This essay isn't mine.
I taught a course on Interactive Fiction last semester and a graduate student named Kate Worzala wrote a really nice piece on Tale of Tales's game The Path for her final paper in the course, which I then encouraged her to submit at PopMatters.
While Kate grew up around video games, she doesn't self identify as a gamer and was a little leery of the course's subject matter. She hung in there, despite playing games like The Path and initially finding herself despising it.
I actually understand writing about that which you despise. I often found that the books that I disliked the most when I was a student often occupied my thoughts when it came time to write the paper, causing me to seek somehow to explore them all the more. Maybe I wanted to understand better why others admired them? Or maybe I wanted to confirm why I shouldn't like them at all? I'm not quite sure. (I do know that I admire Hemingway a great deal more now than I did then, though.).
In any case, Kate brought some definitions of labyrinths from Umberto Eco, some discussion of The Path by L.B. Jeffries, and her own thoughts on her experience with the game and grappling with what it was all about together in the essay. I think that she ended up with a pretty nice piece about the game as a result:
Labyrinths of Childhood: Exploring The Path
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