at the cost of being essentially ignored by formal scholarship, games as an art form in has always enjoyed an environment without a solid line between the high and low. kojima has always been heralded as a master of both the high brow and the low brow, but i think his greatest talent in this regard is his ability to, for moments at a time, thread the needle and get you seriously pondering about like Wet Dryman or whatever

this quote in particular is deeply reminiscent of something kojima said w/r/t the whole "games as art" debate. instead of relating his creative process to that of the artist, he said "art is the stuff you find in the museum, whether it be a painting or a statue. What I'm doing, what videogame creators are doing, is running the museum - how do we light up things, where do we place things, how do we sell tickets?"

this idea of game design as a profoundly compositional creative process feels especially apt to me when looking at lorelei, in the way that it iterates on its myriad of disparate influences in order to illuminate new ways in which they all shine new light on each other. very reminiscent of the way that suda would, say, combine and iterate on late-stage postmodernism, the burgeoning internet, and y2kism to produce the silver case, to great thematic and experiential success. lorelei feels similarly uncompromising in how deep it's willing to dive into its influences, but it's able to cash that hefty check on the game design front- the game is often confounding, but never offputtingly so

gaming has plenty of lines of discourse that have been poisoned through bad-faith debate but the whole souls game easy mode debacle has had the especially disgusting knock-on effect of people who wear their completion of these games as a badge of pride lashing out at others and their legitimate experiences out of pathetic insecurity

i think it would be hard to argue with the idea that in a perfect world these games could accommodate literally anybody who would like to interface with their challenge but it truly boggles the mind how some people are so deluded as to act like the use of certain tools the game quite literally shoves in your face render the playthrough in some way invalid. the pretense of authorial intention isn't even there anymore, revealing the arbitrary cruelty at the core of the sentiment

your reviews are always so lushly crafted, every time i come back to your page and take a browse i'm blown away by the lucidity and apparent ease at which you manifest really hearty commentary. it honestly leaves me pretty jealous. please never stop posting