I watched (in a second screen sort of way as I tended to some work) the Game Awards last night. I'm not interested in talking about what the ceremony means—it's an obviously vapid affair—but the powerful sweeping of awards by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was interesting to see. it also left me feeling a bit... odd.
Before I say anything, I wanna say that I'm happy for that team and think they made a very cool game. very little if anything I am writing here is a judgement on the game itself or the quality of the experience therein. It's good! if you play it, I think you'll have fun.
But while I'm often interesting in talking about games, I'm also interested in how we talk about games. This is what made Horses fascinating to me and it's draw me out to write again. Because as the night went on and Geoff Keighley talked about the power of indie games like Expedition 33, I couldn't help but feel a bit uncomfortable. Something felt off, y'know?
In watching Expedition 33 get subsumed into Keighley's mainstream machine and the narrative picture he wanted to paint about 2025, I couldn't help but frown. 2025 might be the year where indie games and alternative sub-genres outshine a flagging AAA space but I think we need to be honest about what drew Keighley to Expedition 33 and drove him to drag that game first and foremost into the narrative he was trying to build. Because when Geoff Keighley mentioned "indie games" what he really means to say is "indie games of a certain scale and aesthetic." This is what many people mean!
So I want to talk about RPGs and I want to maybe talk about budgets and I want to talk about respectability. Because for as impressive a story I think Expedition 33, it hardly a mistake that the indie RPG that supposedly redeems the genre is one which, national identity or not, chases so hard after AAA games and Hollywood...
Talking about JRPGs can be weird because people like to over-complicate what the genre's "deal" is. Because there was a time, particularly after the death of adventure games, where JRPGs rose up to almost solely occupy a space as "the games that tell stories" there's a kind of romanticism that comes up when some people talk about the genre. That's understandable but it perhaps overplays the depth of the stories that are told in JRPGs and really in video games generally. Most games stories are pulp and hardly revolutionary.
It's okay to admit this. Good, even, to understand that you could have gone to the movies at many points this year and probably watched something with a bit more meat to the bone than whatever video game you were playing at home. That's just the truth and it doesn't make games less beautiful. Still, a lot of people in games (players or developers) struggle when confronting this truth.
disclaimer: some motherfuckers don't seem to understand that when you say something like "many games are not telling advanced stories" that's a pretty mild thing to say. and it's also not a value judgement on whether or not games are worth our time. they are. but games are not exceptionally different or more special a medium than any other, I think. yes, many games are beautiful and tell amazing story. but also a lot of games are quick to consume trash.
the difference rests in the audience, their anxieties and the craving that many people have for games to somehow be the *most* special or *most* beautiful medium when I don't think art works that way. and I think if we are going to be honest with ourselves and account for our cultural moment, we need to be honest about games. if that bothers you, I don't know what to say and I don't know if I care to take any more time in my writing to assuage your bruised ego.
We all agree that games are art but when some of us confront the fact that very often there's often better art found on our bookshelves, it can lead to a paralyzing fear. it's fine though! and life just gets easier once you acknowledge this is often the case and embrace that games cannot simply be a medium that exists by themselves and only judged by their own rules. they exist next to all other works and it's totally okay for us to talk about them in relation to other art
but throughout the 2000s, video games have grappled with this fear, experimenting with all kinds of ways to invite praise and seeking a certain kind of respectability. this usually means intimating films many years after they've done something. AAA games in particular often chase after other mediums instead of trying to sharpen *games* themselves. they try very hard to be less like a game.
games do this thing where they kind arrive at things a decade late, most often in terms of emulating the movies. Children of Men pioneers some new long camera shots and twelve years later, God of War boats about never taking the camera of Kratos. So it goes on and on in ways I'm not gonna really catalogue. indeed, the Sony prestige model is the perfect touchstone for the kind of anxiety I'm talking about. the ongoing quest for "playable cinema" that fails to understand that how oxymoronic of a term that is.
and yet we seek it insatiably.
This is the snag with Expedition 33 which colors so much of the conversation about the game. For all the craftsmanship and all the ways I see, in the artists who made it, kindred spirits... I cannot help but also see a game gripped by this yearning.
You might think that unfair of me to say but remember that I'm not really talking about Expedition 33 the video game. so if you wanna talk to me about how the story changed you life, I think that's great! I can totally see how that could happen with this cast of characters in a way that maybe it didn't for another RPG. this is a well made piece of work and if it affected you, swept you off your feet, or whatever you are not wrong to have felt that way. though I might caution you to avoid saying something like "there's never been a story like this!"
what I am really talking about is Expedition 33 the Rhetorical Object and what i see first and foremost is a game of certain luxuriousness and richness. people have grasped that quality and made it a kind of rallying cry. see? see? even with less budget we can still make One Of These and have it feel suitably AAA. It can hit That Threshold.
we can be Like Them.
That last part is where I stumble. Yes, this is an "indie" game insofar as it wasn't backed by a major publisher but its sensibilities, the kind of production it is trying to emulate and embody is distinctly that of a high budget, mass market AAA product. and much of the conversation about the game has not really been about the story itself (which is often compelling but also has a back third and conclusions that I think I actually not particularly good) but how a "small indie team" managed to create what was nominally a AAA game. because that's what Expedition 33 is.
i don't think the artists sat down and said "okay, how can we make this look respectable?" but I think it clearly has thoughts about what leads to mass appeal and they just happen to align with the kinds of tenets and discussions I've heard in conference rooms. if you don't think people talk about games in terms of awards, sorry but yes they sometimes do!
and remember: games can "do" many thing things at once and art very often does things that the artists and creators may not intend! and players or other public figures (marketing men, YouTube culture warrior types) can absolutely turn games into symbols that the creators did not intend for them to be. games are often two things: a text and a conversation. that's just how this works. so even if the developers of E33 didn't intend for any of this, that doesn't stop it from happening. sorry that just how art works. it does stuff!
because Expedition 33 is a game of suitably lush stylisms... though not too lush that we can't also have a bit of photoreal alpha-graphics here and there... whose story is backed up by the performances of many skilled actors, a few of them Hollywood figures, all underscored by a highly *produced* orchestral score. many people (not all of course but in a sane work I wouldn't need to make that disclaimer because of course not all! maybe not you even!) were drawn to this game not because it was an RPG but because it looked so much not like what their mental image of an RPG was. this was "respectable."
"I could tell folks about it and they could look up a picture and I wouldn't feel embarrassed." is a kind of sentence that pops up around the game sometimes. because if gamers are one thing, they are often extremely embarrassed by the games they play.
I have been playing Trails of Cold Steel in my spare time during this holiday season and in general I don't think this game, which is far from the best Trails game even, is doing anything much worse or better than Expedition 33. at least not in a sense that makes it inherently less worthy of my time. it's probably gonna piss people off but I think often they are doing similar things. employing similarly journeyman writing approaches. they operate on a same kind of broadness even if they are telling different stories. and in this, I actually commend Expedition 33. for all the anxiety I see in the game's production design, the tone and feel does match other RPGs.
but that's the snag isn't it? when you boil it down, Expedition 33 is just another RPG. (something I say with love!) it's not really any more respectable a story than any other in the genre. it's equally broad as anything else within the space and contained in that broadness I think there's a very real kind of humanity to be found but you can find that same humanity here in Cold Steel or Lost Odyssey or many other places. I found great reserves of it within Octopath Traveler 0 recently! RPGs kick ass. it's just a good format and in embracing the genre, Expedition 33 can be inspiring. hell, I think a 7/10 RPG will put any prestige games to shame. the form is just that potent
which is to say that Expedition 33 is... a video game! lean in close and you will find it is a similar shape to most other games of this type. compelling, sure! revolutionary? industry changing? I'm not sure.
but Trails of Cold Steel looks and feels "of the genre" and engages more blatantly in some tropes whereas Expedition 33 does not always. and even when that games does The RPG Stuff it looks like the Big Boys, carries itself like the Big Boys. and so I cannot help but read, to some extent, the conversation around that game and the resulting awards adulation through anything other than a respectability politics lens.
a lot of people turn their noses on JRPGs! I outlined a recently example of this in my Horses blog mentioning how Ian Bogost, a kind of model games academic, often colors his criticisms of video game story telling with Orientalism. Japanese RPGs and their stories, when he mentions them, are inherently less worthy of being considered "serious games." and I think many people feel this way. there's a kind of embarrassment with RPGs (particularly Japanese works) for their broadness and brighter aesthetics, for their tropes and forms. so many... though not all... people coming to Expedition 33, I think, are folks who felt chagrined by RPGs but by virtue of the game's AAA qualities. it felt safe to them.
take that with all the implications you can. what made it felt safe? well, it was like a movie. it was more obvious western even though it was working in the same emotional space as the rest of the genre, etc etc..
If you look a certain way, embody certain aesthetic markers of "quality".. people fundamentally treat you differently. this is true not just in life but with art. Last night, as Larian revealed their new Divinity game's trailer (which... hell yeah brother let's go!) I watched a scene of highly detailed gore. Flesh teared, snapped, burned. Lusciously, gorgeously and on the main stage there was a moment where folks at the Game Awards simply watched animated torture. meanwhile, visual novel makers or art game developers have their games banned from storefronts. what gives?
I guess they just don't look quite so good anyway y'know?
This is the same thing that catches me with Expedition 33. looking a certain way, meeting a certain kind of quality, made it an easy choice for awards but it is also a game that Keighley could not ignore sucking into the machinery of his prestige celebration. it was easy to! the game made it easy by seeking those AAA markers and signifiers. it's undeniably a good game but it also looked the part. and because it looked the part, it's not just an RPG anymore but *the* RPG that's redeeming a genre which is not particularly in need a redemption.
and so the attempt to escape the pain of being locked in a genre... creates more pain for the genre. more frictions, more contortions as the game is subsumed by capital forces and becomes a symbol. you too could be respected like this if you just made you games look like ours. the art exists but another thing is also birthed. help, i've been turned into a marketable plushie! help, I'm not longer just a decent RPG but an object lesson about production.
thank you Unreal Engine 5, I couldn't have done it without you.
finally, I can be the thing I've always wanted to be.
I can finally be "one of the good ones"
Lines of thought that seem Normal but are actually rooted in extreme puritanism:
-Seeing the nude human body is inherently traumatic
-Sex scenes in art are pointless
-Wearing kink-related clothing in public is the similar to performing a sex scene in front of unwilling participants
-Depicting female characters expressing sexuality is always degrading
-People's sexual fantasies are always an endorsement of the behavior they want to see in real life
-Sex work is more traumatic and coercive than other types of work
The goal is to treat sex as just another thing people do. That is a much healthier attitude than hiding it! It's not uniquely traumatic, it's not weird to talk about it or include it in society.
The challenge I have with AI-generated art lies in the process of its creation. It requires you to take a multidimensional, abstract thought and compress it into a linear sequence of words—words that come with predefined meanings and biases outside of your control. This translation forces you to engage with a machine that interprets your intent rather than allowing for the direct, intuitive "thought-to-paper" process that traditional art enables. Instead of a seamless flow from imagination to expression, AI art demands a layer of negotiation with an algorithm, filtering creativity through an external system rather than originating purely from the artist's mind and hand.
AI-generated art imposes a fundamental constraint on the creative process, forcing you to negotiate, compromise, and reshape an original thought to better conform to the model’s dataset. What begins as a raw, multidimensional idea must first be distilled into a one-dimensional sequence of words—a process that inherently strips away nuance, emotion, and the subtleties of visual thinking. But the filtration doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve translated your idea into language, the AI then interprets your words based on its own predefined biases, training data, and statistical associations, creating yet another layer of detachment from the original vision. Rather than directly expressing an idea as one would with traditional art—where the act of creation is an immediate extension of thought—AI art requires a back-and-forth negotiation with an external system. You’re not just making art; you’re engaging in a process of interpretation, trial, and error, wrestling with the limitations of language and the opaque nature of machine learning models. And since words themselves are inherently reductive, compressing vast, complex ideas into finite terms, the very act of describing your vision to an AI means losing part of its essence before the first pixel is even rendered. AI art shifts the role of the artist from creator to translator—someone who must bend their vision to fit the machine’s logic rather than letting intuition, emotion, and spontaneity guide the work. It’s an inversion of the traditional artistic process, where the medium serves the artist’s intent rather than the other way around.
The process of AI-generated art fundamentally alters, even taints, the purity of creative expression. It takes what begins as a unique, original thought and forces it through a series of compromises—reshaping it to fit within the constraints of a model trained on past works. Instead of allowing an artist to explore uncharted creative territory, AI art forces them to work within the boundaries of what has already been done, subtly steering every output toward a reflection of existing data rather than a truly new creation.
This process isn’t just a technological limitation; it’s a philosophical one. True art is often about breaking away from established norms, discovering something unseen, and expressing thoughts and emotions that haven't yet been fully articulated. But AI, by its very nature, can only generate from precedent—it reconfigures, remixes, and regurgitates patterns drawn from its training data. In doing so, it injects an unavoidable influence into the work, making it impossible to create something truly free from what came before. Rather than acting as a pure extension of the artist’s mind, AI art becomes a collaboration with an algorithm, where the artist must continuously adapt their vision to the model’s biases, limitations, and predefined understanding of aesthetics. The result is not the direct manifestation of a thought, but a negotiation—an attempt to shape the machine’s output into something close to the original idea, all while knowing that the process itself has already distorted and diluted its essence.
In this way, AI art doesn’t just change how art is made; it changes the very nature of artistic creation, shifting it away from originality and into a space where every new work is inevitably tethered to what has come before.
I mean even before you engage with an AI model, the very foundation of its "creativity" has already been shaped by external forces. Every piece of art it has been trained on has already been interpreted, labeled, and categorized by someone else—curators, programmers, and data annotators who have decided what each work means, how it should be classified, and what role it plays in the dataset. This means that before you even begin prompting, a layer of artistic interpretation has already been imposed upon the model, influencing what it can generate and how it understands art as a whole.
But who gets to decide what a piece of art objectively means? Who determines how a painting is labeled, what themes it represents, or how it should be described in the context of an AI dataset? Art is inherently subjective, meant to be experienced and understood in deeply personal and varied ways. Yet AI systems flatten this complexity into rigid categories, assigning definitive meanings to works that were never meant to have a single, absolute interpretation. As a result, when you use AI to create art, you’re not just working with an algorithm—you’re working with an entire pre-filtered worldview, shaped by unseen hands. The AI doesn’t see a painting the way a human does; it sees patterns, metadata, and assigned labels, all determined by someone else’s interpretation of what that art is "supposed" to be. This adds yet another layer of distortion, forcing artists not only to translate their own thoughts into words but to do so within the constraints of an already biased system.
you'll get the urge as an artist or a writer to say out loud the things you're worried about "the proportions are off" "kind of out of character" "i'm not good at summaries" "didn't get as much detail as i wanted" "i made a mistake and here's how" and that's the self-conscious part of your brain telling you "it's bad and if you don't tell them you know it's bad then they'll think you're stupid" but you've got to ignore that little voice and pretend you think it's good or else that little voice is going to ruin your life
snowghoul
vaporwave
romaincrisis
baratheonpilled
jacobvanloon
