Reflections

Earlier this year I started playing A Monster’s Expedition, a puzzle game wherein you play as a monster exploring a museum of humans and human artifacts. Your character encounters a variety of knick knacks which are easily recognized by players but are mysterious to the monsters. Each has a little readable sign which (mis)interprets the object for the monster visitor. For example, you might find a beach ball described as an egg from the inflatable flamingo species. The game pokes fun at the guesswork involved in museum research and how curators may claim to understand things which they do not. A Monster’s Expedition also demonstrates how a cultural outsider can be highly judgmental of the culture they claim expertise over. For example, the game begins by explaining that it is based on human museums which were shockingly indoors, but obviously monsters have much more practical outdoor exhibits. The game includes the joke that monsters believe they may have been indoors as an attempt to ...

 Nothing will make you believe the idea that psych wards are made to punish deviation from the norm quite like spending a few days in one. The psych ward is designed in a lot of ways. 1. The ward is a panopticon (key point) Imagine being admitted, they take everything you brought in with you; from your phone to your wallet to your clothes. then they put you in a glass box. This is your room. Next door to you is a man who can't or won't speak English. He is constantly murmuring prayers. Next door to you is an old friend who today believes that you are (quite literally) the devil's advocate.  The wall is glass. The door is glass. There is no lock. There is a curtain, kept just high enough off the floor for them to see your feet if you are walking around the room. You are always watched. And always judged. You can read, a week later in your exit report, if you so choose. What the doctors and nurses thought of you. You can scan through the sterile notes and analyses they made a...

It was important to me to return my least favorite roommates pants.  Really, things start much earlier. There was a wallet I got as a child. When I try to think back to it, the details begin to blur. It was small and denim with some embroidered detailing in pink or maybe purple. I was young enough I don’t remember my age, maybe 6. I had no need for a wallet. Nothing of value to carry in it. But I thought it was a beautiful thing and a gift and I loved it dearly. I lost it. Somewhere. Somehow. The way children lose so many things. Dropped on a floor or a bench unnoticed. I remember it simply as being there one day and gone the next. for months, I looked everywhere I could think: in the house, my backpack, my pockets, the lost and found. It never did turn up again. I think about that little wallet to this day. I once thought I was going to die in an airplane crash. I sat there in the sky, thinking through my whole life, tallying it up in my mind. The worst part was that I was leavi...

This post contains spoilers for Disco Elysium.  Last year, a lifetime ago, I played through Disco Elysium with my then partner. We built a character with high psyche and followed our emotions and Inland Empire to discover the mysteries of that strange world. Last week, I decided to replay it on my own. I created a high physique and intellect character in the hopes of finding different dialogue. A part of me thought that maybe playing it through, facing Harry’s fears, might help me face my own. The ex-something who haunts him. Who his brain keeps telling him to forget but who he can’t stop picking at all the same. I know the feeling. Disco Elysium is a story about many things. One of those things is love. After all, if you have a high enough Inland Empire when examining the body (as I did in my first playthrough but not my second), the victim will tell you that love did him in. But no one you meet in the game is much in love with anyone or anything. Every character is hurt and jad...