The world is full of Homo sapiens, human beings, the last species of hominid. We have approximately 20,000 genes and a vast diversity in our gene pool. It is exciting and terrifying what our species has achieved. Exciting because we can create amazing things. Terrifying because our individual voices can be lost in the noise. This website belongs to just one hominid, a place for me to share my creativity and voice. And that’s enough.
All in Video Games
If there’s one word to describe Elden Ring, it is “esoteric”. Designed to be inscrutable, made to be studied and learned like an academic pursuit, playing Elden Ring makes you feel like you’re part of some special club for people who truly wanted to put in the effort. But that esoteric design can also facilitate a tribalism that results in immature trampling on legitimate questions about accessibility and difficulty.
Last year, I suddenly decided to try a new form of creative expression: micro-videos. Of course, that’s not the cool name for them and I don’t know what the cool name is but basically, short videos of under a minute in length that I put up on TikTok and Youtube Shorts. It was a fun experiment that I’m carrying on still today! I have a few videos that have hit it big and truly gone viral but actually the ones I’m most proud of have maybe a few hundred views.
I’d wanted to write a piece about the real genetics of Pokemon for a very long time. The only problem is that, despite having breeding and “evolution” and so on, Pokemon doesn’t really use rules of real-world genetics! Instead, “evolution” is much more like another real biological phenomenon: life cycles. In this article, I discuss the standard evolution-by-level and the more unusual evolution-by-stone and how both of them compare to life cycles that exist in real world animals.
Recently, I was interviewed by Ben Lindbergh for The Ringer all about how genetics and evolution are represented in video games. The piece ended up being almost a profile on me (of all people). I also share a bit about my recent writing, about how I’ve started freelancing, and about what my goals are with my writing going forward.
I had a chance to sit down with Patrice Désilets, the creator of Assassin’s Creed, to discuss his recently released game Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey for Escapist Magazine. We talked about their goals when creating the game and how they tried to infuse real scientific facts about human evolution and ancestry into the game. Patrice was a fun interviewee and was very candid about their design goals with the game as well as where they want to go in the future with Ancestors.
In my recent piece published in Escapist Magazine, I discussed how the monster and environment designs of Monster Hunter World feel so deeply immersive because the designs utilize elements of adaptive evolution, the real scientific concept that creates actual animals and plants in the real world.
“Gaming disorder” is now a diagnosis according to the World Health Organization and the response to it has ranged from sarcastic skepticism about gaming being treated like a disability to complete faith in it as truth and a hope that its definition will lead to helping people with addiction to gaming. But on deeper inspection, I have doubts about video games in particular being focused on in lieu of addiction being seen as the ultimate problem facing these people.
The very real concepts of “mutation” and genetic conditions are often used in science fiction. A recent video game demonstrates an all-too-common and lazy way of using them to create “monsters” without any scientific context or consideration for actual patients with those conditions.
