You can’t get stories about being alive from something that never lived.
The 21st century to date has been a procession of situations in which you’re forced to explain the readily explicable. Nothing is true, no lessons were learned, nothing can be taken for granted; thinking adults in 2025 are occasionally forced to argue with fellow travelers about such fundamentally obvious things as “you should have a baseline level of care for other people” and “bleach is not medicine.” Anyone who feels angry and insane right now is just paying sufficient attention.
That same disconnect lies at the heart of the furor over generative AI as a creative tool. On one side, an army of plagiarism robots that burn forests and drink the sea to create infinite pages from Thomas Kinkade’s How to Draw Manga; on the other, anyone who understands the value of human expression, emphasis on the human. Offshoring any part of your creative mind or soul to glorified autocorrect is an act of unsolicited surrender. You’ve volunteered for erosion. There’s less of you now, whether you acknowledge that or not.
If there’s one silver nugget in this septic tank, it’s the potential for a new appreciation of the elemental strangeness of being human. This is a messy, imprecise, unstable existence, and it’s the only game in town. In any form it takes, from disposable kitsch to a great national novel, art is a story we tell one another to try and make life make more sense.
This week, we’re celebrating that. These are games that we appreciate specifically because a large language model could never have produced them: they’re too weird, too horny, too specific. In an age where the entirety of pop culture is threatening to collapse into thin gruel, these are projects with a careful human touch. In 2025, that’s become more valuable than ever before, and worth celebration.
When we initially kicked around the idea of this themed week, the first game I thought of was Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. I wasn’t initially sure why.
2018’s WtWTLW is a giant jam-band of a project headed by Johnnemann Nordhagen, who’d previously worked on Gone Home and BioShock 2. It’s described on its Steam page as a “narrative-adventure game,” which isn’t wrong, but also feels insufficient.
You play WtWTLW as a nameless drifter in the Great Depression who loses a poker game to a spirit. To repay your debt, the spirit charges you to wander the United States and collect stories, yours and others’: strange, sad, funny, pathetic. You then tell those stories to other travelers along the road, to watch how those stories have changed when they bounce back to you.
The broad appeal of WtWTLW is in its status as a freeform anthology. A murderer’s row of narrative designers and writers worked on the game, each picking up separate characters and vignettes. It’s half mythology builder, as you both collect and contribute to the early folklore of this alternate magical 20th century America, and half a chance to swim around in this deliberately disorganized pool of digital New Weird. I wish Utah Phillips had lived to see it.
As that previous paragraph suggests, this is the kind of game that either resonates or repels; it’s Exactly Your Shit or would hit you like a petty punishment. There is no shame in this. It is not a flaw with the game. WtWTLW is on a list alongside the Velvet Underground’s first album, China Mieville’s novels, John Waters movies, or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: creative work so deliberately narrowband that any audience it finds outside of its actual creators is a happy accident.
Unfortunately, WtWTLW might be best-known in 2025 for its financial failure. In a postmortem on Medium, Nordhagen described the up- and downsides of the experience of making WtWTLW, which included the disclosure that it had been a commercial “disaster.” Naturally, a few gaming outlets jumped on that part of the article, which forced Nordhagen to clarify that he thought WtWTLW was “an amazing artistic achievement.” It just hadn’t made any money. Success takes many forms.
At this point, it’d be easy to point to the two preceding paragraphs and call this essay justified. WtWTLW is and was too ambitiously weird for its own damn good; hence, it arbitrarily fits our anti-AI theme. We appear to be done here. But no, not quite.
In the aforementioned postmortem, Nordhagen noted that part of the inspiration for WtWTLW and its foremost success was “gathering a fantastic crew of incredibly talented writers from a variety of diverse backgrounds…I am also very happy that we managed to represent a huge amount of America’s diversity in the writing staff for the game, and I’m proud that we gave a number of new or unheard voices a place to tell their stories.”
That varied crew of creators and its sandbox approach to its story team up to give WtWLW a rhythm like jazz. It’s unpredictable, going from mundane to fantastic and back again within 5 minutes, with a dozen genres packed inside. One city might hit you with tragedy, action, horror, or farce in the same day. It’s like life; it’s not set up to work within neatly organized lines.
That turned out to be why I’d thought of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine in the first place. It’s a game that fundamentally does not work without its sense of humanity; it’s a story about stories, and what it means to be alive at the same time as all these other people.
Without that sense of celebration, of us, our differences, and this stupid species we’re all in – if you kept everything else, but auto-generated the stories with your plagiarism machine of choice – it’d be pointless noise. Whatever else you choose to say about it, this is perhaps the single most human, humanist game of the 21st century to date.
