Video Games as Modern Literature

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Across
  1. 2. Your capacity to make real choices and have them genuinely matter, rather than just being carried along by events.
  2. 3. Someone who only watches from a safe distance, never stepping in to participate or decide.
  3. 5. When a reaction hits you deep in the gut, physically and instinctively, long before your thinking brain catches up.
  4. 8. The respect and elevated status a thing earns purely through its reputation over time.
  5. 11. The figure at the very center of a story, whose journey we follow, even when that figure is far from heroic.
  6. 12. To rebuild your opponent's argument in its strongest possible form before you dare to answer it.
  7. 13. The deeper cousin of sympathy, where you don't just feel sorry for someone but climb inside their experience.
  8. 17. The self-appointed guardian who decides who and what gets let into the club of respectability.
  9. 18. The rich inner life of a character that makes them feel like they contain far more than the plot strictly needs.
  10. 19. To gradually wear down someone's emotional response through repeated exposure until it barely registers.
  11. 20. The whole underlying framework through which an era understands a question, the thing that shifts in a revolution of thought.
Down
  1. 1. The strange, cleansing relief you feel after a sad story safely empties out an emotion you'd been carrying.
  2. 4. The dizzying, unsteady sensation of disorientation, whether from a high ledge or an impossible moral position.
  3. 6. Describes an experience so absorbing that you forget where you are and lose all track of time inside it.
  4. 7. The overall level and quality of serious public conversation a society manages to have about a subject.
  5. 9. The fine, subtle shade of difference that a careless reader sails right past but a careful one stops to notice.
  6. 10. The uncomfortable state of sharing in the guilt of a wrong, even when you weren't the one who fully committed it.
  7. 14. A worn, recurring device or cliché that a medium reaches for again and again until you can see it coming.
  8. 15. The collection of works a culture has officially blessed as essential and worth passing down.
  9. 16. Boldly going against accepted belief in a way that makes the orthodox slightly nervous.