Meandering through Games and Narrative

A first session and meandering discourse about narrative in gaming with personal examples of narrative, semi-narrative, and non-narrative games and their place in my life and heart.  Light discussion, but no spoilers for: Mouthwashing, Baldur's Gate, Stardew Valley, Graveyard Keeper, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Tiny Glade, and Dystopika.  Take an increasingly less structured wander through a calm valley in my otherwise sometimes troubled mind.

Transcript

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Hello again, wonderful internet person, and welcome back again to Gnall by Design, this little space between the platforms that I'm carving out for my mind. This time, I'm here to talk about gaming, a nice little sunlit valley that lays between the dark and twisted forests and mountains of my mind. One of my true and enduring special interests, so it is probably something that we will come back to time and time again. And really the goal of this session is probably more to give a lay of the land, to draw the outline of this happy little glade in my heart, more than to get too exhaustively into any particular game or kind of gaming, but instead to cover a number of my thoughts around narrative, semi-narrative, and non-narrative gaming. Though in the category of non-narrative gaming, one thing I won't be giving a lot of attention to right now, though I do believe it deserves quite a bit of attention in many people's hearts and gets it from an extraordinary crowd of folks, is the world of purely simulation gaming. Things like Microsoft Flight Simulator, just things that are made entirely for building anything in as abstractly as possible, uh, like Gary's mod or any anything like Blender, which again, obviously Blender is just a 3D modeling and editing environment rather than a game, but it's an interactable space and people play there. And so while not a game, I think there are a lot of things that people engage in as games in and of their own right. We can work on that definition and debate it with Wiechtenstein on what is a game. But let's get into it. What are my thoughts around the world of gaming? Let's start off in the world of much more strongly narrative gaming, things that compel you forward, worlds that I really enjoy going into but aren't where I spend the majority of my time. But some things just to outline where many of my interests in narrative gaming have been from the very strongly narrative, uh, although not a bright and happy ray of sunshine in this little valley, is something like mouthwashing. Mouthwashing, if you haven't checked it out, is a fairly short, very contained horror or thriller sort of journey, a psychological horror that is incredibly compelling. If you've played it, you understand it. If you've seen it and thought about it on a Steam or other list of games, you probably have seen the art and either been compelled to wonder or utterly repulsed from it. I was one of those that was more on the repulsed side until finally I just decided to dive in, and it opened with the words, I hope this hurts you. And my goodness, it did hurt me and changed me, but in ways that you should be willing to explore. But it is a game of extremely strong narrative. You are going through a storyline. You are forced to go along a journey with the characters. There are not many options. It is in substantial parts on rails. It's on rails in a way that is almost like old arcade shooters. There are clear paths forward. You occasionally have choices in exactly what you are doing at any given moment, but it is confining you. It is directing you. It is a full and very limited narrative that intends to tell a certain kind of story. And again, I really recommend not just dipping your toes in, but fully diving into that one. It's not a long journey, even if it is a difficult one to complete. And then there are games that are difficult to complete and that have wonderful narratives, but that give you so much freedom in how you complete everything that it's almost fatiguing just to approach them. And of course, I am talking about Baldur's Gate 3, a wonderfully narrative game, a beautifully constructed world and set of choices that you can make. But boy howdy, you can make any choice you want, with an almost limitless variety of options, but you are going to be making choices all the time. Choices that will have consequences that may be immediate or may be very far reaching. You know at every time that you are going along many thousands of possible paths within that narrative. Always being directed forward, having something to do. There's not necessarily a lot of freedom within the world in terms of you must keep going forward. The story is meant to be completed. You are not going to lose yourself along the way and become a farmer. Or at least I haven't found a way to just start a farm in it thus far. And that's important. I think it's good to have stories that compel you forward. And then we begin to get a little bit more and more distant from that as we journey farther into this valley. We have games like Cyberpunk 2077. Very clearly has a storyline, and again, a quite nice storyline, a storyline that I have enjoyed. It wants you to get in and play that story. You ought to see Hanukko at Embers, and it's not going to let you forget that that's really what it wants you to do. But you can also just kind of ignore that for very extensive periods of time. You can just go and explore the world and keep on exploring. Keep finding new little missions to sidetrack your way through. And then every time you complete one, it will remind you that Hanukko is waiting at Embers. Really, really wants you to engage with the story, even if it lets you wander very far. This is very much like many of the later Assassin's Creed games. Those started off being much more strongly narrative, more on Rails, much more mission-based, and now are overwhelmingly open world-based, especially as we get further and further in those titles, probably much to their detriment. Black Flag and Odyssey are two of my favorites, but I think they really start to represent where open worlds begin to damage narrative gaming if what they want you to do is be compelled into a narrative, and those are games that seem to want you to complete them. You just may never get very far, in fact, with them. They will overwhelm you with map icons that you can chase down, while also really, really wanting you to do specific things. And that's fine. Again, I don't think that that's bad. I think that there are some detrimental qualities to giving someone both a narrative that you want them to go through, and also an immense open world to distract you, because at some point one detracts from the quality of the other. Freedom starts to be impinged upon by the open world, by the need to go and chase down every icon on the map. It eats away at how compelling that narrative can be. And the narrative doesn't find enough focus within such a large world. It can't occupy the entirety of the world because it's just a play space that is perhaps unforgivingly large for any narrative. Baldur's Gate manages to pull something like this off because the world really isn't that large. The maps are extensive. The maps give you a lot of ways to approach the story. But they're not compellingly trying to seem like the entirety of England. Having to traverse the entirety of England makes any narrative seem fairly small by comparison. And so instead, whether it's a very large, very detailed world, or one that's smaller, but doesn't require as much of you, this is where I think I in particular start to find what I consider semi-narrative gaming to be of particular interest. Semi-narrative games, in my experience and in the things that I have explored in particular, always have some story, but they tend to have mechanics that can guide you into very different places that you can engage with in their own right without necessarily being compelled forward by anything else. Some games that have stood out in my play history are games like Subnautica. There is a storyline in Subnautica, there is a story to complete. It plays out in front of you, especially the opening acts. There are immediate and huge signposts that are directing you toward the story that they've made. And those initial story points are easy to explore. But very quickly after that, it leaves you very often to just find the rest of that story on your own. And if you're not searching for it, it gives you a world to play in that isn't going to challenge you to keep moving forward in any sort of immediate and forcing way. Instead, you can just tend to your little sea gardens, desalinate water, explore very small or wide chunks of the environment around you. You can get entirely lost in memorizing a single biome, or you can explore all of them, and the more deeply you do that, of course, the more of the story you're likely to find. But it's not forcing you into those other areas except in that you're going to try and keep finding resources to keep building new and different things. But it's not forcing you there. In the same way, that's like something from and in what I think are increasingly and in the same category of semi-narrative games. Things like Stardew Valley. Very clearly, there are story elements to engage with. Unlike Subnautica, there are a lot more characters for you to directly engage with, whose stories you can choose to explore. A world that has a lot more definition because its scope is somewhat more limited. And it has more definite mechanics that you can just keep repeating through, of course, developing and rebuilding your family farm. And you never have to stop farming. You don't necessarily have to begin exploring the caves and dungeon. You can just keep on farming. And you can become a successful and rich farmer. And it will never punish you really for just taking that journey and never going forward. And to that extent, it's an absolutely wonderful little tool set to have a world in which you can live, but which isn't always forcing you forward. It is not mouthwashing that is trying to hurt you. It's Stardew Valley. It's a happy little valley that wants you to stay. On the flip side of, let's say, lighter dark mode in a browser, Graveyard Keeper is kind of the opposite of Stardew Valley in emotional tone, but is basically identical in what it's having you do and compelling you through. Maybe a little bit more direct of a story than Stardew Valley, but not by a significant amount. And instead of farming, you're tending to a graveyard, a church, a world that has a similar set of characters, but reversed in terms of, again, some of its emotional tone. But not so much that it is a gothic horror of any kind, in my opinion. Again, it it gets into darker elements than Stardew Valley does. But it's always a very playful take on the dark. The characters are wonderful, they are delightful, they are there even at their darkest moments, except for maybe a couple, except for maybe the engagement with the church. But I'm I'm always sort of inherently against burning heretics in most cases, and there is a storyline that is certainly about that. Or at least a uh compelling set of characters who are pushing against those boundaries and comfort. But let's not get too far into that. Again, this is a happy, whimsical little ray of sunshine in what have otherwise perhaps been some darker topics along the way here. And it's these fundamental building blocks in things like Subnautica, Stardew Valley, Graveyard Keeper, where there is a world, it's fairly limited in scope, but it lets you just play out whatever you would like within that space. And I think that that is where a lot of people really find their favorite gaming niches. Because what many of us want from a lot of games is to be occupied, to have something where we can go back to for some little hints of dopamine, but where we are building actively much of the story in our own mind. Baldur's Gate has a story it wants you to complete. You may be role-playing your own particular kind of story within it. You can have almost any kind of character there that you want to. Within, of course, the limits of the setting of Dungeons and Dragons. And you are building your own story, you are building your own emotional relationship to that world, but it is compelling you forward. Stardew Valley, you can just become who you want to be in that little place without having anything to compel you to do or make certain choices. Again, there are those story elements for you to engage with there. It's not a non-narrative game. It is, again, as I would consider, semi-narrative. It is something that wants you to engage with a story with as few requirements toward that as possible. It's becoming more and more like a Lego set, in my opinion. There are instructions, there are limitations to what you can do, but you can fiddle about for roughly as long as you would like. In a similar way of having clear mechanical structures and things that compel you forward, but where you can play out your own worldview or roleplay in a very different way, with very few limitations, and also what I consider to be within a sort of semi-narrative space is the world of historical simulations, and also any of the 4X style of games. You are, again, and in a way more strong than Stardew Valley, being compelled forward because there is a ticking clock of some kind. There is a historical narrative taking place. In this realm, I especially see and have enjoyed Paradox Games. In sort of order of history, Imperator Rome, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria, Hearts of Iron, and, as a true just Space Age 4X, Stellaris. Each one of these in their own particular iteration at this point in terms of version. Those being out right now, Imperator Rome is its own thing. It had been formerly a Europa Universalis title. Hearts of Iron 4, which has uh, along with a couple of the other games, been around for closer to a decade. And I forgot, Victoria III, uh, in that time set. And Stellars, which has been around, again, I believe for a decade at this point, is in its fifth major version. In that way, it has endured and changed in ways very much like No Man's Sky. Another game that I would put clearly within the more semi-narrative world of gaming, but one that I won't talk about a ton here because I feel like it has stories of its own to tell than really I want to allow in this first gaming session where I'm outlining this little valley in my heart. But historical simulation is probably one of the styles of gaming that I have gotten the most enjoyment from in my life. I am a nerd for Europa Universalis. I have collectively thousands of hours between the different iterations of that set of titles. And easily thousands. We're breezing through those hours at a rapid clip whenever I really find a groove with a particular country or time period. I'm I'm more of an England-France player in the current iteration because the Hundred Years' War is exceptionally fun to play through for me. It's history I enjoy thinking about and getting to tinker around with. And that's what historical simulation titles really give you the opportunity to do. There's no specific storyline that you were playing out, except in that nations exist and histories keep moving forward. There are all of the mechanics that keep driving the world forward, but it is not a historical recreation. It is a historical sandbox. And I enjoy that more than being forced through a specific historical narrative. Hearts of Iron as a story about World War II, I think, is an exception to that, because, well, I am a World War II history nerd, and so going through a more confined historical path in that has its own specific kinds of interest to tinker around with the nations that can and do exist within that space during that very contained period of time. But that's a sometimes snack compared to the wider range in games. And again, Europa Universalis probably has the longest timeline of all of them. Crusader Kings also tends to have a large number of years to play through. And whereas in Europa Universalis you were playing out the role of a nation, in Crusader Kings you are playing through the world of very specific historical or ahistorical characters. You have a very different set of building blocks available to you in each. In one you are, uh, for Crusader Kings, playing directly with a cast of characters, with their inclinations within that mechanical realm. Ah, and it gets wild and wacky. It is probably one of the sillier of the paradox games just because of how wild character mechanics can get and how divergent history can get very quickly when a cast of characters is just allowed to play out its worst tendencies. Because RNG is always going to. Take us down strange and I think delightful paths. I have seen in the world of Crusader Kings II a resurgent Muslim Ireland perform a reconquista against England, something that shouldn't probably happen within that narrative time frame. But when you really unleash the mechanics, it can, and it's wonderful to see that happen. It is wonderful to see all of world history take a very different path and get very wonderfully wacky. In that similar way, Europa Universalis tends to be a tiny bit more bounded by history only because you have some more established nations, though, with the longer time period available in the most recent title, Europa Universalis had typically started in the year 1444 and gone to the 1800s. It now starts at 1337, the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, and plays out from there, and giving another century of time to play out, things can get significantly wackier. There's just a lot more time and space for the world to become strange, and I love that. I want the world to be able to grow in its own ways. I don't want to play one very specific history. I want to be given a set of Legos, and I want to be able to explore all of the different things that can be built with that. And paradox titles at their most wonderful, even when they have all of their problems, all of their wrinkles. Let that sort of semi-narrative world play out at its best. If you're willing to just swing with the problems, to not get too tied down by expectation, I think it can really hold a special place. And again, this is where I come to in my heart for gaming. It's about being given a space to play in. Strongly narrative games give you a very narrow playground, more of a running track to go down, and sometimes that's wonderful. But I like these wide open spaces. I like to be able to get lost in what I'm doing. And when I look up, to be confused, to have a sense of wonder about how did this come to have happened? And so historical simulation has a very particular place within my heart. We'll come back, I am certain, at different points in the journey of this podcast to talk more and more about what I love about especially these particular historical simulations. But that I think leads us to games that allow for similar levels of play, similar levels of divergence from the norm, but that are not compelled by a clock ticking forward in quite the same way. Still time mechanics that drag us forward, but not a lot of storyline or almost no narrative that's required. And that, I think, is where I really get into the other great love of my life in gaming. And those are lightly narrative builders, is how I've termed it in my notes. Some of these are more of your colony builder, and really probably all of them actually are more in the colony builder sense of gaming. The two that have stuck with me and had the most sprawling and labyrinthine places in my life are Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld. Dwarf Fortress, in its early iterations as a purely ASCII art-based game that was controlled entirely from the keyboard, was not something that I engaged with directly as a player. At that point, it was a little bit too much for me to memorize uh at the places I was in my life when it was uh before its Steam release and before it had a more strong uh graphical tile set that didn't require significant modding to get to, and that became much more mouse-controlled, uh, a fully mouse-controllable world, even though hotkeys are super important to memorize because it is very helpful to be able to navigate by hotkey and not be bounded entirely by mouse interaction. But it was a game that I while I tried to engage with the fully keyboard and ASCII art versions of it, I was only ever semi-successful. It was something that I was compelled to keep picking away at, to keep trying to play, but that I never made it especially far with. Instead, I became an avid fan of other people's worlds in Dwarf Fortress and the stories that emerged from their explorations of the wide-ranging mechanics. And in Dwarf Fortress you are a little group of dwarves building a fortress. It's a pretty self-explanatory title. It's also, I believe, the only game held uh in the MetArt Gallery? I believe it's the MetArt Gallery. I'll have to double check that and confirm one way or the other when I come back on a later episode of this. Something that is spent twenty years in development has had such a sprawling and detailed level of investment that it is considered its own piece of art. You generate a world on demand, and then you go set off to fail in the most spectacular way possible, or to simply succeed and build a fort, possibly dig too far, delve too deep, as dwarves are like to do. But along the way, what it's really giving you is just a cast of characters, an expansive cast of characters. You can limit how many dwarves you have at hand through its many, many options and layers of preferences, but it is giving you a society to build. And then it's letting you just go a bit wild. You can succumb to where chinchillas. That's happened to me. A where chinchilla invaded a fort that I'd made it a couple decades into, and with one simple scratch, it was off to the races, and it was a death spiral of where chinchillism that I didn't have the knowledge or experience to be able to contain. And it was one of the most hilarious failures I could experience because wear chinchillas are not particularly dangerous or durable creatures, but if they harm anything at all, whoopsie, the curse is spreading. And so it did for me. And honestly, I'm not sure I tried to control it all that well, because it was it was very funny. Where chinchillas are naturally comedic, even if it resulted in failure. And you can turn all of that also just straight on off. You can have no enemies really show up. There will always be some creatures in the world that you may have to contend with depending on how good or evil the environment you find yourself in is. But the main reason, of course, you're building a fortress is that there can be invasions, but you can turn those off. Turning the invasions on keeps it a somewhat more, I would consider, narrative game because you have something, you have the failure you want to prevent. It will keep getting more and more difficult to do so, but you can turn it off and just build and just live the life of a dwarven lord as you try and navigate the different desires of your denizens. And that's wonderful. It is something that I can lose, again, hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours in, building little worlds that are either threatened or at peace. And it just allows me to dig through the layers of my own mind. I am there laying down the roads of my own narrative and finding an emergent story within that. Something that has, again, very adjustable mechanics. You can kind of decide the level of difficulty and hardship you want to experience, is RimWorld. RimWorld is a much smaller, in most cases, and I believe more personal colony building experience, as you're generally starting with a smaller number of refugees who have crashed upon an alien world. And now you have to try and help them survive, with overall a very similar kind of starting package of resources as you would find in Dwarf Fortress, but without the natural reinforcements that would come with living in a world populated by other dwarves and being a part of society that can send more colonists to you necessarily. Depending on how you play Rimworld, you can have a very expansive or very constrictive colony, but it tends toward a smaller, smaller size than Dwarf Fortress does. You tend to, from my experience, develop a deeper relationship with each of the survivors of the crash that you're presented with. And then you just build and you have the option to select different narrators. You can go from very random, very demanding, or very chill, and you can turn on or off almost any set of challenges that you want. You can, like Stardew Valley, turn off almost all of the challenge and just be a set of wonderful farmers. Or you can crank that challenge up and have terrible mechanoid beings continuously descend from the sky while you're already competing with fire and radiation storms. You can build whatever narrative you want to experience. And do this, and in many of these games that I've mentioned, do this with a variety of community-made mods. Mods that will take you in any direction possible that will entirely change the scope of each of these games radically. Or not. Again, these are all games that are compelling enough, I believe, that you can play the vanilla version and never really require more. Especially if you're not someone who puts nearly as many tens or hundreds of hours into a title. You may not ever find that real need to modify it in radical ways. You won't need to necessarily go down the Skyrim chase of seeing how many multiples of the game install size you can stack up just in game mods. But you also can, and I love it for that. I love each of these for that. But Rimworld is another one of those games where I found a certain special love of it because you can just allow it to play out, let your mind spread the paints of a palette around what's going on. I'm obviously someone who plays it in a much more chill way, with fewer terrible mechanoids raining from the sky. Not zero. I still like to have to defend my my colonies. But I tend to not be trying to crank the difficulty up all that high. And that's true of many of these games. I will sometimes engage in very difficult challenges in any of these, but this is a happy little valley in my mind. I'm not trying to set up as many thorny bushes as possible to jump over. And I think that's okay. I think there's a lot of focus on playing games in the most difficult way, and that does get clicks. If you're streaming on Twitch, there is a certain compelling nature to doing difficult tasks because that is how you get viewership, and that is how you make money. Doing difficult things is kind of the point of that kind of displayed gaming in many cases, at least for some of the more popular streams that I've come across. But in the same way, I've found other people playing them in exactly the chill sort of way that I do, while people are mostly engaged more on the parasocial relationship side with those creators. It's more about talking about life, having a chill time than it is about watching someone grind through challenges. So, like me, probably an older gamer audience for the most part, because we've got stuff to do and don't need to bang our heads against our keyboards in quite the same way as can be fun to do as a younger gamer. And then we get to things that in my mind are more increasingly just little Lego tile sets to build with. All of these present to you that sort of ability to build your own narrative and character along the way, to create little landscapes and environments of your own. But in the non-strictly simulation category, but of things that I consider to be very non-narrative gaming, things that are just giving you Legos to play with, I've really found a lot of enjoyment in two particular titles as of late, those being Tiny Glade and Dystopica, very, very radically different little builders. In Tiny Glade, you are making maybe one very detailed house on a hill, maybe a very small village, but it's a very contained experience. You can get quite a bit of density. Again, for folks who are truly investing a lot of time and effort into what they're building, you can get to very, very dense, complicated, if still village-sized worlds. But it's about building in a tiny glade. And that I think, just from a title, is wonderful in its containment and in its relative peace. I have found so much freedom of expression in Tiny Glade. Because just building little homes with little doors and little windows and having nothing else go on at all. There is no storyline, there is no larger world to explore. There's no threat that's going to come and burn the little village down, it is just your little village. It is your towering wizard tower. I know I just said towering tower, but hey, those are nice too, and I can use whatever language I would like here, even if it's terribly repetitive. But building these little diorama are just wonderful. It allows you to, without needing to experience any other challenge or mechanics, or be compelled to do things in a certain way, be very free to just play. And I think that's something that we lose sometimes. All of these games are about play. We are playing the games. But mechanics dictate that we do things in very certain ways, that we are trying to survive in Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld. We're not trying to fail immediately in most cases. In city skylines or a city builder of that nature, you're trying to build a city with a growing budget. You're not trying to lose and go into debt. Tiny Glade has none of that compelling factor. You don't need to balance anything. There's nothing except some happy little sheep, maybe some happy little ducks and birds, some little garden bushes, and building your little house, and perhaps letting the sun rise and set over it. And just letting yourself exist in a space where the only narrative is what you are building into it or not. Maybe you have no thoughts about the diorama that you build, or maybe you fill it with the families or people or isolated wizard that lives in his tower. Maybe you are thinking about the elves that wander in and out of this little woodland. And I think it's about allowing yourself to stay and exist in that space that recaptures some sense of the sacred within us. I think any of these titles can do that, can give us the space to fully experience only our own thoughts and mind. But for me, Tiny Glade in particular has a certain meditative and semi-spiritual quality. It is something that compels me to be at peace while I interact with it. Kind of like the flip side between Stardew Valley and Graveyard Keeper, Dystopica is a similar kind of builder with no mechanics, no budget, nothing that is forcing you forward in any way, shape, or form, but instead of making a tiny glade, you are making more of a dystopian, blade runner style megalopolis. It is dark, it is neon, and it is utterly compelling, and I also still believe peaceful, but in its own different casting of the palette. It is what I spend quite a bit of time in both Tiny Glade and Dystopica, making different background wallpapers for my computer. Because it's just fun to. It is the sort of thing, and it is one of the few sorts of games that actually compel me to use their screenshot modes. Tiny Glade just because I'm creating beautiful little diorama. Dystopica, because it also presents you with a whole palette of filters that you can play with. It is the Instagram of Blade Runner. But without any characters. You're again not going through any form of narrative except for the building process itself. The history is what you are building into the scene. It is what you are carrying of yourself into those spaces. And in my opinion, it is again building this very different and altered sense of the sacred, but it is giving you a palette, a little Bob Ross space to have happy accidents in what you are building. Less happy and joyful and less it's a little bird now, or now we have a happy tree that Bob Ross would make and that's very clearly evident in Tiny Glade. But by dragging skyscrapers around a flat space that becomes increasingly dense and lit is something that allows you to keep building up a different kind of Lego set in your mind. And it's just a wonderful sense of play, again, at least for me. For some it may be imposing a dystopia on your mind. But for me, it is almost identical to Tiny Glade. It is me with a paintbrush, this time in the dark mode colors, this time experiencing the world of Cyberpunk 2077 as a Lego set in a much purer sense of building with Legos than Tiny Glade is building with a Lego set entirely themed for Stardew Valley, but an equal sense of play and building, and I really treasure that kind of non narrative building. And there we have it a journey. Journey from very direct stories, from being compelled forward in very specific ways from a game that starts with the words, I hope this hurts you, down to games that have open worlds and very clear stories. Subnautica being back into more of that happy, joyful space and ray of sunshine, traveling more into the abstract of how do we build and how do we interact with ourselves with a palette in which the story may involve certain survival mechanics, but where we are building the kind of story and place that we want to, that we want to experiment with in our minds, be that a happy place that trades with elves and dwarf fortress, or be it an organ harvesting farm for vampires in Rimworld. It allows us to explore any of these kinds of spaces to play in and explore. All the way down to basically just having a paintbrush. And all of this just within the world of video games, in the world of interactive art in this fashion. And I love that we've given ourselves so many different ways and spaces to play. And I spend a lot of time getting a lot of satisfaction from being able to play in these spaces. And this may be a wandering and discursive discussion without very strong boundaries, it may not have a lot of narrative of its own in this discussion. I've certainly gone from more to less narrative in my own meandering sense of those words. But again, if you're coming here from the original introduction to this as a liminal space where I hope that we're able to build a place for our heart and our mind and for our mind and our hearts, I think that it's this kind of wandering through my own thoughts about things like this, giving myself time to build on these concepts and ideas that we should all allow ourselves to do, just like these games allow us to build our own narratives and narrative space, and can do so in whatever level of challenge we want to bring into it ourselves. I think we should allow that more and more in our own hearts and minds. Allow ourselves to experience our thoughts and emotions as much as we can, and do so as safely as we want to. We can bring a lot of challenge into that. Although, certainly, that is often a more assisted journey with either trusted friends, a trusted partner, a trusted therapist, uh, those may be the spaces in which we seek more direct challenge with our minds and thoughts. Or we may pursue both light and dark thoughts, but with as much or as little challenge as we want through the world of gaming. That is something that I don't think we give enough credit to, is that how we play within games gives us a space. It gives us a way of interacting with ourselves, and not just idling away time. It is time well spent for many people. And so we'll come back to each of these different layers of more and less narrative gaming, how they've lived in my life, experiences I've had in building or deconstructing narratives, specific narratives in the more, again, narrative game space, ah, we'll probably come back more and more to these less narrative spaces. What does it mean in my heart to play Europa, not just as a set of game mechanics, but what am I experiencing? Why do I keep coming back to certain places? Why am I compelled into certain kinds of gaming, not just to complete the challenges the developers have set for me, but to complete my own thoughts, to complete some part of me that sometimes may feel like it's missing, and is given a place to build itself back into being through these interactive mediums. So I really look forward to when the thoughts and space find themselves coming back to each of these layers. But this has been quite a long little meander through these thoughts. And I'm real glad that you've stayed with me until now. So I think we'll leave it there. Next time, we'll be coming back to There Is No Anti-Memetics Division, My Little Book Club with Myself. Part three, whatever chapters that encompasses, hopefully part three of the book, but we'll see where and when we make it to. And then we'll come back to whatever topics feel good along the way as we continue in between those book club sessions to come back to these little meanders. So until we next find ourselves in this space between the platforms, again, thank you for journeying along and have a wonderful day.