Hey friends,

It’s been a while, I know. But I’m back for a some big news: Suddenly I Was a Shark!, my memoir-ish deep dive into my favorite video game of all time, What Remains of Edith Finch, is part of the absolutely enormous new StoryBundle: The Greatest Hits Game Bundle 2, curated by the legendary David L. Craddock.

This thing is stacked. I’m talking 65 DRM-free books about game development, culture, nostalgia, and more—many of which are exclusives or hard to find elsewhere.

Get the books here

🦈 What You Get:

For just $5, you get:

• Suddenly I Was a Shark! by Caleb J. Ross

• The Set Side B Archives: Vol. 2 - Mission: YouTube by John Harris

• HG101 Presents: Arcade Cult Classics by Kurt Kalata

But for $35, you unlock ALL 65 BOOKS, including:

• Embed With Games by Cara Ellison

• The Xbox 360 Uncloaked by Dean Takahashi

• Long Live Mortal Kombat: Round 1 by David L. Craddock

• Memories of Arcadia by John Harris

• HG101 Presents: Wrestling with Pixels, Through the Moongate Parts 1 & 2, Inside Video Game Creation: Second Edition, and dozens more

Seriously, this bundle is massive.

Why Now?

This bundle is available for a limited time only over at StoryBundle.com, which means if you want a copy of Suddenly I Was a Shark! and enough video game lit to break your virtual bookshelf, now’s your chance.

And remember: every purchase supports indie authors, DRM-free reading, and even the Video Game History Foundation, if you choose to donate a portion.

📚 Grab the bundle here: storybundle.com

Get the bundle here

🦈 Read Suddenly I Was a Shark! and 64 other books for the price of lunch.

Thanks for reading—and supporting the weird little stories that keep our industry human.

– Caleb

P.S. If you’ve already read Suddenly I Was a Shark!, consider gifting the bundle to a friend. It’s super easy through StoryBundle, and hey, nothing says “I love you” like 65 books.

It’s 24 hours of your favorite Polymedia Network streamers and podcasters playing video games, live podcasting, and even answering questions in the words most fun game of trivia (that’s the event that I’m participating in).

Head over to PolymediaNetwork.com for details including a full schedule of events. I’ll be part of the Polymedia Game Show hosted by Blue Peg, Pink Peg’s own Kevin McAlexander.

This event truly is a good time. If you aren’t familiar with the Polykill crew, no worries. They are all so easy to fall in love with. Hey, and after the stream, if you like the vibes, head over the Polymedia Network site where you can learn how to hang out with us more.

Follow Polymedia on Twitch.tv

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL…

The new StoryBundle deal is live. The Holiday Game Book Bundle, curated by uber-prolific video games author David L. Craddock, is available and includes my own book, Suddenly I was a Shark! My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch.

I’m honored to be a part of it.

I’ve purchased several of these bundles in the past. It’s a bit surreal to see my work alongside StoryBundle and video-games-writ-large staples like Dean Takahashi, Kelsey Lewin, and of course David L. Craddock himself.

So, dive into the world of gaming with 12 must-read books about game development and gaming culture, all wrapped up in the Holiday Game Book Bundle from StoryBundle. Whether you're curious about the origins of id Software, want a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the Xbox, or love classic games like Animal Crossing and Day of the Tentacle, this bundle has something for every gaming enthusiast.

Highlights include:

• The id Software Interviews by David L. Craddock

• Opening the Xbox and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked by Dean Takahashi

• Two books from Boss Fight Books on Animal Crossing and Day of the Tentacle

• Exclusive titles like The Set Side B Archives: Vol. 3 and The Best of GameDev Stories V2

How It Works:

• Pay what you want: For as little as $5, get the basic bundle of three books.

• Upgrade for more: Pay $20 or more to unlock all 12 books, including exclusive titles.

• DRM-free & versatile: Read on any device—Kindle, tablet, or smartphone—restriction-free.

This bundle is available for a limited time only at StoryBundle.com.

Get the Bundle Now!

Over the past year and a half, I’ve poured myself into a new hobby: indoor bouldering. The time I spend at the climbing gym eats into the time I have available to write about video games. And since I want video games to continue being a big part of my life, I’ve had to choose to PLAY games more than WRITE ABOUT games.

But I still love writing, and so I’ve started a bouldering Substack. If you happen to exist in that weird Venn diagram where video games and indoor bouldering overlap, please head over to Sendship, a Bouldering Substack, and subscribe. I aim for bite-sized weekly posts.

Sendship, a Bouldering Substack

I climb fake rocks on indoor walls.

By Caleb J. Ross

The super-short form posts are much less time-consuming than the posts I’ve done here at Video Games Are Real, which is why I have room for both climbing and writing about climbing.

If you head over there, I hope you enjoy it. If you don’t, well, I’ve loved having you here at Video Games Are Real.

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Over the last several months I’ve become obsessed with bouldering.

I don’t use the term “obsessed” lightly. I’ve changed my diet to accommodate better climbing. I wake earlier than I ever have, so I can get to the gym before anyone else arrives. I cancel plans so I can climb. I fall asleep to bouldering-themed podcasts. I’ve even shortened my video game time to allow more time on the wall.

I measure the worth of my days in terms of sent problems.

Hell, I use a term like “sent problem” when “completed climbing route” makes just as much sense.

Other terms I now use daily: dihedral, arete, drop-knee, Gaston, dyno, jug, crimp, and on and on and on.

Where there’s overlap between my two loves–video games and bouldering–I get excited. Plenty of video games incorporate climbing mechanics, but generally, those are limited to a) the loose clambering of an Uncharted game, b) the deceptively rigid approach of a Horizon game, or c) the all-out, do-anything approach of a modern Zelda game. And while those games are all fun, the climbing mechanics are focused on traversal above all else. The “problem” part of a bouldering problem simply isn’t a focus. And that’s okay. These games aren’t meant to be training tools. They are meant to be conduits to fun. Period.

But sometimes, a detail invites that blurred line between training tool and fun. Enter Jusant’s stamina-recovery animation in which the player character shakes out their arm while clinging to the wall.

Though the practicality of this shake is debatable, its use in actual rock climbing is pervasive. The science is at odds about whether or not the move has any physiological benefits. Psychologically, though, I’ll admit it feels helpful.

When regaining stamina in Jusant, the player character shakes their arms. Real climbers do this too. The inclusion of this small detail changed my approach to Jusant. Before, I was playing a game that felt like a simple commandeering of rock climbing to support the immersive capacity of a video game. After, I was playing a game that had something to say about rock climbing. The arm-shake is such a specific detail that it burdens the entire game with responsibility it likely didn’t ask for.

I was no longer playing Jusant for fun. I was now playing Jusant to see what it could teach me.

It’s important to note the difference between Jusant’s rock climbing and my bouldering. Rock Climbing, as a term, generally refers to tall walls and ropes, while bouldering refers to short walls without ropes. Rock climbing tends to be more about endurance and overcoming fear. Bouldering tends to be more about puzzle-solving. But when it comes to shaking out our arms, both rock climbers and boulderers do it. I highlight this difference because, as a boulderer, I was unfamiliar enough with rock climbing to be especially primed by Jusant’s arm-shaking detail. I wanted to learn more about this thing I’m proximate to, but largely unknowledgeable about.

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The arm-shaking animation planted a seed of trust. It made me consider the intentionality of every other animation and mechanic in the game. Is the way the player character drives pitons into the wall reflective of real rock climbing? Is the stamina gauge itself true to the amount of stamina a strong rock climber (as Jusant’s player character clearly is) might have? Should I accept the distance between pitons as a lesson should I ever find myself navigating a real cliff face?

Obviously, from a legal standpoint, nobody can hold Jusant accountable for anything that happens to a player when that player tries to climb an actual rock wall. And the developers have said nothing to indicate that they intended Jusant to be a teacher. But in being a game about rock climbing, and by incorporating details to benefit accuracy, it's become a model, a passive teacher. It's not a responsibility the game asked for, but a responsibility the game has inherited.

I love the idea that the intentional approximation of an activity can be educational. Imagine a rock climbing game on an early gaming console, the Atari 2600, perhaps. The game would lack the fidelity for nuance, and nuance is where trust between the player and the developer is established. “Immersion” might be another name for this type of trust. But once fidelity reaches a point where a developer’s attention to detail can be highlighted, the player can’t help but mine that attention to detail for purpose. And what better purpose than the teach the player something?

I tend to argue that because video games are meant for human players, their scenarios must be interpretable by human players. Sounds obvious, right? But this simple concept is what enables me to find lessons in video games. The car physics in the Gran Turismo series allowed one of its players to eventually become an actual racecar driver. The Office of Naval Research has indicated that playing first-person shooters could make for better soldier candidates. Video games that focus on authenticity allow players to learn about their real-world proxies in uniquely immersive ways.

However, while video games might be able to induce technique and overall knowledge, they shouldn’t be burdened with motivating people. A person who plays a first-person shooter isn’t primed by the game alone to use a real gun. A person who plays Gran Turismo isn’t pushed by the game alone to race cars. And a Caleb who plays Jusant isn’t likely anytime soon to climb hundreds of feet up along a cliff face with just a rope and some pitons. I’ll stick with bouldering near the ground, thank you.

Do you know someone who might have thoughts about rock climbing and video games? Share this post with them. It’s like a fun, unexpected gift.

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A friend keeps a bag of brand-new, unworn socks at the ready. When she knows a tough day is ahead of her, she breaks out new socks. Rather than dread the challenging day ahead, she looks forward to the feeling of new socks. We all love the feeling of new socks. Admit it. It’s a pleasure you never fully thought about until just now. I’ve taken to keeping a stash of emergency feel-good socks myself.

I’ve long said, the only thing better than finishing a great video game is starting a new video game.

Every Saturday morning begins the best day of my week. I visit the coffee shop, do some writing there, then head to the cigar lounge for some reading, and finally I do a few hours of bouldering at the climbing gym.

Having something to look forward to makes any bad day, any mid-game slog, or any tough week feel like nothing more than a passing speed bump.

Today, right now, is the beginning of my best day. I’m sitting at the coffee shop, sipping a black cold brew, writing this post. This, all while looking forward to the climbing to come; even on this best day, I reserve a prize on the horizon.

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My advice to you (if I can be so brash as to offer unsolicited advice…though, I suppose you did see the words “some advice” in the title, so, yeah, it’s your fault): identify the small things that bring you happiness and build your life around them. Use those small things as carrots to keep you moving forward (this analogy is especially relevant if carrots bring you happiness).

Do you have a particular dinner you look forward to? Make it every day. Seriously. As long as the meal won’t introduce unhappiness (ex, gastrointestinal angst or general unhealth), then make it. Every. Day. I’ve gone months in a row eating chorizo and eggs every single day for dinner.

Find a beefy video game with a loop you can fall into. For me, my current carrot is Assassin’s Creed Odessey.

Look forward to the morning by going to bed early. Seriously, try it. It’s amazing how much less you will dread the morning when you don’t wake up feeling like tired garbage.

At work, find the small things you enjoy. And don’t be afraid to admit what brings you happiness. For example, I enjoy the immediate satisfaction of cleaning shelves. In my earlier, grocery store employment days, I always volunteered to clean. My coworkers thought I was weird.

Today, at my desk job, I look forward to helping others solve their spreadsheet problems. I hunt for ways to help. Then, I schedule meetings throughout the week. My goal is to, every day, have a spreadsheet problem-solving meeting with a coworker.

When enough carrots are dangled, the week becomes all optimism.

Monday morning’s new socks become Monday afternoon’s spreadsheet-fest becomes Monday’s happy drive home becomes Monday’s chorizo and eggs becomes Monday evening’s Assassin’s Creed Odessey becomes Monday night’s round of video game podcasts as I drift to sleep becomes Tuesday’s repeat, and Wednesday’s, and Thursday’s, and Friday’s (which is the Ur-carrot of the week), becomes my glorious all day Saturday carrot becomes Sunday’s more rock climbing (this time with my two kids), becomes Sunday evening’s Many a True Nerd’s Fallout episode, becomes Monday’s new socks.

So, go ahead, decorate your entire week with carrots.

Top image credit: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/carrot-socks

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I recently started playing an Assassin’s Creed game, my first ever. Odyssey, the one with Sokrates and Spartans and the magical eagle. This game was released in 2018. I’m having a great time with it. So, have I missed out on 5 years of happiness?

When I told a friend about my newfound happiness, he admitted to enjoying that game when it was released, but quickly dismissed his appreciation as “nostalgia,” as in, the game isn’t actually good, but I loved it in the past. His apology confused me. Ignore for a moment that our referent is only five years old; it was the general implication that confused me, that nostalgia—though real and powerful—isn’t a valid metric of quality. Logically, I agree with my friend’s assumption that nostalgia is untrustworthy. But why, then, did my friend’s casual dismissal confuse me?

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Though I play many not-new games, for some unknown reason during this particular Assassin’s Creed Odessey play session I was struck by just how happy I felt. Then, in light of my friend’s dismissal, confusion set it. We played the same game. The only difference is how long ago we played it.

According to Alan R. Hirsch in his report, “Nostalgia: A Neuropsychiatric Understanding,” nostalgia is:

“a longing for a sanitized impression of the past [...] not a true recreation of the past, but rather a combination of many different memories, all integrated together, and in the process all negative emotions filtered out.”

The human brain has an incredible ability to focus on the future. The past’s peaks are sharpened while the valleys are filled in and forgotten. 

According to research (warning: paywall) nostalgia does a lot of great things for humans by highlighting positive moments of our youth. It’s bittersweet sure, as we can be tricked into thinking things will never be as good as they once were, but the net effect is that life feels more meaningful and death less frightening. Nostalgia smooths over the rough parts of childhood, so we aren’t emotionally weighed down by how awkward we were as kids or how mean we were to other kids or how many bad video games we played (and how few good games we played).

So, when I play an old, good game for the first time—like Assassin’s Creed Odessey—the happiness that game brings doesn’t highlight an unfulfilled life; rather, it simply fulfills a life. That’s awesome! Nostalgia is great.

But I remain confused, nonetheless.

Nostalgia is complex. My mere human brain presents only so much understandable logic to the surface, “user interface” level of my consciousness. The brain is a computer, like that. I can double-click to open Microsoft Word, but I don’t need to know about the 1s and 0s that allow for the double-click to open a program. Same with nostalgia. I can think deep about its output, but hell if I understand the mechanisms that drive it.

This all forces my acceptance of nostalgia’s power. But it doesn’t keep me from trying desperately—perhaps futily—to figure out the barriers of its power. For one, does nostalgia’s power decrease as time increases between me and the nostalgic referent (and as the number of possible replacements for that referent inevitably increases)?

Probably, right? While I don’t want future me to decide, as I sit surrounded by all types of future gaming innovations and incredible mechanics-expanding peripherals, that Super Metroid sucks, I have to accept that, logically, Super Metroid can’t forever exemplify pinnacle gaming, as the concept of pinnacle gaming should, I hope, be forever changing. I want to trust that a quarter-of-a-century old game isn’t the peak of my gaming experience, but I also want that experience—and all of the emotional energy I’ve invested in it over the years—to be true.

The truth is, I cannot use logic to loosen the grip of nostalgia. I simply have to accept that the peaks will be sharpened, and the valleys will be filled in. And I have to trust that process is a net positive. And if nostalgia colors our perception of the world, then how can we so easily dismiss it as a metric of quality, like my friend did? Afterall, there’s a reason we remember some games from our childhood so fondly. Aren’t those games the peaks that time has sharpened?

Here’s my proposal: instead of using nostalgia as a tool for dismissal, trust it as an indicator of quality. Rather than, “I probably only think that game is good because of nostalgia,” say, “nostalgia tells me that is probably a good game.” Then, when playing that old game again, though your modern-critical lens, look for the good, look for those peaks that were sharpened, not for the valleys that time has filled in. Trust that your childhood feelings are valid.

This post contains bits from my video Are Old (Retro) Games Better than Modern Games? | Hey Future Caleb

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I am 40 years old, meaning I'm of the first generation to grow up with video games and the Internet. This means, of course—as the generation cycles tend to encourage—that my generation's parents feared both of these things. And so, the narrative unfolded that video games broke the children, and the Internet is where perverts thrived.

This is the advent of rock music. This is racial integration. This is marijuana. To the older generation, the change is worrisome. To the younger generation, there is no change. There is only the way it is.

Thankfully, my single mother of three kids was too busy to worry about hysteria (and so left me to play whatever video games I could), and we were too poor to afford a computer, let alone the Internet. For me, video games were never a demon. They loomed not as a specter but as a blanket.

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So, as a lifelong gamer, I found myself at first confused when at the age of 11, in 1993, the US government aimed its pitchforks at video games. My world was one where video games were welcomed. This confusion quickly manifested into ardent defense because I knew (as much as a kid without hard data can “know”) that video games weren’t a universal bad. What little data has come about over the years only confirms this. To date, there’s been no reliable study to show that video games cause violent behavior (mostly because, as Alexander Kriss says in his book The Gaming Mind: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play, there have been no fair studies upon which to even build such conclusions).

But while lab-controlled experiments aren’t reliable, we do have several years of survey data that show a very positive outlook on video games. The ESA recently released its latest annual “Essentials Facts” report and, well, it’s becoming more and more obvious that video games aren’t an ever-present fulcrum of change across generations, but are, officially, the way it is.

While the full report contains a lot of great information (see the entire report here), I was most interested in the results related to how players themselves perceive the benefits of games. Between 2020 and 2023, there’s a dramatic increase in the percentage of survey respondents who perceive games as offering a variety of mental and social health benefits.1

So, what does this mean? For gamers, it simply confirms what we’ve long known about video games. They can have a very positive influence on the people who play. For others, this data suggests that it’s becoming harder and harder to blame society’s ills on video games. The go-to demons for the last 40 years are now officially nothing more than strawmen.

I would also like to—but cannot ethically do so—cite the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for such an increase in video game appreciation. Lockdown, in the US, largely began in early 2020. When people are forced out of the physical social circles they once depended upon, are they more open to the virtual social circles that video games provide? Possibly. The dramatic increases are telling. A 15%-point increase in the number of people who play video games with others is amazing. A 20%-point increase in people who have met a friend, spouse, or significant other through video games is incredible.

My hope is that the class of people who dismiss video games as a reactionary default faded away decades ago and that for the subsequent years, dismissal was more of a cautionary or agnostic approach, as in “video games might rot your brain, son, but you’ve never tortured a bird or lit a trashcan on fire, so go ahead with your Halos and your Grand Theft Autos.” And now, in 2023, it seems maybe that most people begin with optimism. That’s a great thing.

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For most of my childhood, I believed that smoke was attracted to light. While my mother read the latest Danelle Steele or V. C Andrews novel, her cigarette smoke would loft quickly, fade, and then magically reappear above the end-table lamp next to her, rising, seemingly, from the bulb itself. The wide, cylindrical lampshade billowed smoke from its top like a giant, overweight, parental version of the cigarette itself. A father teaching his child. This is how you exhaust the room, son. The cigarette offers a meek, thanks dad, in the form of a narrow line of smoke. I could watch these lessons for hours. The smoke was mesmerizing.

Eventually, I learned that the smoke didn’t actually follow the light, but rather light simply allowed me to see the smoke. Around this time is when I began hating my mother’s smoke. She took notice. She retreated to the bathroom when she needed to light up. The light’s control over smoke was a farce. The magic was gone.

My new disgust extended beyond our living room. My single mother worked at a bar and often had me in tow in lieu of a babysitter. There, I’d retreat to the back storeroom where a single Playchoice-10 arcade cabinet, despite my lack of quarters, kept my attention for hours with its varied attract modes. But more importantly, the room’s lack of beer taps and waitstaff kept the smoking patrons at bay.

I became militant. I forced coughs when passing strangers with cigarettes. I stomped on butts left to smolder on sidewalks. During our occasional restaurant meal, when the host would ask if we preferred “smoking or non” I’d interject with “non” before my mother could answer. I did this despite my mother never having been a during-dinner smoker. I guess I simply saw the world as a battlefield between smoke plums and my own opinionated breath. I took every strategic advantage I could.

Then one day, my mother quit. As easy as a light switch, she stopped smoking. The battlefield had turned in my favor.

The victory hardened my resolve, though I remained intrigued by my enemy; I stayed entranced despite the war. I entered my high school years amid friends who took to pot and cigarettes without question. While I didn’t escape their company, like I did my mother’s company, I did decline any invite to partake. That was my line, I suppose. As long as I wasn’t imbibing, I was free to watch the smoke without feeling like a hypocrite. I was free to imagine a world where smoke was magical again.

I dabbled in incense for a few years in high school. I'd puppet the smoke with my breath, twisting it upon itself with every exhale. The scent was fine enough, but it was the lighting and the manipulating—controlling the magic—that intrigued me. When I breathed, the smoke fought for survival. When I held my breath for long enough, the smoke would regain control; it survived only when I was slowly dying.

A rich, pseudo-villain named Camp, from the 1994 movie Ace Venture: Pet Detective, collected fish. At one point, in a moment of vulnerability, he says about his fish “No matter what is going on in my life, I can always watch them swim and be completely at peace.” That line stuck with me. For years after hearing that line, I searched for my own version of Camp’s fish, a switch I could flip to calm me. The incense got close. Unfortunately, though, incense was easy to ignore. Light it and walk away. Small distractions weakened the smoke’s allure. I needed something I couldn't walk away from.

In college, I lived in a deteriorating eyesore of a home across the street from campus. The basement walls had long-ago cracked along the entire perimeter. One connected horizontal wound collapsing the foundation, like how an aluminum can might buckle to the weight of a stomping foot. When it rained, crawfish took refuge in our basement, ushered by thin streams trickling in through the walls.

The state of the home’s interior was reflected on the outside, from cracked stone stairs to wooden siding more worn of paint than covered by it. But there was a porch, objectively just as dying as the rest of the house, but I claimed it as a refuge. When paired with a couch rescued from a neighbor's curb, that porch became a proxy of sorts, to my childhood living room, made whole when I discovered cigars. I had found my aquarium. I would watch my tobacco-wrapped fish spew smoke for hours, fighting cool spring breezes, brisk fall winds, icy winter chills, rare summer drafts, and of course, my own teasing exhales.

On this porch, I wrote much of my first novel. On this porch, I made friends. On this porch, I lost friends. On this porch, I created hangovers, I slept off hangovers. I studied. I ate. I watched the world move for four years of my life. All these things knotted among spindles of magical cigar smoke.

The best part: I couldn't abandon a cigar like I could a stick of incense. Incense reacted to my breath. A cigar depended upon it.

Not everyone appreciated the magic. My wife detests the smell of a post-smoke me. I get it. I’ve dated a smoker. It’s not pleasant. So, I groom myself appropriately, taking a shower and brushing my teeth following a cigar, but her anger persists. Even when she outwardly ignores my retreat to the back porch for a conjuring session, I feel her disapproval. Call it cosmic osmosis or call it simple guilt, but her disapproval does contaminate my enjoyment. I needed distance.

I found respite at the local cigar lounge. Outwardly, this place was a perfect sanctuary. Chairs so comfortable, they tempted sleep. An entire room stocked with cigars, lest my own wand run dry. Nooks and crannies perfect for peaceful reading. And, best of all, a building full of like-minded cigar lovers…right? Not quite.

My identity is both honored and challenged at the cigar lounge. My favorite spot within the lounge is seated inside a small den area toward the back of the building, but to reach this treasure, the dungeon first forces me through an uncomfortable gauntlet.

Upon entering the building, I’m always struck by the density of old, white guys. Cigars are not cheap. Seeing them enjoyed by such a lopsided survey of society doesn’t speak well of how far we’ve come (I hope) on our collective journey toward equality. Taken as a core sample, people with disposable income to spend on lighting leaves on fire are still very white and very old.

The gauntlet then presents three giant televisions mounted to the walls, each always broadcasting sports (usually golf), news (usually Fox News), and more sports (sometimes, golf again, but a different tournament). I tiptoe onward.

Once through this initial chamber, I move on to the hall leading to my favorite reading den. Now, don’t get distracted by the vending machine. You might be looking for restorative health items after that first golf-and-news battle, but this machine is a mimic. A broken coin return door vomits all change across the tile floor in loud plinks. You might have a refreshing Diet Coke in hand, but you’re scrambling across the floor for quarters and dimes, as those quarters and dimes ding and clang their escape loud enough to draw stares from the rest of the dungeon enemies. Poisoned by embarrassment. Rather than replenish your health fully, the Diet Coke only satiates what the vending machine has zapped.

Ignore the machine. Head for the hallway. But never relax. The hallway is lined with framed portraits of lingerie-and-bikini-clad women posing with cigars. Cigar Girls, they are called. Their presence makes me uncomfortable, for sure, like dungeon bats watching, waiting for me to invade their proximity. They coexist with photos of soldiers posing with cigars, holding banners advertising their military regiments. Such de facto absolute positivity is always uncomfortable for me. Nuance has molded me into the hero I am today, a cautious hero. A good presented as an absolute is always hiding something. So, again, I tiptoe onward.

Once safe, I reflect. It’s strange being here. With so much of the cigar lounge being the antithesis of what I am, being here feels like a compromise. But not a strong-enough compromise. After all, I keep coming back. So I have to question: If I’m the type of person to love this problematic thing, then am I problematic? Am I the company I keep? Am I all about half-naked women and big guns?

We all have our tolerances, I suppose. I don’t buy Ubisoft games anymore because of the company’s alleged rampant misogyny (except, I will buy used Ubisoft games). I avoid any game with microtransactions because of their overtly predatory nature (except for franchises I love). I don’t play dating sims because they are boring (except for Doki Doki Literature Club; more on this below). So, at the cigar lounge, I morally disengage because I love the comfortable chairs and the swirling smoke so much. But something else magical happens: the cigar lounge conflict actually forces me to temper my own personality more, to become a beacon of outside influence. I become a bigger video game nerd at the cigar lounge than I am anywhere else; a “take that” to the machismo and carnality.

A visit to the cigar lounge is a rare opportunity for me to curate an outfit. My Triforce t-shirt? Absolutely. When I arrive and park, do I ensure my rear-window stickers—icons from Undertale, Limbo, Stray, Breath of the Wild, and Ghost of Tsushima—remain visible? Of course. And that laptop I’m writing this on right now? You’d better believe the room can see my Annapurna Interactive and What Remains of Edith Finch stickers decorating the rear of its top cover. If I am the company I keep, I’ll at least keep a filter in place.

My resolve gets tested. Recently, I accessorized my gamer battle outfit with a Nintendo Switch. I happened to be playing a game called Doki Doki Literature Club, which, from the outside would appear to be a pervert’s dreamland. Buxom anime girls vie for your—the player’s—attention using typical dating simulator flirt mechanics. Converse with the girls. Learn their personalities. Then overanalyze the hell out of the burgeoning relationships to arrive at a win state, which, uncomfortably, means gamifying emotional manipulation. To score is to “score.”

I played the game more hunched over than normal, shamefully shielding my screen from any potential onlookers. The absurdity of my paranoia isn’t lost on me. The cartoon girls on my screen are no more fake than the posed Cigar Girls lining the walls around me. In fact, the girls on my screen are more real. They’ve been given backstories and personalities. They exist as part of a dialog with the player. The girls framed along the walls are all monologue.

Doki Doki Literature Club is unique, though, as it ultimately plays out as a commentary on its own genre’s problematic aims. The emotional manipulation common to dating simulators is presented here as the seed of a horror story, not a romance story. Innocent courtship implies shared give-and-take, a dance of sorts, a melding of personal lives and communities. Doki Doki Literature Club dismisses the romance of voluntary community and instead explores forced community. These are relationships you become a part of because you feel obligated; these cartoon anime girls develop unhealthy dependencies on you.

Emotional walls are natural, and healthy courtship means confronting those walls. But with Doki Doki Literature Club, are you navigating around walls or around landmines?

Then an old, heavy, white guy with a cigar bouncing from his lips, lumbers by. I crouch deeper into my chair, shielding my Switch screen further. The man pays me no attention, but even the possibility of embarrassment reddens my ears.

Modesty is denying permission to express feeling good about yourself. Lowering yourself to raise others. Don’t do this. Wait…am I talking to Monika or to myself?

The old man passes. I uncoil. I relax. I turn again to my game. And then, as if trying to prove my place in this world of leather chairs and modeled women, I take a puff from my cigar and press A to see what Monika has to say about the next Literature Club meetup. I’m a beacon of two worlds colliding, two communities melding.

The old man inserts a five-dollar bill into the vending machine. He chooses a canned drink. The drink falls. His change falls, and because the coin flap is missing, the man’s change spits out across the floor. I could have warned him, but I like being a part of an inside joke. I like the badge that signifies my belonging. I admit, I also like this small victory.

I exhale slowly. The smoke rises in thin curls. “I can always watch them swim,” I think. “I am at peace.” The sexism, the celebration of war, the sports, the Fox News, it all mutes behind the smoke. Why not simply enjoy a cigar somewhere else, in my own backyard for example? Well, I do, as often as the weather allows (I even have a hammock beneath my porch, which is my true heaven), but these chairs. Damn, they are comfortable. And these enemies, I need to be near them. And Monika, she deserves to be seen as much as any of us do.

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For 355 days of the year, the closest I am to an ocean is the Red Lobster two miles from my house. In Kansas City, we have lakes, sure, and a river, yes, and even fountains, many, but practically speaking the only way to relax into a beach wave’s ebb and flow is from within a bathtub amid some Lobsterfest tail fins and a few soggy hush puppies bobbing in the soap suds. 

But for the remaining ten days each year, the ocean is reachable. It’s real. My family takes a vacation each year to a beach on Florida's Atlantic side, and within that week and a half, I acclimate to the ocean lifestyle quickly. Obnoxiously quickly.

I become a snob. After the first day, I'm sunburnt, speaking of my former life on the plains like time spent in prison. I made some mistakes, sure, but I'm better now. I know about sea turtle mating habits. I can debunk myths about peeing on jellyfish stings. And "red lobster" had better be a description of the native Caribbean spiny lobster, because I swear to God if you think seafood has any right to exist in a chain restaurant, I'll punch you right back to your landlocked home you saltless bastard! That’s me: from a happily landlocked citizen to a snobby seaside ex-pat in mere days.

Ten days on the beach is magical. The destination’s romance alone carries me for the months leading up until I can reunite my toes with the beach sand. During those months, I dream of my temporary life devoid of day job obligations. I dream of ignoring my diet, of ignoring a gym routine, of ignoring the self I had been forced into for the entire year otherwise. But even in this disconnected utopia, a vacation is still a great way to catch up on video games. 

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The ocean can't pull me away from the screen. And, honestly, I ask myself: should I even put such a burden on the ocean? Is the Atlantic Ocean any more real than the newest Zelda game's Hyrulean beach that I’ve been running along for the last few weeks? According to Theory of Mind, fictional universes (ie, video game worlds) and real universes have the capacity to appease the human brain in similar ways. But not everyone trades plane tickets for a Nintendo Switch. People still visit beaches.1 But, considering the experiences are similar, the sandy beach must be different enough to justify risking one’s life for it, right, like my seatmate Martha did?

Martha (which probably isn’t her real name; I didn’t ask her real name, because small talk scares me) had never been on an airplane before this trip. I’d estimate her to be about 40 years old, with her mother, riding next to her, about 60. Her mother was a veteran flier, compared to Martha. She ruminated on her flying experiences with intent toward comforting her daughter (“that shaking is normal, honey”), but I—already in the headspace of my snobby seaside ex-pat future self—interpreted a bit of common braggadocio. Flying 35,000 feet above ground in a sold metal tube is nothing to us pros. I liked Martha’s mom, so felt a cosmic empathy for Martha’s plight.

I studied Martha. Every move she made was in response to her first-timer awe. Pressurizing the cabin prior to takeoff scared her. Vibrations panicked her. Once airborne, she gripped the seat in front of her despite the absolute futility of it (that seat is going just as fast as you are, Martha). Upon landing, she clenched through the initial touchdown, but quickly relaxed (I didn’t have the heart to tell her that upon touchdown the plane is still going 130 - 160 mph; if the plane breaks upon touching the ground, you’re still going to die, Martha). But that rush, from her height of terror upon touchdown to her immediate calm, that’s a powerful transition. That’s the rush that kickstarts the glad-to-be-alive self-reflection that vacations are so good at revealing.

Martha risked her life to see the beach. To her mind, death was not just possible, but was likely enough to justify grasping for any stability to avoid imminent death (even the illogical stability of an airplane seat moving at 130+ mph). Shouldn’t I, then, be willing to at least give the real beach proper respect over my video game beach? Matha shouldn’t accept her likely death in vain, right?

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So, I tried. For the first few days, I wandered Zelda’s Hyrulean beach only when the Florida beach rejected me: when the sun was down, when the weather was bad, or when it was simply far too crowded for my introverted self to comfortably navigate. And things were going well. Until a couple—I'll call them The Robertsons—brought their chaos to my world.

Chaos is a world without rules, and though The Robertsons didn't bring the debaucherous, destructive energy that chaos implies in many contexts (including that of the Zelda big-bad Ganondorf, of which I was very familiar), they brought lawless confusion, nonetheless.

From my balcony perch overlooking the condo swimming pool below, I watched as the Robertsons approached every single one of the pool deck’s 20+ lounge chairs, one by one, methodically inspecting them, repositioning them into a unified grid… shifting by only inches, by centimeters, even. They inspected each chair’s placement for full seconds before adjusting, like they were staging a brochure photo shoot of a place no human being has ever touched. Come to Uncanny Precision, where a Perfect Vacation is Possible if Only We Move This…Just a Bit More…There!

I attempted to tease out the Robertsons’ logic. OCD? Maybe. But then why come to a beach, where endless stowaway sand grains in every skin fold and pants pocket keep even healthy brains on edge. Maybe this chair-organizing ritual was a sort of adorable quirk the couple shared, which allowed their relationship to bloom from awkward first date to old, married couple. No matter the true case, attempting to tease out their logic was all I could do. I was left swimming in assumptions, tangled amongst loose threads.

Once the final chair had been positioned just so, the Robertsons gave each other a high five. Now these assholes are celebrating this chaos!?

Nothing made sense. I had no language to articulate what I was seeing. My jaw clenched. My vision blurred. My blood boiled.

Why? There had to be a reason for the Robertsons actions. I don’t want to believe in chaos. To me, chaos is just unfulfilled order. There had to be guiding rules somewhere. What ruleset were the Robertson’s operating under? Did they preplan the final chair layout? Is a high five a common celebration in their daily lives? Folded the laundry together: high five. Emptied the dishwasher together: high five. High-fived together: high five?

But then, a young woman walks out of the building. She’s holding a baby. She hands the baby to Mrs. Robertson, whom I now assume is her mother. She gives Mr. Robertson, her father, a hug. The baby is young, easily less than a year. This is probably the baby’s first vacation. Maybe the baby’s first time away from home. The parents, it seems, wanted only to make the mother’s world as perfect as possible, right down to the placement of poolside lounge chairs. 

With this puzzle solved, the rules revealed themselves. My blood cooled. My anger dissipated.

My apologies to Martha, but the comfort I felt with this solved puzzle drew me back to Zelda. A video game is curated beauty, with rules and logic. For a brain, like mine, that cannot rest, this type of intentionality is like a warm blanket. Video games on a beach don’t detract from the beach. They help the beach stay manageable. When the real world is full of so many unanswerable whys, video games grant me the absolute bliss of an answerable why.

More of my thoughts about gaming on vacation:

Does playing video games during a vacation ruin the experience?

Of all the books I’ve written (many), this is my most important. I'm a life-long gamer and a devoted thinker, and this book is the culmination of a life spent writing about video games both as essays & blog posts and as hundreds of visual essays, editorials, and comedy videos on YouTube. With Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch, I feel like I've finally made a valid contribution to this world of video games that I love so much.

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If you are a paid subscriber, you get Suddenly I was a Shark! My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch as part of your paid subscription! Just click here, and download. It’s that simple. (also, you get almost all of my other books and essays as well…it’s a pretty sweet deal, I must say).

About Suddenly I was a Shark! My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch.

What Remains of Edith Finch was released in 2017 amid a gaming public that had largely already dismissed the game’s genre. A walking simulator game exchanges the traditional ‘shoot, jump, run’ mechanics of most popular video games for a passive ‘walk, investigate a thing, walk some more’ set of mechanics. With no points, no combat, no puzzles, and no goal other than narrative progression, What Remains of Edith Finch’s success came as a surprise to most. But for those few who appreciated the power of a combat-less, story-driven video game, What Remains of Edith Finch would become a beacon for an emerging trend of games that aim to change the gamer themself. Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live alumnus and host of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, says of the game, “it’s one of my favorite things... it's gonna change your life."

In Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch, author, and lifelong video game enthusiast, Caleb J. Ross explores the life-changing impact of this unassuming video game about a young woman’s attempt to understand a curse that has killed every member of her family. By mixing developer interviews, personal stories, and examinations of the game’s many literary inspirations, Caleb delivers a powerful story of personal change via one of the most important walking simulator video games ever made.

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The remaining 459 seeds could eventually be exchanged for a cartoonishly coiled pile of shit. Less cool.

The stinky curlicue offers no benefit other than as a permanent ticket of sorts that grants Link witness—at Link’s request—to the shit giver’s silly little dance. Or as is more likely the case, witness to a silly little shuffle to the nearest toilet.

We should have known. The Korok seeds challenge the very classification of “seed.” They can't be planted. The descriptive text notes their "distinct smell” (I'm not a botanist. Maybe certain seeds stink. Durian fruit smells like dead bodies. Maybe its seed does too). But there's no excuse for us to have ignored the very nature of the Koroks themselves: they are tricksters. It stands to reason then that Hestu—the aforementioned shit giver and shit dancer—after having built up and honored a mutually beneficial exchange of goods with Link would eventually leverage that trust to deliver a more powerful punchline. No more “maybe those are petrified teardrops.” At 999 returned Korok seeds, all that remains is: “those were definitely rain-drop shaped, sphincter-pinched nuggets of poo.”

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Collecting brought valuable rewards for a while. In a game with very limited weapons, bows, and shield slots, increased capacity—the reward—meant a lot. So, reasonably, we expected further collecting to mean further rewards, right? If 441 seeds/poops increased our inventory, would 999 seed/poops do something even greater? Expand our inventory to the infinite, for example? For some, it was worth a try. For me, I just waited 13 days post-game-release until some nonsleeping, noneating, and (ironically) non-bathroom-using gamer spent the dozens of hours to find out. 

All of this is known. Going into Breath of the Wild's sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, we know the Koroks are assholes. We know Hestu is a bigger asshole. Yet, we still eagerly collect Korok shit from prankster Koroks like we’re some kind of voracious toilet at Loki’s house.

In Breath of the Wild, the punchline’s audacity was enough to forgive it. But what about Tears of the Kingdom? Is a joke funny the second time? (Oh, and yes, Nintendo does give the same non-reward reward for the Tears of the Kingdom hunt. Only this time, you must collect 1,000 Korok seeds. And to be fair, Hestu’s gift now has FOUR coils, not a measly three).

The first time, our collector's brain drove us to gather as many seeds as possible, kept motivated by continuous high-value rewards. This is game design 101.

But what drives us this second time? Personally, I love the audacity of a repeated joke. But from a wider (ie, smarter) perspective, I believe Nintendo gets away with the punchline’s return because the magic of Tears of the Kingdom is that the journey is the reward.

The world of Tears of the Kingdom is simply so fun to explore, and gathering the Korok seeds represent such a surprising variety of delightful game mechanics that even with no reward (which is essentially the case here), collecting remains fun. The Korok seed hunt is like dragging a pooper scooper through cat litter made of fidget cubes and memory foam. I know the end won’t smell great, but the journey is amazing.

We also must consider that perhaps the Koroks are innocent. Maybe their shit gifts are genuine, like a house cat offering a dead bird or an aunt at Christmas gone off-list on a hunch that maybe you'd like The Simpsons Wrestling instead of your requested Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

But I can't accept that possibility. The Korok are sentient creatures with a mastery of the Hylian language and, in Tears of the Kingdom, they have friends. They understand complex language, have empathy, and they cherish social connections. I refuse to believe these beings have a blind spot for appropriate displays of gratitude. Imagine your aunt trying to pass off her gift-bagged dump as sincere. You wouldn’t buy it. 

Or maybe you can’t imagine the Korok being innocent. Nintendo’s got you covered there, too. Presented as just another way to stretch the game’s verbs, Tears of the Kingdom allows Link to physically move the Koroks using his new Ultrahand ability (an ability that allows Link to move things). The guise here is that Link must help reunite Koroks with their friends, but that’s only one option. Other options include:

• Tossing the Koroks off of cliffs

• Strapping rockets to the backs of the Koroks and sending them into space

• Crucifixion

It’s good to know that Nintendo has given players the freedom to respond to the double-dipped poop joke however they want. They can laugh along. They can dismiss the stringed carrot entirely, driven solely by the collector mentality. Or they can commit war crimes.

Me? I’ll help those Korok assholes only as long as I’m getting good rewards. As soon as my inventory space caps out, though, the remaining Koroks are as good as dead to me.

My aversion to player-versus-player games superseded (and still today, supersedes) any cultural zeitgeist, despite my love of video games and my obsession with following the industry. To put this into perspective: I listen only to video game podcasts while driving. I haven’t heard an actual song in my car since 1925 when I’d drive Opera Singer Adelina Patti around in the back of my Ford Model T Runabout. The entire neighborhood hated me. Opera singers can’t really do low-volume. Also, none of that is true, except for the “I listen only to video game podcasts while driving.” But you knew that. I already said I was born in 1982, which, according to math, is well after 1925.

I love video games, but there are certain genres I just don’t care about. And that’s expected. We can’t all love everything. But something feels false about loving only part of something but still claiming to love the thing entirely. It feels false even though it also makes complete logical sense. Loving something implies a full understanding of that thing, which, if you are a thoughtful person, means of course you’d then be capable of dissecting the thing enough to reveal—and admit to—its faults. I think this is what they call a catch-22. It’s impossible to truly love something because at some point you should know the thing well enough to see the elements that are incompatible with you. The human brain has trouble with this kind of ambiguity.

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This strange crevasse is where GoldenEye 007 has wedged itself since 1997. I never liked the game. Not even a little bit. It could be that I never owned a Nintendo 64 during the game’s heyday, and so all of my play sessions were against more practiced, console-owners. It could be that I’ve never been a competitive person…ever. Once, in Junior High, I pretended to be competitive by crying after a basketball game loss (because that’s what I’d see the star of the team—a very competitive person—do several times), and even during the cry I thought “well, this is stupid.”

Here is where Alyse Knorr’s book GoldenEye 007, the 29th non-anthology book in the amazing Boss Fight Books catalog, comes to crowbar the game out (crow the game out?) of its 22nd catch crevasse. The entire Boss Fight Books catalog has been so enjoyable that even when a book is released whose subject title I have no personal connection to (or have outright hated toward) I still read the book. And with GoldenEye 007, I think I finally understand why I find these untethered books so enjoyable: they close that catch-22 gap by allowing me to appreciate a game even if I don’t like the game.

Knorr doesn’t simply offer a rote development history of the game. So much time is given to the developers themselves to speak, seemingly untethered by NDAs. So often the development team comes across like antsy creatives ready to explode at the mere hint that someone like Knorr cares about all the stumbles, successes, and creative approaches they took during development, especially as a relatively small development team (about 12 people). This is a rag-tag group of geeks who are genuinely gleeful when reminiscing about their strange path toward video game superstardom.

For example, at one point the team considered leveraging the Nintendo 64’s Rumble Pak as a gun magazine analog. The player would slam the Rumble Pak in to reload the on-screen gun.

Or consider this: a bug during production caused the player’s gun to be swapped with the Depot level’s fence asset, so when trying to throw the gun, a fence would be thrown instead. The team played a few rounds of “fence deathmatch” before properly fixing the bug. In today’s world, where Goat Simulator and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom exist, I think a wacky sandbox approach to a James Bond game would work pretty well.

Oh, and you know that distant island in the Dam level, the one you can see just barely through the lens of a sniper rifle scope? Yes, that was originally meant to be a playable area, accessible by a (scrapped) boat mechanic.

Alyse Knorr’s GoldenEye 007 is not just well-researched, it’s not just well written, it’s a damn-fun read. The number of straight-from-the-dev factoids alone is enough to make this book a must-buy for creators of listicles about video games.

Most of all Alyse Knorr’s GoldenEye 007 makes me…dare I say…appreciate GoldenEye 007.

There was a time, before digital downloads crept their way into the physical cartridge sandbox that humans and those from Groblovia1 alike would attend what are called Midnight Release Parties, participated in mostly by the party goers themselves and—only as a point of obligatory worship of the Capitalist engine—coordinated by hourly employees at GameStop. See, the Midnight Release Party isn’t really a party. It’s an event where hundreds of eager video game purchasers line up outside a video game store to await the release of a new video game, which means that “Party” is the most marketing-forward use of the term since political parties confiscated the word to encourage interest in government. I assume this is the reason political parties aren’t referred to by the more accurate, combinatorial-leaning “political factions.”

Thankfully, the “midnight” part of Midnight Release Party has been massaged down to a more reasonable evening hour. But it’s amazing, right, that even as digital distribution threatens to make physical cartridges extinct, the Midnight Release Party still exists, even if only for universe-changing games like Tears of the Kingdom. It’s worth taking note of anything that can cause people to willingly stand in a line for hours.

For Tears of the Kingdom, the queues were to be expected. The game’s predecessor, Breath of the Wild, is considered by many to be the best video game of all time. Fans, me included, eagerly awaited Tears of the Kingdom like members of any US political faction awaited the results of the 2016 presidential election, tears included.2

Okay, I’ll move on soon to the point of this post, but first let me quickly emphasize the anticipation of this game by reminding you that the producer of the game, Eiji Aonuma, refused to reveal the “Tears of the Kingdom” subtitle during the game’s announcement because he feared it would give too much of the game’s plot away. Then, when we got “Tears of the Kingdom,” nobody could discern the reason for Aonuma’s secrecy. Perhaps Japanese has a more forward relationship with homonyms, and so Aonuma thought Americans would surmise that “tears” could be “tiers” and thus we’d intuit the sky/land/underground structure of the game’s world map.

But no. We didn’t.

Instead, once we did learn the title, we collectively dismissed it and instead collectively embraced our zeitgeist pantaloons now having been fully crapped into. This is the fucking sequel to Breath of the Wild, dammit!3 Let’s just digest that concept for a minute before we start trying to lore-mine our way into speculation and inevitable disappointment.

Thankfully, the game released to the opposite of disappointment…which is…appointment? This game has been appointed King of Games due to its stellar reception. The game currently sits at a Metacritic score of 96 out of 100. This is a ratio that would, in any other situation, make even those who pride themselves in their rational treatment of outsiders look at the 4 non-believers as pariahs deserving of the 96’s ayre and pitchforks.

So why did I almost give up on this Midnight Party-worthy, subtitle-hiding solar eclipse of a game? Because I couldn’t stop Link from freezing to death after completing one of the early-game’s tutorial shrines.

The game’s first quest, essentially the tutorial quest, asks the player to visit three shrines, each of which grants the player a power and then teaches the player how to use that power. Once the three basic powers are gathered, the player is able to move into the final bit of the opening tutorial. That’s most players. Players named Caleb J. Ross had a bit of trouble with the third of the three shrines, a shrine that sits high up in the game’s mountains where an almost-naked, early-game Link doesn’t have the right clothes to combat the icy temperatures. Instead, the player must gather nearby plants called Spicy Peppers, cook them to release their body-warming properties, and then eat the resulting meal for a timed buff against the cold.

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The buff effectively adds a timer to force the player to return to habitable elevations lest Link freeze to death. This should be easy, but the third shrine sites atop a mountain cliff (with sides too step to leap down, thus making a quick fall an impossible counter to the timer) and adjacent an icy river (which is so cold, even a Spicy Pepper meal fails to protect).

The situation seemed to Caleb J. Ross’s that we are meant to learn how to use our Ultrahand ability while under the pressure of the Spicy Pepper timer. The Ultrahand allows Link to build various devices to help navigate the world. The hour leading up to the third shrine taught me how to build a raft out of logs, for example. Given this previous introduction, it seemed logically to build a log raft and sail it across the icy river.

Nope.

Apparently, the trees in this biome don’t fall in perfect raft-building measure like the logs of yore. Once constructed, my raft repeatedly capsized, no matter how delicately I placed it into the river, assumedly due to the crooked trunks. I tried varying the shape of the raft, the number of logs, the position of a helpful fan (in lieu of wind and a sail), and I even added nearby crates to the raft, a-la a pontoon, only to have these crates reveal their unassuming delicacy when, after dropping the craft at the shore in prep for my surely-successful voyage, the crates burst into splinters. The river is like 20 feet wide with NO current. Come on game, just let me swim it! My Spicy Pepper timer is at less than two minutes and I’m out of ways to manipulate tree trunks!

Where Tears of the Kingdom truly boiled my blood is with its lack of fast travel (at this point in the game; I understand that fast travel is introduced later). Every icy drowning returned to me to the shore with my limited Spicy Peppers and worthless building materials. With fast travel, I could have returned instead to a warmer environment. I felt trapped. Did the game not account for this?

I’ve seen enough Breath of the Wild gameplay to know that there’s definitely a galaxy-brained way of solving my problem. But I’m not galaxy brained. I’m crawlspace brained. Guest-bedroom-brained, at best. So, I had to keep faith that the genius designers at Nintendo understood that players have brains of all sizes. So, I tried again. And again. And again. And every time, I got just a bit closer to the opposite shore of the icy river, but never close enough to leap to land.

And those incremental gains were tedious. I navigated the river while riding a half-submerged log with a battery-exhausted fan, willing my Link to clip along an iron damn, tilting my Switch in hopes that the gyroscopic tech in my Pro Controller extended to my gameplay style of “just a little bit further” said through clenched teeth. Remember in the 90s when our parents would move their entire bodies with a controller to get Mario to jump. I was doing the 2023 version of this, only for me there was actual precedence for controller movement to impact character movement. But sadly, this was not the case with my forever-marooned Link.

Eventually, the solution revealed itself, and what an anticlimactic solution it was. I simply had to navigate back up to the shrine and cross the river via a land bridge behind the river’s source waterfall. Then, once back down to my original angry-elevation, I found myself at the opposite shore, looking over to all the wrecked crates and felled trees of my previous, idiot self. Just a few, short climbs down, I was back to the warmer climate.

And that return to warmth came a return of my excitement for Tears of the Kingdom. I can’t stop thinking about what’s next. In fact, why the hell am I writing this right now? I’ve got Tears of the Kingdom to play. Bye.

I’ve been having a great time living out my Spider-Man fantasies, and an even better time learning all of the nuances and vocabulary of this new hobby. To me, the fun part of knowledge is the learning part, not the display-of part. I’ve taken so many Coursera and Udemy courses for skills I’ll never actually use. It’s probably something I should talk to a therapist about. It seems weird, right?

Anyway, one of the early concepts I learned while climbing is that climbing is split into two schools: “top rope and lead climbing” is different than “bouldering.” And not only is there a difference between the two, many climbers only pledge allegiance to one or the other. Some hobbyist climbers enjoy both, but as a hobbyist becomes an enthusiast, a choice is made between the two. Do I focus on climbing (ie, a tall wall, a rope, and a fun rappel down) or do I focus on bouldering (ie, a short wall, no rope, a hopefully-controlled climb down)?

During my latest climbing session, the early morning of April 22nd, 2023, I think I made my choice. Bouldering. But why?

“Why?” is a question a friend recently posed. It was the first time I actually realized that the distinction between the two forms is a known, accepted distinction. All of my climbing sessions for the preceding month had been split between ropes and bouldering.

Coincidentally, however, that morning (before I saw the friend’s question above), I had opted to rent only shoes for my climbing session, instead of shoes + harness, which meant that I had committed myself to a day of bouldering only. Then I saw the question above and realized that maybe my shoe-only rental wasn’t a matter of simply wanting to arbitrarily focus on bouldering for a day, but was a decision that had already implanted a forever-forward bias favoring bouldering because I responded to myself—my lips probably moving along with my otherwise silent defense—that “bouldering is great, because…” And, nothing. Because why?

Why did I choose a life of bouldering on that early morning of April 22nd, 2023?

Besides the lower session cost due to not having to rent a harness every time, bouldering feels like a more intentional action than rope climbing.1 But that’s too general a reason. Specifically, bouldering:

1. Is a puzzle. There is always a most efficient way to reach the solution to the bouldering problem (yeah, the route a climber takes when bouldering is called a “problem” which I absolutely fucking love). Each problem is designed by a setter, and that design is intentional in a way that I don’t see as much with rope climbing.2 A bouldering problem setter defines the starting holds for the climber’s feet and hands and also defines the final hold (which determines a solved problem). From there, the climber’s got to puzzle their way through.

   

2. Is a puzzle that can be Dishonored through like Corvo when confronted with a locked glass-paned window. While a bouldering problem should be solved with efficiency and with stamina in reserve, it doesn’t have to be. For those who want to brute force their way to a solution, they can. It will take a lot of strength and a lot of stamina, but it can be done. I will never have that level of stamina or strength, so I’ll stick with a stealth playthrough of the Dishonored Bouldering Wall.3

   

3. Has an easy mode. Both schools, rope climbing and bouldering, have grades for difficulty. However, bouldering (at least at my gym) tends to allow for multiple solutions to lower-difficulty problems. But as the difficulty grade increases, the solutions become more strict, especially as the problem grows upward along the wall. What can start out as a mid-grade problem with a few different options, will ultimately coalesce into one solution. Having many options at the start is quite helpful. Or, at least, it teases me into attempting the mid-grade problem while I know not to touch a high-grade problem. It’s like running into your first Lynel in Breath of The Wild and noping out back to a small party of Bokoblins. Bouldering lets me grind on the same mid-grade problem for weeks, happily, feeling productive, until I finally solve it.

   

4. Prioritizes technique over strength. Similar to my Dishonored item above, but different in that while a bouldering problem can be solved with strength, it is much more likely to be solved with technique. With rope climbing, I feel that strength tends to be more important than technique. As a pretty weak person, I like my walls like I like my video games: accepting of my preference for a methodical approach. Bouldering is the Shadow of the Colossus of climbing while rope climbing is the sport’s Dark Souls. Yeah, I said it.

   

Upon choosing bouldering as my climbing preference (though I still enjoy rope climbing), I was encouraged in a confirmation bias kind of way to codify the elements of my choice. Now, after having done so, I think I understand more about myself and my preference for hobbies, not just climbing. Not only are puzzle video games one of my favorite genres, but I love the puzzle aspect of the programming side of game development and the puzzle nature of spreadsheets (ohhhh, to land on that just-right formula….nothing beats it). Hell, and I love puzzles. Just plain ‘ol jigsaw-ass jigsaw puzzles.

Have you ever tried climbing? If so, which school do you prefer?

Here’s a real one of me bouldering:

So, what will this particular building block become? Probably an essay about how Grand Theft Auto saved my life.

So first, let me set up my aversion to real-life driving.

I don't like to drive.

Wait, let me shift into reverse and back up a bit: I don't even like cars. Cars have, for my entire life, been a cancer, always present, but visible only under a bisected specimen labeled, “056: Rural America” which sits uncomfortably among a collection of social strata cores collected for nefarious pigeon-holing purposes. Each jar contains a culture and hidden within each culture an example of its infected worst. The bisected “437: Beachfront Community” core reveals a pustule of ever-oozing pus bait for insurance scammers eager to pounce on immigrating retirees. The bobbing-in-its-own-moonshine-based-formaldehyde “612: Mountain Town” core reveals citizens wary of outsiders but paradoxically eager for new murder victims. The “885: Urban Living” core reveals a festering, and too-generalized-to-be-taken-seriously, unvalidated pity for all other cores.

Yeah, I’m the lab tech in this stretched metaphor, which means, yes, I’m doing the pigeon-holing here. These are my own suspect observations of the various culture cores, but for one of the specimens, the pigeon-holing comes by way of my own embedded research. During my childhood, cars plagued my "056: Rural America" hometown. Given my aversion (even then, as a young Caleb) to my rural environment, cars, therefore, became both a sign and a symptom of rot.

I was born on an even smaller than “056: Rural America” town, a “302: Island Military Town” called Adak in, let’s say, an igloo. The Adak island sits at the tail of the Alaskan archipelago not quite equidistant between Russia and Canada. In a tug-of-war contest, Russia would be winning but only slightly. And the prize: a utilitarian military town packed full of slipshod homes, slipshod families, and slipshod sandwiches. Probably, anyway. The truth is, before I could develop memories that were permanent enough to allow me the title of Annoying Guy Talking About his Exotic Birthplace in a conversation, I was whisked away to the mainland where, after a brief stint in Maryland, I spent the majority of my childhood in Kansas in a small “056: Rural America” town called Osage.

The town is easy to find. Start in the Kansas City metro area, where I live now, and drive 1 ½ hours south on the I-35 artery, before fading into country road veins that dump into backroad capillaries until eventually you realize you must have blinked because you passed the pre-stroke blood clot that is Osage. So, do a three-point turn right there on the highway—don’t worry, nobody else is driving on this road—and doubleback until you see a sign pointing to Osage City. You’ve arrived!

That’s right! According to the sign, this isn’t a town. It’s a thriving metropolitan CITY. Population: Don’t worry about it.

“That sure sounds like you’re covering the fact that this city is actually a town,” you say.

I agree. But I follow in the obfuscating footsteps of Osage City’s founder—Tim Osage we’ll call him—whose exploration crew of late 19th-century dirt road sherpas were certainly confused as well.

“Osage...City, sir? I think you mean Osage Town,” uttered one particularly brash crewmember.

“Or Osage Ville,” yelled the annoying crew member who doesn’t have ideas of his own, but instead he hijacks other ideas. And even worse, this bastard thinks that his lateral ideas are better ideas. What an asshole.

“You’re both thinking too narrowly,” Tim Osage responded. “One day this will all be a bustling metropolis, full of people and about 8.4 million working cars!”

“How, sir? We’re over an hour drive from the nearest actual city. And ‘one hour’ is a time measured using future gasoline car technology. In today’s probably horse drawn carriage time, that’s like weeks away!...and also, why did you stress ‘working’ cars so much? Are non-working cars a problem in future Osage ‘a Real City’ City?”

Unfortunately, Tim Osage couldn’t respond. His new “Welcome to Osage City” sign couldn’t bear the weight of the additional C-I-T-Y and so collapsed upon Tim Osage, killing him instantly.

But as a former long-time resident of Osage City, I can confirm that yes, non-working cars are a problem in future Osage ‘a Real City’ City.

My memories, like all of our most vivid memories, are informed by their most potent aspects. For me, for some reason, that aspect is cars. Cars everywhere. Osage was a town where exhausted cars decorated lawns like skeletons ripped of their skin by atomic blasts, a town where ass cracks worshiped before propped car hoods. In my Osage, birds had learned to court the sound of ratcheting socket wrenches.

Almost equally as potent to cars in my galvanized memories were the citizens themselves and their relaxed approach to any alignment beyond cars, sports, and heterosexuality. Now, I fully admit that my own personal disdain for bigotry certainly accounts for how much I remember—or falsely remember—the degree of sexist and racist uninhibition. To my memories, the entire queer spectrum was dismissed with hostility, and non-whites were openly treated as second-class citizens. For Halloween one year, I dressed up as a zombie ninja (ie, a ninja, but you know, also a zombie). My step-father’s mother asked, without hesitation, “Are you a jigaboo” or something?” While I knew the term jigaboo was awful, even more awful was that nobody there—a crowd that contained at least four adults—didn’t dare to make sure I know how awful the term was. They let the derogation survive and gave it permission to thrive.

Also, not nearly as important a point, but what about a zombie ninja screams “Black person?” Anway…

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Everything else about my childhood in Osage City was amazing. I had friends. I had a loving family. But the intersection of cars-to-close-minded-bigots was too narrow to ignore. And rather than work ‘across party lines’ to dissociate 4x4 pickup trucks and Pontiac Firebirds from their drivers, I gave into the human brain’s penchant for shortcuts. Cars = bigots = small town = bad.

My brain-laziness surely wasn’t informed only by the lifted car hoods and exposed ass cracks lining my everywhere periphery, but also by my mother’s much more proximate second husband (and aforementioned step-father) whom I hated with atypical fervor. I generally get along with everyone. But not this guy, I’ll call him Barney. And Barney loved cars. Barney = cars = bigots = small town = bad.

Barney and my mom married when I was in high school, in a ceremony that my older sister refused to participate in due to her hatred for Barney. I was too young to think I had such a say in my role, but even if I thought of protesting the same way, I wanted to walk my mother down the aisle. I participated for her and only for her.

Perhaps Barney reinforced the Venn diagram of bigot and car owner more than any other part of my childhood. He didn’t just love cars; he loved cars when he shouldn’t have. After he and my mother divorced (just a few years after they married) I never saw him again. But, I did hear his name once, called out by a judge, in court. We were scheduled for the same date, different offenses. Me: a Minor in Consumption (not-yet-21-Caleb didn’t quite know how to party responsibly). He: probably drunk driving. He loved beer as much as he loved cars, and he loved them both often simultaneously. After emptying a Budweiser, he’d discarded the cans into his truck bed through the rear window. Every turn shifted the cans along the metal truck bed rails like rice grains cackling through a rain stick.

He was a no-show for that court date. I don’t know what the legal repercussions were, if any. Years later, I’d learn that he died of liver issues. Yep.

Once, while mowing the large, country lawn surrounding the house our fragile family exist in for a few years, I ran over one of his infant pine trees. I blamed our new puppy, claiming that I was trying to pull him from in front of the lawn mower as I was driving it, and uh oh, I accidentally destroyed the tree. Honestly, though, I just wanted to destroy something he cared about.

But this isn’t about how fake-heroic I can be. This is about how much I hate driving. My aversion to cars seeded an aversion to driving in a way that I accept isn't entirely rational. So hard was my distaste for car culture that I refused to accept the obvious benefits. I can hate Hitler but still enjoy highways. I can condemn the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but still think bone marrow transplants are pretty cool. Before Ted Bundy murdered a bunch of people, he worked as a suicide hotline operator. I could high-five him for that (though if given that chance, I'd still check my perimeter to ensure no bystanders are watching who might get the wrong idea. I know I wouldn't be very receptive to my own stammering. “No…he, like, helped people, I swear, look it up, he's bad, but that high-five was for the suicide stuff…wait, why are you calling the police!?").

So, I’ve never really allowed myself to enjoy driving because I’ve for so long built up a dislike of the car. This isn’t fair to the act of driving. It’s not fair to the people I coerce into doing all the driving during road trips.

But the one kind of driving I loved: reckless driving in Grand Theft Auto.

I imagine that the next “essay building block” might dig into my time with Grand Theft Auto. By pairing the games fake driving (that at the time felt like accurate driving physics) with a real-life highway-speed car accident that forced me to rely on what I learned by playing Grand Theft Auto…really…I’ll build an essay that has fun with the disparity between my distaste for car culture and my reliance upon it.

To be frank, when I measure the possible good against the probable bad, I tend to fear what generative AI will bring to video games. AI has been part of games for a while, but mostly as a background design tool (texture generation, for example. Though texture generation is technically “procedural generation,” not AI. It’s a sliding scale: “procedural generation doesn’t typically use AI.”). We haven’t yet seen AI as a marquee feature. We don’t yet know how AI will influence the foreground parts of games like character movement, quest generation, or dialog.

I won’t pretend to know how designers will leverage AI for game design. I’m not that smart. But follow me as I allow my ignorance to breed fear for a moment.

Beyond the standard fears with AI—the loss of jobs for humans, mostly—I fear the loss of community.

Right now, in our human-curated gaming world, one of the great side effects of games is that multiple people are able to congregate around a shared experience. But when that experience is fractured into many (hundreds? millions?) of different experiences, how can a group of people gather ‘round the water cooler/campfire to discuss a single experience? Will the live event become the de facto experience? …

Live streaming will be the only way to share a game experience.

One possible output of using generative AI for the foreground parts of video games is that Twitch-style game live streaming will become an even greater component of video games than it is already (which is hard to imagine, I know).

Streaming will no longer be a way to share an experience between the streamer and other viewers but will become the only way to experience, with a group, a particular version of a game. If that streamer gets a side quest or a dialog option that nobody else will ever see, then the only way to become absorbed into the zeitgeist of a game is to be present during the micro-zeitgeist of a Tuesday evening streaming session.

I’m worried about this future. I’m busy on Tuesday evenings.

Whoa, Caleb! I think you are forgetting that generative AI isn’t necessarily something game designers will use as a real-time mechanic…

Generative AI creates the end product; it isn’t the end product.

Generative AI isn’t necessarily something that would be used during gameplay. In fact, much more likely (to Yoshida’s point), AI would be used during the development phase to create the assets that would then go into the final singular experience.

AI could be applicable during pre-production to ideate upon concept art. In fact, I’m guilty of using the AI tool MidJourney to help jumpstart my own creative solo brainstorm1 when designing the cover of my newest book Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch (which releases June 12, 2023). Ultimately, I created a cover that was not informed at all by the MidJourney output, but my mind was still opened up to the possibilities of using generative AI to get the brain juices flowing.

For anyone who has ever been part of a brainstorming process, you know that kickstarting the process can be hard. Maybe we let AI kickstart it for us.

Whoa again, Caleb! I think you are also forgetting that most video games never offer a truly universal experience…

Games have rarely promised a single experience.

Games have always been procedural engines that rarely output a singular experience. The most well-known procedural generation type is the Roguelike genre which is entirely dependent upon randomly generated scenarios.

And beyond procedural generation as a genre mechanic, sometimes games—no matter the genre—have random enemy spawns and random enemy pathing that are based on the player character’s behavior which is, of course, subject to the whims of the (relatively randomly motivated) player.

There's also a thing called RNG (random number generation) which is a stand-in term for how games randomize everything from loot drops to attack rates. Such things are technically random experiences.2 In fact, under a powerful enough microscope, there is no singular experience.

In a video (featuring a much younger, baby-Caleb) titled “Are You Always Cheating in Video Games?” I argue that any deviation from a game designer’s intended mode is cheating, yet, paradoxically, it’s impossible for a game designer to insist upon a single mode. Therefore: no single experience.

Regarding the player’s adjustment of a difficulty setting, for example, I said: “...if the argument is that the normal, default mode is the correct, non-cheating mode, then playing either the easy mode or the hard mode is cheating [as either is a deviation from the intended play mode, despite one being more difficult].” Furthermore:

“By that logic, [players and critics] have a lot to demand from developers in order to agree on what is the default mode. You've got to look outside the game—not just difficulty settings, brightness level, effects volume, controller input map—but also how big your tv is, the comfort of your chair, the controller you are using, what food you've eaten…”

It’s impossible to build a critique around a single experience, because a truly single experience is impossible. So, fearing a future of bespoke experiences is, maybe, possibly, just a little bit, okay(ish).

Whoa for the third time, Caleb! I think you just convinced yourself that generative AI has a place in video games that doesn’t need to be met with fear…

A bright side for those of us who sometimes appreciate a curious human over the human curiosity.

When I imagine a future in which plot-critical elements of a game are unique per player, then I see a less interesting world where fans of gaming, and fans of gaming conversation, are less served than they are now. The conversation about a game becomes impossible when there is no shared view of what the game is. This possibility is scary. I can’t be convinced otherwise.

Buuuuut, if I dismiss both the benefits that generative AI could bring to the ideation phase of game development, and the potential for a water-coolerless world, I do still see one more, small, yet highly speculative, benefit.3 What happens, I wonder, when Death of the Author is fully realized, forcing criticism to abandon authorial intent?

What happens when a group of humans (gamers, museum-goers, concert audience members, etc) collectively discuss a piece of art, as art, that has no practical human source?

Let’s imagine generations of distance between the input and the output where the human context has been completely phased out of art’s creation. What happens then?

Does the audience become hyper-focused on aesthetics to the detriment of the art’s intellectual implications?

Is a “human seed” necessary to have an intellectual argument or can (must?) non-human art still be coerced into an intellectual argument? I mean, humans are the ones having this imagined argument, and so humans must adapt to any situation per the tools we have available, so what’s left but to accept that a human with a brain will see every nail as a subject to our brain-hammer?

Technology isn’t scary to those raised by technology.

I understand that I’m likely being very reductive. Nuance is hard to parse when the event horizon isn’t even visible. On a smaller scale, my paranoia is the same paranoia that drives every aging person ever. To fear the unknown is natural. So, I must constantly remind myself of a conversation I had years ago with author Stephen Graham Jones about the ebook’s (at that time impending) encroachment of paper books. I feared a generation that wouldn’t know the pleasures of physical books, a generation of people not knowing a paper book’s smell, of not knowing the feel of the paper at your fingertips when turning pages, of not looking down to the top of the book to see a bookmark marking your progress. Stephen argued that a new generation of readers will not lose those connections to books. Those connections will simply take on different forms. They will cherish the heat of an e-reader against their palms, the glow of its screen under covers, and the few seconds lag between touching the screen and seeing the next page flash into existence.

In other words, a future generation of gamers will love generative AI art for reasons we in the current generation cannot fathom.

The human is an incredibly adaptable creature. Our brains won’t let us live without intellectual and emotional attachments to art. With that in mind, I embrace my curiosity about what generative AI will bring to video games. Yes, despite how likely it might be that AI will drain the office water cooler, I’m curious about how the big-brained human will refill that cooler, because the human cannot exist without a full office cooler.

I’ve worked on this book for the last two years. Of all the books I’ve written (many), this is my most important. I'm a life-long gamer and a devoted thinker, and this book is the culmination of a life spent writing about video games both as essays & blog posts and as hundreds of visual essays, editorials, and comedy videos on YouTube. With Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch, I feel like I've finally made a valid contribution to this world of video games that I love so much.

The release date is June 12th, 2023!

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(The paperback version will be available closer to the release date)

Paid subscribers here on Substack will get the .epub version of Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch as part of their subscription when the book is released. Upgrade to a paid subscription now.

Now, without further ado, here is the book cover…

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About the cover design

Much like Creative Director Ian Dallas wanted to evoke feelings of the sublime with What Remains of Edith Finch, I wanted the cover of Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch to do the same. The bathtub floating within its own impossible overflow is surreal, awe-inspiring, and definitely sublime.

Additionally, the flooded bathtub might remind some readers of a specific scene in the game, but I won’t ruin your day with that absolutely heartbreaking event. Play the game. Read the book. You’ll know.

The oversaturated colors give off a dream-like quality that compliments the dreaminess of the image’s subject. This cover is a window into the impossible.

The title text is angled to highlight the buoyancy of objects within the flooded bathroom. Much as the table, the chair, and the bathtub itself are powerless to escape the flood’s lift, so too are the title’s letters.

My favorite little detail is the way the table juts out in front of the “a” which forces the title to become part of the scene, rather than just a layer on top of it. But, then the shark shape, a flattened, very non-real portrayal of the animal, which is attached to the letter “l,” stands defiantly in contrast to the realness of the world that the overlayed table tries to pull the text back into. I love this conflict of surreal dreaminess and iconographic stability. I have to say, though, it seems the dream is winning this battle.

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About Suddenly I Was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch

What Remains of Edith Finch was released in 2017 amid a gaming public that had largely already dismissed the game’s genre. A walking simulator game exchanges the traditional ‘shoot, jump, run’ mechanics of most popular video games for a passive ‘walk, investigate a thing, walk some more’ set of mechanics. With no points, no combat, no puzzles, and no goal other than narrative progression, What Remains of Edith Finch’s success came as a surprise to most. But for those few who appreciated the power of a combat-less, story-driven video game, What Remains of Edith Finch would become a beacon for an emerging trend of games that aim to change the gamer themself. Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live alumnus and host of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, says of the game, “it’s one of my favorite things... it's gonna change your life."

In Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch, author, and lifelong video game enthusiast, Caleb J. Ross explores the life-changing impact of this unassuming video game about a young woman’s attempt to understand a curse that has killed every member of her family. By mixing developer interviews, personal stories, and examinations of the game’s many literary inspirations, Caleb delivers a powerful story of personal change via one of the most important walking simulator video games ever made.

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Tell the world!

Do you know someone who loves What Remains of Edith Finch? Do you know someone who loves reading about video games? Share this post with them or consider buying a copy of Suddenly I was a Shark!: My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch for them. They will love you forever…probably.

(If you’d rather read this essay on your Kindle, you can do so by clicking over to the Kindle store right now.)

Water, as a consumable, has no enemies. Doctors and plastic bottle manufacturers agree on very little, generally speaking. Go ahead, serve a few drinks to a member of each faction and you can expect heated debate that aligns to each team’s stance on the “due no harm” mantra. The doctor, with martini in hand, sympathizes with the health of the Earth. The plastic bottle salesperson, with a contraband pint flask of plastic-bottled vodka that he pulled from his jacket pocket in defiance of the disdainful stares of the bar staff, couldn’t give a shit about the Earth. But turn the conversation to a shared venture—the need to drink and to transport water—and these two inebriated enemies might put aside their moral and professional alignments and take a few more swigs, enough to, maybe, since I’m dreaming here, lead the rest of the bar patrons in a harmonized “Sweet Caroline” chorus or two. Or “Don't Stop Believing.” Take your pick. Join my dream.

Despite the unifying power of water, I still judged Scrote Johnson. Scrote drank a lot of water. Too much, maybe. The year is 2287. America has been ravaged by the aftermath of nuclear war where citizens live as scavengers with binary alignments to warring factions not unlike my own made-up doctor versus plastic bottle salesman rivalry. The fuck-the-Earth evil salesman equivalent in Scrote’s world are the Raiders, who, true to their name, raid. Who do they raid? Why the love-the-Earth good doctor-equivalent settlers, of course, who just want to farm irradiated potatoes, milk their mutated two-headed Brahim cows, drink some water, then die. Maybe they belt out a verse from “Friends in Low Places,” to cap the night. It’s not too much to ask, really.

Maybe I judged Scrote Johnson because I had already committed to denying her proper respect. I chose her name for no better reason than it made me chuckle.

I’m not without the capacity for remorse, of course. During my 412 hours of Fallout 4 gameplay, I searched for emergent qualities that might indicate a more fitting name. It should have been easy. Fallout 4’s population of post-apocalyptic deviants routinely name themselves after traits that surface through long, hard lives where nuanced personality reduces in the open-flame heat of survival. The Raider boss Ack-Ack is named after the firing sound of her minigun. Boomer blows things up. Sinner? Well, he sins. Scrote? I imagine Commonwealth citizens searching her dress and inventory for onomatopoetic connotations. “Don’t try,” Scrote would say, and I could almost feel her side-eye daggers hit me through the TV screen. “Some immature player thinks my life isn’t hard enough, so he named me Scrote Johnson.” Heh. Scrote Johnson. The name stayed. 

With a life this hard for everyone in the Commonwealth, especially so for a woman with a name full of penis slang, water should have been a luxury left sacrosanct. But still I judged. Every morning, just after rising fully dressed from her blood-and-dirt-stained mattress, without fail, Scrote gulped water in loud, obnoxious swallows, her throat thrusting up, then down, up, then down like an oil derrick uncaring to the land it depleted. In a pinch, she'd use her hands to cup irradiated water from the nearby creek. In that same pinch, she might instead slurp from her own toilet bowl. Both options served Scrote. She had a thirst meter to keep full, after all. And so, I, her immature player, kept it full. "Press A to drink,” the game prompted, so I did, judging Scrote the entire time. Nobody needs that much water, I told myself. Press A to drink. Press A to drink. Press A to drink. Thirst meter full. Finally.

Should I have listened, I might have heard my own real-life kidneys screaming at me over the sounds of enemy gunfire ack-acking from my TV as Scrote dried her satiated lips. "Water!" my kidneys demanded as an immigrating calcium deposit traveled through my urinary system.

Press A to drink, Caleb!

In my world—comparatively utopian given its absence of Raiders, Gunners, Rust Devils, and irradiated wildlife—water couldn’t get my attention. I drank water in the same way that I might talk about the weather: generally, only to bide time amid lulls in unwanted small talk. Oh, I would contribute to this awkward conversation, but, um, my mouth is full of water (gulp). Even water-based, doctored-for-taste beverages barely moved me. Sodas, sports drinks, Ultra Fiesta Mango Monster… these liquids impressed me, even if only in the way neon lights and fireworks do, but they couldn't activate me.

My defiance felt inevitable, honestly. The real world had given up. Grocery stores are essentially Galapagos (a)Isles of unnatural selection where every flavor of randomly mutated liquid competes for the eyeline. Even plain water had long succumbed to targeted marketing modification. Who could possibly deny the buxom curves of an Eternal brand bottle? What kind of architecture-hating buffoon wouldn't revere the stately elegance of a Voss brand bottle's Tuscan column simplicity?

Some water bottles even flaunted their simplicity in stark contrast to the implied high maintenance of a partner like Eternal or Voss. Low maintenance brands announced their casual jeans-and-flannel style with the word "alkaline” peppered among the marketing speak. So much water had become non-water, that real water had to remind me that it’s real water.

Even if most people saw through the labels and accepted the glass of soda or juice or Pink Drip Remastered G Fuel as at least half-full (of water), I saw every glass of liquid, no matter the color and fizz, as empty. Had I a thirst meter myself, it would be forever flashing in the annoying way that screen feedback needs to when the player is making a critical mistake.

But Scrote Johnson, she had a thirst meter; an on-screen, depleting bar of color whose sole purpose was to provide constant feedback to me, a player more aligned to meter-induced dopamine than to human hydration. “Press A to drink” took priority over “lift arm to drink.” At the most absurdly sad level I forfeited my own health for the health of Scrote. I could be drinking water myself but think of poor Mrs. Johnson and her in-game stats that will drain to nothing if I don't act now.

To me, water was an icky unnecessity, and Scrote Johnson’s morning routine was nothing more than a gameplay loop, based on—but an exaggeration of, I insisted—a human’s “need” for water.

Look, I understood that water is fundamentally important, but an understanding of water’s importance doesn’t immediately nullify skepticism. There had to be a limit to how important water really is, right? I pee seven-to-eight times a day. How important could water be when my body has a built-in water-emptying spigot? Consider also that humans have invented a porcelain bowl, designed to catch the spigot water, which itself is full of more water that gets flushed away.

The mere existence of bottled water reinforced my skepticism. Surely, something so universally needed wouldn't require marketing. Consider this: there was a time, long ago, when pebbles were used as money. Then someone said, “no no no, you must use this coin, which is made out of the rare shiny stuff we found inside those tiny rocks.” When someone tried to argue against this ridiculous currency conversion from an easily attained thing to a laboriously attained thing, that person was stoned to death. Or, as the society had previously called it, monied to death. And that pebble-to-metal slipperoo was the greatest con ever pulled until bottled water.

Eventually, after so many waterless years, I finally heard my screaming kidneys. My refusal to drink water landed me in the hospital with several kidney stones where, for the following months, I’d endure the most excruciating pain of my life. At times, I thought I might die.

I realize today that not dying of thirst is important for me beyond the corporeal. Consider the optics. I live in a city whose civil infrastructure downright celebrates water. Kansas City contains more than 200 registered fountains, placing us second in the world in number of fountains behind Rome, Italy. Given Italy’s several-thousand years head-start in concrete manufacturing—and assuming no other city cares enough to enter the challenge—second place in a decorative water contest strongly implies an excess of drinkable water is always within my reach. Should a person die of thirst in a land lousy with water, their “die young but leave behind a beautiful corpse” mentality survives them instead as “die brittle and leave behind a confusingly water-defiant” corpse. No matter what they stood for in life, a dusty corpse amid a veritable flood leaves their loved ones searching for reason. Why did Caleb hate water so much? He did accidentally inhale water when learning to swim in 1989; did that make him want to fight water? Is water hateful? Is it racist? Should I boycott water, too?1 These optics, I recognize now.

Though I named Scrote Johnson as such for humor, the impact, I believe, extended to her strengthened will to survive. I hindered her in a world already eager to keep her down. So demoralized and physically broken down was she, that water—simple, basic (alkaline) water—strengthened her. If only I, pressing A to drink but never equipping a cup of water myself, could have absorbed a bit of the strength I imbued into Mrs. Scrote Johnson. Instead, I sublet my kidney to a stone. But I wouldn’t ignore the lessons of the devastated Commonwealth forever.

This is the story of how Fallout 4 saved my life.

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But I recently realized a different form of power fantasy that video games allow: the power not just to make a decision but to be confident about that decision. See, my life is filled with assumptions (at work, I assume what that pie chart means; at home, I assume that my kids and I agree on what “clean” means). Video games provide feedback (ie, answers to questions) that instill confidence.

Eradicate assumptions…most of the time

I have a mantra at my day job: eradicate assumptions. Basically, I ask enough questions until a situation has exposed all of its variables so that I can make a good decision. Eradicating assumptions has been an incredibly positive practice in my daily life. I ask what a pie chart means, even if it seems obvious. I review action items following every meeting because it’s dangerous to assume that everyone knows what they need to do and equally dangerous to assume that I know what they need to do. Maintaining such assumptions forces me to reserve space in my “head RAM” for this unknown data. That’s not fair to me or to the person who is unwittingly being charged with my own assumptions.2 Eradicate assumptions.

Playing and developing video games over the years have allowed me to live in a glorious utopia of eradicated assumptions. I don’t worry about “what if” because the “whats” are all there for me to parse. My health bar is always visible when I’m put in situations where health can be impacted. My character’s heavy breathing indicates critically low stamina. A well-designed game gives players access to the information they need to make a decision when that decision needs to be made. Well-designed games eradicate all assumptions. Well-designed games avoid paralysis by assumption.

But while video games can always be distilled down to binary decision trees, people are generally pretty complicated. This reality has led me to a default state of apology when outside my warm, comfortable world of gameplay feedback.

Most of the words that come out of my mouth during interactions with living (ie, non-video game) people are forms of an apology. I think this habit boils down to a lack of interest in competition, conflict, and even coercion. I accept life as it is, rarely fighting for myself. This isn’t a noble stance; don’t be confused. It’s almost certainly more of a lazy stance.3 People can be so nuanced, so idiosyncratic, that no number of questions can eradicate every assumption. So, I operate under a universal assumption to blanket all unknown assumptions: I assume I am always in the wrong. This is my safety blanket assumption, a failsafe for human interaction.

Inside my safety blank of assumed fault

I'm so non-confrontational that I approach every interaction as an assumed competition that I've already lost. In this way, my competitor no longer has any reason to fight. We can move on to more important things (like assumptions that can be confidently eradicated). When interviewing subjects for my What Remains of Edith Finch book, my interview pre-amble often tripped aimlessly amid caveats to shield against assumed animosity. This book will be a love letter of sorts, it’s NOT a hit piece…I know you maybe never thought it was a hit piece, but you know, just in case you did, you shouldn’t think that…not that you’re wrong to have thought that. I mean, there are always vultures circling, right? But I’m not a vulture, unless you like vultures, then let’s talk about vultures. Let’s forget this interview entirely; this should be about you, not me. What’s your favorite vulture fact?

At work, part of my job involves teaching people how to use software. For every wrong click my student makes I apologize. I should have guided better. I give them no room to defend their actions. Instead, I apologize. Let's try again. This time, I'll do better.

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When I pass strangers in the grocery store, close but not touching, I do so with a "pardon me" hanging from my lip. Always. The fear of collision, of confrontation, is enough to prime an admission of my own guilt even when, rationally, no guilt is necessary.

I’d like to think that my always-assume-I’m-wrong stance on life has led to strong relationships and a better understanding of the people around me. My rationale is that if I show the other person how much I respect them (by pre-conceding to any of their truths) then the other person doesn’t see me as a threat and is more likely to be open and honest with me. Surely, though, this has backfired; can people see through this, lose faith in my humility, find me not worth their time? Probably.

Even my movements, wordless, are gestures of apology. I tend to sit cross-legged, one leg crossed over the other, meeting the lifted leg’s ankle against the grounded leg’s knee. When sitting this way anywhere in public where the chairs crowd a walking route—waiting rooms in doctor offices, airport terminals, the DMV—my hanging foot searches for a stranger walking like a dog’s snout hunting smells from a car window. Upon sensing stranger movement, I flex my ankle open, like a salon door, to let a stranger pass, for concern that they just might, despite their distance, be forced to carve a path around my foot. Would the extra few inches I offer even matter to a stranger already given in to the labor of foot travel? No. Certainly not. I know this, but I move my foot anyway.

Team Quiet versus Team Loud

Even my lack of movement is an apology. At my favorite writing spot (a local cigar lounge; maybe a topic for a future post), there’s a tension that sometimes suffocates the room. A divide exists between those of us who want quiet—who want focus, who want to work or read or simply enjoy the silence in a way that life otherwise prohibits—and those who see the three 70” wall-mounted TVs and assume that those TVs are meant to be used (assume rightly, I concede). Unfortunately, their use comes with a kingly control over the TV volume, a power too many on Team Loud wield haphazardly. It doesn’t help my side, Team Quiet, that the chairs along the half-perimeter facing the TVs are large and soft enough to camp in and their collective shape (tiny crescents) encourages conversation. The room isn’t built for Team Quiet. In the battle of Form v. Function, where one must precede the other, Team Loud takes the Form victory at the cigar lounge.

A few days ago, I arrived early to the cigar lounge. Early arrival is the only way to stake claim to Lounge Land for Team Quiet. Even a soldier from Team Loud, upon entering a silent room already occupied by Team Quiet, sometimes questions their own alignment, unwilling to interrupt a stranger’s focus by turning on the TVs. My presence is enough for them to question their own presence. I respect these wartime sympathizers.

That day, I managed to hold the territory for a full two hours. Just me, my computer, and three powered-down TVs. It was a glorious day.

Two hours is about as long as I can write in a single stretch. So, satisfied with my output, I remove my Team Quiet armor—two foam earplugs— and prepare my exit.4 But then, like an assassin in the night, a Team Loud soldier arrives. He plops down in a chair directly opposite the center of the three TVs and powers on the center screen to a basketball game, mashing the volume-up button before the sound even has a chance to escape from the speakers, before he even has a chance to measure the need for his volume raid. This guy is a pro, a Capitan. A Lieutenant, at least.

I freeze. I had already decided to leave, but now I have to consider my options. But—and here’s where my lack of wartime commitment reveals itself—my options are not in service to this outward battle of Loud versus Quiet. Rather, my options are in service to my inward battle of optics: if I leave now, this TV guy will think I’m leaving because of his arrival, because I don’t like him, or because I’m mad at his mere existence, because, I mean, nothing else has changed. His arrival is the only variable. My leaving is the only result. The assumed conflict paralyzes me. My own Lieutenant would be very disappointed in me.

Of course, I say seated. In lieu of my exit, I re-read what I had just finished writing, pretending to do an edit pass, but thinking “how long is long enough so that this TV guy doesn’t mistake my exit for a frustrated, huffing-and-puffing, angry exit?” The real answer, the logical, rational, actual answer: no amount of time is long enough, because the very conceit upon which my “problem” is built is dumb. Caleb, just stand up and leave! That guy is already yelling at the screen because some guy failed to put a ball in a hoop. He doesn’t even know you are there.

Even should I frame this tension through the lens of my Loud versus Quiet battle, staying seated only communicates to my rival that the interruption is okay. Team Loud doesn’t learn anything if I stay. There’s legitimately no reason to not leave. I’m both a paranoid human AND a bad soldier.

I speak only in apology. I move according to apology. I remain unmoving according to apology.

While maintaining a safety blanket assumption of fault eliminates the need to eradicate so many other assumptions, video games offer a respite even from that one blanket assumption. When playing video games (and when programming video games), I get to live a life without any assumptions. It’s delightfully freeing.

In my forthcoming video game essay, “There are No Kidney Stones in the Commonwealth: How Fallout 4 Saved My Life,” I poke fun at Fallout 4’s dialog system (Pre-order the essay on Amazon or become a paid subscriber to read it here on Substack and to receive a .epub version of the essay when the essay is released). Each dialog tree offers only four responses to any statement. These choices are not only limited in number but they are also limited in the nuance that so many other RPGs have accepted as necessary convention. But upon writing that essay I was reminded about the comfort such definitive, and limited, choice can bring. I re-fell in love with a video game’s commitment to exposed variables, to a world without assumptions.

Maybe I should try my hand at confrontation in real life. Maybe I don’t have to rely so heavily on my safety blanket assumption of fault. Maybe I can actually tell a stranger they are wrong.

Will I, though? Will I ever confront a stranger? Probably not. I fear I won’t just be paralyzed by assumptions but might also get paralyzed by fists.