Trick to make me write #2,147: strand me at a carwash for an hour with an iPhone and no earbuds.I’ve been continuing to play FFXIII, and I find my disdain lessening as time goes by. It will probably never eclipse FFVI (which, as previously noted, will always be to me FFIII—I realize this is incorrect, but it is a mistake tied closely to my identity), but that’s not really 13’s fault.  None of the FF games I’ve played since 6 have felt adequate.¹ Part of it is the beautiful graphics that Squeenix has always aspired to—in 6, the SNES’s highly-touted and rarely used Mode 7 makes not one but two appearances². The switch from top-down to isometric made the games harder to navigate, and moving from place to place became a more visible process. I’d never run into walls before, or misinterpreted a texture for a door, but starting in 7, this happened all the time. (Since 8, my dad has referred to the FF series as “those walking games.”)

Last night, after Megan went to sleep, I sat down on the couch. Final Fantasy XIII in the PS3, for better or for worse.³ Wireless keyboard and mouse in front of me, on the coffee table. Harmony beside me. Sixaxis in hand. This (I swear to you) is the problem I had: I wanted to play FFXIII while using a Linux live CD to resize the ext3 partition on a hard drive in the Hackintosh hooked up to my TV (to make room for an HFS+ partition, of course), but I was frustrated because I couldn’t set up picture-in-picture on my Harmony, and I was too lazy to get up and walk across the room to get my TV remote.

This pretty much sums up my whole self.

Back when I played WoW, I used to ease my commute by listening to [WoW Radio][1] (which seems to have imploded since then), and in particular [Octale and Hordak Versus the World][2]. I don’t really know why, as in large part my response was screaming wildly at my steering wheel in violent dissent. (Passersby, I assume, thought I was singing in my car and heavy into death metal.) When I was a regular listener, the show seemed to be a paean to difficulty for the sake of difficulty, and Octale exploded more or less every week about the idea that games might be “fun.” I’m no stranger to the idea that [games can be no fun][3], but it always seemed to me like Octale and Hordak’s purpose was a sort of social stratification. There is a formula for establishing a person’s value, and its scale is DPS.

Kill Screen Issue #1, featuring my essay “King of the Ogres,” is available now.  Check it out.

There’s a scene in The Magicians where one character pounds the hell out of another, seemingly unprovoked.  A friend says of the fight that the pummeler’s agression had been building for a while.  ”He was either going to hit you or start a blog,” the friend says.  ”Honestly, I’m kind of glad he hit you.”  Starting a blog feels a little like farting in an elevator.  I’m doing something most people do at some point, intentionally or otherwise, but something that is nevertheless slightly embarrassing and very public.  But as you’ll see, I’ve had a growing discomfort with how people are talking and writing about video games, which is what I spend a lot of my time doing, mostly while my wife puts her fingers in her ears and goes “LA LA LA.”  Two of the things at the core of my identity are gaming and essay writing, so this blog will in part be a space for me to rub those two things together in a way that is hopefully fruitful, and hopefully not too lascivious.