Not every fictional genre is suited to video games, and that’s ok. We don’t read poetry for car chases, we don’t go to concerts for psychological realism, we don’t play The Sims: Hot Date expecting an erotic thriller.

But the neo-noir crime drama? That should be a slam dunk.

There’s a reason detective work is a staple of popular fiction: it’s episodic, it’s lurid, it lends itself to good plotting and pacing. It also involves the audience more directly than other genres, inviting them to inspect the scaffolding while the story is being built. It’s a procedural format that should, in theory, perfectly suit the proceduralism of video games.

At least that’s what I told myself five years ago when I forked over sixty bucks in a Baltimore GameStop for the criminally hyped L.A. Noire.

In fairness, the guy who upsold me offered an irresistible pitch: as Detective Cole Phelps, I would detect across a lovingly recreated 1940s L.A., sifting for clues and interrogating suspects. An impressive roster of character actors lent their performances to the game’s many NPCs — which a groundbreaking technology called MotionScan purported to render with unprecedented nuance. To separate truth from lie, I would, as Phelps, analyze their behavior down to the facial tic, and use it to question them into a corner.

The game’s meticulousness made it that much more disappointing.

The art, for 2011, is sublime. L.A. Noire’s L.A. looks like the medium’s last major statement before its imminent pole vault to VR. The story is engaging and the writing is competent.

But Phelps himself is an erratic psychopath, misinterpreting every cue you give him. In conversation he bulldozes over criminals and bystanders alike. Regardless of how you the player interpret a scenario, it becomes impossible to make Phelps telegraph your savvy.

L.A. Noire’s writer and director, Brendan McNamara, later admitted that development changes were partly to blame. Phelps is given a set number of interrogative options — he can believe, doubt, or accuse a suspect — and these were relabeled after recording. “Doubt,” for example, originated as “force,” meaning that when you want Phelps to apply a light touch, Phelps wants Phelps to crack skulls.

Untold millions spent to animate a fluttering eyelid, and the game is routed by word choice.

In hindsight, though, the whole project seems quixotic. L.A. Noire is predicated on the most dubious proposition in gaming, which is that NPCs have an interior life. Its corollary — that you can access a shred of that life under the right circumstances; that you can communicate with a non-playable character — is equally farfetched.

And yet that basic premise isn’t unique to L.A. Noire. Versions of it crop up everywhere you encounter a dialogue tree. As traditional RPG elements start to color a wider cross section of single-player games — and as the market for those games dwindles ominously — designers have devoted more and more resources to bolstering the C in NPC.

But enlivening characters in a video game demands more than just good writing or thoughtful AI. Naturalism and a rich backstory won’t guarantee that you have a meaningful (or even coherent) interaction with a pile of code. Dialogue on the page is static and impermeable; in a game it must be transmitted, received, and interpreted by both parties.

Consider the virtual disconnects a game asks you to hurdle to defuse a rival or hit on a crewmember. As the player, you have to assess the behavioral options allotted to you, which are often taglined summaries of a meatier action or speech. You have to trust that you’re drawing the right inferences from those options — that you and the developers see the situation eye-to-eye. (Suppose one dialogue choice is “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou”. How barbed is that? Do the writers mean it as an observation or an accusation?)

It’s hard enough to communicate openly and honestly with a person you’ve known for decades. Making your intentions clear to somebody’s conception of a 40s-era gangster, let alone an Asari Matriarch, sounds like a job for a semiotician.

And all the while, with each encounter, you’re made to judge what the NPC is narratively capable of — what subplots or story arcs they’re waiting to unlock for you. One of the most refreshing discoveries in Mass Effect 3 is that Samantha Traynor, the Normandy’s comm specialist and putative potential love interest, is gay: not only because it’s an early instance of a mainstream game expanding beyond the heteronormative, but also because, if you play as male Shepard, something you thought was within your control is revealed not to be. An NPC is granted brief interiority by rejecting what you the player want.

That’s a rarity in games, and it hints at a structural problem. Playable characters don’t speak; they command. However incidental the exchange, every word directed at an NPC is progressing the game in some sense. Whether you’re opening a relationship or closing it, attracting NPCs or repelling them, the game’s world is adjusting to your whims. Your pronouncements trigger change.

The British philosopher J. L. Austin had a name for this kind of communication — he called it a speech act. He theorized that under certain conditions, statements can perform concrete functions. By saying “I do” at your wedding, you become married. By ordering a diet coke at a restaurant, one appears.

Of course, such conditions don’t often present themselves. If you’re able to summon a drink it’s because you’re paying someone to care that you receive it. If you declare yourself to be a husband it’s because the person opposite you desires to be a wife. The vast majority of our speech is met with ontological indifference: people listen, and then they continue living their lives.

That’s why persuasion is such a notable phenomenon, and why good trial lawyers bill crazy rates. The power to make people do things (or even just respond) is supreme. Our speech almost never acts, and we know it.

The playable character, on the other hand, is always performing — even when he’s simply talking. In that respect, he resembles only one other figure: God. The Old Testament is filled with famous examples of performative language. (“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”) Speech acts are part of what defines God’s divinity, and in a video game, they help define yours.

The consequence cuts both ways. Obviously games only work when they provide a measure of control that is absent from our everyday existence. The thrill of mastery is exactly what we’re after. But as the player, your authority undermines any relationship that might otherwise feel organic.

When everyone is your subject, nobody is your peer.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.

What We Talk About When We Talk to NPCs was originally published in Cube on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Excavate the crawl space behind the second floor landing of my childhood home on Long Island and you may yet find a musty copy of the official Journal of Myst. Treat it gingerly, for it is a totem of my youth — a portal to a bygone era. In that way it mirrors the game it came with.

Over the winter that straddled ’93 and ’94, approximately 200 million American dads visited their local Wiz and picked up a copy of Myst, the point-and-click adventure title. They proceeded to play it in family dens and refurbished basements across the country. Myst became the CD-ROM’s first blockbuster, and the bestselling PC game for almost a decade. It is the computer game your own dad played (unless you yourself are Dad).

You may have seen him slumped over the communal Gateway, methodically clicking a gummy mouse as he adjusted his bifocals. You might have heard him muttering a string of numbers to himself while cracking open a third Diet Coke.

Myst and its attendant rituals were a source of endless fascination in my home. My dad usually played it at a witching hour only partially accessible to me, in the desperately elastic minutes before bedtime. I’d catch the haunting notes of the game’s music box intro, followed by that familiar whoosh. I’d glimpse ocean, gears, and bookshelves. The next morning I’d flip through his Official Journal and survey the fresh entries, scribbled in his indiscernible type, accompanying some impossible diagram.

Because my dad is not precious about his stuff and likes it when people are interested in his doings, and probably determined that a seven-year-old could wreak little havoc on a save file in which death is impossible and progress requires logical thought, he gave me free reign to Myst at my pleasure.

I went everywhere; I examined everything. I was never able to leave whatever stage he happened to be on, as I considered the game’s puzzles fundamentally unsolvable. But I flipped switches and redirected pipes. I lingered on the composition of each frame. I listened to the game’s eccentric sound effects.

Mostly I referred to my dad’s copious notes, trying to decipher what he had already deciphered, laboring diligently to spot something he might have missed. My mission was the mission of any kid who craves refrigerator glory — acknowledgement, praise — but as a Wasp, my need felt more acute. That’s because congratulations are the standard units of affection in any Wasp household. Embarrassed by love, Wasps prefer to confine its expression to those moments of objective achievement or surmounting. It’s easier for a Wasp to say “great game!” than “I care about you”; this is what draws us to racquet sports.

At seven, I wasn’t a budding athlete. But I was smart, or felt smart, and I knew my dad was smart, and I spent a lot of energy on the matter of bridging our smarts, of signaling to him that in my squash-incapable body was a more than capable mind, a fully-formed personhood worthy of his attention. Academics offered a roundabout path to that goal — and of course there was the time-honored tactic of constantly telling him my opinions.

But Myst was a novel and irresistible vehicle for dad seduction. It was, crucially, something he already enjoyed; it was one of his few recreations that I could even fathom, unlike reading the Financial Times or smoking a cigar on a lawn chair in the driveway. And it provided a whole world to engage with: an aesthetic vocabulary that only he and I had access to. It was the perfect bonding agent for father and son.

Myst itself, meanwhile, is a game about fathers and sons — or one father, Atrus, and his two large adult sons, Sirrus and Achenar. The game begins, memorably, with your sudden appearance on the titular island. You discover a message from Atrus meant for his wife Catherine, in which he summarizes the story’s prompt: his library of dozens of books “linking” to various worlds has been destroyed by one of their two boys. He is attending to the matter presently. Catherine, stay put.

You are not Catherine, and perhaps you feel mildly uncomfortable at the thought of insinuating yourself into a private family matter. Nevertheless, you’re trapped here until you do something about it. This becomes abundantly clear when you realize that you are totally alone on the island.

So you check out the library and verify its charred contents. You meet Sirrus and Achenar, who are each trapped in a color coded volume and who are not unruly teenagers, like you supposed, but grown men with facial hair. They call out at you through thick static, imploring you to recover and replace the torn pages of their books so they can escape their tiny prisons. (These sequences — no matter what your age in 1994 — are starkly terrifying.)

It bears noting that while Myst is mostly remembered for trailblazing graphics and an almost lyrical evocation of loneliness, its premise is conventionally domestic: powerful fathers, errant sons.

As you hunt down the brothers’ lost pages, you learn more through found letters and journals. Atrus is a polymath who can write entire worlds into existence through an ancient tool known as the Art. Half godhead, half cartoonishly potent novelist, he is a meticulous observer of his creations — freely travelling among them and befriending their indigenous societies. He brings Sirrus and Achenar along on these excursions and educates them in the Art, but things predictably Go Sideways when the sons develop a taste for omnipotence. They scheme to kill their father and usurp his position as universal patriarch, but end up betraying each other before Atrus catches on and imprisons them.

If this all sounds positively Greek, that’s because it is. Classical tropes abound in Myst. The name Atrus even echoes Atreus, father to sons Agamemnon and Menelaus and head of the cursed house that bore his name, and which was doomed by the gods to suffer repeated instances of family murder.

Sirrus and Achenar themselves, from what you can gather, live like wayward Wasp youths: pursuing decadent pleasures in the shadow of daddy’s success, bouncing between vacation homes, harassing the help. They come to represent distinct subtypes. Achenar’s messy chambers are littered with instruments of torture and war, whereas Sirrus keeps his four poster beds neat and his syringes hidden. Achenar raves at you like a lunatic while Sirrus drips with deference. As villains, they’re convincingly sketched, but as agents in the family drama, they exist only in relation to Atrus; where he is deliberate, compassionate and rational they are impetuous, heartless and deranged. Restoring either of their books results in your swapping places with that brother and losing the game. The only possible salvation, of course, is through Atrus.

Sirrus and Achenar are failsons, destined to compare unfavorably to their maker. They suggest the inherent risks of structuring the family around the family business, and the dark side of dad-worship: if you can’t beat ’em, despair.

Brilliant but remote father figures occupy a literary category all their own, and consciously or not, Myst was among the first video games to broach that venerable topic. Although at the time I grasped none of these cultural nuances, the impulse to alternately reach for and rebel against the Dad Unit was one I would grapple with for years.

Catherine’s total absence from Myst is briefly alluded to in the game’s “good” ending, when Atrus mentions that his wife is trapped on a different world, thus laying the runway for Myst’s beloved sequel Riven. (“Your princess is in another castle.”) But as I played the game’s 20th anniversary re-release, I wondered just where the hell she was — and how many moms and daughters might have wondered the same thing. To its credit, Riven does introduce these female characters. But it also doubles down on Myst’s formula: its antagonist is Atrus’s father.

After untold hours of inept sleuthing, my seven-year-old self finally did solve a puzzle. It happened basically by accident. I recorded it carefully in my dad’s journal and then ran to go find him. When he confirmed that it worked, he praised me up and down.

It made my week.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.

In advertising, everybody wants to be a storyteller.

Maybe that’s because the word evokes a familiar mystique — a nostalgia for the time when ads were so novel and slick that people accused them of hidden agendas and subliminal hijinks.

Maybe it’s because the “storytelling” conceit dresses up awkward truths about what it means to work as a creative in a commercial space, constantly defending matters of gut, jockeying for position as a representative member of “the least important most important thing there is,” in Don Draper’s succinct formulation.

Storytelling gives our jobs a coherence and a point: it ties together every subjective choice and asserts that their sum is greater than the parts. It dumbly gesticulates toward a unified field theory in which the brand exists in perfect harmony with the company it fronts — as well as all past and future marketing efforts. And it helpfully erases the fingerprints of creatives themselves: “telling a brand’s story” presupposes that some version of the story was always there, waiting to be plucked from the ether by a creative medium and midwifed into tangibility.

In other words, consecrating ads as stories satisfies every meta-marketing objective.

So what’s the issue?

One obvious problem is that most brands have no particular story to tell — at least not anymore.

Julie Creswell’s great piece on Sears illustrates this new reality. The iconic retailer began as a salesman’s fever dream and innovated its way across the 20th century; now it limps along in a state of predeath, squeezed for every last penny through the financial engineering of its majority shareholder. While it once played the protagonist in some grand narrative of American retail, populated by icons like the mail-order catalogue and suburban stripmalls, Sears is just another flailing Amazon competitor today.

In 2017, whether a company thrives or struggles, its story is usually one of acquisition, scalability, and creative accounting. That’s not necessarily an indictment (though John Oliver offers a cutting one). But it does make CMOs who extol “authenticity” sound faintly ridiculous. Odds are good the brands they champion are one of a vast constellation of similar companies in a private equity fund or holding company portfolio, steered by the same market forces as their corporate kin.

Globalization, and the immense thicket of supply chains that undergird it, have in a way neutered the potency of brand stories — ironed out the kinks of differentiation and regional flavor that are the foundation of traditional storytelling. Stories are inherently local, even parochial: anchored to a place, a person, a set of circumstances, they reflect a particular worldview. As brands become increasingly global, they’re less able to tell that kind of story credibly.

And it’s hard to understand why they would ever want to. Advertising is an objectively terrible format for storytelling. Even the famed 60 second commercial, that fading holy grail, is ill suited to it. Good stories — the ones we watch on TV or film, read in prestigious weekly magazines, remember from our high school English classes — reward characterization, voice, humanity, and a bunch of other nuanced literary stuff. Commercials aren’t given enough breathing room to hit those notes.

Of course, many great story-driven commercials do exist; some are responsible for attracting creatives to advertising in the first place. But those are the outliers, as any casual TV watcher can attest. The vast majority of narrative spots are hammy and trite. Operas are more emotionally grounded. Conflating advertising with storytelling doesn’t set a high bar for quality; it commits a category mistake, dooming creatives to work with the wrong set of tools. The real power of advertising is in its interactivity.

Print ads plainly demonstrate this. Print is often cited as the purest advertising medium — if an idea can satisfy in two dimensions, it must have some validity — so it’s telling that print rarely traffics in narrative. Part of it is that nobody has the patience to read bricks of copy and that awards juries favor visual solutions and so forth. But maybe the most salient reason is that good print is more like a game than a story, and good creatives understand this intuitively.

Saki put it best: “In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.” Ads that require your participation, that present a puzzle to be solved, already have your attention. The really clever ones can leave you basking in an intellectual afterglow, like a prefrontal orgasm: your reward for expending effort on behalf of the brand. And in that moment, brands are at their most persuasive. What could be a better sales technique than convincing the buyer he thought it up himself?

Whether visual or text-based, retro or contemporary, print ads succeed when they engage you in a game.

The same holds for true other media. Take this Ikea billboard.

Whatever this billboard is doing, it is not telling a story. Rather, it’s asking you to reconfigure an unexpected image — to briefly decode the rules that govern this scene. At 60 miles an hour, they don’t need to be complicated: in this case the item and its price tag are ontologically swapped. But the pleasure of that recognition is the inherent pleasure of games.

What defines a story and what defines a game, and how much they overlap, are higher-order questions than advertising needs to answer. Lee Clow famously suggested that “The Apple Store is probably the best ad [Apple] ever did.” Are the Apple Stores examples of environmental storytelling? Maybe. They’re clearly an exercise in worldbuilding. But as with video games, their principal mechanism seems not to be narrative, but play: the thrill of being let loose in an unknown system and testing its rules. The immediacy of unscripted interaction.

The most famous campaigns from the past 20 years, from Subservient Chicken to Nike+ to Red Bull Stratos, share this gaming DNA. Narratives are often built into or around them — as product launches or “branded content”, as news events or PR coups — but narrative is incidental to their enduring appeal. At their most elemental, these ads are expressions of play.

Even celebrated TV spots, when you examine them, don’t look much like conventional stories. The Saturn commercial below, for instance, is not the tale of an autoless society in which people walk down roads.

It’s more like a test: can you decipher the rules of this world? Can you figure out what the ad is going to tell you before it tells you? Whether you can or can’t, that knowledge gap is what makes the commercial compelling.

Some TV spots go a step further, recording a playful moment without bogging it down in any semblance of story. They often feel lighter and less cynical as a result. Ikea executes this perfectly:

People love monkeys, no doubt. But it’s the snapshot of chaotic, joyful play that anchors the message and resonates with the viewer. Kitchens can be a locus of messy fun; with the right appliances and design (supplied by the right brand), yours can be too.

Stories aren’t going anywhere, needless to say. Creative advertising values insights — sometimes those insights are best consumed passively, and sometimes the right tools are psychological realism and dramatic composition.

Story remains a powerful lens for viewing anything at all.

But play is advertising’s great skill, its strongest foundation. When we recognize and respect that, good creative follows.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.

Advertising Isn’t Storytelling was originally published in ART + marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Before there were trigger warnings and safe spaces, before there was even the notion that ideas could be so toxic as to prove dangerous, there was Mrs. Vetrone’s 7th grade English class, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. Over a span of months that also featured the announcement of grownup hairs, the first fumblings of chat messenger cool, and a deeply unsatisfied desire to excel at lacrosse, Mrs. Vetrone introduced me — as graciously as any veteran educator could — to the problem of evil.

But enough about me. When did you learn about the Holocaust?

It’s a slippery question. Hitler and the Nazis might have always existed in your mind as an evocative force of evil. If you grew up alongside a Jewish community, as I did, abridged biographies offered additional clues. But cattle trains, crematoria, Arbeit Macht Frei — at some point, an adult sat you down and radically expanded your moral imagination.

Chances are they used literature to do it. While there is no universal syllabus for humanity’s greatest crimes — teaching the Holocaust at all is only mandated in seven U.S. states — most of our Mrs. Vetrones stuck to a tested method, pairing the historical record with the profusion of poetry, memoir and fiction that flowers in the wake of social calamity.

For everyone, but especially adolescents, the need to explore dark chapters through the prism of creative expression is obvious. World War II might be the province of history, but the human condition remains the object of art, and 7th graders across America are coming to grips with it every year.

Could a video game help?

Is it possible to play the Holocaust?

The question is almost offensive on its face; it even seems to fail semantically. The conditions required for play simply don’t exist in that context. You can’t “beat” the Holocaust: there’s no conceivable win situation. Escape? Survival? Any game that dared to give you an objective in a concentration camp wouldn’t just be tone deaf, but farcical.

And though a clear rules-based system governed the deportment and extermination of 11 million Jews, Poles, Slavs, Romani, and other minority groups — a system so fetishized that its very efficiency became the stuff of myth — it doesn’t provoke any kind of meaningful engagement. Just the opposite, really. From ghetto to grave, the fascist state stripped its victims of agency, humanity, mobility, and finally life; it was a system designed, if anything, to nullify engagement, to confiscate from the Jews every tool necessary to engage with the world.

When you add to those conceptual roadblocks the observation that video games are young, commercial, and trigger-happy, a Holocaust adventure title starts to sound like a totally bad idea.

So I was astonished to play one as brilliant as Inside.

Not that Inside claims to be about the Holocaust, or anything else. Its publisher’s description reads, in full, “Hunted and alone, a boy finds himself drawn into the center of a dark project”. It is wordless, textless, and just three hours long.

It’s also a platformer, the venerable game type familiar to most people. As in Super Mario Bros., you control a character — the boy in question — who runs, jumps, and interacts with objects on a two-dimensional plane. The gameplay consists of avoiding capture and solving puzzles to progress ever-rightward, towards an unknown fate.

The world you encounter along the way is detailed but placeless — a dreamlike dystopia that never quite feels anchored in reality. Its bleak color palette and industrial setting evoke a 20th century police state, but there are no explicit markers as to where or when you are, and many of its other elements are fantastical.

And yet the game is indisputably in conversation with the Holocaust from its opening minutes, when you take control of the gaunt, faceless boy at the edge of a forest.

Evading dogs and flashlights, you quickly learn that a single misstep can mean immediate death. Inside kills you so many times, and in so many ways, that it hardly bothers to punish you for it; the boy typically respawns just moments prior. Death starts to feel less like a failure then a setback, a brief frustration on your way to more baroque horrors.

As you leave the trees and cross into farmland you pass trucks and trains carrying unknown cargo. It occurs to you that you’re traveling in the opposite direction than makes sense — why did you leave the cover of forest for wide-open fields? Why do you have to continue forward at all, except that the game demands it?

The limitations of the platformer now seem thematic as well as aesthetic: there is only one possible way to go. There is only one possible way this ends.

That gnawing fear is fed on the outskirts of a city, where you encounter a line of people herding themselves into one of the cargo trucks. This group is unlike the one pursuing you; they are hangdog and lifeless, moving as if controlled by an unseen force, their bodies already requisitioned for some sinister purpose. It’s the first clear allusion that Inside makes to its unspoken source material: humans as cattle, borne to the slaughterhouse. Dead men walking.

You soon discover a means to control these bodies yourself, through the boy, and this ability underpins the game’s most fiendish puzzles. Venturing deeper into the city, you infiltrate a series of factories, and then a dense warren of underground labs. You move through massive theaters where scientists perform experiments on the bodies: drowning them, pulverizing them, marching them to brutal suicides — if they’re even still alive. And at the center of this hell, you locate the beating heart of the “dark project” that awaits you.

Inside’s third act ensures it a permanent place in the annals of gaming by ratcheting up every element to 11, producing a sequence so grotesque you’ll find yourself laughing — and meanwhile posing unanswerable questions about the nature of complicity and control.

But it’s the artistic gamble of the game itself that we should applaud: the audacity to translate the surreally playful language of Super Mario Bros. into a nightmarish allegory about one of the worst evils ever perpetrated. Inside makes you afraid without the artifice of dialogue or drama, without the canisters of Zyklon-B or the cool psychopathy of Ralph Fiennes. That doesn’t make it better, but it does make it interesting, and worthy of our time.

The ascendance of video games and the advent of virtual reality will push these topics into places that make people uncomfortable — but pop culture is already peppered with Holocaust schlock. It won’t be misguided efforts that trivialize history, but a complacency in how history is rendered.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Vetrone assigning Inside to her incoming class.

But I can imagine her playing it.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.

Ten years ago I secured lucrative bragging rights by actually doing what other white fuckboys merely gestured at — teaching English to primary school students in Kham, the historical Tibet.

Over eight weeks I got fat on butter tea, introduced frisbee to my charges, and immersed myself in a culture so foreign as to reframe my sense of wonder.

I also encountered some of the problems endemic to poor and politically disenfranchised communities. Work was physically punishing; alcohol abuse was common.

One of western Sichaun’s most persistent and generational issues, however, felt wholly sui generis. According to the director of the NGO I worked for, the most pressing threat to our students’ education wasn’t booze or violence or apathy but a small fungus that preyed on local caterpillars. It was called cordyceps.

Like something out of a sadist National Geographic, cordyceps spores would germinate inside the larvae of ghost moths, killing and occupying them, and eventually erupting from their desiccated bodies.

So, yikes. Who among us would not run from the Exotic Death Mushrooms? But as it turned out, powdered cordyceps are prized in traditional Chinese medicine, and their scarcity makes them more valuable ounce-for-ounce than any other resource on the Tibetan Plateau.

Which meant that instead of yak herding or subsistence farming, Khampas often felt compelled to scour thousands of acres of mountainous grassland, collecting these parasites wherever they could be found. And for a family on the financial brink, it often made more sense to deploy children as an extra set of eyes than bet on the vanishingly slim chance they’d merit scholarships to an eastern university.

It was a knotty, ongoing concern for the region, but if I’m being honest, not one that I devoted much thought to after I left.

Cordyceps themselves, though — their brutal and nauseating nature — had burrowed into the folds of my deepest ganglia, adding one more phobia to my list of useless phobias, so that when I finally started playing The Last of Us ten years later, and first confronted the human victims of a fungal parasite that drives its hosts to violent madness, and that resembles in many ways a cordyceps, and that in fact is a cordyceps, a fucking nightmarish mutant strain of cordyceps that has pole-vaulted across the animal kingdom to infect soft and fleshy human bodies like my own, my sympathetic nerves were as jacked, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, as they have ever been.

And I was hooked.

Even in the current pop-entertainment landscape, which is saturated with undead fare, any story that premises a zombie apocalypse on the natural selection of little-known fungi warrants a second look. Most zombie fiction just doesn’t try that hard. The Walking Dead are animated by a mysterious virus; 28 Days Later depicts the aftermath of Monkey Rage.

But The Last of Us, from its opening moments, offers the kind of grounded details that signal a seriousness of purpose — many of which are lifted from the precepts of prestige TV. Despite its pulpy setting, the game succeeds as a narrative at least partly by adopting the tonal and thematic conventions we recognize as highbrow: deep characterization, ambiguous moral concerns, and a plot that doesn’t pander or shrink away from its consequences.

In fairness, there’s not much plot to speak of. When the outbreak begins, Joel loses his twelve year old daughter to a soldier’s deliberate gunshot while trying to flee their city. It’s the first in a series of escalating heartbreaks, and it unfolds over fifteen minutes. The game then jumps twenty years forward — humanity clings to the margins of life, surviving mostly in militarized quarantines. Joel and his partner Tess work as smugglers in the Boston area, and they’re given One Last (or at any rate, Big) Job: deliver Ellie, a fourteen year old girl, to a dwindling rebel outfit called the Fireflies, who ostensibly fight for whatever civil norms are salvageable in this hellscape. It soon emerges that Ellie is immune to those goddamn cordyceps, and so the stakes are set: Joel must get humanity’s last hope to the only people who can develop a cure. Needless to say, allies die, the goalposts keep shifting, and the plan’s very validity remains in question throughout.

The story’s broad strokes are visible from the game’s cover art. Does Joel, still grieving the death of his Ellie-aged daughter, try to keep this new dependant at emotional arm’s length? Does Ellie, passed around between grownups with guns while shouldering the weight of the literal world, put up a guard as stubborn as the old man’s? Do these two broken souls form an attachment that rivals — surpasses even — the blood commitment of biological family?

Yes, yes and yes.

But that synopsis doesn’t begin to address the actual experience of playing the game.

The Last of Us exhibits craft in spades — its haunting score, nuanced dialogue, and starkly gorgeous art direction all evince a richly textured drama. But those are table stakes in 2017, and their role here is to bolster and justify what happens alongside them: the gameplay itself.

This being a survivor-horror-stealth-action title aimed squarely at the 18-to-35 demo, gameplay often requires Joel to liberate the infected from the bondage of their disease via some sturdy American firepower and an ad hoc assortment of guerilla munitions. But combat is desperate, not gleeful. Your goal is almost always to escape wherever you are with minimal bullets spent or trouble incurred — the practical effect of which is to make the game anxiety-inducing at all times. Most of the infected are categorized as runners, which concisely summarizes their threat. They reach you fast and are elusive at range; dropping them efficiently entails strict adherence to a whites-of-their-eyes policy. If you miss and they grab you, the only way to throw them off is by smashing a button as fast as you can for what seems like an eternity. Meanwhile, more are advancing.

And that’s just Joel. The Last of Us becomes downright devious when it throws Ellie into the mix — or vice versa. (In one chapter, you control Ellie while Joel is grievously injured.) Most of the time your companions hold their own in fights and don’t need protection. But occasionally the game contrives more complicated scenarios. In one memorable set piece, Joel and Ellie are traversing a town abandoned but for its last resident — an old smuggling contact of Joel’s named Bill. The town is overrun with infected but Bill survives by laying sophisticated boobytraps around the cordoned-off section he calls home. On your way to meet him you stumble, as Joel, into a snare trap, triggering a brief cutscene. Joel is hoisted by his feet until he — and you — are hanging upside down, your POV flipped. Joel directs Ellie to cut down the counterweight keeping him/you suspended: a refrigerator twenty yards away.

As she climbs on top of it and starts to hack at the rope, a wave of runners appear, heading towards you. Joel screams at Ellie to hurry up and suddenly you’re in control again, madly training your gun on a series of upside down zombies while you shriek falsettos in your studio apartment.

You kill the initial horde, but Ellie falls off the refrigerator, causing the trap to hoist you even higher. Now Ellie is on the ground and you’re farther away from it, looking down on her from a sharp angle. More runners round the corner. You’re out of reach — but she’s not. They sprint to her. Your blood having since curdled in your veins, your sphincter resolutely puckered, you force yourself to adjust to this new position and dispatch the five infected with your eight remaining bullets. You pause the game to go dry heave over your toilet. You resume. Ellie climbs the refrigerator again and severs the rope, releasing herself back into your care.

I can only presume this is fatherhood.

It’s a masterful example of what The Last of Us traffics in: improvisation, disorientation, dread. It also manages to deepen Joel and Ellie’s relationship — and by extension, your investment — within the confines of the gameplay.

Most of the emotional punch hits like that. There are, to be sure, dozens of devastating cutscenes throughout the game. But so much of its lingering power transmits through unscripted experience.

As you and Ellie journey across the country, you discover pockets of narrative that provide a bleak backdrop to events of the past twenty years — letters, photographs, and other domestic detritus offering glimpses of what actually happened to people. And here it should be said that people are the true subject of The Last of Us. From its first fifteen minutes, when the soldier kills Joel’s daughter, a broad theme materializes: trust nobody. The survivors are more dangerous than the diseased. Which, ok, sure, is basically the central tenet of zombie lore. It’s the kind of recycled trope you’re likely to find in any genre fiction. And yet through the weird alchemy of gameplay — supported by the writers’ laudable commitment to pessimism — it feels fresh and cutting.

At one point Joel, Ellie, and two allies venture through a sewer system on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. They come across the grisly remains of a makeshift settlement, and as you explore the space you piece together its sad history. In the wake of the outbreak a survivor took up temporary residence there to hide from the infected and raiders. He eventually met a friendly family while trading supplies aboveground, and offered to shelter them. The group, which included a number of young children, lived in relative comfort until someone forgot to close a door.

The infected you kill while moving through the tunnels are the (former) members of this commune, minus a few. You find the rest in a locked room, where a cluster of small skeletons huddle together under a blood-spattered tarp, a larger one laying beside them. On the floor is scrawled a last message: “They didn’t suffer.”

Would any of this play better as a film or a show or a miniseries? Would stumbling upon a room of dead kids startle me as much if I hadn’t made the choice to jimmy open the door? Would Joel’s relationship with Ellie become my relationship if I didn’t fight to preserve it chapter after chapter, killing after killing, each failure providing a clue to a possible future in which we both survive?

A number of critics have lately suggested that gameplay and narrative aren’t natural companions — or even that video games would be better off abandoning traditional notions of story altogether. But The Last of Us proves what games can do in the service of character and premise and plot. In the right developer’s hands, even a gantlet of death will make you feel more alive.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.

Pity the gamers who grew up in MMORPGs, the medium’s crassest bastard, an unholy amalgamation of our creepiest traits.

World of Warcraft debuted in November of 2004, a few weeks after I entered boarding school as a sophomore. It tore through victims at an alarming rate. Who could care about sine waves amid the real-time, racially motivated warring of Alliance and Horde? Why join club basketball when you could join a faction, dispensing death and justice with your magic mace instead of chucking bricks in your workout socks?

Pimply social maladapts didn’t stand a chance. Even the most severe punishments available to an institution empowered by that fathomless phrase, in loco parentis, proved poor deterrents — exams were flunked, classes skipped. By spring term I heard rumors that one kid in our year would soon take a medical leave due to his deteriorating lifestyle. Guy was too deep in the WoW.

Still, that was just one case. Most students were unaffected by the sudden blight of addiction — including me. Which seemed odd, because I was predisposed to virtual geekery according to every metric imaginable. Within the past year alone, I had logged literally hundreds of hours in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the mere title of which announced fealty to the same dorky aesthetic as World of Warcraft. I had oodles of leisure time tied up in nothing more compelling than TV box sets and boutique sugar drinks. I was ready to develop a punishing habit; I was ready to be tweaked good.

Yet rather than ensnaring me, the game simply exhausted me. Like most role-playing titles, massively multiplayer or not, the majority of gameplay in WoW consists of killing monsters, completing quests, fetching items, and leveling up your character on the basis of those feats. That central mechanic had animated some of my favorite games, and with the right narrative flourishes could make for indelible entertainment. But in WoW the gameplay felt airless and enervating, and it took me years to understand why.

Little did any of us know at the time that we were participating in a vast commercial experiment — one that fondled our darkest pleasure centers in a canny gambit to siphon money over time. World of Warcraft was, by any reasonable assessment, a long con.

High schoolers made for easy marks given their vanity, myopia, and willingness to be early adopters; but the fever soon spread to college campuses and the living rooms of the un- and underemployed. By that point WoW had claimed more global users than heroin: 12 million in late 2010. It was the undisputed king of a new virtual reality, accessible and ubiquitous — though dozens of competitors thrived.

The most popular MMORPGs fought for market share by tapping new genres and offering even more granular experiences. Eve Online boasted an in-game economy of startling sophistication, subject to the same financial hijinks — bear raids, pump and dumps — as our own. The near-Periodic array of resources in Star Wars Galaxies birthed graduate theses on divisions of labor. Second Life, whose developers had the temerity to assert wasn’t even a game, wigged people out with its wildly libertine explorations of sex, art and social intercourse.

It was a great time to have nothing going on in the so-called real world.

Among non-gaming audiences, however, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games had become a predictably stigmatized pursuit. Their subject matter didn’t help. Neither did their revenue models, which mostly relied on monthly subscription payments and which — although necessary for the object permanence of the virtual worlds they supported — seemed to incentivize Pavlovian conditioning over genuine play. Coupled with the notorious personal hygienes and eating habits of many gamers, these features contributed to the prevailing sense that MMORPGs were a pointless vortex of time and attention, and left their devotees worse off in the long run. (One Urban Dictionary entry characterized MMORPGs as “a treadmill that makes you fatter”.)

Such criticisms, obviously, could be leveled at video games writ large, and are beside the point anyway. If fun is defined by the players, then a colossal subscription base had already spoken — and who were outsiders to judge? What made the role-playing of, say, Model UN any different? Certainly not its political or educational dimension; MMORPGs revealed more about diplomacy and trade than most high school history classes. They also provided a refuge for lonely, isolated, or anxious players who couldn’t readily participate in IRL communities.

On a micro level, the argument might go, any less-than-savory aspects of MMORPGs were balanced out by their possible social benefits. At worst, they were just another everyday vice.

On the macro level, it was a different story. On the macro level, shit was fucked.

Imagine a global dumping ground for productivity, humanity’s most precious resource. Millions of players from all walks of life electing to sink their time, energy, and mental and physical capacities into a bottomless pit of purported recreation, meanwhile stoking the flames of a new capitalist machine. Hellscape, thy name is MMORPG.

The evidence abounded. For one thing, real-life markets had emerged to commoditize gold farming, the practice by which MMORPG players earned various in-game currencies in order to sell them online for actual dollars (otherwise known as real money trading or RMT). Its economic opportunity was unmistakable: virtual currencies could be harvested from anywhere, including countries with a very cheap labor force, and gamers already paying ~$20/month for subscriptions could be counted on to drop a little extra in order to speed the progression of their characters.

So, inevitably, a cottage industry dominated by the Chinese arose to exploit global economic asymmetries.

This was not necessarily bad news for the East or Southeast Asian workers doing the actual farming; while reports of harsh conditions proliferated, clicking a mouse is inherently safer than most factory jobs. Rather, it was bad news for the game developers, who now had to worry about the liability of creating and hosting potential havens for money laundering, fraud, and other regulatory noncompliance issues, and who scrambled to find workarounds.

It was also bad news for the user base, who on top of everything else were wittingly or unwittingly tampering with their own game by driving up inflation and cratering what was once a level playing field.

But none of these peccadillos compared to the sheer grossness of what the virtual markets represented in the abstract. At their peak they stored billions of dollars of real value. Even today, with shrinking subscribership, trading estimates put their aggregate GDP as high as $28 billion. That’s a player-produced economy larger than Latvia’s — which is an actual, physical place where people actually, physically work.

You could argue that virtual currencies are not so different from cryptocurrencies, options and futures markets, and other kinds of secondary and speculative bet-making. But by feeding the dependencies of gamers who pay for the privilege of producing this wealth, and essentially don’t profit from it at all, virtual currencies feel orders of magnitude more perverse.

I’ll take the Candy Crushes and Mobile Strikes over World of Warcraft any day. At least the lower-order freemium games come at my wallet with the baldness of a slot machine or lotto ticket and not some blood elf in battlegarb, jonesing for his next fix.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.

As will forever be the norm, my first brush with sexuality involved a computer screen and naughty intent. But the encounter, when it finally arrived, was fully censored, and moments later my avatar — sweet, fumbling Larry — had died of an STD. I was eleven.

Anyone who remembers the name Leisure Suit Larry will know that he hasn’t aged well. Published thirty years ago to mock outrage and massive sales, Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards must have confirmed the worst stereotypes about computer games and the programmers who made them. Playing as Larry, a balding schlemiel whose virginity is his one defining feature, you’re tasked with bedding a woman before the night runs out.

This proves difficult not because seducing strangers on the fly is difficult, and demands a kaleidoscope of skills inaccessible to most casual gamers. Nor is Larry’s manifest loserdom an obstacle; once you find them, his potential sexual partners are cringingly receptive to gifts (including money). The game challenges you instead by scattering those gifts across a cheesy nightscape and making you search for them — along with a dozen other handy items and scraps of information — without giving you much clue as to what you’re looking for. Losing Larry’s virginity comes down to discovering the proper application of a few “everyday tools”, like a length of rope or a shot of whiskey.

To any adult who’s not socially deficient, the premise is tasteless or worse. (Though that didn’t stop millions of people from buying and presumably enjoying the game — including my dad. (Was it part of a bundle that included Captain Comic and Reader Rabbit? Did it come with his Apple II? Did he in fact learn of the existence of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and decide to purchase it for his own personal use? The sands of time abrade all memory.))

But to a straight white eleven-year-old male born in the waning days of Reagan, for whom sex itself was a game to be mastered and girls an order to be feared, Leisure Suit Larry was a revelation — it felt exactly right. Of course the major set pieces of grownup life would include a disco, a hotel/casino and a guttertrash bar complete with blinking neon sign. Of course the possibility of death from alley thugs, pissed off cabbies, and aforementioned STDs would haunt every seedy encounter. Of course it would take a combination of guile, guesswork and a stolen membership card to slip past the bouncer or talk your way into the back room.

Even getting access to the game itself required forbidden knowledge. To prevent the inevitable, creator Al Lowe introduced a multiple-choice test meant to block underaged players, which questions ran from the literal to the irreverent and suggestive. (“Lee Harvey Oswald killed…” “c. John F. Kennedy”; “If a physician were stranded on a desert island with Bo Derek, he would probably…” “d. Thank God”)

I remember playdates hovering behind me, debating the biography of Sergeant Pepper. There were enough questions to make rote memorization difficult, and most of them called for judgment, not merely fact. Many teased the subject matter directly: “The most likely place to find virgins is…” (a. The Virgin Islands; b. Virginia; c. St. Mary’s Girls School; d. Hollywood). Even when the game was doing its best to dissuade you, everything presented as an inside joke — the core frustration and central appeal to an audience of eleven year olds who desperately wanted to get it. (If you missed two questions, a pop-up text screen would exclaim “You’re a kid!!” as though you had just tripped on your stilts and tumbled out of your beige trenchcoat.)

So after several reboots, you clear the final question. You rejoice. You high five. The game advises you to slip into your leisure suit. Its cheerful MIDI soundtrack issues from the speakers. You’re pretty sure you’re going to see some boobs. You barrel into Lefty’s bar and start typing all sorts of commands, most of which aren’t understood. After days — weeks? — of diligent sleuthing you discover the password to the pimp’s apartment graffitied on a bathroom wall. You gift your whiskey shot to the wino in the hallway and get his TV remote in return. You use the remote to change the channel on the pimp’s TV to porn, thereby distracting him. (The pimp’s blackness, like the Quikimart cashier’s brownness or the indeterminate sienna of the back alley thugs that serve to demarcate where Larry can and can’t go, never register with you as even mildly problematic.) You march up the stairs and greet the hooker triumphantly. You disrobe and engage in censored pixel action. The game announces that while you have technically lost your virginity, you haven’t won. After a minute your crotch begins flashing and a text box helpfully informs you that you have contracted a disease. Larry falls down dead because “while life may be possible, it is no longer worth living.” The game doesn’t respect you because you don’t respect yourself. You start over.

How many iterations of this formula can a preteen compute before the game’s worldview becomes encoded? How much exposure to an insidious attitude — a collection of ugly gestures that would almost certainly be called toxic masculinity in today’s parlance — can eleven year olds safely absorb?

It’s not as though Leisure Suit Larry was the most sexist cultural artifact of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Far from it. But by deploying sexual frustration as a gameplay mechanic, as something to be conquered by effort and cunning, it brought me closer to frank misogyny than many of its bawdier contemporaries. Thank God life, and sex, bear no resemblance to it. Never in my postpubescent years have I had to fish for diamond rings in dirty sinks, or swipe the unmarked pills from a neighbor’s windowsill just in case they might later come in handy. Money is obtained, dully but duly, from my employer and not a bank of slot machines. Women are humans and seduction is bidirectional. The world as a whole is less titillating, but more interesting. Some of these recognitions were perhaps harder-won than they should have been.

Still, there are moments when the game’s ancient perspective sneaks up on you like a dormant punchline. I remember standing in a line freshman year, mentally preparing to show a nightclub bouncer my fake ID for the very first time. When it worked and he let me by, I understood that a new stage of life awaited me, a new plane of existence had been achieved. As I walked into the dark space I could feel my eleven-year-old self taking over — palms sweaty, limbs limber. I looked around. An empty dance floor dominated the room, flanked by hordes of identical men huddled in leather booths: an ocean of Larrys, just trying to get lucky.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.