Heavenly Purgatories: The Postmodern Labyrinth

In a way, the Backrooms is a collective dark fantasy born out of the industrio-consumerist landscape — a landscape where all sorts of mutilative efficiencies and conveniences, funneling back to an altar for a molochian machine god, have deprived so many of our built realms of aesthetic sensitivity.

The Best of Elden Ring's Level Design

After a couple of years of generally writing only critically negative things about Elden Ring, the time has come, I guess, to highlight some of its virtues. Given my usual emphases, it also felt right for the focus to be on level design.

Passport to Myopia: Silver Saucers, Ivory Towers

Suddenly, the CIA-approved theater going on with UFOs and self-described whistleblowers — most of whom conveniently (and anonymously) reside within the governmental structure — has prompted everyone and anyone to opine in ways not at all commensurate with their apparent level of knowledge, or the matter’s imposingly interdisciplinary nature.

Ugliness Writ Large: Beyond Boston City Hall

…the attempt to find a hard correlation between form and sociocultural effect seems as hopeless as it is reductive. For the specialist, it is an extension of the long-attractive notion that architecture is a language, and each building an essay made up of lexical units. For the layperson, it is a faith in a perennial art which found its highest expression somewhere in a virtuous Past.

Lithic Lacks & Chromatic Apologia (2023)

Today, the word “aesthetic” is often used superficially to distinguish between items as one might with brands. Architect and historian Xing Ruan makes a careful correction regarding this in his recent book, Confucius’ Courtyard: “…we ought to be reminded of the root of aesthetics: ‘aesthesia’ is not just about beauty but connected with sensing — feeling and coming to life. The opposite of being alive is ‘anaesthesia’ — the dulling of the senses.”

The Obfuscating Effect of Contemporary Non-Materialistic Ufology (2023)

…we still have no good working definition for what material itself is. Indeed, the very division into the “material” and the “spiritual” by some non-materialists — the idea, for instance, that the soul is materially transcendent, or insubstantial — ironically maintains the materialist, or Cartesian mind/body, paradigm.

The Spectral Revolution (2023)

…much of what passes for radical politics today, among both Left- and Right-identifying domains, is really the passive consumption of an event which one has had little or nothing to do with, but which can be appropriated according to the most emotionally agitating form of the dialectic.

Strangled and Mangled: Classicism and Its Ersatz After Architecture’s Commodification (2022)

It is not difficult, when treading the relatively casual discursive spheres of architectural observation and criticism, to find many instances of designs for élite clientele being mocked for formal ugliness, stylistic ignorance, and architectonic ineptitude. Many of these designs have pretensions of classicism (that is, of the Greco-Roman variety), meaning that such criticism can draw from well-established stylistic rules or suggestions. What is rarer to find is an equivalent scrutiny regarding common architecture.

A Phenomenology of Gazes || Nope (2022)

“Nope” is almost aggressively defined by gazes. Anyone who has seen it will remember Daniel Kaluuya’s character, OJ, not so much deducing as intuiting, within a life-or-death scenario, that the movie’s flying saucer — really, more of an Unidentified Feeding Object — consumes anything which grants (or appears to grant, as the movie’s climax demonstrates) it attention.

Formalism, Dreams, Souls (2020)

Like the language of dreams, the visual and textual constructions of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 are cyphers, cryptograms. Also like dreams, even once we have located embedded archetypal narratives, their varied mutability preserves a fundamental mystery, compelling further interpretations and producing abundant layers of cross-referential and cross-cultural significance.

Economy and Thematic Structure: Symphony of the Night's Level Design (2015)

"Why is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night good?" is a question that's been asked countless times over the years since the game's release on the PlayStation in 1997. People seem almost desperate to know the answer to this in the wake of similarly modeled but less acclaimed titles such as Aria of Sorrow and Order of Ecclesia.

Aldrich and the Desacralization of Dark Souls 3 (2020)

Aldrich, the obsessive-consumptive cannibal saint, is one of Dark Souls 3′s most interesting figures when one sees his actions and inferred character as representing a prominent facet of humanity’s spiritual position at the time of the game’s setting. If we look at Dark Souls 3′s landscape as an assemblage of symbolics, and compare it to Dark Souls’ arrangement, we see that an inversion has occurred…

Size and Sensibility || Elden Ring (2022)

With a game like Demon’s Souls or Sekiro, the world conformed to some association between your lone person and what might be interpreted as engaging, multiform level design. Most of Elden Ring, however, is an overworld where the greatest guiding principle was making the size large enough so that traversing it by horse didn’t trivialize the sense of scope.

PREPARE 2 SIGH || The Music of Dark Souls (2019)

The Dark Souls series’ soundtracks are, collectively, one of the largest recent aesthetic offenses perpetuated in videogames. To contrast their unimaginativeness with the rest of the games’ material, it’s hard to not feel a dulled sensation nearing depression, as if a bright gray sky, overcast yet with no distinction of clouds’ forms, had settled upon one’s mind.

Ruins of Memory (2020)

Every building is a medium, for it imparts information put there by someone or something. Ruins are a special sort of medium, in a state of structural stability and instability. As mediums, they are closer to our meaning for intermediate. Each ruin is somewhere between its completion and an unimaginable apocalypse. It is both historical fact and, as Robert Harbison writes, a “way of seeing.”

Souls Games Are Great, Except For The Sexist Messages From Some Players (2016)

Anyone who has played these games will know that the majority of players’ messages don’t fit into the discussed paradigm. They mostly preempt hurdles, proclaim victories, encourage curiosity, and craft humorous, mimetic mini-narratives. Yet the sexist messages’ exceptional nature arguably heightens their presence.

Where Did the Fun Street Fighter Music Go? (2016)

Street Fighter V’s soundtrack isn’t as much an annoying attempt at cinematic gravitas (it is, a little) as it is the most conservative sort of populism, continuing where Street Fighter IV left off. Nearly every track is an obvious and embarrassing grab at commercially viable epicness: a synthetic orchestral ensemble, for the classiness, paired with electro/dubstep elements and maybe an electric guitar, for the coolness.

The Soul of Place: My Favorite Dark Souls Sites (2022)

Something which makes architecture so exciting, and attempts at describing it potentially a considerable challenge, is that it produces in us feelings for which there is often no term, or even sentence, precise enough; yet it is a craft of high creative and ocular precision. At times it can seem that poetry of a sort is one’s only recourse.

Overestimating Overviews of Overworlds (2022)

…Elden Ring has not, actually, done very much to reinvent its chosen genre. The assertion that it has “[ignored] twenty years of open-world design” is so stunningly, evidently false that it is amazing such a byline could even be chosen to garner incredulous clicks.

DALL-E 2 and Objective Art (2022)

…a hindsight-obvious yet crucially important distinction of AI-made images, like those of DALL-E 2, is that the machine can never refuse a request; it can only acquiesce and then approximate. The curatorial aspect of production solely involves what’s to be found in the bank of images. In a strange and unprecedented way, it represents “objective art.”