Penny Arcade

I was telling Mark about this new Riot fighting game, because a trailery thing just came out, and how I'd played its philosophical predecessor Rising Thunder at PAX fuckin'... years ago. I can see why that team would get bought, even just off that sliver, because I've thought about it consistently ever since then. Those ideas aren't unique to Rising Thunder or Project L or whatever it's going to be called, though - David Sirlin's Fantasy Strike leaned into this…

The idea that I delight in killing players is essentially a fiction, and the way you know that's it's not true is because - as suggested previously - a bunch of dead characters and their resentful, starving players aren't a receptive audience for my intricate statue puzzle, whose solution is contained within twelve lines of immaculate, technical verse. Even so, it's been a nice theme to return to. Maybe my favorite line in all of Penny Arcade comes from this comic,…

I only knew about this because Gabriel's son, who is actually named Gabriel, was incensed enough to bring it to his attention. People watch this for the trailers, that is simply… a fact, but Gen Z is such a spicy cadre that it is hard not to be delighted by it. Servants of Nidhoggr, all. I couldn't make heads or tails of many categories in the Game Awards, and I am open to explanations as simple as bog-standard illiteracy up to sophisticated theoretical frameworks like…

At the very highest level, looking down, I think that the Halo Infinite Battle Pass has progressed thinking on this form of monetization in a way that suggests that they have, uh, parents on the team. Or, at the very least, that they have a philosophical bone to pick with the typical FOMO pump that a timed season creates. This is the part I like: you own the Battle Pass. It's like a TTRPG supplement or something, and it even occupies a space on a kind of shelf; the pass itself is something…