I’m not sure who to blame for how boring most of this book is:

• The British for their empire and the consequences of that on the Irish.

• The Catholics for influencing the Irish and warping their existing folkloric beliefs.

• Lady Wylde herself for presenting these stories in a very blunt and uninteresting way.

All of the above?

1. Conserve your semen.

2. Achieve immortality.

3. Rejoice.

Yikes

Part 1: Amazing. Seems like this could have easily been an inspiration for the old school Fallout games I’ve always loved. Following one monk through the post-apocalypse is cool.

Part 2: Gigantic shift in tone. A less personal, more political story takes hold. Kind of hard to get through. The shift was really jarring.

Part 3: I haven’t gotten that far yet.

Not my cup of tea. Philosophy should be understandable, this text is incomprehensible.

Maybe if was downing absinthe with Sartre and his crew back in the forties when this was written, I would “get” it. As-is though, this is pretty hard to get through.

Joshua Halberstam is the king of strawmanning. Every chapter involves him describing these absurd caricatures of human beings and then using them to try to say to something interesting (keyword: try).

Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art dives deep into these ideas and expands on them.