Hello everyone! I hope this letter finds you well. Today’s newsletter is mostly about the Fire Emblem series, but it is also, briefly, about the phenomenon of human weight, so consider this our first-ever content warning—as well as a reminder that, despite this letter’s ostensibly frivolous purview, we here at CORRIDORS OF TIME HQ will never shy away from controversy, invested as we are in honest, urgent, heavy-hitting (sorry) reportage. In any case, most of the thing past the first section is just about video games or whatever. Ok see you later!
I went to the doctor recently. The scale proffered, as is its unhappy wont, a startlingly large number; I was perturbed and perplexed. The doctor referred me to a dietitian, to whom I reluctantly dragged myself, presuming I was about to be told to eat carrots instead of potato chips, or whatever.
Instead, the doctor informed me that there exists a hormone in the body responsible for the regulation of appetite and various digestive functions; the chronically overweight produce less of this hormone than others, rendering them literally hungrier. Given the incredible difficulty of outrunning such a deep-seated imperative, the task a chronically overweight dieter of any kind—the disordered eater, the fad practitioner, even the ostensibly healthy calorie-counter—sets out to accomplish is, for most intents and purposes, impossible.
I sort of knew this before, or at least understood parts of it, but it was nonetheless stunning and surreal to be given this information directly, clearly, and kindly, by an authority figure. It is liberating and maddening. Even post-facto, understanding is a gift—but one would like to know the rules of the game one is playing.
The game I have been playing this week is Fire Emblem: Engage, the latest entry in the Fire Emblem series. Fire Emblem is a tactical RPG, meaning you strategically maneuver a cast of characters with various strengths and weaknesses around a grid like pieces on a board in order to combat a group of enemies. Each encounter is comprised of dozens of smaller unit-vs.-unit encounters, and each of these unit-vs.-unit encounters involves several important computations.
As you can see in this image, two of the quantities on offer are percentages. The character Alear as a 100% chance of damaging the “Corrupted,” and a 3% chance of a critical hit, meaning his attack will do damage in excess of the predicted 20 HP. The Corrupted has no chance of a critical hit, and its attack only has a 62% chance of hitting Alear at all.
Fire Emblem is a mechanically fascinating series for a number of reasons; one of them is the history of these little percentages, particularly the “hit” percentages. They’re dependent on the generation of random numbers—which, in the case of video games, are actually technically pseudorandom. (Classic RPGs often secretly correlated random battle encounters to steps taken on the map; modern speed-runners exploit this feature in shocking and intricate ways.)
The most recent entry in the series, Fire Emblem: Engage, uses a modified version of what people call a “1RN” (short for random number) system, characteristic of older Fire Emblem games. (Engage actually uses a hybrid of the 1RN and 2RN systems, but I think for our purposes it’s worth simplifying things.)
In 1RN games, the hit percentages you see on the screen are accurate. In this system, in order to determine whether or not the Corrupted will successfully attack Alear, the computer will generate a random number between 1 and 100. If the number is lower than or equal to 62, the attack will strike; if it is higher, it will not. It is, in essence, a dice roll.
Many of the later entries in the series, however, use a proprietary system developed by the Fire Emblem team; fans refer to this system as the “2RN” system. 2RN math is conceptually simple but deceptively strange. Here is a lucid explanation from the fansite Serene’s Forest:
However, in the other games, 2 RNs are used. The RNs are averaged, and if the averaged value is lower than the Hit value, the attack will hit.
For example:
The mathematics can get horrendous, so I’ll take the extreme case of a Hit value of 1.
To miss, the averaged value of the 2 RNs must be lower than 1. In other words, the total value of the 2 RNs must be lower than 1 + 1 = 2. There are only three case where that occurs, and that is when the RNs are 00 00, 00 01 and 01 00. Any other combination results in a total value that is equal to or higher than 2.
There are 100 RNs, so the total possible number of combinations is 100 x 100 = 10,000. Thus, the case of hitting is 3 out of a possible 10,000 cases, with the other 9,997 cases resulting in a miss. This means the probability of hitting is 3 / 10,000 (%) = 0.03%.
So, while the Hit value displayed in the game is 1%, the actual chance to hit is 0.03%.
The tl;dr here is that percentages below 50% become progressively even lower than the displayed percentage, and percentages above 50% become progressively higher.
Why would they do this? The first game in the series to use 2RN was The Binding Blade, the sixth entry in the series and the first for Game Boy Advance. The previous release, Thracia 776, is notoriously difficult; it’s usually considered the hardest game in the series. Between Thracia and Binding Blade, director and designer Shouzou Kaga left the company, taking with him the particular variety of difficulty exhibited by the early games. (So characteristic is this design philosophy—as well as the thorny narrative intricacy of Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776 in particular—that the games he worked on both before and after his Intelligent Systems days are often lumped together as “Kaga games.”)
It took Intelligent Systems three years to make The Binding Blade. (For context, in thirty-three years of developing Fire Emblem, it only took them three years to put out something with the Fire Emblem name one other time, between Awakening and Fates—and Fates was really three distinct games released simultaneously.1) With the transition from Super Famicom to a portable handheld system, the developers wanted the games to be more accessible; and, as it turns out, people aren’t actually that good at statistics. (This isn’t a dig. I’m not particularly good at statistics.) 10% feels much more like 0% than like 100%, to the point that people respond badly to an enemy’s 10% strike actually hitting, even though each Fire Emblem play-through consists of hundreds and hundreds of these calculations, and an attack with a 10% hit chance will hit, well, one in ten times.
The entry before Engage, Three Houses, was designed to be maximally accessible: the first for Switch, it is arguably the most story-heavy entry in the series; it is definitely the most socially and environmentally immersive outside of combat. (It’s such a treat.) Fire Emblem: Engage, on the other hand, is a “love letter” (so many freaking love letters these days) to older Fire Emblem games—the plot, such as there is one, centers on acquiring rings that allow you to summon former series protagonists to fight alongside you.
Design-wise, then, 1RN makes a kind of holistic sense for Engage. For the first decade or so of its existence, Fire Emblem was a notoriously “hardcore” series—early games feature the infamous “permadeath” mechanic, where characters who die on the field are dead for the rest of the game. (This became an optional setting with the first 3DS entry in the series, Awakening, itself another successful bid for mainstream popularity. And Three Houses introduced a rewind mechanic that allows you to undo a limited number of individual moves, removing the constant need to quit out and start from a previous save that I, at least, experience as characteristic of the the earlier games, at least when I’m not playing with emulated save states.)
The important part, for our purposes, is that even though the numbers look the same, 1RN and 2RN do indeed feel very different. If you played Three Houses, enjoyed it, then picked up Engage, the combat will feel slightly, surprisingly higher-friction. Your attacks miss more often and the enemies’ hit more often. It might not be as fun, or it might feel more thrilling, depending on your temperament.
I didn’t know all this when I was playing it, but remember feeling like something slightly weird was going on with the numbers in Three Houses. I wasn’t complaining, but it felt like it clicked a bit too nicely into place. If a 10% hit chance is displayed, your “true hit” chance is 2.1%; a hit value of 80% will hit 92.2% of the time. It really does add up.
That’s also why it’s a brilliant little piece of game design. As Fire Emblem progressed, console computing capacities and shifting design priorities transformed the games from relatively austere, text-centric tactics games to sweeping anime spectacles. What blew me away about Three Houses—why it might still be my favorite entry in the series—is how genuinely grand it felt. When the camera pans in for a combat animation, it reveals each of your units is surrounded by dozens of foot soldiers, and then you do a triple back-flip on a dragon and then shoot someone off a horse with a magic arrow or something and say something triumphant. The narrative spans years. I was almost crying during the final battle just because it felt so crazy. It’s very cool, and the sense that you are constantly defying the odds is a non-trivial part of the thrill.
But all of these mechanics are concealed from view. The player is not meant to see them—not even meant to consciously note them. The only reason anyone knows about this stuff is because there are Fire Emblem fans who will literally break open the code to figure out how shit works. There are the rules as you see them, and then there are the real rules, and they do not match up, such that the things you do do not make sense within the context of the rules you are given.
In the case of Three Houses, this disconnect generates an aesthetic effect. Not everyone likes this effect. Many diehard franchise fans miss the Kaga days in particular, and it’s true that something like Genealogy of the Holy War—a game where each action you take really does feel consequential, and whose maps are four to ten times the size of any other entry in the franchise—has its own kind of grandness. (If you connect the maps up, they really do span the entire fictional continent.)
What becomes clear here is that, in the case of both the Kaga games and the later entries, even the crunchiest mechanics have not only strategic implications, but also narrative ones. The world follows rules, and those rules feel a particular way, and that feeling is part of the experience. If you seemingly evade every strike with a 20% chance to hit, you start to take more risks—and the story, about (what else) a group of students overcoming massive odds to save the world, begins to feel different.
In Genealogy of the Holy War, you really feel the desperation of Sigurd and co.’s heroic undertaking: the weight of the player-tactician’s job lends the narrative pathos and weight. If it’s tricky to get to the village in time, and you can’t quite seem to nail it without sacrificing a named character, the villagers—or the named character—might die; this decision casts a shadow over the rest of the game. (Or you’ll just reset your console fifty times.) In Three Houses, the slicker experience makes the whole thing a bit less grave, a bit more cinematic. Your dudes, you feel, rule. But it’s nothing intrinsic to your dudes, exactly, or it’s something as intrinsic as everything else, because there’s no game apart from the mechanics. You can present game mechanics without much in the way of (non-emergent) narrative, but you cannot really have a game narrative without mechanics.2
Game mechanics are designed, among other things, to simulate features of reality. Part of my interest in the medium is because I’m fascinated by this translation process. Even when I wasn’t playing them, gameplay systems I’d played years before served a metaphorical function for me. The quantitative measurement of growth is definitively linked in my mind to the concept of experience points and leveling up. Bringing my car to Providence for the first time felt like nothing so much as unlocking a new zone in Grand Theft Auto, especially when I started carjacking cops and driving their cars around. (Just kidding! It felt more like a new World of Warcraft zone.)
Random numbers perform a similar function. The generation and deployment of random numbers, like dice rolls, serve as a stand-in for all varieties of chance—not only the possibility that your rifle will misfire, but also that you will bump into someone because they decide to move at the last minute (Super Mario Bros.), or that you won’t be able to say to your crush (dating sims) or nemesis (CRPGs) what you meant to say. Because of this wider room for chance, the features of reality which video games simulate and represent are often not found in quite the same way in other art forms.3
But not only do video game mechanics simulate features of reality, they (usually; ideally) make them more fun. I do not think it will come as a surprise to say that I am, in fact, profoundly uninterested in becoming some kind of real-life military tactician, let alone fighting in an infantry charge—but I like playing Fire Emblem. (Though I have occasionally wondered, in a childlike fantasy I find slightly unsettling to experience as a thirty-year-old, if I should abandon all other interests and get really good at using a sword.) This is the joke of something like QWOP: this isn’t how games work! Real life is the place where I can’t do stuff. Games are for doing stuff in.
When I was in college, I knew a lot of people taking cultural-studies type classes about video games and “virtuality,” but they were always playing fucking Second Life. (One semester, one of my good friends was playing Second Life for three simultaneous courses.) The hype cycle around Second Life, repeated almost note-for-note by hilariously anachronistic Metaverse boosters, posited that what people really wanted from a virtual world was Pure Freedom. You can be anyone you want!
But I don’t think people turn to video games to fully transform themselves into a New Person, with all the practical and psychospiritual burdens human subjectivity entails. I don’t think that’s actually what role-playing is.
I’m going to do another letter on this at some point, but I think Metaverse heads, such as they are engaged in anything resembling contextual thought at all, forget or elide the fact that their systems are often modeled on massively multiplayer online role-playing games, and that both halves of the term “role-playing” are essential. A “role” is tightly circumscribed in advance of its enactment: for the most part, actors have scripts; even improvisers have guidelines, principles, given scenarios. And as for “playing”—my hypothesis, if you’ll forgive the wild speculation, is that people play games because they like playing games. You know, games: like, the fun kind.
A video game is a code object. It is the methodical circumscription of infinite possibility, an elaborately and invisibly engineered set of boundaries and rules which make art and play possible. This is hardly an original insight, but it is important to remember, because the rules are as constitutive of possibility as are the choices made within those rules.
Because Second Life, of course, is as fully circumscribed as Tetris, or whatever. In both cases, there’s infinitely more stuff you can’t do than there is stuff you can. It’s not a matter of whether or not to impose limitations, it’s a matter of which limitations you impose. In its way, this just as true of art (formal constraints are so often generative, not stultifying), politics (neoliberal “free market” economics is, in fact, entirely reliant on the state maintaining a massive field of institutions and regulations), etc. It’s as much a principle for those who break the rules as it is for those who follow them: breaking a rule only signifies anything because the rule is there. The person who dwells beyond limitations is, literally, unhoused.
The mechanics (as it were) of ordinary life are inconsistent, largely invisible, and surreally punishing. One of the dominant metaphors of “privilege” discourse is the metaphor of the starting line—it’s impossible to catch up if you start a full lap behind—but this strikes me as both begging the question (why the fuck am I in a footrace in the first place???) and an understatement. The problem isn’t just that some people start farther ahead than others: it’s that some racers are far more likely than others to get arrested in the middle of the race and dragged off the track, and some people can’t stop falling down and eating shit and are now trying to run with a mouth full of broken teeth, and some people are blindfolded and haven’t been told which direction to go, and others are somehow on chariots, and also all the referees want to win, too, and keep making terrible calls so they can. (This all on top of the fact that, like, 2% of the people there even want to run in a race.) Put most stupidly: if life, such as it exists right now, were a game, it would be in grave need of a balance patch.
My absurd World of Warcraft letter more than filled my Q3 quota of Emotionally Vulnerable Disclosure, so I’m not going to get into how this shit I mentioned with the dietitian felt. I will say that it has reminded me that certain aspects of our society are, uh, sub-optimal. For most of my life, I have believed myself a certain kind of agent, possessed of a certain variety of agency which I have volitionally or habitually failed to exercise; this daily failure has been a fundamental and constitutive feature of my self-understanding for as long as I can remember. But the real world—in this case, hilariously, the literal interior of my own physical person—was operating according to rules not yet generally understood, or which I, at least, had not been informed of.
The thought that there is a world behind, or underneath, or apart from-but-connected-to the visible world is seemingly as old as both thoughts and the world. Secularism, such as there exists a thing we can call secularism, by no means drove this belief away. Consider the three thinkers responsible for what Paul Ricoeur fancily called the “hermeneutics4 of suspicion”: Marx said that every single commodity conceals an invisible social relation; Freud said the part of the mind we perceive is almost irrelevant, causally speaking, compared to the part we can’t perceive; Nietzsche’s thought pivoted on the concept of value, the invisible force by which we make sense of and relate to things. The important stuff is somewhere else, somewhere you can’t see—but it’s also right here. It comes from somewhere outside of you, far beyond your ken—but it’s also borne by the things you own, hidden under your “natural” sense of right and wrong, buried in your heart of hearts.5
Form, in itself, is always invisible—it is that which makes the visible possible; the logic connecting the pieces of a novel or painting together. Video games are a metaphysically strange instance of this because there is also an extremely concrete invisible component: the world of the game is entirely a result of code that the average player will never see. (This is now true of all digital media, but, uniquely, it was always true of games.) The whole thing is, and has always been, smoke and mirrors, shadows and projections, emerging from long slabs of pure numbers and text, texts inscrutable to all but expert technicians. Meanwhile, if you the plastic thing in the slot in the plastic box, a world pops up on your TV, animated and playable.
I don’t have any pat conclusions from these parallels; I don’t even know if they’re persuasive. I guess, if I had to summarize what I find interesting about all of this, it’s that games are controlled environments in which to find ourselves playfully and safely subjected to invisible forces not of our own making. As in life, we are forced to play by the rules, rules which create us as much as they limit us. The difference is that, in a video game, you can win.
I’m counting weirdo offshoot games like Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE and the Musou or “Warriors” games, as well as the Satellaview-exclusive BS Fire Emblem: Archanea Senki-hen, a short release most easily analogized to DLC, so this is maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But it took a long time, for them.
At some point I want to do a newsletter on the stunning masterpiece Higurashi When They Cry, a “sound novel” whose only mechanic is clicking forward to advance the text. Whether or not this is a “game” is debatable—it probably isn’t—but I am choosing to shout it out here primarily because it whips absolute ass.
The phenomenon of moving through space is probably the ultimate instance of this. Of art forms I can think of, only dance—and sports, if you’ll accept it—centers movement to the same extent, although in both these cases the motion is completely on the part of the performers, who comprise a very small minority of the participants. Architecture maybe comes close, too, but it circumscribes movement, rarely touching it, unless you bump your head or something.
This just means a way of interpreting something. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a way of interpreting something that does not take what you’re trying to interpret at face value.
Even more concretely, consider some of the scariest ideas of ordinary life: you can’t see radiation, viruses, or toxins; you can’t always tell when there’s something wrong with your body; all of our interactions and desires are overdetermined by the forces of violently hierarchical history.