The two big stories right now, mainstream gaming ones, are stealth promotional campaigns on Youtube and the Candy Crush Saga saga.

I'm not a frequent enough consumer of Let's Play style content to even understand the first one, so I'm glad Ben can spend the time figuring that out. I'm in the JPEG business; I get agitated when the pictures start to move, rub my chin, suspect grim sorcery. But it is one thing to offer money, and another thing to take it; I do wonder why we reserve our approbation for the former. But, whatever. It's hard out there, and not just for pimps. When I thought for even second that I could make a living at this, I sold the entire thing to an evil sorcerer without batting an eye. It's more than money: it's an opportunity to live sideways, at an oblique angle to every established social structure. It's like the "candy" the Queen gives Edmund. He's not entirely off the hook. But you can't entirely blame him.

The Candy Crush thing, though, wow. I'd read that Forbes link I put up there, if you haven't already. Independent of the legal aspects, I don't like what this kind of shit does to language. I have an aesthetic allegiance to words, and I have a business interest in them also, and neither one is served when people start declaring incredibly vast terms their personal fiefdom.

The Kickstarter campaign for The Banner Saga completed before Candy Crush Saga was even released, I looked that up yesterday when I was trying to understand this stuff. I was trying to understand it because King, the "candy crush people," are saying that they don't think The Banner Saga is trying to rip them off while simultaneously saying that The Banner Saga named itself in such a way as to be "confusing and deceptive." This is like saying that you are not, in fact, the devil, while you polish your own black horns with baby fat.

My friend Paul Ledesma and I used to play Mars Saga, back in eighty-eight or eighty-nine, and I haven't looked especially hard but I would imagine that there is more than one videogame that has leveraged the term Saga, because it means "big story." Specifically, a "big Norse or Danish story." The Banner Saga is, almost certainly, the most legitimate usage of the term in the entire history of interactive software.

(CW)TB out.