About

Games rarely end when we turn them off.

They follow us into conversations, relationships, daydreams, and the stories we tell about ourselves. We agonize over fictional decisions. We grow attached to people who don't exist. We spend hours constructing characters only to discover that, somewhere along the way, we've put pieces of ourselves into them.

The Player Condition is a publication about that space between the game and the person playing it.

Through essays on games, storytelling, psychology, culture, and player experience, The Player Condition asks what our relationship with games can tell us about ourselves. Why do certain choices feel impossible to make? Why do we reload a save when we don't like the consequences? Why can creating a fictional character feel strangely like creating—or discovering—a version of ourselves?

This isn't a site about whether a game is good or bad. It's about what happens when we play it.

The Player Condition is written and edited by Leah Cromarty, an English graduate and lifelong player interested in the human experience of narrative and game.

Essays on games and the people who play them.