Podcast
Venthuffer
Hosted by Jason McIntosh · EN
A series of short monologues about the Valve Steam Deck video game console, and tangential musings.
13episodes
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10 - Resolution
Apr 28, 202500:12:05Tap to summarize“Good enough for your eyes and mine.” Applying Depression-era thinking to modern hardware upgrade cycles. Things mentioned in this episode: “Everything can can be invented has been invented.” Agmena Paneuropean Book, the typeface used by Elden Ring The $485 Volume Knob Godot, an open-source game engine Show full transcript Full transcript: “Resolution” I am told that the Steam Deck has a resolution of 800p. I’m sure I’ve read exactly what this means, more than once. And every time I let myself forget it soon after, lest the knowledge tempt me to gracelessly yearn for a counterfactual world where that number could be bigger, leading me away from satisfaction with the marvels and wonders already in my hands. This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck by Halstrick. My father—from whom I derive my nom de jeu—was of the breed of conservative American dad who—perhaps by dint of a childhood that overlapped with the Great Depression—didn’t cotton to the notion of upgrading perfectly acceptable hardware. “Good enough for your ears and mine!” he’d say whenever one of us kids suggested a replacement for our home’s Kennedy-era stereo system. “Good enough for your eyes and mine!” he’d say as we pointed out opportunities to think a little bigger with our collection of mid-century televisions. I think I understand where he was coming from. My father lived in a world of binaries, as far as property and possessions were concerned: either you had a thing, or you did not. If you did not have a thing, and you needed it, then by all means, work to acquire it. But if you did have a thing, and then you act as if you didn’t, pining for a slightly shinier version of the same thing? Then, son, you need to check yourself, because you’re on a path of eternal dissatisfaction, refusing to ever feel happy with what you already have. I think of dad’s dismissal whenever I hear speculative talk about game console upgrades—which, of course, has lain thick around the Steam Deck almost since the day of its launch. The system has enjoyed a few improvements in its first couple of years, gaining an OLED screen and more generous storage while shedding a bit of weight—but nothing so drastic that you’d call it the Deck 2. And yet, I have absolutely witnessed friends stating that they’d like to have a Steam Deck but will wait until they can buy its successor—a system which, at the time of this recording, has not even been hinted at by Valve. I understand the impulse. Barring unforeseeable drastic changes in consumer-electronics paradigms, we can surely expect the Steam Deck’s official followup to arrive some day. But I temper this expectation with my strong belief that any single aspect of consumer technology advances along a sigmoid curve. Back when I was really into Apple hardware, millennial Macs and early iPhones especially, one felt the vertigo of living in the steep middle of that curve. The upgrade cycle was not merely inevitable; it was exciting! I’d hang around websites with gorgeous charts and graphs pinpointing—with evidence!—precisely where on the historically proven cycle every major Apple product sat, letting you plan your next upgrade so as to maximize the lifetime of each purchase. Beyond the fact that this approach encourages a definition of “lifetime” which states that your computer or other gadget drops dead the moment a fancier model becomes available—the sort of thing that would earn withering skepticism from my father, “What, did it stop working? I hear you typing away on it every night!”—I think that when it comes to squeezing more meaningful power out of microprocessors, we rounded the top corner of that curve many years ago. At risk of sounding like the proverbial nineteenth-century patent officer who declared that everything worth inventing had been invented, I really do get the sense that few technological barriers still exist to prevent the realization of worthwhile game concepts. We can figure out more ways to pour more simultaneous polygons into a game world, letting them individually render every eyelash on your character’s face as they blink away raindrops which each have runtime-computed trajectories, but none of this contributes to the truly engaging and long-term memorable elements of a game, the stuff generated only by the creative muscle of human minds. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—advances between two major platform revisions do represent true leaps across a quantum threshold. My current paternalistic grouchiness about upgrades came about in the run-up to the PlayStation 5, when I still felt utterly floored by the abilities of the PlayStation 4 I had received for Christmas many years prior. I saw nothing but a cynically commercial ploy in enticing people to drop another thousand dollars or so on a new box, controllers, and other clattering, miscellaneous plastic in order to enjoy barely-perceptible improvements in graphical rendering. But then, of all people, my manager at work—a former games journalist—sat me down and explained the true differentiator between this console generation and the previous. That was the presence of solid-state storage, a marvelous looping-back to past eras of games burned into ROMs and cartridges, where the loading times of games’ increasingly vast data sets were no longer constrained by physically spinning media. Solid-state drives don’t improve the frame-to-frame appearance of any game, but they do vastly improve the overall experience of spending time with any interactive work recent enough to require load screens. I was convinced and that sold me on… the Steam Deck, actually. And shortly after that, I purchased the Steam edition of Elden Ring, even though my family already owned it for our PlayStation 4. And I saw the look of astonishment on the face of my partner, who had perished a thousand times in the Lands Between, as my own gurgling deaths were reset in moments, rather than a full minute, I felt satisfied with that upgrade. At the same time, I was aware that, as much as Elden Ring on the Steam Deck absolutely runs good enough for your eyes and mine, something about it still looked off compared to the PlayStation. Presently I realized that it was the text: the game’s use of a tasteful, serifed, variable-stroke typeface looks wonderfully evocative on a traditional console. But on a Steam Deck pushing its video out to an external display, any flourishes of text become reduced to juddering, palsied jags. It’s still readable, but it doesn’t look great. And sometimes it isn’t even readable, which can all by itself lead to Valve to stamp a game with that timorous yellow dot of partial Steam Deck verification, instead of a green checkmark. I know what kind of games I like. And as much as I luxuriate in amazing effects of computed sunlight filtering through breathtaking artificial mists, my ongoing attention will always be on mini-maps, and inventory readouts, and journals full of scrawled intrigue, and on and on. I need those small, flat symbols to look as crisp as they can, as round and healthy as the dialog of a Zelda character on first-generation Nintendo Switch. My understanding is that the fixed resolution of the Steam Deck is a trade-off that optimizes gameplay on the handheld system’s built-in screen, and which allows output to much larger displays, but only after passing through an up-scaler that’s prone, by its nature, to lose fine details. I find this acceptable for screen-filling landscapes and character models, and less so for text, where details carry information. And so the expensive particle-effect mists part to reveal the frontier of what might actually entice me to upgrade, when the day of Deck 2 arrives. My internalized emulation of dad’s skepticism could concede the point, and allow an agreement. For all that, my father’s brand of conservative confidence has the disadvantage of a certain closed-mindedness, one which can manifest as a blindness to the value of other peoples’ interests, compared to one’s own. On my first draft of this monologue, even as I confessed to my own hunger for better text rendering, I had decried the pursuit of optimal frames per second (FPS) as a foolhardy obsession among a certain class of videogame enthusiast. The Steam Deck caters to this sort of twiddling, making it easy to tune the maximum FPS of individual games. I once set the FPS of Elden Ring from one number to a different number, following the advice of a popular online guide, and experienced—no obvious difference at all, leading me to dismiss the whole statistic as a kind of pseudoscience, the equivalent of hi-fi aficionados arguing over which kind of wooden stereo knobs contribute to the richest sound. But then, between that draft and this recording, I started a weekend project of learning the open-source game engine known as Godot. This exposed me to several fundamentals of how modern video games work. And here’s where I learned that frames-per-second is a fundamental unit of measure for a game’s processing loop, including the speed at which it can poll and respond to player inputs. This can have much greater effect on the quality and playability of a game beyond its mere appearance. It can even affe...
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9: Extermination
Apr 14, 202500:11:22Tap to summarizeRecalling the time when House Flipper forced me to take a hard look at a real-life household crisis brewing behind the refrigerator. Things mentioned in this episode: House Flipper on Steam German cockroach (Blattella germanica) in Wikipedia Show full transcript Full transcript: A word of caution. In this episode of Venthuffer, I talk about creepy crawly things. If you’re not in a mode to hear that sort of thing right now, maybe come back to this one later. In the summer of 2023, I put a household dilemma out mind by trying an interesting game, not expecting that it would directly simulate the very problem I had hoped to buy a bit of escapism from. Not only did it surprise me into seeing my local crisis from a new angle, but it presented me with the keys to its own solution. To defeat the monsters plaguing my home, I had to become the NPC, and hire the hero. This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. What drew me to try House Flipper, five years after its 2018 release? It’s in the peculiar sub-genre of games that simulate bootstrapping and then growing a business doing something that’s actually rather rote and labor-intensive, a category including games like American Truck Simulator, or even Stardew Valley. As suggested by its title, you succeed in House Flipper by buying homes for cheap and selling them at a profit, but you spend most of your gameplay time cleaning up and remodeling the broken-down, gutted, weed-choked dumps that you acquire before releasing them back into the market. And this is all done by hand through a first-person interface that has you do everything from cleaning out cobwebs to repainting walls to buying and installing new furniture and appliances for every room. Well, for some time, I had been curious about the potential for a highly specific simulation game like House Flipper to present not exactly a transfer of real-world skill, but of a highly suggestive experience. That the ideal, anyway! The player has to accept that simulating the magnitude of the labor and the logistical complexities of running a real-estate business—to say nothing of its legalities!—must involve significant abstraction, compared to what one sees in a more mechanical and objectively verifiable simulation, such as in a flight simulator. But I was also drawn to this game’s specific theme because of my parents’ career while I was growing up. Their work predated popular-culture use of the term “house flipping” by decades, but it’s what they did for my whole childhood: we’d all move into some junker of a home, which my parents spent a year or two fixing up as their primary shared project, and then we’d all move on to the next one. So when the game went on sale while during an extended home-alone period, while my partner was in Chicago for a professional conference, I spent a full evening or two in the world of House Flipper. I could quickly see its appeal to “satisfaction” in the social-media brain-rot definition of the word, giving you a chaotic environment and the tools to make it orderly, step by step, letting the work—and its immediately visible effects—serve as its own reward. But while I can acknowledge that attraction, I don’t really resonate with it. I could tell that progressing very far into the game’s simulated career path would be a slog, and that I’d lose interest in the game once the novelty passed. But my reasons for trying it remained, and I decided to stick with it until I had the basics down, enough to flip my first house and at least enjoy some sense of the fulfillment promised by the title. And that’s where I found a point of crossover. Listener, here I must make a confession of which I’m not proud at all, but my story hinges on sharing it. At this time, our upper west side apartment was experiencing a cockroach infestation. German cockroaches, if you need to know. The little ones. It started small. We are both experienced urban dwellers and had had our share of unwelcome arthropod incursions plenty of times. So we deployed the usual drugstore tricks and traps and didn’t worry about it too much. But, by the time my partner left for her trip, it was clear that, for the first time, the invaders were outpacing our casual countermeasures. Look: as far as I can tell, they never got into our food. I have my suspicions about what they were eating, and I’m pretty sure they were taking water from the cats’ dishes as well as our freezers’ ice trays, but they left our food alone. And they never got into our bedroom. But none of this lets me deny how, in the wee hours of every morning, the rest of our small apartment’s floor would roil with cockroach rush hour, streams of skittering commuters fanning out from multiple bases of operations they’d clearly set up in dark places. The only ones I managed to find myself, quite by accident, were the battery compartments of my cats’ automated feeders. All this was going on while I played around with House Flipper. So when, early on, one of the fixer-upper problems you encounter in the most vile of abandoned squats is roaches, I sat up a little straighter. The game simplifies it, of course, as it simplifies every aspect of refurbishing a home, but it contained two startling kernels of truth. In House Flipper, you play a professional who knows better than to fight a roach infestation by squishing individual bugs, or by merely laying out some store-bought traps and calling it a day. No, the House Flipper player-character heads straight to the nest, and pulls out their vacuum cleaner. That is to say: There are nests, and you can destroy them directly. House Flipper is, by its nature, a meditative game. I had plenty of time to think as I cleaned up that wreck of a dwelling, sweeping up its broken glass, hauling out its greasy pizza-box stacks, and methodically dismantling all of those… nests. By the time I had finished my virtual labors, I had also sat with the truth of how the game’s predicament overlapped with my own. And that’s the moment when I realized. That strange, almost sweet smell that had been wafting from the strangest places in our apartment over the last couple of months. Oh. That… was the real-life version of the on-screen prompt that tells you to hold the left trigger down, to bring up your toolbox radial menu and select the vacuum cleaner. It had been flashing at me for weeks and I didn’t understand it, at least not until I stumbled upon its digital translation. And so when I was done with that in-game mission, I powered down my Steam Deck, and I made the inversion. Reaching through the sleeping screen and pulling the game’s reality inside-out like a sock, so that I might take up the role not of the heroic bug buster and avatar of order and cleanliness, but their unseen client. The owner of the shamefully pestilent dwelling, finally making the call. And two people answered the call. I directed them to the smell. I opened my dishwasher. They saw everything they needed to see, and left. And two others came soon after, laden with equipment and dressed for business. At last I bore witness to at least one facet of the presence being simulated behind the House Flipper game camera, and I deferentially stayed out of the way as they set to work, pulling my refrigerator away from the wall with a directness I recognized, as if it were a mere 3D asset in a wireframe world. But this game wasn’t my story, so I didn’t directly see what they revealed: only that one of them immediately hunkered down and set to work, using both hands to attack something. Her partner struck up a conversation with me about city politics before I became too curious, nudging my unhelpful attention away from the work area: a touch of benign social engineering for which I can only be grateful. Things continued in this vein for some time, requiring another followup visit or two, before the roaches were seen to and their hideouts made sufficiently uninviting to discourage any rival clans from moving in afterwards. And I haven’t played House Flipper again since then, either; doing so would still feel a little… redundant. I’m still intrigued by the potential of experience-focused simulation games. I mentioned American Truck Simulator earlier, in part because a dear friend has encouraged me to try it, putting myself—a Manhattanite who rarely gets behind the wheel anymore—into a voluntary highway hypnosis as a pleasant way to relax. I see the appeal of that too! But I expect that it will be some time before I replicate my experience with House Flipper, where I play only about five percent of a game, and yet end up feeling that I won it… so transcendently. This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick. We got rid of that dishwasher, by the way.
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8: Suspension
Mar 31, 202500:09:25Tap to summarizeThe Steam Deck has a one-button suspension feature that lets you safely set the console down and immediately turn your full attention to something else, at any time, even in the middle of a game. Even though this is one of the best features of the Deck, it’s in tension with another feature, one that can make instant suspension effectively unusable. This episode is about how I had to discover this for myself, and buy my way out of it. This episode was inspired by a conversation I had with the hosts of The Short Game podcast on an episode about the Steam Deck that they kindly invited me to join. Things mentioned or alluded to in this episode: The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects by Marshal McLuhan and Quentin Fiore Persona 4 Golden Caves of Qud Starting with this episode, I have changed the tagline of the show from “A dream of the Steam Deck” to “A reverie of the Steam Deck”, for various reasons. Thanks to Marc Moskowitz for the winning suggestion. The cover artwork for this episode uses the image “Clifton suspension bridge at dawn” by sagesolar. It is licensed under CC BY 2.0 . Show full transcript Full transcript: They don’t put it on the box, maybe because there’s no way to boast about it with numbers. It has nothing to do with screen size, or processor speed, or frames-per-second. You have to have used the Steam Deck for a while to realize that one of its key features, maybe its most important—one that elevates it above both ordinary gaming PCs and handheld systems of the past—is how quickly you can make any game stop. This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. Today, my home has two Steam Decks in it, purchased about two years apart from one another. The second one is a newer model, but that’s not why I bought it. I bought it because, so long as only one Steam Deck was in the house, nobody living here could use one of the console’s best features. That’s the ability to instantly and wholly suspend whatever you’re doing with one click of the power button on the top of the console—or, if you’re using a Bluetooth controller, with a short sequence of button presses. So long as the console doesn’t run out of battery power, you can resume play instantly at any time by pressing that button again. It works like a dream. Or, rather, it’s dreamless, despite being formally called Sleep mode. From the point of view of the game running on the console, play continues uninterrupted on either side of the suspension, heedless of time suddenly skipping ahead in the real world. But this feature is in conflict with another, one that Steam Deck seems to possess only begrudgingly, because its presence is expected on modern game consoles. The Deck lets you create multiple user profiles on a single device, if you want to, each tied to a different Steam account, and makes it relatively easy to switch between them. However, switching profiles essentially means rebooting the whole device, which wipes away any suspended game. Now, there’s nothing inherent about the mere presence of a second player profile on the Deck that prevents Sleep mode from working exactly as intended—at least, not until the point when that second player asserts their right to have a turn with the machine. In households like mine, containing two people with boundless love for one another but fiercely independent gamer identities, this introduces friction. The problem rises not from the mere act of sharing, a central tenet of any long-term partnership which, I dare say, never hurts to practice more. Instead, it creeps in, over iterations. Watching your beloved play the game that brings them joy means that when your turn comes around again, you won’t be able to click the power button and resume your game in the same moment where you left it, as you can when striking out solo with Steam Deck. No, you’ll need to spend whole minutes flipping the system back into your account, watching boot-up animations, selecting your game, wading through all of its own various startup screens, and then finally going through whatever in-game warmup you need to accomplish before you can finally resume play. And the whole time you’re doing it, you know that you’ll just need to do it all over again at the start of your next session. And you’ll come to wish, more and more, that you could just click that wake-from-sleep button instead. This can fester, friends. This can turn the act of sharing a thing you love with a person you love into something ugly. It can start to feel like you’re being denied a thing you deserve. Imagine sharing your home and your game console with a partner who is just as into the Jungian teen hijinks of Persona 4 Golden as you are into the procedurally generated fungal infections of Caves of Qud, and rather than see this delightful absurdity as something to celebrate and bond further over, it becomes a gateway into quietly seething resentment. That’s no way to live. And that’s why I bought my partner a new Deck for Christmas. The quiet perfection of the fast suspend-and-resume feature shows how the Steam Deck is designed not to desire all of your attention, and presses this generosity into all of the games that it runs, regardless of their own design. The Steam Deck wants you to be able to put the game aside immediately and with no hard feelings whenever a loved one in your vicinity needs your attention instead. You click the button and set the device down, knowing you can pick it up again when you’re ready, and with no penalty to pay in lost progress, or time wasted to startup ceremonies. And this knowledge lets you put your game out of mind completely, shifting your attention entirely to the the person or thing that needs it in the moment. But even if the unjealous Steam Deck doesn’t want all your attention, it wants the attention of nobody except you. Its surface design might say, “Oh, no no, I don’t mind being shared, add all the accounts you want, no problem!” But in its heart, it wants to be a personal device. I refer to its heart almost literally, or maybe I should say its guts. If you drop into Steam Deck’s so-called Desktop mode and dig around its underlying Linux operating system, you’ll find that, no matter how many Steam user profiles you add to your Steam Deck, there remains only one actual user account on the machine. That user has the login name: “deck”, in all lowercase. This is interestingly ambiguous, isn’t it? Does this user represent the Deck’s human operator, or the deck itself? I find this confusion very suggestive. The design of the Steam Deck intentionally mingles these notions. If I can risk borrowing a page from Marshal Mcluhan here, the Deck wants to be part of your personal identity by becoming a extension of your body, in the same way as the car you’re driving is an extension of your feet, or—more the point—how the smartphone in your pocket is an extension of your central nervous system. This isn’t novel to the Deck, it’s a natural fit for any successful media device. And I would claim that the Steam Deck’s success at becoming part of your extended body pivots around its ability to suspend play and then resume it again with hardly more mental effort than that which is required to move your fingers. But as a side effect, handing the device off to someone else feels kind of bad. I may not feel the profound unease I do when someone is scrolling through my unlocked phone, holding a big chunk of my own live and squirming sensorium in their hand, and out of my control. But it still doesn’t feel good to loan out hardware that, even in a lesser way, feels like part of me. And lest I be accused of solipsism, I acknowledge that other users of the shared Deck can’t help but feel exactly the same while I’m enjoying it. It’s kind of a shame that the designers of the Steam Deck feel the need to maintain its traditional-console front by having it masquerade as a multi-user system. The Deck works best when treated as a sort of cybernetic limb that you can flex to express a personal playfulness. By making the act of putting it down so painless, the Steam Deck’s design helps you make room for a richer life, full of things deserving your attention, something that suspension bridges. This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.
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7: Cruise
Mar 17, 202500:11:20Tap to summarizeOn Balatro, and my diminishing personal susceptibility to videogame addiction—even when I invite it in. Things mentioned or alluded to in this episode: The Salmon Walk in Ketchikan The Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau “Shipping Out” by David Foster Wallace, better known by its reprinted title of “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” Nethack.org The first trailer for Balatro The Steam store page for Balatro, which includes the second trailer video that I mention The mobile-version teaser trailer for Balatro Show full transcript Full transcript: What began as an embrace of nihilism in a desperate attempt to feel something while disconnected and adrift ended with a discovery of… nothing in particular. And the subtle difference between those two varieties of absence held a profound relief. This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. I don’t need to dive deep into the reasons I didn’t have a great time during the interminable “sea days” of an Alaskan cruise last summer. Really, I enjoyed our ports of call very much, from Ketchikan to Juneau, and I can go on at great length about my new appreciation for salmon, both as a meal, and as a symbol for the presence of the divine in nature, especially as represented in the ubiquitous formline artwork of the Pacific Northwest’s indigenous peoples. The sea days, though, held little to inspire me. While I did pack a book or two, the prospect of being sealed in a bobbing vessel with no internet access and surrounded on all sides by the very same shuffling Trumpian decadence well documented in a famous essay by David Foster Wallace had me all but climbing the walls of my stateroom before dinnertime on day one. This is when I resolved to do something that, for the past several months, I had forsworn. I pulled our Steam Deck from the luggage, and for the very first time, I fired up my partner’s copy of Balatro, which had launched earlier in the year, and which I had until that moment willed myself to avoid based on the reputation that it had immediately garnered. Here’s what I thought would happen: Feeling, again, addiction as something almost physical, a fitlhy goblin that I invited to nest in my brain, its fist clutched around the nearest knot of axons. With a sharp yank, it could pull my attention back to the game, again and again, feeding it all the electricity of my faculties in exchange for keeping me numb to everything else, including the passage of time. With land nowhere in sight, it’s what I thought I wanted. As you might infer, I have a certain history with profound video game addiction. I touched on it, indirectly, in episode five of Venthuffer, the one about Permadeath. I’ve never been one to fall under the sway of games that massage you with the sort of mild, unceasing success offered by Bejeweled and its ilk. Rather, my poison has always come in the form of Roguelikes. And, the Roguelikes know this. “Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself,” says the front page of Nethack, as it has for decades, quoting an early, anonymous addict of the venerable dungeon crawler. So it was for me, especially in my 20s and 30s, losing days or more to the endless chase for make-believe “experience points”, enumerated as an meaningless integer and graduated into arbitrary “levels”, and the narcotic pleasure of working hard for hours at a time for no external reward other than simply watching those numbers just… go up. Balatro didn’t necessarily launch with the attitude that Nethack has, but very quickly grew into it and then far surpassed it, something you can track through Balatro’s progression of official trailers throughout 2024. The Balatro launch trailer is a typically peppy introduction to the game and its own spin on deckbuilder mechanics. The trailer I first saw, though, shows how the Balatro team quickly adopted a more focused idea of who the game appealed to, stuffing the video with critical quotes about the game’s addictive qualities, and—most alarming to me—a slow zoom-in on a score-counter as its numbers grew larger and larger and caught on fire, the result of a particularly strong play. That is to say, a shockingly naked appeal to those with a certain susceptibility to seeing a number going up. Months later, the announcement of the game’s mobile version had become an overt, swaggering troll. The video intermixes bewildering flashes of gameplay footage with anxious horror-movie sound effects and shots of players weeping in despair while the publishers cheer in triumph. The teasing grin of the game’s mascot transforms into a dreadful, close-up leer, boasting of the game’s mental domination over its paying audience. And, as the north Pacific wind whipped over me, lying alone on the promenade deck, clutching my Steam Deck in freezing fingers, I chose to willingly submit to all of it. Anything to keep me alive until we anchored at Victoria, B.C. I launched the game. I played the tutorial. I let myself drift. It was… fine. I mean, it’s a good game. I admired the design, but to my surprise, it didn’t really speak to me. The most negative thing I felt was mild frustration at losing again and again, without the ever-present tug towards a distant but seemingly attainable victory that I have long expected from roguelikes. And so it just became a merely interesting passtime, and not the sucking void that I was promised by its own marketing materials. After returning home, my partner taught me some basic Balatro strategies, letting me achieve my first wins. I found myself appreciating and even enjoying the game a bit more. And this feels like where the story should take a dark turn, but, no, not here either. My total playtime with Balatro has yet to surpass 20 hours. I do still pick it up now and again, but just for the sake of variety between other games or activities. The goblin never moved in. And it’s not just Balatro. I’ve become reacquainted with Caves of Qud since I last spoke about it on Venthuffer, playing in pleasant bursts as time and interest allow, and disinclined to let it hook me again. I’ve also played the first few chapters of the 2024 JRPG epic Metaphor Refantazio, and while I know my younger self would have been completely parasitized by its expertly engineered treadmill of overlapping quests and ever-rising levels, I felt pleasantly full and pushed back from the table somewhere in the high teens. I’m sure I’ll dip in for another visit when I next have an appetite for that particular sauce, though I’ll lack the desire to drown in it. I have a hypothesis about the relevant changes in me that have allowed me to casually stroll through games that were once bear-traps for my time and attention. In the past, when I knew I was making poor use of my time at a game that I kept picking up anyway, I would sometimes mutter out loud: I can feel myself getting older. This was an inexperienced way of expressing a lament that I’ve since become more familiar and even comfortable with: my time and attention are my most limited and precious resource. The notion of “wasting time” seems like such an anodyne scold when one is young, like “wasting water”. My growing awareness of my attention’s finitude has, I think, weakened the ability for any video game to wholly subsume it for very long. But there’s something else too, both subtler and, in a way, more real. Video games have always been important to me, a primary route to staying playful. But I’ve come to value them more as experiences than challenges. Today I have as much desire to spend hundreds of hours with any one game as I would with any one book, or film. Certainly some rare examples might deserve that much attention, but generally I prefer to acknowledge, appreciate, and maybe even savor the unique experience that a game has to offers, and then move along. Maybe that happens at a credits-roll, and maybe that happens when the game seems to start repeating itself. I set it down with gratitude, I push back, I move along. And I let myself take pleasure, even eagerness, in having something to move along to: Maybe another game, or some other media, or maybe a completely different vessel for my attention: spending time with a friend, or taking another swing at learning piano. Or, yes, writing out a podcast script! Experiences have a lasting physical component, you know. Novelty, and discovery, and learning, all score themselves in the white matter of your brain, making connections that change you in the most literal sense possible. Even if I can’t see a number tallying of how many neural pathways I’ve grown, I increasingly suspect that it’s the only number-going-up in my life that I ultimately care about. I’m not saying that I have the antidote for the stagnation of game addiction. But I have realized that, for me, the way to keep that goblin away from its nest is simply… to crowd it out. This has been Venthuffer...
Transcribe →Venthuffer returns in 2025
Dec 1, 202400:01:29Tap to summarizeHello, dear Venthuffer listener. I am retroactively declaring that the previous six episodes constitute season one of this audio zine. One consequence of launching a weekly publication in October is that no sooner does the show start to get its legs under itself, than the wintertime holiday vortex arrives to sweep those same legs away. I am very pleased with our initial episodes. Even though I fell short of my entirely arbitrary goal of ten issues, I did meet the six-episode high-water mark set with my previous monologue project. And I find that I have a lot more to say about the Steam Deck and points adjacent. But the work deserves my full attention, and I can’t quite manage that while otherwise gearing up for the year ahead. So, Venthuffer is going on a short break, to return… sometime in early 2025. Before the equinox in March, let’s say. If you subscribe to Venthuffer in the podcast app of your choice, then you’ll be the first to know when it returns. And you can always keep tabs at venthuffer.com, where, yes, there is a full RSS feed, if that’s how you swing. Until then, happy holidays, enjoy the Steam sales, and make time to play attentively with the games and the people that you love. And you can find me, on Steam, as Halstrick.
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6: Ouroboros
Nov 24, 202400:09:22Tap to summarizeOn UFO 50 and ever-flowering cycles of the simplest game designs. Things mentioned in this episode: Spelunky UFO 50 Carl Muckenhoupt’s post The Eggplant podcast discusses Magic Garden Jim Stormdancer’s critique Wikipedia’s article on the Snake game genre Snak by Zach Gage and Neven Mrgan The cover artwork for this episode uses the image “Nokia 3310 mobile phone, 2000” from the Science & Society Picture Library. Show full transcript Full transcript: A six-person, eight-year project helmed by Derek Yu after he made bank with Spelunky in the early 2010s, the absurdly audacious work called UFO 50 gives us a pirate ROM cartridge from an alternate universe. It contains fifty wholly original video games for an entirely notional 1980s console, spanning the complete ludography of UFO Soft, a game publisher that never existed. Carl Muckenhoupt quipped online that: “The basic fantasy behind UFO 50 is having something that’s like your Steam library, but of manageable size.” Much like my own real Steam library, I suspect I’ll never thoroughly explore every corner of UFO 50—and this is hardly a complaint. Initially released on Steam for Windows, UFO 50 fits perfectly on the Steam Deck, transforming your hand-held device into a Game Boy from another dimension. And one of the many joys I have so far discovered within its collection is a slippery and disguised adaptation of a ubiquitous yet seldom discussed mobile game with a particularly cyclical history. This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. If we wish to play along with the fiction of UFO 50, it’s better to think of it as a visitor from an alternate reality than a forgotten historical artifact. The developers have adhered to the spirit of the 80s in some ways. The aesthetics are more or less believable. While some of the more modern character designs stretch credulity, all of the games’ visuals comprise relatively simple sprites and color palettes, and the audio is entirely ruled by the square-wave effects that we still associate with the era. At least as significantly, the control scheme is strictly that of a mid-80s console: An eight-way D-pad, two action buttons, and that’s all. But the authors of UFO 50 gave themselves far fewer restrictions on pinning the games’ design to their putative era. For example, the game called Rock On! Island is unmistakably a 21st century tower defense game, and Party House is a solitaire deckbuilding game, relying on a tabletop mechanic that wouldn’t exist until nearly 2010. They’re both good games, and honestly? Their overt anachronism is part of the fun! When arranged in their default faux-chronological order, the collections’ first and last games both feel like much more sincere attempts to emulate designs popular in their respective quote-unquote publication years. The very first game, Barbuta, is a mulishly janky pre-Mario Bros. platform game, and Cyber Owls is an entirely believable cash-in on the late-80s craze for ninja-turtles clones. These two bookends give the other 48 games period-appropriate cover—literally!— to get a little historically unbound with their mechanics, which I find delightfully clever. This sets the table for one of my favorite titles of the collection, even though it’s one of the simplest. Magic Garden is the fifth of the fifty, and has the look of a simple arcade game. You control a little girl who skips around a square playfield, collecting cute, blobby creatures called Oppies and leading them into safe zones, while avoiding obstacles. But things start to feel a little off pretty quickly, especially if you have any experience playing actual arcade games of the early 80s. It will probably take you mere seconds to discover that you have only one life. You will learn this when the girl careens into a wall, which knocks her down and ends the game instantly. At first, this feels bad! Jim Stormdancer has critiqued this single aspect of Magic Garden as betraying the kayfabe of the entire collection, noting—quite correctly!—that any game of the era would certainly give you three lives, enough to feel like you figured out things at least a little bit before your first game-over. But it’s also a clue. Despite my own initial bafflement with Magic Garden, I was interested to see folks in Discord, on Mastodon, and on gaming podcasts really hone in on analyzing this game, even though it’s hardly the deepest design in the collection. However, it is arguably the first of the UFO 50 games that feels good to play, if you’re approaching the collection chronologically, the first one that isn’t intentionally designed to feel juddery and dated. Once you brush aside the single-life quirk the appeal is immediate: Save oppies, stay alive, and get that score as high as you can! So, I kept Magic Garden on my UFO 50 play rotation. And at some point, I tried it during phone calls with older members of my family, who naturally ask of me a hundred-to-one listen-to-speak ratio. It became immediately clear that this was how the game wanted to be played: in fidgets. Curled on my couch, AirPods in my ears Steam Deck in my hands, I could contentedly hit that start button dozens of times in the span of one thirty-minute call. And soon I realized: Oh, it’s Snake. The game is just a variant of Snake, straight from my old Nokia’s cracked LCD screen to you. And then everything makes sense. Of course you don’t have lives in Snake! Why would you? Snake is designed to pass just a few moments before your inevitable game-over, and if you want another bite of Snake after that, my all means press the button and carry on. In case there’s any doubt, the true identity of Magic Garden is given away by the on-screen word “Oppies”, which in retrospect is a typographical blur of “Apples”, the things you try to collect in the classic flip-phone game. A sublimely subtle checksum. With the scales fallen from my eyes I could see that Magic Garden is actually a perfectly clever and quite original twist on its progenitor. You don’t just eat and grow until you die. The length of your snake-which is to say, the little girl plus the train of collected oppies following her—grows and shrinks as you collect and deposit the creatures. Obstacles continuously spawn, but every time you meet a dropoff quota you receive a powerup which gives you a brief window to clean up otherwise deadly enemies. This means that you’ll occasionally encounter satisfying moments where you clear everything on the screen, and can collect oppies at leisure for a few luxurious seconds before meanies start spawning again. You end up living for these natural pauses, and they always feel great. You’ll still die because you miss a turn, or something hemmed you in, or you just got unlucky. But again: Snake. There’s no sense of lost progress. The high score table is just there as a pole star to aim at. The game is a meditation, a voluntary focus for your attention on something immediately present, with frequent breaks. Magic Garden isn’t even the only new and interesting take on Snake released by a well-known indie-game developer in recent years. I could for instance also point you to Snak, spelled S-N-A-K, which Zach Gage and Neven Mrgan published for the Playdate console in 2023. This one brings a very fun rail-grinding mechanic to the classic formula, and demonstrates how a contemporary game creator doesn’t need all the fictive trappings of UFO 50 to say something new about an ancient design. With Magic Garden, we have a 1970s arcade game, revived for 1990s cell phones, reinterpreted by a 2020s game, pretending to be from the 1980s, and to which I set the full capabilities of a quad-core three gigahertz hand-held computer. I do have to appreciate how this particular snake has been eating its own tail for about as long as I’ve been alive, suggesting that the art form of video games is now just old enough to have its own multigenerational archetypes of design, with its own demonstrations of how some patterns are just… eternal. This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.
Transcribe →
5: Permadeath
Nov 17, 202400:10:09Tap to summarizeAppreciating Caves of Qud as a gymnasium for Stoic thinking. Things mentioned in this episode: Caves of Qud Jotun, Who Parts Limbs Rogue NetHack Angband A snapshot of my Stoic studies as they stood when my character “Kiyuwumar” met their end An example of the Mastodon posts I made during that run Show full transcript Full transcript: I know that my best run at Caves of Qud, and indeed any traditional roguelike, happened between the first and fifth of March in 2023. I know this because of the dates attached to the Steam achievements I earned during that run, which today read to me as an inventory of keepsakes found on the body of Kiyuwumar, the Star-Eyed Esper, when their body was recovered from the ruins of Bethesda Susa. Among them, the one that breaks my heart is an achievement earned for befriending the science-genius NPC known as Q-Girl. It depicts her in portrait—a sort of anthropomorphic bear with a punk hairstyle and goggles. My character died so suddenly that I know they weren’t found with Q-Girl’s photograph clutched to their breast. But I think it’s not impossible that, in the split-second of awareness that their end had come, her face was the last thing they thought of. This heartbreak represents my high-water mark in the roguelike dungeon-crawler genre, and it is likely I’ll never surpass it. I couldn’t bear to even try Caves of Qud again for the rest of that year. When I timidly started to play around with the game again ahead of its long-awaited official one-point-oh release, it didn’t dispel the psychic hurt from my previous run, which I realize I now wear on my memory like a scar, no less real nor more ridiculous than the mark by my right thumb from where the family cat scratched me once in the 1990s. This game injured me. And I can’t recommend it highly enough. This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck by Halstrick. It was the legendary troll named Jotun, Who Parts Limbs, who killed my Caves of Qud character with a single axe-throw, mere moments after I first encountered him, and while I was just beginning to size up the situation. When it happened, I sat in silence for a long moment, my blood turning to ice. With nerveless fingers, I took one last screenshot, and I knew here I beheld the whole of my practical response. There would be no coming back from this error, no confessor I could call who could tell me how to undo my mistake through meditative toil, or through manipulating data files. For me, the game was over. As designed! Caves of Qud—that’s spelled Q-U-D and it is pronounced like the cow’s chew-toy—is a traditional roguelike, one that hews close to the mechanics of the primordial computer game literally titled Rogue, a single-player, tactical turn-based dungeons-and-dragons simulator. Qud has several play modes, but the one it nudges you to think of as the true way to play—by making it the default choice on its New Game menu—is the so-called “Classic” mode, where character death is immediately permanent. This game isn’t the sort of roguelike that becomes iteratively easier as you replay it, allowing you to retain or upgrade certain aspects of your character between “runs”. Anything that you carry between Caves of Qud runs is encoded entirely in the experiences and memories of you, the player. The level-one scrub that you roll up at the start of your hundredth Qud run is no more intrinsically powerful than the one you meet the very first time you play. I’ve been a fan of traditional roguelikes for a long time, starting with twentieth-century classics like Nethack and Angband, though I never made particularly deep progress at any. I’ve been aware of Caves of Qud for some years, but I finally got the nerve to try it after I saw that Steam had marked the game as fully compatible with Steam Deck. Which immediately enthralled me, because seeing that little green checkmark seemed a patent absurdity. Every trad-rogue that I’d ever enjoyed required so many keys in order to issue its umpty-hundred possible commands that it even resisted play on a laptop, which lacks the requisite number pad. But the Caves of Qud developers, beginning their work on the near side of the millenial divide, managed to actually make a dungeon crawler of the ancient mode completely playable with only a game controller. They created a clever scheme which arranges all the commands you need into chords involving the trigger and shoulder buttons. So, to move around, you tilt the left stick in one of eight directions, then squeeze the right trigger. This frees up the right stick for highlighting and learning more about other objects in the world, and the D-pad-plus-trigger for paging through the visual quick-access bar of unusual commands specific to your character’s skills, something informed by MMOs and other, much newer role-playing games. In addition, Qud mixes in a lot more automation than the ancient games had. For example, the left shoulder button will automatically have your character try to move towards and attack the nearest enemy, regardless of direction, and pressing the Y button while holding the left trigger puts your character into an auto-explore mode that stops as soon as they see a threat. This sounds like a lot. It is a lot! And yet, if you’re willing to give it enough attention to learn the ropes, it clicks. It’s a good game, developed with care and attention to player feedback over the course of many years. After a couple of sessions, it even starts to get comfortable, and you may begin to feel confident with it! You’ll probably start keying in commands rapidly, learning to read the screen, a sense of mastery starting to creep in. And that, of course, is how you lose. Well, I knew the risks, which is to say, no matter how high I flew, I knew the only way that this could possibly end. When I had that amazing Qud run which ended so abruptly, I had been studying Stoicism for about one year. The philosophy was brought to my attention from a colleague at the very large technology company I worked for at the time. A chief hangup of the ancient Stoics was death, and specifically the purpose of living when death, the erasure of everything, was inevitable. And one way to square that terrible circle is this: Your life is a gift, and it is your duty to respect that gift by making of yourself the best you that you can, given the time and resources available. And because of these studies, I could not help but see that a traditional roguelike as a simulation of this, precisely. Stoicism counsels its students to locate their own path to developing personal virtue, and to walk that path as far as they can. In a roguelike, the nearest you have to virtue is experience level, and hit points, and ability scores. So be it: it’s an abstraction, but an effective one. Just as in reality, you have essentially no control over the game-world external to your character, but you can do your best to extract experience points from it, and then you do have full control over spending those points to improve your character in some way. Also, you have from the outset an ideal that you can strive for—winning the game. But whether you get there or not—and very probably not—the game will end. It will probably end suddenly, and much sooner than you’d like it to. So I wore this attitude as best I could, for that one week when I found myself possessing a Qud character that had somehow survived for more than ten hours of play and was well into the midgame, against all odds, gathering up power and potential. I began every session reminding myself that I was ready to die. I would post summaries of my achievements each day to Mastodon, and always conclude with a reiteration of how I already felt peace with the increasingly precious character’s inevitable loss. So when it happened, I wasn’t sad, or mad. I was devastated, I felt real shock. It was the furthest I’d ever gotten in a game genre I’ve been fascinated with since I was a kid, and even when you fully expect it all to get ripped away in an eyeblink, the sense of separation from this long focus of your time and attention is horribly painful. But I remember it. I remember it! Hundreds of thousands of in-game experience points might have spun away into the darkness with a single flash of the axe, but they all translated to one point of experience in my real life, earned by the challenge of how I choose to face this chilling breath of loss and mortality, delivered more profoundly and more directly than a video game had ever gifted to me before. And it’s up to me how I spend that gift, on myself. This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.
Transcribe →
4: Introduction
Nov 10, 202400:06:37Tap to summarizeExamining the origins and motivations of this audio project, four episodes in. Things mentioned in this episode: Jmac’s Arcade, my previous monologue series Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It, monologues by Jason Scott Permanently Moved, monologues by Jay Springett Third Strongest Podcast, each episode of which opens with monologues by Ryan Veeder, Sarah Willson, or Zach (or me?!) The instigating Mastodon post about Steam Deck sales by Liam Dawe Show full transcript Full transcript: Before I launched this audio zine, I wanted to prove to myself that I could keep up the regular production pace demanded by a periodical. And so I produced three episodes that tackled the topic essentially in medias res, launching right into discussions of highly specific ways that I find the Steam Deck interesting and personally relevant. I promised myself that if I could pull that off, then and only then would I allow myself the indulgence of a first-person-soaked introductory episode. And, I am afraid to say, we have now come to it. This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. If you’ve followed my audio work prior to this, then you might be familiar with Jmac’s Arcade, a series of video-accompanied monologues that I recorded during the first years of the twenty-first century, looking back at the coin-operated video games that were central to my very young life decades prior. I had originally meant that to be a much longer series, but it felt complete after a half-dozen episodes, in part due to my own self-consciousness about mining my own childhood memories for stories. Beyond that being a finite resource, I also felt a hesitancy about dedicating so much attention to my personal past while a culture of independently produced video games was only just beginning to flourish all around me. I didn’t realize that Venthuffer is the successor project to Jmac’s Arcade until I had recorded its first episodes, and recognized the voice that I heard. So here is the realization of my long-dormant desire to apply that voice to games and game technology of the present era. Credit also goes to other technology-adjacent monologue series that I’ve enjoyed in the years since, including the work of Jason Scott, Jay Springett, and—if you’ll pardon the hyperspecificity—the increasingly long and always interesting introductions to the Third Strongest Podcast by Ryan Veeder, Sarah Willson, and Zach. But why the Steam Deck? Why plunge into a multi-part, soul-searching study that centers around this particular piece of heavy, noisy, honestly a bit janky consumer technology, one that isn’t even particularly new? The single trigger for the idea that became Venthuffer was a Mastodon post by Liam Dawe, who runs the blog Gaming on Linux. He had analyzed the public sales data about the then-new video game Black Myth: Wukong. By triangulating it with changes to the top-sellers lists that Valve regularly publishes, Liam found evidence that ongoing sales of the Steam Deck console were, more than two years after its launch, very strong. And this made me happy! And I immediately questioned this feeling! It felt very much at odds with my sense of stoic self-definition, to find my own happiness bound to the sales figures of an expensive toy, with whom my own relationship was limited to being just another paying consumer. But this again was a voice from my past that I recognized, and the voice was my own. Like a lot of gaming and technology enthusiasts, I burned with platform partisanship in my youth. As a child I pledged myself to the furtherance of Atari, and in my late teens and twenties would go to the mat for all things Apple, especially the Macintosh. I certainly still admire and use Apple technology, but it’s been a long time since I’ve identified with it, since I’d feel a rush of shared victory at hearing news of strong quarterly earnings. But here it was happening again, from a direction I did not at all expect, this homely little handheld computer, twice the weight of a Nintendo Switch and infinitely louder, with a roaring and infamously fragrant outflow vent. And talking with friends some two weeks after this realization, the domain name for this audio zine struck me like a thunderbolt. And you know that’s all it took. So Venthuffer exists as a personal exploration of what intrigues me about the Steam Deck, hoping that in my investigation I’ll uncover a small but glowing cloud of tangents worth writing out, and reciting aloud. If I had to choose a single thread to pull, it would concern the unusually wide band of history that the Steam Deck straddles, both in terms of the games that it makes accessible, and in the legacy inherent in its surprisingly unhidden Linux-based operating system. In subtle ways, the Steam Deck acknowledges video games as an art form with a long, living history behind the ever-hyped leading edge that most game media focus all of their attention on. And, as my own past projects might suggest, that really speaks to me. All that said, I do intend to proceed with caution. I’m not that young man with a Performa 6100 and a chip on his shoulder any more, and I have no desire to publicly defend any consumer technology, let alone venerate it. I look forward to examining the flaws of Steam Deck and, maybe, what these flaws have to tell us about the larger culture. Steam Deck is not gonna be around forever, and I doubt it will be remembered as the most influential gaming console. Still… I think it might be the best one. And I wanna give that a closer look. This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.
Transcribe →
3: Mods
Nov 3, 202400:06:59Tap to summarizeLetting my friends expand my gaming horizons through consensual rule-breaking. Things mentioned in this episode: Doom modding according to Wikipedia Lethal Company Zeekerss’s Patreon, Steam ludography, and Roblox history The “More Company” mod Deep Rock Galactic r2modman “Manual until it hurts” Show full transcript Full transcript: The last time I ran a mod was to replace the sound effects in my Macintosh copy of Ultimate Doom with voice clips from Beavis and Butthead. You could also make the Doom guy wear sunglasses, both during gameplay and on the loading screen, which I always thought a mark of caring follow-through. But after that, I would think of modding my games no more, across many generations of consoles, until some friends wanted to show me a game they liked—and the only way they could do it was if we all broke its rules together. This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. Lethal Company is the masterpiece of the young auteur known only as Zeekerss, who took several big swings at indie game publishing during his teenage years before landing a worldwide hit in 2023. Lethal Company is a wonderfully minimal four-player co-op that again rings the anticapitalism thematic bell for a simple and satirical game where you control anonymous and extremely fragile hazmat-suited flunkies hired by a cynical megacorporation to recover scrap metal from abandoned bases crawling with monsters and death-traps. And it’s so fun to play with friends, and because this game exists solely in the tumultuous world of publicly developed Windows-only games, by the time I heard about Lethal Company, it had already grown a modding community around it. And I approached the game mod-first, because I was invited to play with a friend group that preferred to crowd six or more players into a session at a time, a rules-bend possible only if one installs a mod such as “More Company”, an add-on by someone with the joyfully echolaliac GitHub handle not not not swipe zee, which doubles the number of simultaneous players that Lethal Company normally allows. More recently, I’ve been really into Deep Rock Galactic, a truly great work by the dozens of Danes at Ghost Ship Games. Well staffed and with the maturity of years behind it, Deep Rock has a modding control panel right in the game’s own user interface, making the acquisition and management of developer-approved third-party rules-tweaks relatively seamless. Lethal Company, made by a solitary, scrappy indie is not a game in the same league, and the modding experience reflects this. Now the game is a hit, and you can find a lot of very enthusiastic advice about how to get Lethal Company mods to work on Steam Deck, specifically. Even so it was the project of an afternoon, and did require the acquisition of some additional kit. Friends: this is the game that drove me to buy my first bluetooth mouse, and I bought it for my Steam Deck. I regret nothing. So, yes, this did mean dropping into Desktop Mode, where you voluntarily unclip the Steam Deck’s cheerfully chunky game-selection interface to fall into the cold and austere plains of an Arch Linux desktop, your footsteps clacking and echoing down corridors studded with dimly-glowing terminal windows, whose limitless possibility is outstripped only by their obscurity. Happily, my professional background allows me to feel perfectly at home in environments like this, and so I was able to download and install the app called r2modman, and use it in turn to download and install the More Company mod. I wound up with a long list of Linux command-line flags that I needed to enter into a certain text field back in Steam Deck’s gaming mode. Now, Gaming Mode is meant to emulate a traditional game console, and so its text-entry capabilities are… present, but not its forte. Maybe there is a way to copy text from the Desktop and paste it into Gaming mode. You know, now that I write this I am thinking of clever things I could have done involving private web servers I run, but I didn’t do any of that then. Instead, I typed out the whole string into the MacBook I had open with the mod-installation instructions, and then after flipping the Deck back into Gaming Mode I typed it all in a second time. There is a slogan of the indieweb movement: Manual till it hurts. Friends, I had a game-date at 5 PM sharp, and I did not overengineer this solution. This exercise bubbled up memories from even further back in the past than messing around with Doom dot-WAD files in the 90s. It reminded me of nothing so much as carefully typing in long, long source-code listings from the back of various early computing magazines, lured—very much then as now—by the promise of a cool game bursting to life on my screen at the end. Back then, though, the code was not just long but utterly inscrutable; my eight year old self had no idea what each line of BASIC meant, or what what purpose I transcribed line after line of purely numerical data blocks. Here, at least I had an inkling about the meaning behind the gobbledeygook. I might not know what “BepInEx dot preloader dot dll” is, exactly, but I know the general shape and pattern of command-line flags and file paths when I see them. The advice from the internet was slightly out of date, it turns out, and I had to bring my own field-modifications to that serpentine text-string, swapping in references to file paths that I saw r2modman install. And, listener, I still got it. It worked on the first try, and I made that pre-dinner gaming date with an overlarge friend group. I have never been especially attracted to PC gaming because I don’t usually enjoy this kind of meta-gaming, fussing over settings and bits and pieces, just to make a game work. But it’s so nice to have a system that, when I do want to spice up a game’s ruleset with something off-menu, it trusts me enough to let me get my hands a little dirty. This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show at Venthuffer.com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.
Transcribe →
2: Trailers
Oct 27, 202400:06:53Tap to summarizeSubtle game trailers that stand out in a sea of sameness. Things mentioned in this episode: Steam Trailers in 6s on Mastodon Sturgeon’s law Skeleton Rebellion Sunflower Pie Show full transcript Full transcript: I found Skeleton Rebellion through a bot on Mastodon called Steam Trailers in Six Seconds. The bot performs exactly as promised, posting silent, automatically edited, six-second highlight reels from games’ promotional trailer videos, shortly after they’re published on Steam. The bot’s creator, Ichiro Lambe, ported it from the former Twitter at the end of 2023, almost exactly one year after I first purchased my Steam Deck. I quickly saw it not just as a great channel for discovering interesting new work, but specifically a spotlight on how the Steam Deck itself provided me an access-pass to magnificently bizarre worlds otherwise invisible. This is Venthuffer, a dream of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. After following Steam Trailers in Six Seconds for a while, you might start to become aware of a certain self-similarity among all the trailers for most new games. This came as no surprise to me, as one who has always had Sturgeon’s Law close at hand: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” The majority of the bot’s posts almost seem like clips from the same two games: either the prematurely released work of a precocious student, or a competently photogenic game about guys running around doing ordinary video-game stuff. Little pixel-folks bouncing around platforms collecting gems, a paranoid first-person view of a flashlight bobbing down a dark corridor, sharpshooters jogging around a gloomy battlefield. It all looks extremely familiar. Titles and blurbs and the occasional review score burst in and fly about, energetically listing game features as if you don’t already have a dozen or more entries in your Steam library with precisely the same qualities. But all this is necessary, it turns out. All this gruel, all this chopped-up trailer mash of undifferentiated game-stuff, serves as the bed of bland grain on which the most extraordinary colors and flavors might be set. One that writhed and glittered for me within the first few days that I followed Steam Trailers in Six Seconds was Skeleton Rebellion by Joe Renwick. This game is a very short JRPG that chooses anticapitalism off the menu of de rigueur indie-game themes, and implements it through a story of undead minions who are sick and tired of necromancers ordering them around under lousy conditions and worse pay. A typical trailer would probably tell you exactly this, in so many words, over some gameplay footage. Skeleton Rebellion’s trailer does not do this. Instead, it opens with a wonderfully bespoke fifteen-second-long animation where a wizard mumbles his claymation lips and wiggles his greenscreen-composited fingers, causing a stop-motion pile of bones to spontaneously form into the game’s protagonist. After the wizard points expectantly to a pile of trash, the skeleton slaps him upside the head, and only then to we segue into the montage of gameplay clips. But none of these have explanatory titles. And yet, all of them show, clearly, that this is a gonzo single-developer Final Fantasy clone fueled entirely by the same sort of joyfully kitchen-table animation that the opening cartoon showcased. The trailer combines taste and restraint with the wisdom to waste no time before establishing the game’s tone using that brilliant animation, laying down context and mood before getting to the unavoidable business of showing gameplay examples. It’s perfect, and remains perfect when ground down to six seconds. According to its store page on Steam, Skeleton Rebellion runs on Windows only. I don’t expect that to ever change; this is the default state for strange little indie games created with a shoestring budget. But, thanks to the emulation layer that powers it, the Steam Deck runs the game superbly. I began playing Skeleton Rebellion while reclining on my couch within minutes of seeing it blip by on Ichiro’s Mastodon bot. And as someone with no interest in building or maintaining a gaming PC, this is simply not an experience I’ve ever quite had before, this freedom to see a beautifully bizarre little Windows game for sale, and having it run in my hands moments later. I’m happy to say I’ve applied this freedom time and again since then, buying or at least wishlisting obscurities that sparkle and glint from the vast and otherwise grey terrain that is the Windows gaming world. Another game I found through the six-second bot at around the same time is Sunflower Pie, a short visual novel by ThePenSword. Not a genre I normally go out of my way for, but again, the game’s trailer looked so arrestingly strange and stylish against the majority of the bot’s content that I couldn’t resist exploring it further. So, while the Steam Deck can act as a hand-held pass to a whole and ever-growing world of strange and unique work, it leaves to you the challenge of finding the good parts. Eventually I did start to discover that tools for this purpose exist outside of what Valve itself provides, rewarding patience and curiosity with the joy of completely unexpected discovery. This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show at Venthuffer.com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.
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