Nathan Wainstein is an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Grant Us Eyes: The Art of Paradox in Bloodborne (Tune & Fairweather, 2025). He also co-hosts (with Bryan Counter) Authors Die Twice, a podcast on video games and aesthetic theory.
Nathan Wainstein
Articles
The Paradox of the Second Person
Nathan Wainstein reexamines Naughty Dog’s 2020 game “The Last of Us Part II.”
Game Wonder: On FromSoftware’s “Bloodborne” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”
Nathan Wainstein explores the aesthetic ambiguities of wonder in FromSoftware’s video game “Bloodborne” and H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Haunter of the Dark.”
Repetition, with a Difference: On “Deathloop”
By assimilating gameplay repetition into its story, “Deathloop” hints at resolving the dissonance between game form and narrative form.
Bugs and Features: On Video Game Glitches and Interpretation
Are video game glitches a flaw in the art, or a feature?
Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values?
“Dark Souls” is marked by formal features — difficulty, narrative fragmentation, and spatiotemporal distortion — that are associated with modernist art.
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