Off Center Episode 17: Transgressive Games and Understanding Male Gamers with Kristine Jørgensen

Scott Rettberg: Welcome to another episode of Off Center. I'm here with Kristine Jørgensen, a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Bergen and the PI of the Center for Digital Narrative, who's leading our game studies node. Welcome, Kristine.

Kristine Jørgensen: Thank you, Scott.

Scott Rettberg: So today I'd like to talk about a number of different things. One is your research journey, how you got from where you started as a PhD student to where you are today. Another is a big project that you did over a period of several years called Games and Transgressive Aesthetics. I also want to talk about a new project that you're working on called Understanding Male Gamers. Then maybe we can talk just a little bit more generally about how games and narrative interact and what the function of narrative is in games—If there is a function, if they're opposed to each other, if they work together.

Kristine Jørgensen: Great.

Scott Rettberg: All right, let's dive in. Why don't we talk about how you became a game studies scholar to begin with?

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah. I don't think it's that interesting of a story because I just started out like everybody else. I think right now, or at least in the past, everybody who is a scholar in game studies is basically a gamer at heart, they started gaming, playing on their Commodore 64 and Nintendo’s and whatever back in the 90's and 80's. That's also where I'm coming from. I was very interested in games, back in the late 90's I started media studies and found these obscure texts about interactive fiction and about e-literature— Texts that Espen Aarseth wrote when he was a postgraduate and things like that. Those articles really sparked my interest in thinking about the fact that we can do things like this in media studies.

Scott Rettberg: And of course, Cybertext was written here, in this very building.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, it was. I have my copy. It has a lot of annotations in it.

Scott Rettberg: Great. So, what game did you like the most when you were a kid? Just out of curiosity.

Kristine Jørgensen: Oh, that's a really difficult one. I have these very fond memories of a game that I played with my cousin when I was, I don't know, seven years old or something like that. There was a game called Bride of Frankenstein on C64. I thought it was really scary, all these monsters coming after me.

Scott Rettberg:  Okay, that sounds like there is a narrative, and links to classic narratives as well.

Kristine Jørgensen: Oh, it does, it definitely does. But I don't think the way I remember the game—there wasn't really a lot of narrative. It was a platform horror game. You were the Bride of Frankenstein, and you were supposed to pick up different body parts to make sure to put the Monster of Frankenstein together.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah, that's funny because one of the most popular early hypertexts was Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, which was about the Bride of Frankenstein. So, there's another connection to the digital narrative.

Kristine Jørgensen: There is.

Scott Rettberg: Now that I think about it, if my kids are having a little figure run around the screen and pick up body parts for entertainment, maybe that's a little transgressive? So, how did you get into this idea of edge cases or transgression in games?

Kristine Jørgensen: Oh, that's a difficult question. I think that when you play games, a lot of video games have a lot of what you can call—I mean, it's about shooting and killing and there's a lot of violence. A lot of things that innocent bystanders, I mean, your grandmother or whoever, they would look at the screen and see, “oh, this looks really horrible, this must be problematic in one way or another.” But as a game player, you never—of course, there are different situations and people, but very often when you play a game, you don't really experience what is happening on the screen. Even if it looks quite excessive, it doesn't feel excessive when you play a game. That observation was quite important for me when I started thinking about the Games and Transgressive Aesthetics project. What I was interested in there was to try to explore that, to talk to people about their game experiences when they were playing games that had some, for them, transgressive content and to look at in what cases—

Scott Rettberg: So are first person shooters transgressive by their very nature?

Kristine Jørgensen: No, I don't think so. I think it is a problem about the concept of transgression as well, because it is very idiosyncratic. It's about whatever you find to be somehow triggering or uncomfortable for you. That is one of the essences of my project, that people have different understandings of what is transgressive for them. The project is also about what individual players find transgressive versus what is seen as transgressive in society. That tension between those two things is quite central in that project.

Scott Rettberg: It is interesting just as I think about the history of games to a certain degree, not all games, but a lot of them grow out of the military industrial complex idea of how you interact with computers. The earliest computers were used for things like missile trajectories and I'm thinking of a lot of the early arcade games that I played when I was a kid, like Space Invaders or Missile Command, you would be moving a vessel around the screen, shooting things. Then as we get into the genres of computer games, things like Castle Wolfenstein and Doom— There is this historical association between games and violence as a kind of transgression. But then those also become a genre. In a way, it's the opposite of transgression. When first person shooters are, maybe not as much so anymore, but for a period, those were really the dominant form of commercial game, right?

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah. That historical development is of course there, and that relationship still exists. The research on military games and militaristic games is almost a subgenre of research in itself, both in terms of the more critical studies that—the industrial or, as you were saying, the military complex, the societal relationship between those. You asked if first person shooters are a transgressive genre, but if you could just ask another question, whether militaristic shooters are a transgressive genre, and in some respects, they can be seen as transgressive because they deal with militaristic things and deal with war; that is obviously a transgressive topic in many ways. But in other words, you see that the commercial developers, when they're creating military games, don't really want to show the transgressive stuff. They don't want to show how war really is; they want to give you a nice experience where you are the hero.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah. When people die, they just fall over. You don't spend a lot of time focusing on it.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, exactly. You don't show the civilians who are killed in war or you don't show war crimes or anything like that. You do it in a more sanitized way to make an interesting and entertaining experience. My colleague Holger Pötzsch has written about how military games are sanitized and that they are not transgressive. They're explicitly attempting to not draw any sense of subversion or sense of discomfort in the player. In that sense, you could say that military games are the opposite of a transgressive game.

Scott Rettberg: And in a way, they're normalizing that, too, right? I always think of the example of America's Army, which was a game that the US military passed out at high schools, at recruiting events that took you through the process of going to boot camp and then going off on the campaign. It's a way to make us comfortable with war.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah. But it also deals with one of the other tensions we had with the word transgression in this project, because you can say that by trying to make a game like a military game not be transgressive, it is transgressive because they're subverting what war is about. That is also at the center of the issue with that term, transgression, because it can mean all or nothing.

Scott Rettberg: It’s transgressing a lot of different values. Some of the games that you dealt with in the project did look at war from a completely different perspective, right?

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah.

Scott Rettberg: There's one about someone hiding.

Kristine Jørgensen: You’re thinking about This War of Mine, which is an indie game created by a Polish developer and which is basically about trying to show the experiences of civilians during war. That is a different way to do that. I know that game got a lot of praise for its perspective on war and for showing another perspective. But of course, a lot of people would also say that trying to do that would be transgressive, because games are supposed to be only about fun and for play. Whenever you show something and create difficult experiences through a game that is itself a way to transgress the idea of what games are all about.

Scott Rettberg: Right, and we get into this idea of serious games.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, in many ways we didn't really do research on a lot of traditional serious games, games for learning or things like that. But there definitely was a serious aspect to a lot of the games that we were studying and looking at how do they represent different kinds of uncomfortable or difficult experiences and to what degree is that something that games should do?

Scott Rettberg: I think I remember there was one where a mass shooter was the protagonist, right?

Kristine Jørgensen: Oh yeah. Hatred. That was also by a Polish developer, there's something about the poles, I guess, where the developer was aiming to create the most violent game ever, and it was just a mediocre shooter.

Scott Rettberg: Right.

Kristine Jørgensen: Critics were asking whether this was a rhetorical strategy to make sure that it would sell, since it wasn’t a good game. Saying it was supposed to be violent would probably get some media attention, and it did.

Scott Rettberg: Okay, so there's different ways of transgressing here. One is maybe to give us a different perspective on war that's less sanitized, another one is maybe just using violence to go over the top. What are the kinds of transgression that you look at in terms of ways that games transgress societal codes?

Kristine Jørgensen: Both of these games that we've been talking about now are very important games in the study and games that we actually exposed our participants to because we did studies with actual players. We did diary studies where the participants played these games at home, and they logged their experiences with those games. And of course, that is also creating a lot of interesting questions because is it ethical to subject your research participants to—

Scott Rettberg: Something possibly traumatic?

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, so, one thing is the fact that if it's traumatic to them, maybe it's not a good thing to expose them to. But of course—

Scott Rettberg: It’s a research result, right?

Kristine Jørgensen: It is. But then of course, they volunteer to be part of that study because they have some expectations about what they're going to do, and that might, in itself, mitigate the experience for them. So, maybe it became more or less transgressive.

Scott Rettberg: That's interesting just in terms of thinking about research methods. A lot of the people involved in the center come from humanities backgrounds, and social science, humanities and game studies really overlap and intermingle in a lot of different ways. But you come from social sciences. This research method, would you describe it as qualitative participant research? Tell us a bit more about methods and what methods you think are most effective for understanding games.

Kristine Jørgensen: You say I come from social sciences, but I don't. I'm a humanist, but I work at the Faculty of Social Science. That is when I'm not with the CDN.

Scott Rettberg: You’re in fact one of the deans, right?

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah—In terms of research method, qualitative methods are what I'm able to do. So, it's always about qualitative methods. I think that, if you're going to be able to find out anything about people's experiences, it needs to be qualitative. Because it's hard to quantify experiences without putting specific labels on things like perhaps some psychologists do, like sad or happy or whatever. To get an understanding of how people experience degrees of transgression or the lack of transgression, in the gaming context, you have to make sure that they are able to somehow document or narrate their experiences over time. We found that to be a bit difficult in terms of transgressive experience. If a game is transgressive, it doesn't need to be transgressive from the moment you turn it on until you finish playing it. It could be just the moments of transgressions and how could you identify them, how can you make sure that they are being played in the right ludic context without playing the whole game? If I were trying to expose these people to one particular scene in a game, that would be out of context, and maybe if they found that particular episode to be transgressive, they might not actually find it transgressive in a bigger span of the game.

Scott Rettberg: Well, I like the fact that it's mainly about the stories that people tell about their experiences of games, as how you get to broader insights. Did you find that the stories people were telling surprised you?

Kristine Jørgensen: If they surprised me? I'll just have to try to think back to specific situations that these participants were talking about.

Scott Rettberg: Well, their reactions, let's say. I'm just thinking about whether this kind of research is verifying what you already know or if it's opening new pathways, new questions?

Kristine Jørgensen: I don't know if I can say I was surprised or not, but what we found was that people have very different experiences with the same game and content. How they process the game is different in the moment that they’re playing, versus how they think about it the day or the week after.

Scott Rettberg: Have you looked at in the moment kind of stuff too? You're not into the whole eye tracking thing, right?

Kristine Jørgensen: No. We didn't do that. It was based on the players themselves reporting. Their instructions were that whenever they would play the game, they should answer the questions in this survey; it was quite qualitative. They described what emotions they had, what they had been playing, etc. And then we also did a follow up interview after that finished the whole session. It could be two weeks, three weeks after the session and then we got a lot of—they were talking about the games in a different way than what they did when they wrote in their journals, right? For example, we had this woman who was playing Grand Theft Auto(GTA) and she got a bit jumpy. She wasn't good at driving cars in the game and she happened to run over pedestrians, but it wasn't her fault. She didn't intend to do that. So, she was jumping in the chair saying “oh, I didn't want to kill these people”. That was the first session, the second, and third session, she said: “But this is fun, let me do it”. So, yeah. She moved from having this feeling of transgression or whatever you could call that—she was surprised to have this reaction of something she didn't intend to do, but then she realized that it was part of the fun.

Scott Rettberg: So, understanding the language of the game and understanding, not the cultural morals of your life, but the cultural morals inside the game.

Kristine Jørgensen: Absolutely. But what you could see when I interviewed this woman some weeks after, she said that she'd been thinking about these moments and she did enjoy the game, but she was thinking that this game is about people from poor communities and who are criminals because they don't have a choice. And then she thought: “I don’t really think it's a good thing to be entertained by people and their tragedies.” She got this other sensation when she had the opportunity to consider what she was doing.

Scott Rettberg: Did you go driving with her afterwards?

Kristine Jørgensen: No, I did not. I'm not certain I would like to.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah. Well, there’s an interesting question too that this brings up. I think that sometimes game makers might come in with a rhetorical position or with an ideological position. Sometimes it's “oh, okay. Violence will sell in this game” or “I know this genre and if I can do a lot of really detailed flames dancing across the screen or something like that, then I'll sell more”. But other times, and certainly in indie games, people come into it to make some argument or to promote discussion of societal issues.

Kristine Jørgensen: That's true. We saw it in the games that we used. We chose certain games that had gotten a lot of coverage because they were supposed to create emotions or to concern humanity, or our emotions in a deeper way. They certainly were games that would try to convey a message. When we were trying to map or decide what games we wanted to use for this project, that is the kind of game that our attention was led to. We were searching the internet for discussions about what is a game that is transgressive or that breaks with expectations. We saw these games that people praised for creating emotions which were unexpected or that felt important to them. But we also did look at games like the one I talked about: Hatred. Also, I think that GTA is a game that puts the participants in two camps. There’s a camp of people who loved the game and found that its satire works well. And then you have the other group, who find that the game doesn't speak to them at all because they find it transgressive. It makes fun out of situations that aren't fun, like the woman who was running over all these pedestrians. With Hatred, most of the respondents fell into the category of not liking the game. They found it bad and speculative. A lot of players didn't find that to be very transgressive, at least over time they found that, “okay, yeah, it's the first time you see—"

Scott Rettberg: See how it can jump the shark and—

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah. The first time you saw a beheading it felt a bit odd, but when you've seen it four times, you knew basically what the game was about.

Scott Rettberg: Something that just occurred to me is, what do you think about the idea that games are a carnivalesque, like the philosopher Bakhtin talks about, a release from the constrained societal norms that we have every day. People step outside of that for a very temporary period in order to have a different experience or to step outside of where they fit within the usual societal structures and test things out without necessarily becoming the things that they're playing.

Kristine Jørgensen: Torill Mortensen and I, who I wrote one of the books in this project with, did a chapter where we applied Bakhtin’s carnivalesque framework—if you can call it a framework —to these games. I think it is a reasonable way of explaining transgressive game content; It taps into the idea that I was touching upon, that games should be about something fun, that they shouldn't be serious. What we discussed in that book was that sometimes games get criticized for that precise thing, if they are trying to address something transgressive or uncomfortable, that they shouldn't because it's supposed to be about playing games. In those situations, I think that Bakhtin’s theory could absolutely explain what is happening, that this is a temporary arena or situation where this means something else than it otherwise would. Early game studies theorists were quite attentive towards trying to talk about games as something that was happening within a magic circle, a parenthesis to real life. But we are questioning that in the Games and Transgressive Aesthetics project. We also think that that frame, the fact that games and playfulness somehow mitigate the seriousness of whatever is in the game, is a way that makes games very fitting for that kind of content. Because even though you might experience something that is difficult in a game, I mean emotionally difficult, it's still something that you don't actually experience because it's only in the frame of a game; it's still fiction.

Scott Rettberg: We've been talking about transgressive games, but now I want to turn to the topic of your new project, that you got some Norwegian Research Council funding for called Understanding Male Gamers. First of all, I know that there's a lot of stereotypes out there of what gaming does to the male psyche, and there's certainly some very prominent examples of disturbing things, like the Gamergate scandal, of which maybe we can talk a little bit about, in terms of how gaming culture addresses gender. Maybe start there, why should we have a project on male gamers, and what do we hope to understand?

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, that's a very interesting question. As you said, there has been a lot of situations when gaming culture has been discussed in popular discourse and in the news media, and there is no doubt that there is a lot of people in gaming culture, particularly women and minorities, that are facing a lot of difficulties when they play games, a lot of harassment. There is no doubt about that. There's been a lot of research on that which shows that there is a lot of what we could call toxicity in gaming culture, and that there are a lot of people who experience toxicity. What is quite interesting is that this research is always based on the experiences of those women, of the minorities, etc. Of course, that is the case because nothing else would make sense in the context of the situation, but what it also shows is that there has not been much research on male gamers. This argument didn't end up where I wanted.

Scott Rettberg: But the research has been on examples of toxicity, the experience of female players who must conceal their gender when they're playing online or they'll get harassed in various ways, or racist discourse in chat rooms and massive multiplayer online games, which is something that's common.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah.

Scott Rettberg: Although, if I look at my kids playing games and I see my son playing games with his friends, of course there's always this worry, is this the world that he's entering into? Is this what he's going to be taught or socialized in this environment? I don’t think so. I think that he and his friends, teenage boys, it’s probably not primarily a venue for developing racist and misogynistic characteristics. It doesn't seem to be that way from the outside. I guess what I'm wondering is, how do we get to an understanding of both how these environments can develop, but also, what about the rest? You want to uncover that middle range as well as the extremes.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, absolutely. The ordinary, if we can call any gamer ordinary, they're ordinary kids, ordinary adults who play games and they happen to love games. But what we have seen in game studies is that, historically, empirical research on players has focused on men. Most of the players that are documented in research are men. Whenever somebody does interviews or surveys of players, they end up with 90 or 80% male respondents. So that has led to the situation that we believe that we know a lot about male gamers because, statistically, we know about them, and demographically they are mostly male. But we haven't really—

Scott Rettberg: Does that percentage map on to the gamer population, is it 80-90% men?

Kristine Jørgensen: No, it does not. Not now, not anymore. It might have in the past, but now international numbers show that it's still a small majority of men, but it's like 55 versus 45.

Scott Rettberg: But also, it's men versus young men.

Kristine Jørgensen: Oh yeah, absolutely. But the thing is, because of these numbers, it's been mostly men who have been respondents, but they haven't really been the subject of research, right? These respondents happened to be men. So that also has led us to think that we know a lot about men and we don't know that much about women. So, a lot of the gender research has been on women due to that fact. None of this research has asked what it means to be a man and a gamer, whether there is a relationship between those things. Is gaming a very masculine thing, and if so, how and why? And is that the reason why you see a lot of toxicity in gaming culture? When I've done research on players about the contestation of gaming culture, I do hear women say that, yes, they feel there is a lot of toxicity. They often avoid playing online games due to that. But male respondents sometimes tend to say that “of course there is a lot of toxicity in gaming culture, but everybody is subject to it.” They don't really believe that women see this to a higher degree than themselves, because they also experience it. I don't know, I don't think there has been enough research to really show whether it’s true or not. But research so far suggests that it is worse for women and minorities to be gamers than it is for men.

Scott Rettberg: Well, maybe that's another question, how the content of the games relates to the cultures that evolve around them. Is there a lot of machismo involved in Stardew Valley or Minecraft, versus some of the more military oriented games?

Kristine Jørgensen: I mean, there is so much diversity in games these days, both in terms of who plays them, but also in terms of game content. You have this idea about games being first person shooters. But today, games are also Stardew Valley, and what they would call the emergence of the genre “cozy games,” which are, you know, games that are cozy, and which have a different profile and a different experience than high paced shooting at whatever moves.

Scott Rettberg: Talking online Scrabble.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, exactly. A lot of these things are happening in online communities where games happen to be a part of that community. And I think that online setting is part of why there is the experience of toxicity, it is probably connected to the online sphere. It might be because it's somewhat impersonal, you don't see these people. Often, the kind of games that you play online with strangers are high paced, adrenaline filled games where it might be easy to also be verbally aggressive because you are in a competitive mode, you have this adversary situation where you have enemies, and you have friends.

Kristine Jørgensen: There is something about that kind of ludic—

Scott Rettberg: Even the scenes around it, right? Like Kristian Bjørkelo wrote about Skyrim, I haven't played it, but I understand it is a game based in Norse mythology. And it became a hotbed for antisemitism, for Nazi groups to get together when they wanted to play something because it was a very Aryan safe environment.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, exactly. That’s an interesting case, I think, Skyrim. Because that's an open world role playing game, and it’s set in a Nordic environment. When you play the game, at least when I played the game, I got the impression that this community of Nords, which they're called, which are these Norse Viking-ish people. I got this idea that they were really attentive towards race and heritage. When I played the game, I got a sensation that they were making a joke out of racists, but then racists basically embraced it and said “oh yeah, they are talking to us, and this is how it is, and yes, we want to play these people because they are racist and so are we”.

Scott Rettberg: Yeah, they just jump right into the stereotypes, I guess. There's a whole history too of, if you think about Lord of the Rings, right? Great novels, but—

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, exactly.

Scott Rettberg: You go back and there are these ideas of races that have defined qualities.

Kristine Jørgensen: That ties back with the transgressive games project. The idea that the same kind of content can appeal to very different groups for different reasons, even though it is the same content.

Scott Rettberg: What would you say was your experience as a woman playing games, coming up over the years? How did that shape your entry into this project?

Kristine Jørgensen: I don't play online. I haven't played online for many years. That's always been the thing. I don't really want to go there because I know, the few experiences I've had online haven’t really been that pleasant. It's not that it's been something that I feel—I haven't been harassed personally, but just the environment is bad. I've been in World of Warcraft for many years, and that's not really that kind of online environment. But you did meet people, and you talk to people who sometimes were—they didn't really treat you as a human, probably because it was over a distance, you were only doing, you know, textual.

Scott Rettberg: Right, right.

Kristine Jørgensen: And if you did something that they didn't like in a group setting, for example, if you happened to get your group killed on the monster or whatever. They would get angry with you; they didn't really have a lot of patience with people who didn't play on their level. I've never been the best player, so sometimes I did stupid things. Those situations were quite uncomfortable.

Scott Rettberg: It's interesting that it’s become the default. It's a strange thing you probably expect and maybe a generalization too. But it does seem that a lot of the stories that come out of massive multiplayer online games are stories of abuse ultimately. Which is sad. I liked World of Warcraft. Although I only played it with academics. We were like 20 academics, we were polite.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah. You're polite. You asked about the Understanding Male Gamers project and my entry way into that. As you can imagine, from what we're talking about now, I like games, and I've always been interested in games generally. I've been part of gaming communities that are also related to analog games. And my experience is always that I've been playing with mostly men for my whole life, and they're nice guys. We couldn't really recognize that situation where all these—It sounds like when you were looking at all the feminist research in game studies, all male gamers are bad people. But that is not true. Well, first, it was anecdotal evidence that I had. But it created a suspicion that these stories about all these bad Gamergaters and all these bad men online, that must be just a few people. It's not something that characterizes the whole culture. That is the background of this project. I want to talk to men to understand what it is to be a man and gamer and how they feel that this contestation and all these things that are happening in game culture, how they interpret it and what they feel about it.

Scott Rettberg: And I do think for me, at least when I was growing up, gaming was an important part of my youth, but it was going to the arcade with a bag of quarters and hanging out with everybody, watching people play games. Then it was going and playing basketball or catch or baseball or whatever. There was that traditional type of game. Then, there was the brand-new cool computer game thing, where now I think it’s the default. After the pandemic, especially, there was that period where that was the only way for young men, adolescents, to play with their friends. I think there has been a profound shift to where it's such an important part of the social sphere growing up.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah.

Scott Rettberg: Maybe just before we go, this all fits into a broader focus on games and narrative. We don't need to get into it, but there's the ludology narratology debate, the birth of game studies where Espen and other folks were saying “well, you shouldn't be trying to think about games as stories. You need to use a different vocabulary”. But I think now, increasingly, there's attention towards the place where games and stories meet. What role do you think story plays in games or what are the most important aspects of that?

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, there is a long answer here. I'll try not to talk too much, but I've been through that whole thing. When I started as a master's student, I wanted to write about games as narrative, but I was discouraged. When you've been playing games, you see that they contain and concern themselves with narratives. And I think that it is something that the games industry has embraced. They don't doubt whether what they are doing concerns storytelling or not, because it obviously does. They are trying to create interesting stories in their medium, which is games. So, my question is, if the practitioners out there, the people who make games, if they don't doubt that, and if they're able to create interesting narratives using a game as medium, why should we as researchers doubt that? I think that is an academic, you know, analytical—

Scott Rettberg: Turf battle.

Kristine Jørgensen: Yeah, exactly. It's just a structuralist battle over definitions. I think that we have to look at how people experience these things and how they are developed. If people experience these things as games and as narratives, that is what they are. And I think that is one of my—how players experience games is my concern. So now, I want to study how people experience games as narratives.

Scott Rettberg: Excellent. And before we go, what are the three best games of all time?

Kristine Jørgensen: Oh, no. No, I should have expected this. Planescape: Torment. It's a digital role-playing game based on the Planescape setting in Dungeons and Dragons.

Scott Rettberg: Okay.

Kristine Jørgensen: That one. That is my go-to and only answer.

Scott Rettberg: All right. Planescape: Torment. That's the one I'll have to check out. Is it better than Galaga?

Kristine Jørgensen: It is.

Scott Rettberg: I don't believe it. Well, thanks a lot, Kristine

Kristine Jørgensen: My pleasure.

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