Between the treacherous drifts of the Everwinter and my trip eastward, we haven't really been in the office. With both of us in, the power rings have joined and the morning has largely been spent talking about crucial matters, like the effective range of javelins and the frequency with which an elder red dragon may issue gouts of crackling flame. It's glee of such a concentrated sort that I must store it up, keep it, as (statistically speaking) human lives seem to trend away from glee.
Here, then, is the final strip of the series. I do wonder how long we can like the same things - my guess is "not especially long." I can already feel myself pressed to become a more pure manifestation of myself, more absolute, so that the choices left to me are either the Camarilla or The Society For Creative Anachronism.
Virtually every site I read to keep up on things related to gaming had some variation on this story last week: according to the latest stats at Major Nelson's blog, Gears of War 2 was "stagnating" at fourth place in terms of games played. I would say this is consistent with the sort of rapid-fire, rabble-rousing non-news that gluts these blogs in general.
Nevermind that there are no actual statistics for players, or how much of this play is co-operative, or local, or online. There's no information about session length, or multiple ownership, or (in some cases) multiple platforms. If being fourth place constitutes a dark fate, how much more shameful, then, must Left 4 Dead's meager showing at 7th place be? My assessment: very shameful. Particularly when you consider that only last week, Left 4 Dead was at 6th - the veritable catbird seat! No doubt Valve has been chastened as a result.
It's utter cellulose - inert, useless Goddamned "information." Why should I care what rank a game I like (or don't like) is, particularly when the mechanism being used to determine this rank is opaque, let alone incomplete? Assuming these statistics are useful in any way, plenty of games don't get the audiences they deserve. Resistance almost certainly has better concurrency than LittleBigPlanet - are you improved by this data? Is the universe?
(CW)TB out.
