After we discussed my twenty favorite albums of the previous calendar year last week, today I want to introduce you to three games that came out in 2024 and which may be of interest to the readers of this blog. Because the themes present in these products of digital entertainment harken back to subjects that we discussed on Bildungblocks in the past and provide, I hope, a new perspective on them. These are, in my opinion, also the best games of last year. As such, the following discussion doubles as a list with my favorite video games of 2024.

I was a bit apprehensive to create this list. Because everyone has music in their lives, even when it is unvoluntary – you may have to listen to songs when you walk down the street, visit a shop, or when the neighbors love one artist a little bit too much and a little bit too late at night.¹ But with video games, the general perception is that these are not yet as commonplace. When I dove into the demographics of gaming, though, it turned out that enjoying this kind of digital entertainment may be more universal than you – or I, for that matter! – would think. As throughout every possible walk of life, we find a lot of people who indulge in playing video games. Whether as incidental leisure or more structurally, be it on their phones, computers or dedicated consoles.² And all those people, I think, might profit from checking out these titles.

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1. POOLS and the Concept of Liminality

Most of us have been in a public swimming pool and probably all of us can imagine how those venues look like. In the game POOLS, yes the capitalization is intentional, we start out in such a place. But from the get go we realize that something is not quite right. The tiled halls, sauna’s, changing facilities and – obviously – swimming pools appear to go on forever. And the items that we can find in these endless arrays of rooms, from the expected slides to rubber ducks, are strangely out of proportion. There are also things that we would not expect to see, like statues whose eyes appear to follow you and a lounging sheep. What’s more, disregarding the occasional cattle animal and strange whispering voices that fall silent once you approach, these places are all deserted. The exploration of this unsettling environment is the gist of the experience that developer Tensori has crafted. And it can be connected to the idea of liminal or backroom games, which leads us to the scholarly concept of liminality.³

The idea of a liminal place is easy to imagine but difficult to explain. They are often described as areas in-between. Border environments that – one way or the other – are perceived to not fit normal use of such physicalities.⁴ The overpass near a train station, where people only come to leave, for example. Or, indeed, a deserted public pool, which is supposed to be full of sounds and happiness. The presence of such spaces can be said to enhance the experience of playing video games.⁵ But our fascination with liminality goes back a very long time. The idea of a liminal space has also been fruitful, for instance, with regard to studying the attitudes of people in antiquity towards the wilderness.⁶ In that respect, some ancient texts – like the stories about Gilgamesh, which we previously discussed – can be viewed as a distant relative to our modern games with a role for liminality.⁷ Both then and now, liminal spaces are not uniformly positively or negatively perceived. Like the otherworldly beauty of the silent halls of POOLS, one finds valuable experiences among the eeriness of the ancient wilderness as it was once described.

For those dwelling in the cities of ancient west-Asia, for instance, the wilderness was a literal place in-between. They had to traverse it to reach other large settlements, be it on business or on personal errands. And while doing so they could be accosted by all kinds of inconveniences, from bandits to demons.⁸ At the same time, the wilderness was also seen as a place where the supernatural was more accessible.⁹ As such, one could easier experience the undiluted divine there – beyond the aforementioned demons, that is. Lastly, besides spiritual retreats the wilderness was also a destination for those who hoped to exploit the natural resources found therein, like wood and minerals.¹⁰ And this ancient human ambiguity towards the wilder parts of their natural environment brings us to our second game of today.

2. Tiny Glade and the Definition of Nature

The endless eerie rooms of POOLS – yep, still doing the capitalization – may exhibit a certain calm and serenity, but the most relaxing time I had behind my computer last year was with Tiny Glade. In this game, made with loving attention to detail by developer Pounce Light, we can create small cottages, adorable castles, and luxurious villas in a carefully crafted arboreal landscape.¹¹ The resulting creations, within the limits of what you are allowed to draw and build, often reminded me of stereotypical retreats in nature. Most immediatly perhaps Henry David Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond, where he wrote the famous Walden; a book which was itself turned into a video game.¹² But our gardens in Tiny Glade, like Thoreau’s own abode – however pristine it may appeared to him – are very much a product of human intervention, and this made me think about the way in which we define an environment as being natural.

We already encountered such an exploration of the role of nature in our lives and digital entertainment when we previously discussed the video game Firewatch. But Tiny Glade, I reckon, illuminates another aspect of this matter: it shows just how much of what we call nature is, for better or worse, artificial. In his phenomenal book Thinking Like a Mall, Steven Vogel teaches us that in our current day and age perhaps all landscapes on earth has been changed by human interference, however indirect.¹³ The titular mall is therefore as natural as any landscape that may we perceive as untainted by human influence.¹⁴ We are thus merely left with generally accepted images of what a natural surrounding is supposed to look and it is these that we recreate with a game like Tiny Glade, though it is not any less relaxing for it.

And this is an interesting observation, especially if one tries to incorporate it within the methodologies of the Environmental Humanities. Because if we research people’s relationship with nature, we mostly study their attitudes towards environments they saw as natural in their own locale and time – and this might differ from our current and local views. What’s more, even in the deep past some landscapes that can be denoted as quintessential natural, were regularly the product of or shaped by human intervention over exceedingly long timespans. We may wonder if forests in ancient west-Asia – to continue our earlier example – could even be called untouched in such eras, even if one confined one’s focus to the human resource gathering therein.¹⁵ And this ambiguity contributes to the aforementioned status of the so-called wilderness as a liminal place. But not all liminal spaces are those that are envisioned to be more or less natural, human-made, or even of this world. And this becomes clear in our last game of today.

3. Life is Strange: Double Exposure and the Trolley Problem

Life is Strange is a narrative game series wherein a roster of varying protagonists encounters a superpower which is conveniently enough thematically relevant to their story and struggles.¹⁶ Life is Strange: Double Exposure is in fact a sequel to the first game in this series and features the same main character: Max Caulfield. In her first adventure, Max encounters a rather cruel iteration of the famous trolley-problem. As a chronic overthinker, she naturally finds herself cursed with the ability to turn back time and she uses that perk in a number of dangerous situations to save the life of one Chloe, who is – depending on your choices throughout the game – her once and future best friend or love interest. But those apparent violations of the march of history come with some inconvenient drawbacks and at the end of this first game, Max has to choose between saving this single loved one or an entire town full of people.¹⁷ Life is Strange: Double Exposure plays out ten years later and the unlucky Max loses again someone close to her. But her abilities have evolved with her changed attitude towards her earlier overthinking. She can now move in the spaces between realities and is able to witness – and influence – how the future would have played out if her friend Safi had not been killed. All the while trying not to get tangled in the endless possibilities of alternate realities.¹⁸

As we discussed before in a blog dedicated to the original trolley-problem, this thought experiment has an interesting history and it is therefore all the more disappointing that many treatments of it remain fairly surface level. The Life is Strange-series luckily avoids this trap, both in the first game, which was developed by Dontnod, and in this sequel that was brought to us by Deck9.¹⁹ In the first installment, Max learns that overanalyzing and second-guessing oneself with every decision, in itself constitutes a decision which may harm you and those around you. Furthermore, much of her doubts and insecurities can be traced back to the harms perpetuated by the world in which she lives and the structures that, well, structures her society. In her case, specifically the prevalent views on young women.²⁰ This is especially poignantly illustrated by Chloe’s setbacks, who is not only a young woman but is also seen as having accumulated too much baggage to fit within polite society. As such, scarifying Chloe is more than a utilitarian solution to one more trolley problem – it would confirm once and for all the view of society at large that Chloe and people like her are more disposable than others.²¹ In the new game, Max had ten years to come to terms with the guilt and regret of either choice, and we see these lessons being accepted and applied. The ambiguity lurking behind the seemingly utilitarian options available to her in the first game is now more fully understood by a Max who may appear sadder, but who is also wiser and more in tune with the injustices that pervade her surroundings.²² As a result, she not only calls out the bluff of the new trolley problem presented to her, but also manages to remain steadfast with respect to her own moral compass – the full extent of which is naturally determined by player choice – regardless of what the world throws at her. As such, we are left with a morale which is perhaps fitting to end my reviews of the year 2024 with and to take with us into this fresh calendar year.

Conclusion: Video Games and Thematic Storytelling

Any medium for human storytelling, I believe, has the potential to explore important themes. And games, due to their interactivity, are perhaps particularly suited to delve into the themes we discussed today.²³ Because when it is you who does the walking, albeit digitally, a liminal space may appear all the more dauntingly mysterious. And when you build your own natural paradise, it is easier to appreciate the artifice of it all. Most of all, when you experience the trolley problem with persons whose trials and tribulations you came to know over hours of gameplay, the choice may transcend the many unhelpful clichés surrounding this thought experiment.

And that is why video games have their place among the offerings on Bildungblocks, for those who are inclined to read about them! Because sometimes one does not have the patience for books, the energy for watching a presentation, or the perseverance for doing research. And in such circumstances a video game might be the perfect medium for learning and understanding.²⁴

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References

1. Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 2.
2. Linda K. Kaye, “Gaming Classifications and Player Demographics”, in: Alison Attrill-Smith et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 610-618.
3. Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, “Here’s a Demo for POOLS, a Backrooms Game with Lots of Lovely Waterslides”. Rock, Paper, Shotgun April 12^th 2024, Rockpapershotgun.com (retrieved on January 31^st 2025); Willa Rowe, “This Indie Game Captures the Oddly Beautiful Liminality of Pools”. Kotaku April 29^th 2024, Kotaku.com (retrieved on January 31^st 2025); Papuc, Oana Teodora, “Exploring Liminal Aesthetics: The “Glitchy And Decayed” Worlds of Vaporwave, Semiotic Assemblages, and Internet Linguistics”, Philologia 2022, 67 (4), p.165-186.
4. Jens Peter Schjødt, “Wilderness, Liminality, and the Other in Old Norse Myth and Cosmology”, in: Laura Feldt (ed.), Wilderness in Mythology and religion: Approaching Religious Spatialities, Cosmologies and Ideas of Wild Nature (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), p. 183-186. For liminal spaces as a mental construct, see: Laura Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mountain Wilderness in Old Babylonian Religious Narratives.” Numen 2016, 63 (4), p. 350-351.
5. Giancarlo Macchi Janica & Massimiliano Grava, “Navigating the In‑Between: Liminal Spaces in Video Game Georaphies”, GeoJournal 2024, 89 (6), p. 247:1.
6. Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia”, p. 373-374.
7. Ibidem, p. 369-372.
8. Stephanie Dalley, “The Natural World in Ancient Mesopotamian Literature”, in: John Parham & Louise Westling (eds.), A Global History of Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 24.
9. Cristopher Woods, “At the Edge of the World: Cosmological Conceptions of the Eastern Horizon in Mesopotamia.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2009, 9 (2), p. 212-214;  Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia”, p. 347; Gregory Mobley, “The Wild Man in the Bible and the Ancient Near East.” Journal of Biblical Literature  1997, 2 (1), p. 222; Frans A.M. Wiggermann, “Mythological Foundations of Nature”, in: Diederik J.W. Meijer (ed.), Natural Phenomena: Their Meaning, Depiction and Description in the Ancient Near East (Amsterdam: North Holland Press, 1992), p. 279.
10. Feldt, “Religion, Nature, and Ambiguous Space in Ancient Mesopotamia”, p. 356.
11. Elie Gould, “’The Baddest Motherf***er in the Room’ is, Unexpectedly, the Cozy Building Game Tiny Glade — Which is Already Ruling Steam Next Fest with over 800,000 Wishlists”, PC Gamer June 6^th 2024, PCGamer.com (retrieved on January 31^st 2025).
12. Alenda Y Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), p. 1-2.
13. Steven Vogel, Thinking like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge: MIT press, 2015), p. 4-8.
14. Ibidem, p. 129-131.
15. Erle C Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 88.
16. Excluding the prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm, though there is a similar mechanic, see: Bengt Lemne, “Life is Strange: Before the Storm – Full Season Review”, Gamereactor December 28^th 2017, Gamereactor.eu (retrieved on January 31^st 2025).
17. Kilian Biscop, Steven Malliet & Alexander Dhoest, “Subversive Ludic Performance: An Analysis of Gender and Sexuality Performance in Digital Games”, DiGeSt 2019, 6 (2), p. 34-35; Mahli-Ann Rakkomkaew Butt & Daniel Dunne, “Rebel Girls and Consequence in Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead”, Games and Culture 2019, 14 (4), p. 433; Luis de Miranda, “Life Is Strange and ‘Games Are Made’: A Philosophical Interpretation of a Multiple-Choice Existential Simulator With Copilot Sartre”, Games and Culture 2018, 13 (8), p. 830.
18. Jennifer Maas, “Why ‘Life Is Strange’ Team Took on the ‘Challenges’ of Bringing Max Back for ‘Double Exposure’ 10 Years After That Split Ending”, Variety October 28^th 2024, Variety.com (retrieved on January 31^st 2025).
19. While talking about Deck9, it is important to mention the recent controversy surrounding this studio, see: Rebekah Valentine, “How Hidden Nazi Symbols Were the Tip of a Toxic Iceberg at Life Is Strange Developer Deck Nine”, IGN April 5^th 2024, IGN.com (retrieved on January 31^st 2025).
20. Butt & Dunne, “Rebel Girls and Consequence in Life Is Strange and The Walking Dead”, p. 433-436.
21. Ibidem, p. 435.
22. Patrick Goritschnig, “Pushing the Lever: Rule-Consequentialism and Utilitarianism in Life is Strange”, in: Lindsey Joyce & Víctor Navarro-Remesal, Culture at Play: How Video Games Influence and Replicate Our World (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 69-75.
23. Chang, Playing Nature, p. 5.
24. Scott Alan Metzger & Richard J. Paxton: “Gaming History: A Framework for What Video Games Teach About the Past”, Theory & Research in Social Education 2016, 44 (4), p. 533.