What Are the Odds?

It's hard to see the world through the eyes of somebody who doesn't know what you know, especially when it comes to really fundamental knowledge about the way the world works. I managed to make it 30-something years into life without taking a chemistry class. When I finally did, as part of a quixotic premedical postbaccalaureate zig on the long and winding road of my life, take a bunch of chemistry classes, the new knowledge irreversibly changed the world for me. I see the chemistry of things everywhere now, all the time: the reactions in soft drinks, the ideal gas law at work, the molecular structures of things like caffeine and perfluorooctanoic acid. Having gone decades without this understanding, though, I can sometimes, with a little effort, turn my knowledge off and get access to a mindset that sees more inscrutable mystery in the makeup of things.

I cannot do that with probability. Is it the fact that I took AP Statistics at the formative age of 16? Or just a lifetime of playing with dice?

* * *

Anybody who's spent 15 minutes talking history with me (or letting me talk history at them) has probably heard me gripe about what a hard time people have seeing the past as having been anything other than inevitable. Some people do believe this literally, of course—that everything was foreordained by God—but many others start with at least a fuzzy understanding of contingency. You look at the present moment, you see the possibilities arrayed before us, and you understand that people living in the past also faced uncertainty and choices that had to be made with incomplete information. Oddly, though, many people then begin constructing an edifice of historical argument that denies or downplays that quality of contingency. Whatever did happen, even if it wasn't preordained and literally inevitable, must have been likely to happen, right? Very likely, in fact, given that it happened and the alternatives didn't. People look for factors that explain why what did happen was likely; they do not look for factors that support a contrary argument—that something that didn't happen actually was likely, or that what did happen was, before its realization, improbable.

We get a lot of post facto justifications for things that were extremely improbable. Ask the average reasonably well educated person why the German invasions of Poland and France were so successful, and you'll probably get some species of Nazi mythmaking. It was the genius of the German Blitzkrieg strategy. It was their highly advanced weapons. (Or, in a specious latter-day variant, it was that they were all hopped up on meth.) It was their iron will to power, whereas the Poles and French were unmotivated and demoralized. 

These things aren't all false—German doctrine was better suited to modern combined-arms warfare than Franco-Polish doctrine was, and that made a big difference—but several of them aren't as true, or as significant, as people assume. German armor was inferior to the best French and Polish designs. Many of their aircraft were obsolete. They had few halftracks and trucks; the vast majority of the Wehrmacht infantry and artillery moved on foot or was dragged by pack animals (this remained the case throughout the war). They had neither a major technological advantage nor an overwhelming numerical advantage over Poland, to say nothing of France; the decisive factors in the invasion of Poland were the fact that the French did not attack the weakly defended German west and that the Soviet Union did, after some delay (waiting to see what France would do), invade Poland from the east. The decisive factor in the subsequent invasion of France was either German boldness or luck, depending on how you want to look at it—they gambled on a high-risk, high-reward strategy and happened to line it up very well with Allied weakness.

The German planners, in 1939, were pessimistic. (Consider the series of false-flag attacks that German agents and German soldiers in Polish uniform carried out in the run-up to the invasion of Poland. People today often sneer at these efforts—who in the international community was going to be convinced by these brazen fabrications? But the audience wasn't France or Britain or the Soviet Union. It was the German public, who were extremely unenthusiastic about the prospect of war.) The world, in 1940, was astounded that France fell so quickly. Today, everybody just assumes it was inevitable. Nazi super science and übermenschlich tenacity carried the day!

* * *

I've realized lately that this blindness to the possibility that low-probability events can (and, in the big scheme of things, often do) defy the odds runs forward as well as backward. People don't just look at the past and assume that whatever did happen must have been most likely; they look at the future and assume that whatever they're told is the most likely outcome will happen. Models that said that Hillary Clinton had a 90% chance to win the 2016 election must have been wrong, because if she had actually had a 90% chance, she would have won: 90% is a very large percentage.

And it doesn't just have to be that large; 70% seems to be enough now to make people think something is essentially inevitable in political polling. Watching people respond to shifting recession forecasts in recent months has been bewildering; people (media outlets, even) keep reading a move from “45% chance of recession” to “55% chance of recession” as “recession now likely," as though 50% is some magical threshold. It's like a weird mutation of the old joke that everything has 50/50 odds—either it happens or it doesn't. Now everything is either certain to happen or certain not to.

My girlfriend works in public health, and was involved not long ago in a conversation about risk that baffled her. The doctors and public health experts in the room were arguing that a 0.1% chance of infecting each patient with a potentially deadly disease was unacceptable. Given a few years, this team will see hundreds, maybe more than a thousand patients, and one or two of those people will probably contract this infection, something they can't have on their conscience. But to others in the room, this seemed absurdly overcautious. A 99.9% chance of being safe? That's basically a guarantee. And if each individual patient is perfectly safe, what could possibly go wrong even in a large population, across a long stretch of time?

* * *

All of which is to say…I don't know, that maybe people ought to play with dice more? There's something about the physicality of them (even digital simulacra of them) that breathes life and menace (or hope) into low-probability outcomes. When percentages show up in videogames, they always seem to lead to frustration. I had a 95% chance of making that shot in XCOM—how could my dude have missed? It was supposed to be a guaranteed hit! But nobody rolling an actual d20 is ever blindsided when a natural 1 turns up. You're always holding your breath, watching it skitter across the tabletop, bracing for the worst or hoping for the best. Nothing is inevitable.

A Reckoning

A couple weeks ago, as we all tried to distract ourselves from the inaugural sword of Damocles, a prompt went around Bluesky, inviting people to share their “most millennial complaint.” Moira Donegan answered the call: “Playing video games is not cool,” she declared, “and it was a mistake to elevate this anti-social pastime that mostly involves engaging in solitary fantasies of domination and violence into a respectable hobby.”

Predictably, Donegan got dragged for this. Kim Kelly got dragged for agreeing with her. Many people insisted that this was, in fact, a boomer complaint, not a millennial one (Donegan acknowledged that possibility herself). Many other people called her an idiot, ignorant, uneducated, a loser. Some people, rather perversely, called her a sexist. A few attempted to ridicule her idea by analogy: Can you imagine if people talked this way about books? About literature?

I have spent many thousands of hours of my life playing videogames, but I was not one of those people. In my heart, I knew the truth: “solitary fantasies of domination and violence” might be a bit dated, but Donegan was more right than wrong.

* * *

The next day—Inauguration Day itself—Edward Ongweso Jr. dropped an essay on his Substack that was both apt for that most Damoclean of occasions and relevant to this debate about games. To begin with, he traced the contours of the gambling industry and connected it to other contemporary American enterprises that prey on the poor and nearly hopeless, desperate people hoping for one big score—buying in on the right meme coin, hitting the most improbable sportsbook parlay, literally winning the lottery. He explained what an enormous, lucrative business gambling has become, how it has eclipsed the vast market for illicit drugs. From there, he moved on to consumerism, AI, exterminism, things falling apart, rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem—it's all worth reading. I got stuck on the bit about gambling, though.

Since surpassing illicit drugs in revenue, gambling has been eclipsed in its turn by an industry that stole not just its crown but its name. Before videogames grew to be a market juggernaut that generates nearly a quarter-trillion dollars a year of revenue, “gaming” was synonymous with “gambling.” This etymology isn't the only strong connection between the two businesses.

Ongweso's essay draws extensively on the work of sociologist Natasha Schüll. In her 2012 book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, she wrote of slot-machine players, whose obsessive behavior had by then come to represent the vast majority of casino revenue, that “what addicts them is the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play.”

In a conversation with former Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, Schüll elaborated: “What they’re playing for is not to win, but to stay in the zone. […] This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don’t just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate [in interviews] is a desire to really lose a sense of self.”

Of the industry, she said, “It’s predation on a type of escape where people are driven to exit the world. They’re not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win. They are trying to make revenue. They’re kind of in a partnership with the gamblers, but it’s a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers don’t want to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I don’t see it that way. This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you want—in this case escape—and [to] profit from that.”

This is an apt description of slot-machine players and gambling, of course, but as Schüll alludes to with her remark about “screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in,” it might be an even more apt description of gamers and gaming. What are microtransactions and battle passes and the endless treadmill of live-service content if not revenue-extraction machines synchronized with players' desire for anesthetic escape?

For players who don't want the jackpot, who want only to keep going, to stay “in the zone,” the gaming industry now offers myriad games without lasting victory, without an endpoint, without closure. Many people have drawn connections between slot machines (and Skinner boxes) and certain types of game before—these are the perils, we hear, of F2P games, of freemium games, of mobile games, of bad games, trash that's beneath the contempt of real gamers. But the Faustian exchange of a steady flow of microtransactions for the opportunity to live in the zone forever isn't just made in trashy mobile Gacha titles anymore; it's everywhere. The bad apples have spoiled the bunch. Every game is a slot machine now. One battle royale after another, forever. One raid after another. One puzzle after another. One match after another. One content drop after another. One achievement after another. One season after another. Forever.

It's not even limited to games. People think of “gamification” as the process of making “real-world” activities more like videogames, but it's actually more a matter of making everything (including videogames) more like slot machines. What is a social media feed if not an experiential slot machine, one that rewards you, quasi-stochastically, with entertaining content? The algorithm puts just enough boring chaff (and ads) in front of you, for just long enough, that the dopamine-rush thrill of your last hit fades, and then bam, something that's just the sort of content you crave slides across your screen, and the rush is back. Over and over. Forever.

One of the reasons I started this blog at the start of last year was that I was getting sick of social media; I found myself posting to Twitter and Reddit less and less, interacting with other human beings less and less, but scrolling more and longer. Pulling the lever, waiting for something good to turn up, but really just paralyzed by that hope, that expectation, the not-quite-pleasure of having an itch and believing that it's about to be scratched. Any minute now.

One of the reasons I got into TTRPGs was that videogames were starting to feel the same way.

* * *

“But not all games are like this," you might protest. More and more of them are, of course; battle passes and games-as-service content drip-feeds and meta-progression mechanics are oozing their way into every genre, into every storied franchise (this crap has even slimed its way into Civilization now, much to my dismay), but it's true: There are some indie games, some retro games, and even the occasional rare few examples of AAA auteurism that prove the rule.

The thing is—and with apologies to the folks who love games and think that pornography is inherently, irredeemably bad and wrong—you could say the same of pornography. Porn doesn't have to come from some giant, sleazy media company. It doesn't have to be celebrated at lurid awards shows in Las Vegas or shot in some dismal corner of the Inland Empire. It doesn't have to involve human trafficking or drug abuse. It doesn't have to be violent. You can make porn with your partner or with your friends. It doesn't have to be for profit; you can distribute it for free or ask for donations. You can write fun, clever scripts, build fantastical sets, make amazing costumes, and tell interesting stories that just happen to be smutty. Or if you're not likely to do any of that yourself, you can probably find porn like that on the internet somewhere, or at least at a film festival—porn that makes you laugh, makes you think, fosters human connection, gives you new ideas.

But is that what you think of when you think of porn? Is that what anybody thinks of? Is that what you assume any significant percentage of pornography consumers are consuming? If somebody says to you, “Yeah, I love porn,” or if somebody tells you, “I can't wait to get home and watch porn until I fall asleep,” does your mind go to that Shangri-La of ethical, creative, uplifting pornography? Or do you just think, Wow. Gross.

When somebody says they're a gamer, what do you think of? We joke about the word; we love our memes. “They targeted gamers,” we chuckle. “Gamers rise up!” We explain that “Sure, I play games, but I'm not a gamer,” or “I'm a gamer, but not, you know, a hard-r gamer.” That ironic distance masks real aversion. Gamers gave us Gamergate. Gaming, especially online, means encountering puerility, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, a whole raft of antisocial behaviors. It has a whiff of sulfur about it, the perfume of the extreme right. To tar all of gaming, and everybody who enjoys videogames, with that sulfurous stigma might be unfair, but it's not entirely unfair. Yeah, there are plenty of kids and women and old folks and others who aren't of that ilk enjoying games—or if not truly enjoying them, at least experiencing a world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm—but it's those hard-r gamers who drive the discourse, they who are the face of the hobby and the drivers of the industry.

* * *

The industry has embraced, with both arms, a vision of videogames as ludicrously profitable narcotic slop. The most vocal, visible gamers—gamers as an identity group—are unpleasant reprobates, many of them Nazi fellow travelers. Are these facts enough to damn games and gaming? Probably not. Most cultural products in the profit-driven hell we inhabit are crap, after all, and practically everything has detestable, and noisy, partisans. There are still diamonds in the rough, games that make us think, that make us laugh and cry, that teach us things, that expand our horizons.

Here I have to turn from objective facts to my own fragile, anecdotal, peculiar subjectivity. For me, playing a videogame, even a game I once loved, or a game of a type I once loved, even a game that isn't precision-engineered to lull me into that world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm, now often feels palpably, uncomfortably hollow. I emerge from time spent playing a videogame like a sleeper emerges from a dream, holding on to a few rapidly fading emotions, bewildered by the dissonance between how intensely things mattered just moments ago and how pointless or incomprehensible they seem now, in the light of day. I'm left with vague memories, or just impressions, and maybe a haphazard sort of narrative that, like a dream, retains some waning interest to me but falls to boring, incoherent pieces the moment I try to explain it to somebody else.

I am a dreamer, of course. You're reading a blog (ostensibly) about TTRPGs; how could its author be anything else? I'll never be one to turn up my nose at escapism: I've loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a little kid, I love novels, I love movies, and I still love games. We all deserve a little escape once in a while; the real world isn't always a great place to be. But to return to that analogy raised by the angry mob on Bluesky—how would I feel if somebody dismissed novels as a disreputable, antisocial waste of time? I'd roll my eyes. Solitary, sure, but never antisocial. To read a novel is to enter into intimate discourse with another mind. It's escapism, sure—the world dissolves—but it's escapism with an endpoint, a clearly marked exit. Through the novel, we immerse ourselves in other places, other times, other lives, and then we return to our place, our time, our life richer, wiser, more thoughtful.

I might've learned a little about medieval history from Crusader Kings 2, a little about trains from Railroad Tycoon, a little about everything from Civilization, but I don't know that even those games truly enriched me. I don't think they taught me anything important about myself or anybody else. The vast majority of the videogames I've played taught me nothing at all, imparted nothing to me. There are very important exceptions, of course—I've written about a few of them here, like SOMA, Cyberpunk 2077, and above all Disco Elysium, and there are others, farther back, that meant a lot to me and changed me in meaningful ways. Planescape: Torment and The Longest Journey come to mind.

In the big scheme of things, though, these games are oddities, exceptions, lightning in a bottle, relics of a bygone age. There will never be another Disco Elysium. There will never be another Planescape: Torment. There might be another Cyberpunk 2077, but it's probably a decade away, and I'm not holding my breath. For every gem, there are a thousand mindless treadmills, a thousand carbon-copy cash-ins on whatever the latest extractive fad is, a thousand software-shaped delivery vehicles for the algorithmically driven microtransaction apocalypse. We've all heard the story: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty made less money for Blizzard than a single $15 microtransaction horse in World of Warcraft. Whatever games were when you were a kid—whatever they were before that moment, before that horse buried Wings of Liberty—is dead and long, long gone.

There's still cool stuff happening in the world of videogames, of course. It's happening in spaces that are less commercial (like the whole constellation of indie games sites driven by donations and pay-what-you-want offers) or entirely noncommercial (like the beautiful community that continues to churn out world-class content for my beloved Quake nearly three decades after its release). Some of the most interesting games of the past decade have been treated with outright hostility by the industry; think of Robert Yang's long war against the homophobes at Twitch. Cool stuff still comes out of more conventional games spaces, too, often when people play games in unintended ways. Look how much more interesting a tactical shooter becomes when a streamer plays it as though his life actually matters—the live-die-repeat treadmill of gameplay gives way to something more affecting, more truly immersive, more like the empathy machine we've so often been promised games could be.

Give me empathy in videogames. Give me auteurism. I'd rather play a new Quake map—and have direct contact with somebody else's mind, their ideas, their creative spirit—than step back on the treadmill of MMOs or CCGs or MOBAs or PvPvE FPSes or whatever fresh hell the industry unleashes next. But better yet, get me off the computer. I'd rather play a board game with family than play Quake by myself. And I'd much rather play a TTRPG with friends: tell a story together, experience something new together, escape the world together without leaving it behind entirely. I don't want to dissolve the world, to annihilate it. I want to make the world richer, more enjoyable, more inhabitable. Better.

Good luck to me, right?

* * *

I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the first Trump administration, near Inman Square, where there's a cute little commercial row. It's a slice of small-town Americana in the city: no national chains, just a bunch of local small businesses, including the sorts you hardly see anywhere else anymore, like old-fashioned travel agents and mom-and-pop delis. There was a store there (I think it's still there) that sold textiles, candles, plants, cozy home goods. They were very into hygge back in 2016; there was a sign in the window for months after the election that asked, “HOW CAN HYGGE BE PART OF OUR RESISTANCE?” I always laughed.

The answer, of course, is that it can't—not really. Maybe making things hyggelig gives you a sense of control in a crazy, off-kilter world and that buoys your mental health and keeps you from falling completely and irrevocably into despair. Maybe. And maybe your Animal Crossing village or your Tears of the Kingdom contraption or your collection of Hearthstone cards does the same. But those things also anesthetize you. They remove you from the world, numb you to pain and struggle and sorrow and pity, and remove you from other people, from everybody else experiencing those things, people you might be able to help, people who might be able to help you (not entirely unlike hygge, in fact, although that's an essay for another occasion).

Yeah, you make friends playing videogames, once in a while. You see the same handles in the same lobbies, or you run into the same opponents, or you run dungeons with the same guildmates. Once in a while, a real connection is formed. People famously have gotten married to friends they made playing MMOs. But 99% of people? 99% of the time? Ships in the night. Traveling companions for a time, but not heading to the same destinations.

Videogames are not inherently antisocial, but the industry has shaped the vast majority of them, including the biggest and most popular, into something profoundly antisocial, something socially corrosive. The vast majority of players have quietly acquiesced. Even superficially “social” multiplayer games are not fostering real connection; they are offering a shared experience of quietism, no more social than slot-machine gamblers making small talk, or sitting side by side in amiable silence, as the life seeps out of them.

Are videogames a moral abomination? Have they no redeeming value at all? Should everybody quit playing them? Of course not. It's not like we'd all turn away from our screens and suddenly, in a great upwelling of solidarity and togetherness, join hands and defeat fascism with the power of love or whatever. If we didn't have videogames, we'd have other vices. We already do; everybody has vices, and there's nothing wrong with that. But we could certainly stand to be clearer-eyed about them, about what they're doing to us, about who benefits from them.

I texted my best friend (the man behind Roman Balan, for those of you following my Stars Without Number campaign, and like me a lifelong enjoyer of escapism and player of videogames) about Moira Donegan's post when I first saw it. I sent him a barrage of messages that began with “I'm probably too much of a coward to weigh in, but…” (look at me—12 days later, I've worked up the courage) and ran for nearly the length of this blog post. When I was finally done monologuing at him, he delivered a more eloquent and far more succinct summation of the whole thing. He quoted the late, great David Lynch: “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”

What Is Scary?

Exodus concept art by Archetype Entertainment

You'd be forgiven for assuming that I'm posting this because it's Halloween. You'd also be forgiven, if you've been keeping up with my social/travel calendar, for assuming that I'm posting this, belatedly, because I attended the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival last week and have been thinking extra hard about horror movies. But no, I'm posting this because I just watched about half of a YouTube video about some videogame I'd never heard of before today. The brain works in mysterious ways.

See, my reluctant participation in the annual rite of Star Citizen remembrance involved a bunch of YouTube watching, after which the algorithm was like, oh, you like ambitious science fiction videogames with no release date in sight? Check this out! It's called Exodus. It's got a bunch of former BioWare devs at the helm! And some novelist you've never heard of but whom people seem to like is involved! So is Matthew McConaughey, for some reason! In fact, here's Wooderson himself narrating some spooky lore about the game's bad guys. This all seems like it should be more or less up my alley.

But here I am, just a couple minutes in…rolling my eyes?

It's not just that it's not scary. There's a lot going on here that seems lazy. They're called the Mara Yama, for one thing. Big “Just give me Satan, but make it Buddhist” energy. The visual design of the ship in the opening shot is cool, but haven't we seen the rest of this before? A little Giger, a little Doom, a little Halo, a little Firefly. A heaping helping of Warhammer 40k. What if the Dark Eldar were also the Flood? Is that anything?

(Oh, remember how everybody in Star Citizen is some white dude named Ernst or Steve? A cursory survey of the Exodus site and marketing materials turns up characters named Jurgen, Edith, Kendall, Torrance, Evan, Max, and Tom. At least the space monsters are Indian!)

Of course there's nothing new under the sun, and if you can put a fresh, well-crafted spin on some beloved old trope, more power to you. (On the other hand, there's deja vu all over the marketing materials. Haven't I seen these “awakened bears” before? Weren't uplifted bears in StarDrive? And in Starfinder? Haven't we done “disposable workers engineered to thrive in harsh environments” a hundred times now? Haven't I seen this concept art before, in Mass Effect, Interstellar, Prometheus, Destiny?) But if it's not original, it has to be good. If it's supposed to be the scariest thing in the universe, it should be scary. This isn't scary.

Scaring players in videogames is hard. Startling them is easy enough, which is why jumpscares in dimly lit corridors are a staple of horror games. Rattling them requires a little more finesse, but is also reliably achievable, hence effects that impair the player's vision, hearing, or movement likewise being staples. Actually instilling fear in them? That's a tall order.

Fear is the expectation of danger, of pain, of harm. You can't cause (literal) pain to a player via their digital avatar, and your ability to harm that avatar is mechanically constrained. Few games punish a player more severely for failing to avoid or overcome danger than by taking her time (making her start over from a saved game or a checkpoint), and those that do tend to compound that injury only by removing some accumulated reward (money, experience points, items)—which is, at the end of the day, just time transmuted into another form.

Rather than fear of harm, the player is more apt to experience anxiety about avoiding frustration (or, if the stakes are low enough, just sheer frustration). Even when a single-player videogame features what is presented as irreversible harm—the ability to lose irreplaceable items, for instance, or the permanent death of the character—it's usually only an extreme version of the same: you can do the whole thing over. Once again, you've only lost time. There are a few interesting exceptions to this rule, like the infamous art game Lose/Lose, but they're few and far between.

In a tabletop game, of course, everything is different. Not only is the prevailing TTRPG convention to accept loss, change, and character death and incorporate those things into the shared narrative, but it would scarcely be possible to retrace one's steps with perfect fidelity as in a videogame (whether returning to a “checkpoint” or “saved game” or starting the entire narrative over and trying to do everything the exact same way). Thus you can scare a TTRPG player by threatening their character (you can even cause them physical pain, or something close to it, by harming or threatening their character, so…you know, be careful). But you can also scare a player by threatening another player's character, or even (especially!) an NPC.

It's a lot harder to do that in a videogame, which is narratively rigid and usually incapable of reacting or adapting to the player's actions in diverse, believable ways. It's not impossible, though. Videogames can often wrench more emotion out of the lives and deaths of minor, plot-inessential characters (I'm thinking of Paul Denton in the original Deus Ex, poor Miria in Fallout 2, a half-dozen people in Disco Elysium) than they can out of threats to people the player is being railroaded into saving (or trying and failing to save). Part of what makes Disco Elysium so great is that although you, the player, don't really have any control over what happens in “the main plot,” neither does your character. You're not being railroaded into the unearned drama of glorious success or harrowing failure, you're just stumbling through a situation too complex and too far advanced to be resolved by one cop's (or two cops') heroics. Most of what you can do to help or harm is just little stuff around the margins.

All of which is to say that while the Mara Yama would be terrifying if they existed in real life, hard as that is to imagine, and might be terrifying in the hands of a novelist talented enough to bridge that imaginative gap, they can't hope, as videogame adversaries, to be much more than an annoyance. An action-adventure game's avatar is fearless; what harm can fear-eating monsters do to him? They wouldn't even be good TTRPG antagonists; there's something both too circular and not interactive enough about “they're scary because they torture you and consume your fear and pain.” A scary enemy needs to actively threaten the things the players care about: their friends, their reputations, their social status. Maybe their magic swords, once in a while.

And videogames? Permadeath can definitely be scary, especially in dynamic settings—multiplayer survival shooters create some incredibly tense moments. But in single-player games, it's hard to scare players more than you frustrate them. SOMA is probably the scariest narrative game I can think of, and it's scary not because of anything that adversaries do to your avatar, but because it uses the model of the videogame avatar to force you to think about your own mortality, your own ephemerality, your own ontological contingency.

A Future So White, There’s Only One Shade (of Skin)

A digital simulacrum of Mark Hamill stars in Squadron 42

Like many nerds who grew up in the 1990s playing the Wing Commander and X-Wing games, I backed infamous forever-in-development space sim boondoggle Star Citizen ages ago, and I keep up with its development. The rumor mill has it that this October—mere weeks from now!—will bring momentous news about the project, perhaps even a release date for Squadron 42, its single-player component. What better time to check in and see how the multiplayer side of the game’s coming along? My decrepit old potato of a PC can barely run it anymore, but it’s a pretty enough slideshow, and I can tootle around in my ship (and in my ship), marvel at the sights, and daydream about what might someday be. And I can reflect on all that’s gone wrong.

If you’ve never played Star Citizen, you might know it—if you know it at all—as vaporware, a scam, a crowdfunding horror story. It is, in fact, neither vaporware nor an outright scam, but it is an incredible monument to poor planning and mismanagement, and a warning about what can happen when you give a couple of dreamy visionaries a billion dollars with no deadlines or guardrails. The whole thing is like a giant game of exquisite corpse; not only does the left hand not know what the right is doing, neither of them knows where the feet are or whether the kidneys are functioning. Even as the developers strip entire mature systems out of the game to replace them with more sophisticated, more complex iterations, they keep adding new material that’s obsolete on arrival: spaceships that don’t support the new resource-management system, static environments that don’t use the destructible terrain or physicalized scenery they’ve so exhaustively developed, mission content that doesn’t make use of the dynamic simulated economy they’ve been promising for a decade now.

This haphazardness is nowhere more evident than in the writing. The basic premise of the setting is a fun kind of Silver Age science fiction throwback, with human civilization representing, in Asimovian fashion, the Roman Empire in space, and various alien species standing in for the Celts, the Germans, the Arabs, and the Persians. It’s inherently mildly racist, of course, and a bit on the nose besides—the Germanic aliens are literally called the Vanduul, and the plot arc that will see them driven ahead of some as-yet-unrevealed space Huns to sack space Rome (Earth), upon which event the center of human civilization will move to space Byzantium (the confusingly named Terra), has been telegraphed from light-years away—but it’s not a bad setup. They haven’t ever done much with the Roman theme, though, because two stronger influences have strangled it.

One is simple nostalgia for the SF films and shows of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Rather than on-theme sites and institutions drawn from Roman culture and history, most of what we’ve got so far is pure cinematic pastiche. There’s off-brand Coruscant and off-brand Cloud City, a Tatooine and a Hoth, an entire Blade Runner planet, ships modeled heavily on Alien’s Nostromo and its sequel’s dropship, and so forth. And hey, fair enough. People love nostalgia, and they love pastiche. The other influence, though, is the lede I buried all the way down here under four paragraphs of faff.

* * *

Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are the brainchildren of brothers Chris and Erin Roberts, games industry veterans who started out at Origin Systems, where they created the Wing Commander games—a series of story-driven space combat simulators, heavily influenced by Star Wars, and a number of spinoffs, including Wing Commander: Privateer and Privater 2: The Darkening, which brought open-world gameplay to the Wing Commander setting. Electronic Arts purchased Origin, and the brothers Roberts left, with much of their staff, to found a new studio, Digital Anvil, with backing from Microsoft. There, they created the spiritual predecessors of Squadron 42 and Star Citizen: Starlancer and Freelancer, respectively a story-driven space combat simulator in the vein of Wing Commander and a wildly ambitious Privateer-like open-world game set in the same universe. (When Freelancer inevitably went way over budget and way past its due date, Microsoft intervened, slashed the most ambitious elements, and shoved a pared-down but functional game out the door as soon as they could. No such luck, for better and worse, for Star Citizen.)

Starlancer was a prequel to Freelancer, relating how the setting of the latter came to be. It began in the 22nd century, with two Earth-based superpowers struggling for control of the solar system. It was literally East vs. West: the Western Alliance (the United States, Japan, and Western Europe) against the Eastern Coalition (China, the former Soviet Union, and the Arab states). It’s a latter-day Cold War scenario concocted by a bunch of guys who grew up on Red Scare propaganda and Ronald Reagan speeches, so of course the perfidious Easterners kick off the action by launching a brutal surprise attack on the West, obliterating France and Italy. A jolly little space war ensues, but despite the player’s best efforts, the West eventually loses. In defeat, they launch five interstellar colony ships—one American, one Japanese, one British, one German, and one Spanish—on a centuries-long journey to settle the star systems that will become the setting of Freelancer.

Freelancer, then, is a far-future setting in which basically everybody is of American, British, German, or Japanese descent (the Spanish colony ship malfunctions; they end up as a mysterious, piratical minor faction). It’s a little weird, and, again, ever so mildly racist, but the game’s backstory justifies it effectively, and it has some advantages in scene-setting and storytelling. Where it doesn’t work so well is in Star Citizen.

* * *

You see, despite not having a naively reactionary World War Three background to explain away the nonexistence in the setting of much of humanity (although I don’t believe Starlancer or Freelancer ever considered the existence of India, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, or Latin America in the first place), Star Citizen and Squadron 42 pick up right where Freelancer left off. In what’s likely meant to be an homage to those older games, American, British, German, and Japanese proper nouns dominate the setting. In-game brands are occasionally Japanese (Musashi, Sakura), occasionally German (Behring, Kruger), and otherwise almost universally Anglo-American. Named historical figures are likewise: Croshaw, Messer, Bishop, Hurston. The cast of Squadron 42? Gillian Anderson, Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Ben Mendelsohn, Liam Cunningham, John Rhys-Davies—obviously a star-studded gesture of affection for the genre movies and shows the developers love, but equally obviously lily-white (and overwhelmingly male). Everybody in this universe speaks English; everybody has an American or British accent.

It’s a microcosm of the whole directionless design process. There’s no overall plan, there’s no vision, there’s no explanation of how anything got anywhere. There have been a whole lot of choices made in isolation: let’s cast this guy we love, let’s have a throwback to Freelancer here, let’s name a character after somebody’s mother-in-law or God knows what. No individual choice is terrible, but a thousand of them add up to something unsettling—a future for humanity in which early 21st-century Anglo-American culture remains hegemonic, in which nearly every person of any importance or consequence is white, in which vast swathes of humanity have apparently vanished without a trace. (And the stand-ins for non-white, non-Anglophone people are literally aliens.)

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of obsessive, encyclopedic “worldbuilding,” but there’s something to be said for having a thoroughly, holistically developed setting for fiction like this. Star Citizen is by no means alone in fumbling its way to an accidentally white-supremacist future (its sometime rival Elite: Dangerous is much the same, as of course are most of the classic genre films and television shows these games draw from); it’s what happens when a bunch of British and American (and German and Canadian, in Star Citizen’s case) creators, drawing on their own milieu and their favorite media, develop a setting piecemeal without considering the big picture. But a few weeks from now—we can dream!—Squadron 42 might have an official release date, and this wildly ambitious game, which for all its faults features some extraordinary technology and gorgeous art, might be one step closer to reality. A lot of eyes will be on the United Empire of Earth; it’s a shame they won’t be seeing something more thoughtfully imagined and representative of humanity’s rich real-life diversity.

The GOAT with a Thousand Young

From Lunaran's "Mothers Be Good to Your Spawns"

While I’m on the subject of greatness, I guess it’s time for me to fulfill my promise a couple months back to make the case that “Quake is the greatest game of the past 15 years, and of all time.” (We’re talking greatest PC game, to be clear. Identifying the greatest game, period, or even the greatest videogame, is probably beyond my ken.)

There are, of course, plenty of valid alternatives. You might say World of Warcraft, for its enormous longevity and industry-warping profitability (greatness doesn’t have to be good, remember), or Minecraft, for its sheer ubiquity, or maybe one of the Sims or Civilization titles…but I feel a strong inclination, when we’re talking PC games specifically, to reach for a shooter. Maybe one of the early id titles, which defined the genre—Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. Maybe one of the slightly later, more refined iterations on the formula, like Half-Life, which created such a strong blueprint for subsequent FPS titles, on consoles as well as PC, to follow, and which spawned the mods, especially Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, that shaped multiplayer FPS gaming for the next two decades. Half-Life is an excellent choice.

For my money, though, it’s Quake. It wasn’t the very first fully 3D game, but it was the first huge success, and the one a host of others would build on—the Quake engine was the chassis on which Half-Life itself was built, in fact, and Quake’s level design established the archetypes for multiplayer arenas that nearly every later shooter would iterate on, from those Half-Life mods right down to the present day. Quake’s influence is immeasurable. But to me, Quake’s greatness, and its greatness as a PC game specifically, isn’t so much in its groundbreaking technology or its trailblazing level design and gameplay. It’s the accidental masterpiece of the game itself, the way it fired my imagination and the imaginations of countless others, and the community that grew up around it and continues to thrive today, almost thirty years later.

* * *

I think it starts with the setting. Quake, famously, was a half-baked hodgepodge of themes, with the various principals at id all pulling in different directions: the original concept involved a trad fantasy setting “bleeding into” the modern world—giving us our cyborg ogres with chainsaws and grenades—and subsequent iteration introduced Lovecraftian horror elements, only for the whole thing to be reconceptualized as a more straightforward Doom-like sci-fi shooter and rushed toward release. There was no time to build a whole new set of assets, though, so the new blaster-wielding enforcers just got dumped into the stew with those cyborg ogres, some straightforwardly medieval knights, and a whole Lovecraftian menagerie. Military bases, castles, and otherworldly dungeons were stitched together into a hallucinatory patchwork of levels.

This wasn’t what anybody at id had wanted, and they swiftly corrected course, releasing Quake 2 the very next year with a much tighter, purely sci-fi theme—one that every subsequent release in the Quake franchise has stuck with. (It’s basically Aliens with cyborgs instead of xenomorphs. Hard to overstate the influence of Cameron’s film on the games of the late 90s and early 2000s; Bungie’s Halo series and Blizzard’s StarCraft are both so dense with Aliens references that they teeter on the line between homage and unlicensed adaptation.)

Quake 2 was a bigger commercial successes than Quake, and Half-Life a far larger success still. They were all built on the same engine (as were a host of less successful titles like Hexen 2, Kingpin, Daikatana, and Heretic 2), and each is as easy to mod as the next. Quake 2 and Half-Life (particularly the latter) gave us a host of popular and influential multiplayer mods, many of which were spun off into standalone titles. But among this family of games, the original Quake is the undisputed single-player queen. Her acolytes have churned out literally thousands of maps, and continue to push the engine’s limits to outdo each other in artistry and ambition. For all that they were thematically cohesive and told engaging stories, Quake 2 and Half-Life never fired creators’ imaginations the same way; they never inspired so many people to tell new stories in their worlds. Quake is a lucid dream, immersive in a way few games are, always inviting players to make it their own.

I wouldn’t say that literally everything works with Quake…but almost everything does. New art, new themes—the dreamscape assimilates them easily. Many of the “classic” map aesthetics that have been iterated on dozens of times and centered by contests and jams began life not at id but in the community—the occult horror of Knave, the Moorish austerity of IKblue and IKwhite, the blood-soaked weirdness of Zerstörer. Those checkerboard-floored libraries, soaring minarets, and grimy monoliths feel as authentically Quake now as any military base, castle, or dungeon.

* * *

I might, one of these days, embark on the Herculean task of visiting all of the All-Mother’s children (or at least all the ones rated 3.0 or better on Quaddicted). To round out this post, though, I have thoughts on just a few enduring favorites.

The maps and mods at the very tippy-top of Quaddicted’s rankings are all great, of course. Arcane Dimensions is one of the coolest things any fan community has ever created. Alkaline is right up there with it. Rubicon Rumble Pack is outstanding (“Ceci n'est pas une pipe” is one of my all-time favorite maps). All the work that’s been featured in the recent Nightdive/MachineGames remaster (Honey, Underdark Overbright, The Punishment Due, Rubicon 2, Beyond Belief, etc.) is fabulous. But I’m going to highlight a few that are a bit farther down the list (although, to be clear, these too are all beloved and highly regarded in the community—this isn’t a list of “hidden gems” or anything like that):

• Zerstörer: Testament of the Destroyer (1997, Nihilism Unlimited): I was 13; this was the most metal thing I had ever seen in my life. The graveyard! That bleak ending! Some of it seems a little cheesy in retrospect (starting with the team calling themselves Nihilism Unlimited), but “True Love Waits” will live rent-free in my head forever.
• Insomnia (2000, czg): I know czg hates this one, but it blew my mind then and it still does now. The scale! The curves! The atmosphere! Yeah, maybe it’s a little lurid and over the top in its fleshy ooh-it’s-so-evilness, but you better believe it hit hard when I was 15.
• Contract Revoked (2002, Kell): I wanted to shy away from maps that’ve been added to the official remaster, but Knave is too important not to touch on, and the OG, despite having been eclipsed (ratings-wise) by the Knave jam, than’s “Subterranean Library,” and Kell’s own “Red 777,” is still my favorite. It has an ethereal quality that a lot of the later, grander, somewhat overstuffed Knave maps lack—an atmosphere of loneliness and desolation, but without feeling empty or unchallenging for want of danger.
• Adamantine Cruelty (2004, Vondur): Beautifully built, cleverly designed. Gorgeous, sinuous architecture and a fun little micro-theme derived from a mashup of vanilla texture sets.
• Warp Spasm (2007, ijed): Something of a throwback, resembling much older releases like Zerstörer and 2000’s wildly ambitious machinima tie-in mega-project Nehahra in the way it brought in custom assets and a substantial backstory. Also like Zerstörer in that there’s something a bit puerile in its embrace of the evil and grotesque. But you know what? It works, even when you’re not a teenager. It’s gnarly. It feels oppressive.
• Dead Memories (2012, Scampie): Another little map that’s just beautifully, elegantly constructed. Takes all the elements of the original base theme and spins something inventive out of them.
• Backsteingotik (2013, sock): Gorgeous, and one of the best implementations of the original game’s “wind tunnel” mechanic and theme. Majestic. Dripping with atmosphere.
• Retro Jam 3 DLC (2015, ionous, negke, and skacky): These are all great, but “It Seemed to Devour Light” by ionous is another all-time favorite of mine. Creates a totally original aesthetic and deeply sinister atmosphere out of (I believe) only vanilla textures.
• Waldsterben (2022, Paul Lawitzki): Manages to feel almost like something that could’ve been in the original game (it couldn’t possibly, but it somehow feels like it) and yet creates a totally novel aesthetic. Moody and rewarding.
• Head Reattachment Trauma (2022, Suzanne “Trashbang” Will): Claustrophobic and urgent. Slightly reminiscent of System Shock while remaining unimpeachably Quake-y. Tells a powerful story—or communicates a powerful sentiment, anyway—in an sly, playful way.

The Best PC Games of My Adult Life

Strife (an underrated classic!)

 

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

As a kid, I would play almost any computer game, including literally any shooter. All the id and Raven games, obviously, and all the 3D Realms games, and all the LucasArts ones. All of Rare's shooters on the N64 (yes, even Jet Force Gemini). All the Turoks. But more esoteric stuff, too: Operation Body Count. Rise of the Triad. Redneck Rampage. Rebel Moon. Chasm: The Rift. Blood (and Blood 2, which, God help me, I absolutely loved). Strife (an underrated classic!). Every single iteration of Chex Quest.

As I got older, I had less time for games, and more of my gaming time was occupied by one miserable Skinner box at a time: World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap. I did find time for the occasional other game, and I did eventually kick the slot machine habit, but my tastes had changed. I've become less patient, or perhaps more discerning, or maybe both. Whatever it is, I bounce off of most PC games (and videogames in general) in a way I never did when I was young. I'd generally rather be playing board games, or playing TTRPGs, or reading.

But a few PC games released in my latter days have made lasting impressions on me. Let's just say, arbitrarily, that I became an adult in 2010. Here are ten games I've loved in the past fourteen or fifteen years, plus notes about a few related titles:

 

10. Brigador

A perfect little retro shooter. Wonderful integration of music, art, writing, and gameplay. Satisfying to play, but stompy shooty mech combat alone wouldn't have held my attention for 30 hours; happily, the world and atmosphere are totally absorbing. It's a fabulously inventive vision of the future, a refreshing change of pace from the omnipresent Space America, Space Rome, and Off-Brand Dune.

 

9. Teleglitch

Highly original, compellingly challenging, endlessly replayable. Puts lo-fi graphics to better use than 99% of retro (or retro-ish, retro-inspired, whatever) games out there. Moody and atmospheric despite being top-down pixel art. In a funny way, it's probably the closest anybody's come to recreating what made (and makes) Quake so magical. (Stay tuned for my inevitable “Actually, Quake is the greatest game of the past 15 years, and of all time” follow-up post.)

 

8. Subnautica

Absolutely captivating, and briefly tricked me into thinking I liked survival games and base-building. Tried The Long Dark, No Man's Sky, etc. Nope! I just like Subnautica. Showed a way forward for first-person action games that involve danger, excitement, and freedom of movement without being a nonstop bloodbath—a path regrettably few have followed yet.

 

7. SOMA

There are a lot of on-rails story-driven first-person games out there these days, and most of them aren't great. You've got stuff like Spec Ops: The Line, which does interesting things with the medium but just isn't very fun or engaging. You've got stuff like Firewatch, which tells a good story charmingly but leaves you thinking, But why was that a game? SOMA is the rare example of a powerful, effectively told story that really depends on the digital (and first-person) medium. It's not perfect—the gameplay can be frustrating in places—but it's haunting.

 

 6. Crusader Kings II

I was a Civilization obsessive for most of my life, logging hundreds if not thousands of hours on every iteration starting with the first (Civ V, with about 950 hours played on Steam, probably represents a distant third place after II and IV). I do play Civ VI occasionally—I've got friends who love it and keep trying to rope me into multiplayer games—but I will never again be obsessed the way I once was.

Yeah, part of it is that they've just glommed too much stuff onto the old Civ chassis, and part of it is that I'm older and tastes change, but mostly it's that CK2 opened some third eye in my forehead and I can never look at grand strategy or alternate-history simulation the same way again. I haven't even tried CK3 and perhaps I never will (can't say I love the Paradox business model) but I had some incredibly memorable times with CK2—and learned a shocking amount about medieval history and geography. It probably says something that, of all these games, CK2 is the one I had a thousand screenshots of and felt compelled to show as I played it, not just a representative image yanked from the internet.

 

5. Shadowrun: Hong Kong

Among the many old-school RPGs launched in that curious flurry of Kickstarter activity a decade ago, Shadowrun Returns was something of an also-ran, raising less than half as much funding as Torment or Project Eternity, and considerably less than even Wasteland 2. It was a great little game, though. (Whereas I found Torment enjoyable but disappointing, Pillars a tedious slog, and Wasteland 2 not even worth finishing. Gotta give a shout to Tyranny, though—the underrated and overlooked little sibling of Torment and Pillars is by far the best game of the three, and would probably be my eleventh pick for this top-ten list.)

Returns was followed by an even better sequel, Dragonfall, and then another, still better sequel, Hong Kong. It's a wonderful setting, has wonderful characters, and tells a fascinating story whose stakes (unlike those of most RPGs, including nearly all of the above) are minor enough to feel real but major enough to feel meaningful. The devs lavished a fabulous level of detail on every little corner of the game. One of the best text-driven games of recent memory.

 

 4. Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Did somebody say “first-person action games that involve danger and excitement without being a nonstop bloodbath”? I would love this game just for its ambition, trying to imagine the blue-collar labor of the spacefaring future and turn that into a game. I love the aesthetic, of course. (Shout-out to Blackbird for Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, too; it's nothing new in terms of RTS gameplay, but the setting, the visual design, the art, the sound—absolute perfection. Those animatics!) I love the slightly hokey but sweet story of solidarity and industrial action. It might have sneaked into this list on those strengths even without good gameplay. The gameplay, happily, is outstanding: cerebral and visceral at the same time, exciting, immersive. A rare and triumphant example of genuine innovation in PC games.

 

 3. Control

Kind of the AAA counterpart to Brigador. Incredibly high-quality production in every respect, with everything working together toward a united purpose. So stylish that you find yourself thinking, Wait, why aren't all games like this? I would play games all the time if they were all like this. Outstanding gameplay, fascinating setting, engrossing story, just a delight from top to bottom.

 

 2. Cyberpunk 2077

We've all been dreaming of a boundless open-world sandbox ever since we tried Daggerfall or whatever as kids. I've soured on Bethesda's games, step by step, to the point that I never finished Skyrim and never even picked up Fallout 4. And I have never been a fan of Arkane's so-called immersive sims. I played Dishonored, I played Prey. They were good, but I couldn't love them. They're not immersive. They're toyboxes full of checklists; they don't feel like living worlds. Same goes for the recent Deus Ex games.

Cyberpunk 2077 is not a toybox. It's the first game of its type I've played that smothers that checkbox-ticking instinct, and it does so with sheer Borgesian vastness. In most of these games, you read every note, open every door, rifle through every shelf—because it's a game, and the developers put this stuff in there for you to look at, and you wouldn't want to miss any secrets. In Cyberpunk 2077, you do not. Why would you go into people's houses and paw through their stuff? Why would you crawl down into every culvert looking for hidden stashes? Why would you read every single news article and grocery list and chapter of erotica you encounter? You don't do that shit in the real world; it would be insane. It would be insane in Cyberpunk 2077, too, which is more like a real world than any game I've ever experienced.

Oh, and the characters are unforgettable, the absolute mountain of music positively slaps, the gameplay (especially after the recent 2.0 overhaul) is solid, and the aesthetic is matchless. Retro-futuristic aesthetics have a tendency to look inauthentic, even if they're cool. Everything's too consistent, too similar; there's no sense of history, of groundedness. That's the case, jarringly, in the recent Fallout titles, in Prey, in the BioShock series, etc. The artists working on Cyberpunk 2077 anticipated that problem and, preposterously, created an entire century of fictional visual arts, architecture, and product design. A century of evolving trends in clothing, automotive design, industrial architecture, and so forth. It's magnificent.

 

 1. Disco Elysium

Boy, it sure sounds like I loved Cyberpunk 2077, huh? What could top that? How about…the second-greatest game of all time?

Disco Elysium could only have been made by a bunch of starving artists who started out with no idea how to make a game. It breaks every rule and is always better for it. This is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, but for real. Probably the only game that ever made me cry. Definitely the only game that ever made me consider getting a tattoo—and when you find out how obsessed with Quake I am, that's going to become really impressive.

As with several of the above, this one scratches my itch for a magnificent integration of setting, writing, music, art, and everything else, and here it's really all cranked to 11. The best writing in a game, ever. Some of the best music. Some of the best voice acting (and my God, the quantity of it!). One of the most indelible settings. The only knock I can make against it is that it's such a fucking computer game. It's impenetrable to people who didn't grow up on CRPGs, and that's a shame because I know a lot of non-gamers who would adore it if they could just crack its hard shell.

Honorable mentions: Tyranny, Frozen Synapse, Titanfall 2, Portal 2, Heaven's Vault

One especially dishonorable mention that might get its own special blog post someday: BioShock Infinite

Back to the Future

The House of Tomorrow in Philco-Ford's "1999 A.D."

When 1999 arrived, I was 14 years old and halfway through my first year of high school. I had a Pentium PC and a 56k modem, and the internet was my oyster. It was the year of Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike, the year I realized that there was infinitely more content available for my favorite games online than what had come in the box. I played just about every Half-Life map and mod that existed, then played everything I could find for Unreal and Quake II, then worked my way back to the motherlode that was the original Quake's fan community.

At that age, I loved nothing more than computer games, and 1999 was a great year for them. The Longest Journey, Homeworld, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, System Shock 2, Planescape: Torment, and Quake III Arena all came out that year, as did FreeSpace 2, the first game I ever published any content for (I had messed around with Worldcraft, trying to make simple Half-Life maps, but never shared them online). It wasn't much, but it was my first step into the world of modding, the DIY side of the hobby, the social world of games—making them, sharing them, theorizing and bickering about them.

I don't think I started my LiveJournal until a year or two later, but 1999 was also the year LiveJournal was launched, so there's that too: a link to my one previous foray into blogging, which was also the first thing I did on the internet that brought me real, lasting human connections, including two friendships that endure to this day. One of them, it turned out, lived practically around the corner, so we quickly became real-life friends (and dated briefly, a footnote in her romantic history but a landmark in mine); the other lived halfway across the country, and yet we've managed to sustain an almost entirely epistolary relationship that's still going strong more than two decades later.

* * *

So what's "1999 A.D." about? The name is snappy and hopefully distinctive, and it's adjacent to 2000 AD, which is kinda fun, but it also, self-importantly, represents an ethos. The year 1999 was, for me, a time of tremendous optimism, when it seemed like my own creativity, and the world of games I loved, had limitless potential. 1999 stands for a broader societal optimism, too, both because it had been, decades earlier, the horizon on which we could see a sure-to-be-better future society, and because, in retrospect, it was, for all the anxiety about Y2K, one last moment of stability and prosperity (for many Americans, at least) before the 21st century's long slide into the suck began.

Computer games, for me, never really lived up to the promise they held in 1999, which is partly because I was a starry-eyed child then, and partly because the breakneck pace of technological advancement slowed enough, around the turn of the century, that our dreams of synthetic intelligence and infinite artificial worlds had to be deferred for at least a few decades, but also largely because games soon became a huge business and a lot of the creativity, ambition, and wildness were beaten out of them by the invisible hand of the market. 1999 was the crest of the wave, for me; later in high school, I devoted more time to the outdoors, to parties, and to getting high, and (a little) less to games. I got into World of Warcraft a few years later, which monopolized all of my gaming time and game-related social energy for a while. I got out of it, eventually. I got into Destiny 2, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap. I got out of those, too. I play PC games sometimes, still—I'll probably write about them at some point—but I don't love them the way I did. TTRPGs, though? I'm belatedly smitten.

I came to TTRPGs very late, especially for somebody who was such a huge nerd as a teenager; I started during the pandemic, playing long-distance D&D 5e on Zoom with one of my best friends, her partner, and some friends of theirs. To no one's surprise, least of all my own, I loved it. I started thinking about running a campaign, starting looking at other systems, started poking around online, knowing, this time, that there would be infinitely more content available than what had come in the box or the book.

I found Dan D's Throne of Salt sometime early last year. Saw this post and knew I had to run a science-fiction campaign of my own. Found Marcia B.'s Traverse Fantasy. Started listening to Astronomica. Found Skerples' Coins and Scrolls. Started accumulating PDFs: Stars Without Number supplements, Mothership modules, miscellaneous old Traveller stuff, all sorts of zines, Skerples' beautiful book. Started a SWN campaign with my 5e group (and two more friends, including my very best) when our two and half years of fantasy adventure drew to a close. Started filling notebooks and sketch pads with notes and doodles and maps and deck plans. Started itching to share my ideas.

* * *

Since my first forays into Half-Life mapping forums, I've pretty much always been active in some kind of online community somewhere: LiveJournal, punk music bulletin boards, WoW forums, Reddit (RIP r/chapotraphouse), Twitter. My activity has waxed and waned, but there's always something going on. In recent years, that something has tended to be unsatisfying, if not downright alienating. Even before Musk's coup at Twitter, social media wasn't feeling very social. Parasocial, sure. Antisocial, asocial. Howling into the void. The shrieking of the damned.

Around this time last year, I started reviewing every film I watched on Letterboxd—the only one of a number of resolutions I made at the start of 2023 (write a poem every day, write about every book I read, draft a novel) that stuck. I have a few followers; I get a few likes. It's cute, it's fun, but it's not much of a dialogue, not much of a community. Just scratches that old itch, makes me want something more substantial, more real. The grove of avant-garde TTRPG blogs I've started to wander through may be a tiny world, but it's a world of conversation, collaboration, creativity. A living world. It's exciting! It takes me all the way back to 1999.