The Game & Word Podcast

View Details

Podcaster, gamer, mystic, and dream interpreter Benjamin the Dream Wizard talks to Game & Word about dream interpretation, dream magic, St. Carl Gustav Jung (z"l), and dreamy video games!

Subscribe to Game & Word for free gaming deep dives, delivered to your inbox every week, AND to enter our signed book giveaway: https://gameandword.substack.com

References:

Our Guest: Benjamin the Dream Wizard

-Socials:

Twitter: @WizardBenjamin

Instagram: @benjaminthedreamwizard

Pinterest: @benjaminthedreamwizard

Facebook: BenjaminTheDreamWizard

Reddit: /r/TheDreamWizard

Discord Server: Benjamin the Dream Wizard

Website: https://benjaminthedreamwizard.com

-Podcasts:

Dreamscapes [Audio | YouTube]

What Dreams May Come [YouTube]

Augury, Bibliomancy & Chaos [YouTube]

Incantus Phylacterium [YouTube]

Dream Wizard Plays [YouTube]

-Historical Dream Literature: Augury, Bibliomancy & Chaos [Audiobooks]

[[NOTE: Contains affiliate links]]

The Court of Curiosity [Amazon]

The Mystery of Dreams [Amazon]

Oneirochronologia: Volume I [Amazon]

Oneirochronologia: Volume II [Amazon]

Oneirochronologia: Volume III [Amazon]

Studies in Dreams [Amazon]

Tyrion’s Dreams & Visions [Amazon]

Literature & Curiosity of Dreams: Volume I [Amazon]

Literature & Curiosity of Dreams: Volume II [Amazon]

The Witches’ Dream Book [Amazon]

The Psychology of Dreams [Amazon]

The Philosophy of Sleep [Amazon]

Dream Psychology [Amazon]

Dreams in Homer & Greek Tragedy [Amazon]

The World of Dreams [Amazon]

Dreams & Their Meanings [Amazon]

Video Games Referenced:

The Persona series

Soma

Remember Me?

Little Nightmares

The Witcher

Dying Light

Fallout: New Vegas

Dragon’s Dogma: Darker Risen

Nier Automata

Age of Empires II: Age of Kings (Remastered)

Yume Nikki

Stray

Theme Music Attribution:

“Simply Me” by Deoxys Beats | https://soundcloud.com/deoxysbeats1Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unportedhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

View Details

J.V. Hilliard—author of the bestselling Warminster saga, and an avid gamer—talks to Game & Word about magic's ubiquity in the fantasy genre, tips on writing magic for budding fantasy writers, and magic's inexorable link to creativity.

Subscribe to Game & Word for free gaming deep dives, delivered to your inbox every week, AND to enter our signed book giveaway: https://gameandword.substack.com

References:

Our Guest: J.V. Hilliard, Author of the Warminster Saga (@JVHilliardBooks on Twitter)

Book 1: "The Last Keeper": https://amzn.to/3m2am69

Book 2: "Vorodin's Lair": https://amzn.to/3ZjPd5R

Tabletop Games Referenced:

Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition)

Video Games Referenced:

D&D's Ravenloft Series

Diablo

Theme Music Attribution:

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

View Details

Eric Holden—Comedian, Full-Time Game Master, and Co-Host of The Goblin's Corner Podcast—talks to Game & Word about Tabletop RPGs, storytelling in video games, and how D&D taught him the meaning of life, the universe, and everything (besides "42").

Subscribe to Game & Word for free gaming deep dives, delivered to your inbox every week: https://gameandword.substack.com

LISTEN to Game & Word's appearance on The Cure is Conversation: [LINK]

References:

Our Guest: Eric Holden, Co-Host of The Goblins Corner (https://goblinscorner.com or @GoblinsCorner on Twitter)

Tabletop Games Referenced:

Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition)

10 Candles

World of Darkness

Deadlands

Munchkin

Fluxx

Troika

Starfinder

Forgotten Waters

King of Tokyo

Video Games Referenced:

Skyrim

Borderlands

Pistol Whip

Fallout

The Witcher

Baldur’s Gate

Neverwinter Nights

Chrono Trigger

Planescape Torment

Theme Music Attribution:

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

View Details

Industry veteran Jennifer Allaway, currently a Senior Game Writer at Monolith Productions, talks to Game & Word about narrative design, what makes for good branching narratives, and how to break into the game industry.

Subscribe to Game & Word for free gaming deep dives, delivered to your inbox every week: https://gameandword.substack.com

Our Guest: Jennifer Allaway (Twitter: @allawayj)

Games Referenced:

Banner Saga

Disco Elysium

Shardlight

Unavowed

2064 Read Only Memories

Choices: Stories You Play

Wonder Woman

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

View Details

Hello! If you enjoy Game & Word, please hit the “heart” button at the very top or very bottom of this post, or on the bottom-left corner of the Substack app. It helps more people find Game & Word, which helps us survive and grow!

The Game & Word Podcast, Volume 3, Episode 3: Lost in a Good Game Study (ft. Dr. Pete Etchells)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Podcast References

Transcript

Footnotes

NOTE: Gmail users, you might see a truncated version of this message. If this happens to you, just click the “View entire message” link next to where it says “[Message clipped]” to read the rest.

Introduction

Hello again, psychonauts!

This episode of The Game & Word Podcast, is going to wrap up Volume 3, so I’ve saved the best for last, so to speak.

Our guest this week, Dr. Pete Etchells, is a video game psychology researcher, and author of Lost in a Good Game, which is a must-read for anyone wanting to dive deeper into this fascinating field.

In this episode, we talk about the challenges facing psychological research into video games, some of the psychological benefits of games that get lost in media coverage, and how to approach science news more critically—and in doing so, better arm yourself against falling for sensationalistic headlines and moral panics about video games.

Enjoy, and catch you all on the flip side!

~Jay

Scheduling Reminder!

As a reminder, Game & Word will pause publishing free content for 3-4 weeks, starting today, in order to give me more time to line up Volume 4. However, bonus subscribers will continue to receive content throughout this period. so… you might want to upgrade your subscription, if you haven’t already:

If you enjoy the newsletter but aren’t ready to commit to a paid subscription, consider buying me a cup of coffee instead. Just $5 will fuel one full night of writing. Just click the image below ☕️:

Still Seeking Playtesters!

I’m also still looking for playtesters to help test my upcoming steampunk tavern simulator. My team and I are working hard to release the game’s alpha build by Thursday. If you’d like to test the game—your feedback will greatly help us as we continue building—click the button below to join our Discord server and be the first to get access to the alpha (link expires on Thursday, so hurry!):

Nothing else to announce on my end… yet. Stay tuned for more info on Volume 4, and upcoming changes to how Game & Word’s content (both free and paid) is structured.

Podcast References

Books

Lost in a Good Game, by Dr. Pete Etchells

Games

Spiritfarer

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Extras

Wellcome Trust

Theme Music Attribution

Simply Me by Deoxys Beats | https://soundcloud.com/deoxysbeats1
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

INTRO: Hello, hello, hello, everyone! And welcome to The Game & Word Podcast. I'm your host, Jay Rooney, as usual. And I've got an amazing guest for you this week: Dr. Pete Etchells. Dr. Etchells is a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University, in the UK, and the author of Lost in a Good Game, which is an excellent primer on the fascinating field of video game psychology.

Today, we deep dive into the nature of psychological research into video games, and why answers to questions like "are loot boxes addictive?" or "do video games increase aggression?" are never as clear cut as we'd like them to be.

We also talk about some recent examples of games serving as vehicles for enabling a better understanding of not just certain mental illnesses, but even basic challenges of the mind, like processing grief. Finally, we end with some solid practical advice on how to tune out sensationalistic and misleading headlines on video games studies, and figure out what all the new psychological research coming out is actually saying.

It's quite an illuminating conversation, and I'm thrilled to share it with you all today. So go ahead, grab your cup of Joe or your cup of tea, put your earbuds on or turn on your speakers, and hit that play button. I'll be back after we're done to wrap things up.

Until then, enjoy Game & word's interview with Dr. Pete Etchells on video game psychology research. See you on the other side!
Game & Word: Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to another special edition of The Game and Word Podcast. Today, I have with me dialing in, live from the UK, Dr. Pete Etchells, author of Lost in a Good Game, which is one of the big books that informed a lot of my research on this last series I've been writing for this for the past couple of months.

Pete, you wanna introduce yourself?

Pete Etchells: That was a wonderful introduction. So I don't think there's much more to say there, but yeah, I'm Pete Etchells, I'm a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University in the UK, so I do research on lots of things, but all things, digital technology, really. So I'm interested in the behavioral and mental well-being effects of video games and playing them, things like that.

I'm also interested in screen time more generally. So how does digital technology affect us in good and bad ways? So yeah, all sorts of stuff like that. Oh yeah. Wrote a book. You've already said that.

Game & Word: And how do video games affect us and how do they not?

Pete Etchells: It's Is actually a really interesting question. So in so far as the answer is they affect us in lots of different ways, but in not massive ways. So if you're approaching that question in the sense of, "do video games impact on our mental health or do they make us more aggressive or do they make us smarter? Do brain training games make us smarter?" Things like that. The answer to all of those sorts of questions is generally "no." They have a bit of an impact, but not that much. And certainly not in such a ways that's worth worrying or considering about, games will make you a little bit annoyed or a little bit happy for a little bit of time when you're playing them.

But in terms of long-term differences, there's not much going on. Brain training games don't work, they don't make you smarter. So that's no good either. But in terms of both over positive and negative effects, there's not much of a swing, either way. I think if you approach that. So the other part of that was that they affect us in lots of different ways.

So I think from a kind of cultural perspective, I think they have quite a powerful impact. So what games do allow you to do is to explore I, I use this term in the book and I hate it. It's really rubbish term, but I'm gonna say anyway, I'll try and qualify it. They allow us to explore what it means to be human, which is a it's just a bit fiery, I think.

But I think what I mean by that is that because video games are unique amongst entertainment media, in the sense that they place you as the active agent in the thing that you're doing, rather than a passive watcher, they offer you the possibility of becoming fully immersed in this experience that you're having and taking on the role of the character that you're playing, the avatar that you are, and therefore feeling things as if you were them.

So video games allow you to explore things like grief or what it feels like to lose somebody, realize how it feels to be betrayed by somebody. It allows you to explore your moral compass as well. There's some great games that have come out recently where they're choice games, basically.

But in the process of making those choices, you can be different versions of yourself. We always like to think that in a certain situation, this is how we would react. But you only really find out what you're gonna do in that situation when it actually happens to you. Video games, give you a chance to look at a version of what you might do in that situation.

Give you a bit of an inkling of as to, say where your moral compass is and things like that. So we're not talking about big, broad, positive, or negative effects on psychology here, but these quite personal. Yet still powerful experiences that they can afford.

Game & Word: So what's the next book about if if you're allowed to talk about it?

Pete Etchells: Yeah, no. Sure. So it's the same sort of style as Lost in a Good Game. But it's about screen time more generally. So it's about digital technology and the impact that it has on us, so things like the relationship between social media and mental health and screens generally and sleep attention and things like that.

Just with a general view that, there's the same sort of thing as in Lost in a Good Game, there's a general perception that screens are bad, and that they're causably bad. If you pick a particular thing that you worried about particularly when it comes to kids and adolescents, you can trace that directly back to screens.

And there's some research which supports that, but you start digging into it a little bit more and that research isn't very good. And there's lots of reasons why that research isn't very good. So it's all about why we've got into this situation and how do we get out of it. And is there any kind of, are there any things that we should actually be worried about?

If so, what, and rather than just worry about them, what can we do to help ourselves, basically?

Game & Word: Yeah.

Pete Etchells: So it's, I'm not gonna say it's a self-help book, cuz that sounds awful. It's not at all. It's more about trying to reframe people's thinking about digital technology, so that we can have more mature conversations about it and not just get stuck in this either, "they're really good and we shouldn't worry about them," or "they're the worst thing ever." Because we never get anywhere with conversations like that really.

Game & Word: Yeah, definitely. What do you feel is the biggest misconception that people have regards to, to video games and their effect on mental health?

Pete Etchells: It's a good question. I think my feeling is generally the biggest misconception about games is , about how they're played. So you, if you talk to people who don't play video games that much, or don't really understand them, you try and get a sense of what they think they are. What they'll end up describing, feels like a very solitary experience. It used to be, I don't think this is so true anymore, but it used to be the case that, you talk about what's a gamer, and people would say "teenage boy in his room on his own, playing a game, pasty white skin's going translucent cuz he's in front of his screen in the dark." I don't think many people think that video games are like that anymore, but I still think there's this sense that they're an isolating experience when actually they're the complete opposite of that. And they always have been, really from the moment that video games were created, they have been social experiences and multiplayer experiences.

They've been things to do with other people. In terms of the misconceptions around video games and mental health, I guess again, the broad strokes general one is particularly from people who don't play them, it's, that they're bad, right? That, that if you play games they're addicting and they're gonna harm your mental health in some way, when you try and press people about that...

So this word "harm" gets used quite a lot, when we talk about games or loot boxes or digital technology more generally, you try and press people on what that means and it covers all sorts of things. Really, it's a very poorly defined concept, I think.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Pete Etchells: People generally use it to mean, "it's no good for you, it's unwholesome," or something like that. So when you actually start to press, in terms of, "specifically define this thing that you're talking about," and you look at the research , that correlates with that sort of definition. You inevitably find that it's not harmful in the way that people suggest it is.

But even now I'd say if you look at this at a broad strokes level and you're talking about the effects on mental wellbeing, which is a very broad umbrella term for "how well you're doing," there's this perception that maybe video games they're okay for a little bit, but if you play a lot of them, that's maybe not such a good thing. The data that we're starting to get now doesn't seem to point in that direction. There is not much of an association going on. Where there is one, it's positive, but it depends on a lot of different things. It depends on how you interact with games while you're playing, why you're playing them in the first place, who you're playing them with, what your motivations are, and things like that.

So it becomes a very complex question to ask very quickly. And you get into conversations with people about this and what everybody in that conversation starts to realize very quickly is that it's meaningless to ask "how do games affect our mental health?" It's like asking "how does food affect my waistline?"

Depends what you're eating, who you're eating it with, when you're eating, how much of it you're eating, depends on your prior history, individual differences, whether you're allergic to foods or not, all these sorts of things. You start realizing that those are the interesting questions. That general question is meaningless in a way. It's not you a, you are never gonna get an answer to it, and B, is it worth asking, probably not, because even if you were to get an answer to it I don't think it can tell us anything useful.

Game & Word: In Lost in a Good Game, you go into quite some detail as to the myriad problems facing psychological research, insofar as video games are concerned. Do you feel that's changed at all since since you first published the book?

Pete Etchells: Yeah, definitely. I think it is getting better. I think there are still risks to the research. So I think if you look at different sub areas of research, different things are going on. So if you look at the whole violent video games and aggression research literature, that has moved on since me writing the book and since the stuff that I talked about in the book in some ways, right?

So we've developed some better ways of looking at that question and what you inevitably find is that as a research area matures and you develop better more robust methodologies, more appropriate analysis methods, where you might have found big effects in the early days they tend to get smaller and smaller.

And that's what's happened with the violent video games and aggression question is that the best evidence that we've got now really suggests that this is not a thing that is worth worrying about, there might be a small association there, but it's, it's not doing any particular damage.

On the other hand, you've still got all the same players in that research field, right? So you are still getting research that, that does the same thing that it did 10, 15, 20 years ago, and saying the same things. What I think is starting to happen there particularly is that people are just ignoring those older arguments now and just focusing on the good research which is a good thing to see. So you look at other areas, so I've done research on loot boxes and the relationship with things like problem gambling and mental well-being and things like that. That's a relatively new area. So I think the first study in that area came out in 2018. If you look at the broad stretch of research in that area, it's pretty good.

Preregistered, a lot of the times people make their data openly available and their code and things like that. So its all these really strong principles of open science that a lot of us have been talking about in psychology for a good few years now to try and improve the state of the discipline: be more honest about the things that you're doing and share things so that people can check if they need to check your stuff. But it's more about, not reinventing the wheel constantly and collecting the same data and over again.

Its all these principles of open science, which is good. My worry with that is that there are potentially new problems in that area of research that we're not thinking about.

These are somewhat akin to other problems that we've seen elsewhere in video games research that we're not really kinda getting a handle on. And I think it generally goes back to this idea of the interplay between the development of video games and moral panic in society. So what happens is. Video game comes out.

Something happens in the real world. People who don't understand video games, maybe attribute the thing, the horrible thing that's happened to video games. And that's what starts something like the whole "violent video games that they cause aggression" worry. Now what happens in, in the research world is that psychologists come along and say, okay, here's this thing that people are worrying about.

We've not really thought about it up until now. It's not been a thing it's not been on our radar or anything like that, but people really care about that. Right? People, the general public are really worried about it. Parents are worried about it. Policy makers are interested in doing something about it.

We need to know what's going on because this is all quite fast paced you end up doing quite rapid research, tends not to be necessarily very good, but you'll find something. That was the problem with violent games research, it was very reactive towards what was going on in society.

The methods that we used to ask that question, weren't particularly good, but they showed big effects. They showed big negative effects of playing violent video games early on. And then that was taken as "well, violent games do cause aggression." When, actually over time you realize that the thing that you're measuring is not the thing that you think you're measuring.

And when you do start measuring things properly, you find that effect actually isn't there. If it is at all, or it's not very big and it's not worth worrying about. And the problem with loot box research is that it's same sort of thing. Start to do research on loot boxes because they were a thing that started worrying about. And what we're kind of missing there, I think, are two things. One is without exception, the research on loot boxes and problem gambling is correlational in nature. So it's really good, really robust work, but it's correlational. Tends to show, and my work shows the same thing, that people who spend more money on loot boxes also tend to score more highly on scales of problem gambling habits.

That doesn't tell you which one comes first. So it doesn't tell you whether spending money on loot boxes causes problem, gambling habits, or vice versa. Some people argue that doesn't matter in a way, because if it's that loot boxes cause problem gambling habits, then you know, you've got really problematic mechanism in games that's causing problems for people.

If it's that people who. Are more likely to have problem gambling habits are more likely to spend money on loot boxes than you are you're targeting vulnerable individuals. So neither of those realities is good,

Game & Word: Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Pete Etchells: But we dunno much about the causal mechanisms and critically, what we don't know is whether there's a third variable that impacts on both. And then we don't know what's happening on the other side of it as well. So lots and lots of studies show this correlation with problem gambling. Very few, if any studies show that translating into psychological distress say, or problems with mental wellbeing or things like that. And you look at the kinda good studies that are coming out at the minute, there's a potential problem here, obviously, with biases in participant samples.

So you know who does your study might not be a random representative population of the entire population of people who play video games and buy loot boxes. But yeah, there's still big studies. I've got a study that's just about to come out where we surveyed 3000 people that played video games and bought loot boxes and all this sort of stuff tend to find those studies is that what people report is that they don't spend that much money on loot boxes per month.

So I think, even in like problem gambling categories, people are spending $50, $60 a month, on average. So there's an argument there is to say, "is that really a problem?" Now, the difficulty with that is that obviously you see a lot of single case stories in the news where people say, "my kid got hold of my credit card and they spent $3000 on FIFA in two days," and things like that. There are people who are spending vast amounts of money on loot box games in what is probably gonna be quite a problematic way. So I don't think the research literature is capturing those people particularly well at the minute. But equally, I'm not sure that it's got a clear sense of what the worry is, or what we want to do at the end of this.

There's this association between a particular survey measure you use, which scores problem, gambling behaviors, and loot box spending. But you also get studies, which show that there's no association between loot box spending and psychological distress. So people are spending money on these games and they may be not happy about that, but it's not causing them psychological harm or distress, really.

So what do you do with that? And, there's not easy answer that because a lot of this work has happened because people are worried about loot boxes with a view to regulating them. And particularly worried about kids having access to these sorts of things.

Do they effectively work as a sort of gateway mechanism for other forms of gambling? We really don't know that yet. And I should say that part of the reason why we're struggling with this, research-wise, at the minute is that whenever you have a reactive research area, that's trying to catch up with what's going on in society, it tends to be very theory-light.

So it tends to be like surveys and stuff. So, do you spend money on this thing? How do you feel? Is there a correlation? That sort of thing. But in the absence of a theoretical framework to think about that question, to pose the question in the first place to think based on our understanding of human psychology, if we gave somebody this sort of mechanism, what might we predict would they do? And how could we change that? You want predictive theories to be able to figure out what's gonna happen for the next big thing that's gonna come out. As well as figuring out why loot boxes are a problem, if they are, and we are really struggling with that at the minute in that particular area.

And I think we will be for a while because it's very easy to do. And I, I should hold my hands up here and say, yeah, the stuff that I've done recently on loot boxes is also pretty absent of theory, because it's not clear what's the best theoretical framework, to think about these questions. I have a friend called Andy Przybylski who who does a lot of work in this area. I interviewed him for Lost in a Good Game. I can't remember whether this quote got into it or not, but when he was talking about this sort of general video games, research, and digital type research, he kinda used this analogy of kids playing football.

So it's what we're doing at the minute as scientists is if you've got a bunch of people who don't play football very much, and somebody punts the ball down the field and everybody runs to where the ball is about to bounce, and then somebody picks up and throws it somewhere else or kicks it somewhere else.

And then everybody runs to that point. Nobody's thinking about what's gonna happen next. And that's what happens with good football teams, right? So they predict plays and strategy and things like that. And that's how you kinda win the game, right? That's what we need to start doing, I think in video games research, generally in loot box research specifically is thinking about, "what's the big question that we care about? What is it that we're worried about here?" And how do we best frame it? Because I think, loot boxes will disappear in the next few years, right? They're a pretty toxic way of monetizing games because they've just got such a bad reputation. So they will go and something will replace them.

And NFTs, don't get me started on those. NFTs are not gonna replace anything in video games. That's just, it's just never gonna happen. They're a nightmare, but something will replace them. And that could be something a lot worse potentially, or it could be something that is not a problem. And that's what we wanna aim for as psychologists is thinking about, okay how do we put in or take out mechanisms within games so that we can maximize the benefits and minimize the potential harm.

Game & Word: Yeah. And I'm curious too, I wonder if you've noticed in your research, or just reviewing the body of research generally, if there's a cultural component to the nature of these moral panics . Like for example, in the US, after each mass shooting, lawmakers are gonna point the finger at video games instead of guns. Which is very much, I think, an American phenomenon. Whereas loot boxes, I think it's more generally agreeable that we probably shouldn't let kids basically gamble.

So I wonder if there's, a cultural effect at play too, at least as far as certain things that people worry about with video games.

Pete Etchells: Yeah, I think so. I think there's perception, biases, right? If you look at the violent video game question and does that cause aggression, by and large, if you look at the generally two camps of researchers, there's one that's very clearly "they do cause aggression." And there's one that's "very clearly that they don't." If you look at who those groups are there are some very kind of clear boundaries between them, right? So the group of researchers broadly speaking, obviously it's not the same across the board, but who are consistently producing research that shows that violent video games cause aggression tend to have a pediatrics background or a clinical background.

And my sense is that what's happening there is that, they're getting patients in their clinics. Parents with kids that they're worried about who are showing aggressive behaviors and you go into the history and playing games and they're playing these specific types of what we call violent games or whatever.

And it's hard not to see that might be a potential link there. And then on the other side of it, you've got so the group who generally produce research that shows that there's no effects tend to be, public health specialists, epidemiologists, criminologists, people who are looking at population level statistics.

And again, there you look at population level statistics, violent acts are going down over time. Video game sales are going through the roof, that's not the correlation that you'd expect if these were really strongly driving violent behavior. So there's that kind of base perception point.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Pete Etchells: I think when you talk about things like, a mass shooting, in America, when something like that happens, I think it's so , it defies understanding on such a basic human level that we don't get it. We can't understand possibly how this could have happened and what you wanna try and do is find explanations.

You wanna find explanations quickly. And there's gotta be for something so shocking and singular, there's got to be a singular cause, so I think that's why it's very easy to point the finger at video games again, especially if you don't play them or you don't understand them or don't know them, if you build up this perception in of certain types of video games in the media that you know, they're gory and the point that the games go around, shooting people and you get points for that, you get rewarded for it.

Without any more of an understanding about what those games are or why people engage with them, it's very easy to connect those dots.

When actually, the reality of this situation is much more complicated. That's not what, that's not what video games are. Something that people don't really talk about is that violent video game as a term doesn't mean that much, right?

What is a violent video game? You look at some of these cases over time and it will include things like DOOM, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, those sorts of games. You look at those games and compare them. Yeah, very different games, right? There's not much really to compare Call of Duty with World of Warcraft.

If you look at this purely in terms of visual perception, just look at the visual display, right? What these games look like, and they could not be more different. Call of Duty versus World of Warcraft. One's a first person shooter. One's a third person perspective game. One, your visual attention is directed very much to the center of the screen, where you are pointing your gun.

Something like World of Warcraft. If you're looking in the center of the screen you're not doing the game properly, particularly if you're in like a raid scenario or something like that, you need to be looking in at what you're standing in where you need to go, where everybody else is. You need to look at the chat box to coordinate what's going on with the rest of the team.

Game & Word: And also, technically speaking, Mario stomping on a Goomba could be considered violent.

Pete Etchells: Yeah, sure. So there's a paper in the early 2000s where they tried to quantify violence in video games. And the most violent game that topped out on the list was Centipede. I dunno if you remember Centipede from the 1980s so there's a centipede kind of scrolling its way down.

It kind looks a bit like Space Invaders, right? Scrolling its way down the screen. And you're the bottom trying shoot segments of it, and you're just looking at that in terms of shooting at something X times per second over the course of a 20-minute gameplay session.

And it comes out as something like 93% violent. Centipede is not a violent video game. That is not, that's not gonna cause any problems anywhere. But I think it generally speaks to this problem that we've got with defining games and talking about them just generally, it's so hard. And I found this in my own, so I've done research on violent games and aggression, and something difficult when we were doing that research was trying to find a sensible way to categorize games.

The obvious approach to go for is to categorize 'em into genres, but even then that doesn't sit right.

So there's a study that I published in 2016 where we use data from an amazing longitudinal study. So it's big study in the UK where they followed something like 15,000 mums to be and then followed their kids all the way through their life. So it started out in the early nineties and it's still going now.

So it's called the Children of the Nineties Study. You kinda get data from the kids and their parents every six months or a year or so. And you get saliva samples and these huge amount of data that so many amazing findings have come outta that in terms of kinda medical health and things like that.

And, anybody can use that data set. You just have to apply for permission to use it. And we looked at it and they had some measures of video game use. We were like, yeah, this is incredibly prescient for a study like this, to ask about, what sort of games are you playing?

Things like that. So that data was collected in 1998 and we published our paper in 2016. Even if it was the most perfect study in the world, would it tell you anything meaningful about modern day video gameplay? Because the kind of, violent games you might be talking about, our data set would be things like Goldeneye, which nowadays looks really archaic, looks cartoonish. One of the key problems that we found was that while it was great that they had questions about video game use in this survey, they weren't particularly good questions. They'd not been particularly well constructed insofar as... so they didn't have a first person shooter category.

The closest that we got to that was "shoot 'em up." Now, if you don't know much about video games and you've got a list of genres here, and you're saying, what is Goldeneye? You probably gonna take "shoot 'em up."

Shoot 'em ups are a very specific type of video game, right? They're side-scrolling games, very different to what you might think of as a shooter game now.

And that's, you can make educated guesses about what people might have been thinking, or you can be conservative about it and say, okay we don't know what people were ticking this box for. It's probably the most violent category because it's got the word "shoot" in it. But how you make those decisions is really difficult.

Game & Word: Yep. Yep.

Pete Etchells: And even how you categorize games now. Like how do you categorize Minecraft?

Game & Word: Mm-hmm.

Pete Etchells: Is it a sandbox building game? Is it a multiplayer, social, glorified, social network game? Is it a violent game? Is it a violent first person game? Because I can't remember whether they actually did it in the end, but there was talk about it being banned in Turkey a few years ago. Because it was violent cuz you're going around hitting zombies with sticks.

So nobody really agrees on how to define that. Genres aren't a good way of defining them, clearly.

You could get super artsy about this, right? So what counts as a game.

And everybody will have different definitions of that. So that's one of many reasons why it's really hard to do research in the area because you're just trying to deal with this amorphous, constantly changing thing, but nobody really knows how to define and nobody really knows how to talk about it.

Yeah. I found that was part of the reason why I wrote the book was to try and find a way of talking about video games in a way that people who play them can relate to, and it doesn't feel patronizing, but people who don't play them and don't really have much experience of them can get a sense of what they're like, really.

And it's one of the things I talk about in the book is that, games are an entertainment medium. And it's weird that we have these conversations, right? We don't have these conversations about movies or music, not anymore. Like maybe had the moral panic debates about heavy metal and stuff in the 1980s, but we don't talk about, "is music driving people to commit horrendous acts of societal violence" and things like that. But we still have these conversations around video games.

And I think one of the things that sets games apart from other forms of entertainment media is that there's a really high barrier to entry. So if you've never watched a movie before and you want to get into movies, cuz you think that might be a fun thing, you might enjoy them, you go to a cinema or you stick on the TV because there are about a million movie channels. Now you literally just sit there and watch a movie. And if you don't like that movie, if it doesn't gel well with you, it's not that hard to watch a different movie. And eventually you might find a genre of movies that you like.

If you decide having never played them before that you wanna get into video games, you get a PlayStation 5, if you can. Good luck. You open it up, loads of wires. You figure out how to plug it into your TV and things like that. Then you gotta figure out how to navigate around the menu system.

Stick the game in, then the game's gotta download a load of updates for two hours. And then at that point, finally, you can start the game. You can start playing it, but before you can get into the game, you've gotta figure out how to use the controller, what the controls are for that particular game.

And then the first time you play it, you'll be terrible at it. Cause you've never really done anything like this before. And there's a learning curve to learning what the ins and outs of the games are. And it takes a long time investment to get to a point in a game where you feel competent, where you really get what's going on, right? And that can be incredibly off putting for people to the point that if you haven't played video games before, and you watch somebody else playing video games, it looks like quite a jarring experience. Cause you don't really get what's going on. I found this now I'm starting to get old now.

And I'm nearing an age where anything new that comes out. I look at with a certain amount of fear and disdain, talk about eSports in the book as well. And I tried to get into eSports, but I think I, because I'm getting a bit old and my brain's getting a bit slower.

I just can't follow what's going on. I can't, it's just a blur to me of what's going on.

Game & Word: My wife is is very much a non-gamer in every sense of the word. Not just video games, too, like board games card games, everything. They just don't engage her mind the way that they do mine.

And over the years, I've tried introducing her to more newbie-friendly fare like Animal Crossing and like games like that. And nothing's really stuck, until we sat down to play What Remains of Edith Finch. And she actually really enjoyed it. And it's a short, only a two-hour game. So it's the only game so far, that she's actually finished with me.

Pete Etchells: That's one of the nice things about a an entertainment medium that's starting to mature, right? Like you look at the top 10 games and your Call of Duties and Animal Crossing and things like that. And there will always be a place for those sorts of games.

But as people who started out in the video games industry and started playing video games in the eighties and nineties have kinda grown up and developed more discerning taste, there's become more of an appetite for different sorts of games that tell different stories. And I think that's a real power of video games, that you can you can tell an infinite number of stories from an infinite number of perspectives that really draw people into a game.

And it's just a matter of trying to figure out what those games are, and what you like and what you don't. And I think we're increasingly seeing that really, that the developers really feel comfortable exploring more personal stories and presenting these as things to people in the knowledge that there will be a receptive audience for it. One of my favorite examples of that is Hellblade, which is a game that came out a few years ago. It's, your kind of standard looking first person perspective fighting game. The awesome thing about that game is that the main character has psychosis and it's part, it's very kind of integral part of this, the story. Now there's 2 decisions that you can make.

If you make a game like that, one is that you can do no research and just use all your kind of standard tropes about mental illness. And people will buy the game, but it'll be a rubbish, horror story, completely unrepresentative of what it's like to have psychosis, but it will work as a game. Or you can do what Hellblade did which was, get a a clinical psychiatrist involved in the development of the game, somebody who's worked with people who suffer from psychosis and from schizophrenia, through focus groups, with people who have this, to really understand what it's like to experience this sort of condition, and then build that into the game. And that's what they did with Hellblade. One of the interesting things about Hellblade is that it's one of the most realistic experiences you could have to date of trying to understand what it's like to have a psychotic episode.

And one of the nice things, I think about that story, it was funded by the Wellcome Trust, which is a biomedical charity based in the UK. They wanted this to be a sympathetic and accurate portrayal. A lot of people who suffer from psychosis and from schizophrenia, who've played the game have got in touch with Ninja Theory, the developers to say, "thank you for making this game because I can give it to my family and my friends and let them play it. And that's what it's like, that's my experience. And it's the closest that I've come to be able to give them an understanding of what these sorts of experiences are like, over and above talking about them." Cause you can never really truly, visualize what that might be like.

But this is the closest thing yet. And people get it a bit more now. And I think that's great, It's a AAA-rated top game in and of itself, with high production values and things like that. And it's got a good storyline. But there's this extra really cool scientific element to it that makes it better for people and the world, and it makes the world a little bit of a better place. And I don't think we would've necessarily seen that 15, 20 years the industry.

Game & Word: Yeah, absolutely. Do any other titles come, come to mind as far as good representations of living with certain mental illnesses?

Pete Etchells: Not that I can think of the top of my head, in terms of mental illnesses. I think in terms of human experiences, one of my favorite games over the past year has been a game called Spiritfarer, which I've been playing on the Switch. And Spiritfarer is, it's a weird game, but it's a nice game, but it's a difficult game as well.

It's a very complex game. For a lot of different reasons. It's a 2D side scrolling sort of game, and it's a little bit of lots of different things. So it's almost a bit like a sim management game, a business management game, but it's also a bit of an RPG as well. And the basic storyline is that you play this character called Stella, who is over in the afterlife as the person who ferries souls on to the great beyond.

And she's got this boat and you go around trying to find lost spirits. And each Spirit's basically a level. So each spirit has a series of quests to complete before they can find peace and you can send them. So it's a story about death basically, and you pitch it like that, and you say why would you wanna play a game about death?

That's a really depressing thing to play. And surely it's quite a horrible experience, but, it's all very cartoonish very lighthearted. So it's really nice sort of safe environment to think about think about death in and the reason that I mention that is that so it turns out that all of these spirits I don't think this is spoiling thing too much, but all of these spirits are people that Stella knew in her real life.

So they're kind of story arcs are mirroring things that happened up until their death in real life. And there's one particular story of a character who's really outgoing and really sociable. And you do a bunch of stuff for him. And every character, they have one big quest at the end.

And then the last thing that you do with them is that you put them in your little boat and you take them to this thing called the Ever Door. You have a really nice, deep and meaningful conversation with them. You've got this one particular character is this like big jovial, larger than life character. And he appears, or at least you finish his story quite a bit through the game.

So by this point, you've taken quite a few characters through and I should say that in and of itself is quite a heart wrenching experience because that's it, then they're not in the game anymore. They've gone. They're properly dead. They're a constellation in the sky.

So yeah, you build up quite a rapport with these characters, right? And you get to know them, you get to feel as though you know them, and then you lose them and it's quite hard, but there's this one character you go through the motions of doing their particular quest and then their last big quest is everybody, you gotta find out what their favorite food is, you have this big feast, and it's lovely, then night comes in, and you wake up in the morning expecting to see that quest and your quest log saying "take this guy to the Ever Door." And it doesn't appear and he's disappeared. Like he's not on the boat anymore. So when it happened, I, spent a good five, 10 minutes wandering around the boat, trying to find him talking to different characters.

And they all say, "oh, I don't know he's gone." And that's it. That, that is the end of that character's story. There's nothing else. There's no Ever Door sequence. That is it. And it transpires through, looking at what goes on later in the game that, that this guy in real life was Stella's uncle.

And this is what happened in real life, just one day he disappeared and nobody ever saw him again. And, it really struck me as one of the most accurate representations that I've ever seen of death and how it actually does happen. We like to think that when people close to us die, that, we will have the chance to say things that we want to say to them, and that, you can prepare yourself for what's gonna happen and steal yourself against that eventuality.

And sometimes a lot of the time, that's not how death works, people go when you don't expect them to, people go in ways that you don't expect them to. And it just hits you out of nowhere and there's nothing you can do about it. And that's it. And you've gotta live with the consequences of that.

You've gotta deal with reflect on. And I was, I had to put the game down after that stop for a bit and really think about this.

Game & Word: Yeah. Mm-hmm

Pete Etchells: It really hit me. Going through this motion and it started to treat it like a a sequential game in a way saying, "I've got this spirit, I've gotta do X, Y, and Z, then take through the Ever Door, do X, Y, Z, take through the Ever Door, and then I'll get to the end."

And then it just hits you with this one character that "no, that's not how things always work." And there's nothing you could do about it. They've gone. That's it. You can't do your nice little rituals that you did with all the other characters that you built up and, make sure you give them one final hug and things like that.

And that's a really good example to me of what the power of video games are, right? Because, you don't really get that sort of experience with any other sort of medium where you are the person, you are the character that's been personally affected by this thing. And because you've invested so much time and energy in the process getting to that point, you've got skin in the game effectively, and these things that happen with them can really, have an impact on you.

And yet, it's this super fun, super bright cartoony game. It's not, it doesn't feel like a hardship to play, but it's a way to explore grief and explore how we deal with death in this really nice, safe environment, to think about, if you've never gone through that before, this might be a little bit what it feels like.

If you have gone through that before, you get to reflect on. You know how you dealt with it before and how you might deal with it again, and things like that. And I think that's one of the amazing things about video games that we miss in a lot of the general conversations.

Game & Word: So I guess to wrap up here, my audience is actually split fairly evenly between gamers and non-gamers. So if you could offer some parting words of wisdom, as far as, interpreting whatever hot new research comes out on video games, or some moral panic, or whatever, what would you advise to gamers and to non-gamers, as far as interpreting that critically and responsibly?

Pete Etchells: That's such a good question. I think it's something that I'd say of any kind of science in the news. Really, science communication is a big part of what I do. And that's a really difficult question, right? So my, my kind of naive answer there is that, if there's a new study that comes out in the media the ideal scenario thing to do is to not necessarily pay too much attention about what's said in the story itself, but go and read the paper itself or very least read the abstract to get a bit more of an idea of what it might be suggesting practically.

That's a ridiculous thing to suggest, because nobody's got time for that unless it's their job, like it is mine. I think one of the big things is to just, and I think this is true not just of video games, but of anything broadly that you see in the news, particularly about science, is to just be reflective of your own biases.

So don't just automatically accept something because it fits with your worldview, and don't just reject something because it runs counter to what you think already. Be critical in both of those. It's a lot harder to be critical when something comes along that you agree with. But those are the times to be super wary and super reticent.

But just think critically about these things. Think about, if you can access the abstract, does what the news article say match what's in there? If you don't wanna do, that's fine. I totally understand. But look at other news sources and see how other places are reporting this.

Are they all reporting it in the same way? Is it all off the same press release? Is the press release right? Things like that, press releases are very often wrong. When you think about the point of a press release is, so what my job is as a scientist is to do research. And what that involves is doing a study, writing it up for publication in a journal getting it published, and then using that to springboard the next study scientists are increasingly pressured to care about impact though.

So when you've got a study that you think might be interesting to people, you'll write a press release for it, or you'll get your university press office to write a press release, or you'll get the journal to write a press release. So that point, what you're doing is you're writing a very short blurb about what the study's about, why it's important, why people should care about it.

Now, one of the big points of a press release is to make it interesting enough that a newspaper will pick it up, right? And there's real risk there that therefore what you end up doing is over exaggerating something or blowing things out of proportion. And therefore, what happens in news is, a lot of the time, you'll see basically a press release published. You have be very careful just taking those at face value because they will have been written in such a way to make them attractive for newspapers to pick up.

And attractive in that sense does not always necessarily equate with accuracy, but scientists are guilty of this as well. In the drive to make things seem more novel and exciting and sexy, in the discussion section of scientific journal article, which is the last section where you talk about what all of this stuff might mean that you've just done.

There is a tendency sometimes for people to go a bit crazy in the last paragraph and go like "in conclusion, further research is needed, but this has the potential to inform new treatments for such and such a disease," when actually what they did had nothing to do with that.

But the way science journalists read scientific articles, is that they'll read that bit first. So if you go, "this could be a cure for cancer," then you can't be surprised. Then when the newspaper article is headlined "scientists discover new cure for cancer," because you wrote it in your article, even though if somebody talks to you go "actually, no, it's not. We just said that because it might possibly in the future." I think you always have to remember that scientists are human and humans can be idiots. And humans can be fallible and they can be biased and they can have pressures that run counter to scientific accuracy, sometimes not deliberately, but that's just the way the world works.

So don't just buy something because the newspaper article says "scientists say this," think about, does it make sense? Does the research question match what they did? Do their results match? Make sense based on the methodologies that they used. Talk to people, there's loads of scientists out there on places like Twitter and stuff who love talking about science, and talking about accuracy and science and they're good barometers.

When some newspaper article comes out, there'll be somebody talking about it on Twitter and they can be a good potential barometer. It's risky me saying that, I think because, obviously the counter to that is, the easy way of interpreting what I said there is to go "I'm just not gonna believe anything that I see written in the news about science."

And I don't think that's the right approach, either. And this is why it's so hard, right? Because, whether or not a study that you see about video games in the news is worth reading about or paying attention to is dependent on so many hidden factors that you won't potentially have access to.

It's very difficult to get a gauge of whether that's worth paying attention to. There's a very simple barometer. That's probably a really objective one, more than anything that I've said so far, if you see stuff about video games published and big claims made about them in the news.

First thing to do is ask, "did they make their data available? Did they pre-register their study?" So in other words, did they put a paper up online somewhere that said, before they did anything in the study, before they actually ran the experiment, they put a paper up saying, "this is what we're gonna do, this is how we're gonna do it, and this is how we're gonna analyze the data." Because what you'd hope is that, once they come collecting the data, they actually follow the things that they said that we were gonna do.

And at the very least, if people do that, you can be a little, not completely convinced, but you can be a little bit more reassured that something weird hasn't gone on where, they've got some data, they analyzed it, it didn't give them the result that they thought they wanted. So they analyzed it in a different way and then analyzed it in a different way, and eventually they found the result that they thought was gonna happen. So they just report that.

There's an entire chapter in the book about why that's a problem. But things like preregistration and making your data and available to people, are a good potential, not a complete panacea, but they're a good inoculation against dodgy headlines.

Game & Word: Do you wanna plug your pluggables?

Pete Etchells: I haven't really got any current pluggables, except if you're interested in reading about video games, I've got a book and I've been talking about it. It's called Lost in a Good Game. It's about why we play games and what they might do for us as opposed to do to us.

So if you're interested in psychology and how video games affect our mental wellbeing and behavior and things like that then that's the book for you.

Game & Word: Great. Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Pete Etchells: No worries. Sorry. It took me so long to get there in the end.

Game & Word: Oh, no worries. It was worth the wait, great conversation. And thank you all for listening, and ladies, gentlemen, non binary folks, anyone and everyone in between: Dr. Pete Etchells. Thank you very much.

Pete Etchells: Thank you.

OUTRO: All right. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you so much, once again, to our wonderful guest, Dr. Pete Etchells, for such a great conversation and such useful insights. As we both mentioned several times, his book is called Lost in a Good Game and it's available wherever books and audio books are sold.

I'd also like to thank all of you for listening today, and especially like to thank Game & Word's paid subscribers for keeping this whole newsletter, podcasting, and publishing operation running, free, and available to all. I particularly want a shout out Game & Word's Founding Members for making this episode possible.

They are: Le_Takas from Lucerne, Switzerland, member since April 14th, 2022. Ela F from San Diego, California, member since April 24th, 2020. Alexi F from Chicago, Illinois, member since May 13th, 2022. And Elvira. O, from Queretaro Mexico, member since May 18th, 2022.

And now that this episode is aired, that wraps up Game & Word Volume Three: Game Over Matter. I do hope you've enjoyed reading, listening, and watching this volume content as I did producing it. Next up is Game & Word Volume Four: Tempus Ludos, which will dive into how video games explore the concept of time and how we experience it.

Now, in order to better prepare for Volume Four, Game & Word's free publication will be on a one month hiatus, starting now, so that I can take the time to properly research, outline, record, write, edit, and generally have enough time to deliver the quality analysis you've come to expect and love from Game & Word, while still maintaining some degree of sanity on my end.

However. If you're a paid subscriber of Game & Word, you will continue to receive weekly content throughout this period, including a really fun piece next week, where I take a bunch of personality tests and see how much they correlate with my play style. To get in on this and other content while their regular newsletter is on break, upgrade to a paid subscription today.

But regardless of whether you're a paid subscriber, a free subscriber, or no subscriber at all, thank you very much for listening today. Ladies, gentlemen, non binary folks, anyone and everyone in between: this publication, this newsletter, this podcast, would not be possible without you.

So I am always eternally grateful for your readership, your listenership, and your support. Once again, I'm Jay Rooney, and this has been another episode of The Game & Word Podcast. Talk to you again, next time. In the meantime, keep leveling up your curiosity, knowledge, and wonder stats with Game & Word, the Curious Gaming Newsletter and Podcast, and a 2022 Substack Featured Publication. Stay curious, players!

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

Lost in a Good Game: Why we play video games and what they can do for us

View Details

The Game & Word Podcast, Volume 3, Episode 2: Final Fantasy, Real Individuation (ft. Eve)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Podcast References

Transcript

Footnotes

Introduction

Hello again, psychonauts!

For this episode of The Game & Word Podcast, we’re doing something a little different.

Our guest today, Eve, is not an academic, doesn’t have a Ph.D., isn’t a content creator, and is not on social media—but they are a longtime friend of the newsletter, as well as someone with a ton of personal experience with this week’s games and topics—both as a lifelong geek and a member of the LGBT community (oh, and they’re also a paid subscriber… hint, hint).

And we had one of the most profound conversations I’ve had the honor of hosting on this newsletter.

We chatted about facing one’s Shadows and the process of individuation, especially as shown in Final Fantasy VII (FF7) and—to a lesser extent—The Legend of Zelda series. We also talked about our own experiences and our own journeys of individuation—as well as the collective process of individuation currently unfolding in the COVID era.

Hope you enjoy our chat. Happy Pride, everyone!

~Jay

PS—This podcast goes into some depth on FF7. Before listening, I highly recommend brushing up on some background information by reading the section on FF7 in last week’s issue:

Or instead, you could spend 50 hours playing FF7 to completion—and then another ~10 hours reading and watching one plot analysis and summary after another in the vain hope of making sense of the narrative labyrinth you just emerged from. The choice is yours.

(And you thought Game & Word was long!)

It’s Time to Subscribe!

Game & Word is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, the best thing you can do is subscribe.

You can subscribe for free, and get each new issue and podcast episode delivered straight to your inbox (or the Substack iOS app) every Sunday.

Or, if you want to directly contribute to Game & Word’s production, and keep it free and accessible to all, upgrade to a paid subscription—and gain access to exclusive bonus content as well!

Podcast References

Books

The Psychology of Final Fantasy, edited by Anthony M. Bean, Ph.D.

The Lifestream of Identity Development, Memories, and the Final Fantasy Franchise, by Ryan Kelly

Games

Final Fantasy:

Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core

The Legend of Zelda:

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

Extras

Our Guest: Eve

Email: evemoonelf@gmail.com

Newsletter: Nintendo Switch Weekly (NSW)

Newsletter

Twitter (NSW)

Twitter (Chris Brandrick)

Discord (Request an invite from Chris after subscribing to NSW!)

Video Podcast: Critical Role

Homepage

YouTube

Twitter (Critical Role)

Twitter (Travis Willingham)

Theme Music Attribution

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Game & Word: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Game & Word Podcast, and Happy Pride! I'm your host, Jay Rooney, as usual. And today I've got a wonderful guest for you today: Eve.

That's right, "Eve." Now Eve is quite a different guest than usual. Eve is not an academic, doesn't have a Ph.D., isn't a content creator, and stays far away from social media. They're simply a good friend of the newsletter and one that happens to have extensive personal experience with the games and the topics that we're going to discuss today—as an avid geek, gamer, and fellow weirdo, and as a member of the LGBT community.

As a result, my conversation with Eve was one of the most profound and insightful that I've had with any guests since starting this publication… six months ago. Wow, time flies. Anyway, I hope you have as much fun listening to our talk as we did recording it.

Before we begin, though, I do want to caution you.

We will be delving fairly deep into some of the story and lore of Final Fantasy 7. So if you've ever played Final Fantasy 7 or just don't remember it, then I highly recommend reading Issue 3.5 of Game & Word, which on the date of this episode's broadcast will be last week's issue.

You'll find a fairly condensed explanation of the relevant plot elements that we're going to discuss as well as links to several different plot summary and analysis videos. In case you just wanna dive in deeper. This way, you'll be better able to follow our conversation without feeling lost, even if you've never played the game before, or any game before.

Of course, you could also play Final Fantasy 7, which I do recommend if you're into Japanese role playing games, or JRPGs for short. But since completing the game takes at least 50 hours, and that's if you kinda hustle through it, and fully grasping the stories, twists, layers, and nuances is gonna take multiple play throughs, or a comparable amount of time, perusing analysis, videos, and fan discussions, trying to parse together just what the hell kind of story you just experienced.

Which if that's cool with you, awesome! But reading last week's issue is definitely much quicker.

Imagine that. There are things longer than Game & Word, after all!

In any case, once you're ready, grab your cup of Joe or your cup of tea, put your earbuds on lay down on your couch, like you would in an old-timey psychiatrists office, and press the play button.

I'll be back after we're done to wrap things up. Until then, enjoy Game & Word's interview with Eve on Final Fantasy 7 and individuation. See you on the other side!

Interview
Game & Word: Thank you for joining me today, Eve. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Eve: Hi! I'm Eve, I'm the guest for this episode. I am a LGBT individual. So, Happy Pride to all my fellow queer folks out there! I'm a gender queer man, or non-binary man. I use any pronouns. And today we're gonna be talking about some topics related to individuation and the sense of self and the masks that we wear as individuals. We're gonna be focusing on two specific sets of video games or franchises: Final Fantasy 7 specifically, and the Zelda franchise, with a focus on Majora's Mask and some of the games where Link has to fight a Dark Link version of himself.

I played Final Fantasy 7 when I was 14 and a freshman in high school. So it was around 2001 or 2002. And I revisited some parts of Final Fantasy 7, so that I can have a fresh memory for this recording. And I have also played a whole bunch of Zelda games. And then I've watched playthroughs of some of the ones that I haven't played.

Game & Word: All right. So Eve, we are talking about a very particular scene in Final Fantasy 7, but of course, we'll be expanding a bit beyond that.

We're looking at Cloud's process of, by the way, I should also say this: spoiler alert! This video is one massive spoiler for Final Fantasy 7 and a few Zelda games. So if you don't want this game spoiled for you, feel free to stop the video.

Eve: You either need to go play, yeah, the 50 hours of that game or do what I did to refresh my memory right before this, and go watch someone's 40 minute Final Fantasy 7 plot summary of the entire game, so that we don't spoil it for you.

Game & Word: Yes. Either way works. And either way, the video will still be here, by the time you get back here and we'll be ready for you.

So we are talking about the one particular scene in Final Fantasy 7, where Cloud and Tifa fall into the Lifestream while Cloud is in the midst of this amnesiatic disassociative state brought upon by what's basically one pile of trauma piled onto another, piled onto another.

And it leads to this sequence where where Tifa accompanies him through his subconscious and walks through his memories to piece together who is the real Cloud. Cause up until this point, we've gotten very conflicting information of who is Cloud, right?

Eve: Yeah. It really is tens of hours worth of this edgy boy main character being steeped in the mystery of his own backstory.

Game & Word: And spoiler alert, it turns out he's not quite who we thought he was. But at the same time, he is in a way. The big twist is that, Cloud is introduced as being member of this elite class of mercenaries called SOLDIER, and this is all that the player and the characters have always known him as. It even says it in the manual, that Cloud is ex-SOLDIER. And one of the big plot twists that actually, no, he was never a member of SOLDIER.

He was a lowly infantryman, and that's what precipitates his breakdown, is this horrible truth that he'd been trying so hard to keep repressed for himself and as far as, what he showed to others. And once it got to a point where he was staring that truth in the face and he couldn't deny it anymore. Then his mind just splinters.

Eve: I didn't remember any of this. My memory, like a lot of people listening right now who are closer to our age, undisclosed, your memory of Final Fantasy 7 is probably from somewhere between 1997 and 2002.

I think it was when I played it. So I had to dive down memory lane. I'm assuming that as a video game scholar and writer, you just have these in your brain permanently and you remembered all of this. He's laughing on camera. But for me, I had to refresh my memory. I had to watch some plot summaries. I had to watch this scene. And it was amazing to watch the pieces of this come together.

Cuz I don't think I ever pieced together the complexity of his backstory, myself. The entire story of Cloud, in my mind as a young person, was "cool guy with big hair and big sword fights to save the day."

In reality, he's a very vulnerable character. He spends most of the game suffering an extended period of psychological trauma. And then finally the scene that we're talking about is him patching a lot of it together. And then that's really a pivotal moment that gives the rest of the game a little more focus in moving towards an end goal.

And it's interesting watching after that scene takes place, he apologizes to the whole main crew. A scene that I don't even remember. But he is standing in the air ship and he's "Oh, sorry guys." And they're like, "Stop apologizing, we gotta go to the next area and fight the bad guys" or whatever.

But it's interesting to watch. The people in charge of the writing for this game built this sort of—and it's so appropriate for, I've been reading your newsletter in the current chapter about this idea of masks and the Persona and the Shadow behind the mask—that Cloud, has built in story elements that give him physical or physiological excuses for all of the normal psychological stuff.

So, he can't live up to the fact that, like you said, he dreamed he wanted to be in SOLDIER. He heard about Sephiroth, this super powerful guy. Who's a super cool guy that leads SOLDIER. They're a little vague on what he hears about Sephiroth, but he decides "I need to be strong like that so I can protect Tifa, because one time we fell off of a cliff and almost died." That's the call to action for Cloud Strife. More spoilers, but we said that at the top.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: So he has to go into the military so he can protect his childhood girlfriend from falling into a ravine again. Great motivation!

But he can't cut it. He goes and joins the military and his friend, Zack, becomes a member of SOLDIER. And he just is too ashamed to go back home, too ashamed to write home and admit that he basically just became an infantry foot soldier, and decides, "Okay, this is my life now. I'm just a foot soldier in the military because I have to hide from the fact that I wasn't good enough to fulfill my own weird self-inflicted goal and dream."

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: And then they give him this easy out for repressing all those memories, because he then gets whatever injected with these magical cells…

Game & Word: Jenova.

Eve: He gets Jenova cells injected and he's trapped in a magical test tube chamber for two years or something. So he has this easy out that he has basically been Mako poisoned, and he is catatonic. So when he wakes up from that, he, the last thing he remembers is on this truck ride, Zack telling him all these stories and he thinks, "That's me!"

So he wakes up and says, "That's me, now." And then we watch throughout the game. and the entire game is just someone coming to grips with the fact that they invented a persona for themselves that is entirely fabricated, someone else's experience, repressed his real memories, and is just lying to himself and everyone. Which is of course, a thing that happens in real life.

But they give Cloud this out of, he's not just repressing memories and trying to be someone he isn't, he also genuinely believes it, because he's infected with powerful alien cells. And so we have a fun sci-fi explanation for our psychological situation.

Game & Word: Basically. Yeah. That's so funny too. I've always thought it was so funny how the series is called “Final Fantasy” and it's gotten progressively more sci-fi ish as the years go by .

Eve: I always thought of VII as being the turning point where they were , "Okay, hang on. VII, you have spaceships and VIII, you have spaceships and cars." And they were like, "We gotta make a U-turn on this and get back to some fantasy." They tow that line.

Game & Word: Definitely. And, of course, not that they're mutually exclusive or anything. I always thought that was funny. Cloud's thing of repressing these memories and then also grafting false memories or new ones. There's a technical term for it actually. It's called a disassociative fugue slash false memory syndrome. He's in this disassociative fugue state from all the trauma he's endured. And then also, cuz Zack gave him something to latch onto, in a sense he took Zack's mask. And put that on himself as a persona.

And of course, Jenova cells didn't help either. That introduces a whole other layer of complication, that, I won't quite get into detail. But Cloud's story also brings up this concept of the Shadow.

And we hear this talked about a lot. As far as psychology goes, and psychological concepts, it's pretty well known. And in media, it's provided very rich fodder for conflict and for storylines. But you have the Shadow, which it's an archetype.

Which is supposed to be this universal truth, basically (to massively oversimplify the concept). And the Shadow is all the parts of your personality that your conscious self, that your ego, tries to repress. Is either ashamed of, or doesn't approve of it. And so your ego, your conscious self, either tries to ignore it or hide it or actively repress it. Which never works out well, because the Shadow is a part of you, and we all have our Shadows.

And they're as much of a part of us as our conscious selves. So as long as we are alive, our Shadows are alive, right? So it's a fight that you can't win. And the more you try to keep it under wraps, the more you try to put a lid on it, the more you block the valve, it just builds up pressure and keeps building up pressure until it blows up. And when it blows up, it's never pretty.

And we see that happen.

Eve: And you have to let some amount of yourself through and, in Cloud's case, and again, we have this hilarious added element of he can't just decide, "Today's the day I'm gonna tell everyone that I didn't make it in SOLDIER," which no one cares about but him at that point. They're trying to save the world and he's, "I didn't make it into the elite branch of the military!" But for him, he literally doesn't remember any of it. It's locked behind, he's been genetically tampered with, or whatever sci-fi stuff.

He's such a great example of this idea of, repressing the Shadow, but letting some elements of it back into, blowing off a little bit of the steam of that valve, so it doesn't go over. Because he has taken parts of his true history, particularly the ones where he was in the same place as Zack, and then woven those in. So he's taken his own identity and woven it into the tale of Zack's life.

I know it's out of scope here, but it makes me want to—I'm never gonna play it—it makes me wanna watch a playthrough of that game where you're Zack, and you see the whole prequel from Zack's perspective, now. It's interesting to think how they would blend those. And if the listeners have played that, then they already know.

The one element of this that I immediately to me, I was like, "Oh no, we have to be critical of this, we have to call this out." We get this whole grandiose science fantasy analogy of the Mask and the Persona and the Shadow in these literal fake memories that Cloud has of Zack.

But the Final Fantasy 7 metaphor for the psychological help you would need to get through that, is the incredibly dangerous entire trope that his childhood girlfriend is the one that fixes his brain, quite literally.

It falls so hard into that trapping of, "A good woman can fix her man, and then he'll be able to save the world," and it's, "Oh no, this was a little bit problematic." But I guess there's no psychologists in Midgar. Everyone's being killed by giant...

Game & Word: No, there is, actually. His name's Hojo!

Eve: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. The evil scientist. Yeah.

Game & Word: Final Fantasy is, I think, one of the worst offenders when it comes to falling back on that trope repeatedly.

Eve: Especially that era. We do have to give it some leeway, on being from 1997 or whatever. Cause they started to take a U-turn on that, I guess in 2000. Yeah. X-2 and XIII where we have much more female focus in some of those games. We can acknowledge it and move on. Not the point of the podcast.

Game & Word: Yeah. No psychologists in Midgar. That's why it's such a messed up place.

Eve: Yeah. Everyone's having a tough time.

The ground's opening up and giant Weapons are coming out. So we're gonna give them all a pass that they got through it as best as they could and they saved the world. And Cloud sure did reconcile all the pieces of his Persona.

I do wanna say in the scene that we're actually talking about where there's three different Clouds, I was waiting for that to look like three aspects of himself. And I guess in a way it was, but not really, it was just like these three Clouds represent three cut scenes, not really three aspects of the self. I thought it was gonna be a little deeper than it was. In reality, it was just a vehicle to have Tifa watch three cut scenes and then unlock all of Cloud's trauma and past.

Game & Word: Yeah, basically three memories, in essence. That's what she's walking through. So I guess it also raises, and this is a more philosophical question, but… what are memories, or what is an identity, but an amalgamation of memories? But that might be getting a bit too deep.

Eve: Yeah. The memories, the experiences, the perception of self. Yeah, we're gonna get into some Philosophy 101 discussions very quickly if we go down that trail.

Game & Word: So instead of Philosophy 101, let's stick to Psychology 101, and talk about that whole process of piecing together Cloud's persona. So that's a process that if Jung were alive, if Carl Jung were alive today, he'd call that an example of individuation. And individuation is the process by which an individual faces and reckons [with] their own Shadow.

And doesn't quote, unquote, "defeat" it. That's another thing that, media likes to portray is heroes literally battling their Shadows, when generally speaking, you're not gonna like, literally throw rocks at your Shadow, but...

Eve: Yeah, you can't just kill the bad memory of yourself and then say, "Only the good parts are enough." You have to somehow reconcile that with the Mask you've been wearing.

Game & Word: Exactly. And that's what it means to face your Shadow. Instead of confronting your shadow in a hostile way, you reckon [with] it somehow. And of course, this process is gonna look differently for everyone, because there are as many Shadows as there are people. But yeah, media loves to have this thing of you literally battling your Shadow. We see it in video games a lot, too. In Zelda for example, you have Dark Link. That's literally Link fighting his Shadow.

Eve: Right. I was gonna say, I think this is where we bring in our other example, which is the Zelda and Dark Zelda here, which is a cartoonish example of this process of, "Kill the bad version of you!"

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: I'm trying to think of which games you have, like a Dark Link that you have to fight. I think it came from Zelda 2, originally.

Game & Word: Yes.

Eve: It was just a pallete swap villain. I know you mentioned, I think [Majora‘s Mask]. Or am I just thinking of that, ‘cause it was in the newsletter?

Game & Word: It was in the newsletter. Yeah. It’s Ocarina of Time, where you battle Dark Link. So, close.

Eve: You battle Dark Link. Yes, exactly.

The funny thing about Cloud's individuation is that most of it, we don't see it in the way that a real person experiences any of it, because he is literally in the Lifestream with Tifa. So they've fallen into a giant crack that's opened in the ground. They're swimming in the Lifestream, the Earth's energy. Or Gaia's energy, or whatever.

And so she's just piecing together parts of his memories and he's, subconsciously I guess, accepting them and reconciling them before he even wakes up. And then, they wash up on the beach, he wakes up, and now he just in one quick cut scene is, "Oh, cool. I remembered all the stuff I repressed. So that's all true. Sorry, guys." And then moves on.

And admittedly, it's a video game for teenagers to fight bad guys. So I do understand that they didn't wanna spend a tremendous amount of time on—they'd already spent enough time at that point in the game, on Cloud being an edgy weird boy!

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: So I get them moving on. But for Cloud, it seemed like his individuation was really just gaining access to the parts that he had repressed. And then he was like, "Oh, boom. Okay. I've accepted all these. Moving on. Let's go save the world." So, I guess that's not the worst way to do it if you're mentally healthy enough to just grab all that and run with it like he did!

Game & Word: Yeah. Suppose when you're in a world with no psychologists, you play the cards you're dealt, right?

Eve: Yeah. he was dealt a talking wolf, and a machine gun arm guy, and a girlfriend that helped him solve all of his mental problems.

Game & Word: Yep. And Cloud was just a-okay from that point on! Actually, no, he wasn't. I think in Advent Children, he's still messed up. Not as messed up, but still messed up.

Eve: Yeah, the real challenge of making something that's supposed to be a one shot and then realizing it's incredibly successful and you need to have a sequel, prequel, and a spinoff… is that if your protagonist has really followed his Hero Journey, so to speak, to the end, you have to find some reason for him to have conflict again.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: I'm trying to think if in the rest of Final Fantasy 7, if that kind of stuff resurfaces, but… nah, we're good now. We're good.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: We solved all the mysteries of this story!

Game & Word: That's a good point. The fact that it's very easy to get the impression, just by consuming media, that individuation is a one-shot thing. "I have to gather all my courage, and dive deep into my mind, and swing a sword at this shadowy mirror of myself, and then integrate all my trauma into myself, and then boom! Nothing, ever, is gonna trouble me in life ever again, ever."

When really, it's a lifelong process. Because our Shadows are always gonna exist, as long as we are. As we grow and we change, our Shadow changes as well, and then we can integrate as much of it as we want at one point, but there's still… it's never gonna go away.

If you approach it as this thing of, "Oh I've reckoned with this particular trauma, and this is what I've been fixated on for most of my life and I'm done," then you're gonna be in for a pretty rude awakening. Because there's always going to be new things to deal with. There's always gonna be new traumas. There's always going to be some part of you that you don't like, or you want to hide from others. So it's a lifelong process. Yeah.

Eve: We're always changing. Life is just a process of change from start to finish.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: Is this the part where we relate this to our own experiences?

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: ‘Cause if so, tag, you're it! You have to go first and tell us about your Mask and the Shadow that your Mask casts.

Game & Word: There [are] a few different ones. I was—obviously, spoiler alert: gaming writer—a huge geek growing up. And I was a child of, you know, the late eighties and the nineties, and being a quote “geek” was decidedly not cool.

Eve: It's become more cool. Hasn't it?

Game & Word: Yes.

Eve: I forget. Are you like a year or two older… I was born in ‘87.
Game & Word: ‘85.

Eve: Two years older than me. Yeah, exactly. It was really much more, still, you got bullied automatically for being a nerd, right?

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: Video games weren't cool.

Game & Word: Nope.

Eve: Yeah.

Game & Word: But my wife, she teaches middle school. And I actually volunteer there sometimes. I help her with her creative writing club students, and I'll DM a few sessions for her creative writing club students.

Eve: Oh, okay. Gotcha.

Game & Word: And, it is remarkable, how much more accepting they are of people's differences. And being a geek is cool now, of course, but it's also people of different races, or LGBTQ people. The zeitgeist of this particular cohort is very much just, "Be who you are, and live your life, and that's cool."

Eve: Yeah, there really does seem to have been… I think I noticed it in the 2010s that, people coming outta school, I was like, "Wow, people are nicer now." Like, they're just a little bit… it's not that no one gets bullied. I'm sure that's still a problem, and we still have a lot of progress to make. But kids are maybe slightly less malicious to each other now for no reason, the way they were when we were growing up.

And I'm an LGBT individual myself. Until maybe three years ago, I had that pretty well under wraps.

I was happy with who I was as a queer person at the time, but I didn't present in a way that was visibly queer. It was one of those “silently not straight” type of things. So I had this sort of upbringing, like you said of late eighties, early nineties, and getting picked on for just something as simple as liking a video game, which is wild to think about now. People would get absolutely bullied into the ground for that.

And I remember as I got into college and the workforce and I was surrounded by people who were slightly more mainstream than me, people who played video games, but maybe they were more playing mainstream games and not JRPGs.

And I started to bridge between my nerdy upbringing and a slightly more mainstream version of myself. Like I started watching American Football and I was like, oh, this is actually pretty fun. Now I have something to talk to my coworkers about. I started playing fantasy football. I started getting into like car culture a little bit, so that I had something to talk about with the normal people around me, so to speak.

Is that is that something you've ever had that experience where you're like, oh, I gotta pretend to be a little more normal at this point, you know?

Game & Word: Oh, 100%. And I think the first time that I really truly felt like I could be myself, was when I moved to San Francisco about… geez, almost 10 years ago. Up until then. Yeah. I was always putting on some kind of mask.

So sports, I think is a really good example. I never particularly cared about sports, but I've always at least, followed them. So that I would have something to talk about, with my roommates or my colleagues or whatnot.

There's also a lot of cultural and societal, pressure and expectations to be more overtly masculine that I really felt comfortable being.

Eve: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Game & Word: So that's another front, that I would have to put on.

Eve: That's right. Yeah, I'm uniquely positioned to talk about the years of trying to fit in with toxic masculinity and going the other way on it. But yeah, being a weird nerdy kid going to a private school and having a small group of friends growing up and then getting thrust into a slightly more mainstream society.

For me, at least, the sort of mask I was wearing in the individuation process I was going through between the age of, I'm gonna say 19 and 20 something, was this sort of balancing that masculinity that society puts on you. But not going too far with it, but going far enough with it that I could learn the language of the men around me.

I worked in an IT field that most of my coworkers were men and learning how normal men, that don't just sit at home and play video games by themselves all night, communicate and relate to each other. And, that experience of something that I would've always rejected to that point of, "I'm not comfortable being this kind of person," learning it as almost like a second language so that I could relate to these people, and eventually getting to the point where I thought, "This isn't really healthy, but it's not bad."

Like these men are speaking a language that I don't speak, but now I get it. And now there is a bond here that is unique, you know what I mean?

Game & Word: Mm-hmm.

Eve: We're only allowed to talk about four topics, but we can relate everything back to those four topics. It's all either Marvel or, sports or something else, but, speaking that language.

And I got then playfully made fun of by, my friends from school who were like, "What's this going on, Craig's the sports guy now." For the listeners, Craig is my birth name. So I go by Craig when I'm using a masculine name, or Eve when I'm using a more feminine name. Because otherwise, you have to come up with a non-binary name and suddenly your name is Spoon or something like that. Shout out to all the five Enbys listening to this. Sorry for calling you out like that.

Yeah, it was interesting getting trapped in between the two worlds. To call out, I'm sure some of your listeners know Critical Role, very popular Dungeons and Dragons live play show. I was gonna say podcast, but video show. Travis Willingham is a voice actor and a player on Critical Role who basically grew up trapped between these two worlds.

He's a huge, I don't know if you're familiar, Jay, he's this huge, six foot three, jacked dude from Texas, with a "yeehaw" accent. And he grew up doing drama and Dungeons and Dragons and playing football because he was a born athlete. Dude was just jacked and he had to play this role of preventing the jocks from bullying the nerds in his school by finding common ground for them to relate.

His great example in an interview was "They play the same N64 games that you do, so why are you gonna pick on them for doing something different?" But I know for years, part of my individuation process was reconciling those two worlds and I'm sure you had a similar experience.

Game & Word: Yeah, absolutely. And still ongoing.

Eve: Yeah.

Game & Word: And nowadays I have much healthier coping mechanisms and ways to go about it than in my early twenties.

Eve: Little older, a little wiser and in a thankfully more open and progressive environment now, in California, I would hope so.

Game & Word: Oh, absolutely. I was in Florida beforehand and no offense to Floridians out there, but… God, I was so happy to get the hell out of there.

Eve: We're gonna go down the list. I've offended the two non-binary listeners who have eccentric names. And now also everyone in the Great State of Florida.

Game & Word: Yep.

Eve: Yeah, it's been an interesting process after that now, because I rode that line for so long. And then now I'm a much more visibly and openly queer person, but I'm still closeted to my coworkers.

So my coworkers have what I call, this can be related back to any aspect, I think, that society puts on people in terms of something being normalized, but, people have what we call “cis-het blinders.” So you're in your lane, you see everyone as cis-het until they give you a reason not to believe that.

I don't look like a non-queer person. But my coworkers are just like, "Oh, okay. So you're just doing something different with your style. That's fine." Now I'm going through this process of being a completely different person, for my own safety and preference, around my friends, and a different person around my family, and a different person around my coworkers.

So we all wear those masks in our life. I'm sure that you have to put on a different persona in each of those scenarios.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: And it's been, I'm now in that sort of cartoon exaggerated version, like Cloud and Link, where it's like, "This isn't normal individuation you're in the Lifestream."

I'm not quite in the Lifestream, but I have to actually pretend to be a completely different person in different scenarios. So the Shadow of my mask has become huge, which is an interesting process I've been going through for the last two years or so. And I'm still on that journey.

So while we are a little older and a little wiser and we maybe have healthier ways to cope with it, I've given myself a boatload more to cope with in the last few years.

Game & Word: And to be sure, the last two years have done that for a lot of people.

Eve: For all of us.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: Yeah. It's...

Game & Word: My Shadow’s gotten stronger over two years of isolation and stress, and I won't bore y'all with my struggles over the past few years, but let's put it this way. There's a reason I'm staking my livelihood on this newsletter now, instead of at an office.

Eve: We're all a little shell shocked right now after the isolation. And it's been wild for me. I'm the kind of person that likes to people watch and observe the way that people behave and act.

And so I've been going through this shift in my own life of becoming a more visibly queer individual. And I'm like, "Oh, what can I get away with wearing? Is someone gonna look at me funny if I wear like women's pants?" Simple example. "Are these jeans too skinny for someone that others are going to maybe perceive as male?" But then you walk out into the world and it's, "Oh, people forgot how to even behave!"

Like everyone got trapped in their house for a year. And everyone's just wearing Crocs and leggings at the store. And people forgot how to function and interact.

So we're all re-emerging, shell-shocked, trying to reconcile the version of us that grew in isolation. And now trying to put a mask back on, remember how to be a social human being, and reconcile that with the scars that we're carrying forward from that long isolation. Interesting process for everyone to go through.

Game & Word: Yeah. Certainly. It's gonna keep a lot of psychologists and counselors employed for a very long time.

Eve: Oh yeah. The therapists have been making the big bucks in the last two years.

Game & Word: Yeah. Cause we've been talking a lot about individuation and Shadows on a personal level. But now what we're witnessing this collective process of individuation occurring or, I don't think we're quite at individuation yet, but certainly, I think our collective Shadows have become very clear to us.

And so now we're at this crossroad of, "Okay, what do we do now? Do we keep ignoring it or pretending it's not there, or are we actually gonna face it, try to do things maybe a little bit better?"

Eve: Yeah, everyone had a lot of time for self-reflection and during that time, major world events kept happening and are still happening that are, major world events are always happening but the last few years have seemed pretty wild. It's been real wild ride leading up to, and then the aftermath of COVID.

I wanna say about seven years ago, 2015 in my mind is the point where we started just going on a roller coaster ride. And it's never slowed down since. So yeah, our American society and our global society are trying to figure out what to do now. People are forming new identities left and right.

Game & Word: Yeah. I suppose this would be the part of the podcast where we propose solutions, but I'll be the first to admit, I have no idea. I have no idea like how to proceed collectively from here. It's...

Eve: You know what? Here's the solution, the wisdom: be kind to each other, be more open minded, try to understand each other, help people who need help. A few other platitudes we could throw on there.

We all have a lot to figure out about ourselves in this new modern world. Just be nice. Let's take some wisdom from those kids that grew up after us who didn't get bullied just for playing Dungeons and Dragons or playing video games.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: And maybe we'll all turn out a little better if we just don't look for extra reasons to be mean.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: There's already enough valid reasons to be mean to people! Just chill on it, and maybe we'll figure some things out about ourselves.

Game & Word: I couldn't have put it better myself. That's… I think that's an excellent note to wrap up on.

Eve: That's what I'm here for.

Game & Word: Eve, thank you again for joining me, and for chatting with me about psychology and video games and the state of the world…

Eve: Yeah. Stuff that we're totally unqualified to talk to. Thank you for having me! This is the part where I would plug something and I have nothing to plug, I'm not a content creator. I'll put some contact info for myself, I'll send that to Jay, so you can put it in the in the description in case someone decided I was so insightful, they have to shoot me an email or something.

But no the closing remark here is subscribe to Game & Word. Can we plug Chris, the man and newsletter that brought us together?

Game & Word: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yes. Chris Brandrick is the publisher of Switch Weekly. Which is...

Eve: Yes, NSW, Nintendo Switch Weekly. Yes. The newsletter that Jay and I are collectively members of, that's where we hang out and talk Nintendo and talk shop.

If you wanna talk to me and Chris, or sorry, me and Jay, subscribe to Nintendo Switch Weekly.

Game & Word: Yeah.

Eve: And Game & Word. And come join the Discord server.

Game & Word: Yeah. And there'll be links. I'll put all these links in the notes too, but yeah, excellent newsletter, wonderful community, Chris himself is just a really standup guy.

Eve: Love that, man, yeah.

Game & Word: He's great. Yeah. He totally deserves your readership, and your Patreon money, too. So... subscribe!

Eve: Yep. That's all I've got.

Game & Word: All right!

Eve: Thank you for listening.

Wrap-Up

Game & Word: All right, that's a wrap, folks! Thank you so much, once again, to our wonderful guest Eve for such a great conversation, and quite possibly the wisest parting words I've ever had a guest impart on me. So, thanks for that! Now as Eve mentioned, they are not on social media, but if you wanna get in touch with them, they have provided their email address for me to pass on you.

It's Eve moon elf at Gmail dot com. That's E-V-E, as in Eve the name, then moon as in the moon that comes out at night, then Elf as in the ones from the Lord of the Rings or the little dudes at Santa's workshop. All one word, all lowercase, no underscores or anything like that. Again, it's Eve moon elf at gmail.com, and I'll include it in the podcast references below.
I'd also like to thank Game & Word's paid subscribers for keeping this whole newsletter, podcasting, and publishing operation going.

And, I'd also like to especially thank Game & Word's Founding Members for making this episode possible. They are Le Takas from Luzern, Switzerland: Member since April 14th, 2022. Ela F from San Diego, California: Member since April 24th, 2020. Alexi F from Chicago, Illinois: Member since May 13th, 2022. And Elvira O from Querétaro, Mexico: Member since May 18th, 2022.

And thank you, dear listener, for listening today. If this is your first time here, welcome! I hope you enjoyed this episode enough to want to stick around. And if you would like to stick around, then I highly encourage you to subscribe, even if you're not able to purchase a paid subscription at this point. We do offer a free subscription tier, and as a free subscriber, you will get Game & Word's popularly acclaimed, longform newsletter and companion podcast episodes in your inbox, as soon as they publish every week.

And if you want to directly contribute to keeping this publication running, as well as keeping it free and accessible to everyone, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

In addition to sleeping well, knowing you're supporting an independent creator, you'll also gain access to exclusive bonus content just for paid subscribers, as well as early access to some free content, along with the ability to comment on podcast episodes and access to special paid subscriber-only feedback threads, where you can suggest future content.

And if you purchase a founding membership, which is the highest subscription tier we offer, I'll directly acknowledge you, by name or by username, both on the newsletter's masthead and as well as on the podcast, like I just did for my Founding Members earlier.

But regardless of whether you're a paid subscriber, a free subscriber, or no subscriber at all, thank you very much for listening today. Ladies, gentlemen, non-binary folks, anyone and everyone in between: this publication, this newsletter, this podcast would not be possible without you. So I am always eternally grateful for your readership and your listenership and your support. Once again, I'm Jay Rooney, and this has been another episode of The Game & Word Podcast.

I'll be back for the next episode. In the meantime, keep leveling up your curiosity, knowledge, and wonder stats with Game & Word, The Curious Gaming Newsletter. Have a wonderful day!

Footnotes

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

The Psychology of Final Fantasy: Surpassing The Limit Break

View Details

⚠️💬📢 PLEASE NOTE 📢💬⚠️

This is an early access podcast episode; paid subscribers can listen to it right away, and anyone can listen to it two weeks after the publication date. So this episode will open up on June 1, 2022. If you want to listen to it sooner, upgrade your subscription today.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Podcast References

Transcript

Footnotes

Introduction

Hello, psychonauts!

This week, I sit down with Jared Hansen, author of The Symbolism of Zelda: A Textual Analysis of Majora’s Mask (the same book I’ve listed under “Further Reading” throughout this volume), to talk about Zelda, symbolism, and game scholarship.

If I sound a little tired or weird, apologies in advance. I actually had to re-record this episode (and a few others), because apparently, nobody’s figured out how to make a user-friendly, reasonably priced, and powerful stable decent functional screen recording tool yet... 😞 So I might sound a little out of it, mostly because I was a little out of it.

(Relatedly, this is also why I’m delivering this to you today instead of last week as scheduled.)

Still, I hope you enjoy the conversation! As usual, you can find this episode’s podcast references, footnotes, and full transcript below.

See you next week!

~Jay

PS—If you need a refresher on Majora’s Mask before diving in, here are the relevant articles:

A Quick Note for Our Listeners

Starting with this episode, comments on all future Game & Word Podcast episodes are only available to paid subscribers. This particular episode is also early access, which means paid subscribers can listen to it two weeks before I unlock it to the public.

Not paid? Want in on these perks? There’s an easy fix for that… ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Game & Word is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

PS—If you enjoy the newsletter, but aren’t ready to commit to a paid subscription, consider buying me a cup of coffee. Just $5 will fuel one full night of writing. Just click the image below ☕️:

Podcast References

Books

The Symbolism of Zelda: A Textual Analysis of Majora’s Mask by Jared Hansen

The Symbolism of Zelda: A Textual Analysis of The Wind Waker by Jared Hansen

Games

The Legend of Zelda [Official Site]

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Extras

Jared Hansen

Blog (Hyrule University)

Twitter

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Game & Word: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to another bonus audio edition of Game & Word. Here, with me today, I have Jared Hansen: a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oregon and author of [The Symbolism of Zelda: A Textual Analysis of Majora’s Mask], one of the sources for our recent two-parter on Majora's Mask. Thank you, Jared, for joining me today.

Anything you want to tell my listeners that I haven't covered?

Jared Hansen: Sure. Like you said, I'm a Ph.D. candidate. I've been writing my dissertation on video games. And I've got two Zelda books out. You mentioned one of them, the other one is on The Wind Waker.

And I'm excited to join you on this podcast to talk about it.

Game & Word: Yeah, thanks for coming on! Tell us a bit about your dissertation. What are you writing it on?

Jared Hansen: I'm really fascinated with video game nostalgia in all of its forms. And so I'm actually studying a community of players who are playing an older video game, Star Wars Galaxies, and analyzing why they're keeping this RPG running.

Since the official servers shut down in 2011, they've been hosting their own private server since then. Because they don't want this experience to die. And it's just been really fascinating to be with these players in a game that's very dated as far as graphics go, but it's still fun and they love it.

Game & Word: And how did you come to start studying video games in an academic setting?

Jared Hansen: In my master's program, I was trying really hard to find a topic. And it was actually Zelda that got me inspired, because I was reading some academic literature on other things, and tried to find what's been written about Zelda. Which is one of my favorite series in video games. I found out no one was really writing about it, so I was like, “Hey, I can make my stamp. I can fill this hole." And that's when I started my master's thesis on Zelda.

And now, my dissertation is a different topic, but [I’m] still studying video games.

Game & Word: So about your books. As we just mentioned, you have two out so far: one on Majora's Mask and one on Wind Waker. What made you choose those two games in particular?

Jared Hansen: These games, along with Ocarina of Time, represent my “peak” involvement, I guess you could say, in Zelda. That's when I was a kid growing up with them, and those are the three games that really resonated with me during that formative time.

I think with a lot of people, that's how Zelda is for them. Their favorite game is the game that they played the most as a kid.

Game & Word: And what really resonated with you?

Jared Hansen: As a kid, I think it was the action-adventure genre. Because it's very engaging. It involves some skill, but it's still a skill that you can master, even at that age. As opposed to something like a racing game which takes a lot more hand-eye coordination, or RPGs which sometimes aren't quite as interactive.

And so, I really loved these games for that sense of adventure. And at the same time, that sense of accomplishment, when you complete a dungeon. It's fun and rewarding.

Game & Word: Absolutely. And how about in terms of the narrative or themes?

Jared Hansen: There's a joke about the Zelda formula, as far as [gameplay] goes, but it also applies to their storylines. Eventually, the series is almost like a fairytale that just keeps getting repeated over the generations.

But for me, it's almost comforting. To know that at the end of the day, there's going to be a Princess Zelda. There's going to be a hero Link and there's going to be a villain Ganon or Ganondorf.

And, yeah, I wouldn't mind if they swap out some villains occasionally, that's fine too. But just as long as we have some recurring myths, tales, and stories that you can rely on and come back to.

Game & Word: Yeah. That does make Majora's Mask an interesting case because It's just so different than any of the other Zelda games, in so many ways. It's even up there with Breath of the Wild, just as far as how different it is while still being recognizably Zelda.

I'm curious to know your thoughts as to your first time playing it. And how your reaction to it was.

Jared Hansen: Yeah. It had a lot of hype when I was a kid, just because the three-day mechanic was so revolutionary. I know there are a lot of people, myself included, I was like, “how can you finish a game in three days?” It just didn't make any sense.

But obviously, after playing it, it's "oh, it's just a matter of rewinding time over and over." And so that mechanic weaves itself into the narrative, and it's just fun. I guess at a subconscious level, it's similar to playing any video game, really.

The whole concept of video game lives, of game overs? Just this idea of, "okay, let's restart, let's reset, let's wind things back and try it again a second time." And that's something that you find in all kinds of video games. I think it's a universal experience that we all enjoy and love.

And Majora's Mask, on the other hand, just puts that in the forefront and reminds you, "Hey, you have this ticking clock, and if you don't get everything done, then it's going to be undone."

That was a little frustrating, but also rewarding, as a kid. And even now, it's fun knowing that throughout the game, my back is up against the wall.

Game & Word: And of course mechanically, it's very different. And in a way that really, really holds up remarkably well, I would add. And thematically, very different, too. Much darker and somber and kind of mature in a way.

What do you think are the main themes that Majora's Mask explores?

Jared Hansen: I know a lot of people talk about how it's an exploration of grief. And I definitely feel that way, but I also feel like it's just an examination of the human condition, in a lot of ways. It just brings that to the forefront—of how you have all these different characters that you meet who are suffering in different ways.

But at the same time, Link is, too. He's trapped in Termina and he's trying so hard to get out and save the day, he doesn't want to be here! He wants to find Hyrule again. And so I think thematically, it really touches on a lot of mature themes, like you said, of loss and sorrow.

And the atmosphere just hangs there and feels… like you said, somber.

Game & Word: Yeah. Another different thing about Majora's Mask was how they took the whole concept of wearing masks and made it so central to the game, thematically. So, as someone who studies symbolism, trying to get at deeper meanings behind what we see on the screen, what do you make of the game's spotlighting of masks?

Jared Hansen: I think from a gameplay mechanic, It's great. And it's almost like a collectible—each one has their own unique ability. You want to go out and find them so you can power up and level up.

But also from a thematic point of view and the symbolism behind it, playing pretend is a common form of play. So when we wear mask,s it's a chance to explore a different personality or a different experience. And to pretend and imagine a different reality.

Whether it's the person wearing the mask or the people observing you wearing a mask; they also have to pretend that, "oh, they are not what they appear, they are this mask." And so I think a lot of the symbolism comes out when you think about, “what are some masks that we may wear?” Invisible ones, masks to hide our pain, or things like that.

Game & Word: And I wonder, as well, if there's some kind of deeper symbolic meaning of the fact that masks feature so prominently in the lore of Termina. Like how they have this entire festival, right? Where people wear masks and party. And the fact that masks feature so prominently in wedding rituals, for example. This is a world in which masks are very central. What does that say about the world, and the culture of the people within it?

Jared Hansen: If we're to try and draw parallels between the culture of Termina and ours, [as Americans] our culture relegates masks to events such as Halloween or Mardi Gras; these sorts of experiences of adventure, play, those sorts of things.

Whereas in Termina, yes, they have their mask festival, which could be akin to Halloween for us. But at the same time, like you said, they also wear masks at weddings and other things. And so it's interesting to think about how, to them, masks can also be symbolic of other rituals, other practices of how we transcend from ourselves and do something different and better.

Game & Word: As far as individual masks are concerned—and I know this is a tough question, so top three is fine—which of the masks more personally resonated with you?

Jared Hansen: Gosh, that's a hard question. I know it shouldn't be, but it is!

I definitely loved the Bunny Hood, just for the experience. It's really fun to go really fast and jump really high.

The Couple's Mask, just because that's, I guess you could say, the peak of the game. You have to go through all of these different experiences, perfectly coordinated, so that you can eventually finish that storyline and receive that reward. And so that's a lot of fun.

And I guess my third mask… I might just have to say the Zora's Mask. Because it's fun to transform into that animal, but also the powers that you receive, and the fact that when you play your instrument, it's a skeleton fish/skeleton guitar. That's pretty awesome.

Game & Word: Totally. The Zora Mask is definitely up there for me. Besides that, I would say, the Garo Mask and the All-Night Mask, too. There's something so strangely, delightfully creepy about it.

Jared Hansen: Why am I forgetting the name of it, the cow mask so that you can enter the milk bar?

Game & Word: Romani’s Mask.

Jared Hansen: That is just so peak Zelda to me. "Let's make an adult joke about alcohol and bars, but we'll make it kid-friendly. So now you can't go and drink your milk unless you're older.” That's just so hilarious to me.

Game & Word: Totally. This is a hard question, because it's so personal, so subjective. But if any of our listeners have been reading these articles, then listen to this podcast and thinks, "Oh, you know, I really should get around to playing a Zelda game." Where would you recommend they start?

Jared Hansen: Personally, I would pick whatever Zelda game is most accessible to you. If you can go out to the store and buy a Zelda game on the shelf, play that. If you have a friend who lends their copy of A Link to the Past, play that. Just because I feel like you'll have a good experience regardless.

[That said], if you play Breath of the Wild, it's a completely different game. And so I think it would be hard for someone to enjoy that open-world exploration, and then all of a sudden they have to play through the Water Temple or something. That might be a bit of a shock.

But at the same time I feel like the series as a whole is really fun and really great, and I would just play whatever you can.

Game & Word: Good answer. Let's say another of our listeners says, "oh, that’s really cool, I never really thought about these things while playing these games before. I want to start thinking of games a little differently, and going a little bit deeper," what would you recommend for them, as far as adjusting your thinking or your mindset to get in that kind of mental framework easier?

Jared Hansen: Yeah. If you're going to try and think of games critically or academically, I would just say experience it, but also take a break from it.

After you've played through a boss, set the controller down and think about what just happened and think about, "okay, what does this story mean?”, and, “why did the designer decide to play this kind of music?"

Or ask questions about not only your experience, but also a general experience. Me playing a “sad dad” game, like God of War or The Last of Us, that story would impact me differently than someone else. And so it's cool to think about, "okay, why does this story make me cry?", and then also think about "what were they trying to tell?". Beause those can be two very different things.

Game & Word: And then, what advice would you have for any budding game scholars out there?

Jared Hansen: One bit of advice I would give is to immerse yourself in other forms of media, too. Something that I really enjoyed with my Zelda books was making comparisons between the game and, say, prominent works of literature.

Like Wind Waker, comparing it to The Odyssey, or comparing Majora's Mask to Dante's Inferno. ' That's one thing I would suggest. But on the other hand, it doesn't have to be literature versus video games. It could be “Video Game A versus Video Game B.”

When you make comparisons like that and say, "Minecraft does things this way, versus Roblox does things that way," that's an easy way to start thinking critically of, "okay, why might they do things this way ,and why they do things that way?", and think more critically about what these games are doing for us, and why that matters.

Game & Word: And as far as you personally, where can people find you or get in touch with you?

Jared Hansen: I am on Twitter, if people really want to talk to me. I also have a blog that I haven't updated in three years, but if you really want to look for it, you can: "Hyrule University." So if anyone wants to chat about video games, shoot me a DM or message me on Twitter and I'd love to talk.

Game & Word: Wonderful. Thank you, listeners, for listening today. Remember to subscribe if you haven't already at gameandword.substack.com.

Ladies, gentlemen, non-binary folks, everyone and anyone in between… Jared Hansen, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me.

Jared Hansen: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

View Details

Table of Contents

Introduction

Newsletter Updates

Podcast References

Transcript

Footnotes

Introduction

Ahoy, me hearties!

Wow, guess that’s the last time I’ll open with that in a while :-(

Alas, all good things must eventually come to an end, including this series. This bonus podcast will be Volume 2’s last issue, which means our exploration of pirates and video games ends here. For the time being, at least.

And while I’m excited for Volume 3, I can’t help but feel a little melancholic while wrapping up this topic. Fortunately, we’ve got a great guest and an awesome conversation for you this week. So, let’s end our pirating expedition with a BANG! from the cannons and another tankard of grog. YARRRRR!!!

Also, if you want a refresher on the entirety of Game & Word: Volume 2 before you listen, here’s the complete series:
Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7 ● Issue 8

You can find this week’s podcast references, footnotes, full transcript, and a couple of big updates after the updates section. See you next week!

~Jay

Game & Word is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

PS—If you really enjoy this newsletter, but aren’t ready to commit to a paid subscription, consider buying me a cup of coffee. Just $5 will fuel one full night of writing. Just click the image below ☕️:

Newsletter Updates

Our guest this week, Dr. Anthony Bean, has set aside two signed copies of his books (listed below), which Game & Word will give away to two lucky subscribers! For more details, be sure to read next week’s newsletter, when the giveaway officially launches.

Thank you for reading Game & Word. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Podcast References

Books

REMEMBER: Game & Word will be giving away one signed copy each of The Psychology of Zelda and The Psychology of Final Fantasy. More details next week! If you’re the impatient type, you can purchase the book

The Psychology of Zelda, edited by Anthony M. Bean, Ph.D.

The Psychology of Final Fantasy, edited by Anthony M. Bean, Ph.D.

The Psychology of Pokémon, edited by Anthony M. Bean, Ph.D. [PRE-ORDER]

Games

Sea of Thieves

World of Warcraft

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

Extras

Geek Therapeutics

Web

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Dr. Anthony Bean

Email 1

Email 2

Twitter

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Game & Word: Hi everyone, Jay here. Just wanted to let you know that at one point during the interview, we talk about the IGD-9 form; its correct name is the IGDSF-10. Just FYI.

[BLEEP]

Game & Word: Hello everyone. And welcome to another bonus edition of Game & Word. I have with me right now, Dr. Anthony Bean: the gamer psychologist, in a nutshell.

Anthony Bean: Anybody—like a gamer, geek, everything. Certified Geek Therapist. We run Geek Therapeutics, where we train people on how to work with video games. We actually have a really cool, “Problematic Gaming” course coming out. It's probably gonna be 12 to 15 CEs [Continuing Education Credits], that is gonna really hit it more from the idea of “gaming is a healthy mechanism, but we just need to work on the mental health symptoms.”

Game & Word: So when you say “problematic,” do you mean problems that are external to gaming, or that involve the act of gaming itself? Or is [gaming] therapeutic?

Anthony Bean: It's kinda all of it. So, what we know basically about the World Health Organization's coming out with their “gaming disorder” [classification], I would say a good 70-80% of therapists are out there being like, “Yeah, we see this as a problem, but we don't see it as the same problem as what the World Health Organization’s doing."

The other 20% are... not great clinicians, is what I would say. Just because it's based in not a great narrative and really faulty research. But what we're doing, is we're taking what is the good research—things that have double-blind studies, things that are verified with good actual psychometrics, not this thing that's "I gave them the IGD-9 short form [IGDSF-10] and, look at this, they have all of these symptoms!" And it's "yeah, but the IGD-9 or Short Form SF [IGDSF-10] has been disproven multiple times." Wo we basically take all the good research, we teach people about everything from neurotransmitters to beginning behaviors, to a whole bunch of other stuff.

So, one of the big things that always comes into play is, “Well, games are just releasing all this dopamine" type stuff. Yes, games release 170% more dopamine than other stuff in life. But guess what? Cocaine's 10,000%. Cheese is 300[%]. Some foods are higher than that, too. If you're going to be taking that little small statistic, let's give it some breathing room and let's show what other types of dopamine receptors come in. When you go and eat a piece of pizza, and you've higher dopamine dopaminergic information happening in your brain, and you're like "gaming's the problem,” you're a little wrong.

So, that's what the whole thing is. We're taking it, and then we're gonna hit it from five different viewpoints of “how do we treat problematic gaming?” Cause we don't treat it as gaming addiction. We treat it as a union approach, as a social construct, family approach, behavioral for ones that get really difficult, a mindfulness one, and then also a one based on trauma, because we've all experienced some trauma and we've seen a lot of things happen that way.

Game & Word: Wow. That’s…

Anthony Bean: It's a lot!

Game & Word: No, it's good! It's good work. It's important work. Certainly, I as a gamer, I'm glad that you're out there basically advocating for us within the mental health community. That's very important work. So thank you for doing it.

Anthony Bean: Absolutely. We like what we're doing, and we like to making sure that we spend the correct amount of time going on with it.

Game & Word: And speaking of time going on with games… this interview is part of a series that I'm doing on pirates, and specifically video games about pirates. And the one that I want to connect this particular interview to is Sea of Thieves. Have you ever played Sea of Thieves?

Anthony Bean: I have a little bit, more of my clients have. And they talk about how they just actually act like pirates and wait behind rocks until someone comes by with the quest’s mega treasure and steal it.

And they're like, we really feel like, we're being a-holes and I was like, “You're playing the game the way it was meant to be played!" If someone is a pirate, but they're finishing a quest, it's your duty to go and take it, take that back from them.

Game & Word: Absolutely, like I was playing and I was matched up with some random dude.

I could tell just by his title and everything, he out leveled me by at least a factor of 10. But whatever, we outfit the ship, we get our provisions, just whatever, we set sail, we chart a course. Just to kill some time, I take out my Hurdy-Gurdy and start playing a shanty, and this dude just throws a blunderbomb and he knocks me overboard!

Anthony Bean: And you’re like, “Oh, man!”

Game & Word: But at the same time, I was like, “That's funny, in a sitcommy way.” Like imagining a pirate getting thrown overboard, just for being a terrible musician.

But that brings me to what I wanted to talk about: inhabiting this archetype of the pirate. Why is it so enduring and so appealing?

Anthony Bean: It really is because we don't have a chance to actually act like that anymore.

Obviously, we have Somali pirates and things like that. But there are quite a few instances [in games] where we get a chance to live and do something that we don't, that doesn't exist in this world anymore. So like these types of swashbuckling pirates—you could take this video game, you can take World of Warcraft, even. Do you know how many people spent hours upon hours of hardcore grinding for the pirates down in Southshore Bay?

There are lots of people that were able to do that. And they did it so they could dress like a pirate, and because they don't exist. And honestly, they're fun, to do that. There's always a big thing of what is a pirate versus a ninja. I personally fall more into the ninja side, but pirates still are really fun.

And if you get to be a pirate, you follow the Code. And the Code is whatever's best for you.

Game & Word: Pretty much. It's called "Sea of Thieves."

Anthony Bean: Not "Sea of Friends"!

Game & Word: Yeah! It's it's funny because, what I think is cool about Sea of Thieves particularly compared to, say, Assassin's Creed: Black Flag—which is perhaps more realistic in its portrayal of pirates—is that I feel like it just lights up a part of my brain that satisfies that need better, even though it makes no claims of actually being accurate.

Anthony Bean: And it doesn't have to be accurate. But I think that's honestly one of the best things that Ubisoft did with that one, is that they went back and they looked at some historical [facts] and they broadened it. That's one of the big things that comes into play, is ,”Can you bring it in, and can it be done in a way that's realistic?" And they do a pretty good job with it.

Game & Word: Oh, a very good job, actually. Which is rare, not just for video games, but just media in general. But then also, whereas, say a game like Sea of Thieves, which makes no claims to be accurate, it's very much like all tropes. How does that fit in and the whole kind of schema of wanting to act like a pirate?

Anthony Bean: There's a lot of cool things that you get to really develop when you're pretending to be a pirate. That's something that I think is true to any avatar that we go and play with online.

And that avatar means something to us. Like, sometimes I want to be a space pirate. I will go and destroy someone's ship, just cause I'm like, “You're just close to me.” That's how it goes.

Game & Word: And what does it say about us just as people, that we have this urge to basically be a**holes? That we need that outlet?

Anthony Bean: The idea is that we get to rinse and repeat. We don't have any real consequences in the game. Just cause we play as some sort of trope inside the game, it doesn't mean that's how like we are in real life. And I think that's the difference between what we see with people, and what we can see moving ourselves forward in a different way, as playing these different characters or being able to engage them. And it works in all video games.

Pirates are just one of those heavily cultured ideas that are very well versed in the world, where you can read about pirates. They really existed. And I think that there's a little bit of a different motive for us to play that, because we're like, “These people lived this way, and we're going to try to live that way too," versus someone who has magical powers and things like that. Because, you know, unfortunately we got the wrong end of the stream on that one, in my opinion. I would like to have magical powers!

Game & Word: How does it differ? How does it fulfill different needs, when we play something that's more real versus one that's purely fantastical? Or is there a distinction at all?

Anthony Bean: It fulfills something for us on the inside. I'll give an example: when I'm in a very creative mood, I play very specific games because it helps to flesh those things out, and in different ways. It's not something that is just a one-and-done type thing. It's if I'm creative and I'm looking for some inspiration, I'm playing a spacefaring game. I need the expanse. I need to be able to take over the world. I need to be able to do a lot of stuff.

If I am just looking to kill some time, that's probably an MMO. It just goes into one of those things are pretty simpler. But it falls into those types of ideas a little bit more.

Game & Word: And in video games, the secret weapon, is of course the interactivity. The fact that you're taking an active role in the story. So how does that impact the effect, or the needs, that playing a different role fulfills for us? Versus, say, watching a movie or something.

Anthony Bean: We get to actually have the interaction with it. Versus us just watching [a movie], immersed within it, but not interacting with it. And I think that's what the controller—that's what video games really bring into and delight for us. It brings us farther than a movie because we actually get to interact with the world around [us].

Game & Word: And with VR…

Anthony Bean: it's coming, man! There's people like, “I don't know when this is going to happen.” And you're like, “Oh, it's around the corner!” Because we're starting to get some therapeutic-type stuff that we can start working with.

Game & Word: And it's awesome! But yeah, going back to pirates—I've mentioned archetypes of pirates. So for our listeners who may not be as familiar with the concept, could you tell us what is an archetype?

Anthony Bean: So, an archetype is like a sense of energies. Think of it as like a constellation of characteristics that all come together.

And when you fit them into these types of pieces together, like a pirate puzzle, then they form a bigger picture. And if you take some of those out and put them into another puzzle and put that together in that form—something else—that's a different archetype.

So things like the idea of the God of Mischief, Loki. He is an archetype that we work with of a Trickster—[that] would be the higher order one. And then he's embodied by Loki, so that would be a lower form, is what we would call him.

Because the higher [the] form that you go, the more metaphorical it becomes, and more all encompassing. A good way of looking at it is a kind of like a house of cards where the top card is like the top of the archetype. And as you come down, it gets more and more nuanced and it loses a lot of what the essence of the original archetype was.

Game & Word: So what makes certain archetypes more enduring or appealing to people?

Anthony Bean: It's really the things that we call video game tropes. If we look at video games in themselves—anime goes the same way, [so does] a whole bunch of geekdom—we could start seeing these very same tropes come across [repeatedly].

And those tropes are archetypes in a sense. And so, as we get to play as a trope—AKA, let's go rogue, paladin, wizard, magic caster, magic user—those are video game tropes, and those are also archetypal essences. If you tell someone like, “Oh, I play a warlock,” they're like, “Oh, you're a magic user, and you probably do things along these specific lines." And, I would say 99% of the time they're going to be right, because that's what the idea of an archetype is for them.

Now, what makes them so wonderful to be playable is because us as video game players, we want to experience these different things. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if, let's say, we’d reverse our worlds and we actually had magical powers and stuff like that, we wouldn't be playing games about magic! We would be playing games about something else, maybe not having magic, and how do we have to problem solve our way through without using magic?

Because if you know all the anime, all the games and everything, if you rely too heavily on magic, you lose your ability to figure out how to solve everyday problems. In other ways, it's the same idea with technology today in our world. So if you were living in a magic world, you'd be playing [in] a scientific world with technology, and that's like the inverse.

That's the fear with technology, that we're becoming so reliant on it that if we'd lost it, the world would cease to function. That's the same idea of the magic world. If you become too reliant on that, then it becomes a different sense of who we are, if that makes sense. We can't hold onto what used to be, and once we lose it, we don't know how to function any longer. I do enjoy the animes that do that and pull that type of plot and be like, “Oh, you're too reliant on magic, and now this thing's gone."

And [all] those types of things that function a little bit differently for us, because it's really important for us to know the difference between them all.

Game & Word: And why do we come up with archetypes or identify archetypes to begin with? Like, [did they make] us into who we are? Or, was there a certain benefit, maybe it helped our ancestors survive or whatnot? How is it that they exist?

Anthony Bean: It's a harder question, and much longer than what we have, because it goes all the way back to early shamanism. So, in early cultures there's the idea of healing and religion and everything comes out of philosophy.

And before philosophy there was shamanism, and the concept of that was, “I can function in these different ways if I believe I am being held captive by this different type of god or these other things,” like before they [were] considered gods. Now, the gods are in our world.

Does that make sense?

Game & Word: It does. Could you provide an example?

Anthony Bean: Sure. Let's use Greek gods because everyone knows them. It's a lot easier than using Norse gods or other stuff. If we were to be aggressive or something like that, we would be held in captive archetypally by Ares. If we were to think through our problems, it would be Athena. If we were to be the ruler, it'd be Zeus. Those are types of ideas; people would see these [figures] and not necessarily worship them as deities, but more along the lines that they are blessed with the powers of the gods on some level.

Game & Word: Got it. And what are the therapeutic applications?

Anthony Bean: When we know what archetype we are being held captivated by, as a plus and a negative side, we can then be like, “All right, what is it trying to teach me, in a sense? What does it mean?” Obviously I'm not being held in god's arms or anything like that, and they're not siphoning something towards me.

But it's something along the lines of, “What is the message that's trying to come out of life here?" We then say, “If Zeus is trying to teach me to be a better leader, how do I incorporate that into my area here? If I'm being idolized, do I really want to be idolized, or do I want to be a good boss?”

That's the type of thing that we tend to go for.

Game & Word: And regarding pirates specifically, what do you think their domain is, in contrast to, let's say, other types of outlaws like cowboys or bandits?

Anthony Bean: Yeah. They're ruthless, they are chaotic, and you don't really know which way they're going to go.

And they are sometimes entertaining. But they are not someone that you really want to cross very easily. That's the idea. So you're your presence is emboldened within them.

Game & Word: Hence, why if you're being an ahole, you're playing Sea of Thieves correctly.

Anthony Bean: And so that's the thing. Think about it like Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean. If you're going on quests and you're bringing something back, you're literally the commandant. That's your role. You're like, “No, I'm playing this game!” No, you're really the commandant. The people who are playing the game correctly are the ones hiding behind those rocks over there, that are going to come and destroy you, take your thing, and then run away.

Game & Word: And what are some good resources that you would recommend for people who might want to learn more about archetypes?

Anthony Bean: There are a wonderful amount of reading opportunities. Go on Amazon to look, and get the Kindle versions if you'd like, but you can just type in “archetypes” and you will literally be endowed with them in lots of different forms.

And there's tons and tons of wonderful writers. And there's a whole bunch of different types of ideas that come out, and that's honestly the easiest place to get it. You can get my book, but mine's on video gamers and stuff like that. And the archetypes have expanded past what's in there right now, too.

Game & Word: Great. And I know you've touched on this earlier, but let's dive into it: so, pirates vs. ninjas?

Anthony Bean: (Laughs) This is always the college thing. My wife and I were just talking about this tonight. We went to colleges on opposite ends of the country. And she asked me tonight, out of the blue—we call this a “synchronistic moment,” because she didn't know I was doing this tonight, specifically on pirates.

And so she’s, “At your college, did you ever have a thing called ninjas versus pirates?" And I was like, “Yep, I was one of the big founding ones for my college.” She goes, “Yeah, I'm a pirate." I said, "I'm a ninja."

So that's one of the things, that she didn't even know this was happening. And I told her, then she goes, “Man, we were definitely in the right head space."

Game & Word: That is an awesome story. Watch out though, sleep with one eye open!

Anthony Bean: Absolutely. We, we definitely try to, in some ways, especially since our kids are the ones that get up, they are like little ninjas and then turn into pirates, [throw] tantrums, then they're downstairs. So they're like good mix of us right now.

Game & Word: And then as far as games besides Sea of Thieves, if you feel like getting your pirate on, are there any that you gravitate to particularly? Or even just to your get your rogue on, or whatever.

Anthony Bean: it's a really hard one, because I haven't really had as much time as I'd like to be playing lately.

But the game I'm actually playing is Pokémon and I am being a ninja in it. And if anyone's playing the new Pokémon Arceus—or "ar-SEE-us" is what I'm starting to hear. And I was like, “I don't know. I'm just going to call it ‘ar-KEY-us’ cause that's how it's phonetically looks to me, guys.”

Anyways, now it's my turn to jump on the Pokémon from the grass. It's my turn to throw something at them. And from the grass! It's not theirs. It's mine. Which I'm like, “This is happening!” Yeah, so I would say I'm being like a little bit of a rogue, and I'll just wait for a whole bunch of Pokémon to come on through, and then I'll just target and go “boom,” and catch all three of them at once. At which point, I can run away. It's really fun.

Game & Word: Before we sign off, do you want to plug some pluggables?

Anthony Bean: Yeah. Anyone that really wants to know what we're doing, go and find us on any social media, @GeekTherapeutics. That is really the big thing of what we do. We have tons of merchandise. We do tons of trainings. We're at conventions. We're going to be at at least six this year.

And it is a wonderful thing to be able to transform this knowledge into a viable space, and to see so many people benefit from it. That's the big thing you can find in all of our books: [Psychology] of Zelda, [Psychology] of Final Fantasy, and soon to have our Kickstarter put back up again, because we made our deal with Nintendo for [Psych] of Pokémon.

Game & Word: Wow, they let you do it?

Anthony Bean: They let us do it. They acknowledged that our book falls under free speech. But they don't let us do the artwork, unfortunately.

Game & Word: Hey, with Nintendo…

Anthony Bean: I take it as a blessing! So that's fine, I changed around the cover. It's not a big deal.

Game & Word: Cool, and if people want to get in touch with you, follow you on the socials, yada yada, what's the best way for people to reach you?

Anthony Bean: That would probably be messaging us through Geek Therapeutics on our Facebook chat. Cause I'm usually on that, or send me an email at anthonymbeanphd@gmail.com or anthony@geektherapeutics.com.

Game & Word: All right. There you go. Ladies, gentlemen, and non binary folks, everyone: Dr. Anthony Bean. Thank you very much for talking to me tonight.

Anthony Bean: You are more than welcome!

Footnotes

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

View Details

Table of Contents

Introduction

Newsletter Updates

Podcast References

Transcript

Footnotes

Introduction

Ahoy, me hearties!

Ok, this bonus issue isn’t as “piratey” as the last one, but it’s still one hell of a haul for the S.S. Game & Word, and I tell you why!

This week, I have another audio interview for you, recorded live at GDC 2022! I spoke with Chris Smith, Metanomic’s chief economist, about how video game economies work. That’s right, “game economist” is a real job. And, as it turns out, quite a fascinating one!

Now, before we begin, I must apologize in advance for the audio. I edited out all the distracting conference background noise, but as a result, parts of our conversation might sound a little stilted. It shouldn’t be too distracting, but if it is, please accept my sincerest apologies. Also, thank you for bearing with me as I slowly get the hang of this whole podcasting thing.

Also, if you want a refresher on Game & Word’s current volume before you listen, here’s the full series on pirates so far:
Issue 1 ● Issue 2 ● Issue 3 ● Bonus 1 ● Issue 4 ● Issue 5 ● Issue 6 ● Issue 7

You can find this week’s podcast references, footnotes, full transcript, and a couple of big updates after the updates section. See you next week!

~Jay

Thanks for reading Game & Word! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

PS—If you really enjoy this newsletter, consider buying me a cup of coffee. Just $5 will fuel one full night of gaming writing. Just click the image below ☕️:

Newsletter Updates

Ok, I’ve got a couple of updates. I’ll start with the biggie: I’m back from GDC (Game Developers Conference)! This means Game & Word will resume its normal publishing schedule, starting now.

Oh, and the conference was a blast! In fact, I have a message for all my new subscribers from GDC:

Welcome to Game & Word!

I hope you enjoy the newsletter. Please feel free to reach out to me any time by replying to this post, dropping a comment, or emailing me at gameandword@substack.com—I love hearing from my readers!

That panel I moderated also went quite well! I haven’t located any video yet, but I did find a picture of a picture of me looking all moderator-like. And no, that wasn’t a typo. Behold:

Well… technically it’s a picture of a frame/screengrab, not another “picture,” per se. But you get the idea.

Anyway, moving on!

In other news, I wrote a guest post for Night Water, an excellent newsletter for the nocturnally-inclined among us, published by writer and veteran podcast producer Adam Cecil (Welcome to Night Vale, Milky Way Underground). Have you ever wondered why gamers seem to be natural insomniacs? Well, I think I’ve cracked the mystery:

So, what did you think? Did I nail it, or was I way off? I’d love to hear your thoughts:

Oh, and if you’re as much of a night owl as I am, I highly recommend subscribing to Night Water. And no, not because I wrote on there (ok, not just because I wrote there). It really is a great newsletter for the naturally nocturnally inclined:

Ok, that’s it for the updates! Podcast references, transcript, and footnotes are below.

Podcast References

Books

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Papers and studies published by Ted Castronova

Games

Minecraft

Port Royale

Tropico 6

Civilization

Extras

Follow Metanomic on:

Twitter

Follow Chris Smith on:

Transcript

NOTE: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Game & Word: Hello, everyone! And welcome to another bonus edition of Game and word recorded at GDC 2022 in San Francisco. Today I have with me, Chris Smith, chief economist at Metanomic, a company that automates economics and games. If you want to elaborate on that, Chris, go ahead.

Chris Smith: Yeah. Thanks for having me. So, I'm Chris, I'm the chief economist at Metanomic. What we do is, we consider ourselves the first runtime autonomous economy engine. So what we specialize in is essentially trivializing the amount of time that the game designers spend designing their economy. We tried to take the boring stuff out of game design and handle all the calculations and stuff that they would need to do.

Game & Word: Do you know, on average, how [much time] the designer saves?

Chris Smith: So it depends on the genre and the type of studio, obviously. If you're talking about a giant AAA studio you're potentially talking about, I would say two to three man-hours a day for 18 months. If you're talking about a smaller game, maybe an indie, you're probably still talking about three to four months of a game designer's time. So we like to think that we've cut out a lot of that.

Game & Word: Gaming economists seem to be a pretty rare breed. I was stuck, I was really struggling to find a source that was knowledgeable in both areas for this piece. How did the path to your current position look like?

Chris Smith: Yeah. My background is actually as a PhD in economics, originally. In my undergrad, I loved video games. So I was trying to study video game economies in an academic setting. And then I ended up going on to do a PhD and I started to study more hardcore economics topics like labor market discrimination, transportation, kind of “classic” econ topics. Well, transportation's not necessarily a classic econ topic… but because of my undergraduate work, I ended up having a guy, the CEO of Metanomic, Theo Priestley, reach out to me just randomly.

And he was like, “hey, do you want to come design a video game economy?” And I was like, oh, that sounds cool enough. So yeah, I'll do some consulting work. What it ended up becoming was Metanomic. We ended up designing on accident, a tool that could be used for any economy, not just a large MMORPG. So that's how I got here. I had all the training and, fortunately, the interest to perfectly fit [in] this type of position.

Game & Word: And to what extent do game economies function, I guess for lack of a better term, like “IRL” economies?

Chris Smith: So, that's a really good question. And I think it's going to become a more popular question to be answered in an academic setting.

I know, personally, prominent economists who are interested in studying digital economies, particularly video game economies. So, it obviously depends on the game. In terms of the fundamentals of economics, you think about classics, [the] Law of Supply and Demand. Those are all, we see all of those in these digital economies, which is interesting because we think of digital economies as this free-range, infinite scalability, you can do whatever you want, there's no limit. [But] there are limitations in these digital environments, and they replicate those that we see in the real world. And so that's why we see a similar economic phenomenon in video game environments [as] we would in real life.

Game & Word: An example of that would be, I guess like what we'll call a “bubble.” How often do you see that?

Chris Smith: So bubbles are very common. In the MMORPGs sometimes, though, they're driven by open information speculation. Where people know what's going on, people know why these bubbles are forming whereas in the real world, we don't have anywhere near as much information as we do in video games.

So it's hard for us to know whether something's a bubble or something is actually, that's the real value. That, to me, is one of the great, liberating things about digital economies: it’s the openness of information. There's no longer these hardcore asymmetries of information. So I know if I'm buying this bubble asset or something like that.

Game & Word: Yeah. And what extent do you think that affects the usefulness of looking at digital economies as a way to like better understand or even predict an IRL economy.

Chris Smith: So that was actually one of the reasons I started studying video games when doing undergrad. One of the reasons I was interested was if we can find an environment that is controlled, that is experimental, that replicates human behavior in real life.

Why can't we run an experiment in the digital economy and predict the outcome that would happen? Let's raise the minimum wage. Let's lower interest rates, things like this, that economists are toying with all the time, trying to—and bashing their heads against the wall—run experiments. So that, to me, is the direct application.

Game & Word: Got it. So, in your talk today, you mentioned now a lot of things like labor markets and tech growth was another one. Would you mind giving a quick kind of rundown for our listeners?

Chris Smith: Yeah so my background in my Ph.D. is actually, my dissertation is focused on labor market topics, labor market discrimination, and particularly racial discrimination in the labor force, [and] transportation discrimination. I've looked at the hierarchy, the structure within a firm.

What this comes back to is essentially workers trade off on, “do I want to take Job A, Job B, or, live on unemployment benefits?” Or something like that. These options—Job A, Job B—are exactly, they're analogous to the types of choices that people make in a video game economy.

Do I want to become a lawyer, or do I want to become a banker? Do I want to become a mage or do I want to become, an assassin or something like that? So in that way, those labor market decisions are very similar.

For technological growth, I talked about this in the talk, but, that's what video game economies are: they're the exploration of technological growth to the Nth degree. Power levels, leveling up their statistics, everybody just loves becoming better.

And that's what real economies do. They become better over time. It's just much slower and more boring [than game economies].

Game & Word: What are some interesting times that really illustrate what we're talking about?

Chris Smith: So, I bring this example up all the time. One of the things that I think does a really good job at exploring technological growth is actually Minecraft's economy. You're constantly upgrading your pickaxe to the next level, and then eventually you're enchanting it and stuff like that. So there's, there's this efficiency thing. You're constantly increasing your output by increasing your technological capacity. And yeah… I'll leave it at that.

Game & Word: How can economic theory help people design better video games? Or gaming economies?

Chris Smith: I think that there are two answers to this.

The first one is a philosophical one: using economic intuition to drive your decisions as a game economist. What I mean by that is: you can, if you know about certain economic principles, you should be able to predict what's going to happen.

So I talk to a lot of potential clients that are, they're like "this thing ended up happening." And I'm like "you know that this is the mechanism that caused that?" And they go, "oh!" Or I'll be predictive, and I'll say "the mechanism that you've built here, has an expiration date." And they'll say, "no, it doesn't." I say "there actually is." You wouldn't know it if you didn't know economic theory or at least economic intuition.

That's the philosophical answer. The more technical answer is, just a better understanding of mathematics, a better understanding of algorithmic thinking would really benefit simulating environments and stuff like that. Yeah.

Game & Word: And do… oh, I lost my train of thought. All right. We will come back to it.

What are, so kind of moving away from MMOs or multiplayer sandbox games, say you take a game like Tropico, where it's just a simulated economy, but it's like completely an experiment. In the truest sense of the term. Which games do you think really do it the best?

Chris Smith: Obviously there's like the Civilization, games but in terms of simulating an economy and doing it really well not a lot of games have explored economics as a gameplay mechanic in my opinion.

And I'd be curious to hear if there are games that people can think of. I was speaking with someone today who was interested in running kind of a game where the player is actually the God character or the government who's designing the environment, that little agents behave in to see what the economic outcome is.

So I actually think it's a potentially understudied, underutilized gameplay mechanic. If that makes sense.

Game & Word: Have you ever played Port Royale, any of those [games]?

Chris Smith: I don't think so.

Game & Word: So that's a series of trading simulators set in the pirate age Caribbean. And so a lot of, buy low, sell high, plunder a ship or two on the way.

Chris Smith: So I'm actually, I'm an avid board gamer. I would say that I played, I spent a lot of time on board games. So that's my bread and butter, and board games do a really good job at exploring economic phenomena. This question of, buy low, sell high stuff like that controlling the supply, understanding what is going to happen two turns from now.

So that's where I draw some of my [observations], so I'm always interested in learning about video games that do what a board game does, in a video game setting

Game & Word: Ah, I remember, the question from earlier on! What kind of misconceptions, or maybe faulty assumptions, do you see recurring a lot? Like with, game designers, when trying to design economies?

Chris Smith: Game designers are startlingly good at making video games like or making economies.

Like they don't even know how good they are, actually! That’s my view. But I want to preface this by saying there are some incredibly phenomenal game economists out there, and I don't want to undercut those people, but on average, the mistakes that are made really come down to one thing, and it's not giving yourself control for the future.

You design this mechanism that in theory works, but once it actually gets going, it runs out of control and you have no way to control it. But economists are constantly… they have a thousand levers they can pull when things go awry. So that's, to me, the rookie mistake. If you will.

Game & Word: Got it. So we've been talking about like we could talk about purely, simulated digital economies, you have the MMOs and then you have the quote unquote “IRL” economies. What do you think are some of the most recurring things that they share? And also, like where do they differ in certain key ways?

Chris Smith: I'll start with where they differ, because that's the easier question. They differ in the way that and I was just talking to a guy about this. In real life, it takes you a long time to accrue capital.

It takes me a long time to earn a wage. It takes me a long time to buy a car. All of these things are spread out over a massive—relatively speaking with in terms of my lifespan—amount of time. And, you don't have the luxury as a game designer to spend that much time. So there's this natural sink… sorry, faucet.

The faucet in real life is super slow. It's a trickle in video game economies. The faucet has to be faster in order to keep players engaged. There has to be more reward in the environment.

Game & Word: Just for our listeners, you say the “faucet? “

Chris Smith: Yeah. So a faucet is basically injecting resources, injecting rewards into your environment and how quickly that is.

And then a sink is basically what the players spend that reward on, how do they get rid of those resources? And is that a fun process? So typically we like to make those faucets or the sinks fun. That's the critical thing. So yeah that's what I mean by [faucet]. The big difference is that there's a trickling faucet in real life and flowing faucet in a digital economy.

And then what is similar about them? That goes back to the labor markets, and a technological growth argument that I was making, where there are fully fledged labor markets within video games. And actually this is a research project that I'm considering taking on with one of my mentors.

Really looking at what's the best economic model to study video game economy behavior by the players in the economy. Is it a labor market? Is it a trade market? Is it a clubs market or something like that? And for the listeners, you can Google that. I won't go into that, but yeah.

Game & Word: Speaking of that. Where would you recommend, say if someone's, interested in an economic theory, but maybe feels a bit intimidated by it? Where do you think, or where would you suggest that they start?

Chris Smith: Yeah. So I would say because I have an experimental, sort of an experimental background, I've got to recommend the classics, like Freakonomics, Predictably Irrational. Freakonomics, I forget who [wrote] that I'm a terrible economist for forgetting who that's by, but Predictably Irrational is by Dan Ariely. Those are some “poppy” books. Those are more about human behavior than actual theory, or less focused on theory.

In terms of some cool, oh [economic] literature, Ted Castronova is an awesome economist who in the early, late nineties, early two thousands. He started to really academically look at these digital economies. So that's a really good place to start and his stuff is very accessible.

Game & Word: And I know your specialty is in neoclassical economics. I was wondering what your thoughts are on, say behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, applied towards designing.

Chris Smith: Yeah. I mean that I could talk about that for hours. I actually, I went into the PhD with the intent to become a behavioral economist. I wanted to study these… wanted to use experiments to study anomalous human behavior. Or in terms of the theory, anomalous behavior that to us as neoclassical economists doesn't make any sense.

The beautiful thing about video games, and the thing that the disconnect between video game theory and economic theory, is that video game theory understands the power of lore—the power of storytelling, and the role that plays in the economy. So from a behavioral standpoint, behavioralists are [thus] always trying to measure unmeasurable things or seemingly unmeasurable things.

I wrote a paper in my undergrad, actually, about it. It was a “zero price” paper, and it was basically looking at the cost of something that's free. And I found that I called the cost of something that's free, "the moral cost," the cost of taking it from someone. So there's this feature, this thing that's unmeasurable or not important from an economist, or [rather] a classical economists perspective, but really important and relevant, to a video game designer and to a behavioral economist.

Game & Word: Great. I think that's That's about it for me, for my questions. If you want to, if you have any pluggables you want to plug, now's the time.

Chris Smith: Yeah so definitely obviously check out Metanomic limited. We have a Twitter, we have LinkedIn, we have a website, and we're going to have a new website coming up soon.

So Metanomic, we have an MVP coming out in about four months and so we're very excited. Please reach out if you're interested.

Game & Word: All right. Wonderful. All right. Thank you, Chris. And thank you all for listening. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe at https://gameandword.substack.com. This is Jay Rooney, recording live from San Francisco. Have a good day.

Footnotes

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

View Details

Ahoy, me hearties!

This week, I present to you a bonus interview with Matt McLaine: gamer, pirate historian, and an indispensable source for this whole pirate series. So grab a cuppa grog, have a seat, kick up your peg leg, turn your parrot’s volume up, and enjoy!

Oh, before you do: in parts of the recording, you might hear my daughter milling around in the background (clearly, she wants to be a gaming writer/podcaster as well!). Apologies in advance if you find her chirps distracting. If you find them cute, however—and there’s no reason you shouldn’t—then I apologize for nothing.

Also, if you want a refresher before you listen, here’s the full series on pirates so far:
Part 1 ● Part 2 ● Part 3

References and transcript below the fold. See you next week!

~Jay

PS—As a reminder, Game & Word will now publish on Sundays instead of Mondays. If you have any thoughts on the change, feel free to let me know by replying to this email.

Thanks for reading Game & Word! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Podcast References

Books

A Merry Life, and a Short One: Unhelpful Self-Help and Terrible Advice from the Golden Age of Piracy by Matt McLaine

Piracy Papers: Primary Source Documents from the Golden Age of Piracy by Matt McLaine

At the Point of a Cutlass: The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton by Gregory Fleming

Ashton’s Memorial

Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly

Pirates in Their Own Words by Ed Fox

Villains of all Nations by Marcus Rediker

Games

Sid Meier’s Pirates!

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Sea of Thieves

Pirate 101

Risen II: Dark Waters

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

TV Shows

Black Sails

Crossbones

Extras

Follow Matt McLaine on:

Twitch

Twitter

Amazon

Reddit

r/pirates

Transcript

NOTE: This interview and its transcript have been edited for length and clarity.

Game & Word: Hello everyone! Thank you for joining us for this bonus edition of Game & Word, featuring gamer and pirate historian, Matt McLaine. Matt, do you want to say a few words?

Matt McLaine: Welcome aboard! I'm glad to be a part of Game & Word. This has been a fascinating journey. I can't wait to dive into pirate history, and how video games treat that history, and how they weave back and forth between them. This is going to be a great ride.

G&W: So, what's your verdict, generally speaking? What's your assessment on how good a job they do of that?

McLaine: In general, there's a lot of them that just slap a skull and crossbones on anything random and call it “piratey.” I mean, literally, if you give your character a pirate hat and a cutlass, Skyrim can be a pirate game, so to speak.

G&W: Right.

McLaine: If you're standing on a ship and you're holding a cutlass, well, close enough, right? There's the games that just put the appearance on it, just the facade of piracy, and there's ones that actually take their time to do some research.

Assassins Creed Black Flag? Obviously, they changed a lot of things; you have their mythology behind everything, but the names, the events, a lot of the interactions are a lot more realistic.

Then there are games like Sid Meier's Pirates!, which again, given that you have to play through game mechanics as a player, you have to make it fun, you have to make a game of it-

G&W: Yes.

McLaine: Games like that, that actually set out to be more historical, tend to, I think, do a surprisingly good job of it.

Sid Meier's Pirates! dates back to the 1980s. It was a Commodore 64 game, an Apple II game, and then they remade it in 2000, and again in 2012. So, it's just been going on and on, but it's essentially the same game under the hood. They haven't really changed the history of it, but they did a decent job getting most of it right.

Granted, [there are] things like you're in the Buccaneer Era hanging out with Henry Morgan, and then Bartholomew [“Black Bart'“] Roberts shows up—from 1720—in 1666. You're like, "Hmm," but, again...

G&W: Yeah. It's also like [that] in Civilization.

McLaine: Right. You can play historically, or you can go to Alpha Centauri in 1700.

G&W: Exactly.

McLaine: Given that game players are going to find a way around it, they're going to run out of content if [the developers] limit themselves to what only happened in 1715.

So there are the games that try and do a good job of it, historically, given what they have to work with. And there are games that just put the “look and feel” on it. Like Sea of Thieves, for instance, is just a free for all without bothering with much of the history behind it. It's giving you the environment and a sandbox to play in, but it's not trying to be historical.

G&W: Basically, it's giving you the archetype of the pirate, versus the reality of the pirate.

McLaine: Right.

G&W: If you do play Sea of Thieves, I'm always looking for crewmates!

McLaine: Everyone is, right?

G&W: Yeah. Specifically, ones that aren't a**holes.

McLaine: Yeah, knowing my life, I'm going to show up and they're all manatees.

G&W: A funny thing happened to me this morning, actually. I was on a sloop, open crew, and this guy joined me. He clearly out-leveled me by a factor of at least 10. So we all get set up, we get our provisions on the ship, we're en route, we decide on the voyage. And then, I'm just kind of wasting some time playing my hurdy-gurdy, and the stupid a**hole shoots me overboard. He just shoots me overboard!

McLaine: Yeah, that's Sea of Thieves for you. That's the whole game in a nutshell, right there.

G&W: I know you mentioned Sid Meier's Pirates! and we talked about Assassin's Creed, but ignoring the historical accuracy part, which pirate games do you personally enjoy the most?

McLaine: I get a lot of historical piracy in the things I do outside of gaming. Just research, and writing, and things like that, so when I'm gaming, it's like, "Yes, I've seen that before."

It's like, my wife teaches dance at the college level, so when she watches serious performances, that's one thing. But when she watches a random TV show that has a dance bit thrown in the middle, she just turns her head and says, "I can't watch it." She's like, "Nope. I can't look at that, because all I'm going to do is nitpick."

[Like me] sifting in through the history, I'm like, "Yeah, that's pretty cool. They actually got that right. They're pretty accurate there," but then, I find myself bogged down. I'm like, "Ah, no! No! That was a Bartholomew Sharp expedition, that wasn't Morgan! That was 1692, not 1688!" And then I’ve got to stop, and take a step back, and be like, "Okay, chill." It's Tropico 4: Pirate's Cove. It's not The General History of Pirates: The Game. We can just let it go.

But, if I'm looking to have pirates in a game, I have to make myself not be worried about historical accuracy. So, something like Risen II: which is a complete sword-and-sorcery fantasy world, but it takes place on ships and islands.

There's a lot of shipborne activity, and you can take the “pirate” route in your playthrough, and again, it hits the tropes, but without even trying to take itself too seriously.

G&W: Right.

McLaine: Games like Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, which is a fantastic role-playing game; if you like the old Baldur's Gate-style RPGs, that’s the next step. But again, takes place in a very coastal, islandy environment. And you can follow that route, and you can deal with those characters, and you can just sort of hang a hat on it and say, "Okay, this is as ‘pirate’ as it's going to get without having to worry about the history of it.”

Because if I want the history, I got a whole bookshelf over here that's packed with history, and I got a hard drive full of articles, and chapters, and things. So I'm like, "Sometimes I just need to step back from the pure realism."

G&W: Right.

McLaine: There's a link on my desktop right now for Pirate 101, which is a kid's game. And I was playing through Pirate 101 for a while, just as part of my Twitch series. And I'm like, "This is [an] absolute kids’ clickbait, ‘please pester mom and dad to pay some real money’ loot box.” But just to kill a mindless hour or two, hacking away at skeletons, wearing skull and cross bone tri-corner hats? …Okay! It's that or Cookie Clicker.

G&W: Pick your poison, right?

McLaine: Exactly.

G&W: Yeah. I feel you, man. My daughter pesters me, like... Yeah. As a fellow father, you have my solidarity.

McLaine: Yeah. My kid was playing Wizard 101 for a long time. This was years ago. They're over it now. They're playing Wizard 101 like, "Dad, there's a pirate version of this same game! It's called Pirate 101."

I'm like, "Eh, really?" But then, I'm like, "You know what? I'll check it out. I'll stream it a couple of times." I have a character in there that's level… whatever.

It wasn't one of those things that you can play like a father-daughter adventure together. It was just more like over dinner like, "Hey, I got up to level three and I found the golden coconut."

And they're like, "Really? I found that, too." And okay, we can bond over that, but it's not multiplayer enough for me to hang out with them and get a session going or something. It is what it is. It's just a time killer, so all good.

G&W: So, what got you interested in piracy? Just as a topic of scholarship, or inquiry?

McLaine: I’d ask the same question, but I'll go first, since you asked. Just years ago, I randomly read David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag. I just needed a book to pass some time. I don't know, walking through an airport or something. I just had to have something to read. I saw the skull and crossbones on the cover. I'm like, "That looks cool." I read it. It was really interesting.

And then, a few years ago, something just struck me like, "You know what? I'm going to reread that book. It was interesting back then. I think I remember it." I reread it and I'm like, "This is awesome." Something just clicked. I was hooked. I'm like, "I've got to learn about this."

And one thing about Corningly's book is, it is years old now. It was a few decades back now. It's been superseded. I think you say that in your blog, that there’s “newer and better” [pirate books].

But he mentions a lot of really obscure pirates. People who don't appear in anybody else's work or who only get mentioned in his book, and nowhere else, like he found some newspaper clipping from the 1700s and just said, "Oh, cool name," wrote that down. And no one else has a copy of it, because it's buried in a British archive somewhere.

And I'm like, "Okay, everybody knows about Blackbeard. Everybody knows about Stede Bonnet. And everybody knows about Bart Roberts. But who's this guy? Who is Joseph Farrow? Who is John Bear? Who are these guys?” And I went looking for info on some of the lesser-known names. There's nothing out there. Not in a quick Google search, anyway. The name comes up, but there's nothing immediately that jumps out that has a life story.

Like, there's [already] a monument to Stede Bonnet in downtown Charleston in South Carolina. Somebody in the pirate subreddit posted a picture of it saying, "We got to find this guy's remains!" Well, there aren't in any, but there's a monument!

Anyway, I started looking for these obscure pirates and there wasn't anything. I said, "You know what? I'm going to fix that." So, I picked the list of names. Just a few. And I said, "Okay, Thomas Wake, and John Farrow, and William Maze. I'm going to search what happened to these guys and find out, and I'm going to add them to Wikipedia, so that the next person to go looking for them, when they type in, 'Joseph Farrow Pirate,' it'll be the first link that comes up. And they'll have a quick bio of him, and links to the people he hung out with, if he had any influence or if he just died obscure, whatever."

And as soon as I did the first one, I'm like, "This is cool." And of course, when you find one, you find info on another, and then you're down the rabbit hole.

G&W: Right.

McLaine: And I started writing Wikipedia articles for pirates. And I ended up writing a whole lot of Wikipedia articles for pirates, almost all Golden Age, a few Buccaneers. And before I knew it, I had done so many of them. And again, I didn't do the big ones. Bart Roberts is already there. Blackbeard's already there.

I'm not going to touch Stede Bonnet's article because it's a mile long, it's a novel in itself. But, all these little guys? And it started fascinating me because I live in South Carolina, so a lot of these people came to the Carolinas. I'm like, "Hey, I've been to that place! That river that guy sailed into, I've been there. That plantation this guy visited when he got done pirating, I've been there. I've seen these things. I've walked where this guy walked," and I'm like, "I have all this information," and I started finding all these connections, local places people have heard of. And I'm like, "I got to do something with this."

So I started finding all this info on these obscure guys, and I started adding in the Wikipedia, and before you knew it, I had done like 100 or 150 Wikipedia articles on obscure pirates.

And when I have all this research on all this stuff I've compiled for, I'm like, "You know what, there's no excuse for not going further with this, turning it into an article, a book, a blog post." And rather than just sharing it through Wikipedia and hoping somebody stumbles across it, to actually go out there and start posting some of this stuff. And it just stuck with me. But I won't say it's an addiction. I keep the bookshelf under control!

G&W: What do you think it is about pirates, just as an archetype, that fascinates people so much?

McLaine: I think it's the same archetype, the same fascination you'd find with the Wild West. Or with Vikings. It's an adventure we can't live today. Things we can't do anymore. And things that, not that we couldn't do, but wouldn't do today.

You read a book by Marcus Rediker, like Villains of All Nations, it's a fantastic book. But he wants to paint pirates as kind of “Freedom Fighters,” fighting evil merchants, and taking down the East India Company, and establishing capitalism, and fighting for American freedom versus European domination.

That's great, but they're also pirates. They're thieves, they're robbers, they’re looters, they’re murderers, and worse. We're so far removed from it, that we can pull out the adventuresome aspects of it, and kind of separate ourselves from the more squeamish parts of it. The same way we could, again, with the Wild West, or 1930s mobsters, or something. We can put ourselves in those shoes and imagine the adventure of it without having to deal with the reality of it.

G&W: That brings me to this thing where it seems we live in a world where people can't hold more than one thought at the same time, and everything has to be “either/or.” And that's kind of like what I talked about, establishing my benchmark for judging a game on accuracies like “how well do they capture the dichotomy,” right?

McLaine: Right.

G&W: On the one hand: pirates are innovators. Very much social innovators with democracy, and equity, and whatnot… while also being brigands, and murderers, and torturers. I mean, they're not mutually exclusive, you know?

McLaine: Absolutely. When people bring up the “Freedom Fighter” aspect, I'm like, "Yes, but there's also this."

G&W: And it doesn't nullify it.

McLaine: Right! And at the same time, yes, they were also doing these things, like Blackbeard, his crew was two-thirds Black, for instance. Bart Robert's crew was like half-Black, or of African descent, or freed slaves, or American-Indian natives. But, at the same time, if they caught a ship full of slaves, they'd sell them.

G&W: Right.

McLaine: So, yes, they can fight for social justice, but at the same time, the motivation was not social justice. Not entirely. There are some guys out there who fight the man: "We are here to fight against base merchants and cruel masters of ships." That was William Fly, I think, said that. But, at the same time, when he gets on board the ship, he immediately puts an ax to the captain, shoots anybody who resisted. Okay… yeah.

So, just as long as we can keep both in mind. And again, like you said, a game like Black Flag does a good job bringing up the fact that yes, these guys were doing all these things to fight against oppression, and that there was a lot of corporate and government villainy, and a lot of complicity. At the same time, they were also thieves, and betrayers, and there was no honor among thieves.

They [Ubisoft] capture that web, that convolutedness of it. That really does, like you pointed out, make for a more realistic portrayal of at least the behind-the-scenes aspects of it.

G&W: And it's funny because it's even more stark if you play the game versus watch a Let’s Play, because—I didn't realize this at first, but it actually makes perfect sense—the player character, Edward Kenway, is apparently based on [Edward] “Ned” Low. And that actually makes a lot of sense because as the player character, you're doing a lot of hacking, and slashing, and-

McLaine: And very violent things.

G&W: Yeah, exactly. So, it puts you in the middle of it; you're perpetrating a lot of this villainy, while also fighting a different type of villainy.

McLaine: Yeah. And that's a lot of what made the Golden Age of Piracy attractive, as a genre. And, speaking of Ned Low…

If you meet a skilled sailor and you're short of sailors, you'll press them to serve you. They didn't like it when the British Navy did it, but the pirates would do it themselves. You don't have a carpenter, or a surgeon? You find a surgeon.

G&W: Yep. What was the name of that poor surgeon who was hiding out in The Bahamas?

McLaine: I don't remember the surgeon's name, but I remember he had a choice of being pressed into service with the French, or the English. And he hid there, and the Frenchman came and grabbed him at sword point until [Benjamin] Hornigold came up and said, "No, I'll protect you, but you're coming with me."

If you're going with somebody, you might as well go with people who speak your language! But, yeah, that did happen.

I believe it was Ned Low who didn't want to press into his service—and this is one of the most violent pirates out there—married men, men with a family.

And again, this guy is one of the most gorily violent pirates out there. Some of it maybe is very likely exaggerated to give him a bad name. We get that. But, enough witness accounts say that he was awful, that he's awful.

G&W: Right.

McLaine: It was [Richard] Shipton, and [Francis] Briggs, and the other guys who served with Low and later had captained ships of their own, who pressed Philip Ashton into service. And Ashton's story is one of the best pirate stories out there. It's real, it's authentic. There's a great book on Ashton's story called At the Point of a Cutlass by Gregory Fleming. It's a fantastic book. But Ashton's story, called Ashton's Memorial, is available for free online. If you haven't read it, it's quick, and it's an easy read.

G&W: Would you mind giving a quick little synopsis for our listeners?

McLaine: Sure. Ashton was a sailor. Again, we just talked about this: pirates, when they were short on crew? In the early days, the Buccaneer era, this wasn't a thing, but by the late Golden Age—the late 1720s especially—the days of 200 men crews were over. If you had 20 men in your sloop, you're done. So, Ashton's ship was captured. He had some skills.

These pirates said, "Okay, all the unmarried men step forward," and someone whispered to Ashton, "Hey, you seem like a nice guy. Tell him you're married. He won't take you." And Ashton’s like, "Why would I believe this pirate? This pirate's telling me to say, 'you're married.' I'm not married!" So, he told him, "I'm not married." And of course, had he said that [he was], they put the married men in a boat and shoved them off. Let them go.

So, he ended up pressed into their crew and served them. He tried to escape a couple of times. One time, he saved himself by diving in the cargo hold and hiding. And one time, another pirate he'd been nice to like protected him like, "Don't hurt that guy."

But, he got on their bad side. Would not sign their pirate articles. Didn't want to be associated with them. Just did everything he could to get away from them. And finally, they went to the Island of Roatan, which is off of Honduras.

And he requested to be part of the shore party. And someone said, "Yeah, yeah, sure, come on. We could use an extra hand gathering supplies," where they had to fill their water casks and things. And as soon as he got to the shore, he turned around and looked, and the other guys were off gathering fruits and things. He took off running into the bush.

And Roatan is... it's got a beach, and a jungle, and not much else. And they searched for him, and yelled after him, and threatened, and bribed, and he wouldn't come out. And finally, they just left him there.

So, he's trapped on this essentially deserted island alone, shoeless, no supplies, in the middle of a jungle. And he's there for like a year and a half. It's a Robinson Crusoe story, but it's real.

And it's very much like, if you know who Alexander Selkirk is, Selkirk was marooned on a Pacific island in one of the Buccaneer expeditions, and Selkirk stayed in the islands for almost a year and a half. And he was rescued by William Dampier, who recognized him, and Selkirk's story is widely thought to be the basis for Robinson Crusoe.

G&W: Hm.

McLaine: But, you also have this story that wasn't in the Pacific. It was right there in the Caribbean: [the story] of Philip Ashton. And Spaniards came to the island, too. And he hid from them, because the Spaniards would've put him in chains and taken him away. Even though that was a salvation for him, he had to watch his... well. And they knew he was there. They heard him and saw him. They couldn't find him. But he had to watch his salvation sail away, because he knew that could be even worse than being left alone.

And this long story, it's very Robinson Crusoe: making a shelter, finding things to eat, discovering what he could and couldn't eat, putting together a raft so he could paddle over to a neighboring island because the mosquitoes were so bad, they were eating him, literally eating him alive.

So, he had to find this little rock out in the middle of the Atlantic, to sit on because the breeze was strong enough. If the breeze hit shore, it just hit the jungle and stopped. It was dead air. But when out on this little rock, he could at least get some rest because the breeze would keep the mosquitoes off. And his feet got torn up because he had no shoes and the island is full of rocks and shells. It's this long survival epic.

Again, Ashton's Memorial, if you Google it, it's available online. It's just a few pages. A preacher he knew, wrote his story down when he came back to civilization.

This old trapper came to the island, met him there, and left him a rifle, a knife, and a canoe. And the trapper went off and disappeared, and he's never heard from again. So, the guy left his stuff here, didn't come back for it, so Ashton did the best he could, survived on it. And eventually, he met some bay men, logwood cutters, and they were a really rough bunch. But he said, "You know what? I can't stay here any longer." Got in with them. Eventually made his way back to civilization.

And the scary part is, the same pirates who marooned him there, came back to the island! They came back to Roatan a couple of times looking for him, because they knew they could get food and water there. So, he would see a sail coming, like, "A sail! I'm rescued," and then, "Oh my God, it's Francis Briggs! It's the same guy. It's Richard Shipton! It's the same guy who's ship I just jumped out of and swam away from."

So, Ashton's story again, is a fantastic one. It makes for a good read. Even if you don't buy Fleming's book, read Ashton's Memorial, the short version. Again, online, it's free. And it's just a great survival story. And it's a great background on these pirates.

Again, doubling back on a long conversation, even some of the cruelest guys like Edward [Ned] Lowe… we talked about this, that whole dichotomy.

In a lot of role-playing games, I've heard the main character described as a “murder hobo.” [Going] place to place, slaughtering everyone in their way, but somehow, supposedly freeing the country, saving the kingdom, defeating the evil wizard, whatever. And in Black Flag, yes, you're doing that. Literally, you're wiping out pirates and raiders left and right. At the same time, you're trying to complete this whole long, convoluted, time travel quest.

G&W: Right.

McLaine: So, yeah, it really is a good depiction of kind of the duality that's going on there, between trying to accomplish something good in the long term, but going about it in the guise of a murder hobo.

G&W: At the end of the day, “do the ends justify the means,” right?

McLaine: Right. And obviously to them, yeah. It's like [the] Jacobite pirates, there's been a lot of good literature written [on them] in the last few years. A lot of them named their ships Jacobite names: the Royal Rover, the-

G&W: Queen Anne's Revenge.

McLaine: The Queen Anne's Revenge, the Royal James. They would drink Toast to the Old Pretender. Charles Vane and his crew drank Toast to the Old Pretender, Damnation to King George. But, a lot of it was just on the surface. They would spout the slogans, name their ship, but you didn't see any of them sailing back to France to join James III, to raise an army, to go put him back on the throne of England.

They're using these slogans, and the phrases, and the tropes, but it's really just on the surface. And a lot of that whole, like, "We're going to fight the man, fight the power," was a lot of talk… but in reality, they're not Robin Hood. When they say “we're going to rob to the rich and give to the poor,” the only poor they're giving to is themselves.

G&W: So, the other stuff's kind of more to ease their conscience, then?

McLaine: Right. Some of it is just to give themselves of a veneer of respectability like, "Oh, we're fighting for James III, the Old Pretender," or, "We're fighting to avenge poor sailors against cruel merchants." And some of it was, like you said, just to ease their own conscience like, "We're not really robbers, we're doing this for a cause!"

And some of it, I think, was recruiting tactic, "Hey, we're not just robbers. We've got something good going on here!” And some of it was just sloganeering like, "If we're captured, we can say we were really doing it for this purpose," or just to give themselves a sense of unity like, "We're going to say we have this uniting cause to bring us all together, because we all hate the East India Company," or, "We all got the shaft because the merchant owed us two years worth of back wages, and never paid us, so we're going to hold a mutiny."

And in reality, of course, they just wanted to loot ships until they could retire.

G&W: When it comes to engaging people in history more generally, I would love to hear your thoughts on video games as a possible pedagogical tool. Because I know more than a few people who were inspired to become historians from playing Civilization back in the day. And I'm sure that Assassin's Creed's also grooming a whole new generation of such folks. What do you feel are some of the advantages and maybe some of the pitfalls of using video games to get people interested in history?

McLaine: I think we touched on it a little bit, and you've talked about it in your blog post a couple of times, that there's the realism aspect of it. How the game is going to communicate fact and history, but they have to manipulate it to make it a game.

They have to, whether it's just pure game mechanics or whether it's altering the setting, like Sid Meier's Pirates!—great game, but you're encountering figures from the 1720s while you're sitting in 1666, or something. So, they're altering the historical aspects of it, to turn it into a game.

And that can, I think, lead people astray a little bit. Until they get enough into it, to do their own research, obviously. And mistaking some of the game mechanics for like, "Oh, pirates did this because..."

Like, why did pirates use cutlasses? Why did they load their cannons with explosive shells? Okay… they didn't use explosive shells. They did use a lot of different kinds of shells, but not those. Did pirates use grenades? Yes, they used grenades, but maybe not in the same way that our game character would have.

And can one game character change the whole game universe? Arguably, someone like Henry Every, or Bartholomew Roberts, or Henry Morgan, had that influence on other people and made a big change in the world. But, it's very different than what they have to let your character in the game do. And I think it can easily lead people astray.

The History Channel, for instance, put out some games. They put out Vikings, and they put out Great Battles of Rome. They put out The Civil War, Battles of the Pacific, et cetera. Legends of War: Patton. They put out a series of these games. None of them were highly regarded as games, because to be a game, you have to be game enough to bring people in and keep them interested. You can't just have accurate history, without having enough entertainment in it to get people hooked.

Which is why a series like Black Sails did well. And they have a lot of historical elements. They're like the live-action version of Black Flag. They name-dropped so many historical pirates, and recreated so many historical incidents—the sinking of the Treasure Fleet, and Hornigold establishing the “Republic of Pirates” in Nassau, and Vane being deposed for Calico Jack—but with enough alterations and dramatizations to make a series out of it.

G&W: Right.

McLaine: And you also have the main character based on, essentially, Long John Silver. Like having Edward Kenway meeting all these historical figures. Inserting somebody from out outside of history, so that they can either take part in events, or influence events, or at least meet all these event makers, in a way that keeps it entertaining.

What's the other series that came out alongside Black Sails? Crossbones. Crossbones came out around the same time and was panned, and didn't come back for four seasons like Black Sails, because it just wasn't good. And I never watched it. I've seen just the trailers, and a couple episodes, but I didn't binge-watch or anything. And again, it got that wrong.

You have to be good enough [at] entertaining to pull this off, to bring people in. And with luck—like Black Sails, like Black Flag—you've done enough of the history work on the side, that people start asking, "Okay, who was Benjamin Hornigold? This Edward Teach [Blackbeard], putting lighted matches in his beard, did that actually happen?" If you get people asking those sorts of questions, you've done your job on the history side—while still being entertaining, staying popular, and making enough money that you can keep this going.

And it's a hard balance, and there've been so many failures of games out there. And there are some that, like Sea of Thieves, [are] for people who already like pirates, not for people who have any interest in pirate history, because that's out the window.

Whereas a game like Sid Meier's Pirates!, you can get into it if you like pirates, but [also], if you know the names and you see Henry Morgan on the cover, you're like, "I know that guy! And not just from rum!" So, you can bring in both crowds.

G&W: Just to kind of wrap up, if you want to plug your pluggables, now's the time to do so.

McLaine: Sure! I am thrilled to have been a part of, and helped out on Game & Word. I did write a bunch of Wikipedia articles. They're buried under a different username, but if you look up the obscure half of Golden Age pirates on Wikipedia, that's probably me.

If you want to read about them under my name though, look up Matt McLaine. I'm on Amazon. In 2019, I wrote A Merry Life and a Short One: Unhelpful Self-Help and Terrible Advice from the Golden Age of Pirates. A pirate self-help book in which I go over actual pirate history and facts, but pull out some helpful tidbits from them, and awful advice that pirates would give you if they weren't trying to press you into service.

And then, in 2020, I came out with a book called Piracy Papers: Primary Source Documents from the Golden Age of Piracy.

Piracy Papers was an homage to one of my favorite pirate books, called Pirates in Their Own Words by Ed Fox, which collected a lot of first-person accounts, historical documents, unpublished manuscripts, [and] compiled them in book form, so that people looking for, literally, “pirates in their own words,” could see beyond just what's in books like The General History of Pirates, and see what the pirates actually said for themselves, and see what people said about them, from the time period.

If you think General History was based on newspaper accounts at the time, you can go back in books like Pirates in Their Own Words, or in Piracy Papers, and actually read those newspaper accounts. You can read the sermons preached at pirate funerals. You can read accounts of pirate interactions with famous figures like Isaac Newton and Ben Franklin. And really get a sense of what different aspects were like, both from the sides of the pirates themselves, from their victims and survivors, from the colonial officials that had to deal with them. And that inspired me again, to make Piracy Papers.

And I've got a couple more in the works. You can find Piracy Papers and A Merry Life and A Short One on Amazon right now, paperback and Kindle versions. I'm going to have a book, Heaven willing, I will have a book on the not-pirate Thomas Green, coming out later this year. Green is famous, or infamous, for contributing to the union of Scotland and England that became Great Britain.

Inadvertently, of course, because he was dead, and it was his death that contributed to it. He was no way, whatsoever, a pirate, but he was accused and executed of piracy. And his death helped inspire the active union that caused the formation of Great Britain. So, it's a great backstory and it's a lot of original period documents surrounding Thomas Green, his trial, his life, and the events that led up to his really unfortunate demise.

And you know, thrilling stories of Scottish judges, who didn't want to find him innocent, because they feared for their lives. One minister's carriage was overturned on the street by an angry pitchfork-wielding mob who demanded that he find this guy guilty and he is like, "…Okay."

And just the backroom maneuvering by the people who wanted the active union to go forward, and were afraid things like this would derail it.

And then, hopefully, don't know if I can manage it this year, but I'm going to try, to get a book out about some of the pirates who influenced the Carolinas, which is my home. Everybody knows about Blackbeard. Everybody knows about Stede Bonnet, the “gentleman pirate.” Blackbeard blockaded Charleston. Stede Bonnet made his escape from jail in Charleston.

But, there were so many other pirates who influenced so many things in the Carolinas. Pirates who retired and bought an entire island off our coast. Pirates who sailed up a river that I grew up fishing when I was young. I never knew that the mouth of that river had a pirate sitting in it!

And when I say, "Oh, we're going to fish the sandbar," that there's a pirate who escaped a bigger ship by sitting across that sandbar because the pirate had a ship with a shallow draft, and knew he could make it and the other ship couldn't.

And the place we go every year to pick out a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch is a plantation whose owner was kicked out of the governor's council because he was found guilty of conspiring with pirates, because that's how he made his money. It wasn't off his plantation work. It was off the gray market, smuggling with the pirates!

And little stories like that just weaved throughout the Carolinas. And the more I dug, the more I found them. And Blackbeard's fascinating, but his influence was limited to holding Charleston hostage for a couple of days, once.

But, there were so many pirates who had more influence, whose names we don't know. And those are the guys—again, coming from a history of starting writing by being fascinated by the obscure pirates—those are the stories I really want to tell. And hopefully, I can get to that this year. If not, who knows? It'll come.

G&W: Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary folks: Matt McLaine. Thank you so much for your time.

McLaine: Thank you for having me. Best of luck with Game & Word. I wish you the best, because it's some fascinating stuff.

Get full access to Game & Word at gameandword.substack.com/subscribe

The Game & Word Podcast: Recent Episodes

Jay Rooney