Habits
I uninstalled Team Fortress 2 about two weeks ago now. Not for the first time, and it remains to be seen if it will be the last – though my past history with multiplayer games suggests it won’t be. At one…
Category Essays
Shovel Knight
Every aspect of a game communicates something about the overall experience of the game. It’s very easy, and very common, for these signals to be confusing and conflicted: Yet it’s hard to say definitively that these conflicts are flaws or…
Distant But Here
I get angry at myself. There’s a lot to be said for humility. It’s nice having no expectations in particular of yourself and thereby being able to surprise yourself – not, that is to say, having low self-esteem, but avoiding…
Meaning It
Children will believe basically anything. That’s their job. At some point later in life, there’s usually some form of disillusionment, and we learn to distrust the motives of others, to believe that we are being manipulated. Afterwards we find that…
Lighthouse
I took a vacation. This vacation ended up being artificially extended by a nasty cold and some other medical issues at the start, so now as I sit here it’s been two weeks of more or less complete non-productivity at…
Passing Time
In 1995 when Chrono Trigger came out, I would have just turned 12. I stayed up through the Summer nights of Sacramento, playing until 5 in the morning on the cracked naugahyde couch in my dad’s living room. 20 years…
The Earnestness of Importance
Television has changed a lot over the last couple of decades. No longer bound to the yoke of short run times and advertisements, TV shows have started becoming more like movies: Longer, more intricate, with a consistent story told between…
Adventure Time
Adventure Time feels like a very lonely place, and I don’t think that’s happenstance. Adventure Time takes place in a world where everyone is unique. Everyone is created in some special way and shape, special made for the specific destiny…
Myself
We aren’t ourselves, really. Over our lives, a persona is constructed around us. For some of us, that role fits us well, and for others less so. Sometimes the gender doesn’t match. Sometimes we don’t really want the things we’re…
Perfection
The arguments against perfectionism are well-established at this point. It’s easy to spend forever trying to make something better, to improve it by repeated half-strides towards some theoretical optimum. It’s easy to get trapped in that mindset and thereby never…