I’ve got a new essay up at Kill Screen. Check it out.

The holidays have taken me away from the blog, but there is good news to be had: I’ve started doing some work for Kill Screen online. I’ll post here when my pieces go up there. The new website looks great, and I’m excited to be involved with it. My first piece, “Here I Am, All Dressed in Drakeskin” may look familiar to readers of this blog, but the next one will be brand new. Check it out.

I have made several attempts at writing this post; this is the first I have deemed an adequate answer—or a beginning to an answer—for the question. As a dog returneth to his vomit, so I return to this question.*

Sometimes—when I get rejected by a mainstream journal with a note like, “Loved the essay, too much video game stuff,” for instance—I see myself through the eyes of my non-gamer readers. I see a competent writer who, for reasons incomprehensible, devotes himself to writing about a hobby that is immature at best and an active waste of time and talent at worst. They likely see it as uninteresting or irrelevant to the interests of readers who are not gamers, and I can empathize. I imagine some readers of this blog, too, sometimes ask the damnable question I ask my students all the time: why is this worth writing about?

Anhedonia is one of my favorite words. It’s a symptom of depression, generally speaking, but it’s such an elegant word for such a specific concept that I can’t help but love it. Anhedonia: the death of pleasure. It describes the feeling of no longer enjoying something you once enjoyed. This is how I feel about Crackdown 2.

I have been playing Fable III, lately, and I really can’t get over how extremely short the game seems to fall of its goals, at least as expressed by this interview with Bit-Tech (discovered, and post in part prompted, via The Brainy Gamer). Abbot of the Brainy Gamer says it this way: “In Fable III, Peter Molyneux wants us to feel loved.” The game is supposed to be about connection, about relationships, about choices that affect our ability to live in the world of Albion, and most of all about people. But whether because of technical floppery or design misunderstanding, the very attempts the game makes to be personable for me make it emotionless.