Some messages are subtler than others.

You can play The Beginner’s Guide in a couple hours, tops. Playing it feels unlike playing any game you’ve played, because there aren’t really objectives to complete or decisions to make and there’s definitely no way to win or lose. The most accurate description of TBG I could come up with is calling it the world’s first interactive critical essay on video games; a game built to explore what games mean to their creators and the people who play them.

The conceit is that the narrator (the maker of the “actual” game you’re playing) is taking you on a guided tour of a bunch of half-finished game ideas created by a fellow game designer he admires. The thrust of the conversation focuses on how games reflect the ideas and personalities of their creators. The biggest point of contention is this: creating for the sake of creating is a pure act — personal, private expression — and then once anything is shared with an audience, the work inherently changes. There are expectations the audience brings to the work, there are interpretations and assumptions made about the work, and ultimately a whole new set of demands made on the creator of the work.

The interactive mode of exploring this idea makes for a very novel, very engaging exploration of the creative process. I loved going on this journey. But I liked it most for being one big exercise in examining my relationship with any of the creative works I enjoy.

Does creativity inherently lose something when it’s shared? Does it require an audience, or change as soon as an audience gets involved?

For things you’ve made, how do you factor in the audience while making those things?

For things you’ve enjoyed as an audience member, what, if anything, do you feel the creator owes you as a creator? Is that a fair exchange?

A topic best depicted in the abstract.

If you truly want to be challenged emotionally and ethically, I suggest — though with the requisite warnings about content that’s troubling, difficult, and may put you in a head space you do not want to be in — listening to the Love + Radio episode, “A Red Dot”, an extended interview with a man describing what it’s like to live life on the sex offender registry.

This isn’t a gawking look at how awful people live. It’s an attempt to empathize with a person who for many will be the least empathetic person you can think of. And it’s successful in that it doesn’t let him off the hook for making some very bad decisions, or having moments that suggest there’s a lingering disturbance within this person. But it also confronts us with the fact that a man can make a bad decision and continue paying the price for the rest of his life, no matter how he may learn, or grow, or change. It’s heavy stuff. I dare you to listen and not find yourself, at least at moments, feeling that empathy.

The tough question is, what can or should be done in this trickiest of situations?

If it’s acceptable to keep persecuting people after they’ve paid their debt, what are the limits to punishment?

Do we believe people can change enough to be forgiven, or at the very least left to live their life?

If we do, why is it ok to keep vilifying them? If we don’t, do they deserve what we put them through, or is there a better way to handle those we want to permanently ostracize?

This book could easily provide 20 more posts, but it would almost feel like stealing.

Chuck Klosterman’s I Wear the Black Hat collects a dozen or so essays about how we see certain figures in society as good or evil, and how sometimes the differences we feel so deeply aren’t as clear-cut a distinction as we might think. What we forgive in one person, we villify in someone else. Or the ways and reasons we remember some of our heroes ignore what other figures are hated for, often depending less on what they’ve done (or believed), but how they presented it to the world. Lots of good conversation (or at least chin-scratching contemplation) fodder, as is usual with Klosterman.

One passage in particular jumped out as a good reason to turn the lens back on myself, especially in the shadow of recent events:

Clear, unsubtle satire on TV shows like SNL and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report can succeed as entertainment, but they unintentionally reinforce the preexisting world: These vehicles frame the specific power holder as the sole object of scorn. This has no impact beyond comforting the enslaved. Power holders — even straight-up dictators — are interchangeable figureheads with limited reach; what matters far more is the institutional system those interchangeable figureheads temporarily represent.

So what does this mean, outside of an academic discussion about power? Well, maybe this: If you want to satirize the condition of a society, going after the apex of the pyramid is a waste of time. You need to attack the bottom. You need to ridicule the alleged ideological foundation an institution claims to be built upon. This is much, much more discomfiting than satirizing an ineffectual prime minister or a crack-smoking mayor. This requires the vilification of innocent, anonymous, working-class people.

As happy as I am to see The Daily Show in particular continue doing good work poking the giant, it may be a way for me to go on feeling superior while laughing at those in power. I sit on my couch venting my frustrations through comedy, while they go right on running-slash-ruining the world.

Does satire ever actually change anything for the better, or is it just a way to feel better about what’s wrong with the world?

Which satires are the most effective? What would make others more so?

Are the biggest fans of satire the people that are actually doing the least to make a real difference in the world?

If they key art for the game can spoil a plot twist, I certainly can.

SOMA is a game that’s hard to talk about without getting into specifics, and there’s nothing more insufferable than talking around something in an attempt to “avoid spoilers”, and thereby talking a lot without really saying anything at all. So there’s that.

On its surface, SOMA is a scary haunted house game set in an undersea research facility where you have to find a way out of the nightmare you’re trapped in, both literally and metaphorically. But really, SOMA is a game about consciousness. And if it weren’t more about that than running from monsters in a dark dank creepy maze at the bottom of the ocean, it would not be a very interesting game at all. In fact I would be just as happy to think and talk about the version of this game with no monsters at all. The monsters are not the point.

Some things a thoughtful person will ask themselves as they play this game include: Is putting a broken-but-still-living thing out of its misery an act of mercy or cruelty? Does this machine feel pain, and is that pain different than “real” pain I would feel guilt for inflicting on a person? Does a form of intelligence not based in traditional human biology have the same right to exist and propagate that we do?

But the biggest questions are about what it means to be human. In a future where consciousness can be transplanted — where our minds have the chance to continue after our frail human bodies, and the earth they occupy, are no longer sustainable — it’s up to us to decide if that’s an action worth taking.

The designers employ a clever trick to force us to confront this directly. At several points in the game, the player comes across kiosks with seemingly benign survey questions about what it feels like to be taken from your original body; about what it means to be untethered from the physical anchor we’re used to.

The questions don’t change over time, but based on the actions you’ve taken and what you’ve been through between these points in the game, you may find yourself reevaluating your responses. It’s tough to say you don’t want to go on when you’ve fought so hard not to give up. What may seem like sweet release viewed from the outside might be a torturous end when it’s your turn. Deciding between a false reality and none at all isn’t much of a choice.

If you could live on beyond your body by putting your mind into a mechanical host, would you?

Would it be better or worse to upload your consciousness to a simulation (like in The Matrix) and leave bodies behind altogether?

How do you think you would feel different in either of these situations, given that you are 100% aware of what’s changed?

Or ignore this post and try a truly controversial topic: Is Scorsese overrated? (Yes, I know I’m asking this in the caption to a shot from Coppola.)

The Godfather and Goodfellas are classic guy movies. We quote them we reference them, their influence is undeniable (even though the latter is a bit over-rated; that’s right, I said it). The Sopranos changed television. Though we know the characters are criminals, we find an admirable dignity in their way of life, we excuse their actions because we’re seduced by their brazen individuality.

When The Wolf of Wall Street appeared in 2013, Scorsese told a story similar to that of Goodfellas, only set in a different kind of criminal enterprise. The same rise to power, the same brotherhood of exploitation and excess, the same kinds of mistakes leading to the same ultimate downfall (though in both cases, a sort of escape from true justice). And yet, Wolf made me viscerally angry. Despite any praise for craft, I sort of hated it, walking out that day. And it always bothered me a little that I couldn’t quite explain why I felt so disgusted by the Wall Street version of this story but entertained by the Mafia one.

Then I read Maria Konnikova’s piece in The New Yorker that basically spelled it out for me (though this excerpt only touches on the larger reasoning).

[P]sychological distance doesn’t require time. Under the right conditions, it can flourish in the moment. The psychological distance provided by “otherness” mimics the distance provided by time. It’s not a phenomenon unique to the mafia. It’s easy to glamorize warfare when there is no draft, or to idealize anyone whose life style seems risky and edgy without putting you, personally, at risk—spies and secret agents, rebels without a cause, the beatniks of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.” As long as there isn’t an easy-to-recall, factual reminder that brings us down out of the clouds of romanticism, we can glamorize at will. The lives of serial killers offer those concrete reminders: they lurk in neighborhoods like ours, threatening people who could be us. The mob is more abstract: it’s a shadowy, vague “organization” whose illicit dealings don’t really impinge on us. Abstraction lends itself to psychological distance; specificity kills it.

We grant mobsters dignity because we enjoy contemplating the general principles by which they are supposed to have lived: omertà, standing up to unfair authority, protecting your own.

Mobsters are far enough removed from most of our realities that we can see them as fictional, as other, and not feel personally offended, harmed, or threatened by them. Bankers, on the other hand, very recently did direct harm to most of the country. They’re too real to admire; or at least, they should be if you’re any sort of moral person.

What qualities are admirable in mobsters? Are there any that would actually apply to your life, or do they only serve as an escapist fantasy?

Do any of those apply to the popular idea of bankers as portrayed in culture? Are they actually that different, or as this article suggests, just degrees of separation from our actual realities?

If you had to be one, which would you want to be? Or rather, which would be the most fun on the one hand, but which would be the most practical life decision? How would you feel once you’d gone down that path?