One of the ways I best understand games is by trying to think about what it is about who we are that makes us want to play and to make them. Why did this particular medium choose us, and why did we choose it?

I still think all the time of this Turbo Grafx-16 game I liked as a child: A young man beams into town on a rainbow against the backdrop of a red sky. Accompanied by a surreal, plinky tune he receives inscrutable advice from salespeople, is a bright cutout of turquoise and white as lucky cats tumble endlessly through the air, whistling when they drop coins.

I’ve said before that I think games give us the fantasy of control over action and interaction, the option to erase, restart, re-do if we mess something up. Today, I’m also thinking that the fact games are historically alienating and abstract, tend to deal with unfamiliar and lawbreaking spaces, helps us feel drawn to them, too. Things that feel beyond us are fascinating and relieving at the same time.

Like I feel a surprising contentment around people who are all speaking a language I don’t understand. There is a sense of insulation, there. They could be talking about anything, and so suddenly it can stop mattering what they’re saying. You can enjoy an abstraction of being among people, but the fact you don’t understand them seems to remove their ability to frighten or harm you.

As a child I experienced a sense of wonder about music, because I struggled to understand and make sense of lyrics. I often perceived simple sung phrases to be complicated and beyond my comprehension, like if I didn’t immediately understand what the singer was saying, I concluded it was some word or idea too large for my child’s mind. I always accepted and embraced this, and taking for granted that there were many things I had no need to translate or comprehend was comfortable.

The games of the 80s and early 90s gave us that sense of soothing absurdity. Either because the medium felt new or because we were children or both, it was its language — sometimes the unexamined nonsense-lexicon of fantasy, sometimes things lost in translation from Japan — that endeared us. Those games felt like shorthand for things bigger than ourselves, for the mysteries of the universe. The word “zone” still holds a kind of magic, to me. It means a capsule domain, governed by its own themes. Means video games, definitely.

Prolific thecatamites seems to naturally understand the appeal of aesthetics and intention always seeming potentially just out of reach of the player’s immediate translation. His games have that ‘mysterious artifact’ quality, and in this great new interview, he explains having been captivated, when young, by the idea that bewildering games just spoke a language beyond him:

Super Mario Land… definitely had an impact as I remember being pretty bewildered by it. You’d jump up and hit some block and a little blob thing would come flying out and play a sound and leave a little incomprehensible message which I thought said LUP. It was all very self-assured which convinced me that it knew what it was doing and there must be some context I was just missing.

Love that, and deeply relate. Back to delivering my life to Candy Box, and its mysterious, beloved ASCII Candy Merchant. More on that soon.