These are games where understanding of the world—both its fiction and mechanical form—are, ultimately, the point. And importantly, they’re treated by developers with near equal weight, internally consistent. You don’t “beat” these games.
I wonder why I am up at such a bleak hour of the morning to watch two men hurt each other.
Why is pain so hard to describe? Of course, there’s the obvious issue: it monopolizes any brain space that might have been used to cultivate apt metaphors and precise descriptions. But even Greenwell’s well-wrought sentences—more vivid than most—leave the sensation out of reach.
If the Stalinist party line was Proletarian Realism, we could perhaps call The Girl a Proletarian Impressionism: not approaching anything like full abstraction, and yet focused considerably more on the sense of a given reality than perfect fidelity to the likeness you'd like it to have.
The end of style, when it ends, is a post on a dejected, impassable frontier. It is the beginning of something wider and colder, and it will have no name.
Diagrams, in their largest capacity and expression, carry not just the limits of the negative but also possibility.
Plots and themes from the projects felt like a missing piece in Morrison's Great Migration stories.
Titles are not investments to be recouped, or successes authors owe to their publishers. Instead, each copy of an APP book is something useful but impractical, something beautiful, something fun.
This flashing back and forth from lived experience to its abstracted digital shape is one of the characteristic rhythms of contemporary consciousness.
This place is full of those spores.
All forewords are, in part, efforts to sell, rather than illuminate.