gaming

Silly Thoughts, volume 2

human transactions, and more things from May

Megan Bidmead

Megan Bidmead

— 6 min read
Silly Thoughts, volume 2

I, like many people, have been sucked into the delicious and slightly devious charms of the latest mega-hot puzzle game, Blue Prince. Move over, Lorelei! (I don't mean this. They can both live alongside each other in my heart.)

Blue Prince reminds me of a tabletop game we own called Castles of Mad King Ludwig. You'd draw rooms at random from a pile and try to connect them, building the most efficient and point-accumulating castle. In Blue Prince, you play a young man with a strange quest: in order to inherit your uncle's massive, sprawling mansion, you must locate the hidden 46th room. But where is it? Seriously: where is it? I'm literally asking you. At the time of writing, I haven't completed it. Which isn't surprising, because Blue Prince is the kind of game that reveals its secrets slowly and sometimes in a maddening order. You only have a certain number of footsteps each day, and every time you cross a threshold into another room, that number ticks down. One run can reveal a ton of juicy secrets, while another can end frustratingly early, giving you nothing at all.

I won't go on about why I think it's brilliant; other people have done this really well, like this spoiler-free review from Thinky Games. The point I want to get to is this: Blue Prince is commanding a lot of my time, and I'm not mad about it. The sheer puzzling prowess of it is quite something.

I'm not the first person to play this in my household. Chris played it first, and has done an honourable job at biting his tongue to stop himself from giving me the answers. He did a bit of digging and found out that Blue Prince was inspired by Christopher Manson's puzzle book MAZE, in which readers (or players, maybe?) have to find Room #45 and come back to Room #1 in sixteen steps. This had such a monumental influence on a young, future developer Tonda Ros that eventually Blue Prince was born. (So much so that Christopher Manson himself hopped on board to develop some of the puzzles and illustrations).

MAZE also inspired another, apparently less perplexing puzzle book, Daedalian Depths, which I bought for Chris to take on holiday with us. What a tremendously cool thing: inspiration upon inspiration, one thing building on another to make something new.

There's a subtle human transaction happening any time you engage with a piece of art, even if you're not aware that it's happening. When you read a book, or watch a movie, or look at a piece of art, or listen to a song, you're using your time to do so. We only have one life, and that life goes by quickly. So to give your time to something is significant. The longer you spend with a thing - that album you've listened to a dozen times, the 800-page book you've been reading for months - the more important that thing becomes in your life. So you pay with time, and sometimes money, and alongside the entertainment value of whatever it is you're enjoying, you also get the reward of being 'inspired'. You get to take something from it. And sometimes that thing could be an epiphany, something that changes your way of thinking on such a scale that it impacts the rest of your life. Other times, it could be something as simple as a word you like. Or a tone, or a mood set by a certain thing.

What you do with that inspiration is up to you. There's a chance that this thing could come out, at some point, in your own work. It could even be twenty years later when it happens: that word that stuck out to you will suddenly appear in your writing, and it will be just the right word for just the right moment. Or the unsettling tone of a particular book will somehow seep into a short film you make a decade later.

And while the line between inspiration and plagiarism is something that people have been arguing about forever, generally speaking, true inspiration is seen as a good thing. For many people, it's an honour to have your work regarded in this way.

This is the way it has worked for as long as art has existed in any form. People are still being inspired by Charles Dickens 150 years after his death. It's a very human thing. This taking of particular elements, reshaping them and putting them into new, original work is the way we slowly pass down artistic ideas through generations. It's part of the way human life, itself, works. I think that's why generative AI feels so much like theft: it's all take and no give.

I keep thinking about this recently. Call me a dork for being sincere or whatever, but this obvious idea has hit me anew. A fashion YouTuber I like called Beepworld put together her own outfits based on ideas from the runway, including recreating specific looks from Sandy Liang's Fall 2025 collection. Liang's inspiration for that was the beloved collectable toys of our youth: Tamagotchis, Furbies, and Polly Pockets. The same Polly Pockets I have still stashed in my garage. (I once wrote part of a short story inspired by Polly Pockets. Clearly, they wiggled their way into the heart of many a '90s kid, to the extent that they emerge in some form as creative projects decades later.)

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Isn't that nice? That chain of events, those passing down of ideas? Polly Pockets > runway > YouTuber's outfit combinations. Old and incredibly difficult puzzle book > brilliant video game. I'm reading a book called Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas; a short story idea popped into my head around Chapter Two, so I'm going to say old book about religion > surreal speculative short story. (Hopefully.) Everything humans make leaves a paper trail, a creative genealogy. You can map it out sometimes, if you look hard enough.

May is my favourite month, I think. May/June/July are my peaceful months, when the weather starts to warm up, so I'm in less pain than usual, and everything feels better.

Thank you for making the choice to spend time with me today. (Not just this post, any post; any amount of time you choose to give to my writing feels like a gift.) And in the spirit of this, here are some things I've enjoyed recently:

Right. I'm off. Have a good week!

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