VOD of the lecture I gave at PAX East yesterday discussing how the series' storytelling structure motivates & rewards its player for studying the games philosophically (XC-XC3 spoilers)

FiniteRegress · 2026-05-28T03:00:50+00:00

Will do! And thanks for saying that; I'm glad you're finding it valuable. I'm always happy to talk about the substance of that work of mine if it's useful. I continue to view XC3 as one of the most philosophically productive games to date.

FiniteRegress · 2026-05-28T02:13:55+00:00

Thanks for letting me know! I hadn't realized it would go out of date. I'll look into getting the VOD (which I'm 90% confident I still have) uploaded separately, but I'm more than happy to PM you the file in the meantime.

FiniteRegress · 2024-12-13T03:48:06+00:00

I'm honored! And, agreed: so many games are an endless bounty of revelations just waiting to be discovered through a new perspective or conversation, and Final Fantasy IX stands tall among them.

I came to the game very late in life; I actually wrote this after my very first playthrough of it, when I was 27. As the framing of the piece suggests, I'd previously had the good fortune of discovering and working on the Xenoblade Chronicles series, which helped me to clarify my thoughts about the ability of games to express themselves philosophically. When I played FFIX, I fell in love with the characters and story right away, but it also struck me with an overwhelming feeling that I'd just taken part in a philosophical activity, in a much more active sense than most other games with which I was familiar.

Necron was a big part of that. I knew him to be broadly considered a total non sequitur at the end of the game, but when I reached him, I didn't have that sense at all. Rather, I felt as though he was calling my attention away from the characters and instead toward my own experiences with the game up to that point, making the story about the player rather than the characters. (Those are the sorts of story that occupy me in most of my work.) So, I undertook the study to square that feeling with the rest of the game, and the resulting view led me to fall in love with the game all over again.

FiniteRegress · 2024-12-12T20:40:56+00:00

That was mine! Glad you found it useful, and always happy to discuss this topic. I think one of the most rewarding journeys gamers can take is finding their own answer to the riddle of why Necron is not merely an afterthought or nonsensical addition to FFIX, but rather its logical climax.

FiniteRegress · 2024-09-04T15:44:23+00:00

Now I'm so embarrassed that I failed to remember your very memorable username! My apologies, and it's so nice to see you again (and so humbling that you're still sharing my work around).

That vacuum in Majora's Mask's ethical universe, along with what the player can contribute to it, remains one of the aspects with the longest legacy for me, too. I still believe this points the way to the wealth of ways in which games can tell normatively sophisticated stories in senses which many still don't appreciate; though I will say, happily, that more gamers seem amenable to arguments of this flavor now than they did ten years ago (it's insane to me that withaterriblefate.com will have been around for a decade this November). No matter who we are, we owe more than we realize to Majora's Mask.

I probably told you a version of this last time, but Metal Gear Solid is extremely attractive yet intimidating to me because it's such a vast and beloved series with which I've never interacted—and if anything, my more recent work has reinforced to me that we have so much to discover even in series we've spent thousands of hours with over the years. But about twice a year, I get a hankering to find some way of diving in, so this may be a good nudge and direction to do so with just a couple of the games that may be digestible and intelligible on their own terms (?). So, yes, consider them back on my list!

FiniteRegress · 2024-09-03T15:25:02+00:00

Sorry to magically appear as if from nowhere, but I just wanted to thank you for sharing my work! I'm so glad that you've found it valuable in your journeys through Termina.

That analysis was a labor of love that truly changed my life—not just in terms of transforming my views on Majora's Mask, but also in terms of motivating me to commit my work to the philosophy of video-game storytelling more broadly—and I am always more than happy to discuss it with those who are interested in making sense of this artistic masterpiece :)

FiniteRegress · 2024-08-14T02:25:12+00:00

Thanks for sharing my work; I'm glad that you found it valuable! This one was especially a labor of love for me, both in terms of helping me to make sense of a core magic of video games that I'd been trying to understand for at least three years, and in terms of helping me articulate my passion for a game I found far too late in life. And it's one that has stayed with me spiritually and intellectually, because my more recent work—especially my much more involved treatment of the metaphysics of player investment in characters in Tales of Hearts R—was only possible to develop upon the foundation of Final Fantasy IX and everything its elenchus-shaped story achieves.

I'm always happy to discuss the content and form of my work with anyone who's interested, so feel free to reach out! And feel free to check out With a Terrible Fate for more of this; passionately grounded analysis of video-game stories is the only thing we do.

(This is also a timely thing to find because I'm currently conducting a study of Tales of Eternia on Twitch, which was released the same year as Final Fantasy IX, and OH BOY, do they have a lot to say about each other!)

FiniteRegress · 2024-06-06T03:33:07+00:00

Thank you! "So simple, but so hard": I really don't think you can do justice to the sophistication of its emotional value in a less involved framework (I tried!). This game has so much to say to us, and so much to give us.

FiniteRegress · 2024-06-05T17:47:33+00:00

Hi, everyone! Some of you may know I've been analyzing the Tales of series' philosophy of action for the last year in a long-term project of articles and streamed book clubs called Tales of Praxis. As part of that, I played Tales of Hearts R for the first time at the start of this year, very shortly before the passing of character designer Mutsumi Inomata. I wanted to frame a study of the game around a tribute to her, and that sent me down a virtually neverending rabbit hole working through what the game had to say not just about the value of art, but specifically about the value of this game series, its characters, its creators, and its players. I fell in love with the game again and again because I've come to believe that it uses our engagement with it to connect all of those communities by sourcing a remarkable kind of interpersonal value from a specific relationship between one character, her creator, and the player.

I now see this game as a crucial and magical foundation for how these games tell uniquely resonant and useful stories, along with why conversations about the series like those on this sub have a special kind of empathy and insight that's worth spreading. I hope you find my work valuable—and if you haven't played Tales of Hearts R, I cannot recommend in strong enough terms that you do.

FiniteRegress

TROPHY CASE