The Tales of Berseria has all of those elements. It couches them in terms of a story that is mature and nuanced. Instead of putting you in control of the forces of good in their battle against pure evil, you assume the role of a once kind and loving elder sister who turns into a ruthless monster. Her name is Velvet and she is out for revenge, driven by nothing but hatred. Her mortal enemy is her brother-in-law, Artorius. He seeks to remake the world in his own image of pure reason, strict discipline, and moral excellence so as to free people from their propensity for greed, corruption, and thus demonisation.

Artorius is not your typical bad boss. On the contrary, he is a paragon of virtue who understands that sacrifice is an irreducible component of any ambitious goal that elevates a person above mediocrity. Artotius embodies rationality and what would historically be considered virile values. He is the stiff upper lip kind of man, who shows no emotion, and is ready to do whatever it takes in pursuit of the right thing.

There is something noble in the traits of character inherent to Artorius; something that everyone can learn from. His problem is one of degree: he is too rational, too knightly, and thus fails to pay attention to the other facets of his being. By essentially foregoing his emotional side, by pretending to be pure spirit without a body that knows attachment and pain, he loses that finely calibrated mechanism we have to understand when something has gone too far. He can no longer feel others, as “others” are reduced to numbers, data points that need to be manipulated until the model yields the desired results.

Velvet is his overly emotional counterpart. She exhibits all the wonderful traits of care and loving, such as how she treats her younger brother. Though those too also lend themselves to disaster when they are misapplied. Love erga omnes is the kind of naivety that invites the wolf into the herd, for example. Similarly, emotional intensity has the potential to turn into uncontrollable rage and self-harming hatred when it is not framed by common sense.

Artorius is a monster for being too rational. Velvet is a monster for being too emotional. This fits nicely with the Delphic teachings on moderation and the wider Greek worldview of admixture. The Greeks think that there is no such thing as pure good or pure evil. Whatever we get can be either of those depending on its degree and the prevailing conditions. As such, we have to exercise judgement and have situational awareness. Quick-and-dirty rules do not work, not even for something as common as drinking water: the right amount is healthy, however both too little and too much will kill you.

Where we want to be is between the extremes, at a point of harmony that recognises all facets of our being and takes everything for what it is in its potential to be benign and detrimental to us. There is a side of us that is scholarly, another that is caring, a third that is lustful, a fourth that is combative, a fifth that is inventive, a sixth that is community-building, and so on. We cannot be only one. Similarly, we have a body and a mind. It is pointless to argue how one is godly and the other is not. They simply are. This is what the Greek worldview comes down to: accept the world as-is, not how you fancy it to be, recognise the multifacetedness that is germane to the human condition, and work with what you have.

Artorius wants a world of complete predictability and total uniformity. If we are all the same, then we have nothing to be jealous of, nothing to fight for, and, therefore, nothing to keep us apart. We can think of the famous song of John Lennon, titled Imagine, as a relevant contribution. The singer asks us to imagine how nice it would be if we had no differences among us, no religion, no country, et cetera. Why stop at the level of institutions though? We can extend that principle to physical traits: imagine we are all the same height, with the exact same looks. Think about how much easier it is to produce a size that fits all! Oh and how nobody will be able to out-compete the others on anything!

What Artorius and John Lennon get wrong, even if they have the purest of intentions, is that they have a prescriptive view of the world. They are arguing with the gods like spoilt children. To get what they want, they necessarily have to undo the innate diversity of our kind and of nature at-large. To every expression of individuality they will have to counter with the preponderant force of conformity, so as to maintain their order.

The ancient myth of Procrustes (Προκρούστης) provides a powerful image for this disastrous propensity for homogenisation. Procrustes is a capable man who has a John-Lennon-esque idea to make all people the same. He implements his plan by placing people on his workbench and making them fit its dimensions. He stretches the limbs of those who are shorter and he cuts off the excess parts of those who are taller. In other words, he is torturing them. Procrustes may be well-meaning at heart, yet his plan inevitably leads to cruelty. Artorius, and I would argue everyone like John Lennon, is destined to do the same even if they think they are not.

Coming back to the Tales of Berseria, Velvet grows as a character as the story unfolds. I think her characterisation is well done. Along the way she finds interesting companions who also go through their own transformations. Without going into the details, Rokurou becomes something more than the villain he is, while Magilou reveals a side of her that was not obvious.

Since I mentioned Magilou, she and her sidekick Bienfu have among the funniest supporting roles I have seen. They add much-needed levity to an otherwise grim world. It is the other lesson to be drawn from this game: to see the comedy alongside tragedy, the absurdity of drama, how it they all ancient theatre, and to recognise that we can still laugh even though we know that underneath that thin layer of politeness and civilisation lies savagery.

It is not clear where you are and what exactly is happening to the world around you. You wake up in the middle of some indeterminate place and must walk to another location. Even completing the game does not tell you much of what is going on. The ending leaves everything open to interpretation. There is no dialogue or any hint you can read on. Just unending darkness.

Limbo is all about the gameplay and its attendant vibes. The actions you may perform are basic directional motions and a single jump. There are no power-ups or tools you may acquire. Beside your innate motions, you can interact with some objects in the environment to solve puzzles, such as to push a crate around or pull a lever.

Each section represents a single puzzle. Solving it allows you to progress to the next section. The problems you are confronted with require both situational awareness and well-timed execution of actions. In other words, you will die a lot until you figure out what to do.

The Limbo gameplay revolves around the idea of trial and error. A small miscalculation and your life is forfeit. You respawn at the point where the puzzle starts, which typically means that you are only a few steps behind where you stopped. Dying is the means through which you learn about the requirements of each puzzle.

This loop of death and rebirth as a vehicle for learning is a fecund metaphor for how we recalibrate our corpus of knowledge. As we are exposed to new information, the now incompatible part of us must be left behind: it cannot form part of the new world. To err in honesty, and to become aware of our mistakes, is to liberate ourselves from the grip of the given falsehood. Those who are afraid to make mistakes, those who do not admit to any wrong, those who choose to only show a boutique view of their self, are not going to progress to the next “puzzle” because they refuse to go through the cleansing baptism of fire that is trial and error.

Limbo executes its ideas well. The atmosphere is consistently eerie, the environment remains unwelcoming throughout, the mechanics are precise, and the puzzles are smart. It is a nice experience all around.

A friend of mine had the game installed on his computer—a fact his mother loathed. “What are you boys going to do with your life!?”, I still hear old Jenny freaking out over our complete lack of interest in education. My friend was terrible at the game, by the way, so I understand his mother’s frustration: at least he could have gone into e-sports had he applied himself more meticulously, you know.

The few times when I would not play football due to adverse weather conditions, I would stay at his place for a couple hours to watch him build up his mighty dukedom at snail’s pace. He would assign a single villager to build all the fortifications, one lass to do all the fishing, and a truly manly man to mine the gold under the beating sun. Then we would just sit there like complete idiots to marvel at the peerless work rate of medieval people.

This is not how you sell a franchise, I know… The game is actually great. I consider it one of the best ever. It still receives patches and new downloadable content because it gets the core gameplay right and has a tonne of things to explore. Casual gamers can enjoy a nice blend of city-building and historical trivia, while seasoned players will find a deep real-time strategy game that shall test their ability to manage resources through space and time as they overcome their foes.

The campaigns are based on historical events, so history nerds will be especially pleased to explore the many cultures they can play as from virtually all corners of the planet. Furthermore, they will be inspired to find answers to the hardest problem of modern science, which is how did those skirmishers carry infinite javelins.

Beside the campaigns, there are exhibition matches with all sorts of rules that are about the intricacies of winning a war through superior control of civilian and military units. Indeed, what we learn from the game once we try to play it at a competitive level is that there is no such thing as an objectively superior army.

Each civilisation has its own strengths and weaknesses, which are expressed through power peaks and valleys as they advance their economies. There is a gameplay logic to this, so that it is fun to play and experiment with all the options. Though even real-world war exhibits the same patterns of force through temporal and spatial magnitudes. For example, the combined armies of USA and Israel may, on paper, be stronger than Iran’s but they have clearly lost the asymmetric war as of this writing.

Concretely, it is a mistake to pick a culture in-game on the basis of whose technology tree yields the strongest units towards the later parts of a match: you may never live that long. At the competitive level, early advantages tend to have a snowball effect. It is thus essential to maintain the pressure high and control the geography of the conflict. Continuous small wins contribute to success much more reliably than a long-planned single killer blow.

What is a bit silly with the latest expansions to the Age of Empires II platform is that the historical window continues to widen. It used to be focused on the European Middle Ages, roughly after the fall of Rome to the widespread adoption of gunpowder. Whereas now you can play as the ancient Spartan infantry as they stand their ground against their primordial enemies of, checks notes, the Jaguar Warriors of emperor Montezuma…

Humans are notoriously bad at drawing clear delineations. If you do not believe me, just ask the neocons at Washington DC to produce a map of the Middle East.

Seriously though, it is cool to get such fan service which doubles as genuinely interesting content. There are probably a few hundred hours that you can put into this game just to get through all the campaigns. Though in practice there is infinite replay value to be had. It is just a matter of how determined you are to distance yourself from society.

What I do consider a negative about the latest additions to the platform are the increasingly gimmicky mechanics that some special forces have. There now are units that project an aura, others that have a charge attack, and others still that can switch forms. While those ideas are cool in their own right, they make for a highly complex interplay of factors: it detracts from the simplicity of just spamming Huskarls at your enemies until they ragequit.

You progress through a sprawling world of forests, mountains, lakes, sand dunes, and underground laboratories, fighting increasingly challenging enemies.

The story is never explicitly given to you. There is no dialogue, no exposition, no lore you may read on. Much like the life we are endowed with, at some point you become conscious in a world that predates you, have all sorts of questions for which there are no definitive answers, and must carry on doing what your condition renders unavoidable. To what end? People come up with clever theories but none is necessarily correct.

The character you control appears to be suffering from some severe illness. At several points during the adventure they cough out blood and look considerably weakened. The protagonist is haunted by visions of inimical figures that pursue, attack, and mortally wound our hero while plunging the world into darkness. Who may those shadowy forces be and what are their plans? There is no obvious answer.

As you move around the map, you collect tokens that may be exchanged for permanent upgrades to your gear. For example, you can buy an extended magazine for your gun and augment your sword to also deflect any projectiles fired your way. This is how you become more potent, though you never reach a point where the game feels easy. Even with all the upgrades you still need to pay attention to your movement, avoid attacks, and strike when the time is right.

The audio design is essential to the atmosphere of the game. Each area has its own theme. The overall mood of solitude in a dangerous place is reinforced through sound. Though it can feel repetitive if you backtrack a lot—which you will do if you are curious enough to check every edge of the screen for hidden passages.

What I like the most about Hyper Light Drifter is the story it communicates through its subtle style. It leaves threads open-ended for the player to interpret according to their own sensitivities.

To me, what we are presented with is an allegory for fear; the fear of losing that which we hold dear. Our hero is confronted with the monsters that spring from within and must overcome them in order to move on. Where to is unknown. To reign supreme over those horrors requires that we embed in feeling the recognition that we do not actually own anything: not the tangible goods, such as the sword we wield, nor the intangible qualities we colloquially refer to as “ours”.

I am a fan of the gameplay. Shooting is precise and the feedback direct. Enemies are generally easy to discern as they stand out from their environment. Their motions are basic so you will quickly figure out how to exploit their weaknesses. In this sense, the game is easy. I personally like it that way as it contributes to the absurdity and lightheartedness of its lifeworld. It would make no sense for those hordes of cultist psychos to be at once delirious in fanaticism and assiduous in their every decision.

My favourite part of the violence is those critical hits that you can score with a precision gun. Once I got my hands on a sniper rifle I was going around “bang! bang! bang!” with the headshots. By contrast, the assault rifles and submachine guns felt underwhelming. It is preposterous to have those unarmoured maniacs take thirty bullets to the stomach without flinching. Though I make an exception for some “epic” weapons that would just annihilate everything. I had one such shotgun which turned an otherwise challenging boss fight into a 4-second press of the trigger.

Borderlands is proudly silly and self-deprecating. It has a certain humour that you may love or hate. I find it appealing. The characters you meet are flat and uninspiring, which I think is a perfect fit. Why would we even make pretences to intellectuality when we are here to pop off some heads? I would find it unsettling if, say, Vaughn was contemplating the implications of his existential angst, even though he looks a little bit like a certain philosopher I know! To me he is not a believable character. He is a talking head that gives you orders and provides colour commentary for a little while until some other equally uninteresting figure takes over.

What the cast of characters does well is express unhinged opinions while behaving casually. As outsiders, we may think this is over-the-top, though we can also take the view of the anthropologist in describing without judging how other people behave. In this regard, the delivery is super effective in highlighting the underlying values of such a futuristic wild west. The only law in this land of danger and opportunity is that of the gun. Individualism and cut-throat competition are the governing principles as each person is set on a path towards personal enrichment and glory.

There is no such thing as legitimacy in this world. Courts of law, correctness of conduct, and tolerance of diverse opinions are the kind of conventions that have no place in the hypercapitalist normality of the Borderlands. The supreme powers that mobilise resources are private corporations which engage in business deals using either financial or martial means. Kind of how Western Europeans conducted trade in East Asia during the Colonial Age, as both businesspeople and pirates.

In this regard, Borderlands provides commentary on some of the excesses germane to our world. History is, in large part, a record of humanity’s inexhaustible capacity for cruelty. Many insatiable butchers of men are remembered with the epithet “the Great” or variants thereof. The most greedy CEOs are revered as prophets of the one true money-god for their remarkable consistency in sacrificing everything to the altars of profit. The villains in Borderlands are social media personalities with a massive cult following who end up being as shallow as our world’s celebrities.

If anything, the fantasy horrors of the game pale in comparison to the brutality that we can now bear witness to in 4K definition. And that we do with indifference, using it as yet more fodder for our doomscrolling mindlessness. Our politics and social norms are increasingly influenced by pernicious memes. We are made to follow greater-than-life characters qua caricatures who speak nonsense and are dead serious in the same sentence.

It is all jokes and gimmicks until you are sent to the front lines to die for the interests of some lobbyist nerds. They are cowards. They will never lead by example. Instead, they will make you, the desperate yet capable fellow, give up your life for their unholy cause. And in times of peace they will ruthlessly harvest your organs for their evil rituals. At least in the Borderlands you have the option to digistruct yourself for another round. Whereas here you get the middle finger and are even happy to have received some attention.

I got Florence (spoilers below) because it was peddled as a puzzle game. Given my positive experience with Gorogoa, I thought to myself “my body is ready!” and looked no further: https://protesilaos.com/games/2026-05-26-gorogoa/.

Alas, Florence is barely a game. The player’s agency is reduced to super simple interactions for 30 minutes. If I am to judge Florence as a game, then I am not giving it a passing grade.

Still, Florence has the redeeming quality of being an interesting interactive novel. The elements of interactivity make for an effective story-telling medium. Depending on the audience, this is more reliable than presenting people with a wall of text that they will get bored of within 3 seconds.

The story is about a girl named “Florence”. She leads the generic modern city life. Her world extends from her home to the office, while her social affairs are largely confined to a binary choice of “repost” or “love” buttons on a social media app.

Like her fellow city dwellers, she commutes while being absorbed in her own world, enabled by digital media. Instead of paying attention to her surroundings, she blasts music in her ears and stares at her screen all the time.

In other words, Florence embodies and symbolises the robotisation of the human being. This is the person that had anticipated and embraced its own obsolescence by machines long before the advent of AI. The introduction of artificial intelligence has, in this regard, been a formality, the culmination of a process that stretches back several decades.

AI can be a celebrity and influencer because those people are reducing themselves to caricatures: fake looks, fake clips, fake personalities. AI can be an office clerk as those are tasked with a robotised job anyway. AI is your new emotional support and romantic other because the solitude of digital life at-large took intimacy away from you, while porn and its Hollywood counterparts gave it the fatal hit. And so on.

There is a life outside that world; a life of slow pace, of simplicity, of austerity, and appreciation of the little things. Talk to a modern girl like Florence, for example, and she will tell you about her notion of freedom, which revolves around the pursuit of a career. Social standing is the token that matters. If this girl has more of an intellectual side, she will expound on the evils of traditional societies, and will go to great lengths to explain how terrible it is for women to be seen as “baby machines”. Instead, she will continue, freedom is realised through business opportunity, not understanding that she is daydreaming of becoming a “paper machine” that the corporate higher ups will blithely replace with an actual bot.

As the story progresses, Florence has the good fortune of running out of battery on her phone. The digital world that is depriving her of situational awareness no longer has a hold on her psyche. She is finally free to notice finer points in her milieu, even though she is not well developed on that front. She meets a guy named “Krish” that eventually becomes her boyfriend.

Through this love affair, Florence discovers a small part of the human element. She encourages Krish to cultivate his musical talents. In turn, he inspires her to express her own artistic inclinations and connect with what she used to suppress for a lifetime, pressured by her “tiger mom” to focus on the bullshit goal that is academic excellence at all costs.

In this regard, Florence gives us a hint of what it means to not be absorbed in your own world and to not settle for mindless routines. Do what you must to survive, but otherwise resist the degenerative forces of inertia as you become your own person and a champion of fortitude.

Florence and Krish fail to incorporate that lesson in every aspect of their life. They make the common mistake of thinking that their future will be all about sunshine and rainbows by switching to an auto-pilot mode. They thus become complacent and eventually revert to a life of mindlessness, which brings about the demise of their love.

Nature does not tolerate stasis. Organisms that become too comfortable experience decline which brings about their end. They are absorbed by other organisms, becoming an environment to them, subject to their force, or altogether undone. Love is no different. It must be maintained with care, with emphasis on the finer points and everyday stuff, the way one tends to their garden with undivided attention.

Life is a struggle regardless. Yes, it would be nice in some way if we could just sit back and rest. But no matter how intensely we prey to a benevolent god, the forces we are subject to will remind us how things actually work. To this end, I bring to memory a wonderful song by Michelle Gurevich, titled First Six Months of Love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqGQIO2m3YQ.

Michelle is a cynic at heart. She speaks the truth without euphemisms and the attendant penchant for beautification. Our world thinks of cynicism in a negative way because fundamentally it prefers to delude itself with all sorts of fancies than to deal with the difficulties pertinent to the here-and-now of our condition.

In the song, Michelle states thus:

Before begin the dissections
Before the therapy sessions
We danced the night we met
Now we need dancing lessons

Remember how it all began
We must not let habit set in
Come up the stairs, let's recommence
The first six months over again

Florence and Krish were not aware of this reality or anyhow did not live up to its rigours.

Florence ends with the girl switching away from her office job as she makes a living off of her art. One can only hope that in the process of disentangling herself from the values of the society she once took for granted would give her the impetus to think that there is more to be done beyond her own personhood.

There is nothing inherently wrong with digital media and the tools that technology makes possible, including video games and this very website of mine. The key is to find moderation, which typically means that you spend more time outside your head, literally and figuratively touching grass.

The plot involves a lad who spots an otherworldly creature as it moves through the city. This person is inspired to research the origins of what appears to be a dragon and to understand more about it. Such is an endeavour that turns into a lifelong pursuit, maybe even an obsession.

From the player’s perspective, the story takes shape through continuous exposure to phenomena, in the form of new pieces to the puzzle. We are developing a narrative as we go, interpreting all of the available information with the tools at our disposal.

This, alone, is a metaphor for how our life works and how we derive meaning from whatever is peculiar to our condition. Nobody starts out knowing why they are here and what all this is. There are no clear answers, no manual with precise instructions, and no proof to justify our most deep-seated hopes. We do that which our very being renders inescapable.

The story of Gorogoa unfolds through many levels of depth and different perspectives. You click on some detail in a drawing to discover another drawing unto itself. There are worlds nested within worlds as you move in and out of them. This is an artistic representation of the cosmos, only that is of infinite zoom levels.

Take a dog, for example. To speak of “a dog” is in some way precise and in another completely arbitrary. There is a form that we discern in the cosmic continuum of life as something that is distinct from the totality, which we name “a dog”. Though this is the case with a certain scope of application, analogous to the effective zoom we have in the game. At another level of abstraction there is no dog to be discerned, for all we are dealing with are particles in a field or galaxies as the tiny constituents of a greater organism. At each level there are systems of systems.

Against this backdrop, to think of something as “fundamental” or “more true” is to assume that there can be a given presence without the preconditions for presence. It is, in other words, to fall into a trap of statements, to take names literally, and thus to limit your horizons. Metaphor, analogy, and simplification are all we can ever employ to describe in finite terms that which is inexhaustible.

“That which is inexhaustible” is a figure of speech. It shows how we cannot afford to provide a definition that covers everything, as such a definition would be identical to the cosmos. Even the definition of a dog is simplistic!

This is how many an intellectual suffers from overthinking and the attendant uneasiness: they try to place boundaries on boundlessness. Much like our hero in the story, it will take them a lifetime to realise that however effective their digging is it will never probe deep enough. Whatever they discover will not be the terminus, but another starting point, which itself is arbitrary.

Coming back to the game, I admire the art direction of Gorogoa. Its story-telling is subtle and effective. The gameplay is intuitive and free from distractions. A fine piece all around!

You are in control of the titular Edith, a teenage girl who has inherited her family house. Edith returns home after a period of absence. The place is deserted and she admits to have been afraid of it. Her goal is to uncover the mysteries of the house; mysteries she was made aware of as a child.

The history of the house is that of its people. Every one died under circumstances that suggest the presence of a curse. From the early stages of the game we are led to believe that something supernatural is at play.

Edith maintains a diary, which we are reading from as the game progresses. In its pages are records of the individuals who lived in this house, going all the way back to the progenitors of the Finch family.

The Finches moved from Norway to America in hope of finding a better life. They were ambitious and capable folk. However, the world is neither simple nor accommodative. One does not get to experience comfort without discomfort. In fortune there is latent misfortune, the most gruesome tragedy contains elements that are benign, while even a peaceful presence has the attendant forces of its undoing.

A stream of water carries with it seeds that turn into vegetation along its edges, whose eventual overgrowth has the effect of diverting the stream further away from them, which in turn leads to the undoing of the vegetation, which re-enables waters to flow from its position, and so on. The conditions that give life a certain form necessarily set in motion the makings of the form’s undoing in an incessant process of transfiguration.

Against this backdrop, the story of the Finches is in its most abstract the history of humankind through its struggles. Another is born, another is gone.

In more concrete terms, the Finch family is understood through a series of personal misfortunes and untimely deaths. The forefather of the family dies on the journey to America, forcing the family to build a cemetery before even making their house. Little kids and adults lose their life in strange and horrible ways.

One may discern the common in the multitude of those sad endings as the machinations of some monster. There are good reasons to believe in such a theory. Though I personally adopt a literal view, which nevertheless recognises the potential of self-fulfilling prophecies.

What Remains of Edith Finch is an artful exploration of isolation and mental illness. Starting with the house itself, it is designed in a convoluted way, which mirrors a conscience of the same kind. Greeks have a saying that translates as “house that is not seen by the Sun is seen by the doctor”, which is exactly what we expect to happen to the Finch establishment with all its claustrophobia-inducing spaces (and this is, by the way, why I designed the house I built to optimise for natural exposure to light, with widely open, minimalist interiors).

There are no indelible lines between subjectivity, imagination, and madness. They exist on a continuum of connection to disconnect from the here-and-now of material conditions. Molly dies because in her pre-teen mind inedible items can still sate her hunger, inducing a hallucinatory trip before the eventual death from poisoning. Why would parents even punish a child to not have dinner and why would they, in so doing, engender in it a want to escape from its immediate reality?

Abandonment, neglect, and an overall lack of situational awareness is ultimately what is causing all those deaths. Sam dies because he wants to take a picture while standing at the precipice, thus underestimating the risks involved. Gregory drowns because his reckless mother left him in the bathtub while she was talking on the phone. Lewis meets his end because (i) he is pushed to increasing isolation and must find solace in an inward turn, (ii) succumbs to substance abuse which is the material extension of inner escapism, and (iii) inevitably lives in a world of his own making since his surroundings marginalised him beyond return.

I can apply this pattern to the other stories. Each person is fundamentally left alone, without support, to face a world that is too much for them. Sometimes the game places an emphasis on the emotional manifestation of abandonment. At others it unfolds through a certain situation, where the person is left to cope with an extremely dangerous, and ultimately lethal, phenomenon, such as Gus who is flying his kite amid the storm while others are having a party.

We can think of the family curse not as some monster that is pulling the strings in the background but as the set of natural attributes the Finches are endowed with, plus their cultural norms. It is, in this regard, their fate to experience what transpires in the story exactly because each is allowed to rely on their own devices when those are woefully inadequate for their survival. One may then discern the adverse effects of gritty individualism on those who are not made for it.

Or, to put it differently, this is an appreciation of what happens when freedom of initiative is bestowed upon someone who has yet to develop the requisite accountability structures: they are not prepared to live with the consequences of their actions. For example, you take care of a child because it is not ready to live on its own terms. Even adults may be children in this way, which is why the social milieu, with its robust hierarchies and tutelary figures, is essential, litanies to the contrary notwithstanding.

Yes, there are some folks who are the lone wolf type: capable, ever-alert and dangerous, and content despite their solitude. Yet they are the exceptions to the norm. One cannot become that which their nature does not render possible nor may they escape from what their condition has made unavoidable. Even wolves, apex predators in their own right, need a pack to thrive. They do not get to choose.