Mr. Math Expert is not, by any means, a well-known YouTuber. Look over his channel and you will find hundreds of videos, though the vast majority are either math problems or film reviews. There are a few old gaming videos sprinkled throughout, and it was my recent pleasure to go through his series of solutions to The 7th Guest, that classic interactive puzzle game from 1993 which, like all too many MS-DOS games these days, isn’t all that easy to play on a modern device. Well, this was admittedly truer when he made these videos ten years ago than today.
What intrigues me about these specific videos is that, like most of the rest of the content on Mr. Math Expert’s channel, there’s no particular pretense of trying to farm engagement. Mr. Math Expert does not speak during the videos, and his skill at solving the puzzles is, by any reasonable account, average. It takes him nine minutes to solve the infamous bishop puzzle. That one might be shorter than is typical, actually, but the point is, the video is a fairly accurate simulacrum of actually trying to play the game yourself, with Robert Hirschboek’s creepy narration and general lack of explanation making it so that you have to guess what’s going on as the disembodied cursor struggles to make sense of the puzzle.
This makes for a fairly disembodied experience that’s oddly appropriate for the game’s whole creepy vibe. But why Mr. Math Expert specifically, and not the other various random, voiceless solutions to the game’s puzzles? Well, because a friend wanted to show me the cake puzzle (he’d made a joke I didn’t get), and this just so happened to be the one he brought up. Then the algorithm just kept giving me more from Mr. Math Expert, and they became these oddly comforting breathers between tasks that I was doing at the time. Solutions for a game I’d never played, for which I felt no pressure to succeed because, well, because I wasn’t trying to solve them myself.
There’s a sort of aesthetic to older video games. Not necessarily the aesthetic of the games themselves, but just the sheer simplicity of the interfaces. They had to be intuitive. In a real world that could often be complicated and crazy, these old puzzles made sense. And nothing could be more infuriating than a non-intuitive puzzle, precisely because that broke the spell of immersion. I don’t generally watch other people play video games, but I understand why people do it better having watched Mr. Math Expert’s videos. Yes, he shows us the solutions. Yet he’s also making a statement about how this game is worth remembering, to him anyway, even if no one looks at any of his other low viewcount videos about completely unrelated topics.
There’s something very philosophically spooky about the whole concept of that. Behind every platform, there are real people, and the bigger the brand, the less real the people. What I’m saying is, this Halloween, don’t just put on a random playlist at your party. Put something there with a little soul behind it. The 7th Guest, with or without the person who uploaded the puzzle solutions, is an aesthetic all its own.
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