Venthuffer

12 - The family name

Rounding out the second season of Venthuffer is the episode about the origins of “Halstrick”, my relatively recent nom de jeu, as promised back in the zine’s earliest episodes. When I began planning this episode last week, I thought it would be a memoir of my history with usernames, a meditation on the value of experimentation with chosen names, and the reasons I borrowed “Halstrick” from my late father. Only the last of these made it into the final script. A cursory check about the name’s deeper history, which I thought would be lost to time, led to some tantalizing discoveries. Three days of research followed. The results are in the episode. Things mentioned or alluded to in this episode: * Guild Wars 2 Guardian [https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guardian] and Warrior [https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Warrior] wiki pages * The photo of “Uncle Joe” Halstrick [/episodes/12/rickys-photo.jpg] held by my brother * The Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History, and Genealogy [https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/milstein] * An 1861 photograph of several members of the 13th Regiment of Massachussetts Volunteers [https://civilwartalk.com/threads/soldiers-of-the-13th-mass-infantry.199533/#post-2605952] * Text extracted from A Complete History of the Boston Fire Department: Including the Fire-alarm Service and the Protective Department, from 1630 to 1888 [https://archive.org/stream/completehistoryo00bray/completehistoryo00bray_djvu.txt] at archive.org * U.S. patent number 190,431 [/episodes/12/gas-burner-patent.pdf] as a two-page PDF * Report of the Chief of the Massachusetts District Police, 1895 [https://books.google.com/books/about/Report_of_the_Chief_of_the_Massachusetts.html?id=c4fNAAAAMAAJ] * Joeseph Halstrick’s memorial page on Find A Grave [https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/278310002/joseph-halstrick] Show full transcript Full transcript: As my father lay dying, I picked up his name. This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. We arrive at episode 12, and the end of season 2. Before I take another break, I want to tell you about the name I use to produce this audio zine. I have used “Halstrick” as a general gaming handle since the purchase and setup of my first Steam Deck in late 2022. Since then—in fact, within the last few days of my recording this episode—I have learned so much more about the name. But before I get into that, I can share my personal history with it. Halstrick was my father’s middle name. Growing up, I never thought about it much. I started thinking about it more in 2013, a year I spent largely in Maine, suddenly put in charge of both my parents’ end-of-life affairs, the details of which I shall spare you. This meant a lot of time alone in hotels, and I passed this time by getting into Guild Wars 2, an online fantasy epic. I rolled up two characters, a man and a woman, a guardian and a warrior. My mind being where it was, I gave them my parents’ middle names. I wasn’t trying for any kind of serious act of memorial; I suppose I just liked the nudge afforded by having the names always in-sight while I played, reminding me of my larger purpose, away from home. Years later, I relocated from New England to New York, just weeks before the COVID-19 lockdowns, all of which felt like a definitive life chapter-break. After that, when I needed to choose a name for my online identity somewhere, I remembered that time in Maine, and I began to experiment with calling myself Halstrick. This included games with a more prominent social aspect, where other players address you by the name you present. And I found I liked being called by this name, one that sounds novel but not fictional, that has a pleasantly obvious shortened form, and with which I have a defensible real-world connection. So when the Steam Deck came, I took the plunge, and renamed my accounts on Steam and Playstation, and then Discord. Every platform or project concerned with gaming now sees me presenting myself as Halstrick—including the zine you are now listening to. Before I launched Venthuffer, I did ask my older brother, who carries my father’s name in its entirety, for his permission to represent myself online using something that he holds the literal birthright to. He granted this permission, generously and easily. And in doing this, he reminded me that the unusual name wasn’t just made up at our father’s christening. My brother has memory of being told, as a very young child, about a man named Joe Halstrick, a Civil War veteran. My brother was encouraged by older family, all long gone now, to think of this man as “Uncle Joe”. But other than a single sepia-toned photograph that he’s kept safe all his life—depicting a middle-aged man with bright eyes and a period-appropriate mustache—my brother knows nothing else about him, or his connection to our family, or why our father was given his name. Well, Uncle Joe did exist, but dad’s name didn’t come from him, at least not directly. I spent several days scouring the web, contacting more distant family members, and spending a long afternoon in the Milstein Division research room at the New York Public Library. Here’s what I learned. Joseph Halstrick, Jr. was born in 1841 in Boston. As far as I can tell, he never spent any significant time away from Boston other than an eventful year or two in the U.S. Army, where he served in Company C of the 13th regiment of Massachusetts volunteer riflemen, joining at age 19. You can find a photograph of him standing among his company, in a small clearing by a tent in a forest. He stands in dead center, brimming with swagger, one hand on his hip and the other resting over the business end of his long rifle, which he’s planted into the dirt like a walking stick. He stares down the camera lens with what is unmistakably the same eyes from the photo my brother has, daring you to call him out on his questionable muzzle discipline. Halstrick was wounded in action at the battle of Bull Run, and mustered out after spending the subsequent winter in the hospital, returning to Boston and resuming his work at his father’s silversmithing business. This trade would remain his central occupation for another 20 years or more. But Joe Halstrick was not one to settle down early. Sometime around 1867, in his mid-20s, Halstrick joined Hose Company 5 of the city’s firefighters. According to the 1889 book A Complete History of the Boston Fire Department, he was very soon “badly burned in an explosion of hot air” while on-duty. I’m not sure whether or for how long he remained a firefighter after that; the book mentions him no further among company rolls. What I do know is that, exactly ten years later, Halstrick was awarded U.S. patent number 190,431. This described an adjustable attachment one could install on the era’s ubiquitous gas lamps, “producing greater illuminating properties with a lesser consumption of the gas”. And some ten years after that, while in his mid-to-late forties, Halstrick changed careers, joining the Boston Police Department as a full-time inspector, specializing in factories. It seems strange today to think of a middle-aged rookie policeman, but I understand police departments around that time as undergoing a transition from citizen-watchmen groups into an organized, professionalized force. It’s not at all far-fetched that an experienced and decorated veteran, tradesman, and inventor—with a such a history of courage and resilience—would be welcomed as senior specialist in the new Boston Police. Halstrick stayed in this role for over 20 years, keeping meticulous records of his inspections. Shortly before he retired in 1907, his service was cited in a journal of American child labor law enforcement, naming him as a member of one of the country’s few police divisions that actively monitored factories for exploitative hiring practices. After retiring, he stayed as busy as his flagging health would allow, showing up often at events around Boston commemorating the war, or the city’s fallen firefighters. Joeseph Halstrick died in 1915, at age 73, and is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Boston. I am humbled and inspired by the life that Joe led. His demonstrations of heroic self-sacrifice for the sake of both his city and his nation speak of a character I can only hope to emulate in part. His mid-life career shift, after decades doing the job his parents wanted for him, resonates more directly, even uncannily, with the path of my own life. And the narrative implicit in his years-long quest to invent and publish a technology to save others from a terrible injury that he suffered? If I ever demonstrate a fraction of that drive on a personally meaningful project with global benefits, my life will have been worth living. But none of this explains how my father, born and raised in the small community of Rockland, Maine, 200 miles up the coast from Boston, ended up with Joe’s name fifteen years after his death. And this where the women come in. My aunt told me about my great great aunt through my father’s mother, named Cora Halstrick. I had found her obituary in the library, the day before, naming her as the widow of Joseph Halstrick of Boston. She had died in my father’s hometown of Rockland Maine in 1939, overlapping with dad’s life by a few years. My aunt recalled my grandmother speaking of Cora with affection and gratitude; she played an active role in helping to care for my infant father, and his brother—and their mother. And so that’s where my father’s name is from. The name is from Cora, a handprint of the love and care she showed my young grandmother’s family, one that my older brother still carries almost a hundred years later. This is not to eclipse Joe: Cora clearly remained deeply fond of her late husband, carrying several of his treasured affects and mementos with her to Maine. She told her niece about Joe, and many years later her niece told her children about Cora and Joe both, and eventually told her grandchildren too. My brother still has that ancient photograph from these tellings, surviving the clouding of time over memory. But I must acknowledge how, in accordance with the diminished visibility of women in the public record, the only documentation I found of Cora was of her passing, listing no details of her life or accomplishments other than her marriage to Joe. I couldn’t even find a wedding announcement about them. I did find another news blurb announcing Joe’s marriage to a woman named Mary Packard in 1868, a year after his injury in the explosion. Did this accident lead to their marriage, somehow? Did Mary encourage Joe to apply his mind to translate his pain into invention? How much of the patent might be co-credited to her, in fact? What happened to her? How much of his life did Joe spend with Mary, and how much with Cora? I hope to know some day—honestly, I hope to make some field trips about it—but right now, I don’t even have enough information to speculate. The treatment of the Halstrick women in the records I found is so frustratingly curt as to be almost funny. Joe’s obituary in the Boston Globe mentions neither Cora nor Mary; another paper’s note about his passing states only: “He leaves a wife.” In a who’s-who book I found about notable Boston residents dated to the closing years of Joe’s life, there is a listing for “Mr. & Mrs. Joseph Halstrick”. So here are those who held the name, together: a 19th century Bostonian who led an astoundingly full and meaningful life, his surviving partner who subsequently went to Downeast Maine and directly helped my grandmother’s family flourish, and another woman whose story is rich with potential but painfully obscure. I didn’t know any of this a week ago. What am I to do with it all? Well, I’m going to keep the name. My father didn’t like to talk about his past, or his family. He never suggested what his middle name meant to him, and he died before I ever thought to ask. My research unearthed not just the life story that I was hoping to find, but a story of people who cared deeply about family, and community, and civic duty. None of this has much to do with video games. I started using Halstrick just to keep dad in mind. Then I used it because it sounded cool on the internet. Now I want to keep holding the name, specifically because I know more about the basic goodness that it represents. I have studied and written about video games for my whole life so far, and I’ve come to accept that that’s how the rest of it going to play out. My main lens for examining games these days is less as challenges or passtimes and more as art, as communication, work made by people for other people to comprehend, transferring perspective through play. And I feel so lucky that I have the chance to continue my personal game studies under an already-adopted name that is so weighted with bravery, and ingenuity, and caring. This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, find links to the things I mentioned on this episode, or subscribe, at Venthuffer dot com. If you enjoy this show, tell your friends. I’m taking a break after this episode, and plan to return with more Venthuffer later in 2025. Be well, stay playful. And you can find me, on Steam, as Halstrick.

11 - Neon

Through sheer luck I happened to overhear an offhand mention of a new Llamasoft game, a remake of an obscure coin-op from the 1980s with which I happen to have a peculiar history. This leads me to reflect on one of the longest still-active auteur careers in video games, and ask the question: Who are Jeff Minter’s games for, actually? Things mentioned or alluded to in this episode: * Jmac’s Arcade on I, Robot (1984) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae261qbBLZY] on YouTube * Space Giraffe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Giraffe] on Wikipedia * Tempest [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(video_game)] on Wikipedia * I, Robot (2025) [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2932910/I_Robot/] on Steam * Tempest 2000 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_2000] on Wikipedia * Psychedelia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelia_(light_synthesizer)] on Wikipedia * Neon [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_(light_synthesizer)] on Wikipedia * Gridrunner [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridrunner] on Wikipedia * “On Authorial Intent and Space Giraffes” [http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/06/on-authorial-intent-and-space/], a 2008 blog post * Polybius [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_(2017_video_game)] on Wikipedia * Tempest 4000 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_4000] on Wikipedia * Ian Malcom’s Mastodon post about I, Robot [https://mastodon.social/@imalcolm/114365081099765748] * Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story [https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/llamasoft] homepage * Jeff Minter on Mastodon [https://toot.wales/@llamasoft_ox] The cover artwork for this episode uses the image “Giraffe over the Horizon [https://www.flickr.com/photos/31801622@N07/5823497858]” by bobosh_t [https://www.flickr.com/photos/31801622@N07], licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 [https://mirrors.creativecommons.org/presskit/icons/cc.svg][https://mirrors.creativecommons.org/presskit/icons/by.svg][https://mirrors.creativecommons.org/presskit/icons/sa.svg] [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse]. Show full transcript Full transcript: In 2007, I recorded the penultimate episode of Jmac’s Arcade, a reminiscence of the all-but forgotten video game I, Robot. This is a bit of what I had to say at the time: “Though I didn’t play it much at the time, apparently my experience of seeing it in the arcade is unusual; it was a pretty rare machine, and how one would make its way to the Bangor, Maine game room I frequented I’ll never know. […] The game itself is actually pretty fun. Despite the title, the story—such as it is—is more Phil Dick than Asimov, with some Orwell thrown in for flavor—the game was released around 1984, after all, a year which contained as many winking references to its namesake novel as you might imagine. Stylistically, the game’s a 3-D platformer in its most literal sense…” Ah, I was in such a rush to get the words out, back then… Also in 2007, Jeff Minter celebrated a quarter century of being the video game world’s best known ruminant-obsessed creator with his company’s release of the psychedelic shoot-em-up called Space Giraffe. Hobbling out on knobby knees, it clattered onto Xbox, the game console I was most interested in at the time. The reception was nonplussed, at best. Most gamers of the day did not know what to make of an acid-house alternate-universe take on Tempest, one full of quite intentionally impenetrable visuals: as much a neurological hack to shock the player into a flow state as a traditional game with scores and levels. According to Minter, it was outsold ten-to-one by another publisher’s simultaneous remake of Frogger. In 2025, Llamasoft—the game company helmed by Minter and his partner Ivan Zorzin—quietly released another game whose lineage passes through both Space Giraffe and I, Robot. In fact, it’s called I, Robot, and it’s presented as a remake of that forgotten game from 1984, the same one I recorded a monologue about just as Space Giraffe started to ship to a world of unready Xbox fans. And you know I couldn’t let that pass without comment. This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick. Playing I, Robot on my Steam Deck with my headphones clamped on, letting my whole sensorium be battered by pulsing visuals and squealing sound effects as I fought to gain a sliver of comprehension about what I was even doing, I had the thought: Jeff Minter is the Miyazaki of… whatever this is. Building on an early career that helped define the scrappy UK gaming scene in the 80s with innumerable titles about mutant camels and stolen lawnmowers, Minter made a worldwide splash in 1994 with Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar console, a remake of Dave Theurer’s classic arcade shooter from 1981. Minter’s other creative passion involved creating music visualizers, or what he called light synthesizers, going all the way back to a simple demo called Psychedelia for the VIC-20 home computer in 1984. Some 20 years later, he co-developed Neon, the music visualizer built into the Xbox 360 console, and and this swiftly became the graphical basis for the full-court audiovisual chaos of Space Giraffe. The game’s mechanics are clearly inspired by Tempest, but Minter has always insisted that Space Giraffe is not a followup game, but its own bizarre beastie. Despite whatever disappointment Llamasoft might have felt from the game’s divisive reviews, Space Giraffe clearly set the course for Minter’s subsequent work. Now co-designing with Zorzin, Minter led Llamasoft into a prolific post-Giraffe period that continues through today, releasing scads of new work for mobile and console platforms, all bursting with the same intense energy, immediately identifiable by their mix of hyperstimulating visuals with barnyard-infused soundscapes. I had largely missed Minter’s first act in the 80s—I did enjoy the Atari 800 port of his first international megahit, Gridrunner, but I was too young to feel particularly curious about its authorship, and none of his weirder games about mystical goat-men and cosmic hover-sheep could easily reach a kid in the US. But by the aughts I had become aware enough of his name to pick up Space Giraffe with interest, and followed the controversy around it with enthusiasm, even spooling out some blog posts about how the fallacy of authorial intent applied to Minter’s defenses of the game’s perceived inscrutability. And, since then, I have bought every Llamasoft game I could: the reboot of Gridrunner for iPhone, the VR madness of Polybius on my PlayStation 4, the inevitable Tempest 4000 on Nintendo Switch, and now I, Robot on my Steam Deck. The launch of each one felt like a reason to celebrate, like a band you loved in your youth dropping a new album unexpectedly. This despite the fact that I haven’t really loved any of this work! I’m not sure I’d call any single title a great game. But I recognize the whole collection as part of something profoundly important, and worth paying for, and experiencing, and even studying. The most salient study question is this: Who are these games for? To a first order of approximation, nobody in earshot of me mentions a new Llamasoft game launch, despite the legendary status of its head designer. In 2025, Minter has been a globally recognized auteur for more than 40 years, and yet I heard about I, Robot through a single offhand Mastodon post by veteran game designer Ian Malcolm. The subject of that post, in fact, was Malcolm expressing pride at attaining a top-25 spot in the new game’s global leaderboards, and acknowledging that this was only possible due to the combination of novelty and obscurity that he has come to associate with all Llamasoft releases. Who is I, Robot for? Few people know about the original 1984 arcade game, fewer have seen it—let alone played it in its original cabinet—and I would hazard that fewer still know that its designer, Dave Theurer, was the same talent behind the orginal Tempest. I seriously wonder if the number of living people who can join me in claiming all three is larger than a dozen people. It can’t possibly be more than a hundred. So, if I wanted to, I’d have ground to claim that I, Robot is for me! Beyond the connection to Theurer’s original game that I’ve felt since 2007, the Llamasoft rework has more deep-cut references that delight and astound me, such as one level that is an explicit homage to Amidar, another primordial arcade game from 1981. But the truth, of course, is that I, Robot—like every other game from Llamasoft—is for Jeff Minter. The excellent 2024 interactive biopic “Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story” opens with an epigraph, quoting an old magazine ad: “He makes ‘em so he can play ‘em.” Minter isolated the elements that he loved about video games and music with his solo work in the 1980s, and all of his team’s output since then has been iteration and refinement using these same elements, again and again. Minter has welcomed all the intervening advances in game platform technology, but has used them strictly to dive ever-deeper into realizing his narrow and uncompromising vision for what a good game is, combining frenetic action with electronic dance beats, psychedelic colors, absurdly chatty text, and a vast collection of sampled ancient-arcade bleeps and hoofed-mammal chatterings. Jeff Minter is hardly the only active game designer making deeply personal work today. But very few creators in this space have such a lengthy ludography, one that has attained an astounding depth of expression by mindfully limiting the breadth of its interest. Theuer’s I, Robot had a frame story about a plucky little android rebelling against the watchful eye of Big Brother, staying one step ahead of its wrath. Minter’s I, Robot does away with all that, and signals the fact by sticking a pair of ovine horns on the robot’s head, making its only mission the ever-deeper furtherance of the Llamasoft oeuvre. I have the impression that Minter’s focus is driven less by obsession than joy. He has been a prolific poster to social media since the publication of Space Giraffe during the LiveJournal era. I have followed him off and on over the years, through Twitter and now Mastodon, tagging along as he wakes up, brews tea, tends adoringly to his flock of pet sheep, and then goes to the pub for a curry. Every now and then he might head into town for a show—maybe Underworld is touring again! Somewhere in there, he makes games, or codes up game-adjacent doodads, and posts hints and scraps of them. All of these things make him happy, and he enjoys sharing them. Again and again, every day, across years. I think he might be one of the happiest people on the internet. As I record this, my plays of I, Robot last only a few minutes, all my lives draining out on the presently inexplicable level five. I can’t yet claim any profound connection with the game. But I take such energy and inspiration from its role as the latest step on a brilliant artist’s personal creative journey, one that I feel very fortunate to coincide with. The ongoing work of Minter and Zorzin has so much to teach me about the primacy of finding what things bring you joy, and—as much as possible—simplifying your life down to their daily practice. Of continuously exploring and refining yourself, through focused, iterative, and meaningful creation. And, maybe every few years, releasing a bit of that into the world, to dance on its own, with colors radiant, and swirling, and wooly. 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. If you enjoy this show, tell your friends! And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.

10 - Resolution

“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.” [https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/06/23/invented/] * Agmena Paneuropean Book [https://www.myfonts.com/products/paneuropean-book-agmena-paneuropean-367538], the typeface used by Elden Ring * The $485 Volume Knob [http://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/2012/05/485-volume-knob.html] * Godot [https://godotengine.org], 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 affect how much energy a game requires to run, something of naturally particular interest to Steam Deck players! This doesn’t mean that the stat-juggling hobbyists are always wholly correct in the depth of their meta-gaming focus, but I have come to respect that their obsessions—which include speculation about how a new Steam Deck might better support higher FPS rates—aren’t without merit. Between my acknowledged longing for cleaner text rendering and my lesson in humility that I don’t, in fact, know everything about the potential of all future game technology, I can arrive at a place where I summon a measured portion of my father’s sense of satisfaction with the present. Letting the future arrive whenever it will, I shall neither squirm with unseemly anticipation, nor resist the possibility of unforeseen promise. When the inexorable opportunity to upgrade does come, I can resolve to meet it with my eyes open. 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. If you enjoy this show, tell your friends! And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.

9 - Extermination

Recalling 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 [https://store.steampowered.com/app/613100/House_Flipper/] on Steam * German cockroach (Blattella germanica) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_cockroach] 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.

8 - Suspension

The 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 [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+short+game+podcast+steam+deck&t=osx] that they kindly invited me to join. Things mentioned or alluded to in this episode: * The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage] by Marshal McLuhan and Quentin Fiore * Persona 4 Golden [https://persona.atlus.com/p4g/?lang=en] * Caves of Qud [http://www.cavesofqud.com] 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 [https://www.flickr.com/photos/62356799@N06/7858490506]” by sagesolar [https://www.flickr.com/photos/62356799@N06]. It is licensed under CC BY 2.0 [https://mirrors.creativecommons.org/presskit/icons/cc.svg][https://mirrors.creativecommons.org/presskit/icons/by.svg] [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse]. 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.