All Thoughts Being Equal

Too late for that plea , apparently, but here’s why basically any video game based on A Song of Ice and Fire,* George R. R. Martin’s gloriously grimdark Take That to the heroic fantasy genre and real-life medieval romanticism, is doomed to failure. The issue comes with the psychology of video games themselves. A video game is meant to be beaten , to at least give some sense of accomplishment for putting time and (rarely more than minimal thumb-twirling) effort into it, whether five minutes beating the next level of Peggle or fifteen bajillion hours grinding towards Blizzard’s latest glass ceiling in World of Warcraft . Even when a game is fundamentally depressing (rarely) or at least a big mind screw you can at least say “well, even if the ending was shit/confusing/nonexistant I still figured out Puzzle X” (*ahem* Braid and Limbo, otherwise quite excellent games). No specific spoilers, but A Song of Ice and Fire is far and away not conducive to that kind of narrative. It becomes...

It may or may not be a secret that I am a huge fan of the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, and the other writers of pulp fiction who knew him. In contrast to more modern creators of horror, who legitimately frighten with in-your-face monsters and death (but not too obvious)—I'm thinking of the movie The Descent along with Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot , very much inspired by Lovecraft actually—Lovecraft's "cosmic horror" conveys that sense of bleakness in the face of a universe that very much does not give a fuck about you. The realization that mankind's petty notions of morality, our flimsy models and scientific pretexts, all fail to grasp the true unwavering indifference of the rest of reality... that's a pretty weird feeling. And while I don't accept Lovecraft's philosophy that the universe is ultimately unknowable—science marches on!—it's easy to see the creeping horror of just how much of the universe is hostile to human life, or barely co...