3 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2025
    1. But the dominant genre during this period was the much more frenetic first-person shooter. With many shooter engines increasingly providing tools to build your own levels or otherwise modify game content, it’s no surprise that many gamemakers began using these tools for other purposes. Many of the earliest walking simulators (including Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, and Mary Flanagan’s 2003 [domestic]) were originally mods for first-person shooters, and the first-person perspective has come to define the genre.

      I love the connection they make to how the walking simulators paved the way for a lot of modern gaming. Many of the root mechanics found in modern first-person games like Call of Duty are seen as deriving from walking simulators and fight back against the notion that walking simulators were useless and had no impact on the gaming industry.

    1. Minos’s maze was therefore a frightening place, full of danger and bafflement, but successful navigation of it led to great rewards.

      This could be seen as a more figurative sense as well, by how the frightening place with all the dangers is the internal conflicts that people have to deal with. Adventures with Anxiety is a great example for that, with how the objective of the game is to struggle with the human's internal anxiety as the wolf and make sure that the human doesn't do anything bad. Dealing with those internal conflicts could lead to that mental freedom, which is the great reward that is mentioned.

    2. The proliferation of interconnected files is an attempt to answer the perennial and ultimately unanswerable question of why this incident happened

      This sentence ties to the big idea that when on a story journey, you should be questioning why everything is happening, even if we don't get all the answers we are looking for. This is similarly seen in Adventures With Anxiety, with how each of the choices makes you think about how it would have been different with another choice and what caused the specific reaction. Overall, it ends with you wondering whether or not you made all the right choices still and you won't truly know unless you play the game again.