The following is an episode of The Drawing Board, a podcast and video series by With a Terrible Fate that highlights the unstructured conversations about video games from which our analytical content is derived.
Welcome to the second installment of Meet the Game Analysts, a video interview series designed to give readers of With a Terrible Fate a richer understanding of the people behind the video-game-story analyses available to read on this website.
Dan and Aaron sat down with Caymus Ducharme, one of the more recently added members of With a Terrible Fate’s growing team of analysts. Caymus first entered the game-analysis arena with an article exploring how The Witness stretches the limits of what’s possible in minimalist video-game storytelling. Last week, he published his second article: a comprehensive look at how NieR: Automata‘s Ending E set a new standard for interactive storytelling.
We spoke with Caymus about a wide range of topics, including:
- His nuanced relationship with The Witness and the reasons that he chose it for his first article on With a Terrible Fate
- A deep dive into his most recent article on NieR: Automata
- How he views the relationship between video-game criticism and video-game appreciation
- His origins with video games and video-game analysis
- Why and how he believes that video games can continue to evolve and eventually tell better stories than Hamlet
- Which video games and storytelling topics he wants to explore next
Check out the full interview below—and look forward to more analyses from Caymus coming soon!