I lost a week of my college life to the fully immersive exploratory puzzle game Myst when it hit CD-ROM drives in 1993. And I lost another week to Myst’s sequel, Riven, when I was in grad school. By 2004 I was well on my way to building an addiction to the first-person-shooter game Half-Life 2, sessions of which I rationalized as self-administered rewards for writing a few pages of my dissertation. Later that same year, after an all-night stint playing Call of Duty and emerging into the gray light of a Manhattan winter morning with claim to neither sleep nor sexual conquest, I left “gaming” behind. Described by Mélanie Courtinat, a Paris-based artist and art director, as an “interactive experience,” The Siren (2024) is a video game of sorts, but one that is intended, as most such “art” games are, to induce in the player a self-consciousness about what it means to play such a game and the mechanics of narrative-meaning that attend to gameplay itself. Produced using Unreal Engine, an industry-leading programme for creating immersive digital 3D environments, The Siren has the look and feel of other contemporary adventure games built with the same engine, such as Chivalry …