Peter Mark Roget, who wrote Roget’s Thesaurus, very much liked making lists. From his Wikipedia:

“It has been claimed that Roget struggled with depression for most of his life, and that the thesaurus arose partly from an effort to battle it. A biographer stated that his obsession with list-making as a coping mechanism was well established by the time Roget was eight years old.”

As you may or may not know, list-making is a common preoccupation in autism. If you’ve got an eight year old who obsessively makes lists as a coping mechanism – you know, it’s not confirmed autism, but it’s reason to crack open the diagnostics. Sometimes we like a nice list. It’s orderly – it gives structure in an inherently wild, rambling environment. I’ve been having trouble focusing these last couple weeks – maybe things have been busy, maybe they haven’t been busy enough. Either way, it’s time to start thinking about the new year. Time to reflect, regroup, and start to plan ahead.

Cool Stuff This Year

There are two games I haven’t been able to write about that I really enjoyed – The Alters and Pacific Drive. The Alters is a survival and resource-gathering game where all the characters are clones that made different life choices – ending up as miners or doctors or other figures you need. It’s emotionally exhausting, and it forces you to make hard choices, and you can’t actually meet all the different versions of yourself in one playthrough – you can only spawn so many clones. It’s a game about coming to terms with the choices you didn’t make. There’s also a song where all the clones get together and sit and sing about how they wish they could have made different decisions – I can’t think of a single scene in any video game that comes near to it. Our art, our creativity, our communal spirit – these are the things that get us through. I didn’t write about it honestly mostly because most of what I have to say is simply repeating what you’ll find in the reviews. I didn’t immediately have anything to add. But it’s shocking – it’s a shocking game – and I’m very excited to have played it.

Pacific Drive is in a similar sort of space – that is, it’s similarly shocking. It’s sort of like a 90s road movie if the Shimmer from Annihilation settled in Washington State. You drive through the forest and collect stuff to upgrade your car, and things bump around menacingly. It’s chill and retro and also haunted. It’s so entirely its own game – there’s really nothing to compare it to. Games like Still Wakes the Deep are clearly part of a genre – and they’re not bad for it, but there is a sense in which those games are generic – literally of the genre. They feel – maybe not predictable, but there’s a sense in which you can look back and say – oh yes, that was a Lovecraftian horror – and that’s perfectly sufficient. For The Alters and Pacific Drive, a description of genre feels insufficient. Any description feels insufficient – you never really feel like you’re done with either of these titles.

I’ve also been reading the Dune series this year – that’s been great. I have the last of the six main books (Chapterhouse of Dune) in the to-read pile. The Dune books often have this narrative structure where most of the book is people sitting around and talking about how things are going to unfold, and then the final five pages have some very dramatic short-lived action. Usually the full consequences don’t even become clear until the next book. A lot of people complain about that structure – all talk and no action – but really the series is about the question of how things happen. What are the levers for social change – how do you direct or impact the course of society when it changes at the pace of glaciers? The third and fourth books, for instance, are 3,500 years apart. Between them, you get to see how things have changed – how single decisions at a given moment ripple down the years. The structure of the books is a thesis on power, choice, and change. There’s a lot of planning, a lot of maneuvering, and then a brief, sudden moment that moves you from one state to the next. It is an unusual structure – it’s not just a simple hero’s quest or something – but it’s like that on purpose.

Cool Stuff Coming Up

Each Christmas I try and read some huge book – last year it was Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, essentially a thousand-page social history of Northampton, and this year it’s Auerbach’s Mimesis. I also have Proust sitting around – I’ve got a six-volume edition, and every six months or so I pick one up. There’s also some of H.G. Wells’ non-fiction work – his Experiment in Autobiography and A Short History of the World are two key ones I want to read – and I have just received a lovely hardcover set of The Lord of the Rings, so I guess that’s on the cards now too. I’m most of the way through Michael King’s history of New Zealand, which has been excellent, and then The Wax Child, the new Olga Ravn novel (her 2018 work The Employees is in the realm of bury-me-with-a-copy). I don’t know that I’ll write about any of them, necessarily, but they’re on my mind.

In terms of stuff here, I do have to finish my Horus Heresy series – there’s one more essay I want to write, about the final book, and then a structural analysis of the series as a whole, which is sitting unfinished at about 8,000 words, about two-thirds complete. There are some other projects I’m toying with, but I’m recognising my eyes are sometimes bigger than my stomach. Off the back of Dune, I’d like to sit down and read Iain Banks’ sci-fi ‘Culture’ novels – I’ve read them in parts, but I’d like to read the whole thing. There’s something interesting in there again about how the Culture, the incredibly intelligent spaceships that run everything, are sort of just miles beyond any other lifeform floating around. There’s something narratively really intriguing in the idea of having one group or faction that’s just much more powerful than everybody else. You have to do certain things to maintain a sense of narrative tension or momentum – to stop the rope from going slack. I’d like to do something on that.

I also took a little audit of the games that I’ve worked on here, and noticed that I was mostly stacked up in the 2010s. That’s – you know, fine – but I’d be interested to work a little more through some 2000s titles. 2007 in particular was a crazy year – BioShock, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Portal, Halo 3, Mass Effect, Crysis, Uncharted, and the original Witcher game. That’s an enormous year. It might be interesting to do a project just on 2007. See how we go.

Look – I mean, obviously, like when we were talking about Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost earlier in the year, this is just a bit of a yap. It’s list-making. Peter Mark Roget and me. It’s good to take that time, think about where you’re going and where you’ve been – in January I had a list of New Year’s resolutions, and I think I’ve abandoned all of them. I was trying to get better with chopsticks. I don’t know if I’ll set anything for 2026 – not that I’m against the idea, I just don’t know if that’s something I currently need. It is nice making lists though.