At the end of 2020, I had to send my Switch controllers to Nintendo for repair. “Joy-con drift” is a well-known hardware problem for the Switch controllers, causing phantom-like movements and mysterious inputs (hence, “drift”). A lot of the games that I play regularly on the Switch, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Stardew Valley, do not require fanatic precision, so the occasional erratic movement of the controllers never posed a problem. Even games that are a little more demanding, like Hollow Knight, were still playable. However, as 2020 wound down, the drift problem on my Joy-con controllers became even more persistent and obnoxious. It made a game like Hades—which requires constant, rapid movement—unplayable. So, I sent them off, and, after three weeks, I now have a set of repaired controllers. (For anyone who is having problems with their Switch and is willing to wait a few weeks, I cannot recommend the free Nintendo repair program enough.)
For the last few years, I have volleyed between playing two genres of video games: indie games, which tend to be story- and character-driven, and large open-worlds, which I enjoy as a kind of immersive environmental experience. (I’ll often give a game a lot of leeway if it has impressive environmental design. I thought The Witcher 3 was oppressively straight—but those landscapes tho?? I was obsessed.) This makes sense for my personality: I don’t really play video games to “wind down” or “de-stress,” so something mindless that acts as a pressure release isn’t my thing. Ever since I played Mario Party in middle school and did terribly, I’ve hated competition games. (I just don’t like losing!) I don’t mind simulation games, but I sometimes have a hard time turning my mind off and playing games as they are intended to be played—so, a game like Civilization is a bit of a challenge if you aren’t willing to sacrifice a few towns for the good of an empire. (My husband once described how he had to sacrifice an entire dome of people in a Mars terraforming simulator, and I was horrified.) I’ve never played sports games because there is not enough homoerotic content to keep me invested.
If I had to categorize my aesthetic investments, I would say that I play games that are novelistic, rather than fun. I know these aren’t mutually exclusive categories, but video game developers often treat them as though they are. There are some exceptions—games like Bioshock Infinite and The Breath of the Wild, which seem both complex and fun—but the material conditions of video game development, like for film, require a huge return on investment. As a result, game developers for the big studios are risk averse, either overworking a central concept to the point of cliché or developing an endless churn of games of the same kind. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, in some ways, feels like the gamification of the film and TV industry: a massive investment of time and resources into something that can be endlessly reiterated (spawning sequel after sequel after prequel after reboot after etc.) and into something which is accessible but never challenging. Big-budget games, like big-budget films, are often spectacular, in the sense that they are visual achievements that are meant to awe and overwhelm, but they are also flat and predictable. They overwhelm so as to invite us out of ourselves, but always for the sake of “escapism” in a way that is subjectively deadening.
I prefer games that might feel a little rough around the edges, which do not have the polish of a massive budget but which might have a lot going for them—a game like Control, about which I’ve previously written, immediately springs to mind. I’m just not convinced that big game developers are taking the same risks as independent developers, risks which push video games forward as a storytelling and experiential medium. Indie games are also more inclusive, and while I don’t feel the need to see myself represented in all of the media I consume, I do understand that this is an important concern for others. Without generalizing too much about independent developers, I will say that the world of low- to mid-budget video games is much more complex, varied, and interesting than that of AAA (Triple-A) game developers. This diversity means that, within the world of independent games, there are so many more opportunities to find a specific game, or genre of games, that appeals to just about anyone. In short, there are more opportunities for people to become gamers when video games move away from the big-budget monstrosities that dominate the market.
It’s important to recognize that the distinction between AAA games and indie games is a material one and not an aesthetic one. I’m making an observation about the economic conditions of games development, and the ways a material condition produces certain aesthetic effects. However, short an absolute distinction between the material and the aesthetic, there is certainly a generic distinction between AAA games and indie games. Indeed, there is a distinction between the types of stories and worlds made possible by the two systems of production. The Call of Duty franchise is a AAA game, while Stardew Valley is an indie game, and the distinction is self-evident. The difference is not always one of scale or graphics, though. Activision Blizzard, the developer that produces Call of Duty, also owns King, which produces Candy Crush Saga. AAA games tend to have a crassness that speaks to the material conditions of their production and the priorities of the multi-billion dollar companies that develop them. (NB: I would hesitate to say that my aesthetic tastes necessarily translate into an aesthetic evaluation. I don’t think the games that I enjoy are “good,” per se, and I do play a lot of bad games. The only exception I would make, though, is for sports games. I don’t like them and they’re almost always bad games.)
There are quite a few indie games that have been released for the Switch in the last few years that I am excited to play—Celeste, To the Moon, and Kentucky Route Zero, to name a few. (And, hopefully, the sequel to Hollow Knight will be released some time this year!) However, after I received my repaired Joy-cons, I was most excited to jump back into Hades. Hades was the breakout game of 2020, and for good reason. It’s a roguelike action game (more on what “roguelike” means in a bit), which was developed by a small, independent development studio in San Francisco. In Hades, you play as Zagreus, the son of Hades, as he tries to discover the fate of his mother, Persephone, and to escape hell. It’s a game that is rich with mythology, sound design, level design, and emotional storytelling.
It’s also the type of game that I would never play.
Roguelike games are a genre of games that tend to be iterative and punishing, often rewarding the insane chauvinism of technical skill. The original roguelike game was Rogue (get it?), which was released in 1980 for PCs. In Rogue, you navigate a dungeon in search of treasure to boost your combat ratings; meanwhile, you fight monsters in order to proceed further into the depths of the dungeon. The dungeons are theoretically endless because they are procedurally generated. (Stardew Valleyimplements a version of the roguelike game in its cave systems, for example.) The trick to roguelike games is to survive without dying. Roguelike games implement a punishing version of “permanent death” (or permadeath) where death forces you to restart at the beginning of the game, often losing all of your stats progression. Roguelike games, as far as I know (I haven’t played many), are light on story, and where story is incorporated into your progression, you cannot progress within the story until you’ve beaten and exceeded your progression in the game. This iterative, recursive structure gives the games a high barrier to entry, especially if you’re bad at combat (like me) or if you don’t have the time to invest in improving your skills (also, like me).
I don’t like games that reward obsession, both because I know I can have an obsessive personality and because it is a cheap way to hold a player’s attention in the absence of story development. A few years ago I removed games like Candy Crush from my phone because I don’t think they do anything except induce a kind of trance-like state of pure consumption. (For what it’s worth, I’m this close to removing Duolingo because its gamification of language learning is not much better than Candy Crush’s monopolization of our poop schedules.) Roguelike games are a step up from endless running games like Temple Run. They dilute the concept of play as a flirtation with the absolute margins of what might be considered “useful,” instead capitalizing on “attention” as a zero-sum commodity.
Hades is so, so different.
Without going so far as to argue that Hades is a radical departure from the roguelike structure, I want to suggest that what makes Hades exceptional is its embrace of risk as an element of storytelling. Roguelikes are risky games, which means they incorporate risk as an element of gameplay. The risk is always that you might die in combat and be forced to replay. Hades incorporates that risk into the pleasures of its storytelling. Gameplay amounts to a back-and-forth between Zagreus and his father, as Z battles both for independence and self-identity and Hades exerts dominance as a show of power. The game is structured like an endless churn of death and resurrection. Z fights to escape hell, but each time he dies, he is resurrected in the chambers of his father. This relentless churn makes each battle exciting and risky, because you know that if you are not successful, than you are confirming the myth of Hades’s omnipotence and hell as his absolute dominion. Zagreus’s vulnerability, both existentially and emotionally, enables the player to invest in the roguelike structure without feeling as though the particular obstacle of escaping hell is purposeless.
It should also be mentioned that the game is a visual delight. (I hope to talk a bit more about the—ahem—horniness element of the game in a future newsletter.)
Polygon has a recent video that explains why Hades is not a typical roguelike game, to its credit. The video also goes into detail about what makes the game a success, in terms of art, music, and storytelling, and it includes an interesting interview with the developer. More than anything, the game affirms what separates independent developers from major studios: it yokes the formal design of gameplay (the iterative cycle of combat and death) to storytelling and, in doing so, brings into focus a world where video games can be treated seriously, as a matter of art. It’s an exciting moment where a practical limitation becomes instead an opportunity for innovation—a risk, it should be noted, that many major studios, with all of their economic resources, are not willing to take.
What I’m Reading
I finally started Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), which is the third novel in his “Trilogy of the Rat.” I like it as a post-divorce novel, and it’s satirization of the far-right movement in Japan feels extremely relevant.
If you haven’t, I’d recommend reading Ben Miller’s review of Christopher Chitty’s book, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System. The review was published in The Baffler, and I think it helps to capture the potential of Chitty’s thesis. Miller invites us to consider the self-serious and yet politically moribund alignment between capital and queer political subjectivity. To quote Miller:
If the protections won by homosexuals are not fixed in stone, neither does the presumption that queers are now and always have been a monolith get us anywhere politically. Those of us who inhabit today’s homosexual subjectivities will need to do more than assume that our cocksucking makes us radical. Enough with the gay art and politics that pimp out the gay male gaze as a revolutionary act; enough with the shallow performances of allyship, the mumbled and dutiful declarations of solidarity that replace actual engagement with the world and its contradictions. To paraphrase Marx, we do not make our own history, but we do make something out of what we’re given.