GPT

"The Weight of Words: A Conversation Between Form and Feeling"

Harper: (not looking up, voice flat)

Do you cry a lot?

Jacob Geller: (pauses, folding his hands together)
Tears are strange—aren’t they?—how they blur our vision but also clarify something internal. In Death Stranding, rain brings decay, accelerating time wherever it falls. Crying feels like that sometimes—an erosion of the self, where the heart is laid bare. Do I cry? Yes. But it’s not always a sign of sadness. Sometimes, it’s just the body’s way of speaking when words fall apart.

Harper: (grunts, jots something down)
Do you ever feel like your life has no point?

Jacob Geller: (a flicker of discomfort, but his tone remains steady)
Purposelessness is a vast, echoing space—like the open water in Abzû, where you float endlessly, weightless, searching for meaning in silence. There’s a tension between the beauty of existence and the crushing awareness of its impermanence. The question isn’t so much, Does life have a point? but, Can meaning exist without permanence? There are days when the answer eludes me, when even the smallest tasks feel insurmountable. But meaning, I’ve found, often hides in the mundane—in the way the light falls through a window or how a song sounds late at night.

Harper: (frowning, scribbling faster)
Do you ever just want to die?

Jacob Geller: (his eyes flicker with something heavy, his voice quieter)
Wanting to die isn’t always a dramatic scream; sometimes it’s a quiet hum—a background noise that you learn to live with. It’s like the sensation in Inside, where you keep moving forward, not because you want to, but because stopping feels worse. There are moments when I’ve felt that weight, that pull toward silence. But there’s also a strange defiance in continuing—in refusing to be swallowed by the dark.

Harper: (glancing at his watch)
Do you ever think about hurting yourself? Be honest—yes or no.

Jacob Geller: (pauses for a long moment)
Honesty is complicated. Pain has a language that isn’t always physical. In Celeste, climbing the mountain isn’t just a metaphor—it’s an act of survival. Every fall, every failed jump, carries the weight of self-doubt. But you climb anyway. Have I thought about pain as a release? Yes. But I’ve also learned that the act of acknowledging it is its own kind of resistance.

Kaufman: (flips the page, glancing at another question)
Do you ever think about hurting yourself or others?

Jacob Geller: (his voice softens, contemplative)
Violence, whether turned inward or outward, often stems from an ache too deep to name—a fracture where empathy and despair collide. In Spec Ops: The Line, violence isn’t a simple mechanic; it’s a question, one that forces us to confront the dissonance between action and consequence. Do I think about hurt? Everyone carries the shadow of it. But the real question isn’t whether hurt crosses my mind—it’s how I interrogate the meaning of that shadow, how I choose to acknowledge its weight without letting it define the totality of my existence.

Reynolds: (glancing at the form)
Do you ever experience prolonged periods of sadness—weeks or months where you feel down, low, empty?

Jacob Geller: (pausing, his eyes fixed on the floor)
Sadness is an ocean with no shoreline. I sometimes feel like I’m drifting in it, not swimming but floating—motionless and heavy. It’s not sadness with a purpose, like mourning or grief, where there’s a narrative arc, a reason to hurt. It’s sadness without shape, like in Kentucky Route Zero, where you drive endlessly through dark roads with no destination, feeling the weight of a story you can’t quite grasp. So, yes. Prolonged periods of sadness. But it’s not always dramatic or cinematic. Sometimes it’s just a dull hum that fills the background of every moment.

Kaufman: (adjusting his glasses without looking up)
Do you ever feel hopeless?

Jacob Geller: (pauses, tilts his head, and speaks with deliberate thought)
Hopelessness, like the fog that clings to a forgotten shore, is less a constant feeling and more a space we sometimes occupy—an architecture of despair. In Silent Hill 2, the fog doesn’t simply obscure; it transforms. It creates a world where the boundary between safety and danger, clarity and confusion, blurs into something terrifyingly intimate. So yes, I’ve felt hopeless. But to name it, to see it for what it is—that act already contains within it the first glimmer of hope.

Reynolds: (makes a note, without looking up)
Do you ever feel numb, disconnected from things that used to bring you joy?

Jacob Geller: (takes a deep breath)
Numbness is a kind of forgetting. Imagine standing in a sunlit room, but the warmth doesn’t touch you. The light is there, but it doesn’t feel real. In Shadow of the Colossus, the world is breathtaking—vast, sublime—but also empty, drained of life. When you slay the colossi, it should feel like triumph, but instead it leaves you hollow. That’s what numbness feels like: the death of wonder. The things that used to move me—art, stories, even the simple act of being outside—they’re still there, but the connection between them and my heart feels severed, like a wire cut just beneath the surface.

Meyers: (leaning forward, his voice lowering conspiratorially) Okay, but tell me this—do you ever enjoy the violence? Does it… thrill you?

Jacob Geller: (pausing, visibly considering his words) Enjoyment isn’t a single, simple thing. There’s a spectrum of emotional engagement. I’d say the thrill isn’t from the violence itself but from how art uses it to provoke reflection, tension, or catharsis. Take The Last of Us Part II, for instance—its violence isn’t just spectacle. It’s a narrative tool that forces players to confront cycles of vengeance and the cost of hatred. It’s uncomfortable because it’s meant to be.

Reynolds: (nods)
Have you ever had thoughts that life isn’t worth living?

Jacob Geller: (his gaze drops, and his voice carries a raw edge)
Yes. Those thoughts come like shadows—uninvited, persistent. They are quiet, like whispers you try to ignore, but they linger. In Gris, there’s a moment when the world turns grey, when even the act of moving feels futile, and you just fall… endlessly. There’s a heaviness that makes you feel like sinking is easier than swimming. It’s not a desire for death, exactly. It’s more like exhaustion with life itself—like every breath is a burden.

Harper: (clearing his throat, impatient)
Are you sleeping too much or not enough?

Jacob Geller: (tilts his head, considering)
Sleep feels like an act of surrender. In Pathologic, time is an adversary—something you can’t outrun. You have to rest, but doing so brings consequences. That’s what sleep is like for me: a negotiation between exhaustion and fear. Too much, and I feel like I’m drowning. Too little, and I’m a hollow version of myself. Either way, it’s a compromise I can never quite win.

Harper: (growing visibly annoyed)
Okay, fine. Do you ever feel like you’re worthless?

Jacob Geller: (his voice grows softer, introspective)
Worth is a fragile construct. In NieR: Automata, androids fight battles they can’t fully understand, asking questions about purpose in a world that’s already crumbled. The weight of worthlessness feels like carrying a question you can’t answer—why am I here, and what difference does it make? It’s a heavy thing to hold. Some days, I carry it better than others.

Harper: (sighs, flipping the clipboard to a new page)
Do you even want to get better?

Jacob Geller: (pausing, then speaking with deliberate calm)
Wanting to get better is a complicated thing. In Dark Souls, healing requires vulnerability—you have to stop, expose yourself to danger, in order to recover. Do I want to feel whole? Of course. But wanting doesn’t always feel like a burning desire; sometimes, it’s just a small flicker of hope. Getting better isn’t a destination—it’s a series of moments where you choose to keep moving, even when the road disappears beneath your feet.

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Harper: (throws down his pen, exasperated)
Jacob, this isn’t a philosophy seminar. I need clear answers, not metaphors. Jacob, I’m just trying to fill out a form here. So… are you saying yes or no?

Jacob Geller: (meeting the doctor’s eyes, calm but firm)
But metaphors are how we make sense of things too large to name. Isn’t that what language is for? To build bridges between feeling and understanding? If I could give you simple answers, I would. But these aren’t simple experiences. They’re tangled and vast, and sometimes a metaphor is the closest thing to truth we have. I'm saying that a simple yes or no would reduce the complexity of human experience to something far smaller than it deserves. And I’m just trying to remind you that every form conceals a story—and stories, even the difficult ones, deserve to be told with care.

Ms. Blake: (clearing her throat, impatient)

If you focus on what you can do instead of dwelling on your limitations, you’ll find it’s really all about mindset. Don’t let your challenges define you—rise above them.

Jacob Geller:
(pauses, folds hands)
It’s curious, isn’t it—this language of triumph and transcendence, this metaphor of rising above. A ladder you’re meant to climb out of your own experience, one rung at a time, as though you could simply leave yourself behind. But this ladder is not built from real wood or rope; it is made from platitudes, from the fraying clichés of a world that sees difficulty only as something to be overcome, rather than understood.

When you tell me to focus on what I can do, you reduce the intricacies of my experience to a balancing act of pros and cons. You imply that suffering is a kind of self-imposed burden, a dark cloud that could be parted if only I were better equipped with the right mental weather machine. But struggles are not clouds to be dispersed. They are landscapes to be navigated—sometimes treacherous, sometimes beautiful in their harshness, but always real, always demanding.

You ask me not to let my challenges define me. But what is identity if not a mosaic of our encounters with the world? Struggles shape us, carve contours into the surface of our being. To deny their influence is to erase part of ourselves, to sand away the jagged edges until all that’s left is a polished and false facsimile of wholeness.

You offer hope, but hope without nuance is hollow. You tell me to rise above, but what if I have no interest in leaving? What if my identity is not something I am trying to escape but something I am learning to inhabit fully, with all its weight and texture? What if there is wisdom not in denying limitation, but in recognising the complex, sometimes paradoxical ways it binds and liberates?

So, I ask you—why must I overcome? Why not exist, with all the messiness that entails? Why not make space for a narrative where difficulty is not failure, where pain is not a flaw, where living differently is not a tragedy in need of triumph? Because, ultimately, the world does not change when we climb ladders built from empty words. It changes when we build something more solid, more honest, more human in their place.

Ms. Blake: (clicking her pen, her tone turning patronising)
Have you thought about how your problems affect the people around you?

Jacob Geller: (his expression darkens)
Ah, the burden of existence, measured not in one’s own suffering but in the inconvenience it causes others. In The Last Guardian, the bond between a boy and a monstrous creature is fragile and imperfect. Their struggles are intertwined, and neither exists without affecting the other. But is the creature’s pain less valid because it disrupts the boy’s journey? This question—how my problems affect others—assumes that my value lies only in what I can provide, not in the fact that I am human and hurting. To acknowledge my suffering is not to deny the suffering of those around me; it is to recognise that we are all caught in the same storm.

Ms. Blake: (pauses, considering his next words carefully)

Do you talk to anyone about these feelings?

Jacob Geller: (smiles faintly, a flicker of self-awareness)
Talking feels like standing at the edge of a chasm and trying to explain its depth to someone who’s never seen it. Words collapse under the weight of certain feelings. In What Remains of Edith Finch, you walk through stories that have already ended—experiencing the fragments of lives that no one can piece back together. That’s what it’s like to talk about this. The words are there, but they can never truly contain the thing I’m trying to show.

Dr. Reynolds: (leans back, taking in the weight of Jacob’s responses)
How do you cope with these experiences?

Ms. Blake: (sighing, clearly frustrated)
Isn’t it just a matter of changing your attitude? Choosing to be happy?

Jacob Geller: (tilts his head, his voice soft but unwavering)
Happiness is not a switch, and attitude is not armour. In Papers, Please, you play a border inspector making impossible choices. There’s no “positive attitude” that can make those choices easier—no mindset that will turn desperation into triumph. 

Ms. Blake: (impatient, flipping to the last question)
If you could just think more positively, don’t you think you’d feel better?

Jacob Geller: (a faint, weary smile)
In Dark Souls, even the smallest flicker of a flame can be extinguished by a careless breath. Thinking positively won’t make the world less cruel or the road less treacherous. Positivity isn’t a shield against despair—it’s a fragile ember that must be nurtured. To simply demand it is to misunderstand its nature entirely. Yes, I want to feel better. But wanting alone doesn’t make the fire burn brighter. It takes more than will. It takes understanding.

Ms. Blake: (sets down her clipboard, exasperated)
Jacob, these metaphors… they’re interesting, but they’re not helpful.

Jacob Geller: (looking directly at her, his tone calm and resolute)
But they are helpful. They’re how I make sense of a world that doesn’t fit into your checklist. They’re how I give shape to feelings too vast for simple words. If you want answers, you’ll find them between the lines—where metaphor becomes meaning, and story becomes survival.