death

Please Finish Your Games Before Dying

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Due to one part being bad with money and one part psychosis, I have over 100 Switch games. Many are smaller (and were thankfully cheaper) indie games that are probably shorter than a dozen hours, but the catalog still adds up to a huge time investment. At the rate I play, maybe a decade’s worth of games. Perhaps I should stop playing, “browse the eShop deals section and buy random shit,” and focus on something with better game mechanics, like this Live-A-Live demo with huge sections of nothing but listening to people speak at me.

If games stopped coming out, would you have enough to last the rest of your life? There are a few factors at play – how old you currently are, how long you’ll live, your ability to get your hands on old games, and your willingness to play old stuff. Assuming you’re a good person who can stomach games from most generations (I understand not wanting to play Asteroids clones for years, but then why did you buy them in the first place?) →  Call me game-shmael.

The Future of (my) Video Games

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Currently playing: Wasteland 3

Hoping for the best, planning for not the worst

I spend a lot of my time thinking about retiring in my 50s. I spend the rest of my time planning for the breakdown of society. The incompatible ideas constantly vying for my conscious attention will occasionally drown each other out and allow general concepts of family, work, and video games to briefly occupy my brain. These short moments of distraction are usually then reframed in my mind so as to view them through one of the primary thought patterns – where will I live in relation to my children after I stop working, or does a year’s worth of water for an infant equal a year’s worth of water for an adult?

Sometimes I think of my physical game collection through these lenses of retirement or environmental destruction. The enormous amount of plastic involved, which I recently learned can’t actually be recycled, and also began to appear in antarctic snow in measurable quantities, does not factor into my thoughts – I don’t believe individuals should feel responsible for systemic problems unless they’re actively profiting off of maintaining the systems or are my neighbor, that guy’s an asshole (too bad he isn’t hunting frequently enough to prevent him from buying bumper stickers about how badly he would rather be hunting). →  Ys: The Article of Napishtim

Top 10 Trends I Ignored – An Old Man is Prideful of His Ignorance

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In the dozen years since I used this site as a platform for bad jokes, Wii apologia, and po-faced discussion on design, many gaming trends have come, and in some cases, gone. Having ignored most of these shifts in the industry, I will now document these trends and explain why I am better than each of them.

  1. MMOs

These already existed when this site launched in 200…something. As I am competing with my dead grandfather at having the fewest friends, I worried social gaming would lead to comradery and therefore defeat. This fear was unfounded, however, as years on gaming forums have led me to accumulate exactly zero new acquaintances. “Who is that condescending guy who only posts single sentences that are obviously sarcastic?” is what I assumed people would say. Warnings from moderators and replies from people who thought I was serious are instead all I got. Many true artists are not understood until their work is reanalyzed and contextualized, often years or decades after their deaths. →  It’s not you, it’s me.