Jordan Cassidy

Boosting again, please share! Still looking for writing work-- full time or contract, i'm incredibly adaptable and eager to learn and grow ✍️

Always pumped to see more publications and writers hop onto blue sky.

Hey ya’ll. Pleased to say Inverse now has a Bluesky account, and I will (largely) be running it. So if you’d give @inverse.com a follow on here, I’d tremendously appreciate it.

It’s unreal how much shit I simply do not say.

Developing a very potent crush on both Moros and Nemesis which feels like a real referendum on my future as a bisexual.

Still thinking about Expedition 33 almost every day.

Thanks for providing such a good jumping off point! Maybe I'll just keep myself on track with writing by yes-and-ing something *you* write every week.

And that embodiment is at odds with genres where the friction is arguably more cerebral in nature - like with menu-driven JRPGs.

For some, Expedition 33 is the affective equivalent of finding crunch berries in your cheerios. Those parries just aren't supposed to be there.

I'll also add to all of this that I believe friction, and what it is meant to do within specific genres, is why there has been so much debate about parrying in 2025. Parrying is an intense concentration of friction that produces strong embodiment.

Place that alongside all the other themes of pilgrimage and monasticism in Silksong, and all that friction suddenly becomes incredibly productive for understanding what Silksong is *doing*.

I'm still working on the full argument here, but I needed to get all that out of my brain to move forward lol

It's telling that Silksong places all this friction *in front of* the bosses. It's saying, "if you cannot calm yourself through the run, you cannot face the enemy."

This might annoy you as a player - and again, fair enough - but it *is* fascinating for a game in which you play a warrior monk.

I would argue that it's one way that playing Silksong is an exercise in monastic embodiment. It simulates patience and skill through repetition. Frequently I'd find myself steeling for a run at the boss by literally emptying my mind, breathing into my chest, and calmly reapproaching the sequence.

But friction is also useful in terms of thinking about how games make meaning. Why might Silksong be forcing us through these sections over and over? Sections which frequently are *extremely* non-trivial, requiring high level platforming and combat to navigate over and over.

Here's what I mean. In his piece, Westen describes the friction of Silksong's long runbacks to boss battles:

"Long runbacks to bosses did not make it feel any better when I finally won," he says.

Totally fair if you're investment in a game's friction is primarily about fun or completion.

Westen over at Big Nerd is tapping into this idea of friction and effort as a way of reframing the more well-trodden (and at times tired) conversation about games and difficulty. I like this reframe because it more precisely connects us to conversations about pleasure, meaning, and accessibility.

Not everything from Aarseth's work has aged well - I think his work put game studies on a weirdly isolated growth trajectory that often put it at odds with other disciplines, rather than integrating with them - but his work was right to put nontrivial effort at the heart of understanding games.

In 1997, Espen Aarseth coined the term "ergodic literature" to describe texts that require "nontrivial effort" to traverse. It was his way of distinguishing between traditional literature and the emerging category of interactive texts - cybertexts.

My Hottest Gaming Takes of 2025 So Far This may surprise you, given the title of this article, but I don’t like a lot of “hot takes” in the gaming space. I feel like a lot of these takes are given in bad faith, and mos…

Been an interesting year for thinking about friction in video games. @bignerdgaming.bsky.social shared some interesting thoughts about friction as part of his Hot Takes piece last week (bignerdgaming.com/2025/10/03/m...), and it's planted a bug in my brain that hasn't stopped buzzing.

A thread. 🧵

“The South will not rise again
Until it’s paid for every sin
Strange fruit, hard bargain
Till the roots, Southern Gotham.”

She knows what the fuck she is about.

Huh. I thought 8/10 was pretty consensus on Tsushima - that’s about where I’d put it too. Excited to try out Yotei though, it definitely looks more my speed.

Hell yeah my guy. Every new victory counts.

First clear in Tartarus complete - 37 nights in. Maybe slow to get there, but I'd been knocking on the door for a few runs. Love the way completing a run just draws me deeper in. Fantastic stuff.

The triumph of trumpism is directly related to years of liberal politics equating politics to consumption, a dynamic typified best by a phenomenon I call “the millennial comfort object,” I.e, nostalgic fan properties like Harry Potter and Taylor Swift. In this essay, I will…

I like Hecate a lot. She’s a kind of character that was just missing from Hades 1, and my relationship to this world is much richer with her in it.

No poet quite as tortured as this prose.

I have a lot of thoughts about the new TSwift record, but the weirdest is why has she been listening to all of Weezer’s worst work?

As a hater, been really enjoying the fallout of this Pitchfork top hip hop albums list.

Upcoming Horror Game From Spec Ops: The Line Director, Sleep Awake, Is Sensory Overload Sleep Awake is a promising upcoming horror collab between the director of Spec Ops: The Line, Robin Finck from Nine Inch Nails, and Blumhouse.

Sleep Awake is a promising upcoming horror collab between the director of Spec Ops: The Line, Robin Finck from Nine Inch Nails, and Blumhouse. www.endlessmode.com/article/upco...

We love a dev keeping it a buck lol

This graph makes me very anxious.