78 - The Art of Video Games (feat. Master Samwise and Joshua Traylor)

wish I read more books when I was younger. But at the same time, looking back through the lens of where I've come in my literary renaissance over the last few years, and I've been spending some time thinking about what stories are just to different avenues of pursuing wisdom, I think that there is actually a lot of potential here in using games in the.

many others as well. And as I start to put these ideas together, I wanted to talk with some people who have spent probably a little bit more time than I have at this point thinking about just video games like as a medium and what they are and what potential benefits they can have as well as of course you know where they can help us and going wrong. And so with that in mind, today I'm talking with Master Sam Wise, who was on the show a little while ago when we talked about the War of the Row.

Herem and are joined by Josh Traylor, who is a Mythic Mind patron and you'll know him from most of the chats on the Poetic get Up. But before we jump into that conversation. I do want to thank all my patrons for making this and all the various things that I do possible. In the last episode, I detailed some of where I want to see this going, and

every patron helps in bringing us in that direction. By name, I would like to specifically thank all Tier three patrons and higher, and so that's Mark, Chaz Clinton, Aaron Evy, Justin who just upgraded, Kyle, Mariah, Paul Tyler William, and Chase who just joined on as a patron. Although he has been in I think all my courses up to this point, and you know him already from the EDA chats.

Big things are happening in my mind and I would love for you to be a part of that, from the courses that are already on the schedule to new course ideas that are percolating, both from me as well as from some other potential creators. We've got some new podcast series on the horizons, We've got some new patron chat series coming up. There's just a lot of room

for participation all around. And we just recently announced our next several months of patron chats, and so for March and April, we assuming no scheduling upsets, we should be finishing up the poetic Adam, and then for May and June we're actually going to be getting into the Nights of the Old Republic one and two, which are most certainly the best Star Wars games ever made, some of the best Star Wars media easily brought up to potentially

even arrival the original trilogy. But as I say later in the conversation, I'm wtllle hesitant to make that claim, but we definitely, I think, better than just about anything else that's come out since then, and so we'll be talking about that, and then after that, I'm pretty sure we're going to be getting into Tolkien's Children of Huron, which provides some good connections to some of the things

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into our main conversation for today. All right, welcome back to Mythic Mind, where today we're gonna do something we haven't done so far on the show, and that's gonna talk about video games. I'm sure we'll get into some specific titles, but you know, really just I want us to have a broad level conversation of like what even our video games? You know, is it just a waste of time? Or is there some value to be had there?

And given that we're having this conversation, I guess it's kind of obvious where we're going to come down on that, but you know, it might be helpful to start off just by talking a little bit about like like some of some of our background or experience with games as a medium and as a kid, as a teenager, I played a good bit, probably more than I should have.

Kind of wish I read a few more books, but nonetheless, in many ways kind of having not having much of a literary focus as a kid, aside from what I picked up in school here and there, I do kind of feel like looking back, games did kind of fulfill some of that innate human desire for stories for you know, entering into other worlds that that's sort of been chanting, and so I think there's something there that can see

looking back. You know, once I went out on my own, once I got married, a lot of that sort of dropped off quite a bit. Once I had kids, dropped off a lot more to the point where now, I mean, every once in a while I'll pick up something, but it's it's usually the same something I've been playing for ten or more years, because you know, even though I picked up a couple of things during a Steam sales not too long ago, the reality is, if I have a few minutes to pick up a game these days,

I tend to go for familiarity. But I do think that there's something to this question, like.

baseball or backyard soccer. I'm familiar with those old, old titles that most likely came in the bottom of cereal box. Or I played something like Roller Coaster Tycoon, where you're just building and maintaining a theme park, you know. Lego

Star Wars also came in a little bit later. So yeah, once the family computer was up to the task, so it didn't I didn't really start playing games more extensively till I was later in high school, and then I got I was into things like Call of Duty and Star Wars Battlefront and a lot of first person shooters, ones that may may may be are not completely devoted value,

but certainly just have kind of a more entertainment casual nature. Again, you can find value in most anything that isn't just a complete trash, but in those games are are were anyway generally made with with love and care, and they the stories they told were were somewhat solid, but nearly most of the time was just spent in multiplayer shooting

other people who are also shooting back at me. So it wasn't, honestly until probably after college the last gosh, how long will be graduated less than a decade that I really started diving into more of the deeper world of video games.

and the character development. And I think, what what games have an advantage over something like, you know, even literature, but certainly over television and movies is the depth to which they can go because it just because they are able to take all this time. Because television, even television movies especially, but even TV shows are limited, right, and there is kind of a set limit on how long they can be. Even in the age of streaming, where you can really only be so long, you can only

do so much. Games don't really have that problem. If you look on my channel, you know, the longest my longest videos are all about video game characters because they you spend so much more time with them. If you spend twenty hours or fifty or sixty hours playing through a game, you spend so much time with this character, you're able to absorb these little details and then you

get a lot more out of it. So yeah, I think basically that's kind of my journey with games is it's just in the last less than ten years or so where I really come to absorb the value that they can have in their ability to tell stories. But then there's more to it than that, And there's a video I'm planning to do and probably in the distant

future at this point. And how video games cultivate virtue and storytelling is certainly one way, and the ways in which they can tell stories that are distinct from books and movies are good and definitely to be measured. But there are other ways and that they can teach perseverance. They can teach, you know, explore and they need to the desire to explore and wonder. They can even teach the logistical thinking and planning and you know, thinking ahead.

And if you take up games like factory games where you're planning and building you know, a factory, you're collecting resource. Theyre all sorts of ways which games can build us. It's they're fascinating, basically.

my life. So yeah, for me, I actually like pretty much have played since basically as long as I can remember before because my dad was like in his twenties when like the og like Nintendo and all that came out in the eighties, and so when I was born in the mid nineties, like he already had like Sega Genesis and was a Super Nintendo eventually Nintendo sixty four

PS one Dreamcast. So I really like cut my teeth on all of that stuff like that nineties gaming, even though I was extremely little in the second half of the nineties when I was a toddler, but really from there kind of like got more. I definitely like stuck with like the Nintendo a lot and wasn't really allowed to play like a lot of like the emerated games at the time. So I would probably good good decisions

on my parents probably for that one. So played like a lot, played like a lot of game game played like a lot of them. Sixty four eventually I got like more into like the Microsoft like Xbox three sixty stuff when I was in middle school in high school, eventually kind of like got into uh I was super into Halo at one point, Like those games were great, and I thought that they had exceptional writing as well.

I mean, I really, I mean I've played a lot of different stuff, probably all the way up until my early twenties and then just it's not like I never like lost interest or like saw there as like I never really really with a phase where even where I thought like video games were like stupid or pointless or a waste of time, I would say, and I would certainly still argue against all of those claims to this day.

I think I just like I started to find interest in other things more probably that and spend time on growing up like you know, music and eventually like reading as well, So probably like distanced myself a little bit more so when I my knowledge of gaming rely spans from stuff from like the late nineties, probably too roughly like the mid twenty teens. So I'm pretty I'm I'm a good like decade out of the loop, I would say,

with a lot of things. The only one of the only early RPG games I played in the past ten years is Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven, which I definitely have things to say if it comes up. But yeah, pretty much like a long story short that's like kind of like the broad kind of like the broad sweeping overview of really my experiences.

value of reading fiction. And at that point it just I just started reading everything I keep my hands on, and it really reshaped the way that I view just about everything really, especially you know, it really started with with Tolkien and the you know, getting into his unfairy stories and sort of his philosophy of myths and that sort of thing, and you know that that's allowed me to look back on some of the games that really stood out to me, especially in my youth, and recognized

that maybe they're not just a waste of time. I definitely went through that phase where I felt like, you know, its just escape, But as Tolkien says, escape is part of the process of recovery, and so I do believe there's some value there. But at the same time I'm working through this in real time. I I wonder how much the games are just fun or there's an amusement factor, and then I want to justify value into it, into

the story. I don't know, is that a do you think that's a temptation when we talk about like, you know, Sam, you're talking about how we can discover virtue and video games and you know different positive lessons, like do you have any comment on that, like how much is that real? And how much are we trying to justify something?

saved my life. Right where people if you go on if you go on YouTube and search you know, dark Souls, search Dark Souls saved my life, you will find I'm sure no shortage of of videos of people saying that they were in a dark place. They felt hopeless and helpless, right they they had felt like they had no no, no power, right they couldn't do anything. And then they picked up Dark Souls and the game if you haven't played it, and it beats you over the head, quite literally.

It beats you down repeatedly, over and over and over again. The game is designed unless you, you know, really go out of your way to make it easy for yourself, which you can do, but it is designed to kill you repeatedly. The one of the versions that came out on PC anyway, I'm not sure if this original version is called Dark Souls Prepared to Die and the game tells you right away like you're going to die, and you're going to die a lot, and all you can

do is get better. I mean that's it. You can yeah, sure you can do various things to do that, right, but the main thing is simply getting better at the game, learning the boss's attack patterns, learning when to attack, when not to attack, learning when it's time to change your

your own weapon or your build your strategy. And it teaches people to have an internal attribution where they say, Okay, this failure is clearly just my fault, right, and the only thing I can do about it is change because the game's not going to change.

world of the game. Right, if you learn that lesson in Dark Souls and you don't apply it to your life, I mean, yeah, that's that's what most people might very well do. But for these people right who actually let it change them, I mean, then it changed them, it did something meaningful. So yeah, again it is it is with most mediums. Video games are simply about how you approach them right. Intentionality is huge. I can watch the most prof I could read the most profoundly philosophical book

on the planet. But if I do it just because I want to say that I've read the most profoundly philosophical book on the planet, who cares? What good is that? What it has that changed me?

frustrating even when you when you fail. But another thing I want to like say with Dark Souls specifically is there was what actually drew me into that game. It was, Yes, it was the challenge, it was the difficulty. But the best word I could use kind of describe the world and the lore and the aesthetics of Dark Souls is enchanting, to be honest. And it's the same thing that I think any one of us could find enchanting about the

best of like the fantasy genre. Right, whether you're talking about the great works of the Middle Ages or you're talking about Tolkien or maybe even some of the the contemporary later modern works that uh that came after Tolkien, Right, there's something enchanting about these worlds that are that we don't see around us necessarily, but there is there is there is an enchanging reality within the world, and it awakens and illuminates our imaginations in this this special way

that we can't maybe you can't even always fully explain in a sense, and that was that was really stood out for me. And one thing I'd describe myself as is so like I always I've thought about this a lot, and sometimes I knew a lot of guys that were like into like army men growing up, right, Like they like were like we're obsessed with like World War two and stuff like that, and there's like nothing wrong with that. I think that's great, and there's a lot of wonder

to that as well. But I always describe myself as a kid who was more into like knights and swords than like army men and like rifles. Not I'm not gonna say one is better than the other, but that was just like my draw So I think something like Dark Souls was enchanting, but it was almost like enchanting in an adult way, whereas when I was in a kid, the world and war and mythos of the Legend of Zelda was super enchanting to me as a kid. I still think it's interesting and enchanting as as a thirty

year old. By the way, so I'm not gonna say it's it's child it's CS Lewis right. It's like you you love childish things, then you don't love childish things, and you grow up and you will love childish things again, right, Like it's like that's like kind of like how I would think of like Legend of Zelda. But Dark Souls is not for kids. It is for adults. But it's

it's enchanting. It's a totally different way. And I mean you just want to talk about like how like I've never seen outside of like a fantasy book series or like some of the old Icelandic or you know ar

Thury in English tales. It's like outside of some of that, I haven't really seen anything else with such a rich war and uh just like story behind it, but the story is not on the nose, you know, it's not explicit like you get to learn it, don't get to kill things and read artifacts and put the pieces together, and honestly, then watch hours and hours and hours of basically Dark Soul scholars on YouTube to really actually understand

what's going on. And there's a lot of meaning there, like long story short, like it's it's it's profound right, And I think sometimes people can even play dark like the Dark Soul series just for the challenge, and that's great, and maybe they subconsciously reap some of the imaginative and

philosophical aspects of that in a way. But I think, like even just to play it for the challenge of supreme refined melee combat is still like missing out on all like the richness of meaning written into those games and designed into those games.

and came out twenty twenty two. It has a similar sort of Gene where it's this dark fantasy setting, the world's kind of trapped in this cyclical cycle where no one really dies, and it was like the Tarnished and eld Ring of the Undead, And in Dark Souls, we're kind of just kind of this cyclical cycle to life which you're a little bit seeking to break. So there's

you know, so that you could go into. You could probably teach a whole course just on that concept right where it's just like you've basically created immortality and you're realizing how awful it truly is. But even without having you know, it's like, as we're having this conversation, like, oh, that's right, I keep meaning to go on YouTube and like Josh said, find the you know, watch a Foddy video or whoever else is doing the videos on all

the Dark Soul, the Dark Soul's lower Deep dives. But one of the things that really stands out to me that is most enchanting in Dark Souls, you spend a good amount of time underground or at least in very dark places, and there are moments where you see sunlight, Like there's there's a whole long section of the game where you're going through is essentially the sewers, and it's fairly early on and then you you finally end up in the Boss room and there's this big crack in

the ceiling essentially where sunlight shining through. And it makes me think of the scene of the Two Towers and in Aderas where they see the described in the book, as you know, the single high window through, you know, sunlight shining through. And then that same theme comes back with a single star that Sam seeds as he's on the I think it's the planes of Gorgoroth, And you know,

it's just kind of this message like not all is dark. Right, You've been going through this incredibly dark, depressing area, and even as you're about to take on this giant you know, dragon like boss, right, you still see this this beam of light coming in that kind of tells you there there is hope here, there is an end.

I hooked my my laptop that I have for gaming on up to our TV. I'm sitting there with my my sleeping newborn on a lap at two in the morning or whatever, and like, all right, I'll start playing Skyrim. And so I mean, I, like I said, I barely dipped my toes in. There's not even much I can formulate about, you know, my thoughts about the world yet, unfortunately, because it's like okay, you know, I'm just starting to you understand kind of the the world building that that's

going on here. So I wish, I wish I could tell talk more about it, but unfortunately, just not much.

they have literally entire books, like libraries of books written within the games. And so the fact that you know they are willing to, you know, invest the time in writers to literally write books in the game, most of which are going to go unread by you know, those are those who are buying the titles. It just I think shows a level of detail which you know, unfortunately, moving forward, I imagine all such things will just be

AI generated. But at least once upon a time, you know, that really took the time to you know, invest in such little storytelling d details that you know, it's easy for me to look at a title like that as well as whatever comparable fantasy series are out there, Dark Souls, whatever, and it's easy for me to look at that and recognize the potential for enchantment, the potential for kind of expanding your engagement with kind of with ideas, with philosophy,

with with kind of what could be. I do think that there's a lot of inherent value in that well, I guess, I mean from here it it'd be interesting to hear about, you know, some other titles that have sort of captured your imagination, that have captured your time, and uh, just to dig into a little bit about what it is about these particular titles that stand out to you. So I mean, Josh, what's something else that has been uh, you know, near and dear to you.

And what I like about cyberhok twenty seventy seven. I mean, first of all, like the writing is an incredible, great character arcs, great dialogue back and forth between like your the protagonists in which you play, and the various recurring like side quest characters that he encounters in Knight City, in the outskirts of Night City, which is the setting

of the game. But I think what's really, uh, what's really profound about that game is that it almost, to me, it almost captures, it almost captures like a fairly realistic version of like what the future could be in a sense, because grow I liked I liked Star Trek growing up, and I guess like to some extent, I still do like the next generation and even like Deep Space nine

to some extent. But one thing I kind of like abandoned when I got older is I found out like Gene rodden Berry's kind of like conception of the future just super like utopian, and it's like everything's going to be super diplomatic with all these aliens, and like everything looks crisp all the time, like their uniforms are always perfectly uh, you know, perfectly like steamed and pressed and all that. But the ship is like the ship is

beautiful and there's nothing. It's a very like glorified depiction of like the progression of science beyond the time that will probably all, you know, beyond the time that we'll probably all live up to right like like hundreds of years in the future, whereas with cyberpunk, the future looks it looks kind of it looks kind of gross, right Like, I don't know if it either of you ever been to like Times Square in New York City And I always heard about it and thought it would sounded cool

as a kid, and I went for the first time a couple of years ago, and I thought it was kind of gross. It's like there's just a bunch of weird characters walking around in the middle of the day and there's just big giant screens with not beautiful images on them in any sense, And that's that's kind of like what side like the vibe of cyberpunk twenty seventy seven is. And people are people are kind of gross

in it in a sense too. But I think what it really captures more than anything is kind of like the ramifications of one like taking like technology and science

too far as humans. Probably the over alliance on science and technology and the way in which are kind of like just our human condition is kind of put on display even more so because of technology and how the things that I've always been there for all of human history, like since the Fall especially, have been have been prevalent and real, but there's a way in which technology and the evolution of science and like the data network and the rapidness of communication puts that on like full display,

and the way that that's even modified as people are basically, you know, at this point, like half robot and like you know, part human, part robot, having implants and all these things asking the questions even like basically anthropological questions regarding like what actually is a human? And are you still human or fully human if you have these implants. It really deals with all of those things really wonderfully.

And I'm I'm trying to hit it all here, so I'm kind of randing and speed talking through it a little bit just to hit the high points. But I can't recommend that game enough because it's not necessarily beautiful, but it's meaningful and it really I think, asks a lot of thought provoking questions and explores them quite nicely.

I think of that, and yeah, okay, that's definitely a future where we feel like we're creeping closer towards Also.

One of my favorite things about those books is the the ending, especially that the epilogues of like Out of the Silent Planet, for example, where you know, at the end, Lewis basically comes out and says, oh, by the way, this stuff is real. Now, now go cast down the demonic scientists. And you know that I saw that article coming out a few years ago about how Lord of the Rings is radicalizing. But nothing is as straightforward as Lewis's epilogues in those books against science.

We're dealing with the remnants that are left, and everything is just gross and mean and dirty, but you know, there's still these glimmers of goodness, glimmers of hope, this reminder that life does go on, life can go on even when everything externally is stripped away. And I actually think thats as much as you can expect Amazon to do I felt like they decently maintained this with the show in that you know, like Lucy, the main character part of her story is you know, she's like the

bright character in the Wasteland. You know, she always has this positive attitude. She even you know, maintains fidelity to the Golden Rule. You know, that's a kind of an ongoing theme here, even you know too well people who aren't very nice to her. It's a Again, is it like a Christian franchise. No, certainly not. However, I do think that there is just some of that resilience of life, resilience of goodness that can be found through I mean this,

you know, post apocalyptic, retro future look at things. And so that's that's that's my go to, you know, dystopian franchise of choice, Sam tell us about. You can either comment on any of that or just go off on something else.

the Rings is not. It is it is very much Christian, but it is not. It is not a sermon, it is not a homily, right, And that's I've said this many times. I will say it many more times. Christian movies generally suck because they don't care enough about the movie part, right, They're trying to communicate their message to a to a broader audience by making a movie. This is what Hollywood has been doing, just from the opposite end of the faith spectrum, where they don't really have

much faith. They don't really have much morals for the most part. They just kind of have a vague sense. I mean it's like Marxist morals basically, where it's like, yeah, these people are pressed, we're gonna need to make sure we support them until they become the present. And it's like, anyhow, this is what Hollywood's done. They've they've forgotten a lot about you know, especially big mainstream Disney forgotten about the

movie part. The art right, the telling a story in a way that no one else can, and they just want to tell people things just doesn't work anyhow. That's that's my little self buck. So when you talk about you know, movie or movies, franchises, games, whatever, being Christian, most of them are not going to be. But there Peter Criefton Is in Philosophy of Tolkien repeats this phrase

from one of Tolkien's letters at least twice. I'm halfway through the book and he's repeated it at least twice, where Tolkien says, you know that you know more important, or at least the objective of you know, something like Lord of the Rings is the elucidation of truth, right, the encouragement of good morals by showing them in these you know, real but fantastic ways, right with these characters.

So that's, you know, whenever I'm approaching and analyzing some media, which is what I do on the channel, right, I analyze it from a Christian perspective, but from the more from the lens of virtue and you know, growing to you know, growing in virtue, growing in love of others. Anyhow, So I ended talking about actual games that I actually care about, were about to say something, Andrew, Yeah.

of War Ragnak, which came out twenty twenty two. I believe, so their continuation of the original God of War PlayStation games, you know, one, two, and three and a couple in between, which followed the tale if you're not familiar of Krados, who is a character. He's a son of He's a son of Zeus, because who in Greek tales isn't a

son of Zeus? Who basically who's a wife and who is tricked into killing his own wife and child in his battle lost by Aries, and in revenge she ends up tearing down all of Olympus and throwing all of Grease into chaos. And then he attempts to what's the word that you have to use to be algorithmically collect, he attempts to unlive himself, and that's where God of

War three ends. Follow up, you catch up with him a decade plus later in God of War four in the in the reboot, and he's now it's now he's now in Norse mythology, so he is has found a

new life. He is, you know, married a Nordic woman, a giant as we found out find out, and had a son who's I think about nine, nine, ten eleven years old in the first game, and the first game begins with his wife's funeral and him have to figure out how to raise this kid to be a father, to be a good father when he never really had that example, and his struggles with his past, right, his struggle with forgiving himself right, finding you know, redemption just

for himself, right, That is a huge, huge theme, right, obviously, someone who's who's done horrible, horrible deeds in the past finding for self, forgiveness and redemption. That remains a theme

throughout both of the reboot games. And so those stories absolutely captured my attention because especially as a father myself, even though my kids are a bit younger, just struggling with you know, whatever struggles I may have, and how I really do not want to pass on my own faults and flaws to my kids, you know, seeing him, you know, grow in humility, right and meaning that in the very truest way where he learns to know himself in his place. Right. But yeah, forgiveness and redemption by

far the largest largest themes in those stories. And that's again it's a very Christian message, even if the developers are probably partly not Christian. Certainly the studio as a whole is not explicitly Christian, but that's kind of Christianity's whole thing. So and it's but it is beautiful and it's one of the one of the things that even people who aren't Christian, they can realize that, right, because

it is just an obvious truth. If you just tell people that, yeah, you can't change what's done, right, you have to move on. At the near the end of one of the last games, not to spoil it too much, but one of the one of the characters says to Credos, don't you know what I've done? And Creatos responds responds, yes,

but what will you do now? And that plays over and over and over in my head because that's it, right, because I certainly have the temptation to look back on what I've done, whether we're five minutes ago or a year ago, and go, what was I thinking? What's wrong with me? And you know the answer is who cares? What are you going to do now? Oh? That's definitely on the more story spectrum of the you know, the

games that have really captured my attention. There's lots of others, many far less story driven, but yeah, for the sake of brevity, all kind of there for now?

ourselves is what is life demanding of me? That's a different kind of question. A lot of times we asked the question what is the meaning of life? We even though again as a Christian like I have answers to that, but I feel like a lot of time when we ask that question, we make it so abstract as to hide from any responsibility that might come from the answer, Whereas if we asked the question, like what do I actually need to do today? What are my responsibilities today?

What do I do in light of the things that I've done yesterday, Like, given the facticity of what's before me, what do I.

you know, wear wolf like creatures or whatever. You know, one of which you know, Kratos is you know finishing move, will grab the things jaw and rip it in half.

they're not horribly long. The first one is maybe twenty hours, the second is. I think I finished it at under thirty, especially because I don't I didn't bother playing in a higher difficulty because I wanted to experience the story. Those are very very good, very well done games. The right eating is excellent.

anything related to that franchise. Now, as far as okay, another game of choice that I can bring up here, you know, in addition to Elder Scrolls, Fallout one that I find myself returning to on a fairly regular basis, even still at least every couple of years or so. Knights of the Old Republic Right definitely top tier Star Wars games, top tier RPGs in general. I think that this is just an era of Star Wars history lore

that's so rich for storytelling. It's back when Star Wars maintained obvious differences between.

the sequels and such things. Right, But that I always what I like wanted what I wanted when like they like announced the Force Awakens, right, episode seven, Force Awakens, that's what it was called whatever it was like ten ten eleven years ago when they announced that, when they were like saying they were making a sequel trilogy to Star Wars, it's like going in the direction that like Kotor was, is like what I wanted them to do right, especially like the second game where it's like you really

have like kray As almost like this like Nietzschean like Zara thirstraw like type of figure who's kind of like challenging you to It's almost like they could be like taken as like deconstructionists in some way, of like the Jedi in the Sith and I guess it kind of is in some ways, but in some ways she presents like this this via media, like really like gray path between the two, and some sense she's like kind of just like hates the Force all together and wants it

to die. But all those are really interesting ideas to explore in Star Wars, right.

I like the stories, I like all the character arcs, and I more than like, I love the world of Star Wars, like the original Star Wars just a really cool world, like a lot of the design of you know, the different characters, the different races, the different planets, like the the the escapes of like the cities and the deserts and the jungles like all of that, Like it's

it's a really cool world. The Jedi is a really cool idea, you know, basically these kind of like monastic nights with laser swords in a sense like that's that's that's a really cool idea, right, And it was in a sense like probably in some ways really original in its time. But the problem I've always seen with Star Wars until like besides like really with Kotor, is that they have a great foundation that they never really built

off of. The original trilogy set up so much there that could be explored with literature, with philosophy, with a lot of interesting ideas and dynamics and character arcs, and then you know, I'm not going to really talk about the prequels because we could just talk about all the memes and the acting and the script and all of that. But with the sequels, I feel like there was a real opportunity there with honestly, some quality actors, some big

name Hollywood directors. Maybe you know, jaj Abrams could have done better. Maybe he could have I don't know, but those ideas, like I wanted them to explored so bad in episode eight. It really seemed like with the trailer and like the hype up to that it could they could have explored some of these ideas from like Kotor one or Kotor two in it, and then it was just kind of a schlockfest, to be honest, I'm just

gonna say it, like it just it just was. And they didn't do any of that with with like Luke, they didn't do any of that with with Ray or Kylo Red or any of these people, and it was it was a huge disappointment. But well, all that to say that, like Kotar one and two are the Star Wars story that like I always dreamed of but has

never been told on a screen or even in a book. Necessarily, it's in these semi obscure video games from the original Xbox which a lot of people didn't even really play in the early mid two thousands, and they're just kind of you know, for instance, it was gonna be like lost in history, and I'm like this, this is the greatest Star Wars story ever told, and few and far between people have experienced this or even know that it exists. And like, there's my plug. Buy therefore you to play

those games. It's like if you'll give for something rich in the Star Wars universe, it's like, there's your story. Play the code our games, especially Kotor two especially.

and the Sith. But what makes that different than what happens in the newer movies is that she's the obvious villain, like she does something wrong, which just shows that the start contrasts in storytelling, whereas so much of I mean, I know that we could it'd be easy to spend the rest of this conversation just hating on the new movies, but you know, so much of those movies are just they're deconstructing in the wrong way, which is the spirit of the age I suppose, where all the heroes get

ripped apart. You know that Han Solo, obviously one of the coolest characters in the franchise, is now this like deadbeat divorcee who's just like not really doing anything significant anymore, you know, every Luke, I mean, he's obviously a lesser form of what he really should have been. By this point in his story. All the heroes are getting torn down. The institution of the Jedi gets torn down as just this artifice of raw power. You know, it's all about deconstruction,

as if that's somehow spirit of nobility. I don't know, but Kotor is Star Wars as it should have been, And you know, honestly, I can't elevate it above the original trilogy simply because that's that's the original. But I think a case can be made that it is an even better story. But again, I that's hard to say looking back. I same, do you have any experience of those games.

a job as I would have liked. And I admit I played the game under like a little bit of time crunch, so I probably didn't enjoy it as much I would as I would have liked. I also played it twenty years after it came out, and I went, I would have enjoyed this a lot more eighteen years ago if I had played it before. I had the expectations of what modern RPGs look like, just in their combat, in their dialogue, not not the quality of the dialogue,

but just how it's visually portrayed. Where all the dialogue and Kotor is just a talking head, which is not as interesting as seeing an actual dynamic cutscene such as technology, that's how it goes. I found the philosophy of that game to be wonderful. Again, it is very very much a story of redemption, assuming you make light size choices. And I mean but even even at the end there right like Revan offers redemption to Malick. It's Malick, right,

that's it. Yeah, you know, even saying that, like I found it, you can find it too, despite him, you know, persisting in in his errors till till that end. And yeah, and you find that message, you look for that message, you find that message.

done a fantastic job. I'm not going to do that. That's not what we're talking about. I will say one thing. It's fine for us, as human beings living on a planet Earth to say laser swords, because that is our conceptual knowledge of a lightsaber, right, it's the sword made out of a laser. Luke says, laser sword. In the last Jedi, and that drives me nuts because it's a lightsaber. He knows it as a lightsaber. They don't know what

swords are. All they know are lightsabers. I mean, I suppose there could be other some sort of swords or whatever, but it's it's a lightsaber, he says it in this you know, just again it's deconstructing, right, like he's tearing down the idea of a very lights heaer by calling it a derogatory name. Drives me insane. Anyhow, the others, the other Star Wars game.

Wars video games. And it is if you haven't played it, which you probably haven't because it's very It really got buried. It's a story about a commando squad Clone Commandos during the initially like the Battle of Genosis, and then a couple of later missions including Battle and Kshik Battle on Kashik which is seen in episode three of the prequels, and basically they were kind of behind enemy lines missions. Uh,

and it is fantastic. It's you know, it's again. It's a short first person shooter where you're just going through. You're fighting you know, droids and gen oceans and you know,

raw mercenaries hired by the separatists. But what forms the core of the game is the bond that these four Clone Commandos share, right, they all have their initial individual distinct personalities, because otherwise it would just be kind of weird if they were in fact just the same person, even though they are the same person, and they have

this incredible bond of brotherhood. My favorite thing to ever appear on a screen as Band of Brothers, the story about the one hundred and first Airborne at one of their companies right in the in the war in Europe in World War Two, because it shows this just how war forges this bond of brotherhood and how like that can be found like nowhere else.

most incredible love. And I think that's I mean that you talk about like the beauty of God's creation, like God's ability to you know, reshape, to make all things new right into sense, right where he takes this horrible thing and he creates something incredible, incredibly beautiful out of it, even if, like you know, on Earth, you know, may last a short time because men get killed in war, but they had they found this love that they couldn't

find anywhere else. And that you find that distinctly in Republic Commando right where these you know, these these four clones right they are they consider each other brothers. They would happily and immediately die, you know, rather than see one of their comrades fall. And it's a phenomenally phenomenally done story. It's something I made a video about it a long time ago, and like I need to revisit

that and talk about that more in depth. You know, it makes me think of like Halo Reach to some extent too, where you know it is kind of you know, they're doomed in a sense that it's not quite the same as Halo Reach, where you know they all are doomed, but you know, you kind of you kind of know this can't really be a happy ending, but you're there for you know, the bonds that are forged. And yeah,

it's it's very very good. There's another one, just if you can find it on Steam for cheap, which it always is, and uh, yeah, definitely want to check out.

mean another well we're on on this theme. I mean another title the Well, I'm guess I'm going back to the Old Republic, but the the MMO is actually really good. The start the Old Republic MMO and I I haven't I don't play a lot of MMOs. I played Wow for a while when it first came out. I went from from the beta up through Burning Crusade. But the The Old Republic MMO really takes that basic model. It's kind of a wild skin, Like I guess, a lot of things are more or less, but you know, each

of the classes gets its own character story. That's basic. The KO tore length at least nearly, which you know, I hadn't really seen before to have that much replay value, that much variability, that much storytelling built into this one game, and it's, uh, yeah, so that's just I don't know. I don't have a who lot else to build on that, because again, it's like eight different games essentially built into one as far as the storytelling goes.

I'm getting them in the right, I think, but they were basically like the stories of Luke Skywalker after Return of the Jedi and him like he's like the new like Jedi Master, he's like the Yoda. Now he's not like super old or anything. He's still kind of looks like you know, Mark Hamill looks like in like the mid eighties, but he's like that.

like the Jedi. He's building the Jedi Academy as is in the name of in the name of the game title, and like it's it's that story, and like your your character is basically one of his, like the apprentices and padawans there, and he's got this Jedi night named Kyle Kataran, who's like one of the most underrated Star Wars characters of all time. He's almost like Han Solo if you became a Jedi. He's got that like like aristhmatictic, like

rogue smoke order, sarcastic personality type. But he's great. Those games are awesome too. I couldn't recommend them enough as well.

that stands behind me when I when I filmed videos. Yeah, phenomenal story, that's super awesome.

for me. It's it's it's so easy I think for creators, for studios to move away from how do I tell a story? To how do I tell the story that people not even just that they want to hear? How do I tell the story that people should hear?

it's it's a fantastic game. And even if you're not into the MMO elements of it, which you know, I I need to just play by myself. I'm an independent gamer for the most part. You know, you can go through those play essentially like single player games with just very rich storytelling. Well, I mean, is there anything else? And I said, we could go on all night.

the game is is itself often a story. So some of my two of my favorite games that are both of my top ten hours on Steam are the Xcom games, not the original ones from like the early nineties, but the reboot from twenty twelve and then the Xcom two from twenty sixteen, And so basically it's an alien invasion. Xcom is the you know, multinational agency that comes together and unlike all other multi national agencies or created, is

actually effective. So right, so you're fighting back against the aliens and you know, progressing your technology tree, you know, doing various research, building out your base, et cetera, all those you know, good kind of RPG like elements. But you are controlling a you know, kind of a top down almost like you know, almost like a table talp game, squad of soldiers that you you know, on take turns, you know, moving around the maps, the tactical turn based game.

You move around the map, you shoot the anlyats, you throw the grenades. You know, you win the mission and

the story. This game would not be half as good if it didn't let you name your characters, but it does, and so you can name them Ao and are Eric, orn Almer and so forth, or you can give them names from Star Wars or pick your favorite fantasy you know series, or name them after your friends and family whatever, all right, but then you have because you have characters, right, because you have people, this is now a story, right, These characters now have arcs almost right where they get wounded,

you know, they're severely you know, wounded by a place asthma bolt from from an alien. But they come back and you know they rise, you know, the top rank they have the most kills of the whole mission, right, or you know someone who's your star throughout the whole whole mission. You know, it gets the gets the floor blown out from out of them, the falls to their death.

you know, the choices you make matter. And I think that's one of the one of the things that games to tell people best because they're interactive. It forces you to make choices, and those choices mattering is you know something that is obviously applicable to our for day life.

I played it a lot with my friends and it was a game I got very good at, which again there's it's the most sport like video game that you could possibly ever make, because it's most sport video games Madden, NHL whatever are just like press a button to throw the throw a pass, shoot the puck, shoot the ball, whatever, and like there's very little actual refined skill in it, whereas Rocket League is you have minute control over your car and it's all physics based, so how you hit

the ball at what point, at what angle, what speed matters, and you know where the ball actually goes right, So it is it's just entirely skilled. There's basically no luck whatsoever. And having play a lot of sports when I was younger, that kind of filled that need for a little bit, whereas like I'm not wasn't competing in sports anymore, so it gave me something to really practice and get good at.

So yeah, very different for most of the stuff we've been talking about, And that's kind of what I love about video games is where it can it can you know, bring out good in you, It can teach you all sorts of things. It can you know, be of value, even if it's whether it's practicing a very specific skill in Rocket League or exploring pill deep and philosophical themes in Kotor.

a good exercise from time to time. Uh, Josh, tell us, what's what's your most played game?

it in twenty minutes. Like I'm not. I wasn't never that ridiculous, But I think that that is like my most played game, and honestly, like it really was. Yes, it was fun, but I wanted to like keep exploring that world. It's Dark Soul is one of the world's called Wardrone, and I wanted to keep exploring Wardrone over and over and over and over and over again. And that's what kept drawing me back to play. It was

like a comfort food for a while. It was like whenever I was like needed to, like I don't want to say relax too much, because you can only relax so much playing Dark Souls, but there was like a level or like there's something that just feels like it's like like going home after like a difficult journey in a way to like only go home and go on a virtually difficult journey. But there was something really comforting

about just exploring that world. Even though the world is sometimes terrifying, the world is sometimes challenges you to wit send in a way. But yeah, I just something about that game that's always kept bringing me back to it. So that's I have, like I think close to one hundred hours on that on Steam, so quite a lot.

Has anybody you know been been harassing you right as England and Constant been attempting to trade with you, and you have to tell us what the go pound sand like? There's I don't know. I love the Yeah, the ability to just tell a story with you know, the ability of games to tell stories even when they're not telling a story.

of what's playing out. That you participate in the act of subcreation as a reader versus a movie where you're just watching something play out. I think a similar case could be made for video games, at least for a large number of video games. When you play a role in creating what the story is. I mean, yes, you're operating within certain parameters, but you are also operating in

certain parameters. When you read a book, you're dealing with the texas given to you, and so I think that that case very easily could be made.

story and you're playing through it. So it kind of depends on the game. There's a lot of a lot of variation there. But yeah, I think absolutely. I didn't I assume that it's from one of Tolkien's letters, because most everything that Tolkien says that I haven't already read from his letters or I don't remember anyway, I've read some of them, but yeah, I hadn't heard that before, So that's fascinating.

basics of what I wanted to discuss. I mean, is there is there anything that Josh or Sam you feel like should be brought to this that hasn't already It's a gay if not, But I don't want to cut off any thoughts.

like simple and aesthetics, if that makes sense. So I think like something like something like Legends of Selada might like fit into that category more where I guess like there is like an explicit story, but sometimes there's there's more beyond the story, or sometimes it's just the story is really basic, but there's more within the world. And one game I wanted to bring up in that regard in case anybody else's point is I was curious of a pointed shadow of the Colossus and if not, I'll

like look that game up later. First of all, but that's a game where there's this it's kind of just symbol like you're this, you're this boy, and you you arrive at like this temple on a horse and basically had to beat these I think it's like I don't even remember how many coloss side there are.

cool and coincidental to hear. But yeah, so there's like basically these sixteen coloss side and it's like your character is like this, it's kind of like your typical like you know, twelve year old boy with a sword in a fantasy setting and he's got he's got this horse, which is sometimes incorporated into the combat, sometimes more, sometimes less, but like you just you're just dropped off on this huge plane and you find the next colossus by like he holds his sword up to like the sun and

like it points a beam of light towards just the general direction you have to go. And that's that's it. Like that's the entire game is just hunting down the sixth Colossi. They all represent different different like mythical beasts, and therefore it you have different ways to basically attack them like that. They're all like kind of they're kind of like a giant humanoid boss puzzle in a sense.

But it's it's just a really fascinating game, and it's so unbelievably unique, but it kind of like ties in with that concept I'm trying to get at here. It's like, there's not like some explicitly deep store. It's not like it's not fall Out New Vegas where you can spend like dozens of hours just walking around, you know, the

desert of Hilas Vegas talking to different people. Right, It's not you don't really talk to anybody the entire game, but somehow there's a story being told there through like the substance of the world versus you know, the mouths of the characters in this sense. And I feel like that's like a there's like a category of gaming that

that that is that is that too. That's sometimes not talked about, but it can be even overlooked because sometimes it can be seen as or that game was dumb or something because it didn't have like a story, like what's the point it's like, but there was there was something there, and I think sometimes people just it's over their head. They miss it.

I think, and it very much has a story. It has a narrative set into spaceship or space station, you know, the not too distant future that you know it gets infected by an alien parasite essentially, but it has a lot of environmental storytelling, right, so, whether it's notes that are left around or even just like I think I've seen I remember seeing this in a video like someone's like baseball glove and pizza that are sitting out and kind of like you know stowed away spot where you

can learn about you know, other characters for mostly all that anyway at this point just by you know, walking

around and observing the world. And that's you know that you could apply the same sort of thing to you know, Breath of the Wild, where you you're going to learn about the history of the world just by observing, by walking around exploring, whether it's you know, just looking at every nook and grit that you can possibly find, or talking to every NPC and that you know, exhausting every possible dialogue tree, and yeah, that you know that is

really cool. Where it's just the games really take in And this supplies to to think, to games more than

most media, but to all media, because intentionality matters. Like we said at the beginning, but you really do get in what you put out, or get you really get out what you put in, and to an extreme extent where yeah, you can last through you know, the main quest of Skyrim, which everyone told me not to do when I tweeted that it was my first time playing and asking for advice like don't play them in question, Okay, I got it. Yeah, So it's just explore right experience.

That's something that games can do that you know, other media can't really.

But the real purpose of the game, the value of the game is in the exploration, the engagement, in the subcreation of determining like what kind of role are you

going to play in this world? And I think that's what gives something like Skyrims so much replay value, and that yeah, even though you're you're doing the same stuff eventually if you've played enough times, but you do it with your own sort of headcanon on who you are and what you're doing in the in this world, how you're engaging, And you know, Josha talking about that like dynamic storytelling of just the nonverbal cues and whatnot, the

symbolism of the aesthetics. And I feel like even in these these Bethesta titles, you get a lot of that when you're just wandering around and you discover like the way like you'll come across like a corpse. That's that's in a certain way with other environmental cues as to what happened here, you know, follow Out I think does this very well with the way that you know, some of some of the settings laid out, and it's just it becomes this immersive, mysterious enchanting aesthetic, or I guess

for Fallout kind of disenchanting is more of the point. Yeah, and so I think it's it's a good point. Well, we've been run for like an hour and a half. We could, as said, easily go all night just talking about different things, but I think we'll go ahead and wrap it there for now, and maybe if we want to at some point in the future we could hit up some more things. But I appreciate you Sam and Josh coming on, and I'm sure that we will talk again about something or another.

God Speak. The music for this episode is owned by Bethesta. Please don't sue me. I don't play many video games these days, but there are certain titles that have stuck with me, enchanting the mind of my youth and never entirely fading away. One of the chiefs among these titles

is the Elder Scrolls, namely Marwin, Oblivion and Skyrim. The level of artistry, mythology, and lore of this universe is vast and provides a strong representative for asking the question as to how video games might relate to literature as an art form. Where might it rise to such a level, where must it fall short? And what unique advantages does

it possess. For this eight week study, we'll be seeking to answer these questions while analyzing various elements of this franchise, specifically focusing on content related to Morow and Oblivion and Skyrim will be taking a look at the philosophy of RPGs and considering the philosophical implications of character creation and formation in an open ended series such as this, and will be looking at the relationship between in game religion, lore,

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