Procedural Generation and Emergent Gameplay as Storytelling Devices

This post originally appeared in Recomposing the Pines on 5/3/14: 

I've been sitting on this one for awhile, with a pile of hyperlinks to various articles about procedurally-generated worlds in gaming stacked up in a post titled "Drafty Draft," but it was finally starting to play Minecraft seriously again this week after not playing much since, oh, 2010 that helped me figure out what I really wanted to say. Which is, briefly, that procedural generation in gaming is mostly awesome.

Not entirely awesome, mind you. As I ranted about at length previously in my now-locked personal blog, "procedural generation" has recently gotten roped in with "retro aesthetic," "roguelike," and "RPG elements" in the quadfecta (?) of current gaming buzz-qualities that ensure that it ends up in a lot of games that don't really use it effectively, just because it looks good on a feature list. For instance, taking out procedurally generated worlds in something like Teleglitch might actually add to the tension of the game, because you'd have some idea, at least, of what's coming, precisely what to be afraid of. Not procedurally generating the worlds of Don't Starve might actually lead to the player's accumulation of knowledge about a world's consistent geography and how to use that to his/her advantage when they next respawn, creating a situation not unlike the amazingly effective respawn mechanic at play in Rogue Legacy. But then there are games like Terraria and Minecraft, which arguably wouldn't work at all without the procedurally-generated worlds that their play takes place in.

The game that taught me not only to embrace death, but to look forward to it.

But what I wanted to write about today has less to do with how procedural generation plays into a game's mechanics and more to do with how it might factor into a game's story.

I got my start writing legitimately (if you want to call it that) about games by writing about how narratives and stories function (and fail to function) in gameworlds. Given that most modern video games are a complex combination of pre-scripted "storytelling" through cutscenes and/or "events" that eliminate 99% of player agency paired with spur-of-the-moment player interactivity, I believe that games create unprecedented possibilities for cooperative storytelling/worldbuilding (they're the same, I'd argue) between the "authors" (developers) and their audience, but that they also contain unprecedented pitfalls. The only reason most people would scoff at the idea of a "Citizen Kane of video games" is because currently the pitfalls are like sinkholes and potential peaks are fragile, windswept pinnacles.

Like this one.

In this article, Beraldo argues that "the main point is that games are a shared authorship experience. You will better remember that time you managed to evade cops opening fire at you by diving into an air duct in Deus Ex than the fact that one of the bosses was an ubercyborg with an accent." And this is what really got me thinking. I'm a huge Deux Ex fan, and this describes me completely. I remember, and appreciate, the game's Gibson-influenced cyberpunk story as something engaging and interesting and fairly audacious for a video game, especially in 2000. But I remember and appreciate it precisely because it was a very effective wrapper within which my role as a player interacting with and reacting to the gameworld around me played out. I cared about the story because the unexpected moments of air-duct-diving that emerged through gameplay were so compelling. I cared more about the air-duct-diving than I would have otherwise because the story wrapped those moments in a sense of fictional gravitas that is lacking in a game like, say, Tetris or Super Mario Bros. So it's a symbiosis, in a way. But it's a lopsided symbiosis that's unevenly reliant on the strength of the gameplay. A game without a compelling story can still be a fun game. A good story without compelling gameplay is just a slow, QTE-ridden low-budget movie.

It's unequivocally true.

But I'm oversimplifying. The reason Beraldo's example works so well for me is that he's not just talking about Deus Ex as a game that contains both story and gameplay, but a game that contains both story and emergent gameplay. The reason diving into an air duct to escape gunfire in the game is such a tense, compelling, and ultimately fun experience is precisely because there is no particular "level" or scripted scene in the game in which this occurs. Instead, it occurs as a result of the player's behavior in the world, the reactions of a guard or enemy robot to that behavior, and then the by-the-seat-of-your pants improvisation the player must undergo to escape what is likely a much better armed and armored (and thus unbeatable by main force) enemy. The scenario emerges from the way the game's rules and its world are designed, not as a discrete, pre-plotted encounter, the outcome(s) of which are already predetermined by the game's code (at least, not in a direct sense).

Warren Spector believes that games that enable these types of player-driven experiences are "the only thing that sets us apart in any meaningful way from other mediums." But it's not just a matter of being able to claim a niche: he refers to games that depend on emergent play as "engines of perpetual novelty." Not only do these games offer novel play scenarios in the short term (like Beraldo's example), they also focus more in general on the player's interaction with and experimentation within the gameworld than on herding the player along one developer-curated path, the only possible "right" experience. As Spector says, developers interested in emergent gameplay should "[e]mbrace the idea that your job is to bound the player experience, to put a sort of creative box around it -- but you don't determine the player experience. It's not about 'here's where every player does X.'"

Yeah, no more of this, please.

To me, emergent gameplay adds not just moment-to-moment novelty, but potentially limitless replay value (in games like Don't Starve, for example) that isn't reliant on new DLC and achievements that require you to replay the exact same content over and over again to achieve some esoteric level of mastery. Replay values comes not from the desire to hone your skills in a vacuum to become really good at doing one specific thing, but from the near-limitless possible permutations of your gameplay and its results and your reactions to those results that can occur in the gameworld.

Of course, non-emergent types of games just are fine (Spector and I agree on this, and I recently had a hell of a good time playing ), but I've also found that his claim that "once players get a taste of [an emergence-based] game, it's very hard for them to go back" to be very true in my experience. This really started for me with Minecraft way back in 2010. There were a lot of other things that were unique about the game to me at the time, but what really stuck out (and what still does, honestly) was the experience of trying to survive the game's nights early on while slowly learning the rules of the world and building a primitive shelter. This was emergent gameplay at its finest, determined entirely by the rules of the world and my actions within them rather than the limited gameplay dimensions of reaching a particular, required goal or the need to complete a particular level.

I think that this type of emergent gameplay is something that procedural generation can mesh with quite well. Where the effect of procedural generation is perhaps blunted in something like Risk of Rain, where the ways in which you interact with the world around you are necessarily very limited (in this case by a Contra-esque sort of gameplay), in a game like Minecraft (or Deus Ex) there are enough gameplay possibilities that randomized worlds, and randomized content within those worlds actually force a much wider variation in gameplay experiences than "Oh, I'm the purple guy that shoots the big green guy with the grey gun" or "Oh, I'm the red girl that shoots the little black dogs with the yellow bow...so that's different!"

I hope you like finding the teleporter.

And this is where story comes back in. In games with emergent gameplay, procedurally-generated content does even more to encourage players to make their own compelling experiences with the "creative box" by making sure that every player's experience is unique in its details while taking place in a gameworld that would still be recognizable to other players who are familiar with the particular game.

This is how you end up with pieces like Quintin Smith's "Mine The Gap" or Tom Francis' "The Minecraft Experiment," both "virtual travel narratives" that I examined during my dissertation work.

When a player's experience is unique in the details but relatable more generically, it makes their story simultaneously more personal and more shareable, makes it seem more like a compelling narrative that they are invested in and have helped create instead of just some game that they're playing simply to pass the time. Any Deus Ex player understands Beraldo's example immediately, and likely has a similar example of their own. But, because of emergent gameplay, their own example is also importantly different, importantly personally theirs. Any Minecraft player understands the broad strokes of Smith's narrative immediately, but because of emergent gameplay and procedurally generation, they necessarily have importantly different, importantly personal stories, because it's not only their gameplay experience that's fundamentally different, it's also the world that that gameplay takes place in.

And, well, I think that's neat. 

What the Internet Is Doing To My Brain

So, this is nowhere near a novel argument or idea at this point in our (ab)use of the internet, but for some reason this particular video about it really resonated with me and a I felt like writing a little bit to get the ol' brain going since it's Sunday afternoon and all and generally at this point in the day I would just be...well, you know, reading about panda bears on the internet.

Now, before anyone jumps on the "The internet does lots of good things for us too, lol n00bz, STFU!" train here, part of what I like about this video is that it presents the idea that a lot of internet use encourages shallow thinking, but that we should simply be aware of that and balance out the type of work we make our brains do on a daily basis accordingly, rather than being all like "teh internet sux0rz!" (actually, does anyone really type like that anymore?). So don't stop using the internet. I'm not going to stop using the internet, and I don't want to be out there all alone, because I've already got a big enough echo chamber here in this blogspace. But.

But I think the distinction between shallow and deep thinking is an important one. The ability to engage in deep thinking (or "critical thinking," which is either the same or close to the same thing) is, as far as I can tell at least, a learned behavior. You get better at it the more you do it. If you don't do it, or if you don't have to do it, you never learn how. Much of my teaching lately has been increasingly focused on trying to get students to think deeply (or critically, or laterally, or however you want to label it). Some of them take to it like a laser-mounted shark to water, while others flounder and never really find their stride (or stroke?), but by and large the common factor I see in pretty much all incoming college students is that they've never been expected to do it before. At least not in concentrated amounts. And this is weird to me. Not only is it weird, based on my own experiences and biases, it's also just bad.

"In The Iliad, Homer portrays war as fucking awesome."

When I was a kid, I thought about everything. And (let's get this out of the way right away) it wasn't because I was smart or somehow exceptional, it was because I was curious. When I wasn't in school, I spent a fair amount of time playing outside pretty much every day, I played video games obsessively, but only as much as my parents would let me play (usually an hour a day or so), and I read voraciously (big surprise!). There were always times when I wasn't doing any of those things, though, and much of that time was spent wondering about things like why the sky was blue, or why there was evil, or why there was good, or whether or not I believed in God (or any god(s)), and so on. I spent a lot of time thinking deeply, and part of the reason, I think, is because I couldn't access "simple" answers through an internet search like we can nowadays.

"I JUST WANT TO KNOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!"

Recently, I had my Humanities 101 class read excerpts from Plato's Phaedrus, and now every time I think about What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains I can't help but thing of Phaedrus's treatment of the then-new "art" of writing. In the dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus are arguing about the efficacy of writing as a form of communication (and I'm summarizing loosely here), and Socrates relates a story meant to show the supposed danger of writing:

"At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

The tl;dr here is basically that by recording the memories and stories of what had traditionally been a predominantly oral-historical culture in writing, people would actually lose their ability to remember as well because they would begin relying on the written versions of records, stories, myths, etc. Later on in the same section of Phaedrus, Socrates argues that choosing to value the sign of a piece of information (i.e. the written version of a record) over the direct memory of that record itself, we also make ourselves less versatile in our thinking; for him, the important ability is the ability to successfully and convincingly debate a piece of information, a stance on an issue, etc. When you write that information or that stance down as a static document, your opinion becomes less able to adjust on the fly and becomes less robust in the face of criticism due to its existence (primarily, at least) as an artifact rather than a thought or memory.

Pictured: versatility.

And regardless of whether you perceive of it as a good thing or a bad thing, history has borne Socrates's idea out. He was right about our codification of knowledge. As just one example, consider how much of modern-day Christianity is based on trying to retroactively fit values and mores from a two-thousand-year-old culture into present-day society, just because we have an old book with a bunch of rules encoded in it. How different might that particular religion be if that book (and, indeed, all books) never existed?

The (long, boring) point I'm trying to make here is that our "choice" (if you can call a world-wide cultural shifts that) to value the written word over the orally-disseminated memory caused a fundamental change in the way that information was understood. I don't think it's a huge stretch to suggest that the advent of the internet might be the next such shift. As with most such things, I don't think that this shift is necessarily automatically bad or good, and even if it was "bad," what the hell could we possibly do to stop it at this point? The fact is that it's happening and that internet use, much like writing, brings with it certain advantages; however, we also stand to lose a lot in the transition that was good and meaningful and important to the previous information culture (i.e., me) such as what I was calling "deep thinking" above. And, like Socrates, it's hard for me to understand how this loss could possibly be a good thing.

Just like anyone else, I certainly understand the dopamine rush that comes with instant-gratification internet searching. I've gone on my fair share of Wikipedia and TVTropes binges (or, even nerdier, phish.net and ryanadamsarchive.com). And yet I can't help but feel that on some fundamental level, the experiences I have when I step away from the internet are somehow more meaningful, more fulfilling, and more human. That's not to say, again, that there can't be real human value in utilizing or even just listlessly surfing the internet (and in fact, I've built what little of a career I have so far arguing for just this), but it seems to need to be balanced out with experiences that give you an opportunity to think deeply. I make a point, for example, to go for a walk, run, or even a drive pretty much any day I spend more than a few hours working in front of my computer (and thus either actively or passively connected to the internet). Out in the world, doing these activities, is in some way the polar opposite of being enmeshed in the global social sphere of the internet: I'm forced to confront silence, I'm forced to think, and I'm forced to reflect (no mp3 player, CDs, phone calls, anything on these excursions, unless of course someone calls me and I have to answer). For a brief period of time every day, at least, I'm put back in that position I was in as a kid, where I had to make my fun, to use my brain to wonder and learn about the world, and to ultimately make meaning out of nothing rather than having it given to me. I love my work, and I love finding bigger and better ways in which our newest information dissemination technology can make us more human, but it's precisely so that I can keep doing that work, and doing it well, that I need to disconnect as often as I connect.

There's a lot of outcry right now over the apparently reality that college students aren't able (let along willing) to critically think like they used to be able to. Honestly, by and large I don't disagree. While this might partially be an effect (in this country at least) of No Child Left Behind (and that's a whole other blog post in and of itself), and the answer might partially be to Teach Them Harder, I wonder if much of this unwillingness to think deeply comes from a more fundamental place: they way that they understand, create, and access information in their day-to-day lives. Maybe it's making them smarter in new ways while making them dumber in old ways. But I'm pretty convinced we can have our cake and eat it too if we just unplug a little bit (more) each day.

Thoughts?

In Which I Argue Against That Article About Hating Grad School That Everyone Loves

First, for your perusal (and potential embittered vindication): said article.

I've seen this article and the various responses it's spawned making the rounds lately on Facebook, and as a former graduate student in the humanities, I felt compelled to respond. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that between the time that I began drafting my response and now, I actually got a tenure-track job in the humanities and will be an Assistant Professor come fall. However, the meat of what I want to say has been in my head since before I even knew about my campus interview and my point(s) of contention with Schuman's article remains largely unaltered by my personal good fortune.

For me, said article presents one particular (and highly subjective) set of expectations about the grad school experience and how oneself should be as a grad student; Schuman's is a viewpoint that I disagree wholeheartedly with while realizing that many people (including many of my colleagues) have ended up in grad school precisely because they believe now (or believed at one point) what she seems to have believed before her recent disillusionment. I don't write to disabuse anyone of their particular notion of grad school or of their own grad studentdom; as I'm well aware, many of us only survive the grad school process (especially the doctoral program process) by clinging desperately to our ideas of ourselves as Graduate Students and not questioning them too much. I write, instead, because my experience of grad school in the humanities was almost entirely positive, and I'd like to think that even bitter, bitter Schuman would prefer that more students have experiences like mine than like hers in the future. In short, I find her point of view overly critical, one-sided, and as such, unhelpful, and I'd like to think that mine might work as a counterpoint that could help someone, somewhere, someday, and thus validate my hope that my experience is worth sharing for a few paragraphs on a stupid blog that hardly update anymore.

I'm going to attack this thing a bit systematically, because I don't want to miss anything. First, there's the probably-trolling title and subtitles ("There are no academic jobs and getting a Ph.D. will turn you into a horrible person" or "Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor," take your pick). Well, here's a counter-troll: I received my literature Ph.D. in May of 2012, and it did not make me an emotional trainwreck; in fact, grad school was the first time in my life that I felt challenged enough and had enough of a sense of purpose and sense of self to not be an emotional trainwreck. In many ways, beginning grad school was actually the culmination of a long, slow climb out of a lot of issues with depression and aimlessness that I've had since I was a young kid. It was hard academically, and in the sense that it required me to do a lot of soul-searching and self-evaluation that I might have not been motivated to do otherwise. But that was good for me. Oh, right, and on top of all that, grad school actually did make me a professor.

Next: I'm not sure if Schuman's opening paragraph is still trolling or not. Beginning grad school in any discipline with the apparent end goal of getting "a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired" is pretty naively utopian. Let's just say that if you're interested in pursuing a literature Ph.D. only because, basically, you don't want to work hard or you only want to work nine months of the year, then you're barking up the wrong tree right off the bat (how's that for portmantidiom?). How you could not realize this right away is absolutely baffling to me, which is why I choose to assume that Schuman's being a bit tongue-in-cheek here. Just like you shouldn't decide to become a doctor because you like riding in an ambulance and wearing scrubs, you shouldn't decide to become a teacher because you want summers off. If you need me to explain why that's dumb, I'd be happy to devote another post to it later this week.

The "two months of unpaid research sequestration and curriculum planning" line admittedly hits a bit closer to home, but this is one of the major points that I wanted to wrestle with anyway. I spent the first three years of my undergrad as a computer science major. I had started college with the twin beliefs that a) more education is just plain good for you in the old, liberal-arts sense and b) you still needed to be able to do something semi-practical by the time you graduated so you could get a job. I chose computer science because I liked computers, but I took as many electives as I could on the side, just because they were interesting. In practice, though, a) worked out quite well while b) did not. I struggled with computer science, not because it was a difficult major (though it was) but because I couldn't make myself care about the material. By the end of the second year, every single class period was spent in agony, waiting for the clock to strike the end of the hour so I could leave, say, Data Structures and head across campus to The Short Story. By the end of my third year, I'd changed my major to Literature and I fucking loved it. Of course, the obvious downside to a Bachelor's degree in English surfaced when I graduated and ended up spending two years working at gas stations, restaurants, and shopping malls. I had changed my major originally with the idea that I might someday become a college professor in mind, and of course I knew that that required graduate school, and yet I had absolutely no desire to attend a graduate school that would require me to pay tuition. Even with the specter of future decades of menial service jobs looming before me, I couldn't bring myself to accept a graduate student position that would require me to go into debt. I didn't want to have that sort of debt hanging over my head, and, more importantly, I didn't want graduate school to be framed throughout my entire experience of it as a gamble that I needed to win in the end (i.e. get a "real job") or else spend god knows how paying back loans while working at McDonald's.

So, for two years I mucked around doing various minimum-wage jobs until I got an offer from Washington State University, whose English department would pay my tuition for two years while I got my M.A. degree as long as I taught freshman composition classes for them. Tuition paid, and just for doing what I wanted to be trained to be able to do anyway?! It was a no-brainer. A few days later, I was packing up my things and preparing for a long cross-country drive to Washington state, and the rest is history.

As a result of this opportunity, I was able to not only go to grad school for almost-free, I got on-the-job training and was (in theory, at least) more hireable out the door as a result. If after getting my M.A. I didn't get a job, so what? I wouldn't be any worse off than I'd been before, and I'd have a graduate degree to show for it. As it was, I went on to get a Ph.D. at the same school with the same deal, and then got a job, but the point of all my blabbering here is that I'd decided from the start that if I wasn't able to get into a school that would pay my way in exchange for teaching or research work, then I just wouldn't go to grad school at all. It was important to me to be able to treat grad school as its own valuable, meaningful opportunity, and not just a means to an end or a long-odds gamble on some future money. At WSU I did real work in both research and teaching while fulfilling my degree requirements and if anyone ever had the nerve to insinuate that what I did for my eight years there wasn't a "real job" because I was a grad student, I'd probably dropkick them in the face and then calmly explain why they couldn't be more wrong. It seems to me from Schuman's article that she only perceived of grad school as means to an end, and then when that end wasn't reached, she took it out on the experience of grad school retroactively.

I didn't by any means get paid a massive amount for my graduate school stipend, but it was enough to get through the year on as long as I spent carefully. So, yeah, I did research for most summers, but I got to make my own schedule for the most part and I wasn't really "unpaid" in the sense that it was explained up-front that I would only get paid for nine months of the year. Easy math (even for English majors!) said, then, that I save a quarter of everything I made and set it aside for the summer. Voila! No longer "unpaid" research! It also helped that the research I was doing was, by and large, seriously fascinating. For my M.A. thesis, I regurgitated a bunch of information about Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" because I thought grad school was about impressing imagined muckety-mucks who wagged their fingers at me from the top of the Ivory Tower in my nightmares, and it was miserable. When I came back for the Ph.D., I sat down and literally (like, in a list!) identified all the things that made me unhappy about the research I'd done thus far and found a way to reinvent my work so that I was doing something I truly enjoyed. Subjecting Kafka to first-order logic sounds fucking horrible to me. I'm sure to someone out there, it would be endlessly fascinating, but it's one of those topics that, at least at first blush has the ring of "I chose this to impress my committee" rather than "I chose this because I love thinking about it and talking about it and teaching about it." Why would anyone set themselves up to do that much work on an become that immersed in something that they don't really care about? Obviously, it didn't make Schulman happy. My research was based on finding similarities between a few of the things that were important to me (hiking, video games, and geocaching), and then figuring out how the theorizations of writers like Heidegger, Tuan, and de Certeau might help explain how those practices were just as worth talking about in academia as Chaucer and Shakespeare and the global literature author-du-jour and "the long eighteenth century." And it was a blast. I spent as much time hiking, blogging, taking pictures and playing Minecraft for my research as I did writing. And at the end I still had a 300 page dissertation to show for it, which I'm now in the process of turning into a book manuscript. Because it was fun. Not because someone was forcing me to do it. There are much easier jobs than this one. Why the hell would you choose to do this one if you're just going to do what you think you have to do?

One thing I agree with Schuman on is the idea that getting a job after graduate school is, generally speaking, not really related to how "right" you do things. The application and interview process for academic jobs was/is pretty much the most depressing, harrowing, agency-less process I've ever been through in my life. But, throughout the two years I was on the market, I kept two things in mind. First, that I had begun and had always continued graduate school as its own experience/reward. I came out of my Ph.D. program (as a result of preplanning) in no debt, and with tons of experience in writing, publishing, and teaching that I hadn't had before I started. I'd had a great time, and it had made me a better and happier person in so many ways than I'd been before I started in 2005. That was enough for me. If I didn't get The Job and had to end up working for a publisher or teaching at a community college to make ends meet, so what? I'd had a great time and gotten to do what many, many people haven't been lucky enough to get to do already. Demanding more seemed (and still seems) ungrateful.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, I really don't understand how getting a job in academia is any harder than getting a job anywhere else right now. To hem and haw and hand-wring and so on because you spent six years (or however long) preparing to get a job that doesn't now exist sounds (again) like you made a bad gamble, setting aside years of your life for some imagined payoff down the line, especially now when you can no longer claim that six years ago "things were better" with the job market (both in academia and in general). People at various levels of education and with all sorts of types of specific training are jobless and even homeless all over the country; do we really have to keep pretending like the employment situation in academia is a special, extra-horrible case?*

Perhaps the most troubling part of the original article for me is this: "During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)" I never believed any of these things, and I firmly believe it's because of the attitude I had toward grad school, which I described above. Ultimately, for me, grad school was a job. Admittedly, it was a job that paid less than most, required more hours than most, and, at times, seemed more thankless than most...but it was still just a job. I was willing to continue to do it in spite of these poor(ish) conditions because I thought the trade-off was worth it in the name of getting to do a job that actually meant something to me. And it was worth it. As a result, it was never in danger of consuming my identity, of usurping the other values and activities and relationships and facets of my personality that I valued before I began and that I still value now. I have known and know people who react to grad school in the way that Schuman describes, and I can't help but think that to react to a job in such a way must indicate an intense, perhaps repressed need to make a significant change to one's view of oneself, and that that fetishization (Aha! Grad school word!) of the grad school experience that results is meant to be the catalyst for that change. When the end result is "failure" (i.e., not getting a tenure track job) that shatters this new self-image and results in embitterment. But "the system" or "The Man" or grad school isn't to blame for this disappointment: none of those things are ever going to transform you into a special, magical (and possibly holier-than-thou) butterfly. Only you can do that.

In the end, I know that I, to some degree at least, got lucky. I got lucky to get into WSU in the first place, then I got lucky again to be allowed to come back. Then I got lucky to get a postdoc position, and again to get a faculty position. Of course, it wasn't just luck; I also worked really damn hard throughout all of that in pursuit of those opportunities. But it likely wouldn't be too far off base to say that all my hard work had very little to do with where I actually ended up, and that's a depressing thought. It's also, I think, the main thing that Schuman and I can both agree on. It's unfortunate that taking the "right" track through academia doesn't automatically result in a tenure-track job, yes, but show me a place and time where everyone always gets what they earn and I'll invent a time machine and move there. The trick for me was (and I mean this in the hippiest way possible) to enjoy the journey and worry as little as possible about the destination. I didn't have a backup plan going into graduate school because I waited until I didn't need one. My research wasn't drudgery because I wasn't willing to let it be. Grad school didn't consume my life because I entered grad school so that I could have a life, and live in a place where I could be myself, before, during, and then after I learned what that actually meant.

When I read pieces like the one that Schuman wrote, they don't make me happy that I "figured it out" (or whatever I did). They don't make me feel like I won and others lost. They make me sad that there's no way to explain my experience to more people, so that others can get what I got out of the grad school experience. It was really the best 6 years of my life, but it didn't just magically happen that way; I made it that way. I have a suspicion that when it turns out to be the worst 6 years of your life, the same thing is still true.

* I'm talking generally here. The treatment of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, as a form of cheap, easily disposable labor is a trend that definitely needs to be talked about and, hopefully, stopped.

Got No Sun-Time When She's Gone: Some Thoughts on Higher Education, Time Management, and The Descent Into Madness

This. This is what should be on my car.

Not just because I'm a huge fan of Back To The Future, but also because I am woefully, depressingly, annually, monthly, and daily short on time. Or at least it seems that way.

I got into education (and, specifically, English Literature) for all the usual humanity-y, hippie-y reasons, but also because I've always found the clock-in, clock-out, 9-to-5-job life horrifically crushing and depressing, and I liked the idea that a teacher/professor was able to make their own hours, to a degree. Now as anyone who works in higher ed knows, "make their own hours" usually ends up translating to "works 70 hours a week and gets paid for half of that." Seriously, most weeks I work somewhere between 55-70 hours (and sometimes well more than that!) and I get paid for 27.5 hours of that. The rest is work that isn't required, but that you're expected to do (by your department, your advisors, colleagues, and/or the field at large, depending on who you are, what you do, and where you work). The result is, by the standards of the workaday world (who likes to pick on people who "make their own hours" as people who don't actually work all that hard), I work full weeks and somewhere between 15-30 hours of overtime per week, just to make about $18,000 a year. Oh, and last summer I worked at least 40 hours a week every week but two, which I took off for my only vacation of the year, and I got paid for five weeks of that summer work, total.

This post isn't a complaint, though...or at least, if it is, the complaint is implicit in what I actually want to talk about. Seriously, the entire higher education system is absurdly fucked up and deserves a lot of serious critique and reform in a lot of areas including the way adjuncts and instructors are treated at most universities, but that's a rant for another day (maybe tomorrow?).

I love my job. I'm happy to do it. So happy, in fact, that I'll accept $18,000 a year to work for 3000 hours (that equates to a little under 66% of minimum wage, in case you were wondering). But so will a lot of other people, which is why I have absolutely no job security and my entire future goes up in the air every 8 months or so. I love my job so much that it's beginning to occur to me (thanks, in part to reading some of this blog over the last few days) that I could probably stand to love it a little less.

I'm a hard worker; Protestant work ethic and Midwest blue-collar and all that. When it comes to teaching and researching, I daresay that I'm a good worker. And yet, after eight years, my job continues to ask more and more of me, and I find that I can't afford to always say "yes" anymore. There are too many other things to do, too many other facets of life to experience, and, frankly, I really don't think anyone at my current job is going to care and nobody interviewing me for future jobs is going to notice if I only work, say, 45-50 hours of my 27.5 hour weeks from now on. I don't want to let my students or my colleagues down, but I suspect I've only ever avoided that by letting my friends, family, and myself down instead, by not making time for anything else but melting into an exhausted puddle in front of a stupid TV show at 10pm, after wrapping up my workday that started at 7am...for the fifth or sixth day in a row.

I talked about this issue with Lindsey a few nights ago and she suggested that I stop taking on so many projects, stop saying "yes" to everything. It was a good suggestion, but I've never been a "yes" man, really. I've turned down a lot of projects in the last six or so years, and never once have I regretted it, despite the fact that many of those projects went on to be quite successful. Generally if I take extra classes or grading jobs, it's not, honestly, out of the goodness of my heart, but because I need the money to get by. When someone offers me a place in a new project, or any other new responsibility, I find myself immediately weighing it against what I already have to do, and against what little free, "me" time I have. Sometimes the project is worth the sacrifice, sometimes not, but I've never felt compelled to accept something just to beef up my CV or pad my cover letter. If it's not something I can actually throw myself into and honestly care about (for whatever reason), then I don't bother.

I don't think my problem is that I take on too much. Rather, I think that I belabor what I do take on, often past the point of usefulness. The downside of all that touchy-feely, make-your-own-hours stuff that makes academia so great is the lack of concrete feedback on the work you're doing. How much class preparation is necessary? How many hours a night should you spend making lecture notes? How long should you spend commenting on student papers? These things, at some point, need to be broken down into a machinistic process, or else they get out of control. I once knew an MA student who spent an hour commenting on each of her students' papers. She had fifty students, and they each wrote six papers that semester. That's 300 hours in fifteen weeks just spent on grading. She was also teaching two classes and taking three graduate seminars. She wasn't especially off her rocker (any more than any of us are), she just couldn't bring herself to invest less than that in her students, and there's no mechanism in place (officially or unofficially) to tell someone when to stop grading, when to stop planning...you do it all by feel, and when something doesn't work out, it's all too easy to assume it's because you didn't work hard (read: long) enough.

After eight years of teaching, I have a fairly good handle on how hard to work on my classes. Sure, my students (some of them, anyway) deserve a lot of effort, and I'm willing to give that to them. But, as I've come to realize, they also deserve the energy and attentiveness that comes from being an instructor who's functioning on more than three hours of sleep, who is especially excited to talk about the reading on, say, Ed Abbey today because he just spent the weekend in the mountains, backpacking and reading Desert Solitaire. It's really not just Work Really Hard, but rather Work Hard combined with a bit of Don't Be Insane.

I have a lot more trouble, though, with the research/professionalization end of the spectrum. Last year I applied for nearly 100 jobs (out of fear of ending up unemployed the day after graduation). These are academic jobs, mind you, that require, generally, a whole portfolio's worth of documents to be mailed. Not only did this almost break me financially, I almost didn't finish my dissertation on time as a result. This year, I'm sending out far less (around 40 or 50), but the downside is that I'm much less likely to actually get interviews. Similarly, from about 2007 to 2010, I regularly sent out articles for potential publication (usually around three a year) and tried to attend 4 conferences a year, at least. Since then, the dissertation and the ensuing job search and increased class load has made that more or less impossible...but if I had the time I'd probably still be at it. There are so many avenues in this job where a "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" approach works that it's hard to not just adopt that attitude. The more article proposals I send out, the better chance I have of getting published. The more job applications I send out, the more likely it is that I'll get hired. The more conferences I attend, the more likely I'll be to be seen as a member of "the conversation." The problem is, there are no real rules on how many of these things, how much, you really should or can do beyond your own common sense. And when you begin to be driven by a fear of pending unemployment, when you can't afford clothes that aren't used and your girlfriend can't pay for her asthma medication, common sense starts to fly out the window.

All that said, I'm taking another stab at the whole damn thing. This semester, I teach three classes, back-to-back-to-back, until noon on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For the rest of the day, until 6:30pm at the absolute latest, I will be preparing for the next class period and doing other teaching-related work. Tuesdays and Thursdays, during normal work hours (9-6 or 10-7) I will be doing research-related work. If there is any overflow, I'll be dealing with it for a few hours on Saturday, but otherwise, I'm going to try to take weekends off. I am going to live like a human being, and, if my career refuses to allow me to do that, well, then I'll just find a new one. I want to do this for the rest of my life, but I don't want it to be the rest of my life.

Some Statements Related To Video Gaming That I Take Issue With, Part Two

You know that I can't pass up the opportunity to comment on a story about video games featuring a huge picture of Oscar Wilde, right?

"Congratulations! You have destroyed the vile Red Falcon and saved the universe!"

Obviously, "The game author is dead" is just a headline designed to make people angry, since that's sort of what Kill Screen does...but...IT FUCKING WORKED BECAUSE NOW I'M ANGRY.

I spent a good chunk of my dissertation chapter on Minecraft describing how gameworlds are co-constructed between the player and the developer, so obviously my opinion runs a bit counter to this piece...but, specifically, I have a problem with the conflation of video games as an expressive medium with older media (in this case, literature) that's implied here.

Now, I've spent an ungodly amount of time in English departments in the last decade and nearly-a-half, so I'm pretty familiar with the turn in literary criticism from the author-as-text-and-meaning-maker to the author-as-text-maker/audience-as-meaning-maker. To me, they're both true to an extent: an author creates something with a certain intent (why the hell would you write an entire book otherwise?) which the audience interprets any number of ways, projecting themselves and their experiences onto the text and maybe coming close to understanding the author's original intent, and maybe not.

"I'm pretty sure it's about, like, construction workers, and, like...uhngugnkgalsgdlsa"

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter how close you get to the creator's interpretation (though it might matter how close you get to your professor's interpretation, depending on how vindictive he/she is): they create a static work, put it out into the cultural stream (that sounds gross) and then you consume it (okay, that sounds grosser). The relationship is pretty one-way.

With games, though, things are a bit different. The creators (coders, developers, whatever you want to call them...the people who make the game) only do part of the work of creating the gameworld (I won't say "story" here because that would then open a different and much larger can of worms). There's a very fundamental difference between literature and games, which is that in the course of playing the game, you help create it. Sure, if not a single person reads a book when it is released (like my dissertation, for example), it doesn't perhaps reach its fullest potential as an expressive work, but it still fundamentally exists. Gameworlds really only, truly exist when there is someone moving through them (via an avatar or what-have-you), and, like some extra-dorky version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, once you've begun observing the gameworld, your input becomes a part of its output.

Thought it might sound like I'm arguing that games are even less dependent on the author than literature here, the reality is that the creation of a gameworld is necessarily symbiotic (player + "author"). The only situation in which the game author can be dead is the hypothetical one in which we make our own game and play it ourselves and never let anyone else play it, and even that is still a sort of "player + author" situation.

Sure, arguing that the game author is dead is nice and provocative, but it's fundamentally impossible. The book author's intent might not matter once you start reading and latch on to your own particular interpretation. However, the game author creates the very system of rules from within which you form your opinion of his/her work, and thus seems, to me, to be pretty indispensible to the process of interpretation.

Some Statements Related To Video Gaming That I Take Issue With, Part One

The ol' rage-o-meter just spiked, thanks to this video, or, more appropriately, the text that accompanies it. Apparently, RPG elements improve every game, and now the new Tomb Raider has them!

Why does this enrage me, you ask? Well, because I'm a middle class white American male! I've got to have something to get angry about! And today, "RPG elements" are that thing.

First of all, what the fuck are "RPG elements"? I've played a lot of RPGs in my time, and boy do they have a lot of elements, both collectively and individually. Said elements do in fact seem to be making their way into every single game on earth lately, and I'm not entirely sure that it's reasonable to say that they improve every single one of those games.

Short version: there's a reason that the RPG is a genre. Now, I'm all for genre cross-pollination (in games and also in books, music, movies, whatever), but I sincerely question the validity of needing to inseminate every other game genre with RPGs' fundamental DNA, which includes (often, though not always) leveling, classes, statistical categories, and other often number-based complexities (the things that I assume the IGN author means by "RPG elements").

Long version: Games are systems. They are also worlds. The system (the code) builds the world, and dictates how the player can and cannot interact with it. We're at a wonderful stage of genre cross-pollination right now with regard to games, but it seems like so often the result of the cross-pollination is simply to throw more systems at the player, under the assumption that if you gives him/her enough things to do, they'll walk away feeling like they got their money's worth. And to a degree, I think this works. Learning to master systems, overcoming obstacles, and then learning to turn the rules of the game to our advantage is inherently satisfying, whether we're talking about football or World of Goo.

Button hook on 3?

However, just tossing more systems into the mix willy-nilly makes it difficult to maintain any sense of a coherent world. So yeah, when I play a game like the new Tomb Raider (which I obviously haven't played, but I have played a lot of similar adventure/FPS-type games with RPG elements grafted on to them), there is always some satisfaction in unlocking a new skill by accruing enough skill points, or XP, or whatever it's called in any given game. It's nice to feel like I earned that particular skill and that once I've earned enough points, I have a chance to choose how to spend those points in a way that will suit my play style. So it's accomplishment first, followed by the opportunity to personalize a character in a superficial way (which, for some reason, often gets conflated with "role playing"). The question I have in this situation is "Who buys Tomb Raider to role-play?" We don't. We buy Tomb Raider because Lara Croft is badass and we want to control her and use her powers of awesome to kick all the ass on earth. So while it's a momentary reward of sorts to unlock a new skill for Lara as a result of your awesomeness at ass-kicking, it feels strange to me in the larger context of the game. Why do I need to have a Lara who is a survivalist or a Lara who has better eyesight? Why can't I just have an awesome superhero with all kinds of neat powers and not feel like I need to play through the game 18 times in order to get to do all the cool things in it? Because RPG elements, that's why.

Maybe the best way to explain what the face-fuck I'm talking about is to talk about Deus Ex. Deus Ex is, nominally at least, an FPS with RPG elements. And yet, your manipulation of the game's skill system has dramatic consequences "on the ground," so to speak. If you create yourself to be a master hacker, you can hack your way through shit, but if things go south, you're not going to power your way out of trouble with your rocket launcher, because chances are your character's too weak to even lift and fire the damn thing. Deus Ex makes sure its RPG-style skill system makes sense in the larger context of the world and the way that the player survives and succeeds with in: the system has weight. In many RPG-inflected games since, that hasn't been the case. It's like the industry saw that a few games like Deus Ex successfully put fried onions in a burrito, and so now everything's got to have fried onions in it, even the goddamn carrot cake.

Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?

Sure, in a lot of these games (and I'm sorry for not providing an example right now, my brain is literally seeping out of someone else's eye sockets), you can customize things like Accuracy, Weapon Specialization and such fancy things, but all your choices really mean is that the game is slightly harder if you choose to create an physically weak, eagle-eyed sniper and then plow through while bludgeoning everything with a war hammer. Beyond that, there aren't any real consequences, because (presumably) developers want the player to eventually be able to work their way through the game however they want, so that they keep coming back happy.

Contrast this with, say, Baldur's Gate 2 (since that's what I'm playing now). If you create a Dwarf fighter who specializes in crossbows and axes, just try fighting a high-level enemy with a bow or a knife and see how far you get. At some point, your choices catch up to you, and within the game world, to succeed, you need to play as the character you've chosen to be. Those character-defining decisions carry weight. That's RPG elements for you.

Slapping a bunch of cool "bonus" skills together into a skill tree and requiring the player to kill a thousand bad guys to unlock them all has nothing to do with role-playing, and honestly I have a really hard time understanding how they "improve" anything. Sure, it gives you more stuff to do, but since when has gaming been about giving the player more things to do, just for the sake of doing them?

diss extracts: interlude 3 (part 2 of 2)

here's part two! if you have no idea what's going on, read part one first.

At first, I panic. The world seems to tilt on its axis under my feet and I find it hard to breathe. Reflexively, I use the moon to take a bearing and still firmly in the grip of terror, I start running. Remembering the pile of bones and the charred stone, I keep running. I run for nearly a mile and then, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, I come to a panting stop. Suddenly my back hurts where the rocks in my pack must have slammed against it over and over while I ran on, unaware. Scanning the area, I recognize the grasslands around me and the gentle slope of the ground to the north as it moves toward the edge of another, smaller lake. I am still far from home, but I'm headed in the right direction. At least there's no–

My thoughts and blood are frozen as a piercing shriek cuts the air. In its wake, I hear the rattle of bones. I know these bones too well: they live somehow without skin, without organs, powered only, it seems, by malice. I turn towards the sound and in the moonlight, silhouetted against the hills to the east, I see the skeleton, already nocking an arrow and drawing its bow. It's still too far away, I think to myself as rationality wars with terror for command over my thoughts. Sure enough, it fires an arrow – the twang of the bowstring mixing with a gleeful murder's hiss – and I watch it arc gracefully through the night sky before it thunks into the ground twenty feet in front of me.

Suddenly, a snarl from behind me yanks my attention away from the skeleton. So there are enemies on at least two sides of me, now. I need to get to high ground, ascertain the situation, and decide how to fight my way home. There is a rise to the southwest; I jog toward it, putting the skeleton at my back but moving at a pace that makes it certain it won't gain ground on me while my attention is diverted.

The zombie, of course, is waiting for me at the top of the rise. By the time I see him, I don't have time to check my momentum, so I dive and roll under his first swing, ending up behind him. He turns slowly, but it takes me a moment to shrug off my rucksack and yank my old sword from its scabbard. By the time I've drawn my weapon, he's shambling forward to rake his claws across my face. I don't let him, obviously. I take one step back to put myself out of his range and then I follow behind his swing with a descending cut of my sword, hacking off the offending limb.

Zombies cannot feel pain. Once I did not know this, and that ignorance nearly cost me my life. Now, though, when the zombie responds to losing his arm by immediately swinging the other one at my chest, I'm ready. Snapping my sword back up, I step inside this second swing and cut the arm off before it gets to me. It slaps wetly against my chest as it falls away, and I take a step back, putting distance between myself and the zombie's teeth, which are his last remaining weapon. He comes at me immediately, as I knew he would. As he does, I hear an arrow wizz by both of our heads, but there's no time to worry about that yet. Instead, I set my feet, grit my teeth, and let the zombie impale himself on my sword. Then I quickly plant my foot in his chest and kick, sliding my blade free as he crumples to the ground.

Thanks to the time I've wasted on this skirmish, there's no point in trying to develop a plan now. From atop the rise, I can see the countryside swarming with dark shapes in all directions, and the skeleton is almost on top of me. By the time I shoulder my rucksack and slide my sword back into its scabbard, it's already nocked and drawn another arrow, so I take off as fast as I can to the southwest, running in a zigzag pattern and hoping it's less of a distance to my house than I suspect.

The next two miles are a blur of desperation tinged with fear as I slowly become aware that I am being hunted, herded by a large group of skeletons who are – unfortunately – not nearly as stupid as their zombie allies. Over flat land, though, I can outrun them on foot, and as the light of torches comes into view slowly but certainly to the south, I actually begin to think that I'm going to make it home safely. Then, I top the final rise and see how thoroughly I've been outmaneuvered. Quite literally at the door of my house wait two enormous, red-eyed spiders and one of the grotesque, limbless, mottled-green creatures I've come to think of as “creepers”.

With who-knows-how-many skeletons closing in from behind me, I don't even have time to be scared. Leaving my pack on this time, I unlimber my bow and draw an arrow. The spiders have begun to move toward me, but seem torn between holding their position and attacking outright. I make the decision for them by burying my first arrow in the nearest one's hide. It hisses and comes at me, oozing a brown-black liquid from the wound. The creeper follows, deliberately, behind it. I simply wait, patiently putting a second arrow right next to the first and slowing the spider down a bit more. It is on top of me, however, before I can draw a third arrow. I drop the bow and draw my sword instead, slicing off the spider's first questing limb. It retreats back a few steps, and I do too. Behind the spider, the creeper is circling to my left, so I move to the right to keep it in view. This odd dance goes on for a few moments, the spider and I taking testing swings at one another while the creeper attempts to flank me. As I hack off a third spider leg, I begin to wonder what exactly is going on. Then a hiss from behind me makes my mistake painfully clear: in turning to keep from being flanked by the creeper, I allowed the second spider to come up behind me unnoticed. And now, I'm trapped and quite probably dead.

Seeing the creeper closing, though, I remember the charred corner of my house and the scattered pile of skeleton bones, and I know that I have one last chance. Going for the weakest enemy first, I charge the wounded spider, bringing my sword down in a two-handed, overhead blow that nearly cuts the thing in half. I try to pull my sword free as my enemy dies beneath me, but the rusty blade has been thoroughly mangled by this last, desperate blow and I realize after a moment that even if I manage to free my weapon, it will be worthless to me. This is unfortunate, but really doesn't change my quite-possibly-suicidal plan. The spider behind me hisses again – much too close this time – as I go for the only other thing I have that could be construed as a close-quarters weapon: my pickaxe.

I manage to raise it in a two-handed grip and take a step over the spider corpse at my feet, which seems to surprise the creeper who was lurching forward on its four mottled-green legs, perhaps sensing victory. Before it can recover, I swing the pickaxe laterally, scoring its hide and driving it back a step. I keep moving toward it, aggressively. As I bring the pickaxe up for another strike, the creeper begins to close again, hissing loudly. Throwing a look over my shoulder, I take a step back – against all of my instincts – and feel the spider's forelegs begin to close around my waist. With the creeper coming down on me from the front and the spider's hungry mouth lurching toward me from behind, I will myself to wait until the last possible second...and then I hurl myself aside as the creeper's hiss reaches its highest pitch.

The creeper explodes – as creepers are wont to do – and the explosion hits me in the chest, seeming to unhinge my bones from my muscles. I'm thrown across the front lawn of my house and I land in a bed of dirt, crushing a row of decorative flowers. The spider, closer to the center of the explosion, is completely vaporized. I try to stand, but the ground jumps down away from my feet and I stagger sideways. For a moment, I simply stand staring at my front door, struck dumb by the explosion. Then the sizzle of another arrow passing near to my head puts things into perspective. The skeletons that had been chasing me over the northern plains have finally caught up. I grab my rucksack and make a run for the door.

I fumble with the door lock, and as a result, I almost don't make it. But the skeletons are consistently poor shots and I finally hurl myself inside, locking the door behind me as they growl in frustration, fired arrows zikking off the stone walls of my home. The torches and the stone walls will keep them out for the night, and in the morning, if they aren't smart enough to disappear underground, the sun will melt them where they stand, leaving little sign of their passing except, perhaps, an incomplete pile of charred bones.

I pant heavily for a few minutes with my back against the door, knowing that the hisses and growls I hear outside will continue for most of the night and that, at some point, I'm simply going to have to just ignore them and go about my usual business of cooking and preparing the furnace for smelting another pile of iron ore.

Today, this world has shown me both of its faces: joy, in the exploration of a bounteous wilderness and in the feeling of hard work well done, and terror, in the persistent threat the night creatures pose to my life and all that I've built here. Ultimately, I am free to make my own life here, but it is a life that is earned, not given.

Survival is hardly a game, after all.

diss extracts: interlude 3 (part 1 of 2)

here's the first version of my third "interlude" section of the diss. as usual for the interludes, it's a nonfiction-y narrative thing that sets up the upcoming chapter. this particular one is from the perspective of the player's avatar in minecraft. this is the first half, second half is coming tomorrow. enjoy (i hope)! a few of my avid readers might catch a sly reference to an earlier nonfiction piece of mine, which was published posthumously in the element.

okay, not really posthumously. moving on...

The first rays of of the day's sunlight suffuse my bedroom, drawing me out of a deep sleep. I open my eyes slowly and for a moment I simply take in my surroundings. I am lying in my bed – rickety wooden bedframe, rough wool sheets – in a small, but solidly built room comprised of grey stone walls and a roof made of overlapping slate tiles. The bed takes up almost the entirety of one wall, while the opposite wall is lined with a series of shelves supporting nine chests made from polished wood. A few of the chests have been left open and old tools and worn-out clothes are barely visible beneath their lids. Near the bedroom door – a hinged, wooden affair that is currently closed and locked – a single, failing torch gutters, its wan light overwhelmed now by the warm glow of the rising sun. Outside the room's one window, a cow lumbers by, mooing. It's time to start the day.

I slide out of bed to a standing position. The floor beneath my feet is more hard stone, but it is cushioned and warmed somewhat by a layer of soft-colored rugs, weakly dyed a cloudy white. I pad over to the door, which yields with a creak, and then I proceed into the house's main hallway. Straight ahead of me is the door to a bathroom of sorts, where a porcelain washtub dominates an otherwise sparsely-filled space of roughly the same dimensions as the bedroom. To my left, the hall opens up into the house's main living area. Here, the rugs are a bit more vibrantly colored – a muted blue – and the walls are lined with earth-toned hangings that catch and soften the sunlight angling in through the windows. Against the far wall of the room, a furnace smolders dully, and beside it a few bars of shaped iron – last night's work – are cooling. On a wooden table near the furnace lay a crust of stale bread and an apple. I grab them and put them in the pocket of my trousers. They won't make for a spectacular breakfast, but I'm in a hurry to be on my way this morning and I don't want to take the time to make something else. I reach into another wooden chest that sits on the floor beside the table and pull out an old leather rucksack. Into it goes food for later: some smoked meat from the pantry and a skin of river water, along with a half-loaf of fresher bread. Back at the front door, I round up the usual equipment: pickaxe, handaxe, bow and arrow, and my notched, rusting sword. Then it's out into the world.

As I step outside, I check the two torches that hang below the house's eaves, framing the door. I fully intend to be back before dark, but it never hurts to be safe, and at night these torches will be visible from a long distance. With my back to the front door, I am facing south, and directly ahead the gentle plain on which my house rests continues for a hundred or so feet before terminating in a cliff; it's a fifty-foot drop into the lake that spreads to the horizon. To the east, the land thrusts up almost immediately into a hill that stands, at its highest point, nearly two hundred feet above my roof. As I do most mornings, I turn this way and begin to climb. On my way around the corner of the house, I pass the cow I saw earlier, and as I do he looks up from grazing, mooing again in what I suspect is a cow-greeting.

Climbing the hill is tough going, and, as usual, I don't bother walking all the way to the summit. Instead, I climb just high enough so that I can see out across the flatland to the west and north of my house until it butts up against the smaller, less spectacular hills in the distance. From this vantage, I can see the first sliver of the sun as it inches its way into the sky to the north, and as it does, its light spills out across the entirety of my work at surviving in this place. Waves of golden wheat sway in the wind to the west; they are arranged in precise rows, fed by narrow irrigation channels and protected from roving wildlife by a sturdy wooden fence. To the north is a similarly arranged but less impressive patch of wheat – I culled this one only a few days ago, and what few stalks remain are short and green yet. Along the edges of the lake to the south, papyrus shoots grow taller than a man, and cows and pigs dot the landscape in all directions, numerous enough that I've deemed fencing them in unnecessary. As I scan my environs contentedly, one particularly enterprising pig snorts at me from the hill's summit, startling me and then prompting me to wonder what in the world inspired him to make the journey all the way up there.

All is well this morning, I think to myself; yet, even as I do, my eyes are drawn to the foot of the hill below me, where a few human-sized bones rest in a pile and the corner of the house nearest them looks somehow burnt, blasted, the grey stone charred black. But now is not the time to dwell on such things. Now is a sunny summer morning, and there will be plenty of time for such darker concerns later. With some difficulty, I avert my eyes and turn away to face the day's demands.

There are only two tasks on today's agenda, but those two tasks could easily take me the remaining balance of daylight to complete: I need to find iron ore and wood. The iron ore will be used eventually for the forging of a new sword to replace the brittle, misshapen thing that currently hangs at my hip, and the wood will be shaped into more fenceposts to encircle the third, larger wheat field I am currently in the process of planting. Because of the flatness of the land immediately surrounding the house, it has been hard to keep the fields properly irrigated and the wheat in the first two fields hasn't been growing as fast as I'd like. Getting more seeds in the ground is easy; making sure that the resulting stalks aren't destroyed by any number of wild creatures is much more difficult and requires some forethought.

Fortunately, finding wood should only require a short walk. I've long since cleared the flatland below of trees whose wood went toward my earlier projects, and though I've replanted some saplings in their place, they haven't had nearly enough time to grow to any sort of size yet. So I strike out to the east, skirting the large hill and following a gentler ridge up and up until my house is lost to sight behind me. I've never been logging in this direction before and so I know it's only a matter of time before I come upon some suitable trees. Eventually, the ridge leads me up into the first foothills of the eastern mountains. On a clear morning like this one, I can often see these snow-dressed hinterlands from the top of the hill near my house. They loom in the far distance, gauzy-looking, like something out of a dream, tugging at my curiosity. But for now I have more pressing concerns.

From my current elevation, I can see that along the flanks of the foothills, the trees grow thick and large, and I will have my choice of trunks to cut. I spend much of the rest of the morning chopping down a few of the closer, smaller trees, stripping the the trunks to fencepost-sized poles, and eventually plowing through my nearly-forgotten breakfast. By the time I judge that I've cut enough wood, the sun is directly overhead. Rather than spending the rest of the day hauling logs back home on already-tired shoulders, though, I decide to leave the logs where they are until tomorrow and take a circuitous route back to the house while keeping an eye open for potential iron veins.

I head back down out of the hills and circle around the house to the north, where the land is rough and uneven. Here, rocks jut out of the dirt, forming odd-looking plinths. Occasionally, the ground under a bluff has given way completely, revealing a tunnel or shallow chasm that twists down and down into the stony guts of the world. These tunnels could lead anywhere, and if they ran deep enough they would almost certainly lead me to iron ore. But just looking into their depths from a distance fills me with foreboding – I don't yet need the ore that badly.

After an hour or so of walking through this strange land and another few bites of smoked meat, I am surprised to see a tunnel entrance bracketed by two of my old torches. I know that I haven't ranged far north of home recently, so this place must be one of the first caves I ever dug, lost to my memory in the confusion and darkness of those first days. Regardless, I know that if I've been here already, this particular cavern is at least relatively safe. Checking the position of the sun one last time, I light a fresh torch and disappear down the tunnel's throat.

The cavern opening leads into to a labyrinth of stone. Some of the tunnel's arteries are very clearly my own work – they are neatly head-height, squared-off, and run straight into the earth – while others are more angular, twisting, and disorienting – likely formed naturally by running water. I follow a number of these paths in succession, leaving more torches behind me as I go so that I can retrace my steps if necessary. The deeper the tunnels go, the greater my chances of finding iron ore become, and yet the crushing darkness at those depths is intimidating, and so I ultimately choose to stay just barely belowground. It is only purely by chance, then, that I find an iron vein in short order.

The hard work of chipping through the surrounding stone with my iron pickaxe prompts me to eat through the rest of my lunch as I work, and so by the time I've finally collected what I judge to be enough of the ore, I'm quite ready to be out from under the ground and en route to home and dinner. I follow the trail of torches back to the tunnel exit easily enough, but as I reach the surface, I'm struck by a sudden all-consuming fear. While I was underground, I must have lost track of the time! The sun is long gone, and it has been replaced by the apologetic silver light of a waning moon. It is night, and I am still miles from home.

Screenshot taken from Tom Francis's (PC Gamer) Minecraft travelogue, which I am citing heavily in my chapter.

two of my favorite diss-related images

i've been alternating between both of these as my desktop on my work computer for awhile now. they're both pretty interesting visual representations of a lot of the issues i'm writing about in my dissertation with regard to wilderness, civilization, and technology. plus, i took the first one myself. so there's that. the second one is made by someone else and superimposes a bit of minecraft landscape atop what i imagine is probably a 19th century landscape painting.

i've got another post in the pipe for later about roguelikes and why they generally (but not exclusively) enrage me as a genre of video game.