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55 - Is Choosing From a Script Still Freedom? The Stanley Parable
The Stanley Parable offers you freedom, then shows you that every path was already built for you. But a script you did not write is not necessarily a…
2 days, 8 hours ago
54 - Why We Grieve Characters Who Never Lived
Watch the video:
https://youtu.be/Jlc-KB1Oa2k
Video games do not merely distract from sorrow. Through time spent with characters, player agency, and pa…
2 weeks, 4 days ago
53 - Red Dead Redemption 2: Arthur Morgan, Ivan Ilyich & Memento Mori (revisit)
Watch the video:
https://youtu.be/ynV50tCh6oc
Red Dead Redemption 2's Arthur Morgan and Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich both teach memento mori: facing death can…
3 weeks, 6 days ago
52 - Video Games and the Psyche: Agency, Anxiety, and Upbuilding
Video games are not only amusement. They are structured existential experiences: forks that press agency, anxiety, identity, desire, and failure on a…
1 month, 2 weeks ago
51 - Facing Fate in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Watch the video:
https://youtu.be/Qi0kgEKEEmg
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth asks whether Remake's defiance of fate was ever real freedom: after killing the…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
50 - Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Trauma, and Untapped Depth
Watch the video:
https://youtu.be/yKEFkPQmkU8
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is a visually striking fan-service film that sketches a psychological …
4 months ago
49 - Final Fantasy VII Remake: Reimagining, Sequel, and Fate
Watch the video:
https://youtu.be/GpBsTGBtTZY
Final Fantasy VII Remake is less a straight remake than a reimagining that often plays like a sequel: Mid…
4 months ago
48 - Final Fantasy VII: Grief, Consolation, and Recovery
Watch the video:
https://youtu.be/A_AOv8Jso04
Final Fantasy VII is a story of grief, consolation, and recovery: Aerith's death scars the party and the …
4 months, 2 weeks ago
47 - Outer Wilds: Stories and Music at the End of the Universe
Watch the video:
https://youtu.be/ahKy2pWEFMI
Outer Wilds asks what stories we tell and what music we make when the universe itself is ending. On the …
5 months ago
46 - Final Fantasy Tactics and Demonic Revolutionaries
Watch the video:
https://youtu.be/-MMKFphISss
What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious…
5 months, 2 weeks ago