This is probably the longest I have ever gone without seriously sitting down to play a video game. It’s not like I don’t have a lot to play. The release of Pathologic 3 should have seized me, for one – but despite my wishes to play on stream, my internet has been, shall we say, less than cooperative, cutting out at inopportune times, refusing to work with my streaming computer, and various other problems I simply have not had the time to resolve. It’s been a mess with that machine, to put it lightly. Nonetheless, I could still say that well, maybe I should be playing it offline? I haven’t been doing that lately either. The last thing I played, believe it or not, is the terribly edgy Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare from 2001. It has, shall we say, 2001 voice acting. But I only played that for half an hour before putting it away. 

So what have I been doing? I’ve been fully invested in my studies, and in various creative projects that are moving along. While that doesn’t include my long-suffering Isle of Ethal game, it does include a dialogue-driven art-game that I hope I can produce most of the assets for over the next few months, and one day release on Steam. My creative output also encompasses other poem-games, short experiences made to conjure very specific feelings.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading as well, and one reading I can recommend is Austin Anderson’s “Dark Souls as Networked Hyperlinked Videogame” which is a great summary of Dark Souls’ place in game studies as well as a great look into Anderson’s “networked hyperlinked videogame” idea. Positing that video games can exist in a networked form, he argues that Dark Souls encourages community-building simply by being deeply esoteric and difficult to parse (both in narrative and gameplay). What I found really valuable about this article for my own work is the discussion of Russian literary Formalism. Anderon says in his discussion of Formalism that it “asks player-critics to focus on the defamiliarizing structures within a videogame. The interpretation of these elements allows the player-critic to see reality with fresh eyes via refamiliarization” (2025).

That de-familiarization and subsequent re-familiarization is what I’m particularly interested in interrogating. How can games change people’s minds? What is the place for video games in an impossibly media-saturated world? How can games both hold people’s attention and also be slow and thoughtful enough to make us better people? I’m reminded, of course, of my original playthrough of Pathologic (Ice Pick Lodge 2005) as a naive young woman, where defamiliarization was almost immediate. The entire course of the game is the slow, creeping refamiliarization, getting an understanding of the world around me, before it is revealed to be something else entirely. The principle of defamiliarization makes us see what we normally do not. The things that pass us by seem so regular to us, that they can become invisible; things like systems of governance, ways of thinking, or even just the food we eat need to become refamiliarized in the context of a game like Pathologic.

So the question I plan to interrogate over the course of my studies is – can video games successfully use both defamiliarizing narrative and mechanics to put us in a better headspace? Not just passively – in that we walk away thinking not just “oh that was nice and fulfilling”, but rather “am I a better person, and I will remain a better person because of this game”. There’ll be more on this to come, but I just wanted to share something quick to reassure everyone that I’m still here and I’m going to get back into playing things very shortly!

I also plan to finally stream this coming Thursday afternoon – so I hope to see you there! I have a few games I want to stream and play through this year in their entirety, so these are my current priority:

Resident Evil Village
Metal Gear Solid 2
Pathologic 2 or 3

I’m interested in the first one for simply horror entertainment reasons, the middle one for my research, and the latter of course because it is the ongoing project of my channel to play the Pathologic games. The rate at which I am playing them, however, means that Pathologic 4 will be out just a few months after I start Pathologic 3. Fingers crossed, anyway.

See you all soon!