Game Facts
Game Facts Podcast
Slay the Spire (2020)
0:00
-4:11

Slay the Spire (2020)

Growing older sometimes feels like a zero-sum game.

Slay the Spire
By MegaCrit Games
Released on iOS in 2020

At its core, narrative describes the passage of time. Everything else—characters, plot, description—is ornament. I’m thinking of “The Secret Miracle,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, about a condemned playwright desperate to complete his final work. At his execution, before the fatal bullet strikes, God stops time. Locked in this moment with nothing but his consciousness, the man can finish his play. Even in stasis, with the story reduced to nothing but a character’s thoughts, there’s still a kind of temporal movement. Writing happens, then stops. When the play is complete, God unfreezes time, and the playwright meets his end. 

I read that story when I was eighteen, during my third and final semester at UArts. Sebastian, my Latin American literature professor, either didn’t notice or care that I often showed up to class stoned. It was clear by the quality of my papers that I cared about the material. I was a frustrated music major, burned out on ensembles and private lessons. There was something comforting about the structure of this class—read, discuss, write. Mastering an instrument is a slog. Progress never goes in a straight line. But here, I could see a path forward to the end of the semester, an assurance of growth. It was right there in the syllabus.

I dropped out and got my literature degree eight years later. Since then, I’ve been reading less and less. Blame real life and varied interests. I mean, I’m still in the middle of like eight books; I just have no idea when I’ll finish them. Reading is meditative and calming but also lonely, and the past few years have been lonely enough. I don’t want to just bear witness to a narrative. I want to be part of one.

Video games are participatory. They give you some measure of agency. You control an avatar, make choices in a simulated world, and work toward a specific goal. No matter how much the game railroads you, you’re still the co-author of the story. 

I think we can see this logic at work in narrative-light games as well. There’s barely any plot in Slay the Spire: you ascend a tower, fight monsters, and upgrade your abilities along the way. Battles are brief, and every win earns you a choice of new boons or buffs. There’s pleasure in that loop of accomplishment and reward, that mix of freedom and predictability. And what else is predictability but a curtailment of freedom? To thrive, to stay engaged, we need structure and focus. We need to know what to do next.

God only gave Borges’s playwright a single option, but it was a good one: finish this thing before you die. Or, more accurately, finish this thing and then die. It’s the gift of no distractions, of perfect focus. I wish I could be so dedicated. Growing older sometimes feels like a zero-sum game. It’s getting harder to decide what’s worth my time, what’s within my grasp in the years I have left. I write and I play music—and I’m good at both. But if I gave up one to devote more time to the other, I’d be even better.

0 Comments
Game Facts
Game Facts Podcast
Sasha talks about her middle-aged bewilderment from a QTPOC perspective. And video games, kind of
Listen on
Substack App
RSS Feed
Appears in episode
Sasha V
Recent Episodes