I love this feature from my sometimes-writing buddy Quinns, on the way physical objects in board games act as an anchor for feeling and memory with the friends you play with. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been increasingly attracted to tabletop games myself, and cooperative card and dice games, because of the intimacy of physical objects and the inherent spontaneity of that kind of play.

Anyway, you should read this thing. I intend to improve somewhat at recommending you writing from my friends. Not that you should like them better than me, or something. Just, I guess, they’re good too, y’know?

Apple is selling a lot of tablets. Nintendo is not selling a lot of Wii-Us. I feel at times genuinely sad for console developers these days. I think there might honestly be some people out there who think they can make basically the same kind of game for the upcoming next-gen except with better tech.

“But I am innovating,” says the guy making the same game, except with better graphics.

Thinking about Nintendo brands often feels like a quaint exercise these days, but a modern Zelda set in the Link to the Past universe still seems like a viable idea for traditional fans. I love Link to the Past. Nostalgia, man. I wrote this column a few days ago on why that game was such a bright little star.

I expect dev culture to continue changing, too. Notice how we revere a lot of guys for making certain kinds of flame T-shirt badass boy-magazine console IP like, a generation or more ago? Our ideas about who captains the industry still come from a fading desire for a culture of celebrity, fueled by the last decade’s excitable fan press.

Those ideas are ever more ill-suited to the business reality. Despite its jarring failures, BioShock: Infinite is a far more interesting game than a lot of people knighted in our culture of veteranship would have come up with, and yet. Not that it won’t sell well. Curious to find out how well.

The next-gen isn’t going to save anyone. Better tech isn’t bringing us better games, yet. For now you have become indoctrinated to a dying cult, and clinging to it lines the pockets of the hardware business engine and nothing else.

Like, are you really, genuinely offended by this insult to the noble occupation of making yet more games with magic anime boobs in them*? Do people really see a ‘respect for art’ issue here, or are they just hanging onto every shred of their childhood games industry they can find? Are we just constantly having these kinds of arguments because we don’t have anything else to say for ourselves right now?

Probably related: Game Developer magazine is closing, if you hadn’t yet heard. We’re all chipping in to make the last issue memorable.

Speaking of viking funerals and dead gods, my latest Game of Thrones recap is up at Boing Boing. I actually like reading the comments there. Fun community!

*To be honest, I kinda like the Dragon’s Crown art, Kamitami’s art in general. Boobs aren’t evil. Not everything needs to be realistic. It’s the idea that a critic invites homophobia by… being critical of art, and then it blows up into some huge boring body-policing diversion that drives me crazy.

At GDC last month, Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke, Elizabeth Sampat, Mattie Brice, Kim McAuliffe and I each gave presentations as part of the #1ReasontoBe panel on the triumphs and challenges of women in the games industry. It’s now online and available to watch for free, if you’d like to check it out. Yes, I know, I spoke a little too quickly, but the other presentations are excellent. Full of mic drops.

With a little help and prodding from friend of the site Glenn, I finally got a proper website. Kind of. I would still really love to work with a logo designer and a web designer eventually, but on a writer’s salary this seems like a dream. For now, I’d just appreciate it if someone can tell me how to get the drop shadow off that header image so it lies flat (I’m still leighalexander1 at gmail for the moment, contact at this domain is coming soon) — thank you everyone who sent kind mails and Tweets overnight and helped me fix this.

After some six years and tons of memories, the old SVGL is retired, and now redirects here. About half of the archive has been imported. The older stuff? I kept it, but, uh, let’s not look back too far. If you really need something for a specific purpose, you can try asking me.

Other than a broader mandate and more frequent updates, business as usual. For now I’m going to try to keep it a comments-free zone (I explain why in the new FAQ), except as needed. Keep with me here, will you?

Twitter, you drive me to drink sometimes.

A few nights ago, I had a dream I was engaged in a discussion about formalism on Twitter. These things invade my dreams. This is the reality of being someone whose job it is, essentially, to convey information and have opinions in public on the internet. You should drink less, Leigh. Well, then, you should just get off Twitter. I should, I should.

It is so easy for people to tell others what they should do. There’s a technique popularized in hip-hop battle culture whereby your opening salvo involves pre-empting your opponent by saying all the things about yourself that you expect will be used against you. You can disarm your opponent by being bored of their criticisms, by being ready with something better. Hip-hop has mastered the “yes, and?” Internet writers also have to master the “yes, and.”

So I drink and I vent on Twitter. Yes, and?

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I always found Metal Gear Solid 4 to be not a brilliant game, but a fascinating one. A mad ideologue glutted with tech retreads, again and again, the narrative he’s always dreamed of, and has never been able to get quite right.

The metanarrative eats itself, strains the game until through its seams you can see the soul of its creator: The way he feels like an aging relic in an economic landscape colonized by Westernized war deserts. The way he longs to rest, but is called to the mission yet again, for the glory of his country, and for less definable personal things.

I don’t love the game, but the game made me love the man after a fashion, the way one loves from afar the kind of father that just can’t manage to parent right. I have never run out of things to say about it, and I thought I’d never see the like again, and yet. BioShock Infinite is a game like that. Exactly like that.

Everybody wants to rule the world.  Spoilers.

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I’d been making some late-night Twitter noise about my growing disinterest with the definitions conversation — you know, “is this a game or not,” and all of that. Everyone is already sick of that conversation, I think, so it’s not like I’ve brought anything new to the table, but I do occasionally play and experience things I love and feel compelled to ensure I speak up for them. I don’t really care what they are called.

In response to a couple of my more widely-circulated recent tweets, Raph Koster prepared a considered response; the conversation he wishes we’d had at GDC, to be exact. It’s thought-provoking (and at the very least, shows we can have these conversations in constructive ways, without people taking rigid offense at one another).

Read Raph’s piece; I posted my immediate response as a comment on his blog, but I’ll also post it again here — my main idea is that we have much more to learn and gain, at least for now, by eschewing definitions than we do by prescribing them.

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For years, board gaming was a huge blind spot for me. I hated having to play them as a child, although obviously the kind of board games they give to American kids are not exactly what fans of board games play these days. I kind of avoided getting involved with them — thought it was all sorting units, moving tanks, reorganising economies. I don’t like conventions of war when I’m staring down the barrel of a gun, I like them even less when I am looming over some huge map and counting tiny plastic things. I’m indelicate.

Plus, I have dyscalculia, which means that I might sometimes mentally subtract three from five and come up with three, which is a problem if cards are facing off. There are all kinds of minute calculations involved that my brain tends to tangle. I make with the words, not the numbers, really!

But over the past several month, I’ve luckily learned there are all kinds of analog games, some involving just handfuls of picture cards and some social strategy, and I’ve gotten way into a few of ‘em. Totally happy to play a war game if the war is about the Iron Throne, or if I get to be a spy and lie to everyone.  I’m a nightmare to play with.

I’m a little disappointed in myself that it took me so long to engage with this arm of the great world of gaming. Especially since it’s so timely; the sterile, choreographed anonymity of online multiplayer, or the insistent, notification-dependent mechanics of asynchronous social gaming have started to feel sterile, alienating. I love playing games on the iPad whenever I get my hands on one because of how well it imitates the intimacy and physicality of touching things.

I think physicality and genuine social intimacy have an important role to play in interactive entertainment. Earlier this week I did an interview with Margaret Robertson of Hide&Seek to talk about her company’s Tiny Games project, which is looking at how accessible digital tools — in this case, an app — can facilitate, rather than replace in-person folk play. Live event experiences are really onto something, but as with Sportsfriends‘ journey to the living room, we can do more as far as making that more accessible, less time and space-dependent and less in need of setup.

Anyway, if you’re into analog games, too, my sometimes-writing buddy Quinns and his friend Paul have just launched a shiny new edition of their board game-focused  Shut Up & Sit Down. I think they mainly want to put all their friends in videos, or something. No, it’s good. It makes me excited (I even got to talk about a “board game for swingers” with Quinns a while back. It was a thing).

“You ask me if I think Persona can save the JRPG genre. At the risk of echoing our adventure game letter series from last month, let me ask you this: Is the JRPG worth saving?“

– Quintin and I take on Persona 4 in a brand-new letter series at Polygon. Come along!

GDC is over, and it’s been an overwhelming week. I wrote about that overwhelm at Kotaku in this month’s column, called “Why I Cried at GDC.” It’s kinda raw, so thanks for your indulgence.

Once I got home from a brutal series of travel delays on Sunday evening, I’ve been decompressing. I miss my friends; I feel reacquainted with games. I want to crawl into a little screen and play something old and lovable. And BioShock: Infinite, obviously.

Amazingly, our #1ReasontoBe panel was covered in the New York Times, alongside some signs of cultural and economic thriving in the indie scene. We have a long way to go, but I felt very, very optimistic at the event this week. This was my favorite story out of GDC.

I went on the One Life Left show, and I also wrote a lot during the week — Kentucky Route Zero! MGS5! Warren Spector on games’ borrowing from film! Emily Short on being truthful! Disasterpeace! Unfinished Swan! — there’s more on my public Facebook page, where I keep a lot of my links when I don’t have time for SVGL. I know a lot of you don’t use Facebook, and I continue to promise you I will get a real website someday.

Okay, now I can finally play Infinite. And Game of Thrones is back, easing the harsh transition back into my chilly little New York City life. I’ll be writing GoT recaps at Boing Boing for the duration of the season (!) so follow along! My writeup of the Season 3 premiere is already here!