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.

Generally I try to be cool with him about Warhammer shit, because he's one of only a handful of people who can tolerate me and that's a precious fucking resource. I don't talk about it anywhere near as much as I want to, which is constantly.  I merely talk about it all the time.

I'm not ready to talk about records yet. There's a lot I don't understand about it, it's not mine yet, and if I'm going to address it I need to approach that space and the topic mindfully. But I'm definitely starting to get weird about it. Weirder. I mean, think about my baseline.

Acquisitions Incorporated: The "C" Team returns on February 5th - that is a fact well established.  At any rate, it's something I said one time in a place you might not have seen.  The Internet is very big!  But we're halfway through a three part series that is something like a remix of The "C" Team, a Weird West tale sponsored by Chaosium, creators of the Call of Cthulhu RPG and utilizing that system.  Starts at 4pm PST this very night, come hang out.  Here is a cool image!

Okay! I think we did it.

I've been present for the aftermath of so many shows that it's very startling how gone it is and how quickly it is gone. You keep thinking, or… I guess, I keep thinking, that when something like this happens there's gonna be some kind of echo that blooms in physical space, some platinum tracery midair, some mark. As it is, it's like I like through five seasonally appropriate editions of A Christmas Carol a year, and then it all evaporates to the extent that I can hardly prove it was there.  I hope I'm learning whatever all these ghosts were trying to teach me.