I do not identify as a gamer, a "gaymer" far less. I find my history of video gaming to be embarrassing - I'd rather discuss any other subject. However, it is impossible for me to discount the importance that video games held in my imaginitive life as a product of the suburbs. What else was there to do?

Here are a few of my favorite things. Don't ask me about them in person - I'll pretend I don't know what you're talking about.

Favorites

I could care less whether people consider video games to be an artistic medium, but if we're being critical about what games can do that other mediums cannot, it is a sense of discovery. The sense of accomplishment or achievement tends to be played up these days, and that's fine, but personally I feel much more accomplished having read a really big book. Here are a few of my favorite games from my life:

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Nintendo, 1994.

Admittedly challenging to play without an emulator and save states, but is one of few game boy games that is still enjoyable to play. It takes place within a music box, and the objective is to collect treasure that gradually allows you to unlock different parts of levels. I find it interesting that Wario cannot die - instead, the player is punished by getting sent back to earlier parts of a level. When I was on the bus, a classmate's copy of the game appeared to have become corrupted, and objects were sort of floating randomly around the world until it crashed. This felt like staring directly into the void for my young brain.

Super Mario 64, Nintendo, 1996.

My perfect game. When I die, Peach's castle is my purgatory. I know these levels like the back of my hand. When I see the video about 0.5 A Presses, it touches a chord with me - everything in the game feels simple and controlled, so pushing the game to its outer limits feels like a natural instinct. I peed myself trying to beat King Bomb-omb when I was five years old and wouldn't give up and kept dancing around until it was too late. Two years later, I defeated Bowser. The moment was quite anticlimactic given that, once the credits have run, you are left with an image of a cake and have to manually reset your N64 to continue playing. Hub worlds are very aesthetically important to me. A room full of books, a museum filled with art, and Peach's castle all feel the same to me - a place with many exits for creative thought. Favorite level is Whomp's Fortress.

Star Fox 64, Nintendo, 1997.

The game that almost allows me to "get" furries. Falco is one of the unholy triad of fictional baddies that allowed me to access my sexual identity - the other two being Kopaka of the Bionicles and Riku of Kingdom Hearts. There's also Mewtwo - I'm unsure where he falls into the list. It is endless. I loved staring at the Lylat System in the shape of the Sefirot like it was some sort of screensaver on my small, shitty TV at my dad's house. It has again that same "hub world" mentality, but is more on the rails and more challenging to access. I struggled for the longest time to access Sector Y, and the unknowing of the level was something that excited me - knowing that there was always a horizon yet to be conquered. Favorite level is probably Sector X? Love the trippy dream zone in the asteroid field.

Lego Island, Mindscape, 1997.

This game is incomplete and, outside of the racing sequences, not exactly fun. Lego Island is rather barren, and dialogue from characters often hints to events that aren't necessarily completed. But it is delightful to listen to the endless songs and pointless banter of the Infomaniac. After Trump got elected again, I decided to browse the bad ending of this game because it reminded me of the people on the El that day. It is genuinely scary - so much so that I refused to play it as a child. I stand by that perspective: "it's mine, all mine! Mine?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNSDo__LPQU

Shenmue, Sega, 1999.

The Ulysses of video games. Worth your time, but only if you've got the time to kill. My ideal video game is one where you are sort of just stranded in a world and have to talk with people. My husband saw me playing and asked if I was having fun racing forklifts and I answered honestly - no. But there is also a genuine comfort in the boredom. I didn't play this as a child, and I'm unsure if I would have appreciated it then.

Pokemon Gold, Game Freak, 1999.

There are now more Pokemon than can be known to the average brain. But when I was younger, there were only 152. One day, flipping through some magazine, I came upon screenshots from the SpaceWorld demo, and rumors that there were to be new types of Pokemon. Almost too cool for the child brain to comprehend. Because games were so much simpler at the time, small changes like "friendship" and "night-time" felt substantial. Or, the genuine surprise of wandering around to find a rare Pokemon roaming the world. Being able to revisit the world of Pokemon Blue was icing on the cake - to see how things had changed since your last visit, such as the destruction of Cinnibar Island. Truthfully, I think they just ran out of time, but I love things that are packed with ideas that work.

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, Flagship, 2001.

I was browsing a list of all of the games that came out in 2001, and by comparison this game seems rather simplistic for the times. But I had a game boy, and that was how I was going to be able to play games at the time. Ages and Seasons were the high point of Zelda games for me. I loved being able to grow and collect rings, and I would fill out little books with my own drawings of rings when I wasn't playing. I never beat it, but spent enough time playing it where I could have beaten it four times in a row.

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, Sonic Team USA, 2001.

When I was a child, I visited the home of a friend of my dad's who had a gamecube, back when I did not. He was allowed to have T for Teen games, so obviously he was so cool to me. One of the games he showed me was Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, where you could run around a teen edgy flavored world and collect animals to give to your pet. Shadow the Hedgehog thankfully never imprinted onto me. The boy was generous in sharing some of the games he had to play, showing me the games he thought were cool. It was only later that I learned about earlier entries in this series that are much more aligned with my aesthetic hub world interests (Sonic Adventure 1 in particular). The Dreamcast era was breaking really interesting ground.

I also think of the inverse of this situation, where my dad was shooting at the gun range and some kid saw me with a cell phone. He thought it was the coolest thing, and I could have cared less about the device. I was not so generous with his pestering questions. What is it like to have a cell phone? It's just a tool. It couldn't hold my music or play videos. It was a walkie talkie with texting functionality. Get away from me, loser.

Metal Gear Solid II: Sons of Liberty, Konami, 2001.

I didn't get to play this game until much later in my life, and it frankly would have been too challenging for me to play as a child. But I get why Burial was so obsessed with this game - it was lush, filled with incomprehensible tales of geopolitical strife, and included random calls to your nerd friend trying to recount Chinese proverbs.

We are well beyond the era of postmodern works, and this game is an interesting swan song to that era given its metanarrative elements. It was released a month after 9/11, as the dream of the 90s came to a close and the utopian vision of the year 2000 came to a screeching halt. Kojima's release cycles of games have always been eerily convenient with the course of history, which is part of the reason his work seems so prophetic. I thought that the 10-minute monologue cutscene rants on the internet were genuinely ahead of their time.

Metroid Prime, Nintendo, 2002.

There's not much that can really be said about Metroid Prime that hasn't already been said. Exploration, flavor text, sexy graphics.

Fire Emblem, Intelligent Systems, 2003.

I hate what they've done to this series. The latest entry had a protagonist who looked like a tube of Colgate toothpaste. Although the first American entry was already the seventh in the series, I felt it had the perfect balance of storytelling elements and interesting characters. It was also quite challenging - I was barely able to eke out beating the first game, and all of my favorite characters died. Back at the beginning, when one of your guys died they died forever, so if you made the wrong move you might consider just restarting the entire level.

Over time, I learned how to make better choices around my strategies. A secondary mechanic - support conversations - became a focus. On the second to last level, there was a character you could recruit named Renault, who was mysterious and not entirely human. His backstory could only be gleaned through very carefully killing everyone but the boss and waiting for as many consecutive turns as possible.

I was part of an online forum based around this game, if it indicates my passion for it at the time. I gave an interview about it, which can be read here.

https://playingonthecomputer.substack.com/p/006-interview-peter

Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, Nintendo, 2003.

My college party trick is that I can beat anyone at Double Dash. People say they're really good at this game - I lap them. The secret is the combination of Toadette and Baby Bowser, whom under the delusional haze of cheap college marijuana I now ship. Toadette ensures that you can boost back to the front when your friends, who think that playing as the Koopas is somehow an asset for their offensive power, can overwhelm you. Baby Bowser's ridiculous shell takes care of nasty red and green shells while adding an unpredictable hazard. The koopas may appear to be useful, but as Morpheus told Neo in The Matrix - when you realize you're the one, you won't need to dodge bullets.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Square, 2003.

Bought a used copy off a friend. Hours and hours wasted.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Intelligent Systems, 2004.

I've always had a weakness for collectible fashion. The badge system? Don't even get me started. The humor level was also perfect for its time - and possibly the last time a Nintendo game was genuinely funny. Nothing about this game played it safe, and the passion shines through. Vivian was one of the first transgender characters in a game, which is also interesting to ponder.

The Sims 2, Maxis, 2004.

The Sims has become somewhat bloated in what it attempts to achieve with its latest installments. There hasn't really been any significant innovation, and many of those innovations are kind of sad. Since everyone has a phone, there's no need to really install a landline. You could probably trace the decline of American society alongside the Sims.

But when the Sims 2 came out, it was great. I'd go over to friends' homes and we would create versions of ourselves and our "love interests" at the time. I was gay though, so what was I doing? It was a safe space for feeling erotic with friends without expressing eroticism. Strange, in retrospect, but definitely not unheard of.

LOVED building homes with friends. Gay.

Killer7, Capcom, 2005.

Finally got around to playing this game in college. Beautiful cel-shaded graphics and strange characters such as a man in a gimp suit who offers clues, or Travis, a mysterious assassin with shirts reading "BAD GIRL" or "SEXUAL". All of the dialogue was burbling murmurs. The plot was incomprehensible in the way that really excites me, like Tenet. One of the levels is a critique of organized religion in the United States. You have to fight and kill the Power Rangers. Save the world, or cause nuclear annihilation - it ultimately makes no difference. A game that just oozes cool to this day.

Kingdom Hearts 2, Square Enix, 2005.

Summer vacation is over. The last comprehensible entry in the Kingdom Hearts series, KHII made Disney briefly appear to be cool. Mid-00s edginess was a breed of its own - a Hot Topic-inflected "nobody gets me" mentality.

This game was insanely fun to play, and a clear indicator that I was doomed to live the gay life.

Chibi-Robo!, Skip Ltd., 2005.

Impossible to describe. You are a cleaning robot, but your mission is to be a licensed marriage and family counselor. You must resolve the teddy bear's nectar addiction, help a Lego T-Rex cope with the death of a dancing sunflower, counsel a power ranger suffering from depression, and remedy a human child's "frog curse" that only allows her to speak to amphibians. Your predecessor who was an instrumental part of the family, Giga-Robo, caused an energy crisis and was deactivated.

Humor is a powerful tool for communicating things that are too painful to discuss otherwise. That this game is also fun to play is an added bonus.

Trauma Center: Second Opinion, Atlus, 2006.

Played this again during COVID. A visual novel couched between a surgery simulator. Why aren't there more of these? Loved the opening music - honestly even better than the theme music to ER. If there was a meaning to the game, it was lost on me - and maybe that's a good thing.

Team Fortress 2, Valve, 2007.

It seems criminal that Valve dedicates so much of their efforts to making their company profitable rather than designing flagship games. Actually, maybe that's not true - how many budding STEM majors dropped out of college because of DOTA 2? I'll never forget how my college friend Joe failed because he was so enraptured by that game. He was so fucking smart. Team Fortress 2 felt like it had an idea of work-life balance. It was fun to play, but also something that you could put down.

The World Ends With You, Square Enix, 2007.

TWEWY carried the coolness I aspired towards from KHII towards my high school years and Red Hot Chili Peppers phase. I was pretty fucked up at this point after my stepfather died, and I built a prickly personality around myself. Neku, the loner protagonist, spoke to me on a deep level that only an edgy high school gay could possibly understand. Also there was fashion! AND badges!

Spore, Maxis, 2008.

An unconventional entry perhaps, and I'm with you - the gameplay was truly bad. But the game came with truly robust creation tools, and I actually was "Spore-famous" on MySpore, the creation sharing platform. I used the space ship building tool to recreate paintings from across art history, and my Lichtenstein painting was featured on the website. Browsing through it, my other aesthetic interests of the time are laid bare: Banksy dupes, a recreation of the painting hanging in Frasier Crane's home, Mondrian. A vague suburban malaise emerges from original works like "iControl" which emulates the appearance of an iPod commercial, my Che Guevara portrait, and a piece called "Made in China" that juxtaposes the Statue of Liberty against the Chinese flag. I always ding myself for not taking up painting earlier in life, but I'm glad I didn't because I would have been creating the most banal obama-era political art. Or... was I ahead of my time, predicting a future dominated by NFTs and algorithmically generated art? You decide.

One of the biggest challenges in creating work is finding an audience for it. This was my first (and frankly, last) experience in managing an audience for my work. Browsing through these comments, people were very engaged with what I was creating.

https://www.spore.com/view/myspore/nitrocroc

Persona 3 Portable, Atlus, 2009.

Depression simulator. Spoilers, but the ending is that you save the world at the cost of your own life. All of your friends forget about you, except for your AI girlfriend. Really ahead of its time in that way. It was fun getting to fight alongside my favorite Egyptian deities.

Dark Souls, Namco Bandai, 2011.

Dark Souls may have sent me spiralling into depression when I played it in college, but it also taught me a true lesson: if you throw yourself at a problem enough times, you will eventually be able to solve it. This was a very important insight for me!

Hitman, IO Interactive, 2016.

When I am taking photos with my camera, I spend a lot of time considering how I hold myself in the environment. What should I be taking photos of, and what can't I take photos of? Although people are snapping photos of others on their phones all of the time, somehow the hardware of a camera body puts people on guard. Sometimes, people will get upset with me when I describe a perfect photo I wish I had taken, like outside of the gay strip club when two men were in an intimate embrace outside. One man kept lowering his head down to the chest of the other, and the other man would push his head back up. Touch, don't touch. There are ethical questions around street photography, but that moment stuck with me.

Hitman has profoundly influenced how I take photos. Do I need a disguise? How am I blending into the crowd? Do I need to put on a flamingo suit?

Outer Wilds, Mobius Digital, 2019.

Sadly, a game you can only play once. The universe explodes every twenty-odd minutes, and you have a limited amount of time to explore the solar system in order to stop it. It's like Myst on steroids - if Myst were like, actually fun. A top 3 game for me.

Death Stranding, Kojima Productions, 2019.

Kojima is brilliant because he views America through a funhouse mirror. Death Stranding helped him move on from themes of war to America's social problems. Fittingly, he also predicted COVID-19. Add that to his looney tunes cast of characters (Die-Hardman, Fragile, and - my favorite - Heartman) and you've got a masterpiece that only somebody truly unhinged would create. That's rare.

I'm really struggling with DS2 because he has moved away from the core idea powering Death Stranding and instead created something closer to MGSV. I get it - when you're creating a sequel, innovation is necessary. But what made Death Stranding so great was its feeling of helplessness. The point of the game isn't guns - it's about connection. DS1 captured an idea perfectly, and made it so it was only slightly fun to play, which is the highest praise I can give anything.

Hypnospace Outlaw, Tendershoot, 2019.

I laughed! I cried! A game about being an internet moderator in the year 1999. It's a love letter to a world that no longer exists. Games have the potential to freeze history into a moment in time, and this did that. I saw that they're releasing a sequel of sorts - I'm curious whether they will be able to capture or improve upon what they've already made.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Sandfall Interactive, 2025.

No surprises at all that the head of Sandfall Interactive's favorite game is Persona 3, as he's also created a depression simulator. What is surprising is making a turn-based RPG genuinely fun in 2025. The premise of the game is that in a twisted version of Paris, everyone dies before they turn 33 years old, and the age goes down every year. You're supposed to stop it. While the "twist" at the end might feel slightly contrived, there is enough cushion to make it work. I stand by the fact that the bad ending is actually the good ending. Who am I to deny that fantasy is sometimes more important than reality? I majored in the humanities instead of getting an MBA - I would know.