(I'm writing this in the cab on the way to the airport.)

PARTNER PINS

There are so many ways to "be online." At one point, you might have dialed into a major service or dialed into a service provider. This would have been about the same time I was hauling Token Ring cables out of office buildings the way you'd pull out the roots and vines of an invasive species.

Ol' Greasy Gribbs and I really enjoyed the first season of The Dream, a podcast which was (at that time) concerned with Multi-Level Management schemes, the shoddy products they sell, and the legal framework they've accreted over time to provide nearly impenetrable cover for something like parasitic fraud.

I've got a bit of bad news to deliver unfortunately. Here's a message from PA about our pin selection at PAX East this year. 

Gabe and I don't agree on much other than the fact that we should attempt to disagree without rancor. It's not always possible but we manage it a statistically significant amount of the time. I am of the opinion, as enunciated in the strip, that making things is fundamentally valuable. It's valuable to me and it's valuable to other people. This value is broadly defined; one way it's valuable is that in my experience creative work is very rarely wasted. It always comes back. Sometimes we'll have an idea fifteen years earlier than we could do justice to it and we have to circle back.

I love falling back into The Division. The cover-based shooting gallery just works for me; it's only gotten better (for the way I play the game, at least) after they really goosed the damage skills put out. I have a sniper turret I can deploy that fires Eiffel Towers, judging from the damage; it has its own cooldown between shots, so between that and the precision rifles I'm already using me and this weird little robot essentially form a sniper team just between the two of us.

The Geoff Keighley news - specifically, that he wasn't going to manifest as a kind of E3 Avatar this year - is beyond fascinating. But also not surprising, I guess? It just seems like the latest event in a causal chain so clear that it bears predictive power.

BioWare is committing themselves to "a longer-term redesign" of the Anthem experience, wherein they "reinvent the core gameplay loop with clear goals, motivating challenges and progression with meaningful rewards." To put it like that, to type it, to think and know it, means that it didn't have those things. Those are fundamental things. I wonder how long that sentence took to type.

The third panel originally had substantial percentage of Witcher references - nearly one hundred percent, by volume - but the final version of the strip leans more heavily into synthetic cathinones. But then the title stayed? I don't know. I'm leaving it. At some point in your "ouvre" you have to start studding your work with incongruities just to give historians something to do. Let the studious inheritors of this archive say that this is when Early Onset Coot Disease finally began its lethal arc.

I love the first part of a CCG.

It might not be advisable, but it's entirely possible to do an entire adventure right off the top. I would be surprised if there was a dungeon master slash storyteller slash keeper slash IP specific screen-person who hadn't. Not simply because the vagaries of life create difficulties which are inimical to the manufacture of imaginary worlds for your friends, but also because the form itself virtually demands some version of it.

Kentucky Route Zero might be my favorite game. I've been alive kind of a long time, and played a lot of games, so I am allowing myself a little room to maneuver rhetorically. Not to be tricksy, but to allow for the reality of myself as a finite being. I'm not worried about being wrong - let's say it wasn't actually my favorite game, and it was another game instead. Then I would have two games I loved so much that ranking them was genuinely challenging, which sounds like a win condition to me. No, I want the rhetorical space so that I don't lie to you inadvertently. In any event: when I think about games that are important to me, it would be very near the top of any list worth making.

Legends of Runeterra is one fork-tine of Riot's effort to own every genre. I could put more effort into resisting this force - upon whose banner gleams the very Icon of the Fist - but if they're all going to be as interesting as their foray into this CCG shit then bring on the FPS and the Airship Syndicate collab and the fighting game and whatever else. This isn't some victory lap off League, something to fill a vacuum in Q1. It's marbled beef, a hot take on the form that is built for the future.

PAX East is just a few weeks away and as usual we will have our live Acquisitions Inc. game. However our regular DM Jeremy Crawford can't make this show, and so I'll be taking his place at the head of the table. That's right, it's time for another of my ridiculous one off games! If you are not familiar with my work, you should know that my games tend to be a little...strange. 

Sea of Thieves is still out here thievin' it up, doing all that thief stuff. It remains cool in a way that has an almost mystical capacity to evade review. There is a capoeira aspect to this: it shifts effortlessly into the social space, away from analysis, whenever you try to identify it. Then, when you try and seek it out purely as a social practice, it's like trying to fold water in half. One generates the other while containing it and being contained by it. And the "gameplay" is grounded in such natural principles that it often just… disappears. I consider that capacity to effervesce an index of its craft and genius.