If you thought “oh cool!” as soon as you read the words “Ethan Marcotte” above, then you and I understand each other. Ethan is a widely-cited author, designer, activist, runner, cat person, and one of the nicest men to have ever called me “you son of a bitch,” so I will try not to embarrass him by effusing overmuch in this introduction. Suffice it to say that he was an influence on me long before my good luck in network effects led to us becoming friends.
Ethan has more than once offered me kind encouragement about this newsletter project. Naturally I decided to take advantage of that kindness by demanding to interrogate him for said newsletter. Journalists have asked Ethan many questions about his work and advocacy, but in doing so, have left out one of his key qualities: a borderline-concerning skill at video games. I took it upon myself to correct this oversight.
The following interview has been edited for the usual purposes and all images herein are either linked to their source or are Ethan’s own. For once I did not add links to his answers after the fact, because he did that part himself! It all started when I emailed Ethan to ask what his favorite game was; he decided that in that moment it was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; I did some math and immediately began crashing out about the passage of time. Please enjoy the results below.
Ethan I hate to tell you this, but we’re closing in on the tenth anniversary of Breath of the Wild real fast, despite it being a game that came out when I was already an adult. I feel like it’s not okay for the second-most-recent Zelda game to be nine years old, because that game came out basically in the Present, whereas it is sort of okay for the first Zelda game to be forty years old because that is from the Past.
Do you and Zelda go back that far? Because like—I’m right, right? You know what I’m saying? NOTE TO SELF: Brendan remember to tie this question to the whole time theme in Zelda before you post it
Brendan. Brendan. First of all, it’s rude to start an interview with a question that made my knees crack upon reading it. As anyone can tell you I am in my early twenties and all of my joints work perfectly, and I resent any implication otherwise. How extremely dare you.
Jokes! Sorry! But, yes: I have been with Zelda since the very beginning. My family never owned the first game—I think we rented it for a few weeks from our local VHS rental place (look let’s just take “old as the trees” as read from here on out, ok) that had a small catalog of NES games. We then borrowed a copy from friends I then proceeded to play into the ground. I haven’t played every single game in the franchise, and some of them I’ve bounced off before finishing. But I have grown up along this series, and I suppose it has grown up alongside me.
Now, kindly get off my lawn, get a haircut, turn down that “rock music,” &c.
I apologize for the cruelty of reality and also my unkempt hair. Obviously, I read the poetic tribute to the game’s emotional undertone that you wrote on your blog and then had a hard time with its publication date. You highlight in that post the way loneliness arises in the game through setting and implication. That brings to mind my own favorite video game, Journey; it too can be very much a game about the tacit ache of being alone.
Do you remember the first video game that made you feel something besides excitement or frustration? How did it evoke that feeling?
Oh, man. The feeling that’s coming up for me right now is fear. And it wasn’t even in a game I’d slot into the horror genre.
This was back in the early nineties, and I was a few hours into playing the first Ultima Underworld. It was an early (the first?) example of a first-person camera in a role-playing game. One of my brothers was sitting next to me, and we were sharing keyboard duties as we crawled through the first few levels of the dungeon, trying to find some magical object or other. We rounded a corner on one of those darkly lit floors, and a massive skeleton was suddenly right there, in all the pixelated, twitchily-animated glory 1992 could offer. It felt like it loomed over us our tiny little computer monitor, and my brother and I promptly shrieked. I think I even force-quit the game, I was so terrified.
I’ve always loved video games. That’s the first time I remember being actively scared of one.
(loved that game tho)
I was typing up something about how System Shock 2 is the most scared I have ever been by a video game, and then I thought, well, I think Thief: The Dark Project got me pretty good even before that, and then of course I checked Wikipedia and realized that they shared their production lineage with… Ultima Underworld. Looking Glass games: scaring the piss out of a whole generation of children and their brothers.
I am honestly impressed by your force-quit reflexes. I think there’s something about PC games, perhaps especially 90s PC games, that primed you to be jumpy! I myself spent much of my youth with the background anxiety that pressing the wrong key could Break The Computer, which gave any immersive fear a nice base to build on. And your 1992 monitor may have been tiny, but if your keyboard was within arm’s length of the screen then everything was happening right in your face.
Do you play most often at a TV, on a monitor, or on a handheld these days? How do you find your favorite form factor compares to your gaming experiences from the past?
I almost exclusively play on a TV these days. Growing up I split my gaming between proper consoles and our dad’s various PCs, and then when I went to college I basically only played games on my dorm room computer.
(Well, there was the time some friends and I were kicked out of the college computer lab for playing Descent. Yes, the computer lab was completely empty. Yes, it was Friday night, and we were gaming rather than partying somewhere on campus. Yes, we were very popular and cool.)
Honestly, I’m not sure when or why I stopped playing games on a computer-computer. It probably has something to do with working in tech, and needing more of a good screen/bad screen division in my life when I finish work for the day.
Back to Breath of the Wild though, tell me something that you like about its visuals. Not its graphics necessarily, but like… the look of some place or object you think is cool within the game. I’m not trying to make you talk shop as a designer, but I do think you probably have a sharper eye for that detail in that kind of thing than I do. You know? NOTE TO SELF: Brendan don’t forget to delete your notes to self
Well, hey, I don’t know that my eye’s any better than yours! But personally, I love how the game wears some of its visual influences on its sleeves. Like, I remember thinking how damned clever it was that Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi—the game’s producer and art director, respectively—realized that gouache and en plein air weren’t just gorgeous painterly techniques: they could provide a lush, high-contrast world that could help a player quickly identify objects they wanted to interact with, or areas they wanted to explore.
They’ve also spoken about other historical and cultural influences on the game’s visual direction. Like, the patterning on the game’s “ancient” objects—like the Sheikah Slate and the shrines—were informed by the prehistoric Jōmon period of Japan’s history, and maybe specifically by Jōmon pottery. For a game that’s telling a story across two different timelines, I think it’s lovely how the designers merged several art styles—some of them old; one of them downright ancient—to tell a story that’s quite literally bridging an impossible, awful span of time.
Ethan this rules, I did not know any of that! The comparison to painting methods really struck me—my uncle is a collage artist who frequently works en plein air, so I’m familiar with it as a longstanding and powerful type of creative constraint. The realities of light and weather mean that outdoor painting sessions always have some kind of time limit, whether chosen or imposed.
And that in turn makes me think about how a lot of great games have sprung from a 48-hour game jam. Have you ever been part of a time-bound creative exercise like that? If you were going to be stuck in a room for a weekend creating some project at a fevered pace, who are some people you’d want on your team?
Oh, I’ve never done any group creative project outside of work, timeboxed or otherwise. I mean, I did just start a tabletop roleplaying game with some lovely folks in town, which I suppose counts. (And has been wonderful!)
But in terms of a weekend jam-type thing? I confess that the idea gives me mild panic—equal parts impostor syndrome, social anxiety, and the secret fear that I’m very slow when it comes to designing / writing / creating—but! I really like the idea of assembling a crack team. If I can pick ANYONE-anyone, and if I wasn’t going to start naming friends who might get embarrassed, I’d probably go with Tim Schaefer, Tamsyn Muir, Rosemary Kirstein, and Hidemaro Fujibayashi. My contributions for the weekend will involve making them tea and bringing them biscuits, and tell them all weekend how brilliant I think they’re being.
(Also, if you asked me this very good question tomorrow, I would likely have an entirely different list of names.)
I asked you what your favorite game was, and now I’m going to ask you about what I myself meant. Is BOTW your favorite game in the sense of “I keep feeling joy no matter how long I play it?” Or more “the memories I have from playing this game stand out above the rest?” Or more “I don’t know, tomorrow I’d tell you a different game because it’s impossible to choose one favorite video game?” Or what?
Okay so Brendan this is another tough question. And I promise this is not a clever dodge, but I think it might be some combination of all of those things.
Like, I definitely have other “favorite” games, and they all have some strong emotions or memories attached to them. Playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and The Secret of Monkey Island was more about sitting next to my two closest high school friends than it was about the games themselves. I’d do anything to experience Horizon Zero Dawn’s big narrative reveal for the first time again. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the first game I can remember making me sob—not cry, but sob. Basically, I’m closer to fifty than I’ve ever been before, and I’ve been playing video games since I was four. Maybe five? As I think back over certain milestones I’ve hit in my life, I can think of different games that were there as well.
At the same time, my first playthrough of BOTW was very much a coping mechanism for the start of 2017, and all the political horribleness wrapped up in those first few months. I’ve replayed it a few times since, but I don’t think the game will ever be completely divorced from that point in my life. The game’s themes—the importance of grief and memory, especially in the face of catastrophe and loss—touch on so many things I was feeling back then. It’s no accident that I turned back to it during the first few months of 2020. BOTW is a beautiful piece of art in its own right, but/and it really did carry me through some of the toughest periods in my life. I’ll always be able to turn back to it for comfort, and I’m grateful for that.
That’s a beautiful sentiment and it would be a perfect note on which to close out this interview. But I have to ask one more question, because there is one game you mentioned earlier in our correspondence but left out of these interview answers.
Ethan. I have rolled the credits on Hades 2. I think of myself as moderately skilled at it, for a filthy casual. But how. Are you clearing runs on this thing. In like ten fucking minutes.
I’ll start by saying that speedrunners have done, like, five minute speedruns of Hades 2, which just floors me. That said, I could probably write a few hundred words here about some of my more obsessive tendencies, and how I’ve noticed when I get into a specific video game, I extremely fucking get into that video game. I’ve cleared more runs of Hades 2 than I’d like to admit; all of my weapons and skills are maxed out; I’ve unlocked every cosmetic, every piece of dialogue, every relationship.
I do not say any of this because I’m, like, proud, mind you. But I do think it’s a testament to the game that even after wading through all that folderol, I still just really love picking up Hades 2, and letting my brain sink into the little world they’ve created.
But to answer your question more directly: Moros sticks are my main aspect, I run Strength builds rather than Death, I extremely enjoy Zeus and/or Ares boons. I start with Jeweled Pom then switch to Fig Leaf if I’m really trying to shave off a few seconds. Everything I just wrote in this paragraph is very likely why I can no longer really remember how math works.
AHA, so you freely admit that you’re not so slow at finishing things after all! What if I told you that the weekend jam I want to run is about creating the most immersive thing we could come up with… IN KEYNOTE?!
—you son of a bitch, I’m in.
