Game Sommelier, Part One

Welcome to the first installment of my new blog series, Game Sommelier.

During my recent visit to Oakland University, I was fortunate to meet some wonderful people with whom I engaged in many discussions about video games. Some were tried-and-true gamers, while others were just becoming interested in the subject. I found myself drawn into many discussions about what people loved in an interactive experience, and began making personalized recommendations to them based on their interests.

During those conversations, I looked at my Steam account at one point and noticed that I now own over 1,000 games on that platform, all of which I have played for varying lengths of time. I became inspired to look back on all one thousand (plus some games from other platforms such as gog.com and itch.io) and take note of those which, years later, I feel to have been truly worthy of my time on Earth. While many games are fine vehicles for relaxation and dimensional escape, few indeed are of such quality and spirit that one might look back on them later in life and be grateful that one’s time was spent in such a way. Some games have that transcendent quality.

Long ago, the idea of a wine sommelier… a true expert in wines able to provide the perfect wine for any dish or personal preference, one who had tasted uncountable wines and spent years developing their knowledge and understanding of them… would have been met with laughter. Who would care about such a thing, and who would build such a wealth of knowledge about something so minor as wine? But today, with thousands of wines available, such expertise has indeed become  useful. A few decades ago, there were not enough games available for a game sommelier to have been relevant, but in the future, I believe that such an occupation may be in demand. And while games may sometimes (and only sometimes!) be cheaper than a bottle of good wine, a bottle of wine lasts an evening, while some games will take hundreds of hours of one’s life, making them a very important decision. The only truly valuable resource to a living being in this dimension is time, and spending it wisely is something which I would be honored to contribute to.

I would therefore like to become the world’s first game sommelier, and to help you, my dear patrons, find the very best interactive experiences for your precious time on Earth. If you have no interest in such a thing, then simply ignore this series, but so many people have been asking me about good games, what makes a good game, and what my personal favorites are that I consider it worthwhile to talk about it. In each segment, I will present three games which I felt were excellent uses of my time: one Bronze (glad I played it, even years later), one Silver (inspiring), and one Gold. Gold status indicates true art, something which I believe should be inherited by common culture and enjoyed for centuries to come on its intrinsic merit. These are, of course, only my opinion. I will merely state that I have a graduate degree in world religions and mythologies from the University of Chicago, but my expertise in religion and mythology pales in comparison to the knowledge of games which I have gathered in this life.

We are all, in the end, Homo (or perhaps Drako) Ludens.

Allow me to introduce today’s inductees:

Bronze Label:

Academagia, the Making of Mages

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT: Those interested in the history of interactive fiction, Harry Potter fans, and people who are into mild frustration

Long ago, in the 1980s, a certain writer wrote a book... paper and ink and everything... that was also a game. It became a series of hundreds, and they were the books I looked for when I set foot in any library or bookstore during my elementary school days. They had bright red spinal lettering, making them easy to spot. They were called Choose Your Own Adventure, and I loved them all, and learned a great deal from them about second-person storytelling, meaningful choices, and what does and doesn’t work as a compelling story.

Black Chicken Studios was a pioneer in the practice of recreating this in digital form. Funded through a then-young Kickstarter, it came out in the very last days of actually making PC games on physical discs, and I saw it in the $1 bargain bin at Office Depot. With a gorgeous licensed classical soundtrack, including the famous Humming Chorus by Puccini, It was a pure-and-simple video game version of the old Choose Your Own Adventure. Text appears, telling you what happens, and you make a choice. There was no animation and almost no art, and what there was wasn’t at what one might call a professional level (the user interface practically made my lead artist sick to look at and probably ruined my eyes with all that tiny text, though I liked the color palette).

It did something really interesting that the books didn't do: it tracked your stats. Hundreds of them, even. There are stats for things like your skill in accentuating public relations documents. Not writing public relations documents, just artistically accentuating them. That is a stat among scores upon scores. One’s character in this game is truly mathematically unique as a collection of data, and the feeling one gets when one creates the life of something so complex through thousands of decisions and hours of time and pleasant classical music is most certainly arkasa. (Arkasa is a Draak term for which we don’t have a direct translation, but which essentially means “intellectual pleasure of an edifying kind”.)

It was about as huge as every Choose Your Own Adventure combined by sheer word count, took place in a Harry-Potter-If-Magic-Weren’t-A-Secret knockoff world, and featured slightly humorous but generally lower-to-medium grade writing quality. I was part of the group that spent some time reporting typos and trying to get the game to be better in its official community; I was even thanked a couple of times in official statements. The team had heart… “At dawn, we game” was their motto, one which I hope shall be repeated throughout the centuries by true gamers… and I wish them all well. They also released the tighter and more unique game “1931: Scheherazade in the Library of Pergamum”, which I found interesting, but further projects lacked funding.

Speaking of such, Academagia did one terrible thing from which I learned a strong lesson: it punished you for honest failure. In Academagia, if you succeed, you get better at something, and if you fail, you get worse. This was a horrible idea which betrays a central truth of how reality works, and it salted the game with a dash of misery. You try really hard, and now you’re actually much worse. According to their algorithm, because I eventually lose at Pac-Man every time I play, I must be much, much worse now than the first time I played when I was four years old. My scores would beg to differ.

I vowed that I would never punish one for not getting what one wants or intends. As Josh Waitzkin in his classic “The Art of Learning” attests, it is honest failure, and not success, which transforms, informs, and refines us most. This is why in Golden Treasure, if you succeed, you get what you want, but failure leads to higher ability scores in the long run.

Silver Label:

Sunless Sea

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT: Those who crave a delicious intellectual treat, lovers of Victorian settings and/or literature, those who enjoy a haunting yet thoughtful atmosphere

It used to be that, when playing a Choose Your Own Adventure, you might keep a thumb or finger on a page, in case you wanted to go back to it in a choice or two. After all, many choices led to an untimely end, so quickly flipping back to the page you were on was often necessary, and sometimes you wanted more control than that. Eventually, I used strips of paper plus fingers as an ad hoc system. Instead of doing all that, Sunless Sea has you sail a ship through a dark yet beautiful sea from choice to choice.

The world of Fallen London, a beautifully creative alternate history/fantasy setting, is painted in dim, subtle strokes as you steer from port to port, your tiny light seeming like little more than a mild insult to the fathomless darkness. The writing is both humorous and competent, even ingenious at times. Few visuals, but what is there is beautifully handcrafted. I was more than eager to discover my next economic venture or surreal encounter with an astonishing locale or personage. The music, undeniably nautical and yet also haunting and brooding, was a triumph.

Unfortunately, the game made its information very hard to access. To succeed, one must keep a detailed, handwritten real-world journal of everything in existence, every price of every good everywhere. Sailing around the dark sea was very expensive and the rewards small. After a large number of hours, I still had a weak ship and was unable to access much of the game’s successes. Stats were difficult to grow and life costs were honestly too high. Even pinching every penny, I rarely felt as though I was benefiting from the entire enterprise, and the dark economy slowly drained me.

In the end, however, Sunless Sea was a true work of digital literature worthy of the name. I found myself disappointed when I played the Fallen London webgame upon which it was based; while there were a few gems in it, it was not nearly the experience Sunless Sea was, and I would honestly recommend going into Sunless Sea with no knowledge of its source world. Its lens is sharper and clearer. Its sequel, Sunless Skies, was slightly brighter, slightly easier, and slightly less mysterious and evocative, leaving less of an impression on me overall.

Gold Label:

Planescape: Torment

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT: Those who wish to experience a truly different world, beautiful writing, fascinating characters, beauty, and/or truth

In the summer of 2000, I had just graduated from the University of Michigan and was gifted about $5000 by my family to explore the world a bit before settling down to the business of making money. I ended up spending about six months backpacking across northwestern Europe. In that heavy pack, which I bore with me nearly always… it was a different youth hostel every night, at times… was a single game disc. It was badly battered and scratched, but it was in the top backpack, easily at hand. It was a copy of Planescape: Torment. I played it in the evenings in web cafes in Scotland, in France, In Austria, in Belgium. I had to install it and uninstall it on every computer I used, a lengthy process, and sometimes forbidden. In the end, it was worth ten times the money, time, and trouble I took to play it on that journey.

There are those of us for whom feeling as though one is visiting a truly alien world and seeing through truly different eyes represents a high form of arkasa. Nearly all of the games on this list will have a world into which the player is drawn, sometimes lightly and causally, sometimes deeply and powerfully. Planescape: Torment represents one of the strongest efforts to foster that experience to date. Its world… a vast city of doors at the planar center of the universe, where any portal you step into might literally lead to heaven or hell, populated by a variety of humanoid races… was the most creative setting the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset had ever seen when it first came out, an artistic triumph but a commercial dud. Thankfully, Planescape: Torment became its champion.

And a worthy champion it was. Planescape: Torment is a downright beautiful tale of time, eternity, and the true meaning of redemption, and its setting fascinating to explore. Its characters stand long in the mind, its atmosphere is unique, and its voice-acting is perfect. The great Charlie Adler, who has done more famous voices than I can count, plays Ignis, a character whose dying line was so perfectly executed it still haunts me, though I only heard it once. Its art and visual effects were excellent for the time and still hold up fine with a little tweaking today (it is perhaps best experienced on a lower resolution). Unless one hates to read… which is valid, but if that is the case I can’t imagine that you are reading this sentence… I found not one single flaw with the experience.

When the game finally ended, I rose to my feet, tears streaming down my face. It was a standing ovation for a group of artists who were unfortunately not present, but who had to be honored. I had witnessed a true work of art, a testament to human creativity. How could I stay seated? Only by creating my own work of art to surpass its beauty could I one day complete that circle and fully honor that experience.

. . .

I hope that you have enjoyed our first episode of Game Sommelier. You can find the games above on Steam for a reasonable price; as of now (11/21/23), most games listed above are available for less than ten dollars each.

Until next time,

Ludwig