so I was all in as soon as I heard the concept.

Their monthly episodes each dive into one text from the broader Game Studies canon (or a little outside it), taking it on chapter by chapter. A big part of the draw is that both Cameron and Michael are thoughtful, engaged readers and conversationalists who come at the text from different disciplinary backgrounds that aren't incompatible. It leads to interesting, edifying conversations.

Episode five, on Caillois' Man, Play, and Games is probably the most interesting conversation so far, for my money.

#3 Cocaine & Rhinestones

Most of Cocaine & Rhinestones was published in 2017. I didn't discover it until this year, and enough of it was released in 2018 that I feel comfortable putting it on this list. Even if it was the kind of podcast that got covered in the New York Times or wherever. I think I heard about it a few times, but I remember it clicking around when I listened to this episode of the Trillbilly Worker's Party podcast.

Without this show, I probably wouldn't know that Bobby Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" is one of the greatest songs ever written, or about how great "Harper Valley PTA" is. That's enough to put it on any list. On top of that, though, it's the only NPR-style podcast I've ever been able to stomach. I'm much more about the conversational ones.

If you're at all interested in country music, it's probably a must-listen kind of thing at this point. Not because it's some exhaustive thing, but because Tyler Mahan Coe weaves an interesting narrative out of what might be considered ephemera, and does so while exposing you to some cool shit. I'm glad I listened to it.

#2 Got it Memorized

2018 was the year I got into Kingdom Hearts. I played the first game way back in the day, and I honestly can't tell how much I played of the second. I have vague memories. Which is appropriate, I guess. I had a fondness for the series based on that first game - there is something about rote action games that really hits home for me, and something about convoluted messes that does the same - but I couldn't really say why.

At the beginning of the year, I replayed the first game. Then I started in on the remake of the second, re:Chain of Memories, for the first time. It took me months; the game's action is insufferable in so many ways, swapping out the rote action for a messy card-battle system. The story, though, grabbed me really hard. It's about Sora losing his memories in this castle, and having them replaced with false ones, and about how he maintains his bonds of friendship through that experience and even forges new ones because of it. It's such a precious thing. Then I went on to play Kingdom Hearts 2, in full for (almost definitely) the first time. And then 358/2 Days, Birth by Sleep, and re:Coded. I'm currently most of the way through Dream Drop Distance, and plan on playing through 0.2 Birth by Sleep ~a fragmentary passage~ and watching the HD movie of Unchained X. I'll probably end up playing Kingdom Hearts 3 as well, once that's out. Maybe not, though, who knows.

Because of how long re:Chain of Memories took, I wanted something to supplement with while getting into the more story-focused, Disney-lite games that came after. Which is when I found Got it Memorized, which is a Kingdom Hearts recap podcast. The hosts, Wheels and Jo, go through each game piece by piece, wrapping up what happens and tying it into the broader narrative as it stands. It's a nice way to keep things straight in your head, and to get a slightly different perspective on a series that is notorious for the ways in which it is confusing.

Playing through the games, with the help of Got it Memorized, has made me realize that sense of re:Chain of Memories I had was only a part of the reason the games grab me. Because at their core, this is a series about identity. Friendship is crucial, there, because what the fuck is friendship without identity? Sora's answer is that it's a promise kept, maybe. The series' is a little harder to pin down.

Here's one reason I think it's about identity: all of the stuff that is actually confusing about the game is confusing because it is problematizing identity. The prime example: Ansem. Ansem is the boss of the first game; he's also a wise old man who researched the Heartless. The boss of Kingdom Hearts 2 is Xemnas; he is Ansem's Nobody (a body without a heart). Ansem is still around, though, masquerading as DiZ, because the person who became the boss of the first two games was actually Xehanort. Xehanort is this old fuckbag who stole a man's body, lost his memories and identified himself as Ansem before splitting into those two.

The parts about Heartless and Nobodies is fairly boilerplate fantasy fare, constructed systems that feed into themselves in order to achieve particular goals. All the real questions about the game are "who is" questions. Who is Ansem, who is Xehanort, who is Sora. And each of those is meant in two ways. Who is Sora? As in, what kind of person is he, what is his identity. But also, who is Sora? As in, which of these characters is Sora, or is in part Sora, or is in Sora? The answer to that last one includes Roxas and Ventus at least.

So these games about identity, in the sense of who is the I and also in whom is the I, kind of took over my year. For material reasons, partially; it's a year that I really started working through my own identity in a real way. Having some other folks talk about the particulars of what was happening in this game that mirrored my own experience was helpful. So thanks to those folks. Also play Kingdom Hearts, that shit rules.

#1 Waypoint Radio

Waypoint's podcast game exploded in 2018. The Monday/Friday episodes of Waypoint Radio got formalized - Monday is hosted by Austin Walker and is about games of the moment, Friday by Danielle Riendeau and revolves around a specific topic. They also launched Waypoints, a Thursday podcast hosted by Rob Zacny that takes up media outside of games, and Be Good and Rewatch It, a film and TV podcast hosted by Patrick Klepek. They also continued the occasional Waypoint 101 series, which dives into a specific, slightly older game, and the occasional Article Read series, where one of the staff reads an article they wrote and has a discussion with another staff member afterwards. Waypoint Radio, in other words, became a podcast network in its own right. And every iteration is really solid.

As a games-focused focused podcast, Waypoint Radio has continued to be really astute on questions of labor practices in the games industry and unafraid to discuss issues of representation, exploitation, and politics in general. Plus a lot of football, sometimes. It's different from almost all of the other gaming podcasts I follow - not because none of them tackle either end of the industry, but because of how it synthesizes the smaller podcasts I tend to listen to with the larger ones. It's easy to forget, especially when you listen to as many podcasts as I do and prefer more conversational ones like I do, how much work and talent go into making a conversation interesting for listeners while not disappearing into toothless chatter.

The fact that they make what might be the best possible gaming podcast is then coupled with the fact that the staff shares enough of my taste that I can actually take their recommendations, which is basically unheard of for me. Channel Zero, in particular, would have gone completely under my radar and I would have missed my favorite season of television from 2018 without this show. More than that, though, I might have checked out of games news-style podcasts entirely; the Giant Bombcast and the Beastcast each had rough patches where I considered dropping them out of my rotation entirely (and the Bombcast is the reason I got into podcasts to begin with back around 2013), and those are basically the only other ones I go to (I'm an occasional unsubscriber/resubscriber to Kotaku Splitscreen, which I'm back on since Maddy Myers rejoined). Which probably would've been better for me in a lot of ways, but hey. Waypoint's that good.

Top Tens of 2017: #1s

Here are the best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017:

#1 Podcast: Beyond the Filter

Liz Ryerson's interview podcast only had a handful of episodes this year, but each one dove deep on a topic with someone from the internet art scene. The range of fields that covers, and the depths that the interviews go into make that relative lack feel less of an issue.

Exemplary episodes from 2017 include the interview with Lana Polansky on labor issues in videogames, the discussion with Joel Bocko on Twin Peaks season 3, and a discussion of local art scenes with Bandcamp Daily editor Jes Skolnik. The first two are unequivocally some of the best discussions on their topics from that year, said as someone who has pursued both of those conversations somewhat extensively. I'm much less tapped into music writing/podcasting, so I can't speak to that with the same approximation of authority, but the flip side is that the conversation with Skolnik is one of the only experiences of music conversation I could bring myself to care about.

I appreciate that breadth of topics a lot, not only because I am completely unable to focus on a single medium but because doing this kind of work is a way of creating connections and the conditions for solidarity across genre, style, and scene where labor conditions are already near-identical.

#1 Film: Get Out

I stand by the fact that the end sequence of Get Out is what cements it as a truly incredible movie. Not the bit in the road with his friend, but before that, when his escape both entails and justifies homicidal violence. Because up until that point, there's a perfectly liberal reading of the film; and obviously there is after it as well, because plenty of liberal critics were all up on Get Out. But there's a moment after the protagonist breaks free that feels like a genuine break; he's long past the point of just getting by in a situation, and past the point of trying to come to terms or reason with his captors. He's fully prepared to enact violence to ensure his survival, and he does. If A Taxi Driver is a representation of the political in a way I had appreciated, this is a prediction of it in a way that has come before, but is still no less energizing.

#1 Album: Rainbow by Kesha

I have been struggling for a while now to think of an album that has affected me more on a personal level than Rainbow. Historically, maybe, a Modest Mouse album that made me find a place in indie music and the social consequences of it, or Tupac's All Eyez On Me that kept rap in my life through that period; possibly Xiu Xiu's Remixed & Covered, which solidified my love for that band while also leading me on threads that took me to intense dead ends, like Sunset Rubdown, or years-long journeys, like Why? through anticon. through all kinds of weird rap to today. More recently, I was intensely into To Pimp A Butterfly and Carrie Rodriguez' Lola. But nearly all of those are influential more than they are emotional. And can I just say, for the hundred thousandth time: Rainbow fucks me up.

Like a lot of other things that ended up in the number one spot on these lists, Rainbow is fundamentally about trauma. It's an album released in the shadow of Kesha's struggle with the repugnant things subjected to her by Dr. Luke over the years, the least of which is her lack of recent work. Rainbow, maybe more than anything else I've ever experienced, takes this basis and uses it to explore not just pain and healing, but bitterness, joyous escape, dismay, play, sex, self worth, and love. The bitterness is what dragged me in; lines like

I hope you're somewhere praying
I hope your soul is changing
I hope you find your peace
Falling on your knees, praying

contain an absolutely earnest desire for a person who has done truly awful things to become better, and an absolutely scathing fuck you at the same time. Even more clearly: "some say, in life, you're gonna get what you give / But some things only God can forgive." Or how, just before the second instance of the prechorus which starts "You brought the flames and you put me through hell," she says "And I don't need you, I found a strength I've never known / I'll bring thunder, I'll bring rain, / When I'm finished, they won't even know your name." It's a very basic use of elements juxtaposed unassumingly, but goddamn if it still doesn't get me every time.

The fucked thing, of course, is that "Praying" is what made me fall in love with the album, and after a few dozen listens I barely consider it one of my favorite songs on there. The opening "Bastards" isn't a masterpiece in pop song terms, but it does so much to set the stage for the album. It's a simple refrain - "don't let the bastards get you down" - that speaks to the need to push through some hard shit. "Let 'Em Talk" and "Woman" show the side of this album that keeps working through trauma without letting it force you to become maudlin or disempowered, instead clawing some joy and terror out of a fucked world. "Hymn," probably the most powerful song on the record to me at this point, is a little gesture of solidarity in a terrifying place, a simple way to help empower each other when the only thing that seems possible is to slink away.

I don't want to go track by track, but the heart of this album is everything from "Hymn" through "Rainbow." It's such a beautiful suite of emotional hardship and resistance and coping and, above everything else, hope in oneself and in others. I adore it beyond measure and I'm so incredibly happy that it exists in the world.

#1 TV Show: Twin Peaks (season 3)

From one perspective - the one that I think I prefer, at this point - the third season of David Lynch & Mark Frost's Twin Peaks is a failure. I say that with the caveat that there is maybe no other piece of television I have enjoyed as much as this season, ever; that I think this season might not be as important to the future of dramatic TV as the first two, but that it might be one of the most important pieces of major art of the 2010s; and that it is a beautiful, serious, and involved rumination on trauma in a year that not only needed just that, but absolutely delivered on it in ways that might well be unparalleled in any prior.

That perspective is this: the third season of Twin Peaks is, as far as I'm concerned, an attempt to take the traumatic core of the first two seasons - the way that the show, and Fire Walk With Me in particular, centralize the very specific trauma of Laura Palmer and use it as a jumping off point and anchor to explore both a town and its denizens and broader mythological implications - and expand it out to postindustrial America. That, I think, is where it fails: the human story at the center of the show is not incapable of being at the center of settler colonial superpower, but it simply doesn't fit together as well as it needs to.

One way to point to this is the difference in the opening credits sequence. This time around, it opens with a shot of the fog with the famous picture of Laura Palmer superimposed, which both fade to reveal a helicopter/drone shot of trees. It then tracks over the falls, looking down, before dissolving into the curtains of the Red Room. In the previous two seasons we were treated to shots of industrial logging machinery, birds, and a long shot of those falls, facing directly on. That earlier sequence points to labor and nature, to human enterprise in the world and its perspective. The new one suggests something more akin to omniscience and interiority, of seeing beyond what humans can and diving deep within them. It's a sequence that looks good and gives the mood for what is to follow, but the absences are jarring.

Another way is to point to The Moment in part 8. I am among the crowd who thinks that that episode is one of the most beautiful and ambitious things put to film, especially given its being for a television show. I also think that when Judy vomits up the Bob orb, and the Fireman responds with Laura, the show is failing its central premise. Not because I don't think it can't be worked into a broader theory - the trauma of the atomic bomb, the moment when humanity can truly begin to imagine the world as a destructible target, is potentially just another cycle of the destructive potential of the Black Lodge rather than its birth, for instance - or because I'm an enemy of ambiguity (the thing I am about to say is something I have never argued for, really, and likely won't ever again), but because it simply pushes the viewer away from being able to understand the crucial importance of human suffering and response to the world. That sequence instead becomes something that must be compartmentalized.

My original Fan Theory at the conclusion of the show, which I am somewhat surprised not to have seen arise elsewhere (I probably didn't look very hard), is that this season constituted a hard temporal loop, ending a generation or two before the first season of the show. The fact that the residents of the Palmer household are the Trefonts/Chalmonds, coupled with Cooper/Richard's final words ("what year is this?") and Carrie Paige seeming to come into consciousness as Laura Palmer made me imagine that we were in Twin Peaks before the events of the first season, which themselves would somehow play out to manifest them, creating a time loop. The theory I've heard most is either that they are in a bubble universe meant to trap Judy, or that they somehow transcended into the real world. All of these - including mine - seem to me to be completely bogus. Which is, of course, to the show's credit; there's nothing that can ruin a work of Lynch's like a tidy explanation (see: Mulholland Drive's dream half). But the way the show spent this season diving into the mythological aspects, and its repetition of the key phrase "is it future or is it past?", seem to me at this point to do it no favors as long as you think of the core of it in the same way that I do.

If I seem to be focusing on this failure, let me assure you that it is only because it is the only way I can think of to talk about this show in any way other than a basically random assortment of glowing praise. The performances by Naomi Watts and Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan are unbelievable; the dynamic between Lynch's Gordon Cole and Miguel Ferrer's Albert Rosenfield is touching and funny; the duration of the Dougie storyline is basically perfect in how it gives us the real facets of MacLachlan's capabilities as a performer, Cooper as a real character who isn't boring as fuck, and a massive group of the most important characters of the show; Candie is maybe my favorite character on television ever, and her storyline boils down the show's central preoccupation with trauma and the human reaction to it in a beautiful, heartbreaking way; Hawk doesn't just remain the only fully-drawn, compelling character on the show not named Audrey or Benjamin Horne, he gets even better; Lynch's capacity to create an incredible visual landscape that linger is undiminished; Bobby Briggs is the biggest piece of shit and his arc so perfectly encapsulates that; nearly everything about it is so much better as a follow up to the show and as the first major piece of filmmaking from one of my favorite directors of all time in a decade. My focus on where it fails is only to say that I think it is a show not just worth praising, or recommending, but one worth taking seriously and lovingly and critically.

A PS, since I came to it after writing the bulk of this and don't know how to interweave it, or don't want to: the podcast A Twin Peaks Podcast: A Podcast About Twin Peaks from Entertainment Weekly touches on the theory I had, making it clear that it was discussed. In their wrap-up episode ("One Last Cup of Coffee") the two hosts discuss the possibility that not only is the Red Room not the Black Lodge, but that the only time we see it is at the very end, in the form of the Palmer house when Richard and Carrie Paige return. The other host then suggests the possibility that the only other location we see in Twin Peaks in those final moments, the RR Diner, might be the White Lodge. For now, at least, I like this a lot, and think it ties in nicely with both everything that I adore about this season and everything that I think doesn't work about it. Because if that's right (at least as "right" as these sorts of things can be), then the mythological aspects of the show are functionally extensions of community. The metaphysical source of evil is the family, the household, the site of pain and trauma and the evil that men do; the communal space of food and drink and socializing (and commodity exchange) is it's inverse, the source of good in the world. Which is to say: these are real spaces in this world, and their magical capacities aren't supernatural but simple extrapolations on the lives of these people as we are invited into them through the show. Which works beautifully for the first two seasons, up to and including the way that Windom Earle fantasizes about "unspeakable power" (or whatever) to be drawn from the Black Lodge as an understanding of manipulation and abuse becoming mythologized as it's own source of power. But this third season's attempt to tackle not just this symbol of Americana but the whole - from the genocide of Native people to extreme wealth inequality with the Jones' and Vegas to the entertainment complex in New York to the drug crises/war in Twin Peaks' youth to the consolidation of empire with the atomic bomb - simply aren't supported by a show that does a phenomenal job of extracting symbolic and aesthetic meaning out of the particular space of Twin Peaks. Because as much as the franchising of the RR into Norma's RR 2 GO or the loss of the lumber mill can speak to neoliberalism, it doesn't really get there even with Dr. Jacoby's transformation into Dr. Amp. Bobby Briggs' journey from manipulated murderer & drug trafficker to clean cop when juxtaposed with Deputy Chad touches on the dream of policing versus its reality, but falls short. The things those symbols elide, from the centrality of race in the history of the US to the last half-century of neocolonialism to the persistence of Confederate ideology, the real history of working class revolt and its papering over with brutal repression and mythology, all make the season's boldest and most brilliant moments simultaneously an overextension. But then, that beauty and the power of those images doesn't exclusively rely on this reading, and goddamn this show is so important.

#1 Videogame: Everything is Going to be OK

I don't know that I have a ton to say about Everything is Going to be OK that wasn't said better by the developer in one of her statements or blog posts. I had the honor of showing this game at 2017's Playdate, and it has stuck with me through the whole year in a way that I thought might be the case but didn't honestly expect. It's a digital zine in which you explore a bunch of short vignettes about trauma. Nathalie Lawhead's statement points to the fact that it is a subversion of the idea of a power fantasy; instead of playing like an accumulation of physical strength, it imagines a world in which humor and cuteness are tools of survival, which is itself a mode of power.

Every bit of it I've played is so absolutely spot on in tone and execution. The writing is tight and funny, the images convey exactly the kind of cuteness that is tinged with violence and empathy that I adore, the structure itself feels like a beautiful way to make connections and find the particulars through aleatoric happenstance and personal preference. In a year filled with examinations of trauma, many of which have taken their respective top spots for their mediums, this is nothing short of a bafflingly beautiful and serious meditation on the same that moved me beyond words.

Top Tens of 2017: #2s

Here are the second best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017:

#2 Podcast: Trillbilly Worker's Party

The Trillbillies are a group of three leftists who live in east Kentucky and talk about stuff. It's a great combination of shooting the shit, lefty hot takes, and deeper dives into specific theoretical issues. They specifically talk about Appalachian culture and politics a lot, which is a nice differentiator from a lot of lefty political discourse.

More than anything, what sets this apart is the way that the trillbillies trust themselves to say interesting and insightful things in the middle of bullshitting without putting unnecessary pressure on themselves to be Right or Perfectly Communicative or whatever. It's not just a way to generate ideas, but a great example of how to practice leftist ideas in conversation.

#2 Film: Split

I've said before that Shyamalan can't come back since he never left, and Split is a pretty solid example of that. As a racialized director who chose and was forced into a Spielbergian mode, a lot of his work has been, in my opinion, a way of wrestling with that duality through metaphor. There's a reason Bright falls flat as fuck where After Earth succeeded in spades, is as succinct a way to put it as I'm going to manage.

Part of that metaphor has been Shyamalan's increasing usage of mental health to drive plots, which is almost always kind of a fucking mess. The Village might be the earliest example, but it intensified strongly in The Visit and now here, where it becomes the essential premise rather than the background. I don't know that taking it as a comic (which the surprise cameo at the end confirms it to literally be) ameliorates that at all, but I'm also not sure that I have much to say beyond calling it out.

What makes Split work, though, and also makes it a genuine departure from much of Shyamalan's earlier work, is that the central relationship is between young women. They are painted with fairly broad strokes, but their dynamic creates a sense of a real group of people at odds with each other in genuine ways.

There's also, of course, McAvoy's impressive performance, and the creation of a genuinely compelling villain that promises to give Shyamalan a chance to revisit the world of Unbreakable at a moment when comic book films seem in need of a look at an angle.

#2 Album: Chill, Dummy by POS

Despite some slightly more forgettable tracks in the middle of the album - none of which are anything less than very good - the opening and closing of Chill, Dummy are the standouts. It closes with what I called the best 8+ minute rap song of 2016 (and what is probably the best song of that year period).

I could probably say a lot about it, or at least quote it at length, but I really do think everyone should just listen to it. It's a sprawling invective against police and the state, an honest reflection on shittiness in past relationships and life, a sweeping collaboration that doesn't take the focus off the personal, and a song that has the lines:

That bright black with a sharp tongue and the beats crack
and he bites back with shark teeth and he eats that.
That black bloc'er that can't stop when the coppers creep
and I don't show up, I'm trash talk and I'm fuck peace
I'm Chris Dorner, I'm Doberman dirty, off leash.
I'm Mike Brown, I'm Eric Garner, I can't breathe.

The opening salvo of "Born a Snake" and "Wearing a Bear" are the other moments of the album where POS' lyrics are coupled with his anger and passion to create something fucking incredible.

#2 TV Show: Sense8 (season 2)

If the first season of Sense8 was an admirable experiment with some interesting results, the second is made in the same lab, with the same beakers, and entirely different chemicals. Or, to use a metaphor more in my wheelhouse, it's a show that has been affected by the agent of history, its inherent contradictions heightened.

Those contradictions: Sense8 is a show that wants to have profound things to say about community while subscribing to a fundamentally technocratic worldview. It wants a sort of soft socialism but can only see it through a strict division of labor and an evolutionary path rather than a social one.

This season kind of drops the ball on Wolfgang and Kala. But it does go hard with Sun and Capheus in ways I really appreciated. More generally, it just goes in a way that I very much appreciated. Like all of the best of the Wachowskis' work, it is very much a collection of excuses for setpieces that end up dominating the memory of the piece, and, it turns out, it is quite good at that.

It also might just come down to the fact that Nomi's speech at her sister's wedding made me cry in a way nothing really does. Fuck I really loved that moment.

#2 Videogame: NieR:Automata

There are an absurd number of positive things to say about NieR:Automata. The way it plays with and integrates disparate genres in a cohesive way speaks to its insistence on integrating difference. How enjoyable it is to just run around and mash through simple fights. Its beautiful look that isn't afraid to craft big, annoying environments to let you discover a particular metaphor. It is an incredible thing. Instead of trying to turn this into a holistic essay, though, I think I'd be better able to just list off a few points here that illustrate why this game meant so much to me.

The moment that hooked me on the game in my first playthrough came early. After the first handful of hours, you take a quest that leads you into the desert. You're tasked with taking out some groups of machines who have been acting up. The desert itself is a huge circle of sand dunes and jack shit otherwise. Early on in cleaning up these groups, I stumbled across a pod. These are effectively your ranged weapon, with some characterization. The one you start with is basically a machine gun; the one you find here locks onto enemies and launches a barrage of missiles at them in intervals. This fundamentally changes your interactions within this space: instead of running up on enemies and comboing them while shooting, you can hang back on top of a dune and rain death from a distance. I was struck that I had perhaps never been put in the position of the American War Machine in such a potent way before. Especially as my companion harped on the fact that the machines' speech was just gibberish, that their protestations and terror were nonsense, and that they were simple tools of great evil forces.

The game itself is largely about these machines and their disparate attempts to learn to be human. The side quests, genre-specific as they tend to be, are where this is fleshed out. There are the obvious, well-written ones, like the androids in the Resistance camp who go crazy when they realize they've killed their friends, or who are actively and non-consensually reformatting their partners to make them stronger. It's also in the boss design, like when you fight a machine in an amusement park named Simone (du Beauvior) who is obsessed with winning the love of another (Jean-Paul (Sartre)) despite not knowing what that "love" actuallys is, and so she becomes cannibalistically obsessed with the practice of gaining personal beauty. But the ones that work best are the ones that are literally nothing more than tropes of the genre. A robot named Father Servo spars with you a half dozen or so times; you run shitty races in a series called Speed Tests. These machines are little gameplay challenges and fetch quests and ways to ask you to keep playing. But they're also bizarre little stubs of development for characters that shed light on the broader world. They're specializations, in a way that emulates human society. Except that they end in evolutionary dead ends when they can't be the best.

The flip side of these highly humanistically developed machines are the philosophical ones. The highest example is the aforementioned Jean-Paul, who proclaims basic tenets of 20th century French existentialism. He is a prick, but more than that he is a product of his environment. Pascal's village is a little oasis in a world that's ravaged by endless war, so of course the ideas it would produce aren't exactly hopeful. It is premised on Pascal's own pacifism, as well, meaning it isn't exactly fertile ground for revolutionary thought. But there are also the robots in the amusement park who have an ideology entirely centered around joy; the forest kingdom which has an eternally-infantile king (machines don't grow up) that privileges loyalty and protection over everything. Every thought these machines have stems from their material conditions. Including the ones who hover over the edges of tall structures, only able to be interacted with by hacking, who have nascent questions about the meaning of life, which ends in their self-destruction.

The second time I beat NieR:Automata (endings A-E), I teared up at the end credits. The game ends with you playing a shmup with the credits, which eventually escalates in difficulty to the point where it either is impossible or is nearly so. Eventually, as you die, you get asked questions about whether you want to give up. Behind those questions are bits of encouragement from other players. My first time through I thought that was effective and cute; my second I nearly lost it. I have no reason here, or takeaway really, other than that for a game that is so "spoilable" the actual experience is consistently stranger and more beautiful than knowing could possibly interrupt.