What’s new, friends? I’ve been playing The Last of Us and Animal Crossing (more soon) and watching the utterly singular Top of the Lake on Netflix, which you should definitely check out if you can. It borrows a bit of the Twin Peaks convention, where an incident concerning a young, ostensibly innocent girl gently blooms outward into a narrative about a town and its population.

It’s grounded in bleakly gorgeous rural New Zealand, and also like Twin Peaks it manages to deftly balance stark humor and a heap of dark, scary shit. The thing that fascinates me about it is that basically all the dark shit comes from exploring the unfavorable power balance between women and men, and it’s fundamentally a woman-centric story. Basically every character on it looks like a real person and not a Gorgeous Actor (Elisabeth Moss is a Gorgeous Actor, okay, but she is given a real-world look).

I’m sure I’ll end up writing about it someplace when I’m finished watching it. But anyway, WHAT ABOUT VIDEOGAMES I CAME HERE FOR VIDEO GAMES WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING GET TO THE VIDEO GAMES okay, okay

I’ve joined Quinns and Paul at Shut Up & Sit Down on another roleplaying game review. This time, we take on Monsterhearts, a pen and paper game about the horrors of being an emotional teen obsessed with social power and sex, as represented through traditional folkloric monsters. If this sounds both awesome and a little confusing to you, check out our writeup.

Lately I also played with an Android console (not the one you think), and my newest Creator’s Project column offers a newbie-friendly look at the state of games for social good after the latest Games for Change conference, where I gave a keynote.

I’m also excited to be giving a keynote on the state of gaming culture at the Nine Worlds convention in London in August. I’m gonna talk about grunge music, My So Called Life, mall flannel and MTV’s Liquid Television. I’m serious. Pretty sure I’ve been waiting my entire life to draw a parallel between these things and video games. It’s gonna be cool, you should go, Tino’s gonna be there, etc