Now that's already funny enough but it was while watching Jacob Geller's video on COD's use of (or rather wanton obsession with) torture scenes I noticed something. The gist of his point was that in the entire franchise, badguys always immediately crack from torture and spill because they are, of course, of a weaker breed of person while the goodguy's unbreakable wills and superior moral purity allows them to both resist and perform torture with a 100% success rate. That is, Jacob Geller concedes, with the exception of one. Across the entire franchise sporting 20+ entries and nearly 50 separate torture scenes there is exactly one single instance where one of the goodguys cracks under torture. He writes it off as just some anomaly.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw has a Ryu Number of 4 3.

(CORRECTION: Per @dorkshove and @blasteg, Gandhi's presence in the Hearts of Iron games gives Yahtzee a shorter Ryu Number.)

(CORRECTION 2: An earlier version of this image incorrectly labeled the link between Gandhi and Ryu. Thank you to @zerphses for the correction.)

Both of these videos are about 2~ish minutes long but basically:

— ProZD was unable to appeal one of his videos that was falsely flagged for kids, which he’s remarked restricted the video severely.

— Second Wind’s Yahtzee Crowshaw has reported there’s been a huge dip in viewership on their platform since they rolled out the AI and has recommended turning off Restricted Mode.

I can buy "grass world" as being the "ordinary world" here, that's sensible, it's the starting location, it's a place of familiarity for our hero, that's all fine. And then finishing up the grass world is "crossing the threshold" into the magical world.

And I can also buy fire world and ice world as both being "the underworld", and the boss as being "the ultimate boon" step where the goal has been achieved and the hero gets his reward, and sure, we skip through most of the end stages of the hero's journey in a montage where there's a return to the lands of grass.

Everything else doesn't map though.

In theory, if we were following Campbell's template, ocean world would be second, because right after "crossing the first threshold" comes "belly of the whale". I think maybe you can make the argument that the desert is a form of self-annihilation, and that's why it comes next in the sequence, but then you have ocean world right after that, and it would seem to me to be redundant.

And what's actually going on is that, as far as hero's journey is concerned, the triptych of desert/ocean/jungle is really just "the road of trials", and the reason that they're arranged in that specific pattern (which they aren't always) is a matter of maximizing contrast between the worlds.

The whole business of mapping these things seems very fraught to me though, and I think a better argument is that each world is its own little hero's journey nested within a greater hero's journey. Except that the very nature of interactive games means that so many aspects of the hero's journey have to be thrust to the wayside: the standard Mario game and every imitator and descendant does not have any actual character at its center, it has a player instead, and there can't be any of the beats that require agency or choice or emotion.

I do think that it would be interesting to try to structure a bog standard platformer around the hero's journey, eight or so stages that mapped very cleanly to the motions that Campbell laid out, especially if this was done mechanically: what would it mean to have a world that embodied "meeting with the goddess"? A stage mechanically themed around "atonement"?

Feels a bit inappropriate to say "Happy New Year" these days; we should just say "New Year". New Year, internet. "New Year, Yahtzee!" The cosmic odometer has, indeed, ticked over again.