Bullet Points Monthly

Serfing the Superstructure

Lewis Gordon — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I think like a Runner: calculating, efficient, committed to the contract. I plough my hard-earned credits into better gear; I tweak the sensitivity of my analogue stick so that I can twirl it with greater precision. All this happens once I’m in Marathon, but lately I’ve started to think like a Runner outside of the game. What is the optimal time to log on: in the morning or evening? Are sessions a touch calmer during the day, if less frequent? Do I maximize my enjoyment by minimizing how long I wait for a connection? These meta questions always circle back to the most concrete, unassailable fact of this otherwise capricious game—that I’m reliant on other players for a good time, their meatspace presence tethered to mine through the internet.

The Runners, as others have remarked, are an ingenious bit of narrative design. They are people whose consciousness has been uploaded to the cloud yet can be downloaded into an artificial body, i.e. the various classes of so-called Shells. With each new game session, players enter these Shells via impressionistic loading screens which double as manufactured dreams (or “sense-memories” according to Marathon’s lore). Short, sharp death inevitably follows a handful of tense, loot-filled minutes, yet that’s never the end. Rather, Runners are able to load back into another Shell, thus entering into an endless purgatorial fight for resources on the iridiscently pretty Tau Ceti IV—grist for the mill in the cosmic wilderness.

Runners are sad, servile creatures, consigned to an existence of plastic, polymer, supersized tarpaulins, and getting smoked repeatedly in Dire Marsh’s murky waters. Maybe I am sad and a little servile, too—grist for the mill not of the in-game agri-pharma business NuCaloric or Amazon Web Services analogue, CyberAcme, but of Sony itself. I am a live-service player which means, like the Runners, I am a resource. Where, with each rebirth, the fictional Runners accrue debt to their Shell manufacturer, thus plunging deeper into corporate serfdom, I accrue a kind of time debt to Sony (the game’s publisher and owner of its developer, Bungie). I log on almost every evening like a good, dependable worker, plugging away at contracts and acquiring better gear. To be clear, all live-service titles operate according to this kind of time debt logic; sinking tens, if not hundreds of hours into them makes our leaving all the harder (and our purchasing of skins all the more likely). But no other online multiplayer game has spelled out this wretched power dynamic with such clarity as Marathon.

There is hardly a better indicator of how live-service players have become a resource than the primacy of SteamDB in contemporary gaming discourse. The site, among other functions, tracks concurrent player numbers which has caused armchair commentators, Reddit nerds, and wannabe CEOs to pour over these real-time figures, using them to argue for either a game’s commercial, and even creative, success (including Marathon’s), as if raw popularity at any given moment is the most insightful metric.

But perhaps this number is telling, just not quite how these people envision it to be. Game companies like Sony seek to marshal our aggregate force as live-service players in a bid to create tidal waves of momentum. We are activated by these corporations through slick marketing campaigns and so-called “server slams”, by incremental gameplay tweaks in tried-and-tested formulas, and, maybe above all, by the desire to avoid FOMO for the golden weeks when an online videogame truly feels like the zeitgeist. We are playing, yes; and maybe also being played—reduced to tickers in the daily-active-users bar.

Live-service titles typically obscure their exploitative impulses: the relentless gear grind of Arc Raiders’ is softened by its picturesque, post-apocalyptic scenery. Marathon is pretty, too, though the world is emblazoned with barcodes and branding which reinforces its oppressively capitalist gameplay loop. The game marries competitive online shooting with loot acquisition; this causes a high-stakes, risk-reward dynamic that means every session feels like a roll of the dice (indeed, writing for Kotaku, Zack Zwiezen called Marathon a “slot machine of loot and death”). But there’s a third aspect of the game that shapes the experience: contracts. These simple tasks, like having to scan bioprinters for something called a sparkleaf, funnel each team of Runners around the map, the gamified carrot cajoling them forwards.

In this unholy and frequently unpleasant fusion of casino, bland objectives, and retina-scorching shooter, Marathon feels supremely modern. It may also be an inflection point: a kind of ouroboros-esque comment on the world where score-keeping and speculation are the norm thanks, in part, to the rise of online betting, metric-focused social media, and decades of videogames like Marathon mainstreaming related types of systems and behaviors. I don't think Bungie has made a satire but something colder and starker, a reflection of this moment rather than a value judgement on it—a statement of being.

Marathon feels like the machinations of techno-feudalist modernity pushed to a misanthropic end-state extreme. As players, we’re part of this machinery; the mob, troops if you will, summoned to deliver the aims of the corporation—in this instance, to breathe life into Sony’s product. There is no dissonance between our aims and that of the cyberspace Runners, only resonance: a shared need to execute violent actions with cut-throat accuracy; to pull the trigger with greater proficiency, now with convincing haptic resistance on the PlayStation 5 controller. Marathon isn’t just a game; it feels like bootcamp for a future that’s already here.

***

Lewis Gordon is a writer and journalist living in Glasgow who contributes to outlets including the New York Times, The Guardian, and The Ringer, and ArtReview.

Fist to Mirror, Bullet to Temple

Grace Benfell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bachelor, Daniil Dankovsky, is an idealist. He yearns to defeat death, not in the one-promised-day way that Christ did, but with the cold certainty of science. He wants death to be found legally deceased. Yet, he carries a gun in his pocket, a debutant, the favored gun of assassins and housewives. It could load two shots, but it only has one. It's hard to miss when you are aiming at yourself. This is one of the dualities that defines Daniil. He's a city boy of realities caught in the country town of dreams. A man who dreams of immortality who carries a pistol in case he can't catch it. A doctor obsessed with theory, trapped in a town that demands praxis. Like his companion protagonists, Daniil Dankovsky has fates written in duplicate and triplicate. Though he is the most rational of them, he is also the most mad. The Changeling, a magical girl in the most literal sense, takes the supernatural elements of the plague at face value, thereby evading the arcs of denial which both the other protagonists must overcome. The Haruspex of Pathologic 2 grows weary and hungry, while Daniil flits from heart-pounding mania to sinking, slowing depression. Daniil presents himself as buttoned-up, but inwardly he is far more tortured. For Daniil, as much as for any human being, the mind is the body.

Since the beginning, Pathologic has had an interest in modeling things that ludic systems struggle to represent. Pathologic 2 and its predecessor were both punishing poverty simulators. Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion threatened their protagonist as much as any plague or gunshot. Time was an enemy, for the more it ticked, the less you could accomplish. These games thrive on desperation. In some ways, the latest entry is no different. Yet, the desperation is, for the most part, not physical. Sure, thieves and plague-ridden beggars can hurt the good doctor. But Daniil is desperate for desired outcomes: the right deaths instead of the wrong ones, the true diagnoses rather than the incorrect ones, the truth instead of fiction. For him, time is parchment one can scrape off. With the sharp currency of mirror shards, mercy killings, and completed favors, Daniil can rewind the clock, select what plot lines to reset and which ones to leave alone, like a jaded writer killing and resurrecting their darlings. It is this idea that fuels the game's economy and which can end Daniil if he is not careful.

In a tangible way, this makes the game about obsession in a way that other entries have flirted with, but not fully embodied. Most people have replayed a conversation in their head, knowing more fully what they would have said with more time to think. But Daniil can turn the world over for such conversations, can return to a week prior thinking that one new turn of phrase might open one new door in the future. It's a metacommentary on the series' past. Players cannot reload old saves, but they can time travel, albeit at a cost. It makes the savescumming players indulged in prior games into a tangible part of the world. The town is a machine, one which you can tune to your heart.

But the town is also a body, a great bull with running rivers. Any body has a membrane, a boundary which separates it from the world outside but through which the world can enter. In addition to his more-or-less typical health meter, Daniil swings between "apathy" and "mania." When balanced in the middle, Daniil moves normally and takes no ill effects. When manic, he rushes with inhuman speed and his heart suffers for the effort. At its worst he cannot speak at all and might drop dead. When apathetic, he walks lethargically and the precious currency which Daniil can use to rewind time drips out of him. He no longer cares about the time he is wasting. These states are psychological, yet the primary way the player experiences them is within Daniil's body. They are a reminder of his human frailty. Every slow heartbeat turns him back to apathy; every harsh word to mania.

Yet, these states can also be managed, driven to perfection (or at least to what is needed). The most obvious way is drugs, to which Daniil has plentiful access. Yet, with each use they become less effective, grow a festering addiction. The sensory input of the world is more reliable. Push at a water pump or kick at a trash can to raise Daniil's energy; contemplate a corpse or play with a child's toy to make him care less. In one sense, Daniil is frightfully emotional. The wrong word can drive him to prepping the gun he always carries with him. In another, he is only calculating. To the uninformed eye, Daniil does things that might seem nonsensical. One could imagine a bystander thinking, "why did that doctor just knock over a trash can?" Yet, within Daniil's body, these things are perfectly logical. They tune his body towards the way it should be.

This is all a long way of saying that Daniil Dankovsky is crazy. This is not pejorative, so much as diagnostic. He has such a love for the world that the idea of even one soul perishing is painful and such resentment that it would be better to kill himself than stay in it. He scoffs at the supernatural manifestations of the Steppe, but believes, with kind of a religious faith, that death is mortal. He questions his own sanity when he witnesses the Shabnak, a corpse woman manifestation of the plague. Yet he still builds a weapon to banish it, each and every day. These are dualities, contradictions sure, but they are also madnesses. The inquisitor asks Daniil whether there was really a Shabnak. Did Daniil not simply indulge the legends of the Steppe and kill innocent women accused of spreading the plague? Or is he merely recreating a burning he witnessed on the first day in the town? He can deny or contemplate these explanations but there are no answers, only one fact. When he clears the plague's mist, he can hear a woman screaming. Whatever the real answer, there is no way out. Daniil sees things "rational" people do not.

Unlike Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 remake or either Hellblade, Pathologic 3 does not have trigger warnings. Its credits have no sensitivity consultants. Its marketing material does not boast of its adherence to the reality of mental illness. In fact, diagnosing Daniil might prove a little tricky. Bipolar disorder would be the obvious one, but his sensitivity to light and sound and his fixation on a specific set of pet projects could indicate autism. Pathologic 3 takes place in the past, though naming exactly when and where would be difficult. But it would be reasonable to assume that it was before there was ever a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Perhaps thereby in a time when madness was still a kind of wisdom.

The Bachelor is not the only mad inhabitant of the town. He may be the most diagnosable, thanks to the others' connection to the folk magic and indigenous traditions of the area. Eva, the caretaker of the Stillwater house, where Daniil resides during his 12 days in the town, considers herself both alive and dead, like how light is both a particle and a wave. Her suicide on the 10th day is her testament to that truth. Simon Kain, the seemingly immortal patriarch of the town, brought the plague to it, so that the town could weather the future. It remains unclear whether it is out of mercy, panic, negligence, or, yes, madness. Daniil is merely the one whose body the player halfway inhabits, the role they take on.

Although Pathologic 3 and its predecessors work over all these madnesses, there is always wisdom to them. However strange the Steppe dwellers seem to the civilized occupants of the capital, they hold truth that speaks to the heart of the disease. The Bachelor, the Changeling, or the Haruspex must incorporate them to succeed. This is not so much a thesis as it is a fundamental fact of the world. In hallucinations, in dreams, and in the things that the rational would write off as irrelevant, there is something real. There is a fundamental mystery which punctures the heart of human living. The people who are mad do not always wield it well and they are not always good, but madness itself is never wrong.

The idea of ludonarrative dissonance, at least as it is commonly used, relies on a kind of absurdity. It presupposes that the events "shown" through play are quite literally real. This feels like a uniquely videogame problem. Videogames, with their roots in simulation and computer modeling, tend to present themselves as at least a reality, if not realistic in themselves. Yet this cannot be true. Arthur Morgan never needs to go to the bathroom. The days in Red Dead Redemption 2 are just 48 minutes long. All videogames are abstracted. It would be an inane question to ask whether the town of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari really looks like that. Yet, videogame criticism has been asking questions of such inanity as long as it has existed.

Pathologic generally, and 3 in particular, lean on subjectivity in a way that is rare for videogames. If Daniil runs while his mania is high, you hear the sounds of a film projector accelerating; when he is drowning in apathy, scratches and film grain appear. Clocks are safe havens where Daniil can time travel using money he raided from smashed mirrors. None of these things are literal. They cannot be. But yet, what is? At the end of each of Pathologic 3's 12 days, the whole sky turns into the ceiling and stained glass of the theater, while actors play out scenes next to the Stillwater. To Eva, Daniil asks if the actors and their racket bothers her. What really happens in Pathologic 3, and what is just Daniil's perception or the fragmenting of his memories? But what does that question matter? It's the map that matters, the abstract picture that the game creates.

For all the things that Daniil Dankovsky is, he is first and foremost not real. Still, he is no flat symbol or thin surrogate. It is a fact that for the vast majority of human beings, experience is elusive. Details, like how a tree branch spiraled across the sky or the exact shape of the wrinkles on a stranger's face, are impossible to recall. It is often only exceptional experience which can draw fragments into horrifying clarity. What we remember of a novel or a game or a film is feeling. The product of its multitude details is untouchable. It is that feeling alone which reaches into immortality.

The entirety of Pathologic 3 takes place in retrospect, as Daniil relays his story to an inquisitor. It is retroactive justification, tall tale, and confession. Yet, even with some control over his narrative, perfection remains elusive. He doubles back on himself, tells the truth and then tells lies, recalls important information too late. This is because cracks are what let the light in. A truth that Daniil affirms every time he breaks a mirror. "Once Dankovsky, now a thousand Dankovskys." The whole game is a portrait and the player is both sitter and painter. The result must be incomplete. It is made up not of symbols, but shards which construct a picture no human being has fully understood. If there is any truth it is only us, with all our jagged edges, that can reach it.

***

Grace Benfell is a freelance writer based in Chicago. She is the author of Killing Our Gods: Essays On Religion, Christianity, And Video Games. She co-edits the criticism journal The Imaginary Engine Review and co-hosts the survival horror podcast The Safe Room. In her spare time, she writes horror fiction about bad Mormons and organizes with the Freelance Solidarity Project. Her work can be found at The A.V. Club, The Wand Report, Edge Magazine, on her website, and elsewhere.

A Reluctant Defense of Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine

Julie Muncy — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pathologic 3 introduces its world by placing you in a series of traps. In quick succession, you visit a locked room, a hostile interrogator looming over you; a prison cell, punishment for crimes your player character did before you got here; and the Town itself, a small Steppe village that will soon be quarantined in an effort to fight a vicious, possibly sentient plague. Again, this last one was also your fault—quarantine orders came from one Doctor Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine. You.

Pathologic 3 wants you to feel confined.

///

With two followup games and twenty years of hindsight, it now seems somewhat odd that Daniil Dankovsky, a prissy, stuck-up doctor from the far-off big city of the Capital, is the character who introduced players to the world of Pathologic. He's a dreamer, with big, utopian ideals—he believes death is a pathology that can be cured—but he is, fundamentally, a rationalist, an inheritor of Enlightenment thinking. He believes mankind can reason its way out of all its problems, and he's here to help.

But the Town, as it's presented in the series, is anything but rational. Utopians exist here—plenty of them—but even they are mystics, trafficking in the creation and nurturing of things which defy "natural law," as Dankovsky might put it. And just one layer deeper in the Town's culture, pure magic begins to seep out. Impossible creatures. Earth that bleeds. Plagues that talk. In that sense, the other two protagonists of the series seem more appropriate—a magic child born yesterday (literally) and a local with medical training outside the Town, placing him as both insider and outsider, the perfect liminal guide.

Yet, if you pick up the newest game, clearly built to be approachable to new players, or try out the first one, you'll find yourself saddled first with the Bachelor, a man who only believes what he sees and often fails to see what he really needs to. Odd, no?

That child, the Changeling, even comments on this, early on in Pathologic 3. She wonders why the Bachelor, of all people, is actually able to see the shabnak adyr, a creature of local myth and walking personification of the plague. Surely he's not the type.

"Why you, with your head of solid oakwood, can see her is a very interesting question," the Changeling says, in one of the sprawling game's few truly mandatory dialogues. "Most people like you are completely blind ... What ripped that hole in you, I wonder?"

One of the available responses is, simply, "I don't remember."

///

Dankovsky's been forgetting a lot lately. Early on, the game introduces its central gimmick, a time-travelling ability that lets Dankovsky travel to any of the game's twelve days out of sequence (with some limitations, including a resource cost that can become, in true Pathologic fashion, incredibly punishing if taken for granted). This gimmick lends play a thick air of disorientation. It's easy to forget when in time you are, and due to Pathologic 3's other major change—breaking the Town from one playable map into several smaller ones—it's easier than ever to forget where.

But for Dankovsky, the biggest question isn't when or where but why. Why am I trapped here, in this prison cell? In this town? In this interrogation chamber? You and Dankovsky both experience so much out of order, learning about your own actions in advance, only to be later given the opportunity to enact or rewrite them directly. Causality itself can come to feel unstable, despite the game's laudable attempts to help you track events via an in-game mind map. Nothing unravels the way it's supposed to. No one does what you expect.

In turn, this confusion reinforces the early game's sense of confinement. You are playing the role of a man trapped by choices he does not remember making in places he does not understand. In this way, Dankovsky is often less doctor than he is escape artist, working to understand and therefore massage the progression of events around him just enough to get out of whatever jam he currently finds himself in. You play in loops of information gathering and reactive action, leaping around in time to find breaking points in causality and then use them, Scott Bakula always trying to find the one path home.

It gets to a point where, after a while, you might start to wonder whether Pathologic 3 is about a plague at all.

///

My jaw dropped when I found the pantomimes in Pathologic 3 for the first time. In both prior games, the Town's theater showcases a surreal, self-referential pantomime performance at the end of every day. These pantomimes reflect back the day's contents to the player, offering commentary, letting you know that the world of the Town is not quite coherent in its sense of "reality."

In Pathologic 3, you are returned to your home base, Eva Yan's home, the Stillwater, when the day ends. You cannot go to the theater. But if you go outside you find that the theater has come to you. The skybox and out-of-bounds areas of the map have been stripped away like a set to reveal a massive rendition of the theater's stage. Your entire version of the Town exists inside it. A model. A diorama.

It's beautiful, a level of spectacle I did not expect from a game mostly about walking and talking.

In all of Pathologic 3's pantomimes, Dankovsky is absent. The other characters speak of him as if he's already dead.

///

The question of focus is never one Pathologic 2 invites a player to ask. The plague, as a destructive, possessive, all-consuming problem, is that game's core focus. It informs all the mechanics. As the local-turned-surgeon, Artemy Burakh, you have to keep yourself fed, watered, and swathed in enough PPE to survive journeys into plague districts. All your actions are focused on surviving, saving lives, and finding a cure. The plague talks with you constantly, taunting you, whispering dirges in your ear if you get infected.

Of course, Pathologic 2 is about more than the plague. It cares deeply about colonialism, grief, the specter of death itself. But it never loses sight of that core preoccupation, that one inciting problem. Something is making you and your loved ones sick, and you have to stop it or everyone is going to die. Not free of nuance, but simple.

Pathologic 3 is not nearly so single-minded. You deal with the plague every day, sure, treating patients and investigating leads. But the loci the game returns to are different, now. Confrontations with illness begin to feel like, well, your day job. Seeing patients is wrapped up in a nice minigame package, a straightforward investigation puzzle that you only have to do once for each calendar day. Your duties as lead of the epidemic response are, likewise, limited, just a decree board with a few meters to track and cards to place, only occupying you for a couple minutes at a time. These are things Dankovsky must do, but they're not why he's here.

The plague is almost beside the point. It doesn't present an enemy for Dankovsky, not exactly. It's more like a clock.

///

Eventually, like any prey animal bent on survival, Dankovsky gets pretty good at wriggling his way out of traps. As he does, you, as both player and Dankovsky, begin to realize just how interlocked these traps are, how overlapping. Like an escape artist trapped in a straight jacket, that itself is sealed with a padlock, who also happens to be trapped underwater in a confinement tank, Dankovsky leaps out of one problem to land directly in the next, one prison inside another, inside another, inside another. A path spiraling outward.

And at some point, maybe one or both of you starts to realize you know the answer to the Changeling's question after all. Maybe it's on day—eight? nine? I can hardly tell anymore—when Eva Yan dies, jumping off the Cathedral in order to pledge it her soul, just as she did in the original Pathologic. A tragic act of pure agency that, now, finally, after so many years, you have the opportunity to stop.

Or maybe it's when the game cuts back to the Capital for another surreal interrogation, instead this time you're let out to see to a medical emergency, and you find a plague victim here where there should not be one, and as you talk to him you realize that it's the Bachelor himself, another one, here, somehow, a Bachelor who ran and carried this illness back with him because of course he did because that's exactly who Dankovsky has always been, isn't it, who you have always been. Why did you think that you could be the hero of this story? You can't even save yourself.

You did it. You tore this hole in him. When you refused to let him die, at the start of the game, breaking time itself. Or, earlier, when you talked your way out of his prison cell; later, when you'll finally make your way into the Polyhedron, seeing the world break apart around you. You did this. Like skin left in an animal trap. The remnant of one escape too many, a reminder that you're never quite free enough. That you might never get it right.

You, the player? You, Dankovsky? The difference is moot. The point is, this is a self-inflicted wound. A wound no amount of time turning will fix. And it's this that qualifies Daniil Dankovsky to be the protagonist of Pathologic 3. It's what makes him real enough to transcend his pre-written pettiness and his limited worldview. He's wounded, so now he can heal.

He's wounded, so now he can grow.

///

In the original Pathologic, Daniil Dankovsky is a failure. At best, he finds a half revelation—the secret to a magic tower that could possibly hold an immortal soul after death—at the cost of an entire town. His research organization, Thanatica, is most likely in ruins; thousands of people are dead. He found magic when he wanted a cure, trickery when he needed revelation. The only true thing he learns, if he's very, very lucky, is that he's a puppet of the surreal Powers That Be that control the world of Pathologic, in this game embodied by two (alarmingly large) children. He learns that he's a doll, a character in a video game, and this all meant nothing.

In Pathologic 2, Daniil Dankovsky is a failure. You last see him alone in the house of one of the Town's true protectors, contemplating a gun. He remains misguided, selfish, the useless dandy from the Capital who never truly understands what's happening around him. This Dankovsky fails to see beyond the veil; he fails to see much of anything at all. If he has any happy ending here, it's only because you, as Burakh, give it to him.

In Pathologic 3, Daniil Dankovsky is an open wound refusing to fester. This makes him the perfect lead for what Pathologic 3 is, and a perfect fulcrum on which to hang everything about this game that is so different from its predecessors. This is not a game about the plague, nor even about time, really. It's a game about escape.

It crystallized for me the first time I saw inside the Polyhedron. The Polyhedron, as established in the previous two games, is an impossible object, a tower made of its own blueprints, an empty container for souls, an attempt to take the humanist mysticism of the Town's architects and weld it to the earth itself.

Here, the Polyhedron is all these things. It is also the point where reality itself breaks down even more dramatically than it does during the pantomimes. The "detective vision"-style navigation mechanic here changes the landscape itself. New perspectives open up new pathways. The deeper spaces in it are impossible mirror images of the Town rendered as hand-painted paper, the blueprints of the Polyhedron becoming the blueprints of the game's material world. Here, you talk to shadows. The dead. Yourself.

Here, finally, the series returns to the revelation that the first Pathologic's Dankovsky had— that none of this is real, that even beyond the layer of the theater there is another prison, one that holds the entirety of the fiction itself. A trite point, in 2026, an obvious sort of meta twist. Of course it's not real; it's a videogame. But here, in this new version of the Polyhedron, this revelation is deeper, more electric. Of course none of this is real, but now all the cards are on the table, now the artifice and cyclicality of this world is an open secret. And this creates the possibility of understanding. Of exploitation. The possibility for Dankovsky to escape the cycle of failure that has trapped his character for either twelve days, twenty years, or an eternity, depending on who's asking.

Pathologic 3 is not a story about a Town, a plague, and a trio of desperate healers. Pathologic 3 is a Gnostic puzzle box, its center hollow and recursive. It presents a series of false realities and false selves for its hero to break out of. By following the path left by the hole torn in the fabric of his character, Dankovsky can find a way to become something new. What he becomes is somewhat less clear—in one rendering, he can become a godlike reincarnation of Simon Kain, the Town's dead immortal man, existing in all places, all times. In another, he settles into his role as healer and seeker of wonders both, as a man who acts just as much as he dreams. In another, he simply re-enacts his victory or failure from the first game, Sisyphus embracing the absurd.

///

Pathologic 3 doesn't end. It loops, giving you and Dankovsky the opportunity to retry anything you didn't like, or try new paths opened up by late-game revelations. After I reached this point, I started looking at fan feedback online, wanting to get a sense of how this experience struck others. I saw a lot of people, in Reddit threads and Steam community forums, say that the experience was ... unsatisfying. Too open ended to provide a sense of completion; too familiar in its choices of final outcomes to truly feel new. A part of me agreed.

But—of course. What else would you expect? Pathologic 3 is a game about being trapped. The point of a locked room isn't for its bare walls to satisfy you.

The point is to leave.

***

Julie Muncy is a writer, consultant, and video game developer. She wrote and designed Interstate 35, a surreal visual novel about going home, available now on Steam. You can follow her on Bluesky @julie.radiantarray.io.

Surgical Intimacy

Reid McCarter — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

“What a cozy squalor, what surgical intimacies! The dirt is moral as well as material; the physiological miseries are matched by the spiritual and the intellectual.”

—from The Devils of Loudun, by Aldous Huxley

We will never escape the Steppe. The train doesn’t run from the Town-on-Gorkhon to the Capital and there’s no way to leave through the countryside. Time itself stops or bends into tangled knots within its boundaries. From the outside, Pathologic 3’s Town is something like a snow globe made for us to pick up and shake. We want to watch its inhabitants from a distance, even when looking through the eyes of its protagonist, the Bachelor of Medicine Daniil Dankovsky.

Like its predecessor, Pathologic 3 is less a traditional sequel than a reexamination of the same plot and setting that its creator Ice-Pick Lodge debuted in 2005. The events of its story take place over 12 days, within a vision of early 20th-Century Russia where a plague dubbed the ‘sand pest’ has infected a remote town in the Eurasian Steppe. The Bachelor, a student of thanatology in the unnamed Capital, arrives in the Town-on-Gorkhon on a research trip to investigate rumours of an immortal man. He is promptly engulfed in local politics, trapped by the onset of the sand pest and the supernatural mysteries of the Town’s relationship to time and death. The Bachelor is appointed leader of the Town’s medical efforts. He’s allowed to issue decrees that quell local unrest and the spread of disease.

The overarching goal of Pathologic 3 is to lead the Town through the plague intact. This involves finding patients to diagnose and using the facts of their condition to formulate a day-by-day vaccine to keep the plague at bay. It also requires solving the many problems that present themselves every morning, as petitioners arrive at the Bachelor’s headquarters, an apartment called the Stillwater, letting him know about new gossip, political developments, and murders.

Pathologic 3 wouldn't be nearly as compelling if all of the above was presented as entirely realistic, or if it explored its premise without introducing the spiritual beliefs that animate the Town-on-Gorkhon. The Bachelor, like the modern player, comes to the Steppe thinking its folk traditions are nonsense—that the arcane approaches to death and time its characters embrace are rural superstitions. The Bachelor is his own person, variably arrogant and dismissive, empathetic and humble, with changes to his personality subtly reflected in dialogue options as the 12 days progress and he witnesses more than he expected to among the people of the Town. The game’s major design trapping is introduced by way of time-shifting clocks—the Bachelor moves back and forth between the dozen days’ events, altering them to shape the future—and he encounters characters whose previously nonsensible thoughts prove to be based in a kind of fact. He arrives in the Town possessed of an urbane prejudice, looking down his nose at folk traditions outside his academic purview. He's quickly humbled at the scope of the plague's reach and the failings of his own education to meet the task at hand. As a researcher devoted to a field of medicine as unorthodox as overcoming death, his viewpoint changes, and ours does, too. It's only when he starts to take the Town's traditions seriously that he begins to accomplish anything.

We’re shown the Bachelor's change in viewpoint by the way people react to his questions about the immortal man he's come to the Town to study: Simon Kain. Though Simon's corpse is seen shrouded and awaiting burial on the second day, characters state that this doesn’t mean he’s truly dead. They don’t mean that Simon's become something as straightforwardly fantastical as a zombie or that he continues to exist in the metaphorical sense of the deceased living on in the memory of the living. They mean that time itself is more fluid than we think it is, exemplified in the Bachelor hopping between days and in a ‘game over’ style screen that displays the message “There is no death, there’s only time." There are evocations of Schrödinger throughout, but Pathologic 3 resists the pull of exact scientific or concrete philosophical explanations for its exploration of death and time, of multiple possibilities for every moment in our life and afterlife. It prefers instead to couch its narrative in a fictional brand of spirituality. Its Steppe traditions involve strict rituals for the entering of giant cathedrals devoted to clocks, of disturbing the earth for burials. Children tell tales of hollow acorns and trade in bits of stained glass that refract everyday light into strange new forms. All of these novel concepts seem, at first, like nonsense, before gradually revealing themselves as in-game spiritual inventions for handling the link between time and death.

Pathologic 3 makes our own belief systems abstract through the inventions of the Steppe and the beliefs of its prophets, scientists, and architects. Architecture is particularly important in Pathologic 3, serving as a practical kind of religion for bridging the gap between concept and experience. The Town's architects serve as priests. They grasp for the numinous not through prayer and meditation, but through the design of impossible streets that show those who walk them their future, of spidery stairways extending high up into the sky, of cathedrals to time, and of the overall construction of the Town itself. To walk the Town is to believe in what those who built it believe.

One character explains that the ‘immortal’ Simon was (is) an architect who had a “dream of building a town that would become a crucible,” and the truth of this is revealed as the Bachelor journeys back and forth through its neighbourhoods—as he becomes intimately familiar with both its physical layout and the organic composition of those who are created by and live within it. Pathologic and Pathologic 2 already centre the Town-on-Gorkhon as a sort of living organism in and of itself, a body-as-town that survives only when its various components are functioning together in harmony. Pathologic 3 puts a finer point on this same theme through a system that sees the Bachelor regularly diagnosing the ailments the Town’s people suffer. The sick crowd into his field hospital in the local theatre, and he asks them questions about their coughs, their rashes, what and how much they eat and drink and smoke. The screen shifts to close-ups of their anatomy, bare torsos and limbs on display for the Bachelor to inspect. We zoom in on cracked patches of skin, squint at bruises on arms and legs. There are always corpses, too, and sometimes the Bachelor examines the dirt under their nails and the splatters of blood staining the places in which they were murdered. As he looks deeply at individual people, something greater than their bodily composition begins to make sense. The miseries of the Town’s people grow in proportion to the misery spread by the plague and its attending human violence. There has to be an order to the mortal wreckage of the Town. Pathologic 3's view narrows to explore existential themes, raised by centering the population's bodies. Through this focus, it highlights the earthier, organic source from which every larger spiritual concern springs.

The Town-on-Gorkhon deteriorates as the days progress, rioting districts lined with barricades and plague-infested neighbourhoods heaped with the moaning sick. The upheaval escalates with the arrival of soldiers who patrol the streets near the last of the game’s days. They interrogate and kill citizens, burning their bodies in piles and positioning a giant cannon to threaten them. The Bachelor moves through time to mitigate these issues and, as he does so, he's led to plotlines that invite him to invest in something greater than the rationality that’s guided his profession so far. The Town truly becomes a crucible, for both the Bachelor and the player guiding him through the game. Pathologic 3 increases in both horror and, through the suffering that comes with that horror, the possibility of spiritual epiphany. The streets are choked with death and violence. The Bachelor spends his days peering intently at the declining bodies of endless patients. The Town tests him and shows him, in its impossible architecture and time-warping spirituality, that the bounds of reality can be rethought in different ways.

"My neighbor keeps saying this plague is a test for us all. For the sick and the healthy alike,” a nameless citizen says at one point in the game. “It's like someone is testing our nature—to see if we're truly human at heart or just growling beasts.”

The Bachelor, by the game’s end, has become intimate with the town not just as a larger body he lives within, but with its peoples’ actual bodies and minds. There are secrets and revelations in both. He finds goodness in his indefatigable assistant, Yakov Little, and the ethereal Eva Yan, who resides at the Stillwater with him. These characters become foundations for both the Bachelor and the player as the Town slips further into chaos and dread. Little reminds the Bachelor that there is merit in his devotion to medicine, no matter how futile it may seem. Eva begins as an inscrutable presence, her dialogue a mystery, until, near the game’s end, she demonstrates the Town’s ability to preserve life beyond death. This takes shape through an emotionally resonant scene that speaks, in fiction, to the pseudo-magical abilities of her home and, to the real-world player, to a half-comforting, half-harrowing way of thinking about the dead as eternally present.

When confronted at the moment just before she plans to commit suicide, Eva explains that she isn't really ever quite alive or dead in a Town where time is fluid enough to spread out like a tapestry, rather than proceed evenly toward a constant future. "Think of yourself not as a particle that either is or isn't," Eva says, "but as a wave capable of fluctuation." She exercises free will in choosing to terminate her own state of fluctuation, with the player capable of either trapping her back in 'life' as an outwardly-projected version of herself, dreamed up by the Bachelor's external perception of her, or respecting her choice to float free of reality, even if that makes her appear 'dead' through her absence.

It makes a certain sense, given how fully the linear progress of time has collapsed for the Bachelor. And it illustrates a mode of thinking that opens the Town's rituals up for consideration. They become, to the Bachelor, fragmented attempts to explain something just on the tip of reality's tongue, something beyond the realm of the rational that defeats time and, with it, death itself. The Steppe is a place to stay within and consider, because its mysteries are always just close enough to solve, if we can just manage to think through them, or at least feel their truth in a way that promises revelation.

In all of this, Pathologic 3 functions as a miniature world for the player to engage with both in the toyetic sense—there are puzzles to solve, objectives to complete—and as a sort of movable site of contemplation, or, in the firm sense of the term, ‘interactive art.’ It’s a game that encourages its protagonist to rethink his fictional world and, through his perspective and the ways in which we guide his choices, offers to do the same for us as well.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at Kotaku, The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and posts on Bluesky.

A Real Boy

Willa Bloomfield-Rowe — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Baby Steps is a game about suffering. Protagonist Nate suffers through an endless string of misfortunes in a desperate attempt to find a place to pee, while the player suffers through the mechanical torment of puppeteering his uncooperative limbs through progressively complex environmental hurdles. To play Baby Steps is to ask how much, and for what, you are willing to suffer.

This is rooted in the game's main inspiration: Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Collodi's original story is a cautionary tale that constantly punishes the titular wooden puppet throughout his journey to become a real boy. "This is what will happen to you," Collodi says, "if you don't learn to behave." And so we must imagine that Nate has found himself in the purgatory of Baby Steps' punishing world because he did not listen.

By Collodi's own measure, as made apparent through Pinocchio's flaws, Nate is getting what he deserves. What we know for sure about Nate is that he is unemployed (bad work ethic), lives in his parent's basement (lazy), and refuses to obey his father's attempts at getting his son out of this rut (disobedient child). If these are what bring Nate into the punishing terrain, his fatal flaw—also shared by his wooden progenitor— is what prolongs his suffering once arrived. Nate lies.

This begins immediately. At the start of our journey with Nate we meet Jim, full name Jiminy, a kind (if somewhat condescending) man who offers supplies and advice; things Nate sorely needs, if he can only admit he needs them. He, of course, cannot. He assures Jim he likes walking around with no shoes to shield his feet or map to guide him. Further up the mountain, Nate encounters Mike, a fellow climber. While Nate climbs to find a private toilet, Mike climbs for no other reward than that of a good challenge. He also has shoes, a map, and even a grappling hook; exemplifying how easy hiking could be, if only we took Jim up on his offer. Instead, Nate is subject to endless backsliding down muddy summits that only make the player's frustration at Nate grow. He may refuse assistance, but we are the ones who must do the hard work of dragging him up the difficult terrain one step at a time.

Though Nate's lies often extend to the people he encounters, they originate as internal lies. Pinocchio lies to indulge in vices that stray from the good behavior that will get his wish granted, while Nate lies in an attempt to avoid any feeling of embarrassment or shame in the presence of those around him. Regardless of intent, the consequences are the same. Pinocchio's nose grows longer as do the obstacles Nate is forced to surmount, as a result of his inability to admit his need for help.

This also leads to Nate falling in with a bad crowd: a group of donkey men constantly swinging their big dicks around. They find Nate early in his climb and, sensing his need for people-pleasing and a lack of purpose, give him a mission. They tell him of an angel who grants each person one wish. Having exhausted their own, they pressure Nate into spending his wish on a large supply of cigarettes. With expectation thrust upon him, how can Nate refuse?

These donkey men inhabit the world of Baby Steps with the same ethos as the children who run away to the Land of Toys in The Adventures of Pinocchio; that is to say, with reckless abandon. Unlike Jim (who seeks to help those around him) or Mike (who enjoys the challenge of the world), the donkey men treat it as a playground in which to drink, smoke, and party. They exude the belief that their actions will have no consequences and behave accordingly.

It isn't until Nate reaches the angel that he is confronted with his inability to choose for himself. Separated from Jim, Mike, and the donkey men, the angel silently requests Nate to speak his heart's desire; to make a wish. At this moment, Nate is neither able to make a choice, nor wish for what others have told him to. He instead chooses to die.

Unfortunately for Nate, this doesn't work.

It's important to say that I do think Nate is suicidal. He is clearly lost and in desperate need of help. But I think this moment with the angel is more about highlighting what sets him apart from Pinocchio. Collodi's puppet, even if he falters at times, is always certain of his wish—to be a real boy. Nate is not sure of anything,and can only begin to face his next steps once the escape of death has been taken away from him.

Whenever Pinocchio fails, Collodi is there to remind the reader that the path forward is simple enough. All the puppet has to do is go to school, work, and obey his father. There is no one to tell Nate what to do. In fact Nate's constant desire for validation from others is his downfall.

In the aftermath of his failed wish, Nate does not really engage with the partying donkey men again. He does, however, trek through a mine. We don't see who works this extensive mine, but its existence recalls the fate of those children in the Land of Toys. Their endless bacchanal transforms them into donkeys and they are later sold off to labor in (amongst other places) salt mines. Their revels would not bring peace to Nate's life.

Although, the idea of Jim as Nate's conscience is also not quite right in the way Jiminy is for Pinocchio. We can choose to take some help from Jim in the form of a staircase that circumvents a cliff face called the Manbreaker. It is a big moment for Nate, letting him (for once) take the easy way. Though there is a slight price. Jim makes Nate call him "Lord" as an admission that Nate could not handle the Manbreaker. This reveals Jim's offers of help to be as condescending as they always seemed.

These characters offer Nate variations on masculinity, Baby Steps's potential models of what real boyhood means, all of which have darker shades to them. The donkey men being so obviously rooted in toxic machismo (literal dick swinging) and Jim offering snark behind his smile (you just know he'd mansplain given the chance). So what is left for Nate?

The only genuinely nice guy is Moose, a seemingly reformed donkey man who remarks to Nate that he has a cabin towards the top of the mountain with a toilet. After hours of trekking, Nate sees the mountain's peak, an arbitrary goal, perhaps the loneliest place in this purgatory; a possible place to pee. Then, up from a whale mouth-sized pit, rises a plume of smoke. In the pit is Moose's cabin; and a real toilet.

Baby Steps, like its inspiration, is a cautionary tale. But unlike Pinocchio, who must escape the whale in yet another test of his determination, Nate's story ends here. Faced with a final decision, Nate must choose either to continue to struggle alone towards the mountaintop or give up ground, fall into the pit, and ask Moose for help. The choice is clear, and this admission not only gives him a warm place to rest and empty his bladder. It allows Nate to define for himself what it means to be a real boy.

***

Willa Bloomfield-Rowe is a queer games critic based in New York City whose writing has been featured in The A.V. Club, Digital Trends, Kotaku, and more. She also hosts the Girl Mode podcast. When she isn’t talking games she can be found on Bluesky bemoaning the state of the New York Mets.

Is It Appropriate for a Grown Man to Have a Big Fat Ass?

Astrid Anne Rose — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

"This entire nightmare could not be happening. It was too outlandish. Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order?"

—Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

There's a quick gag in Baby Steps when backpacker Jim offers protagonist Nate a map. A minimap blips onscreen with an eagle's caw. With characteristic awkwardness, Nate declines the map. The minimap disappears. The player will not be benefitting from the necessary affordances of a Rockstar epic. Rockstar games, in this case, Red Dead Redemption, signify a rugged, traditional masculinity; men's stories in men's worlds. A map suggests goals, collectibles, and points of interest: a slow conquest of everything. Baby Steps doesn't have any of that. "The dominant mode is dramatic bathos," says friend of the site Nick Capozolli. The level of challenge the game imposes—or in some areas, almost dares you to engage with—doesn't mean there are commensurate rewards in store.

Bennett Foddy's games have inspired a genre of amusingly busted endurance tests like Push It! With Sisyphus, Chained Together, A Difficult Game About Climbing, and Only Up!, to name a few. The Sisyphus angle is baked-in, I think, to any game that puts you through minor gauntlets of granular physical maneuvering. In its constant anticlimax, Baby Steps engages more directly with this allusion than any other Foddylikes. Nate's constant deferring of any assistance in his climb is a parody of masculine self-reliance, as if he's taken his sudden materialization in this mountaineering otherworld as a sign to buck up. Nate doesn't have a family to cast off or responsibilities to shirk in his pursuit—he was plucked from his dank basement couch mid-One Piece binge.

Why Nate? Who knows. Sisyphus was punished for getting one over on the gods, but Nate is an unassuming schlub. He's not hardly worth divine censure. I'd be surprised if he'd ever pursued anything in his life. The same can't be said for au courant looksmaxxer, streamer, and alpha-of-the-month Clavicular. I'm sure you've had a lot of thirtysomething bloggers try to explain this guy to you in the past couple weeks; indulge one more.

Clav is a narcissist on par with that of Greek myth: he's monomaniacally focused on achieving objective physical beauty at all costs. He's brooding and unpleasant, a joyless hedonist unmoved by the attention of women. Sex is not his preferred matter of the flesh, and despite the monstrous superficiality, hitting someone with his car, and the admitted meth use, there is nothing detectably homosexual about Clavicular at all.

Camp, however, abounds. In one clip of the "ASU frat leader framemogging incident" the tousled blonde assassin looms rectangularly behind Clav, like a Thwomp sneaking up on Mario. “Mogging,” for the uninitiated, is to look better than another guy. “Framemogging” is to mog with one’s build, or frame (this is not the same “frame,” or mindset, from MRA lingo). To mog is to belittle by sheer physical beauty; in ballroom the category would be “face.”

So mogged, Clav sulks, looking honestly close to tears at his helplessness in the face of this man's absurd frame. More often than not, Clavicular looks heavy with Byronic moodiness; surely he knows he can never get what he wants, but he's doomed to pursue it.

Camille Paglia wrote that "A woman simply is, but a man must become." Using his eponymous system, and for an undisclosed amount of money, Clavicular will help you become; or, in his words, ascend. He's the yang to Silicon Valley anti-aging obsessive Brian Johnson's yin. Both of them couch their programs in pseudoscientific, Rogan-verse jargon; everything is "stacks" and "protocols." Boys come to Clav, ascend his protocol, and leave looking like men+. Following Brian Johnson's "Don't Die" method will allow you to defeat death, like a mortal granted eternal life by the gods.

Despite streaming on Kick (a sort of Sadean mirror-world Twitch, less far-right than third option "Rumble") Clavicular's politics are incoherent aside from misogyny and self-interest. His viral fame is comprised of a typically murky mix of genuine reach and ironic spectating. His platform is the mog. The mog is God and the mog is precarious, ephemeral, as fickle as the wind. Paglia, again: masculinity is "risky and elusive." It's mog or be mogged out there. The wrong person walks into the restaurant, the bar, the club, and suddenly your cortisol skyrockets. You are no longer the number one guy in the group. The amount of work you have put into reshaping yourself can be trumped by an encounter with any random freak-of-nature hot guy who didn't have to hardmaxx. He just got out of bed that day.

The so-called crisis of masculinity has hit every sector of maledom, leaving avatars like the "dichotomy is crazy" guy to the ailing Jordan Peterson, from Hasan Piker to the tetchy Nick Fuentes. I remember Tucker Max and The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild, so I'm not convinced this is anything new. It's just a hypercurrent self-help grift, with plenty of lore for Substackers to "unpack."

But OK: how should men be? What behavior is or is not pauseworthy for a grown man to engage in? Seed oils or no seed oils? SPF or beef tallow? Learn how to live off the land or drink matcha? Hit yourself in the face with a hammer until your cheekbones pop or paint your nails? Clavicular promises ascension: get hot, get money. Brian Johnson promises you potential immortality. It all sounds terribly confusing, and unfortunately, I don't have any advice. The culture has been peddling bullshit to women since god knows when, and we still fall for it.

Nate might reject help to the point of absurdity+, but the thing is, he can go it alone. As Ed wrote, Nate may be bullheaded, but he's uncommonly skilled at moving his body from one place to another. In the end, now that we understand the territory, we’re finally given that map, tracing the messy circuit of Nate's journey. In this surreal hinterland, he has found something he's good at, or at least something he can apply himself to in full, an opportunity it's safe to say never crossed his path while he smoked out his parents' basement. Never anyone's idea of an alpha, he has still managed to ascend.

///

+ Pause.

++ "I love my body," exults one of the game's many bipedal donkey-men, wearing only a hoodie, his loose penis swinging low. "I love it too," Nate parrots. Whatever will get him through the current conversation.

***

Astrid Anne Rose is a long-time contributor to Bullet Points. Her work can be found in MEGADAMAGE, BOMB Magazine, and The New Lesbian Pulp, as well as on Gumroad and itch.io.

Manbreaker

Ed Smith — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There are two articles I wanted to write about Baby Steps, one short, one long. They’re both in here. The short one comes first.

Fully Dynamic Onesie Soilage System

I played Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided around the same time as I was playing Baby Steps, and I tell you, robotically enhanced super soldier Adam Jensen couldn’t possibly navigate the strangled, fractured, and all-round anti-traversable world that is surmounted by chubby adult toddler Nate. I kept thinking about Skyrim as well, where you play the mythical, dragon-blood-infused Dovahkiin/chosen one, but the only way you can get over slopes of moderate or above gradient is by horseback. Regardless of their preternatural abilities as written, it only takes a waist-high obstacle or a path narrower than the breadth of their shoulders to render most videogame heroes useless. I think of Master Chief, stuck running on the spot because the hill he’s trying to climb is too steep for his movement animations to accommodate, or Lara Croft, unable to mantle a ledge because it has a slightly irregularly angled lip, not one that’s 90 degrees.

These are contrivances of direction and path-finding, ways of corralling the player along a game’s golden route. There are times when this type of artifice might be too much for our suspension of disbelief—why can’t you go up this staircase in Silent Hill 2 Remake? But usually, visible-invisible walls like these are tolerable oddities of videogame language. We accept them as the mechanisms that make the more crucial parts of games work, until we discover and formalise more graceful mechanisms.

Nevertheless, they lead to a strange paradox in Baby Steps, a game which is at least partly premised on its protagonist’s slapstick inability to walk like a normal videogame character notionally walks. We’re meant to see Nate as something of a clown, and the experience of playing Baby Steps is designed to make us more consciously aware of the actions and inputs that we typically take for granted in videogames. But the controls, animations and multifaceted movement mechanics of Baby Steps mean that Nate is considerably more able to traverse difficult terrain than the archetypal game heroes to which he is subtextually being compared. Nate is also relatively free to go where he likes—although some paths are easier to walk than others, Baby Steps encourages you to find your own, often esoteric, means of reaching the next geographical waypoint, so compared to a lot of other games, where your sense of a place is defined by where you can’t go, in Baby Steps, you’re rarely curtailed by artificial borders. This is not to make judgements either on Baby Steps or the nucleic conventions of videogames that it invites you to notice, except to say that games are perhaps so detectably artificial and contrived already that their contrivance is difficult to parody or satirise, and that it’s equally hard for a game-maker to ‘make a point’ by exploiting or exaggerating those artificialities. Although they’re extremely absurd, Baby Steps’ movement and navigation mechanics are arguably less absurd than the movement and navigation mechanics that we accept in games as normal.

Donkeys v. Crickets

Yussef characterises Baby Steps’ vision of a certain kind of maleness: “unmothered men making due through expressions of nonsensical masculinity.” If the canonical ending, Nate and Moose together in their cabin, feels like any kind of resolution, it’s because it creates the impression that the pair have successfully escaped from, or risen above (they are literally on top of a mountain) the cruder, more emotionally stunted world of macho heterosexual men that they’ve encountered throughout their journey. The dramatic climax of Baby Steps is when Nate asks Moose if he can come into the cabin, his small expression of vulnerability, need and willingness to seek help representative of a kind of graduation from the insecure and solipsistic ‘masculinity’ symbolised by the majority of the game’s characters. If the game’s understanding of men up until this point feels superficial, even misanthropic (you’re either one of the donkeys, a rude, overbearing braggart preoccupied with his basest sensual urges, represented in Baby Steps by drinking and smoking, or you’re Nate, the meek, directionless, physically unripe loser) this ending suggests that these two unrefined ‘types’ of maleness, rather than being in opposition, together form a kind of crucible, in which a third, more complete man might be forged. Given the rough terrain, harsh climates and withering setbacks that he faces, Nate has to ‘man up’. But all that priapism is for naught unless he can also, in the end, find qualities like communication, emotional availability, and sympathy and empathy.

But this optimistic vision of how maleness can be shaped is contradicted by a number of other sequences. As Nate nears the top of the mountain and Moose’s cabin, he meets a gigantic woman who picks him up, cradles him, and sings to him like he’s a baby, and then places him down atop an otherwise insurmountable ice shelf, helping him on his way. During a short hallucination sequence, Nate also imagines the sound of his mother’s voice, gently encouraging and guiding him through a labyrinthine abstraction of his family’s house. Although these characters only appear fleetingly, they are both maternal, supportive, reassuring, and loving mother figures. The giant woman is a caricature of motherhood. Nate’s mother is literally his mother. If the game invites you to discover or appreciate a more complex vision of maleness, femininity by contrast is rendered in an elemental form. The game seems to appreciate the possibility of a nuanced man. It doesn’t seem to have the same kind of appreciation for the possibility of a nuanced woman.

The women in Baby Steps inhabit the strictest roles of their gender—they are mothers and suppliers of gentleness. The giant can also be reverse engineered to quasi Freudian, psychosexual domination fantasies, the mother who can physically destroy her manchild, the mommy domme. In that reading, Baby Steps becomes even more of a game from a male point of view, one where women, if not to be mothers in the domestic sense, exist for sexualisation. The suddenness of the giant woman’s appearance—the jump cut to her holding Nate like a baby—also makes her scene feel as if it’s being played for comedy. Baby Steps is a comedy game and the sequence with the giant uses the same visual language and tone as the other joke scenes. As well as introducing an icon of stereotypified, sexualised womanhood, the scene invites us to laugh at, or at least find bemusing, Nate’s fragility and softness here. It begins to feel as if the game’s ‘voice’ is more that of the donkeys, who have relatively flat ideas about what it means to be a man, and by implication, a woman, too.

If you choose to use the stairs rather than climbing the gigantic Manbreaker mountain, Jim will meet Nate at the top and mock him for not having the courage to take on and surmount the rock face. On the surface, the scene serves to further define Jim as the embodiment of that certain kind of insecure, bumptious masculinity—implying the ludicrousness and superficiality of a masculine want for status, he insists that Nate has to call him ‘lord’ from now on. He also makes Nate wear a sticker which identifies him as a member of ‘Jiminy’s Crickets,’ that is, a derogatory, informal ‘club’ comprised entirely of men who were unable to climb the Manbreaker and had to take the stairs; men who Jim’s derided for their deficiency of testicular forbearance; weak men. Momentarily, it seems as if we’re supposed to feel sorry for Nate, and in turn, a certain suspiciousness and resentment towards Jim and what he represents. But then we get an achievement: “Jiminy’s Cricket - Joined the hallowed ranks of Jiminy’s Crickets.” The Steam icon for this achievement is Jim’s hand pushing the sticker down on the head of a miniaturised, literally baby-sized version of Nate. Combined with the sarcasm dripping from “hallowed ranks” it's as if the game itself is now taking its turn making fun of Nate and his weakness

The physical environment of Baby Steps is unremittingly hostile towards Nate. Long periods of his progress can be wiped out by single, tiny, innocent mistakes. Even the flattest fields and gentlest slopes are booby trapped with ridges to trip him up and make him fall flat on his face. It creates the impression of a world that is intolerant of imperfection. Baby Steps often feels like reality as perceived by the donkeys, or more specifically, like a reflection of a worldview consistent with dogmatic and aggressive types of masculinity, where everything is a competition, the superior eat the inferior, and the only way to win is to never accept anything from yourself that is less than flawless—and where winning is all that matters. In combination with the plinky-plonky music score, composed largely from comedy sound effects arranged in madcap disorder, the game often seems to participate in humiliating Nate.

But there is a final doubling back, as it were. The implied ending of Baby Steps with Moose and Nate together suggests that the game is ultimately ‘on his side,’ and perhaps on the side of the maleness that he represents rather than the donkeys. However, if you return to your save game and take Nate on a final walk to the mountain’s very summit, there is a hidden, actual ending which arguably illustrates that point with greater clarity. Nate opens the crotch of his onesie and, in a final act of transfiguration, starts to urinate outdoors; throughout the game, his unwillingness and inability to do this has been a metaphor for his insecurity and lack of manliness relative to the other characters. Suddenly, Mike, another hiker, one who was able to climb the Manbreaker, seemingly with ease, appears behind Nate and makes him jump: “Having a wee, Nate?” he barks. For a second, Nate freezes. His stream sputters. He’s nervous. Mike, however, is merely a figment of his imagination—when Nate looks around, he’s disappeared. Relaxing, he starts to urinate again, and this is the game’s final image: Nate, having apparently dispelled the spectre of a more bullying, judgemental type of maleness, at last at peace. His ‘softer’ virtues remain intact—his home is with Moose, and among all that that represents. But he is also, at last, reconciled with his gender, symbolised, in this moment, by his indulging one of the multitudinous privileges that come with having a penis. If Baby Steps is often party to bullying and degrading Nate, in the finale at least, in its own especially crude way, it seems proud of him, having dragged himself free from his impotent basement life without losing himself to, or assimilating, the donkey state of mind.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.

Mirror Stage

Yussef Cole — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To play a videogame, to control a digital avatar, often means treating that avatar as an idealized version of oneself. In role playing games like Skyrim and Final Fantasy, the player becomes the unknown hero with those newfound powers, and internalizes that character’s elevated stats and ultra-rare gear. In fighting games like Street Fighter the player becomes the duke’s-up heavy hitter, maps their brain to the exact inputs required to pull off a super move, the right order of buttons to execute a flawless combo chain. In shooters like Call of Duty, the player becomes the invincible super soldier, lugging around an armory’s worth of weaponry, soaking up bullets and making impossible headshots from dozens of yards away. Through these digital representatives, the player leaves behind their own sorry flesh and embraces the temporary perfection of an idealized double.

In 1949, the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan coined the concept of the mirror stage, the moment when a toddler is first presented with their reflection in a mirror. Before this point, the child is boundless, a formless mass of sensations. Looking at their reflection allows the child to manifest a sense of self. The mirror image allows the child to visualize themselves, and in so doing, to idealize themselves, to see themselves as whole, as a person who makes sense, not merely the confused miasma of drives and anxieties they were composed of mere moments ago. “...this form,” writes Lacan in his original essay on the subject, “...situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction…” The mirror lies, or, more accurately, the subject uses the mirror to lie.

Similarly, the player uses the videogame to lie. Most games lie and promise the player that he or she can do anything; that if he or she keeps bashing themselves against a problem, he or she will inevitably solve it. Baby Steps is not interested in affirming this lie. Though aspects of the game are as artificial as anything else in the medium—like the protagonist, Nate’s, thighs of steel, or his unbreakable teddy bear body—the game rings truer than most. It depicts a gross, unfriendly world, explored by a chubby man-child, in soiled pajamas, trudging along on the slimy permafrost, stubbing his toe, and farting. He must climb up taller and taller mountain slopes, survive mudslides and rushing rivers, all while being an all-around ungainly mess, a stiff-limbed nincompoop, stubbornly refusing wisdom or guidance, afraid of his shadow, afraid to ask for aid, afraid to be seen. Reflected in this image is the frightened, disgusting child in each of us, normally hidden behind the bluster and bravado; the hollow performance behind faking it ‘til you make it, the painful kernel of truth embedded in imposter syndrome.

Before seeing themself in the mirror, the subject has no way to align their perception of the world with the experience of being a body living in that world. The mirror establishes, according to Lacan, “...a relation between the organism and its reality.” “In man,” he continues, “...this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months.” We are born too soon. Thrust out of the womb, unable to properly survive, unlike most animals, humans must be nurtured, and protected before they can feel capable. As a part of this development, the mirror allows the subject to wrap themselves in the illusion that they are functional and whole well before they might authentically feel that way.

Achievement Unlocked. You are a person. Congratulations. Your thoughts and desires make sense. You are the hero of your story. Just… don’t look too closely at your reflection’s gleaming surface, or you’ll make out the indentations where the paint has been layered over the cracks, like spackle laid over shoddy drywall.

An important aspect of the mirror stage theory is that the toddler, being so small and inept, cannot physically stand on their own in front of the mirror—they must be supported by a parental figure who helps and cajoles the child into recognizing their image, enforcing their own values and worldview onto the child as a result. In his tenth seminar, Lacan describes how the child “turns round…to the one supporting him who’s there behind him…” and “with this nutating movement of the head… he seems to be asking the one supporting him… to ratify the value of this image.”

Baby Steps is full of references to the maternal figure and the nature of growth and development with (and often without) her comforting support. The game kicks off with a brutal moment of birth: Nate is zapped away from his embryonic basement hideaway and flushed out into an underground lake before swimming sputtering to the surface. Later in the game, he wanders through a dream-like looping vision of his family’s home, stumbling after the disembodied voice of his mother calling to him. In the snowy mountaintops, a giant woman sits waiting. When Nate approaches, she picks him gently up and rocks him slowly, letting him drift briefly off to sleep. These visions and fantasies reflect Nate’s yearning for a maternal presence to hold him up, to tell him it’s okay. Without that necessary support, the child staggers and falls, unable to properly gaze at their reflection and make sense of themselves.

Baby Step’s world is populated by unmothered men making due through expressions of nonsensical masculinity: stomping around nude, badgering the noobs for cigarettes, gorging on what looks to be milk or cum, reeling in desperate, frivolous abandon. Forced to stand on their own, these men shape their own twisted reality: they swim in shit and build massive, silly sandcastles, temples of pointless, manic production, made from the residue of loss.

As for Nate, and the player, all there is is to keep climbing and never stop. Press one button, lift Nate’s left leg, press another, lift his right one; continue and continue and continue. Keep climbing the mountain to get to the top, to get to a place where things might possibly make sense.

Just before the mountain’s supposed peak lies the solitary cabin of Moose, the one donkey-man who is ever truly friendly or warm to Nate during his journey. Working up the nerve to finally ask for help and companionship, Nate may end the game here, and, in the warmth of this welcoming space, find rest.

Yet: the game immediately fades up an interstitial menu which offers the player the prompt to “go for a walk.” The player must press it several times before Nate is finally roused, complaining of “Ants in my pants,” as if noticing the unseen player, who forces him up and out of the safety of the cabin. Nate is, after all, the player’s reflection. If he cannot serve to mask the player’s internal discordance, what good is he? He must become infected with the player’s anxiety, become more perfect and more ideal. He takes a few steps out of the cabin and inevitably falls on his face. A few more steps and he unceremoniously slides down a ravine. Every step in Baby Steps is an act of resistance, a movement away from the supposed ideal sought after in the game’s image. The image in this mirror retreats, leaving the player alone with its absence.

***

Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.

Whispered Poetry

Gareth Damian Martin — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Poetic is not a term I often use to describe games. Perhaps because, even after spending years toiling away on a PhD in poetics and teaching undergraduate students in the subject, I find it evades precise description. Does 'poetic' refer to an author’s propensity to use allusions, metaphors, and allegories? Or perhaps verse-like language structures, where meaning is implied, not stated? Or is it just a stand in for emotional impact, deployed when a synonym is needed? Whichever it might be, it seems like other critics are as reticent to use it as I am. I can’t think of a recent game that was widely considered or described as poetic. In fact it feels like there might be something fundamental to games that excludes them from the poetic completely, as if their need for systems, maths, and strategy rob them of the ability to evoke poetry.

And yet, given all this, Many Nights a Whisper is a game I would call poetic. It’s a game where, sitting down to try to capture what its one hour experience evoked, poetry was the first thing that came to my mind. I suppose it begins with the title, an allusive epithet that stands out amongst a form where names so often are statements of direct action. Popular suffixes for game titles are often terms like -fall, -war, -craft. Percussive and direct, they have their own poetry, but is it really poetic? Meanwhile, “Many Nights a Whisper” is a weather-worn fragment, a chunk of terracotta found without subject or object, inviting your curiosity and input. It’s a gorgeous title, a lyric not a pronouncement.

But we are talking language here—of course it can be poetic. A game title can be poetry, and “Many Nights a Whisper” certainly is. But Many Nights a Whisper also contains poetry in its most irrefutable form:

“Oh, Dreamer behind the wall

Hear my heart’s faint call

Dreamer take my braid

Or watch the dream turn gray”

A stanza of verse, a prayer, spoken to you (the dreamer) each night as you decide whether to grant a person's wish or not. This is the subject of Many Nights a Whisper; the preparations for a ritual where you must fire a flaming ball from a sling into a vast torch, lighting it and granting the wishes of those whose braided hair was donated to your cause. It's a simple structure: each day you train as much or as little as you like, testing your sling and your accuracy on a variety of different targets. Each night you accept or refuse the unseen people’s whispered wishes, taking their braided hair if you do, strengthening the power of your sling. If, on the fated night, you manage to hit the distant target, all the wishes you accepted will be granted, as a new age begins.

This is what makes Many Nights a Whisper poetic: not verse or allusions, not even language, (much of its text is resolutely prosaic) but the ritual it creates, stages, and complicates over the course of the game. Forget rhyming couplets, this is a design that rhymes, that repeats. Each day a stanza that complicates the whole. Wishes are added to the tally, wishes you carry the weight of as you practice your drills. Petulant, grand, selfish, expansive, impossible, bizarre, human wishes. They run the gamut from wishing for eternal life, to wishing for a patch of extinct flowers to return. From the total abolition of gender, to the granting of a pink cat invisible to all but its owner. Those wishes become increasingly difficult to grant with ease, bringing into question free will, utopian thinking, and personal gain over societal change. The game circles back, goes again, finds pattern and lyricism in repeated action, in layering meanings, outcomes onto that action. Being a container for poetry does not make a game poetic, but a thesis expressed in design, in player experience and interaction, does.

The last time I felt the same kind of poetic quality was with Playdead’s highly lauded Inside. The game has occupied my mind since it was released in 2016, and I must have replayed it tens of times. Each time, I kept having this sense that the game was a “prose poem”, a form that I love deeply. Something in the running-on of its locations in sequence evokes not a story, but a thesis, an inquiry. It's not a series of plot events, and instead a self-reflective open form. The repeated puzzles and set pieces that all explore ideas of authority and control seem intended to rhyme, to color each other. It is a game without language, not a single word spoken, but to me it has always felt like a balance of the prosaic—logical, narrative, sequenced—and the poetic—affective, connective, circular. A prose poem. So there was nothing more satisfying than, in my many playthroughs, to uncover, hidden in a symbol language within the game, the title of an E.E. Cummings poem: "Pity this busy monster manunkind." It felt like the rosetta stone to critically understanding Inside as a poetic form, to understanding what a poetic game might be.

Many Nights a Whisper and Inside share this poetic quality. Both are interested in staging poetic situations that the player must then navigate and experience. Actions carry meaning beyond plot or narrative, and instead feel symbolic, exploratory. Both have a compressed, circular feeling, a spiral of meaning that depends on every twist and return. But they differ too. Many Nights a Whisper finds poetry in ritual. The entire game is staged around two rituals: the lighting of the torch, and more importantly, the whispering of the wishes. This engagement with ritual is perhaps the key to understanding how it is poetic as a game. Its developers understand ritual is not about superstition, but about a poetic vision of reality. Ancient peoples did not believe the moon was a rabbit, or the sun pulled by horses in a literal sense. They understood it in a poetic sense. That is to say, how is the moon a rabbit? What might casting the moon as a rabbit elucidate about its qualities, its meanings? What might calling the sun a chariot say about power, violence, and strength? How does it reflect the role the sun plays in our life? In the same way, the rituals of Many Nights a Whisper are not concerned with the literal magic of granting wishes, but instead the poetic power that whispered wishes might carry. How might a wish change the world by being spoken?

In this way, Many Nights a Whisper has helped me to understand how a game might be poetic. It demonstrates a refusal of literalism, and an engagement with ritual, performance, and the staging of a thesis. This has always been the power of poetry: to take a quotidian material, language, one we use and experience unthinkingly everyday, and to transform it. To draw strange comparisons and allusions between objects (“how is a raven like a writing desk?”) in order to transform or at least to allude to a transformation; to express the inexpressible through tricks of syntax and meaning. Many Nights a Whisper ends, whether your shot is successful or not, before the granting of the wishes. That is because it is a game about wishing, not about getting. It is a game about how language might change the world. About desires both fulfilled and unfulfilled, and how they shape us in action and speech. And it is interested in how staging such thoughts through ritual complicates them, brings them to life, and provides a poetic space for the player to reflect within. How, it asks, can we perform a shift, can we change the world, with language? Be it thought, spoken, sung, or perhaps, in the dark of night, whispered.

***

Gareth Damian Martin is a writer, designer and artist. They make games as the one-person studio Jump Over the Age, and are the creator of Citizen Sleeper, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and In Other Waters.

Dead as Dreams

Astrid Anne Rose — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This article discusses plot details from throughout The Seance of Blake Manor.

Spooky Doorway's The Seance of Blake Manor is an adventure game with elements of Return of the Obra Dinn, Ace Attorney, and Danganronpa, which is to say it's about digging up dirt on people and confronting them with your findings. You play investigator Declan Ward, come west from Dublin to Connemara to look into the disappearance of Evelyn Deane from Blake Manor+. Deane and many others are gathered at Blake Manor for a grand séance held by the mystic Carmela Mantovani on behalf of Marquess Jonathan Blake.

The game quickly and elegantly introduces you to the entire cast, establishes the stakes, and educates you on its clutch of systems, with none of this feeling like a laborious tutorial or throwaway prelude to the main events. As Ward comes across evidence it's added to his mind-map, where it can be pieced into a hypothesis or raised in conversation with certain characters. Everybody at Blake Manor has a secret. Forming hypotheses about those secrets lets you confront people, dragging their motives into the light and hopefully dissuading them from attending the grand séance, which is obviously bad news.

Cards on the table, I'm generally skeptical of first-person adventure games where the player has freedom of movement through the environment. Point-and-click or grid-based styles always feel like better approximations of space; in a Gone Home-like, or a Blue Prince-like, you spend a lot of time digging uselessly through 3D environments for things to click on. The detail of the space, the weight of it, becomes a series of invisible stretches between hotspots. In a point-and-click game, you move between discrete, composed scenes that present specific information like a photograph. Even pixel-hunting crudely approximates rifling through drawers or stacks of paper. Séance of Blake Manor cheats the shortcomings of 3D adventure games by giving Ward an Arkham Asylum-esque "detective vision" that highlights any clickable object in view. On its face this is ridiculous, of course: this guy can enter a room he's never been in before and instantly highlight the remains of a magic ritual hidden beneath a bed, or a jewelry box on a dresser ten feet away. It's an approximation of investigative acumen—and, to be fair, a "show all hotspots" button is common in point-and-click adventures—but it's also something I barely used. The game's bright, inky colors and sparing set design effectively communicate points of interest, and Ward collates anything relevant into his mind-map.

At this point I'm going to spoil the game's mystery, which is genuinely engaging and genre-literate, so if you want to play this I suggest you do and come back to my truncated summary later. I also want to apologize to Spooky Doorway, who surely in releasing this game did not intend to provoke Americans to speak on Irish history.

Marquess Blake's séance is intended to harvest the magical energy of the guests in order to heal his crippled son Walter, of whom there are many portraits around the manor. The Marquess and staff all say Walter, injured in the accident that killed his mother, lives in the residence, an area of the manor inaccessible until the climax. In fact, Walter is not real; he never was. The portraits are highly skilled forgeries done by ostensible widowed artist Simon Coventry, who is actually Henry Blake, the Marquess's older cousin. Coventry was nearly killed and effectively dispossessed by the Marquess's father when he was young. He fled with his mother and spent his subsequent years learning as much as he could about the manor and its secrets in preparation for reclaiming his birthright.

Mythology and history are so incumbent upon Blake Manor's plot that there is an in-game library Ward has to visit countless times to progress his investigation, researching topics like Irish mythology, gnosticism, and medicine. One of the manor's many secrets is the slumbering immortal Goibniu, locked away in a subterranean chamber. Goibniu is one of the Tuath Dé Danann, generally referred to in Irish myth as the precursor race to the áes sídhe or fair folk, and the race that shares Ireland with the Milesians, or humans. The blood of those killed during Oliver Cromwell's ethnic cleansing of Ireland seeped into the ground and infected Goibniu's dreams. Coventry uses a "shrine of images" to further warp Goibniu's dreams and conjure the reality of Walter Blake in the minds of everyone attending the séance; like those of the caged angel in Thomas Ligotti's "Miss Rinaldi's Angel," Goibniu's dreams become "maggots of the mind and soul." Using Jonathan Blake's blood, Coventry will free Goibniu from his tormented slumber and in return ask to have his youth restored++, thus reclaiming Blake Manor while incarnated as the young Walter Blake, fully legitimate in the eyes of the law and the manor's inhabitants.

The mention of Oliver Cromwell jumped out at me. Per historian Mark Levene, Cromwell's "extirpation of the Irish revolt" of 1641 was "recognisably akin to the ‘dirty’ counter-insurgency wars of the twentieth century" where an imperial power "seeks to win a struggle against an alternative political programme by treating not just the insurgents but their whole supporting population as equally guilty and thereby expendable."

The staunchly Protestant Cromwell also saw his campaign against the Catholic Irish as a divine crusade. Historian A.J.P. Taylor says "God was for Cromwell what the general will was for Robespierre or the proletariat for Lenin: the justification for anything he wished to do."

With this in mind: Blake Manor was given to Edward Blake as spoils of war by Cromwell after the end of Cromwell's genocide in 1652. The Act for the Settlement of Ireland "re-settled" the land won back only a decade prior by the Irish Catholic Confederation, bottling up the native Irish population on a Connacht preservation while 10 million acres of expropriated land were divvied up among underwriters of the war and members of Cromwell's army. However, this newly landed cohort did not account for the whole of Ireland and no mass migration of English Protestant settlers was forthcoming, so the remainder of the expropriated land was owned by English landlords and rented to Irish "tenants," many of whom were renting the same land they had lived on previously.

Coventry's intricate revenge plot—inventing a suitable heir, writing that fictional heir into reality, and then becoming that heir—is what Levene calls the "model perpetrator's 'never again' syndrome" in microcosm. "‘Never again’ would the Irish be allowed to harm righteous Protestants but also ‘never again’ would they be allowed to defy English order." Rights for me and not for thee; the logic of Coventry's revenge can't be extended to the people who predate his claim on the land. His revenge has the veneer of righteousness, but underneath it's nothing but score-settling. The "dream" of birthright is inherently poisoned; it rests on a selective and self-serving narrative.

By rooting out petty grievances and musty grudges and convincing his fellow guests not to attend the séance, Ward effectively marshals facts and logic into battle against self-delusion. The conventions of the adventure game serve him well here. But Coventry can't simply be dissuaded from his revenge; the detective mechanics are useless against him because the facts of his past, his buried trauma, are a fiction. Ward instead has to fill in the blanks around the real Coventry-Blake, winding closer to the truth of his identity and his motive by groping in the dark. Beneath Blake Manor, the tainted dreams of Goibniu radiate, soaking the manor in a false reality where the land belongs to whoever's name is on the deed and the path of history is true and just.

+++

+This is one of those games where the artstyle is "inspired by" an artist, in this case Mike Mignola, and we all understand "inspired by" to mean "it looks exactly like" Mike Mignola!"

++In doing so, Coventry is weaponizing "Irishness" itself, warping folklore and history into a propaganda narrative. Irish-Americans should be familiar with the notion.

***

Astrid Anne Rose is a long-time contributor to Bullet Points. Her work can be found in MEGADAMAGE, BOMB Magazine, and The New Lesbian Pulp, as well as on Gumroad and itch.io.

Plasticky Taste

Ed Smith — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Dawn of the Dead’s four protagonists, Roger, Peter, Stephen, and Fran, first break into the uppermost floor of Monroeville Mall, they find a large reserve of CD V-777-1s—cardboard boxes filled with basic medical supplies, bottled water, dried and canned food, and the rudiments for building a shelter, issued by the United States Civil Defense department throughout the 1950s and 60s. During their first night and day in the mall, the heroes subsist on the V-777-1’s spartan contents, passing around square tins of heat-treated beef and using some of the unopened boxes for makeshift chairs. They look like they are surviving. They look like how people are supposed to look at the end of the world.

We have already seen the civil unrest that is boiling outside of the mall. The first time we meet Peter and Roger, they are part of a SWAT team storming a tower block in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, because the residents insist on keeping their undead relatives in the basement rather than turning them over to the government to be destroyed. “Why do these people keep them here?” Roger asks, as he helps eliminate the zombies that have been bound, gagged, and secreted in the boiler room. “Because they still believe there’s respect in dying,” Peter replies. In this exchange, the gun battle between the police and the people living in the tower is recontextualised into a clash between the state and the rules of the state, and the creeds and cultural practices of an ethnic minority. The immortal, immutable conflicts of race and class seemingly still exist, despite the zombie apocalypse.

This is the world from which Dawn of the Dead’s four main characters are trying to escape. Between the Cold War, the Red Scare, Jim Crow, college riots, the Hippie movement, and the Great Migration, the ‘50s and ‘60s in America represent periods of enormous social transformation and volatility. Romero’s film itself arrives in 1978, but in the earliest scenes in the mall, Peter, Roger, Fran, and Stephen resemble denizens of the immediate post-McCarthy era, retreating from the chaos outside into their metaphorical fallout shelter. Alongside the Civil Defense supply boxes, Roger and Peter’s guns are icons of modern America’s most transfigurative epoch, the same M-16 rifles issued to general infantry in Vietnam.

Fleeing from the symbolic ‘50s and ‘60s, the four gradually secure greater sections of the inside of Monroeville Mall, gathering more possessions in the process. Initially, they only want for the essentials of survival: tools, a radio, more food, a map of the mall. But as they clear more space, block all the doors with trucks and ultimately rid the mall of zombies entirely, they start ‘shopping’ for luxury goods. They get a television, a refrigerator, and a stove. They drink wine and eat expensive cheese, and have a trio of cut-glass decanters for gin, scotch, and bourbon. Peter and Roger discard their police-issue jumpsuits and start dressing in silk shirts and leather brogues. The bare storage room that the group first breaks into is converted into an approximation of a high-rent condo, complete with a Bang and Olufsen hi-fi system, potted plants, and a spice rack.

In combination with the various montages of zombies shambling around in the mall, you can see why Dawn of the Dead is often analysed as a criticism or satire of consumerism and commerce. ‘The desire for status symbols, for things, for stuff is a mindless one and will make a monster out of you,’ the film seems to suggest. The zombies’ animal-instinct appetite for flesh is a simple metaphor for greed. But Dawn of the Dead is perhaps shrewder and more sinister than it initially appears, and rather than the horrors of blind consumption, is more ‘about’ the existential horror that we experience once we achieve a certain degree of material comfort.

If the 1950s and 60s were marked by civil turmoil and a fear of annihilation from nuclear war, the late '70s and the '80s are conversely defined by prosperity and power, and America strengthening its economic, political, and military positions. The Soviet-Afghan war and the eventual collapse of the USSR helped instantiate the US as the dominant international superpower. Financial markets were deregulated, income and capital gains tax were progressively reduced, and advances in technology alongside free trade with Japan meant an influx of new electronic and labour-saving appliances. “We are the people who have thrown the windows of our souls wide open to the sun,” said Ronald Reagan in 1981, paraphrasing the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The big threats to national security were all gone—and you could buy everything you wanted.

In this context, Dawn of the Dead feels more like a film about boredom, aimlessness, and a spiral into apathy; the alienation and directionlessness that might follow once you have too much stuff and not enough strife. A selection of defining images:

Fran and Stephen in bed together

Fran walking through the ‘apartment’ that the group has arranged on the top floor of the mall

Stephen and Fran strolling through the mall itself

Fran applying makeup in the mirror

The slapsticky ‘Gonk’ remains the iconic track of Dawn of the Dead’s score, but ‘Sun High’ feels more fitting for its themes of estrangement and lassitude.

By the 1980s, America had won the Cold War and succeeded in building its (seemingly) invincible economy. There were no foreign enemies left to defeat and the social despair that seemed to define the ‘50s and ‘60s was now at such a remove that it could be ignored entirely, the white middle-class having pulled (or rather, having been pushed) so materially far in front of the blue-collars, the immigrants, the minorities, and the unemployed that they essentially lived in a different country. For most of the 20th century, even for the most insulated suburbanites, the course of American society might have felt tumultuous and unreliable. But in the final decades before the millennium, with no Commies, the perception of a bright new financial world, and simple solutions apparently available for every problem (“Just say no”), for a lot of the country there was nothing left to do.

This is the position that Peter, Fran, and Stephen find themselves in once the zombies in the mall have been killed or locked out, and they’re free to plunder the stores. When they arrive in the mall, their survival is uncertain. After a few weeks, the only danger that remains is a paradoxical absence of danger. The home that they make isn’t destroyed by the zombies, but by a gang of bandits—as is often the case in zombie fiction, the real threat is not the undead but other people. In Dawn of the Dead, this becomes symbolic of the idea that in a comfortable, middle-class, and materially rich world the only enemy that remains is the proverbial self—when no external threats exist, we inevitably turn inwards. More than two billion Valium tablets were reportedly prescribed and consumed in 1978. Fran, Stephen, and Peter become ironic heroes of this age, paragons of a society where people now have the luxury to drown in the abyss of the soul.+

///

The same on-screen message marks the beginning of every new Project Zomboid savegame: “These are the end times. There was no hope of survival. This is how you died.” But although death, zombie-related or otherwise++, is probable in Zomboid, it is not inevitable, and the reason that you typically finish with a savegame is because you get bored.

A lot of survival games (The Forest, DayZ, The Long Dark, Rust, Green Hell, Don’t Starve) are set in expressly hostile wilderness environments where basic resources like drinkable water are scarce. Zomboid by contrast takes place in the semi-fictional ‘Knox Country’, an approximation of the real-world city of Louisville and its outskirts, designed using actual maps and topographical data.

It’s 1993 and the zombie apocalypse has only just begun. While the owners have become undead, their shops and houses are still filled with fresh and canned food, clothes, guns, tools, CDs, VHS tapes, and essentially everything else you would find in abundance in contemporary America. Even the furniture can be broken down into planks of wood, strips of metal, and constitutional electronic parts for reuse in the extensive crafting menu. The entire Zomboid map is essentially one gigantic mall.

It will take semi experienced players perhaps three or four in-game days to gather everything they need to stay alive indefinitely, and secure for themselves a reasonable fortress against the zombies. Despite its initial survival game overtones, your and your character’s struggle in Project Zomboid quickly becomes the same as Fran’s, Stephen’s, Peter’s, and Roger’s in Dawn of the Dead: what to do after you have everything? The typical Zomboid character is the embodiment of that same material-made ennui that affects Romero’s heroes, in possession of so much stuff that all worldly endeavouring becomes moot, and the only thing left to contend with is the self. Especially in comparison to genre contemporaries, where the search for and gathering and stockpiling of life-preserving resources forms the ‘gameplay loop,’ the quantity and availability of items in Project Zomboid means the focus of your efforts turns inward even within the opening hours. Grinding and building your character’s carpentry, metalwork, foraging, pottery, and other skills becomes a crude simile for a more encompassing ‘personal development.’ You overpower your enemies. You can get every and any material thing that you like. The main thing that you are left to fight with, build upon and metaphorically colonise is your in-game self.

Like Dawn of the Dead, Project Zomboid begins to feel like a grotesque of over-comfortable suburbanism, a world where the principles of commerce, property, materialism, and self actualisation are so entrenched and ingrained that they continue to exist even after the dead rise from their graves and kill and eat the living. It is a game about finding stuff and getting stuff, but with the sick joke that getting the stuff is so trivially easy, in this country, at this time, that the undertaking becomes hollow. Project Zomboid’s creator The Indie Stone acknowledges the original Sims as one of its biggest visual influences. But Zomboid’s resemblance to Maxis’ 2000 masterpiece+++ is more than aesthetic. In The Sims, the ostensible richness of modern life is represented via reductive and dispassionate metres and bars, which empty and refill depending on what they eat, what they do, and how nice their home looks. Your character’s needs, drives, and aspirations are thus expressed as quantifiable data, creating the impression that so long as you do X, own Y, and achieve Z, you will be able to ‘maximise’ your Sim’s life, as one might maximise the value of a stock or property portfolio. This is often stifled however by the game’s capriciousness and darkly comic cruelty—as soon as you buy the ‘Back Slack’ recliner that generates +6 Comfort and +3 Energy, it will be destroyed because your microwave catches fire, or stolen by a burglar, or you will have to sell it, at a loss, because you get fired from your job. Alternatively, you’ll get lucky, and then you can start saving for the ‘Von Braun’ recliner, which has +9 Comfort. Either way, The Sims implies that the gratification of material need in and of itself is inadequate, that life and happiness are subject to forces that can’t be allayed by owning stuff. On first apprehension, there seems to be a straightforward solution to your Sims’ problems, where more things means more effective replenishment of their bars. But the experience is actually subordinate to invisible, immaterial gameplay functions. Both Zomboid and The Sims initially suggest that the whole point of the game is to get things, but their subsequent layers retroactively emphasise the vapidity of getting things.

It was patched out in subsequent versions, but build 41 of Project Zomboid had an exploit where television sets were invincible. You could place a TV in your doorway or at the foot of your staircase, and no matter how many undead flailed and bashed against it, they couldn’t ever get through, so that the strongest and longest lasting bases in that particular build were the ones encapsulated by a perimeter of television sets. This feels like the ideal metaphor for another flavour of middle-class tedium, where you anaesthetise yourself with boxsets, subscription services, consumer electronics, videogames, and toys; where you ‘beat’ or defend yourself from reality by escaping from it. If Zomboid is partly a game about the wilting power of consumerism, and partly about the melancholy and insularity that the same consumerism produces, the image of the protagonist both protected and imprisoned by a ring of TVs becomes singularly characteristic. This theme of isolation is perhaps even stronger considering that when you play Zomboid solo there are no other survivors anywhere on the map.

The zombie is a stupid, weak, and slow creature, to the point that, in order for a zombie apocalypse to be plausible to us as fiction, the infection has to be able to spread by some in-world means other than bites. We just don't buy the idea that zombies could catch up to, overpower, and successfully sink their teeth into enough people to terrorise the survival of the whole race. Concrete explanations aren’t provided, but in Dawn of the Dead, there are hints that the ghoul plague is the result of either an alien bacteria falling to Earth aboard a comet or the radiation spill on Three Mile Island. In Zomboid, it might be a tainted batch of burger sauce brewed by a fast food chain called Spiffo’s.

The Zomboid protagonist is able to kill hundreds, thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of zombies using weapons and objects that are available in a normal town. Dawn of the Dead’s survivors clear out an entire shopping mall, making themselves totally safe from the zombies in the space of a few weeks. Perhaps what the zombie confronts us with is the unnerving extent of our own dominion, the frightening totality of our power. We have so much stuff that even existential threats don’t threaten our existence anymore. The zombie is just one more thing for us to subjugate, and after they’re gone we’ll think about ourselves or whatever.

+++

+ In the climax of Dawn of the Dead, the mall is pillaged by a motorcycle gang, which vandalises the stores, butchers the zombies, and shoots Stephen. If our trio of survivors have become bored and miserable because they have nothing left to fight, kill, or overcome, the bandits feel like an expression of their suppressed desires, and the film’s ending a symbolic conflict between a well-behaved but castrated superego and the id.

++ Zomboid’s subReddit is a collage of unfair, tragicomedy death. You will find players who have lost a game of some two or more in-world years because they accidentally used the ‘go to sleep’ command while in the same room as their gasoline-powered generator and thereby suffocated on the fumes.

+++ I keep starting and then getting frustrated with and abandoning an extremely long article about why The Sims 1 is the greatest videogame of all time.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.

Data Points

Reid McCarter — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This article discusses plot details from throughout The Roottrees are Dead and Roottreemania.

The Roottrees are Dead is a detective game. You play as an unnamed investigator, low rent enough to work out of what looks like a bachelor apartment, with a pulp detective poster hanging above your desk for inspiration and nothing but a desktop computer and a corkboard as tools for your work.

A mysterious woman appears one dark and stormy night and explains that a father and his trio of daughters, the CEO and three heirs to the Roottree candy dynasty, have died in a plane accident. The company’s vast wealth must now be distributed through an inheritance policy that only pays out to direct descendants of the original founders. The woman needs someone to piece together the Roottree family genealogy in order to sort this all out.

She leaves a few clues behind, in the form of photographs, old advertisements, and a list of important names, and you’re set loose to figure out the rest. Over the investigation that follows, secrets shake loose from the family tree like rotten fruit. There are hidden relatives and affairs, spats and betrayals by siblings. Eventually, once the genealogy is complete, the mysterious client reveals herself to be the now-adult daughter of one of the early Roottrees. She was born out of wedlock, it turns out, and raised by a farmer and his partner, a secret Roottree who, as a gay man in early 20th-Century America, was removed from official family records. The woman writes a book about these scandals.

In the game’s expansion, Rootreemania, the genealogy sprawls even further thanks to a follow-up investigation that reveals more of the family’s dirty laundry. Following the book’s publication, a surge of new inheritance claimants has arrived, which requires you to sift through further information to see who among them might be a valid Roottree. This involves digging even deeper into the Roottree’s previously hidden affairs and assessing the backgrounds of illegitimate children. In the process, our perception of the family changes yet again.

Aside from offering a well-constructed mystery to unravel, The Roottrees are Dead is compelling for the way it shows how shallow any objective understanding of something as complex as even a single family can be. By the time the family tree is as complete as it needs to be for the game’s purposes, you have a vast overview of roughly a century of Roottree history. A list of names and occupations, of spouses and children, is not much of a summary for how much has gone on between the lines, though. The family's true nature is formed in between the details of the official record. We get a better understanding of various Roottrees not through the dry facts of their marriages and occupations, but by the ways in which they treated others, spent their money, or reacted to learning about family secrets kept hidden to avoid scandal.

Pointing out that there’s more to a family than its genealogy is a simple enough concept, but it gains extra dimensions in Roottrees through the game’s setting and method of play. Set in the late ‘90s, around the beginning of the digital age, the detective’s primary investigatory tool is their computer. This includes a virtual notepad and dial-up access to online magazine, newspaper, and book libraries. Most importantly, it means trawling through the results pulled up from a fictionalized version of ‘90s search engine WebCrawler, here called SpiderSearch.

The game’s primitive internet hints at technological advancements to come in the next few decades, from online ancestry mapping services and social media to the predictive algorithms now called AI. The advent of home internet offered anyone with a computer and a modem access to seemingly unlimited information. This has only become easier, and the volume of raw data greater, over years of iteration and increased sophistication. Today it seems possible that you might understand a person, at least on some level, just by pulling up their social media profiles, reading their opinions and discovering whatever facts about their life the internet has catalogued.

A person is more than their data, though, even as that data accrues on the internet to form a convincing digital double of a real self. The more we give the internet our personal trivia—or have it taken from us—the more it seems like what you can gleam about us online is a full representation of a human being. It’s tempting to think you can really know a person based on their internet presence, but there’s always a lot left out, a lot that exists outside of the facts.

In an era of tech where complex algorithms are likened to gods and, when deployed as chat bots, are capable of fostering powerful delusions in users, it’s worth remembering how much of life occurs in the spaces between facts. The Roottrees are Dead shows that to really understand a life, you need more than just data points.

***

Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and posts on Bluesky.

Killing Everyone

Ed Smith — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In a 1973 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Francois Truffaut said “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.”

When you endeavour to generate enthusiasm about war from your audience, which you naturally have to do if you’re making a film, you lose something of war’s real nature. The problem might not be about making on-screen war entertaining, but more attempting to impress a narrative upon a representation of war. When we make something into a story, we make it make sense, and when we make something make sense we’re also suggesting that it has implicit reason. But the reality of war normally supersedes reason. It obliterates reason. If you try to shape it into a tale, you inevitably disguise the reality of the encompassing devastation of war, which cannot be explained in terms of logic or morals. Two of the greatest works of anti-war art, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the "Star Spangled Banner", are ‘successful’ as anti-war artworks because they deliberately deform the conventions of their construction, Guernica in its extremism and absurdism (as opposed to realism or naturalism) and the "Star Spangled Banner" in its spontaneous, unpredictable deviations from the music as normally deployed in its official capacity as a national anthem. They ‘work’ as anti-war texts because, like war, they appear to the beholder as ungoverned and ungovernable, and their defining characteristics are their respective disfigurements of code.

If a rudimentary narrative is composed of a villain with an immoral goal versus a hero with a moral goal, fighting one another using equal bestowments of strength, World War II is the closest there is to a narrative war. A lot of wars since then, and especially in the 21st century, don’t meet the criteria for basic narrative, or only meet it if you are predisposed to a crudified version of—usually western colonial—morality. Wars in the last 30 years have instead become almost entirely non-narrative, or what Frank Hoffman called in 2007 ‘hybrid wars,’ that is wars with “a non-standard, complex, and fluid adversary” fought using “a combination of conventional and irregular methods.” Forget moral meanings, we don’t even know what a war is now. This is why today’s war videogames are always about the team rather than the war. You can see this creeping in in Call of Duty: Ghosts in 2013, and then it becomes gradually more defining throughout Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3, and Infinite Warfare, and then even more so in the trilogy of Modern Warfare rebootmakes and in Black Ops 6. The atomisation of CoD’s narratives, wherein we shrink the focus onto a small group of individual soldiers and their personal stories, reached an apotheosis in this year’s Black Ops 7, where you play as a multinational team of special forces operators trying to capture the CEO of a rogue corporation.

Although the team is called Joint Special Operations Command, which in reality is a branch of the United States military, in the game they don’t fight on behalf of a national ideology so much as plain and morally flat ideas like freedom and stopping innocent people from being killed. The rogue corporation in turn doesn’t represent a country or society, or an ethnocentric or geocentric belief system. Its targets are everybody, everywhere and its headquarters are in a fictional and independent citystate, which it owns. These contrivances of world-building mark a concerted effort by the makers of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to decouple the game from the real world and in doing so safeguard it against observations of ideological bent. This is possibly because the makers feel that implications of reality are antagonistic to fun and that it’s easier to sell the game to people all over the world and across the ideological spectrum if the game is neither part of the world or the spectrum.

But this also betrays a perverse (and almost certainly inadvertent) timeliness, because the more that the concept of the hybrid, non-linear, forever war has taken hold in our society, the more the Call of Duty series has stopped trying to make conventional sense or structure out of its fictional wars in kind. In 2003, the year that the war on terror formally began in earnest, the first Call of Duty game was released. It’s a World War II story that focuses on different soldiers from different armies from different countries, united of course in a battle against Nazism and the Third Reich. These characters are essentially nameless and voiceless sets of hands and a rifle, defined by their nationalities and locations: the American campaign, the British campaign and the Soviet campaign. 22 years later and the global war on terror, the ‘GWOT’—ever amorphous, and morally and temporally indefinable—has rearranged our general concept of war to the point that a moral adventure fought on ideological or nationalistic grounds no longer seems either real or plausible for fiction.

This reconfiguration of war’s definition, or rather, the deterioration of the idea that war might be given a definition, has occurred alongside the onset of the “postmodern condition” prophesied by Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard describes both a loss of faith in the unifying metanarratives that consolidated modern societies and a commensurate rise of a “plurality of small, competing narratives.” At its most extreme conclusion, this results in a paradoxical society where the only ideological consistency among its members is that they all reject the possibility of there being a shared belief. It’s a western world where, alienated and marginalised by the failure of modern ideas, people turn ever inwards and fight metaphorical battles in the name of the self rather than literal ones on behalf of the state, the church, ethnicity or isms. If Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s broader setup (military unit without strict national or ideological identity versus corporation without strict national or ideological identity) is a reflection of the 21st century’s non-linear and non narrative wars, the postmodern condition is symbolised by the game’s other main design conceit, whereby all four of the central characters are infected by a neurological toxin which makes them hallucinate monsters symbolic of their innermost fears. Several levels in Black Ops 7 take place inside the characters’ respective imaginations, where they fight living, breathing and heavily armed personal demons. The postmodern alienation hypothesised by Lyotard, where people lose faith in bigger ideas and beliefs and retreat into themselves, takes literal form in the world of Black Ops 7, where soldiers without a country or ideology are left with only themselves to conquer.

Black Ops 7’s multiplayer implies a similar kind of inwardness, or a chosen withdrawal from the wider sociopolitical world. Matches are typically fought in small teams of six players versus six players, on maps that only make architectural sense in the context of a competitive videogame. Although some of their iconography and imagery is borrowed from real locations, they are constructed like arenas, rings or pitches, informally divided into sections that facilitate different approaches to play—rather than a strip of white paint to denote a field goal line, you may find a small balcony overlooking a street, delineating that this is an area built for verticality and scoped weapons.

One match type in Black Ops 7, named Overload, is a version of Bulldog, where one team of players has to collect a ‘ball’ and escort it from one part of the arena to another, while the other team tries to stop them. The game is strictly divided into two halves—after playing a certain number of minutes, the game freezes, there is a pronouncement that the match has reached “half time” and the two teams swap sides, so that the one that began the game attacking west to east now attacks east to west, and vice versa. Also similar to sport—or television broadcasts of sport—every match in Black Ops 7 ends with a slow-motion video of the “best play,” normally a clip of a player killing a large number of enemy players inside a short period of time.

Like the various pretenses of the single-player campaign, the presentation of Black Ops 7’s multiplayer has the effect of separating it from suggestions of the context of war, even though each match is still fundamentally about two opposing sides fighting one another with weapons. The ‘sportification’ of its structure and aesthetic is also reflective of the existence of the forever war, in the way that sports are played, replayed and replayed–new year, new season, new league, new cup. Both Autumn and Yussef describe this in their articles on Battlefield 6, how the repetitive and transient nature of online multiplayer feels increasingly apt in a world of endlessly recursive, impossible to quantify non-linear wars. This impression is perhaps more manifest in Black Ops 7, where the representation of people killing people is made so expressly sportlike that it becomes symbolic of the most cynical justification for the forever war: that war is only a game.

Battlefield 6’s campaign is spiritually similar to Black Ops 7’s, insofar as both represent a shifting in focus, away from the subject matter of war and its attendant thematic baggage, and towards the comparatively simpler and less precarious narrative topic of the team, and the struggles of the team. Reid has written about this for this month’s issue and he convincingly argues that if there is reluctance or nervousness among game developers to engage with (or rather re-engage with, if we account some of the older Call of Duty and Battlefield games) the knottier questions inherent to making war art and entertainment, then that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Battlefield 6’s multiplayer however can be equally evaluated as a deliberately constructed text. Though it is not ‘written’ in the manner that a single-player campaign is written, or directed in the way that a film may be directed, or painted, or composed, or so on, every one of its elements has been purposefully designed and amalgamated. It is a ‘work’ so much as anything else may be considered a work. The fact that certain questions of videogame criticism have historically not been applied to multiplayer games, and that we are used to evaluating them as games in the strict sense, that is, with our focus almost entirely on their ludological components and not on elements like aesthetics, plot, pace and meaning, is perhaps the main barrier to considering in this case Battlefield 6’s multiplayer as a war text, in the same way that its single player is a war text. Get past that and certain characteristics of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer distinguish it when we’re considering our credulousness towards narrative wars in reality and narrative wars in fiction.

The absence of a narrative—and the abundance of chaos—are key to Battlefield 6’s multiplayer. If what we find so difficult to accept with regards to supposed anti-war artwork is that it might impose onto war a temporal and narrative structure, Battlefield 6’s multiplayer does not really impose a structure. There is no heroism in Battlefield 6, in the constructed, romantic sense—no matter how valiant your in-game intentions may be, it is perfectly likely that you will be killed, unceremoniously and without dignity, before fulfilling them. When even the most bitter and undeserved defeat is expunged from existence with the beginning of a new match, there is also no tragedy. The war raging in Battlefield 6’s multiplayer is indefinite and without history, and there is no director, commander or God authoring moments of either individual valour or national anguish. The two sides have names but they are deliberately formless—one way to distinguish opposing armies and their respective ideologies in turn is through their weapons, like the NVA soldier with his AK-47 and the American GI with his M-16, but in Battlefield 6, both forces have the same guns, gun modifications, vehicles and equipment. Each game mode is an invitation to either capture or defend territory, but regardless of your success (or failure), when you begin a new match, all that ground that was won or lost will be reset to a default position, and that default position will again serve as an invitation for battle.

This is also true of other multiplayer war games, Black Ops 7 included. But the effect of Battlefield 6 to encourage analysis alongside Truffaut, Lyotard, postmodernity, and the existential panic of the forever war is enhanced by its visual and audio design. It looks and sounds warlike, which is not the same as realistic, but instead describes something that is capable of generating within you the feelings you’d imagine having in a real war situation–the loud explosions and gunfire, and the general hecticness of Battlefield 6, are likely to spark panic, excitement and aggression. But that ‘warlikeness’ in turn emphasises the absence of conventional ‘warness’ elsewhere in the game. We are made to feel like this is a convincing simulacrum of a war. We are also aware of its structurelessness, its narrativelessness and its ultimate absence of logic or moral meaning. Battlefield 6 starts to shed light on the ironic truth of postmodern war, where the only thing that is tangible and true is that very little, and perhaps nothing, is true or tangible. If war is capricious and cruel, thoughtless and amoral, and never achieves anything and doesn’t change, that is also the war of Battlefield 6’s multiplayer.

But therein lies more irony, because Battlefield 6, by design, is a game where no meaning is available to us other than the meaning that we make for ourselves. You may play it and feel like it is a convincing anti-war text or an illustration of some characteristic of 21st-century warfare, but although it has perhaps been constructed to produce that impression to an extent, there is ultimately no encompassing, overarching meaning being imposed on the game and its players—what is keenly felt is an absence of meaning, rather than an abundance, or even a presence, and so the game still feels subject to that postmodern condition, where our lives are defined by indefinition. Truffaut said an anti-war film is impossible. He also said that every war film inevitably becomes a pro-war film. Battlefield 6 feels anti-war because of its dearth or deficiency of meaning. It is full of emptiness. And contrary to Truffaut, who was speaking in the ‘70s—the modern era—before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the internet and the endless GWOT, that does not make it a pro-war text. Battlefield 6’s ‘anti-warness’ results from a lack of structure and a predominance of disorder—from a kind of anti-meaning. In that, rather than pro-war—or anything-war, or anything—it becomes another reflection, or byproduct, or cultural symptom of the void of meaning that has now become war’s defining characteristic.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.

In Ruins

Autumn Wright — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

What times are these, in which

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

Bertolt Brecht, "To Those Who Follow in Our Wake"

(Translated by Scott Horton)

Every time I see a picture of Gaza I remember there are still people dying of cancers linked to 9/11. More than died on the day. Survivors, first responders, clean up crews, Samaritans, residents breathing in carcinogens exposed amidst the rubble. If the heart of an empire had any empathy, it might see the resemblance. But the news doesn't talk about it that way. My family doesn't. The severed white hand found in the Pile is delicately carried to a medical examiners' tent, extensively documented, and traced to a family of the body that was a person. The nameless brown arm hanging limp from the broken concrete that was an apartment is sensitive content, “totally made up,” a statistic. And how do you count the deaths caused not just by carcinogens, but diseases that wouldn’t exist without cutting power to desalination plants? The cancers that can’t be treated in the hospitals that were bombed, besieged, that became sites of executions? They become “indirect deaths,” as if there were no people who gave orders for their deaths, as if a conscripted, indoctrinated teen didn't pull the trigger all the same. From beneath the ruins, the indirect deaths begin to climb.

Battlefield appeals to the spectacle of scale: More players, longer matches, bigger maps, and vehicles to traverse them. A weighty je ne sais quoi and destructible environments, the rubble exercises a greater power over the player, one that can supersede agency with awe, briefly decentering bullets as the supreme authority of the virtual world. Battlefield 6 is a game about the rubble, and also about blowback. The baffling campaign that fantasizes about a symmetrical war on terror, the recoil of machine guns and carbines that miss the target, the audio and visuals that mark an operator's fire on the HUD. It’s an information war for a red dot above an avatar that can hardly be seen through the smoke and foliage. I spot an enemy, mark them on my team’s displays, and get points when they’re killed. Someone I stunned with a flash grenade or another player I forgot I damaged minutes ago dies and I am rewarded. In Battlefield 6, KDs reflect all my indirect death. Yet when I am indirectly killed, I only see who pulled the trigger—even if they didn’t know I was hiding in the building their launcher toppled. I wait to respawn, look on, and despair.

“The ruin has no value other than as spectacle,” Leila Taylor writes in Darkly. “A metaphor representing our fear of the abandonment of civilization and our powerlessness over nature.” In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe’s wealthy built ruined follies in their gardens, a gothic aesthetic popularized by the paintings of Romantics like Friedrich, whose compositions often collaged real world landscapes into something decidedly more picturesque. The artificial ruins built on manicured lawns were no less real than the images that inspired them. Authentic ruins, like Windsor Castle's Temple of Augustus, were appropriated into the image too, making a tautological argument for a Western Civilization. And they still are, indirectly. The Brooklyn Museum tells me the steles of Kalhu belong here, because they would be ruins today if left in Iraq—as if the colonial projects that spirited the genies away didn't destabilize the region for two centuries. Shelley wrote "Ozymandias" in 1818 about the ruins of Ramesseum, and corpses and skulls filled the 19th century ruins of Samarkand and Chuguchak in Vasily Vereshchagin's paintings, but it was “only with the coming of the 20th century, its cataclysmic changes and the genuine ruins its wars spread across Europe and the rest of the world, that the trend for ruin-building faded.” Paul Cooper writes in The Atlantic: “In the ashes of Dresden, Coventry, and Stalingrad, the romantic ideal of the ruin in the European imagination was changed forever.”

Invasions of the mainland, the kind America has not witnessed since British forces armed with muskets occupied Washington in 1814, are the keystone of America's mediascape. The country's predominant ruins today, remnants of deindustrialization, succeed the World Wars. There are no ruins from the war on terror at home, nor any ruins whatsoever at the site of the World Trade Center. All the rubble was removed during the clean up. 60,000 tons of steel were sold overseas. Other metal was used in the creation of public memorials in each state—what had crushed and poisoned, become sacrosanct. Now, just a mote of the 1.8 million tons of rubble remains at the site in a museum with ticketed entry and a gift shop, a monument to that colossal wreck. Lest the ruins remember what conflict looks like, the official history will never forget the pretext for the indirect deaths of over 4 million people. What, then, are the virtual ruins of Dumbo in each breakthrough match on Manhattan Bridge?

Battlefield 6 is a folly: Trailers and keynotes detail all the ways players can wield power over the sublime force of its ruins—awesome in its most trivial and lofty senses. And like Hagley Castle, built in 1912 with incomplete, sloping towers, the ruins of Battlefield 6 are evocative of the faux ruins of other representative mediums. The color grading and lighting mimic the distortions of lens and film. Its most immersive audio settings, War Tapes, promises to echo not combat, but mastered recordings of it. Its ruins are also playgrounds for a Western world affluent enough to afford the graphics cards made of minerals mined in Africa and manufactured in Asia. And Battlefield 6 is folly: Ars Technica reports the game cost over $400 million to develop, with EA setting the impossible metric of success at 100 million players. (It has sold 10 million copies.) What emotions it stirs, what nostalgia it coopts, now rendered profit for the Saudi government.

Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during the Second World War. More than fifty thousand Palestinians have been killed. Hospitals have not been spared; most are no longer functional. A few weeks before my trip, the World Health Organization reported that more than a thousand health-care workers had been killed, and that it had verified six hundred and fifty-four strikes on Gaza’s medical facilities. The territory’s health sector was “being systematically dismantled,” a W.H.O. representative said. Just last month, Israeli soldiers were filmed opening fire on ambulances in southern Gaza, killing fifteen rescue workers. An I.D.F. spokesperson initially claimed that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals,” but the I.D.F. walked back that statement and opened an inquiry after footage published by the Times showed a uniformed medic next to motionless and clearly marked ambulances, followed by five minutes of gunfire from the I.D.F.

—Clayton Dalton, "Hospitals in Ruins,” The New Yorker (April 18, 2025)

What remains when the rubble is cleared? Who will live to see the final score? Two months of season passes and kill streaks, of reviews and scoreboards; Two years of death and disease, of consent manufacturing and record keeping. Every time I play Battlefield 6, I see a picture of Gaza.

𝄌.

…so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich, "What Kind of Times Are These"

***

Autumn Wright is a critic. Find them online.

Strange Little Planet

Yussef Cole — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Battlefield 6 is a reflection of war. It mirrors real life conflicts, recorded live and piped daily onto our social media feeds. In a somewhat censored form—limbs don’t detach, skin doesn’t crisp and burn, bullets don’t shatter bone—Battlefield 6 nevertheless evokes these images after a manner. Closer to Platoon than to Nintendo’s Splatoon, Battlefield 6 is modeled, from its brand name weaponry, to its heavy tanks, to its tacticool battle gear, on reality and on real warfare.

To play Battlefield 6 is to play at pretend soldier, and all that entails.

Moises Taveras wrote recently about the distressing ways the game’s images evoke the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Its famous, and aggressively marketed destructible environments, with walls that can be smashed through and buildings that can come tumbling down, cannot be disconnected from the images of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis being shared online every day. Taveras writes that he “ … can’t separate it from the tragedies its environments echo nor can I help but think what a feckless reflection it is of our reality.”

This is undeniably true, but there’s also a tonal dissonance at the heart of precisely how Battlefield 6 evokes Gaza and other modern conflicts that is worth exploring. What’s curious is that beyond the layer of imagery being deployed, it doesn’t feel tragic to play Battlefield 6. It doesn’t rise to the level of existential finality that seeing a family crying over the rubble of their ruined home brings to mind. Battlefield 6’s catastrophes are utterly disconnected, and occur outside of time and place.

After all, the enemy designated by the game’s narrative, Pax Armata, is imaginary and untethered to any one nation or belief system; instead, representing a catch-all for “not us.” They have the same weaponry and tools as their opponents, NATO, the same vehicles, the same camo, just painted with a different insignia, barely discernible when scanned across a raging firefight. When faced off against in the game’s multiplayer mode, they stand on equal footing with NATO. It doesn’t matter who wins, since victory in the next round will likely go to the loser of the current one. It doesn’t matter if a house—absent of any signs of domesticity—used as temporary cover is brought down by a tank shell. It will be resurrected by the time the next round starts. There are no stakes in Battlefield 6; everything is cyclical and abstracted. There are only pieces to be shuffled around a board, no people. The game is entirely drained of the emotional register that an actual conflict might naturally evoke.

In Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno, a lyrical, century-old children’s book, a character describes visiting a far-off tiny planet. On this planet, two armies are locked in endless combat. After one side loses, “ … the vanquished army ran away at full speed, and in a very few minutes found themselves face-to-face with the victorious army, who were marching home again, and who were so frightened at finding themselves between two armies, that they surrendered at once!” After surrendering they were all shot. But the bullets “ ... were made of soft black stuff, which marked everything it touched.” Such “kills” only counted when soldiers were shot in the back, from the other way around the world. “After that, the worst marksmen were considered the best soldiers; and the very worst of all always got First Prize.”

When the real costs of war are obscured, war comes to resemble nothing so much as an absurd and idiotic game, with made-up and nonsensical rules. Earlier this year, The Guardian obtained a secret interview conducted with IDF snipers, who had shot and killed multiple unarmed members of a single family for the crime of stepping over an invisible, arbitrary line. One soldier remarks in the interview: “It’s a question of distance. There is a line that we define. They don’t know where this line is, but we do.”

Battlefield contains aspects of this random and arbitrary decision making. Beyond the macro rules of capturing more points than the other team, there are micro self-directed tasks that one can occupy themselves with, like camping a point and sniping at enemy soldiers running up from the flank, or piloting a helicopter, or playing medic and reviving everyone you see, or hopping in a tank and raining down endless streams of mounted machine gun fire on an assumed enemy position. There’s an open-ended nature to matches, a light, directionless feeling of engagement; all frantic pleasure, no remorse; shooting ahead and behind oneself, watching the enemy fall, confident that they’ll get back up somewhere else.

It’s a chaotic fun house, choked in the dust of collapsed concrete. A delirious ode to chaos and destruction, the kind of destruction that recalls knocking down a sibling’s sand castle more than the idea of rebar and stone coming down and burying people alive. Battlefield 6 works by getting close to the hot stove of terror and annihilation, without letting players feel the actual burn.

Unlike nations who must rebuild at the conclusion of a war, there is nothing to rebuild at the end of a match in Battlefield 6. All that has been lost will simply revert back into place. As such, there’s nothing much to learn. We cannot form meaning from something so totally detached from the real human tragedy its images evoke. Those IDF snipers, wrapping up their tour of duty, boastful of their asinine and inhuman little games, or an American commentariat who point to undisclosed comorbidities as a sign that a child’s gaunt figure can’t technically be attributed to starvation alone, view the world in a similar way. A game; a distraction; a series of meaningless images.

“They were strange people in that little planet!” Carrol’s character exclaims after hearing the story. On our own strange planet we seem intent on crafting, in games like Battlefield 6, stranger ones still, meant, perhaps, to reflect the incongruence and absurdity of life while still facing away from it, endlessly aiming in the wrong direction.

***

Mirror World

Reid McCarter — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Battlefield 6 is about the real world, but it doesn’t take place in it. At some point in the Battlefield series’ version of history, events diverge from their proper path and there’s a fictional 21st-century conflict between the United States and Iran, Russia, and China. In the latest game, a faltering NATO is up against an enormously powerful private military company called Pax Armata. The names and political tensions are sometimes based in reality. More often they’re World War III nightmare scenarios, brought from imagination to screen. Battlefield 6 isn’t set in the real world, in a literal sense.

And yet, its fantasy of near-future catastrophe looks recognizable. The guns and uniforms are familiar. The military acronyms and vehicle designs are, too. The soldiers talk like modern people and the world they live in is a lot like our own. Battlefield 6 is a ‘modern military shooter,’ with the references and aesthetics to match that description. It hews closely to aspects of the world we live in, even as it splinters off in different directions more amenable to high-stakes action scenarios.

There’s always something not being said in Battlefield 6. In its near future, NATO exists and it's crumbling, as Pax Armata assumes control of various regions across the world. We’re told this has led to breakdowns in alliances as current spheres of influence shift—different states taking advantage of the turmoil to seize control of neighbours that would otherwise be off limits. The implication here is that Russia, next door to Georgia, where the game begins, is eager to regain its old empire amidst the breakdown. Presumably, China is doing something similar, along with other American rivals.

Throughout the game, you mostly play as members of Dagger 1-3, a Marine Raiders squad that hops around the globe at fighter-jet speed to crack the case of how, exactly, Pax Armata was able to launch its surprise attacks. Battlefield 6 ends with the well-telegraphed ‘twist’ that the CIA is responsible for assisting Pax in its goals, the big clunky idea being that all of the United States’ enemies would band together as NATO falls apart, forming a sort of anti-American superpower that would serve as a single Ur-enemy. As ridiculous as this is, it’s a more suspicious and non-patriotic viewpoint than is typical for modern shooters. It also makes the game's troops look a bit like dopes when they're revealed as CIA pawns, their bravery and loyalty taken advantage of by ambitious leaders.

There’s some power in the specificity of this. Battlefield 6 evokes the CIA’s real willingness to enact mad scientist schemes to further American interests, evoking the agency’s history of larger-than-life subterfuge. Still, the game only evokes this history, rather than including it as text.

Like Ed discussed in his recent article on Mafia: The Old Country, and as I’m sure has been brought up too many times over this website’s life, videogames train (or have trained) their audience to accept certain conventions as ‘normal.’ In a specific narrative sense, this can also involve omitting or obfuscating reality in ways that other media aren’t as eager to do—barring kids’ movies and superhero movies, maybe a distinction without a difference. It’s a market-trained artistic outlook which scans for anything that might offend or make uncomfortable a significant demographic of consumers, and erases or blunts those elements to avoid losing revenue. So: no overt political or cultural messaging that strays from accepted norms and no references to the real-world that might make anyone feel funny. In Battlefield 6’s case, we have a modern war thriller based around the creation of an anti-American bloc of nations, where none of the nations within that bloc are actually named.

What is acceptable in Battlefield 6 is a reassurance of old narratives. At one point, during part of the Gibraltar level, the characters fight through a museum installation devoted to the British military during the Second World War. Later, in New York City, the US president is holed up in a firehouse, with monuments to those lost in the September 11th attacks covering the walls. Here, Battlefield 6 points at World War II’s Allied forces and September 11th first responders as uncomplicated heroes, finding in them an object of broad, safe consensus—a touchstone that can be included because the audience is unlikely to bristle at calling unarmed aid workers and military opponents to nazism valorant.

Similar references to the real world, past and present, would sharpen the rest of the plotline, but players aren’t meant to expect that in a big-budget videogame. Instead, the audience has to fill in the blanks themselves, reading more from the experience than it is willing to provide. It all gives the impression that creator and player are at odds with one another.

Not every story needs real-world specificity to function, but mainstream videogames’ tendency towards avoidance is a pattern regular enough that it chafes, especially in genres like a modern military shooter that wants to model some aspects of reality while avoiding others. Where past Battlefield games were sometimes able to specify countries, political systems, and—especially in the case of uncontested WWII narratives—historical events by name, the latest entry takes place in a landscape of partially redacted or blurred representation.

With Battlefield 6 publisher Electronic Arts’ sale to Saudi Public Investment Fund, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake just before the game’s launch, it seems unlikely that future games in the series will be more pointed—even with claims that the company will retain “creative control” over its output going forward. A cliffhanger ending that suggests a sequel spent hunting down a villainous CIA in revenge for the Pax Armata plot doesn’t seem like a path that the new ownership would be keen on exploring.

Instead, it’s probably better to expect that Battlefield will drift further away from the real world, another series of mainstream games with increasingly thin tethers to reality.

***

4151+3√6, 84*4

Leanne Rahel — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Silent Hill f scriptwriter Ryukishi07’s debut sound novel Higurashi When They Cry opens each episode with a looping soundtrack of cicadas crying and a direct authorial statement. In Onikakushi, the first chapter, Ryukishi, as if a host to a guest, extends an invitation both to Higurashi as a narrative and to the village of Hinamizawa as setting. Tucked beneath this invitation is a note on ‘difficulty’—“The difficulty is extremely high, but I hope you will enjoy the reward.” Similar statements punctuate each following episode. For an author to describe his non-interactive (sound) novel as having a ‘difficulty level’ may appear to be a non-sequitur, but as the reader progresses through Higurashi in series it becomes plainly obvious he is referring to the complexity of logic required to solve the mystery—in other words the ‘difficulty of interpretation.’ In framing ‘interpretation’ as subject to such a game-like structure as a ‘difficulty level’, Ryukishi establishes hermeneutics as the ludological basis for his work. To consider When They Cry, and in turn Silent Hill f, as ‘games’ by a particular author is to contend with the significance of interpretation in them.

Interpretation, much like the games of When They Cry and Silent Hill, has long been a site of discourses on gender and desire. Hiroki Azuma’s close reading of Higurashi in The Birth of Game-like Realism concludes in his coinage of “the (carnal) desire for mystery-solving” as the progression system that drives a reader-player to consider the sound novel a ‘game’+. In his follow-up to Higurashi, Umineko When They Cry, Ryukishi himself moves from presenting hermeneutics as the consummation of the formal intention behind a mystery novel-game to being a core narrative dialectic enabled by the work’s aesthetic metastructure: in the wake of protagonist Battler Ushiromiya failing to interpret the desires of courtship from heroine Beatrice as conveyed through a series of (pseudo-)orthodox murder mysteries, a ‘detective’ emerges in the second half. A self-described “intellectual rapist,” Erika Furudo seeks to exhaust Beatrice and her world of interpretation-as-courtship, leaving behind only denotative meanings that remain after an assault upon the textual body. This dialectic of courtship and rape as axes on the spectrum of hermeneutic methods in Umineko recalls Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Naomi Schor’s consequent polemic, Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction. Sontag, describing interpretation as a “mass ravishment” that “violates art”, ultimately calls for “an erotics of art” to replace hermeneutics. Schor, in her response, suggests that Sontag is wrong to assimilate interpretation to “(masculine) forms of aggression and mastery: rape and imperialism” and instead offers an alternative to Sontag’s call—“an erotics of hermeneutics, text-pleasure as striptease rather than rape.” In particular, Schor finds problematic Sontag’s reductivist definition of “the process of interpretation as virtually one of translation”, that the interpreter seeks to demonstrate that X is A, Y is B, and Z is C. Taking up this definition as a discursive site lets us move the dialectics of hermeneutics in Ryukishi’s work from Umineko to where it finds expression in Silent Hill f++.

The significance of hermeneutics to Silent Hill may initially appear self-evident, in the sense that the conventional interactive progression found in the series at large does not require the setting up of a “(carnal) desire of mystery-solving” to justify their status as ‘games’ to its audience as a sound novel might. That desire is instead fulfilled by each progress-gating puzzle the player-interpreter solves. Who is left hungry when the ludic desire is fulfilled is instead the character-interpretant, for whom the narrative forms the site of desire+++. Silent Hill f’s Hinako Shimizu is one such character-interpretant who emerges as a translator, a Sontag-ian interpreter in its truest sense, in a particular sequence in the game. Stuck in Ebisugaoka Middle School, the transitory physical-psychological space where the spectre of socio-sexual difference first began haunting her, Hinako must solve (translate) “girl code” to gain access to the gender-segregated lockers. In the process, she unravels a narrative left behind by other students—a rare narrative beyond Hinako’s subjectivity in Silent Hill f, revealing the complex interactivities of gender in the world beyond her.

“Girl code” allows this locker puzzle to have a double-layer hermeneutic process and text-pleasure. The first order interpretation is already complete and closed by the time of Hinako’s arrival at the school, the translation and transmission of girl code between students. In this layer, if you read the order of the notes as presented in Hinako’s journal as a chronology, the boys appear to gain a hermeneutic education in girl code over time. Miki’s lover plainly rejects girl code as not worthwhile, ‘4151+3√6’ (‘AISITERU’) being simply a “crazy formula” to him. Satou, who gets called a ‘84*4’ (‘BAKA’) by a girl gets Yosida to teach him the cipher. And finally, Aoi observes and worries that Suga’s locker spells ‘505’ (‘SOS’) without any exterior stimulus from a girl like in the prior cases. The mediation of text-pleasure here is complex—the more the boys learn and use girl code the more it ceases being “girl code”, as it loses both its intention of adolescent jouissance and the girls’ ownership over the language. On a purely socio-structural basis, the male translators of girl code are performing a (masculine) imperialist domination of girl code as text-pleasure like Sontag accuses hermeneutics of enabling. Yet on a textual basis the same male translators are extending empathy, negating any “intellectual machismo” or “hubris” which Schor identifies as the source of Sontag’s contention. The boys listen and are educated by the girls in manipulating this language, and its cessation as a juvenile pastime arises from a shared concern for each other rather than an extraction and repurposing by any gendered imperialism. This process is too adolescent and celibate and even aromantic to say it is an erotics of hermeneutics or “text-pleasure as striptease” as Schor might hope for but text-pleasure as empathy, perhaps, is the synthesis emerging.

The second order of hermeneutics lies with the player and Hinako, who as translators seeking the fulfilment of ludonarrative desire, must retrace this process of hermeneutics in text-pleasure as empathy in order to progress the larger interpretive narrative. The students, in rendering girl code not “girl code” anymore through that process, have de-bifurcated the socio-sexual difference that a middle school reifies, allowing Hinako to move into and out of the gendered spaces of the locker rooms at will in pursuit of further texts to interpret. In this second order, a further constituent element of girl code is revealed to the player—the acquiescences made in service of the puzzle in the translation of Silent Hill f itself. The game does not usually distinguish long vowels (Hinako’s friend is named “Shu” rather than “Shuu/Shū”) or render the phoneme し as “si” (Hinako’s family name is “Shimizu”, not “Simizu”), mostly following the standard of Hepburn romanisation. Yet in service of girl code, Yoshida and Sato are naturalised as Yosida and Satou within Hinako’s journal—the primary site of most interpretation in the game. Text-pleasure as empathy, then, emerges as a phenomenon powerful enough to subvert the technologies of translation that are constituent to the game’s aesthetic metastructure. Sontag would be pleased too, as even her reductive definition of interpretation-as-translation which underpins her critique of hermeneutics will be countered by the gravity of this hermeneutic method that de-bifurcates gender through subverting translative technologies.

Yet it is all a bit too utopian, is it not? Why is there a scenario that potentially negates socio-sexual difference through hermeneutic discourse in a middle school in Ebisugaoka? Especially when Silent Hill f as a whole is often contradictory and acquiescing in its liberatory attitudes? My hermeneutic instincts may be wrong. I may be, like The Trial’s Josef K. in Schor’s taxonomy of interpretants/interpretors, a “failed interpret[or]” engaging in the “overinterpretation of a relatively insignificant detail” or “the outright misinterpretation of a gesture.” To play the role of K. for a bit longer yet, defending myself against that accusation, the temporal ambiguity of the Ebisugaoka of Hinako’s psycho-space allows for a straight aspirational reading. Just as the game does not even reveal whether it is (primarily) set before or after 1964 or 1968—when the Tokyo Olympics allowed a post-fascist Japan to present to the world its newly acquired coat of liberal democracy and when the contradictions of that political presentation boiled over into city streets and university campuses across the country respectively—allowing its narrative with all of its lauded specificities to function as a mostly successful parable across multiple sociopolitical contexts, this ambiguity also allows a potential aspirational future to bloom in that same Ebisugaoka. Even in that aspirational space, Suga Yosie remains in trouble bad enough for Aoi Takeshi to notice and so the work of utopia goes on.

///

++ The term he uses for desire is 欲望, which can have sort of a lustful affect which I hope to convey in the parenthetical echo of “(carnal)” here.

++ Sontag’s association of translation with masculinity had led me to potentially consider discourses of gender and translation in Japanese literature. Noriko Mizuta, in a 1991 essay in Gunzō, asserts that “Translation has long been regarded as a female act and occupation. As with typists, translators were usually women”, comparing translators to midwives of a text but Judy Wakabayashi who translated Mizuta’s piece has elsewhere, in the notes to her translation of Kunikida Doppo’s On Women and Translation, has produced a contradictory material history to this claim by stating that the role of tsūji was a hereditary male role in the Edo Period and that even in the Meiji Period structural inequities prevented a mass proliferation of women translators, the latter claim corroborated by Kunikida’s contemporary observations in the main text. This piece lacks the space to fully contend with this issue. Both of these essays can be read in the excellent Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women's Writing, edited by Rebecca Copeland.

+++ An “interpretor” is the “interpreting critic” (reader) and an “interpretant” is the “interpreting character” in Schor’s verbiage.

***

Leanne Rahel is a writer interested in the crossroads of écriture feminine and otaku culture. Their essays, poetry, and ephemera can be found on their note, and stray thoughts on Bluesky.